Kate: Hi everyone. I'm Kate, the host, and producer of PodRocket and this is PodRocket FSJam mashup. I'm here with Anthony and Chris. Hi guys. Christopher: Hello. Hello. Anthony: Hi. Kate: How's it going? Anthony: It's going great. Really happy to be doing this with you. This was originally my idea and so I'm really glad you were into it and wanted to do it. I'm such a huge fan of the show and really wanted to get together and just talk about podcasting and life and whatnot and all the good stuff. Kate: All the good stuff. Christopher: Turning up like usual and talk like a crazy man. Kate: Yeah. Maybe if you guys just introduce yourselves. I mean, I listen to FSJam, but just for PodRocket listeners, maybe who don't. Anthony: Yeah, absolutely. I am also host and I would say probably producer's a good term. I edit the episodes and tend to reach out to guests. It's not a completely a one to zero split, but there's definitely, I would say I probably spend more time kind of on the back end doing logistical stuff. I'm just so passionate about this thing. It's really the one zone that I feel like I have more autonomy over doing StepZen and Redwood stuff. They're awesome. They're huge teams, but they're not really my thing. They're Tom and Anant's thing. So it's cool to have your own thing and have "creative control over". So I just love podcasting and love listening to your podcast and I think this will be a really fun conversation. Christopher: A hill to die on you may say, or a hill to put a flag on, whichever term suits you, my name is Christopher Burns. I'm CEO and co-founder of a company called everfund.co.uk and we help charities and nonprofits make donating easier through a suite of tools. Magical. Kate: Awesome. Well, yeah, it's really exciting... It's awesome to have you guys on. So PodRocket is a web development podcast brought to you by LogRocket and we have explored topics outside of web development but we are a web development podcast brought to you by LogRocket. Kind of in the early stages I listened to a lot of FSJam. I remember listening and we were thinking like, could we do this? Is this something that's feasible for us? And yeah, I listened to a lot of FSJam, a lot of Syntax, a lot of different podcasts in the space. Anthony: That's cool. Yeah. I realized neither of us actually said what FSJam is. So FSJam is about Full-stack JAMstack. So if you know what JAMstack is, you're like, whoa, it's like JAMstack with a database. Okay. And it started around RedwoodJS originally. I had the idea that we would bring on RedwoodJS core team members and then RedwoodJS contributors and community members and then we would kind of expand out from there. Immediately we started talking to other people in the community like Brandon from Blitz. Who's also been on PodRocket and lots of other people who are doing similar things like the Echobind team we've had a ton of them on. There was just so much stuff happening in the space that we started talking to Prisma and Fauna and people from Amplify. Anthony: I just personally wanted to know so much more about these projects and these people that I started reaching out to people that I was interested in talking to and it's been like a very curated set of projects, but there's so much overlap between our guests and PodRocket's guests. You also bring out lots of founders and talk about business stuff as well. So I think there's just a lot of overlap and anyone who is into one, I feel pretty comfortable recommending the other, because if you like one you'll probably like the other. Christopher: I still remember the day I kind of coined it and obviously by coining it, I heard it. I think Tom said it once, but he didn't really put the acronym of FSJam. I was like, I'm going to make a Twitter account and I'm going to start something. I did, I called it FSJam. It was pink and white because I was like, what colors do we not see in the community? I know pink, that's the perfect color. Then obviously I started talking to Anthony and Anthony was like, I'm really interested introduce me and this point we didn't even want to do a podcast. That wasn't the first thing we thought of. We thought of a more overarching community kind of goals, have a forum, do standard 2010 web things. Then there was that thing Anthony said to me, do you want to do it as a podcast? Christopher: I was like, yeah, let's give it a go and we just went from there and it was such an interesting experience as I've never done a podcast before, but I've always listened to them myself. Anthony's obviously done quite a few. So he's obviously much better in that area and we've just gone on and on and on. We've built from nothing to where we are now and every episode I think has brought something unique to the table. To me personally, every time that I think about a challenge that I have to solve now, I think about a lot of time who have I spoke to on my podcast? What have they been solving? Can I just use their thing instead of building it myself? Kate: Totally. I mean, that's the goal of this podcast for sure. Then hopefully, people who come on are motivated to keep coming on and share what they're working on. Definitely. Okay. So I want to talk about the first like the beginning of FSJam. So, you kind of touched on it, I guess, maybe Anthony, had you done other podcasts? You're like, oh I can do this or I guess what was that okay, how do I actually, record the audio, that sort of stuff? Anthony: Yeah. This is where having a music background actually came in really handy because I'm familiar with recording technology in general, just because I've been in studios for years and years and years. So I have a music degree for people who don't know and I did a podcast with one of my old music professors, Stewart Sims, and it was called the Loose Filter Podcast and you can still listen to it if you want to. I have 20 or 30 episodes I did with him and that started back in 2015 and it was the same deal where me and Stewart did everything ourselves. So he already had a whole system, he had a Typepad website if you know what that is and they would go up on SoundCloud. So it was a really old-school podcasting set up but it was great because you learned the process of recording the episode, editing the episode and then uploading it, writing show notes, including links, all that kind of stuff. Anthony: So I did that for many years with him and then I've also been a guest on many podcasts because I've listened to so many podcasts. So as I was coming up in the web development space, I was reaching out to people like Brian Douglas and Drew McClellan and all these people who have their own podcasts and the real big difference was how do you actually host this thing? That's where we started using Transistor and Transistor's amazing podcast hosting platform. Pretty sure you all have your own custom thing that you're doing just through LogRocket. I'm actually curious to hear about that a little bit, but the whole end-to-end process I was already familiar with. So it made it easier, not really reaching out to guests. That was kind of the one thing, but it's like once you have a platform, once we had Tom on, I feel like we... It was a lot easier to get other people on because we could point to oh yeah, we had the creator of GitHub on our podcast. So then other people are like, okay, it must be a real podcast then. Just it kind of snowballed very quickly once we got a couple key guests on. Christopher: The most crazy thing about it was I was recently catching up with a friend who doesn't really keep up with what I do in the web development life. She's more of a machine learning medical computing and I'm like, oh, did I tell you I have a podcast? And I'm like, oh really? I was like, yeah, you'd never guess who's been on. So I'm watching who. I'm like, co-founder of GitHub. She's like GitHub? The platform I use every day. It's like, yeah, yeah. I'm like, yeah, he, he's a nice guy and we speak to him about cool technology and then I'm like, but here's everyone else. But they're almost as important to me because to me, Tom, yeah, he's a name that everybody knows and really helped the podcasts get going. Everybody else that has been on since sometimes I found their conversations have been so much more interesting, different aspects as what they've been built, their different opinions. Christopher: Because when we speak to Tom, we all share same opinion. We all really like Redwood and we really like building Redwood and using Redwood. So it all feels the samey kind of vibe. But then I think some of the best episodes we've had is when we've had very different opinions or maybe just don't even get it. The more I talk to people, the more they say about our Bitcoin episode and I just have to say it because I think it's so funny because I don't... I'll be honest. This is the whole, entire truth. I hardly listened to the episodes because I can't stand my own voice and the one I decided to listen to was the Bitcoin one and with Noah and Noah's a really great guy. I really enjoyed having him on. I listened to that episode and I felt like I was hitting myself with a brick over the head, but then every single person I've spoke to about that episode has said, you've asked all the questions that I'm just dying to ask, but nobody wants to ask the stupid questions because we're all technology background. Christopher: We're all developers. Surely we understand the blockchain and the uses of Bitcoin and what it really doesn't really mean and everything around it. So I like to say Anthony brings the sophisticated questions a lot of the time and I bring the logical stupid, dumb questions that someone just really wants to ask. Kate: That's great. Yeah. Excellent balance. I know that's... I'm starting to see it more with podcasts. I just talked to Tracy Lee a couple weeks ago that episode's going live this week and she was... Her podcast modern dev just had a couple episodes on blockchain and I was asking about that and I see it more and more- Anthony: Her episode on blockchain I thought was really good. Kate: Yeah. She had a similar sentiment that it did super well, even though she isn't super familiar with it, but it did really well. Anthony: You already talked a little bit about the origins of PodRocket, but is there anything more there you wanted to share in terms of whose idea it was, anything like that? Kate: Yeah. Thank you for asking Anthony. So, I mean, if you go back in the early episodes you can definitely tell that we were learning as we were going and this time last year I was actually, we were trying to just see if we could do it. I was actually Googling how to record audio. That is the stage we were at, how to record audio most effectively. We did buy equipment specifically for this podcast. We were just like, could we do it? Our first episode was with Fred Schott on snowpack and then we also had a second segment with Kaelan, our front-end engineer. He was talking about webpack and so we jammed those two together. Then I actually edited it in GarageBand myself and it took me two days and it was really challenging, but then we passed it around, put it on SoundCloud, did some feedback with some listeners, and yeah. People were like, yeah, it's interesting. The biggest feedback was audio quality could improve, which we already knew. Yeah, so that was how it started before that or how the idea came to be was we were experimenting with different types of content. So the LogRocket blog is very well known. If you haven't read it, go check it out. Anthony: Fantastic. LogRocket blog is absolutely amazing. Kate: Yeah. It's pretty incredible and at LogRocket, that's definitely something we're super, super proud of. We were kind of like, okay, we have written content down. What else could we do? We've tried YouTube videos, like YouTube tutorials. And we just weren't seeing what we wanted to see, I guess. So we were like, well, maybe we can try a podcast and we were actually doing this during the pandemic so it was kind of everyone was doing a podcast. So you're like, I guess we can start doing a podcast. So that's how it really kind of started and now we're at 60 episodes, we publish twice a week. So it's really been fun and we've really scaled production pretty quickly. Anthony: Yeah. I'm kind of jealous actually because you have been outrunning us in terms of the episode numbers even though we started a little earlier, you've already gotten more of them because as you say you do two a week and I am such a control freak about the editing and spend probably between five and 10 hours editing every episode. So it's a huge time sink for me and you've brought on guests that I was already wanting to bring on, but we just can't get everyone on we want to get on because there's only so much time in the day, but it's great that you have a team that can support you and help you really scale this. Kate: Yeah. So I don't actually edit them anymore. So that helps a lot. We have a great sound engineer, his name's Craig, we give him shout-outs all the time on here. Hi Craig. So he edits, which is super helpful because yeah. Like I said, when I edited it in GarageBand, it literally took me two full days. Christopher: It's the unsung hero of podcasting. I really- Kate: It really is. Christopher: I am very thankful of Anthony doing it because I think if I had to do it, I wouldn't know where to start. The reason I say that is because yeah, we actually bought the microphones ourself. I bought one off Amazon and I think Anthony did as well. But the one I bought and this is honest to God, a true mistake that I'm saying on air is and Anthony's going to laugh at this is, I didn't know that microphones had different directions that you're meant to speak into them. Right? So for the first, I think we're on 50 episodes now. Yeah. But we're on 50 episodes. So I think for the first 40 or 45, I was speaking into the top of my microphone when I actually needed to be speaking into the side of my microphone. Christopher: I just completely didn't notice until this one time I was just playing around. We were testing the sound and I was listening to it and I stood up by accident. I was like, wait, what? Then it was the biggest moment I was like, what did I... Why didn't I think of that? Of course, it's different because I think I got so used to seeing everyone else microphones with them speaking into the end. I was just, oh, of course, it's like that, like of course, you do that without realizing that. Obviously, I'm not an audio technical person and each microphone is very different. Kate: Yeah. Yeah. That's actually really... Kaelan our frontend engineer who comes on and hosts, he was actually using it, it was actually backwards. So he was talking in the back of the microphone for a good portion of season one. So you're not alone. Christopher: Yep. I'm definitely talking to the front. I just had to check because that would've been a second like, oh my gosh moment. Nope. I'm definitely talking into the front and the right side. I can see the logo and I'm pretty sure that's right. Kate: Yeah. Yeah. So let's talk about what podcasts influenced us, podcast hosts. We touched on it. I definitely was influenced by you guys as hosts for sure on FSJam, obviously Wes and Scott on Syntax. We just had them on, we kind of talked about their process with Syntax. I think you guys, as well as Wes and Scott, you both podcasts kind of bring in your personalities as hosts and you're just so involved in so many different things that it's really authentic. I think we have a little bit different style, but I think ultimately what we want is authenticity and we want curious people to walk away with entertainment, but also technical stuff. I think you guys do a really good job of that. Anthony: Yeah. You definitely bring your personalities to it as well. I'm usually laughing at some stuff that you guys have some pretty funny comments as you're going and it's very like true to lie as someone else who's a technologist. There's so many weird, specific things about working in this area that once you're in it you're in on the joke, but it's really cool to get to listen to that kind of stuff. For me, part of why I wanted to start a podcast is because I listened to so many podcasts, as I was learning to code. In between when I was a music teacher and when I was Actual Dev, I kind of gave up on music full stop and just started driving for Uber to make ends meet. Anthony: So I used to listen to about eight hours of podcasts a day just because I was working driving and that's just what I did. It was a great way to continue to try learn that skill set while having so little time. So I'm so thankful for podcasts for existing period and Software Engineering Daily was really a big one for me and Jeff Meyerson who for anyone who is following him may know he's been kind having a rough time lately, but he's on the mend now for anyone who's curious. That show is just so pivotal for me. It's been around for six years has close to 2000 episodes. Now I would guess it's to me, there's nothing else even comes close to it. So huge respect for Jeff and everything he's built. Anthony: Then the Devchat.tv empire that Chuck has built. He has 10 shows, JavaScript Jabber, React Roundup, Views on Vue, a whole set of others. They're great. They have a panel as well and what I enjoy about FSJam and PodRocket as well is you have multiple hosts. So it's not quite a panel, but you still have guests who come on, but you have more than one host just asking questions. So it's hard to keep the variety going and make sure you ask all the questions you need to ask with just one person. They have to really do their research well but if you can split the difference and have a couple people asking questions, you usually cover a wider sphere of important stuff, and then React podcast Michael Chan who I'm now good friends with is another pivotal one for me. Anthony: I've listened to a lot and just love his style and love how much he just is able to get into the psychology of his guests and really get the interesting questions out of them and being able to speak to them and bring out what you really want to know about them because some people are kind of closed off, especially if they're dev people and maybe kind of hard to get them comfortable. So that's actually a really important part of this process as well, making sure they're comfortable enough to speak freely and then that can be a hard thing to do as well. Christopher: I think Anthony, your story has been so well, not so well, it's so incredible how far you've came from even the start of doing FSJam. As you just said, you were doing Uber at the time listening to so many podcasts. You don't have a university degree like I do, or been doing it as long, but the amount of knowledge and wealth as in knowledge wealth, not wealth wealth, you have gained. You can say things that even, I don't even know, I'm like, why do I not know this? Yeah, you can just say what the theory is or the paradox is, or the math things. It's because you are like a knowledge sponge when I'm more like a knowledge drain, like a tap. I think it's so cool to think that, as you said, everything you've done, every podcast you've done, every article you have wrote has took you step by step further into the role and position you are in today. Yeah. I think the reason I started doing things with Anthony in the first place was because the articles he was writing were pretty rad even back then. Anthony: [crosstalk 00:22:30]. I really appreciate that. That means a lot. Kate: Yeah. I was going to say when we first interviewed you, Anthony, and I was doing some research and you were like, yeah, I was in the code bootcamp and then I just joined these communities and just started doing documentation and just got involved. I did a code bootcamp and honestly, it didn't even cross my mind to just go start doing stuff. It did not even... I was so I think, getting your story out there about just getting involved is really cool. Anthony: Yeah. It's hard. It's really hard too. When you're in that position, you're still learning and you don't even understand the tech yet. Having that foresight to go out into a community and start meeting people and networking it's so daunting and there's so much happening. You can't even know where to go. So this is where listening to the podcasts came in really, really handy because I already knew what Redwood was because I heard Tom give five podcast interviews about it. So that's why I'm always so excited about giving back and by putting these episodes out into the world. Someone might listen to an FSJam episode and learn about a project that they want to get involved in. I think that is so important to put this content out into the world for other people who are looking for their niche to find. Christopher: To be fair, you can say me and Anthony came together from a podcast because I too listened to Tom talking about RedwoodJS on our podcast and was like, this is pretty good. I should learn some more and obviously, we both joined the Redwood community at pretty much the same time. It just went from there to be fair. I still use Redwood. Anthony still works with Redwood and the podcast is on strength to strength. My podcast that I listen to. Well, I got an interesting few and I'll say this because one, I'm a founder. So first one I would say is called Build Your SaaS and it's by the Transistor guys, Justin and John. They talk about how they've built their SaaS product, how they've bootstrapped it. A lot of it. It's a lot more about the theory of doing it, the emotion of building it than this is what technology we've used because they've used completely different technology stacks tours and at Everfund and everything they say I still relate to. Christopher: So it's a lot more of an emotional connection as a podcast for me and then my favorite podcast ever is atp.fm by Marco Arment, Casey Liss, and John Siracusa. It's an Apple podcast. I've literally listened to it religiously for three years I think. Every episode listened to and they just talk about Apple. I would say I'm an Apple fan, but I more listen to it for their connection and their banter and what they speak about than actually the products if that makes sense. My final one that this was when I knew I liked podcasting before podcasting is The WAN Show by Linus Media Group. That's been going on for so many years, like five, six years. This was when I was back in university because they were on Canadian time and they live-streamed it. It has always been a video kind of podcast, but they do release it as a podcast. Christopher: I've always watched it live on talking about the latest technology, talking about their thoughts on it and how everything goes about it. All three of them are not actually JavaScript-related. I've hardly ever listen to JavaScript podcasts. Why? I think it's because I work on it every day that I think listening to it as well would annoy the hell out of me. Because I'm like, I already know this. This is making me want to cry. I dealt with this problem at work and now I'm going to listen to a podcast about it or I am dyslexic and sometimes when I try to listen to podcasts while I'm coding and sometimes they say pseudo-code, I'll stop writing that pseudo-code by mistake. It's like, wait, no, I'm trying to do my thing. Kate: Yeah. I too have had that. You're listening to music and then you're typing lyrics. Cool. Yeah. So we talked a little bit about community building a community. RedwoodJS I think does a great job, I guess, what are you guys doing with FSJam community or any communities that you're involved in? Anthony: I think we're not very good at community building. We have a discord that is completely dead and is just there to post-episode updates. I would really like to invest more in the FSJam discord. It's just hard because I'm already doing like a million things. So I really can't put more on my plate at this point. So it's hard to think of "a strategy" for our discord. So it's just kind of there. People join. Hopefully, it's nice to get a bump from that if you're not on Twitter, it's a good way to keep up with new episodes and stuff like that. So that's kind of the extent of it right now. I think one day I may try and dig into that more, but unfortunately, I just don't really have the time for it. Christopher: I think talking about how full is your plate is a really big thing because obviously so many times we have spoke to each other and said, okay, we need to do this. We need to do that. We need to do this. And obviously, Anthony's a developer advocate for StepZen. I'm running my own company and you just get so lost in your work that you think, oh, I needed to post the episode. We've been putting all of the episodes on YouTube that literally every single episode is lined up to be put on YouTube and we said to each other, this is really recent. Okay, we'll release them daily and so that's just me going on at 5:00 PM each day and clicking publish and it was just too much because I've been so busy doing everything else. Chucking water on fires sometimes- Anthony: And you said you were going to release it daily, I said, why do you want to do them daily? You're not going to be able to keep up with that. Christopher: Yeah. So maybe in the next week, there's probably going to be a massive dump there that's just like, here's all of them. Because surprisingly people do listen to them for YouTube as well. They're not video just the audio, but it's that thing. To me, it's just making the podcast accessible wherever it is. I think YouTube's actually a really interesting medium for podcasts because some podcasts choose to only put up the clips, say the highlights of the episode when others put on the full episode, I don't know which one's better, but I feel like some people have their choices. Anthony: It's important to also point out that YouTube transcribes and then SEOs your episode. So that's why uploading something to YouTube can actually be super interesting because it makes it more searchable in a way that podcasts is this huge, open dead zone of content that doesn't get indexed in the same way. So this is one of the reasons why you want to put your shows on YouTube just because it will transcribe it automatically and then put it out there. That's actually something I was curious about with PodRocket because you guys do transcripts. So how does that work exactly? You have an actual person sit down and write them? Kate: We use Rev for our transcripts. So we just use upload the file and then they do it for you. Anthony: So they probably... So they do everything. So they probably have their own process where they will auto transcribe it and then have a person go over it. That's pretty much the only way. There's still no software, as far as I know, that can actually transcribe technical content correctly without a person going over it. Kate: Yes and you actually can do the just automated or you can do automated and have someone go over it for you because words like SQL or the tech words that grammatically it's correct but within it's a company or a brand it's not correct. That stuff, yeah, definitely gets tricky. Anthony: Then do you all have a community around... Like you have a LogRocket community I'm assuming, so you probably kind of feed that all into there. Kate: So we actually, yeah, we don't have a discord or forum for the podcast specifically. I mean me, I'm trying to make sure. I'm constantly checking Twitter. I'm not really posting on Twitter unless it's our episodes, but I'm definitely checking Twitter a lot and looking at web.dev stuff. I mean we really just rely on our guests to share and share all the episodes. Definitely, something we probably could be doing more of for PodRocket specifically but I actually talk about this- Anthony: Is there a lot of LogRocket community that is what I'm curious about? Kate: Oh, we don't have a discord for LogRocket either. A lot of our community actually I mean really is the blog. We're pretty, we encourage everyone to comment in the blog posts and this community really is very vocal. So if there's people are curious about something more in a blog or curious about something or they're like, hey, I tried this and it didn't work. Everyone really is super active I think in our blog comments, Anthony: I would hang out in a LogRocket discord if you ever make one. Kate: Okay. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah. We've talked about it, but yeah. I actually talked about this with bdougie on our episode and actually I think, unfortunately, I don't think we were recording when I talked about it with him, but he said the same thing. He's like, everyone just has a discord that's just like a ghost town just sitting there. That's a really big thing, a really big need in communities right now. Anthony: Yeah. I watched him build up Open Sauced over the last year. That was one of the first discourse I ever joined and it was a ghost town for many months and it's not anymore. There's like, you can't point to a thing that he did that made it not like it's a whole holistic process of always bringing yourself to it and just engaging with the people who do show up. Then out of that whole set of people who show up a small subset of them continue to stick around and it's so hard to make a "strategy" around this stuff. It's probably just about being genuine and just showing up and doing the work. Kate: Totally. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's tough to have metrics around it. Like you said, strategy, plan anything like that. So, but I do think we're seeing more and more of it I think since I started working at LogRocket, which is over three years ago. I think, you see more people starting communities and you see more titles, like community manager, community management, that sort of thing. Anthony: Yeah, this next one I'm really curious to get into because we're going to talk about how do we prepare for episodes. I remember when I was on your show, I said you were the most prepared person I've ever seen on a podcast where it was like getting an outline and asking questions and pulling together material. This is where I know our shows are polar opposite. This is not advice I would necessarily give to a podcaster, but me and Chris show up totally blank. We never have an outline. We show up and me and him know the type of stuff we want to ask and we know the general outline of things we want to get into, but we have never written an outline for a show and you have very thorough outlines for your show. So this is a big difference between how we approach these things. Christopher: I honestly think it's crazy. Not that you've got an outline. No, no, that's pretty cool. I mean, that me and Anthony, we normally one of us is normally more knowledgeable in the subject area than the other one. So we normally just let whoever knows more play it, but then it tends to be this point of whoever knows more. It's like, what are they going to do? Are they, going to advocate it or are they going to grill it? Because it normally goes one way or the other and I like to say, I like to grill even the things I know because sometimes I feel you can be a fluffy duffy and ask the easy questions. But recently we was on a podcast with Aldo who's building lambdragon and he was like, before the podcast, he went ask me the tough questions. Christopher: I was like, are you sure you want the tough questions? Because I'll ask the really tough questions and I did. He was like, yeah, it kind of sounds like a grilling to a certain extent, but it's only because it's kind of the critical questions that I think sometimes people want to hear. In terms of planning these questions a lot of them just come into my head while I'm listening to the conversation. Normally with both of us that have a hundred percent at least read, either the documentation, the website, and then sometimes- Anthony: Or even have been building with it for months or even a year at a time. That's the thing is we tend to bring on projects that we are already personally invested in. So we have this huge backlog of knowledge about a thing already just because we use it, we use it day-to-day. That's why we bring the people on to talk to them about it. So we have questions that only come through the experience of working with the technology. Kate: Totally. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that's why you're able to just jump into a podcast and talk about it because you are in it and use it. I think I'm just a really prepared person anyway but I think I just want to make sure that we're asking what people want to know about it. So I do a ton of research actually before each guest and there's some that I do more research than others, but I'm usually reading documentation about whatever they want to talk about. I'm listening to stuff, the podcast that they've done before. I also want to make sure that we're not asking the same questions over and over again, even though there's general questions you have to ask, like tell me about this thing and how it technically works. I just want to make sure that we're not tell me more about this thing that you've talked about a hundred times and Wes Bos was just on and he is saying, he's told his coding story a hundred times and while he'll tweet it out, whatever episode asks him. He's not sure if people still want to keep listening to that. Anthony: Well, that's an interesting one though, because we had Sebastien Lorber on recently from Docusaurus and when we asked him his getting started coding story. He said, no one had ever asked him that before. It was the first time he ever had the chance to tell it. So that's why we bake that into the point where almost every guest we have them tell they're getting started story because we have people who have never done a podcast before. I reach out to people specifically who I know are doing good work and who may not be "podcast people" because I know that they have an hour's worth of things to say regardless of whether they've done a podcast or not, and those are the people where you want to make sure you give them the space to tell their story because they have literally never told it before in a public forum. Kate: Totally. Yeah. We talk about this in the podcast too. It seems like there's with dev advocates there's a group of people who they've been on 10 podcasts. So it is great to also reach out to people who haven't been on as many podcasts and hear their stories as well. I think it's really all about what you want to get out of each episode and who you're talking to, what they're excited about. That's a huge factor also too, of the outcomes of our podcast. Christopher: Yeah. I think personally, some of my favorite episodes of FSJam have actually been the products that I've used every day that one of the ones that comes to the top of my head is React Query the TanStack. I was going to say his name and I was like, I know his name. I'm going to say it and then my head went, don't mess it up. Taylor, Tyler, Lindsay, Tyler- Anthony: Tanner Linsley. Tanner Linsley was on PodRocket as well actually. Christopher: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This was something I used every day and obviously, Anthony had looked at never read, never really used properly. I was so enthusiastic for that episode. Loved every second of it. Then there's some of them that completely surprise me with their guests. Like Peter Cooper, really interesting guy, runs half of the network of newsletters and it's such an interesting story that you wouldn't know if you didn't interview these people and he had never done a podcast before, but he runs half the newsletters on the internet. Anthony: He's definitely done podcasts before. He was on Screaming in the Cloud with Corey Quinn just like a month before we interviewed him. Christopher: There you go. Extra spare facts. Kate: I would love to have him on- Christopher: Opinion. Kate: Yeah. Yeah. Anthony: That was a great episode. Yeah. I really enjoyed that. One of the cool things that I enjoy about doing this is you get to see trends and for us, we're mostly interviewing people who are working on dev tools and Switch, put out a tweet recently saying that you fart on a dev tools company, you get $5 million or something like that. Or I forget what he said, but it was just like dev tools is just blowing up right now. We bring on so many dev tools companies. So that's really the big trend I see and just as dev developer advocates and content creators are driving this in a lot of ways. So I see them as there's this term thought leader and then influencers. I prefer to call myself a thoughtfluencer personally. So this is where I think you have a huge intersection of new things. People who want to know about the new things and how they can work with each other. So that's mostly the trend I see from FSJam, but be curious what trends you see having done PodRocket now for close to a year. Kate: Yes. So definitely we've seen that too, like dev tools. We talk to a lot of people in open source and I think the biggest trend is talking a lot about tools that are... Their performance of tools I think is definitely what we've been talking about a lot. It's interesting. I think some of our most popular episodes were unexpected. I think we talked about this a little bit, but our Rust episode actually did really well and- Anthony: People love Rust. People love Rust. Kate: So that was cool to see. Solid.js We just had Brian on pretty recently. So- Anthony: Yeah, we got Ryan coming up. I listened to that episode and immediately reach out to him and said we need to get you on the podcast. Kate: It was good timing, I think and because actually even we just had Rich Harris on and he was like, oh yeah, I saw you guys had Ryan on. So I don't know if you'd listened to it, but I was like, oh that's cool. So yeah, I think tools that are... Yeah. I don't know, not different, but different, but the same, I guess. A lot of what Ryan talked about was pulling stuff from other what he pulled basically what he liked from other frameworks and I think people kind of like to hear if you have something that works for you and it's cool people like to hear why and what parts are you pulling from? Where did you get that idea? That sort of thing. Anthony: What trends are you seeing Chris? Christopher: My headphones are dead, so I'm secretly charging them, but I can't hear out my headphones. But when I say this is off the cuff, this is very off the cuff. I'm very sorry. I'm going to unplug them and they're going to come back on with 20% instead of zero now. What trends am I seeing? That's a really good question because I'm a very shiny person as in, I like shiny objects, something interesting. I love the risky ones with less than a hundred stars on GitHub. They really get me going half the time. Ooh, what is this that I've just found on GitHub with less than a hundred stars? Yes. Let's use in production. That's what I like to hear. Christopher: Only if it's useful. I don't just stick anything in production just to say. Put my headphones back on right way. I think the biggest trends that I see is that there's a lot of things that have exponentially grown and became so much easier for developers to just abstract away. For example, we're seeing a dev tool for everything from literally your VS code to production. There's now a dev tool for every single action that you can probably take in development. There's a dev tool that will try and automate that in some way and make it easier for you or do some things from your VS code. It's now code sandbox, Gitpod to literally in production that's burst out. I still think there's so much room to go in terms of actually what's actually, I think the most useful out of all of it, it's focusing less on the things that don't matter necessarily to you as the developer. Christopher: The example I like to do is really bring up Stripe in this area because Stripe are known as this five lines of code to create a billing app, right? But it's not actually five lines of code. It's five lines of code to take a payment, but to actually build the infrastructure is I want to view my invoices. I want to sort out my refunds. I want to do all these other things. They've spent a lot of money on that with Stripe Checkout. But half the time I would just say, go use Chargebee or Billfold because three lines of code that you actually add to your app, and it's completely done for you. Some developers probably would say, well, I want to spend 2000 pound on writing all of that myself. But one of the biggest things that were actually brought up recently in a meeting hours in was a different startup that have spent thousands of pound on doing it the AWS way. Christopher: Two people have probably actually used it instead of just the cheaper way, the faster way, because it's that thing. There's so much work to actually build a payment platform and what's the point in building it if nobody's going to use it? So you should just use a service that is free to just get going and it's like that for me, with 90% of the dev tools. Anthony knows because Anthony laughs at this, but if it's a tool that's going to save me time or money or even responsibility as in I can just offload it to them. I'll probably use it because I've got a lot to do so the less I can do the better. Anthony: [crosstalk 00:47:05] That's where it's great. Having you as an advocate for other people who are trying to build things is you're like, I'm trying to do something real here. I got a company we're trying to make money. You have real actual, actionable goals you're going for, and that's why you ask the pointed questions. You're able to say, I don't care how "cool or hip" this thing is. Does it solve a problem? And then does it solve my problem specifically? So having that kind of pointed question at whatever your use case is it really helps focus the conversation. That's one of the things I really appreciate about having you on the podcast. Christopher: I think it's that thing that devs, we love to say, we've rewrote it 20 times to be as small and as fast and as everything as possible with no new functionality. Yeah. It's probably the same the first time and the first time will probably make you money and the amount of enterprise apps that I've seen recently that are just like, as I say, oh my gosh, why are people you using Bootstrap and jQuery in 2021? Like, oh my, this makes me seriously want to be sick, but they make tons of money. Why? Because they don't care about the technology. They just care about fixing and solving the use cases. I think that's really important in every episode that we speak to because when you're a developer and you have to make these decisions, what tools to use, how you're going to solve a problem. Christopher: A lot of the time you have to explain why you've chosen the choices to management or your boss, or your other co-founders in a startup of these are the choices I'm making. Yes, and I tend to find it's best to be as transparent as possible saying, I don't know that area, but this is what I've listened to. This is what I know. It's easier to probably trust that company and just pay their bill then go make it myself. I think that's a big thing in developer tools right now is the lowering and lowering and lowering the barrier to entry to the point that anybody can get 90% of a SaaS startup made without using actually their own logic for most of it. Kate: Yeah. Totally. Okay. Do we want to talk or do we want to jump into 2022 trends? Anthony: Yeah. What is the future of our podcast, podcasts in general? I see so many companies now making podcasts, you mentioned here Nost has one coming up, which I didn't know, actually. I follow NHost so that's really cool. I'll definitely have to listen to that. I see a lot of blockchain companies, they have their own podcast as well. So I think people see it as a useful medium, but it's hard to have a strategy around going back to our previous conversation about building community and stuff like that. So I think that in general, most people know that it's a good medium, but it's hard to see the ROI on it unless you are just following people who are listening to it and seeing that engagement. So I'd be curious, how do you guys think about ROI and what you're getting out of PodRocket in general? Kate: Yeah. So it's definitely tough to measure. Metrics for podcasts are not super clear, and which makes sense because you download it and then we lose track of it. But yeah, I mean, we're more thinking of just how do we basically the podcast kind of exists because our blog is something that we're so proud of and it's so huge and it's now such a big part of our company. We're just more basically just building a brand, being something that people can rely on, being a resource for basically all developers. So it's not really super quantified right now, but it's more just more brand building. Anthony: It's also about building relationships. I know for me, the network I've built through our podcast guests is the strongest network I have and just being able to reach out to these different people and get them on and get to showcase their stuff and then make sure the episode is good and goes out and represents them in a good way. You get so much goodwill back from that and you get to build so many connections and relationships with people through doing it. So for me, that's really where I see the ROI and the return on investment. I think it's hard because it's long-term play. It's an infinite game, not a finite game if you're into that nomenclature. So to me, podcasting is just, it's the ultimate infinite game. It's a really fun way to just get people together and talking, and then also having a really cool thing to put out into the world after the fact, Christopher: I think the biggest ROI for me is when someone literally says I've listened to these episodes. I get that joke. I get that reference. Or when someone recommends it to somebody else is just like, people are actually listening to this and I still find that crazy because yeah, I can see the statistics saying, people are listening to this, but it's so different to see a number saying, this is how many downloads you have to, I'm a person and I'm recommending this to somebody else. It just is mind-blowing to me as in people actually want to listen to these things, people actually enjoy listening to these things and people actually learn things from these things is incredible. Kate: Totally. Yeah. Do you guys get a lot of responses on Twitter, from your FSJam account? Anthony: Not a lot on Twitter. I find that mostly people who are into the show tend to reach out directly through private channels and will let me know that hey, I really enjoy your podcast. I really enjoy listening to it. We've had a couple people tweet about it over the year or so but it's also because I hang out with so many discords, so I'm always blasting it out to have the communities I'm in anyway. I've built-up fans through the React podcast discord or Open Sauced or the Redwood discord and people seem to really appreciate it and just like getting to be a fly on the wall for the conversations that we have. So again, it's really hard to measure, but I've gotten enough face-to-face communication with people just saying hey, I love your podcast that really keeps me going. Kate: Yeah. I was just asking because we actually, we don't get a ton of engagement with our PodRocket Twitter account, but people will tweet at me or Brian or Ben directly, which makes sense. I mean, it totally makes sense, but yeah. Christopher: I think the biggest question that's always on people's minds is when they recommend it is like, who's your favorite host? What's your favorite episode? What's your favorite part? Just tell me, because obviously, we see statistics saying this was the most downloaded episode, but what was their favorite episode? What was that moment where they was like, I actually quite enjoy this? Was it on the first episode? Was it on the 10th episode where they're like, I'm going to keep listening to this? What hooked them? What was their first episode? All that stuff I think is so, so interesting that on anything in terms of analytics does not cover right now. You can't tell what someone's first episode was or their favorite episode because to you... And to be fair, if you don't know podcasting, you can't even really tell how many subscribers you have. It's an estimate. They say, well, we're taking the averages of your last three downloads and that's how many subscribers you have, but it's such an opaque industry, but it's always because it's been that Bootstrapper industry and people like Spotify come along saying, we're going to dominate it and they're not in my eyes. They're still- Anthony: Well, that's because it's decentralized. It's an actual decentralized medium where you put your thing out on RSS feed. People choose to download it or they don't and that's the only metric you get is how many downloads you get into these random podcast players that are out into the world. That's what makes podcasts so weird, interesting, medium. It actually takes the fundamentals of the web and puts them to an audio medium. So you don't get good metrics on purpose because the thing is actually decentralized. Christopher: It's so easy to understand, right? It's just a decentralized network where each body is for themselves. Anthony: It's just watching. It's just like watching. Why? Kate: Yeah, no, I was going to say with NHost, I just saw that I think they have one episode out and I just took notice, but I know that they just came on and they were on for no, I don't think they were on for a Founder Friday segment, but they're pretty small- Anthony: You had your eye on it, yeah, I think for Founder Friday. Yeah. Kate: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, and usually our Founder Friday segments are usually the companies are quite small. So creating a podcast at that size is exciting and I know when I was hired on LogRocket, the company was pretty small and I started on our blog and it was exciting for me to say, oh, a company this size is prioritizing content. Now specifically a company is prioritizing specifically a podcast, which is, I think that's super exciting. Anthony: I'll have to get on that one. I talked to Johan a little bit like NHost they have the whole Redwood integration they're like a GraphQL company. So obviously I'm very aware of them and big fans of what they do. Kate: Yeah. You'll have to be a guest on there. Christopher: The Open Source Firebase Alternative where have I heard that term- Anthony: But with GraphQL Open Source Firebase Alternative with GraphQL that what makes them different from Supabase. Supabase doesn't have GraphQL built-in. Christopher: Well, this is the thing about all these taglines is every product, every dev tool, the amount of time that's probably spent working out how to put what you do actually simply is such a hard thing. Like, oh, this is React. Yeah. But what kind of React? There's 20 kinds of React. Oh, it's static site reacts. Okay. The best static site generator in React it's- Anthony: Yeah because you get a single sentence. You get one sentence to explain your thing and they're like, if you can't explain it in one sentence, why should I even care? Christopher: Exactly. Why should I care? Why should I do this? The best thing and I think this is a trend I think we'll continue to see into 2022, 2023 is more open source companies where a lot of their main product and ISP is already open source and then they tend to close source a cloud version. I think we'll see that a lot more going forward and I think it'll just continue to grow. But personally, I do have some ethical questions to these things where open source is this really great thing and anyone can contribute, but if this thing's going to make money, shouldn't the people that are contributing get paid and there's a lot of them services just coming around that I think are really going to take off because if it is a true open-source alternative to X, then surely you shouldn't put a poor request in unless you're going to get paid for it because the owners of it are probably going to be paid for it. But that's my personal two cents on this kind of open-source software. Kate: Yeah. I feel like we've had a couple guests it seems like the last couple episodes have been kind of that open-source model of open sourcing something and then having the cloud version or some other paid solutions as well. Anthony: Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Kate, for doing this with us. I really appreciate getting to chat about this stuff. So thank you for being such a huge supporter of FSJam. I've been a huge supporter of PodRocket, so it's really cool to get to collaborate on some of this stuff. This was really fun. Kate: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Thanks for again this was your idea. So thanks for putting it out there and yeah, we'll have to do this more often. Christopher: Maybe we can make it an annual thing, hey. But FSJam is probably going to have another annual episode near the end of the year. We definitely should and we definitely could. The Roundup of FSJam of 2021 because I think it's so interesting because I remember this episode and we said, what's going to happen in the next year? Everyone said everyone had their opinion, their own secret flavor of where it's going. I think specifically with FSJam, we're really going to see if they've hit their goals. They're still working towards their goals and what's going to happen next. What have they moved on to? I think is going to be a super, super interesting area to catch up with. People that have already been on the show before whilst 2022 for FSJam. Probably more podcasts with people that have been on before. What do you say Anthony? Anthony: Oh, yeah, definitely. Almost everyone we've had on could come back and do a follow-up episode because everyone we had on has continued to do interesting stuff. Kate: Definitely. Yeah. New versions always. Yeah. You can always talk about those. Great. Well awesome. Thank you so much, guys and yeah, really appreciate it. Anthony: Thank you. Christopher: Thank you. Brian: Thanks for listening to PodRocket. Find us at PodRocketpod on Twitter, or you could always email me even though that's not a popular option. It's Brian at LogRocket.