it's a psychological trick yeah all of that stuff can be staged and i start to think should we be
more professional in how we do our podcast i'm going to do a hard no here
hello and welcome to the metacast podcast the best podcast ever the podcast where we discuss
how things are going in our company and yeah chat about various things i'm your host ili bestiliff
and with me is my co-host arna deka today we are going to talk about software that we use
in our company i mean we are a software company we build software but surprise we also use software
to build software it's like this inception thing that we are in it's all software all the way down
that's why it's called metacast yeah we have a podcast about the podcasting company
and we use software to build software so yeah how more meta can it get well i guess we got to get
meta verified and then we will be like fully meta you're not fully meta yet okay so what are we going
to talk about today yeah we're going to talk about software that we use uh we already talked about
subscriptions that we use and we pay for which was i think a pretty interesting episode that was episode
like 31 or 32 32 was corey queen it was it must have been 31 yeah and over the last few weeks we've
accumulated a lot of scars from using google products now that we are corporate google workers google
workspace users yes and ilia has started developing you're doing more and more of the actual development
work and you're seeing more and more of it so yeah yeah we've been kind of punting this episode because
we were like we are going to experience more bugs from google so let's do it later so now i think we're
at this point where i don't think anything google does can surprise us at this point well sort of
yeah it depends as we talk through the episode we'll find out where we stand but i think it's not all
doom and gloom we would not have been able to build and get it to the hands of our beta customers in this
short duration without google i mean absolutely i wouldn't be able to send the white listing email our
infrastructure wouldn't run and also our users wouldn't have android phones without google yeah
google is a great company it's just um there are some dark corners there yeah and it's gigantic so
there is some like seams that don't work with each other anyway we'll get into all that through this
episode yeah so first let's start with the things that we are improving this episode and i know you
don't have any because you didn't prepare oh i just added one remember well maybe because you didn't
prepare so that's the prepare better for the episode no i'm just uh semi-kidding here but the topic i
wanted to bring up in terms of improvements i've been thinking about positioning i think we talked about
that a little bit last time like x coordinate and y coordinate no the playhead position in audio
okay this is getting too inside jokey too meta right now yeah because yeah we were working on
some play help position in the app today well i was working and um i don't know what's helping me
so i think last time i mentioned that people are thinking we are building a podcasting
like studio kind of thing we are building a podcast we had a discussion about this between you and me like
last week or something yeah we have it on the recording too uh i think it was in the last episode
oh we did okay yeah everything is very meta in my head so yeah so but the other thing i was thinking
about is so one thing is just communicating the message very clearly like we are the founders of
metacast a delivery c corp building a building a startup whose product is a podcast app that people can
use to listen to listen to podcasts obviously this is not the marketing pitch but this is
factual statement of what we're working on podcast is our marketing channel right this podcast is our
marketing channel exactly yes and in this podcast we talk about how we built the company so we need
to make it very clear mostly not on the podcast but on our social media channels and i've been actually
using that line at the end of my linkedin posts saying that we are building a podcast app company and yeah
follow me for more stuff by the way when when we say marketing channel it sounds very salesy in a
negative way i i want to rephrase this to this is more like our community channel right it's a one-way audio
community channel where i mean right now the only people who listen to our are like our supporters fans
people who really are interested in seeing what we're doing how it's getting built and all that and
so it's our one-way audio channel to those people i actually like that because marketing implies that we
drive awareness but i feel like it's going to be the other way around this podcast our users will
discover the podcast through the app and this will be a user radio that's actually a pretty cool
positioning for this so but the positioning i was going to talk about today is i've been watching a lot
of expert reels on instagram expert reels expert reels okay i'm sure it's common in the us as well
but back home in russia anybody who has sizable audience sizable meaning at least a few thousand
people they sell stuff and there are a lot of people selling courses and selling some services
i mean i can get it when people like get like a hairdresser sells themselves like as a hairdresser
right people come to them because of their social media it's all great but there are lots and
lots and lots of people now who have learned how to create reels that drive followers and
subscriptions and all that and then they create courses about creating reels and then those reels
are about creating reels so that they can sell more of their courses i've been watching a lot of those
because they have a lot of useful content useful information for me this is perfect can i just tell
you about an incident i just read about it like yesterday so this is almost exactly what you're
talking about i was on reddit and i think it was the startups or entrepreneur subreddit and there was a
post very bold post right saying like anybody can if they put their mind into it anybody can get two
hundred thousand users within a month and so this person posted saying that anybody can do this and
i'm going to this is my day one i'm going to post every day on reddit saying how i'm going to get
200 000 users a month right through that freaking subreddit that's how they're doing this am i right
it was very meta but almost all the comments were exactly that right like after 30 days you'll come
back and say this is how to get 100 000 users as a course and post it here oh so but here's an
interesting thing there so doing this in public like he's doing or they are doing this person right
they're using this reddit thing as also a marketing channel it's a self-reinforcing thing that they're
doing well i don't know about self-reinforcing i think that might be the attempt but reddit users
are not the right like it's not like instagram right most of the comments in that thread are like
i won't say dismissive but they're very cynical and they're seeing through it that you're not
going to get 200 000 users in a month by posting every day on reddit you're going to get to it
some other way but ultimately what i think not not me the commenters this is the sentiment of the
commenters i'm aggregating into my own voice what i think is that after 30 days you're going to come
back and sell some sort of an info product showing how to grow to 100 000 users in a month
and that itself might be the end goal rather than actually growing some product or anything like
that because there was no mention of what product or what they're working on okay that's very
interesting okay so the positioning i was thinking about is all of those experts that i'm looking at
they have those uh setups where they have lots of great lighting and they have kind of assure sm7b
microphone in front of them and they talk really well uh sometimes when they talk averagely still like
the setup looks really really good and i was thinking about how much does that affect the perception
not by people who watch them regularly because then they can appear in any attire and you will still
perceive them like us right now yeah like us right uh yeah i'm in my pajamas right now no pants me too
green ones
okay but for people who discover them like accidentally let's say instagram recommends it
on youtube shorts you just like look at somebody how much more likely would you not swipe away
somebody who is looking like me right looking like you like just a t-shirt in the house right
absolutely nothing special uh in terms of uh the setup versus somebody who is like sitting at the
desk with their microphone and as if they're talking to some or talking to somebody else like like a
podcast host and there are other people in the background watching them like a dead dog kind of
setup it automatically it is in my head it's like okay so this person has something to say it's a
psychological trick yeah all of that stuff can be staged and i start to think should we be more
professional in how we do our podcast i'm going to do a hard no here
because it just doesn't suit my personality but it's a hard no because i don't like it because i said
no no i know that this is the game you have to play nowadays especially if you want to grow
engagement from like random users who are seeing you for like 30 seconds right and you need to get
those 30 seconds 15 seconds of not even fame 15 seconds of instagram and make it into a follower
these are the kind of gimmicks that you have to do maybe i'm very old school in this way
i personally don't do things like like i barely ever go search for things in instagram or follow
people speaking in instagram most of my instagram and every other social media usage is more like
nature hikes tennis things like that maybe i just don't understand the mentality first of all and second
i don't think i could do that so it's not like i don't want to do it it's rather i can't do that
so ardab how would you feel if we didn't experiment just hypothetically right i'm just trying to like
get you transferred to that mindset so let's say next week we are going to a studio i mean each of us
goes to studio and we have to wear a formal shirt and a tie just like imagine yourself doing this how
would it make you feel okay so before i get to the podcast you already know this and i think you and
i are very similar in this maybe that's why you brought it up but my first job i had to wear a tie
every day it was a company that ends with sucks yes we were named the company it was a huge company
yeah yeah but i had to wear a tie every day that was the first four years three no two and a half
years of my professional work and i was like i'm never doing anything where i'm forced to wear a tie
again so for a podcast no i i don't know maybe it might be too naive but i don't believe in this
sort of engagement and follower kind of mentality i would rather grow 10 connections a year but they're
like actually deep connections who care about you who know you and all that rather than like 100 000
people who follow you on instagram only for the type of things that you produce in instagram for
content for that content for that specific type of content that is why i'm saying content is because
it's not even information it's content it's like a special kind of information it's not just the
information sometimes there is no information but but it's the presentation and the setup and all that
yes it's very engaging i would say yeah but the moment you stop doing that for whatever reason you may
decide i've had enough right i don't want to keep doing this you lose all those they're not really
connections they're i think the word follower itself is like they're not following you anyway so that was
my long long-winded answer to not wearing a tie yeah okay and i think you're very similar so i was uh
yeah yeah i think i can bridge a couple of topics right now because a few minutes ago i said back home
in russia and it just felt weird and i'll get to why in a moment and also um i think a few episodes
ago we were saying how i was about to record from a car actually which didn't happen because we
rescheduled and all but i was ready to do that and we'll get to that in a second and also i think in
episode six or eight when we talked to any and angela from hearts in taiwan eight or ten yeah i told
them i don't feel very american and all that so now you feel very do you now i am very american
yeah so that uh time when i had to record from the car i was going for an interview for uscs
interview for immigration interview where they asked me about a bunch of questions like who is my us
representative and a few other kind of third grade level kind of questions and they tested
my english skills and all that this was your citizenship uh us citizenship test yes i passed
it yes a plus with flying blue red and white colors yes and then the week afterwards uh yeah i had my
ceremony and it actually was a very good ceremony but i had to dress up for that freaking ceremony well
actually i bought a shirt and formal pants because i didn't have any for the last 10 years last time
i wore pants and a shirt when i was interviewing for an mba program back in the spring of 2013
and then when i got my admission letter i'm like screw this i'm gonna throw this all out and because
we're also moving internationally to the us i threw all of my formal attire out because like you i was
working for another company that ends with express and also a big global brand yes very big global brand
yeah and i hated wearing not just ties but actually shorts i don't mind as much what i do hate is pants
i find pants uncomfortable and unbeautiful not that i'm very stylish i know i don't wear pants or formal
shoes i don't have any yeah but luckily i had formal shoes still that i bought in germany they were some
kind of like 200 euro shoes that's supposed to last you all of your life you can get like buried in
those shoes if you like don't lose them because they're just such good quality because they're just
german made and um you know i didn't want to throw away because they were so expensive so luckily i didn't
have to buy the shoes yeah and uh yeah i went for that um in the interview in the ceremony because
it's one of those things where you should not anti-position yourself and uh come out like as a
slab because then they may have more questions for you you should post the picture of yourself that
you showed me that day in the show notes oh maybe the certificate with the flag yeah like you were like
clean shaven haircut and everything you look like a different person altogether yeah wearing a shirt
and pants look like a normal person yeah but yeah anyway so wearing pants then made me feel like
actually not as bad as i expected but you still prefer pajamas yes of course i mean when going out i
prefer shorts i have like these soft shorts they're almost like pajama shorts but yeah but i didn't feel
as bad i'm like yeah this is just parts of the of the game you know when in rome do as romans do so
10 years ago i was a little bit more absolutist in my attire tastes but i really like the shorts by the
way so the short actually really felt good so yeah i might buy a short just for some well i guess
semi-casual occasions uh so yeah if you want to congratulate me with becoming a us citizen you can
leave a five-star review
subscribe to our newsletter yeah or reply to the newsletter yeah all of that send ilia a message
yeah congrats that's a huge step many many many years in coming awesome yeah 10 years in this country
but yeah what was interesting is i was as i exited the ceremony the immigration building i was driving
back home and it felt different part of that was the ceremony was so different from border control
experience that you get as an immigrant uh where they like they look at you like who are you and when
they get the green card they get more polite it becomes normal uh but when you're on the visa it's like
a different experience but there they were like you're one of us and then they had this video of biden
playing which uh as cheesy as it sounds almost made me tear up but it was a very good video
and also there were lots of people there like with families and like lots of supporters i next to me
there was a guy he was probably 60 years old i forgot where he was from somewhere in latin america
uh venezuela or something this guy he looked like he was waiting for this for like 30 years or something
usually that's i mean that's how long it takes so yeah maybe yeah depending on the country of origin
right so yeah but he was like singing the anthem and he was dancing it was incredible he was so happy
when i was going in i was a bit cynical about this whole thing i'm like yeah just give me the paper
but in there i got really really well i wouldn't say i got really emotional i got a bit emotional
much more than i expected it's a big step so that's totally normal to feel overwhelmed and a bit emotional
in that well now you feel very american between episode 8 or 10 and episode 35 you've now become
american i think when we did episode 8 is probably when i just applied for it it actually took just six
months not not that long yeah cool let's move on next to our entree you are talking about positioning we
never finished that thread so like briefly i guess do your takeaway from oh no i was just wondering how
much it might have helped or might help if we do some unnatural things to ourselves again i think it
might help but i don't know it's the kind of thing that i could honestly do it how about you what do you
think i think it depends on whether i can still preserve my natural voice and tone but i think there are
little positioning things that i found that work quite nicely so for example when i write something
sometimes in the first sentence or two i would mention that i worked at google and amazon and then
that like it gives credibility it gives authority then i also stopped using things like i think or in my
opinion or at least i try to use them less of because then it helps you speak more assertively right
even though in in conversation one-on-one you would actually prefer to say those things because it
makes you more humble but when you broadcast you think it makes you more humble it just makes you
seem weak that's what they're saying no no i just said like i think it makes you feel more humble
it makes other people perceive me as more humble i know this is a fact yes oh i should say it makes
other people perceive you as a more humble person and you should do it yes
yeah no i think but those things are very organic right maybe we will someday get to that kind of
place making these small changes little by little but what i don't want to do is completely do something
for the sake of getting instagram views and follows like you said like sitting in a studio
making it look like there are people who are listening to us like in a ted talk that's a lie that's not
a small positioning part and the cleft track yes yeah i won't be able to do that but making small
changes here and there maybe someday you do get to a position where people are sitting there and are
listening to you and cheering and all that and then you post that yeah totally yeah cool
cool 26 minutes in warming up in our episode about software you feel warmed up yet i don't know what
temperature is right now in my room but it is incredibly hot without ac talking about temperatures what was
the temperature that day when you were going to sit in a car and record one hour long podcast episode it was not
too bad because a it was pretty early actually no it was around noon but they had a shaded uh parking lot
oh underground yeah but you didn't know that when you said okay i'm going to record from the car you
didn't know that i didn't know that no that would have been quite an experience i think i would have
had to keep the engine running otherwise i wouldn't be able to use the ac right yeah well anyway glad we
didn't have to do that thanks for cory for rescheduling to the next day yeah all right let's get on to the
entree so i'm just looking at our notes and we wrote them up like six weeks ago i think and i'm trying to
see how we segue into this so in our episode 26 we had jason freed and his co-founder dhh david
hanymar hansen created ruby on rails and the thing we have written here in those is culture of putting
things on rails up front so that's that's a segue i don't know if it worked
okay yeah that's like a junction in a railway track where like some other train comes from the
side it like hits you it derails you yeah now we are on a different train yeah anyway yeah i think
it's a train wreck so very early on we had nothing we just had a document where we wrote up what we
want to work on like in broad strokes something's kind of more detailed but it was just nothing just
a bunch of characters typed in a document right we didn't have a mock-up or and this is like
very very vague like we want to do something where the podcast is not just the audio some at that level
yeah we might have had something drawn in like a notepad which we didn't use in the doc basically
what i'm saying is like there was nothing that actually creates the software there was no code
there was no folder with files there was just absolutely nothing not even mocks like you said
no mocks on on computer and as we started setting things up i think one of the first questions came up
was like do we use cicd for this and these are the rails that i'm referring to are we going to just do it
like the college kids in the basement away and just like whatever not use version control not use cicd
because they probably don't even know what it is just hack the thing up deploy directly to production
have users three weeks in and then see it all burning flames in six weeks and then like redo the whole
thing only to redo it again later on and i think we made the decision to invest pragmatically into tools
up front and i was going to add that word pragmatic there because we did do a lot of the things you said
there but we also didn't do a lot of things yes yeah i mean compared to let's say what amazon does
or google does for their systems we are like at maybe nowhere yeah we're probably at 30 30 percent
i mean i wouldn't say we're nowhere actually tell us what we have do you want to talk about this from
like the rails perspective or and i'm not saying ruby on rails like the guard rails perspective or
from like what do we use what we have yeah i feel like more like what are the processes
that we've instituted to help us be more effective even though it costs us time up front it also some
money on an ongoing basis but it really helps us be more effective i guess what are the tools and
processes and yeah and what are the tools that we are using to achieve those yeah i think the only meaty one
in terms of like automation and all that that we have set up is the cicd for the app everything else
like you said we're almost doing what college kids would do right we we are like you said we are coding
it up i mean sometimes we do a little bit of back and forth between you and me is this the right way to
do about it and especially if it's like a complex feature i do brainstorm with you you brainstorm with
me right but other than that we do it we merge it and then we push it and then it's in production like
we are doing a lot of those things but i think the cicd part this is where being pragmatic comes in
right and what i really like about working right now is pretty much all of the time that we have that
we're working on the actual product is working on the product it's not working on the infrastructure or
building it or deploying it or monitoring like is google review done is apple review done okay move
it to the next step and all that so those are the things we have automated and what tools do we use
because you know there are plenty of tools for let's say cloud deployments but for mobile i would
hazard to guess it's a black box for many people like what tools do we have for that i think at some
point we should actually bring on the founders of the thing that we're using but let's do a brief intro
yeah so we use flutter to build the app flutter is a cross-platform app development framework
that is by google thank you google don't kill this please for our back end we use firebase which is
also it's acquired by google but it's right now it's run by google right it's almost like a part of
google cloud platform and it's very well integrated with google cloud so we use firebase and some parts
of google cloud please don't kill this again the very well part we can discuss later there were some
zombie things there okay yes yeah but we love these things and then once we build the app typically what
you would have to do to get an app into the end user's device is you have to build it with like xcode or
something like that sign it then probably the apple has some ways of like uploading the build artifacts
into app store and then you monitor app store push through like these are the steps and here you go
build deploy it add it to this user group and all that same thing pretty much the same thing on the
google play store side too they have to like upload the file to the yeah like developer console
you build it first i mean like if you do it like a college kid in the basement right so you like you
build it in your computer and then you upload the file and then you have to babysit it in the google
play and apple developer console yes and you move it step by step like for example right now we have two
sets of users for our app you can think about this if you're familiar with like software systems then
rollout wise it's like stages we have super pooper users and just users yeah it's the pooper users are
internal users which is just you and me right now because we get the crappiest versions yeah as soon
as the build is done we get it on our devices actually i don't but that's a different story you do
i get it on android i don't get it on apple thanks to some weirdness in apple but anyway it's a rotten
apple yeah with a bite gone out of it anyway the next step is a closed testers group that we have
set up right and right now how many testers do we have ilia about 15 15 i just allowed this at five
more a couple of hours ago and i actually want to talk about that too like how tedious and automation
worthy that experience was and now you have automated i'm not doing it manually again like next time i'll
automate it before i do it right right and i think this is where it's a really good point about pragmatic
right we do things manually as much as like we're not going to spend three days setting up some amazing
automation unless it really pays off right within let's say a month or something like that and you know
that it's costing time to not do this so i i think what we are optimizing for is like we have only two people
we need to optimize our time so that we're actually working on the product and not the infrastructure and all that and
that's kind of why maybe today we'll also talk about why did we choose firebase why not aws all of those things but
yeah you were asking about the automation machinery because it goes beyond time here because the frustration you
experience during wait times and just like sitting idle or like getting blocked i think it also drains
energy and then let's say if you were like 100 energy and then you actually spend very little time
doing something but it was annoying now you're like 70 energy if you think about energy energy is
probably more of an exponential scale you get a lot less done when you're at 70 compared to when you're at 100
percent yeah and it's distraction which is kind of like the other side of energy yeah yeah yeah yeah
totally so we use a thing called tramline that's uh a few of my it's also a startup a few of my friends
set it up maybe a year ago or something they're doing pretty well now they have started getting
paying customers and all that including us yeah we pay them uh we shouldn't disclose this we should not
disclose what we paid them yeah because they're going through the process of figuring out their
pricing and all that we are paying in advantageous early access rate yes yes and tramline is basically
you write your code you merge it into your github whatever branch that we have it on the main branch
then it picks it up from there builds it so we use something called bitrise to actually build the app
because you can only build an ios app on apple hardware you can't build it on linux or something
like that so bitrise has some almost on-demand kind of machinery available that tramline is the
orchestrator right tramline figures out that oh there's a new code sitting on github and you want to make
a release or whatever it triggers bitrise to go do the build using apple hardware for the ios build and
linux for the android one it basically uses flutter commands and all that to build the app sign it and
all that and then tramline uploads it to app store and google play and then basically whatever you would
do all those manual steps it automates all that the only manual step that you and i have is the
we do have a manual approval and this is the pragmatic part i was trying to come to is we haven't written
integration tests or anything and people who know me would kind of like not believe that but yeah
there are no automatic tests apart from like there is one whether the app boots or not
yeah it's already bootstrapped so yeah that's the machinery that we're using so yeah flutter
firebase and then for cicd bitrise and all this tramline yeah so once you merge a pull request
the next night tramline just picks it up and makes a release and in the morning uh we see a new version
on our phone because test flight automatically updates it yeah because we are internal users group right so
as soon as the build is done it deploys it to the internal users group yours and my phones right now
my android your ios yeah and then that is the only approval step we have is to test it for a little bit and
then we say okay this is ready to go send it to the beta testers yeah and then you get it pretty much
right away well not right away maybe within an hour or so so google play the first review
of the app the very first review it took about eight days eight days but since then it feels very
automated uh because as soon as we send it for approval within about 30 minutes it gets approved
and then gets deployed apple there's more of a human things like there's a mix of automation and human
in the loop because some bills i don't know what they do but on some bills they determine that this
needs more time or maybe a human to verify or whatever and so it takes time sometimes up to a day
but sometimes it gets like approved in 30 minutes or 40 minutes yeah yeah and we have a sign in with
google so basically we don't allow any unauthenticated usage of the app at this point if you use the app
as a beta tester you have to be signed in and we use google sign in is the only option available right
now so and what happens so this was surprising every time we send the app for review there's like four or
five new users who sign in and they seem to just sign in they don't do much in the app right i thought
it was like four or five hundred users no no no right now we're up to about i think 70 or so but every time
you do a release there's like five to ten ish new users who pop in and we were really puzzled like
who are these people why how are they finding it because it's not listed anywhere on app store or
google play on the public one the only way to get it is if we invite you in even then we add people to
the group so if people are not in the group they shouldn't be able to install the app right so the only
thing we were kind of hypothesizing is this must be google testing it or something and we couldn't find
any documentation and i was freaking out a little bit about it so i posted on reddit and all that and
people said the same thing like yeah it's most likely google testing it slipping on our apps so they can
improve youtube music yeah yeah youtube music for podcasts yeah but the the email addresses have a
pattern right it's like first name dot last name and some four or five digits or something like that so
it's like ryan dot severs one two four five six at gmail.com and uh we were not able to figure out
any start document it's kind of bizarre that this is like google doing it and i hope it's google doing
it because but man our daily actives were growing we just have to keep making releases
actually that's an interesting point about vanity metrics right so let's say in our case if all we
tracked was just how many people sign in daily active users people who sign into the app at least once
what we would get is that every release we would get five new sign-ins and uh yeah our daily actives
well actually not daily actives like new users and it would be like a total vanity metric here
it would just keep growing and like you said the more users we make the more it grows so you basically
incentivize absolutely inappropriate behavior to gain the metric that makes no sense the other thing that
we've set up early on which made us feel very professional is we've set up a project in github
very early on we were we started using notion to track our stuff and uh track some of the tasks
but i never liked notion for one simple reason uh of how it manages text editing blocky text editor it's
in blocks yeah you can select multiple bullet points like for me if you can't select multiple bullet
points you're out of my software deck you know i cannot use a use software like that yeah we needed
to move somewhere else we moved all of our docs to google docs and google sheets luckily no slides yet
and we created a github project where we started to accumulate tasks and we actually were really
deliberate about how we set this up and i think actually what we've set up is pretty good i think
it's working quite well for us so what we've done is obviously we have the repos for the app and the
back end for the app and the back end yeah where all code lives but some of our features actually most of
our features they require work in both the app and the back end but they may also need design so we
can't put them in one of those repos or they will just get lost there so what we've done instead we
created a meta repo as you know we love the word meta at this point yeah yeah despite meta meta lc
or meta inc whatever they are meta systems i think anyway so we have a meta repo which has a project
associated with it which looks like a kanban board which has super basic fields like i mean columns to
do in progress i think in design test i think blocked or something and then done we don't have
blocked we don't have blocked yeah okay good we're never blocked because it's you and me right as you
can get blocked by third parties that's stuff with a g yeah and basically we create a bunch of issues in
in that project which get created in the meta repo and that has been working surprisingly well for us
the experience looks very much like what i'm used to at amazon but a lot simpler and i think same for you
it's lightweight and i think we're also keeping a balance on adding enough details into these tasks
but not like too much details at the same time yeah we basically just use check checklists to add like
these are the few things that we need to do to make sure that this feature is done right and as we create
those features we would paste screenshots we would paste some links to things that helped us troubleshoot
issues you would sometimes post a lot more when you have to like debug stuff but it will help us later
run if we have to do with the same problem again but also for me especially screenshots is part of the
memorabilia because our app will be not recognizable a year from now and we can just go back to those
github issues that have a number below 200 look at those and uh we actually had a version of the app
with our internal name and we were using an orca for like the spinners and error pages and all that
and i kept a gif of the app experience for posterity maybe we'll someday release that way it'll be fun
we'll see but yeah that was killer anyway anyway so i think i have seen these task management systems
go two ways one is you don't have any or enough information in them so each task is like the
title is a line that says do x or like implement analytics or like you know something like that
it's like when your tpm forces you to use a task management system and everybody complies
and then it's unusable yeah and then like you go after a month and you have no idea what's involved
in that what it is about and all that that's one spectrum the other side of the spectrum i've seen is
adding too much in there and this starts actually really nicely in the beginning when you add like a lot of
details in these stories but what starts to happen is you start believing in that framework quite a lot
where you start adding nitty-gritty tasks for each and everything even if you're never going to work
on it like like a pasting code there like this is the code i wrote oh no no i'm not talking about the
details of the task but so let's say we come across a bug today well if it's a bug it's a different story
but you have an idea for an improvement if you keep adding all those things into your task management
system pretty soon the task management system will start to overwhelm you with the amount of things
you have there because every time you need to go through you need to triage like what do we need
to do for our next release like what are the minimum things we need to do to get this app to the next beta
right so like when you're working on 10 things but you have like 700 tasks but you have to manage those
yes exactly and i think this is where the balance between them is critical so far it's only been
what like six months or so i guess for us so we'll see how it goes after a year but so far it's a good
balance like i have a grasp of the task board like pretty quickly yeah and with this i'm getting the pull
requests so my son requests me to pull out of this conversation and go read him a book so he can go
to bed so he can wake up tomorrow morning and go to school nice and refreshed so dear listeners we will
finish our discussion about uh the google side of the world and you can see him banging on on the
on the door i can hear him yeah it's like a pull request where they also pinged you in chat right
yeah it's like hey can you look at this pull request yeah yeah i sent it just now two minutes
ago yeah and then they come to you like tap you on your shoulder it's like how about my pull request
right so i guess we'll just have to say goodbye at this point i have forces far beyond my capacity
to manage right now yeah yeah we'll catch up next time all right bye good yep bye
Thank you.