so I've been remote working for, I left my corporate job in 2002, 2003. That was, Sun Microsystems, which obviously don't exist anymore. Not, not in the way they used to. Anyway, I guess there's shelf the shadow of their former self. and So I was, I, I sold the little web app that I made then, and I worked for that company for a little bit, but it was pretty much there was an office in a cool part of London. And it was. it was.
going, if you want to hang in London, it was those, the owner of the company lived like a few minutes walk away from the office and it was like a four person, five person. And we kind of just went to the office if we felt like it. And so I think from that moment on, I've never been a, an office person. I just have a, either it's been, I go in, because I want some social interactivity or there's something that we need to talk about together.
It's just easier, especially, you know, video conferencing. It wasn't really as good or It didn't really exist in the same way back then. And there was the, the, the previous job I had here was through the, there was the first time since then that I've actually been like daily going into an office and it would took some getting used to
Yeah. Yeah.
And I think that the thing is for remote working is a company has to, they have to buy into it like big time, not a dipping their toes in and say, well, you know, it's not really working. You've either got to commit to it and change your working practices to, to take it remote first.
Or, you know, there's gotta be a, a definite goal in mind, rather than just seeing what happens, whether that's like a hybrid goal or, You know, some kind of flexible system, but it has to be a stated thing that you want to make work rather than just, oh, well, it didn't work out right.
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So for now I'm having to commute a couple of days a week and next week it's going to be three days a week. And so, Yeah. I don't think they are planning to fully support remote work for now, even, even though they've had a long time to evaluate it and to see the effectiveness, because work has gotten done, you know, everyone's been working and you know, it hasn't really made that much of a difference.
And certainly for certain specifically for certain types of jobs, so certain roles, right. That make it super easy to just do the work remotely. You, don't have to be in the office, but they're not even differentiating that they, they they're throwing a blanket statement and everyone has to come into the office eventually. So, I'm working on that though. I'm actively looking for a different role somewhere else and I'm not planning on staying there for very long time. So
I mean,
I've been there for a long time already, so I it's time to move
you, you know, there's, there's no one knows that you know what, that, what will happen kind of thing. You can make very strong predictions about how they're dealing with this. Right. So,
Yep. Yep.
Yeah. I mean, I, I, I saw her on the news about, you know, apple saying that, you know, it's like, we're, we will not be becoming a remote first company. Right. Pretty much. I mean, you, you, it's a strange one because I guess, you know, they've just spent all of this money on that campus, that gorgeous building. And
Yeah.
it, I can't blame them if I had spent all that on that. And I think apple has such a, a, a distinct culture goal that, that it's sad in one way That you know, they, they seem to not be willing to, to find some medium. But I, if, if I lived close, I'd probably want to. go into that office.
That was probably a a strong desire to go there if I was there because you know, the facilities and things are somewhat different, once you've tasted the flexibility of remote work Even after it's hybrid or whatever, then it's really difficult to go back to thinking that you have to be in a particular place at a particular time. So many days a week, it's like, well, I, it always kills me that I don't know how people get things done because how do they, I it's, yeah.
When I was going to start to going into the office again, every day as a real, real job, I guess. I, was, I, I don't know how all of the things that I was doing, I don't know when I'm supposed to do them anymore because they just slot into natural ebbs and flows of your day. But to be put on the spot and say, no, you will be here a particular time to. do a particular thing. It's like, but what if I don't want to do that? Or what if it's not the right time for me to do that? Right.
It, it felt such a I guess if you've always done that that's normal and you don't question it so much, but when you've not done it for so long, and then someone's put in this position, it's like, why.
Yeah, Yeah. and I can understand if a certain role requires that you are physically present at a location. Right. And I can see apple, for example, they, they build hardware, right. They design hardware. So I can imagine that's, you know, you can't do all of that remotely a hundred percent. You have to be present.
and there's I don't even, know, what, you know, kind of work really requires to do that I mean, I can imagine, but, but I can only imagine that you cannot be a hundred percent remote if you're, if your role is, you know, designing hardware and testing things And working with hardware, but, but there are certain roles, That You know, lend themselves to be remote if you're just writing software and you're just, you know, coding all the time. I mean, why not?
You can be anywhere and meetings are conducted virtually anyways, especially nowadays.
Yeah. we kind of got used to that. I mean, they're not necessarily optimal. And I think I think there's still a lot of learning to be done with regards to how we approach online meetings and things. So but again, that's, that's, that's one of the things I want to try and solve with dot plan or at least provide an alternative that is, It offers different types of benefits. I mean, the, the big goal for for dot plan for me was to try to try to reproduce the serendipity that happens in an office.
And, I think, that was a big shock for me about returning to office life was there's a lot that you miss by being. Completely remote. And I didn't realize that so much before I went back to it and just people talking on a phone call and the other side of the office, you've you pick up things and you're like, are we working with them? Hold on, who who's doing that?
And I should probably be involved because I know something about that, but because you weren't involved with it, sometimes it's not known, are you again, if you're talking to somebody about a technology, somebody across the other side of the office is like, hold on. I've I've I know about that. And that just gets lost often in remote work, because everybody is doing their thing.
And unless it's assigned to you, or unless it's made explicit that we're looking into a thing, then you just don't know about it. And that's that, that, so the previous company that. I spent, like six or seven years working for remotely, I Three of the staff at a conference. And, but the rest of them that the other 30 something people I never met, we, I, I never even spoke to the majority of them. It was purely text-based communication. And it's great.
You know, I, I have some really good friends. I know it was probably the best working environment that I've ever had in terms of trust and understanding between each other. But it was, there was a lot of serendipity lost there because you just don't know what's going on, unless you become communicative in a particular way, you just disappear into the background.
And so th the, the whole, the whole premise of me starting to up plan was I want to be able to make it easy for people to share what they're working on, what's going on without making it like formal, you know, without me writing a report saying we are thinking about this thing, and if anybody has any input, please, that it's like, well, I'm looking at this. And then people. That's interesting to me. So I wanted to try to form a different way of that serendipitous communication.
That's like a in , non direct
Right, right. Indirect, indirect.
Non explicit. So it's, there's still some ways to go, but it's interesting with it kind of skipping all over the place today. But I had a, We had some communication with one of the beta users here in Fukuoka and his explicit, Reason for wanting to try this out, try using dot plan was he wasn't, didn't feel on top of what his stuff we're doing. and it's like, well, that's exactly what we're trying to solve it. So he.
I don't want to say hesitant, but he was somewhat unconvinced when we started the trial. He's like, I'm happy to try it because I want to solve this. I want to make this better. I don't know if what you're doing is the answer, but I'm happy to try it, to see what happens. His big worry was that his staff wouldn't do this. You know, it, or they would take it with you know, begrudgingly do it rather than buy into it.
And so we were talking to him about a feature that we're trialing with him only him because he had a specific request and I'm like, I'm not sure if this is part of this needs to be part of the product in the future, but I'm willing to give it a go and see how it fits in. So it's this small feature that I added for him. And it's just behind a feature flag so he can use it. And so we said, well, you know, how is the other thing? And he's like, oh, that's great. You know, that.
Almost like not a problem anymore. I'm more interested in this new feature and the fact that the dot plan is. Providing the benefit and it's solving that problem that he had already. He's already thinking about the next challenges. And that was, that was a big like, oh, hold on. The fact that he's now reliant on this, the company has kind of accepted this. This is just part of the way they work now was like, oh wow.
He's, it's weird because you now looking at the next problems and he's almost like skipping ahead. Oh, it would be better if we, if we could do this and say, yo, hold on. I've got to convince everybody else at this first step first. So
Well, that's nice.
absolutely. It was really like validating felt very reassuring to think that especially someone who was hesitant and unconvinced to start off with and especially, it was like, there's going to be like pulling teeth, getting my staff to do this, but they're doing it and they seem to have so the next step is we're trying to arrange another meeting to go in and talk to him in person. Hopefully try and get his staff's feedback as well, because it's, it's great.
If it solves his problem, I want to know how the staff feel about it now. That's the next thing we need to understand. So it's like, it's great if he's happy, but I don't the staff happy as well. So that's yeah, it felt really good to get that that just that validation of like, yeah, of course it's working. So that was exciting. That was a good bit of new this news this week,
That's awesome. Can you describe the feature? Are you at a
the feature that that we've built for him. Yeah, sure. I mean, it's the, it's, it's pretty simple. It's, it's a time tracker. It's a timecard system. So Japan, I may have mentioned this before, but Japan has a labor law rule that if you're running less than. 10 million yen. If it's an office job, if your unit learned that less than 10 million yen per year, a hundred K or, and you're not a director level employee then you have to keep timecards.
Yeah. I remember you mentioned mentioned that. Yeah.
so I mean, it's to stop overwork and stop people being taken advantage of in terms of their office hours. And he said, would they currently have a complicated system with like, there's a clocking machine? There's people making notes of things. There's people writing messages in like a slack type thing. Yeah, I'm starting work, I'm stopping work. And he's like this, this takes a lot of time to aggregate this.
There's gotta be some something you can, and because the way they're using dot plant is it. think I mentioned this before, but again, different people seem to be using it in different ways and I'm trying to now figure out what's the quote unquote right way. Right? There's it works differently for different people works well in different ways for different people. But the way they're doing it is they're doing a morning and an evening.
Check-in so first thing in the morning, they say, this is what I'm going to, this one they plan to do. And then in the evening, this is what I've achieved. That's that I'll come back to an interesting point about that in a second, but that's what they're doing and that works well. So he's like, well, can't we just say I'm starting work and then I'm stopping work and record those times. And that gives us a, Like a recorded list of when people start and stopped work. Can we use that?
And I'm like, well, that you don't necessarily know. I want to tie that to an official clock-in and clock-out, but the certainly overlap there between the systems. Right. And I'm like, I, I didn't want to build I didn't want to build a time-tracking system to be on that. That was like the, almost like the opposite goal of dot plan. I wanted to produce something that was, that didn't feel formal. Didn't feel like something you had to do. It was more of a, getting a benefit from it.
But at the same time, but then I started thinking of the aspect, you know, there's a lot of Movement behind, you know, recording what you've done as a productivity and you know, personal tracking kind of tool. Like, you know, what's, how long did I spend on that?
And you know, yourself, you know, I started to try doing like, time-blocking just to try to control the amount of what I spent my time doing, because it's easy to either lose time on something that isn't important or, You know, I'll waste time. Looking at Twitter, right. Or or or just working too much, you know, that's the other thing as well, you know, we, we, we've mentioned, you know, things about just being able to be aware of how much time you're spending.
And I, so I kind of got back to this Came to this realization that it might be relevant because if you're adding what you're working on, what you're doing and what you've achieved, then being able to correlate this with some kind of time based system that could be personal benefits as well as corporate benefits. Right.
You know, so the socially something I was going to maybe mention is I'm curious what you think about how you respond to people's requests for features, because in this case, it's, you know, he said, I'd really like a time-tracking system as part of this. And I like this, isn't what I want to build. Right. I don't want to build a clock-in and clock-out system.
You know, this is not how I, I know remote working doesn't work well, if I have to plug in at eight 30 in the morning and clock out at six but at the same time, the more I thought about it, I just let it bubble for quite a long time before agreeing to build it. I was like, let me think about this. I don't want to commit before I before I understand the implications of this, but I also didn't want to say no outright, but my first reaction was no, I'm not building that.
And then before I, you know, that that was going on in my head as like, there's no way I'm going to build that. And so I just said, you know, let me think about this for awhile. And, and it took probably about a week for me to convince myself that there might be something in it.
And again, I don't know if it is, but I kind of decided that the, the spending X amount of time, again, a reasonable, I didn't I didn't want to just go down a rabbit hole and build out this fully feature thing, but I scoped a very tight version of this. And I'm like, okay, if I built this, is that useful to you? Yes. He said I'm like, okay. It's, it's very tightly scoped. It's not a full-on, you know, time-tracking, it basically allows you to start and stop a timer.
And either just a generic timer or one related to a project that exists in the system already. So, you know, dot plan now I'm moving to, like, the projects has been like a central part of how the interface works. And if you're a member of a project, you can effectively start a timer on a project and at the time, and that's it. And it just gives you a list of your times. The account owner can see everybody's times and that's it. And so we turn that on for him this week.
And so we will find out how useful that is to him, but just in using that on my, for myself as well. I'm like this isn't, it doesn't feel like it doesn't feel too heavy. It's super lightweight, just lives in the, the menu bar at the top. And I feel like have this extra quantitative data about myself. Now, what I've been doing is like, I can see my, how I, the time I've spent and it doesn't feel invasive. It doesn't feel Like controlling or anything. It just feels informative for me.
So I think there's something in it and I don't know what that is yet, but it's been an interesting experiment to take somebody's request that I was not convinced about and S and just iterate on it and play with it. And I, I've got like, so many sketches here of like, okay, how can I make this work? That doesn't feel like I'm making a time tracking system, right. I'm not, that's not what I'm doing, but how can I incorporate those aspects into this and make it feel part of the same product?
And it's, it's worked out well so far. I think I say I'm, I'm still not a hundred percent convinced, but I'm like 90% convinced. So I'm curious to know, like, so say for instance, you know, someone comes to, you with Fusioncast and says, you know, it would be great if it did this. And you're like, that's not on my roadmap at all. I'm not really interested in doing that. What would you do with that
Yeah. Yeah. It's a tricky, it's a tricky thing to consider those requests and give them a weight. Right? Give them relevance. I think the key thing is I think you, you touched on that the key is to have you have an idea of what your product needs to be. And some of these requests may align really nicely with your, your idea of the product. And some obviously will not align, you know, at all.
So I think if there's a way that you can mold or shape that idea or that suggestion in a way that it'll, it'll, integrate into your system in a more seamless way, then you can do that. I handle this in a similar way. I, my first reaction is usually no, because because I, I have an idea of what I want to do. but you know, as long as It's a request of a feature that is, sort of, related or tangentially, related to
not a completely different product. Right. But it's, it's, it's kind of just out there a little bit. It's just a bit beyond the limits of where you ex what you planned to, do, right.
Yeah. For example, with the thing with fusion cast is that it's a recording tool, right? So I want to stay true to that and keep my course, in that direction. And I don't want to deviate too much from that because I want to take care of one thing and hopefully do it well. Right. It's just this one to, it's a recording tool. it's not meant for editing. It's not an editing tool is not, you know, so I've gotten requests where, people suggest that maybe, you know, if they could edit, you know,
Automatically uploads to like Yeah. Distribution or something. Right. I can imagine the request.
Yeah. Yeah. exactly. And so it's not, It's not a it's not an editing tool. So I, unfortunately I have to, say no to, those. but there are some other requests where even if it's not directly related to recording, but if in some way it enhances the experience of recording, then, you know, I can consider that maybe implemented as suggested or, shape it in a different way that kind of, Integrates better with, with my main mission.
and I and I think that's kind of what you touched on earlier where, okay. your first reaction was no, but then, okay. Let me think about how I can kind of make it work and, have that thing that feature bring more value into your core mission,
I mean, th th that's the interesting thing about this, you know, by embracing something that Not embracing it, but, but giving it space to, to at least try to, live I've touched on something that I think could become kind of core.
You know, the, the, especially this idea of you know, this, this of self of, of recording, not just for other people what I'm doing, but also having the I mean, even using dot plan for me, the company of me is actually useful having this log of what I was doing last week. And just seeing full patterns appear in that is actually very interesting. And seeing you can see your mood changes because, you know, mood tracking built in as well.
So not just for From a a manager company, you know standpoint, but just from. And how am I, doing? I can almost see the ebbs and flows in my own work. You know, how much time did I spend on each project? And again, you'll see by doing this, I, I I, want to try some visualization of this, but we can already see the patterns in the list of data of hold on.
I was really focused on this thing this week are, you know, that period of time and you can, it'll be interesting to do some visualizations on it. So by seeing that it's not, not, completely out there, it's actually has some interesting side effects is paid off. I, think. So I say I'm not a hundred percent sure that it's going to exist in it's in the same format to this right now, but I'm becoming more convinced that it is part of what dot plan is becoming. And I think the.
and again, when I started on dot plan, I had a a reasonably strong idea of what I thought the product was. And it's really interesting to see how it's because it's I guess in some ways it's, it's not a tightly defined, I it's probably the, I think I've said this before as well. It's probably the wrong project to do as an Indi, like a project. Right. You know, it should be super nice like tightly scoped something that, you know, it's, it has hard edges.
But by kind of approaching something that is fuzzy and I've got an idea in this space, but it isn't strongly defined and typed and it doesn't have hard ideas. It's it, it has potentially long tendrils reaching out into other projects. It makes it It makes it tricky. But it also feels super rewarding to see where it goes because it's, it's, it's growing.
I mean, the fact that, you know, projects, weren't an integral part of the, the, my original plan and it's become kind of core just by seeing how people use it and how I use it. And you can see these patterns coming out. And again, if I was a different type of person, I probably could have done this before I started coding. I mean, this is, you know, I guess what service designers and user experience designers do, right?
You know, this, all of this would have been prototyped out and kind of worked with clients. And, but the easiest way for me to, to do and learn is to write code, you know, I can write code easy, then I can draw on Figma or easier than you know, doing, interviewing clients with prototypes and like, well, I can build it for you and see how you use it as the easiest way of learning for me. And I am sure other people will work differently, but it's been a, an interesting journey so far.
And it's really interesting to see it's becoming clearer to me. Well, what it is, even though my initial is not far, but it's different from my original concept. It feels now like it is becoming much more in focus and now it's just a matter of like, you know, getting it perfectly in focus and, and building it out and building stuff, which I now know now no needs building when, before I wasn't even aware that it needed to exist,
Yeah. And it sounds like you, you, in analyzing the request and how the feature would work, you kind of broke it down to parts that, oh no, not parts, but you shaped it down to a way that it would work with what you have, what your, the rest of your product. So it's not, so it doesn't become a whole other product. It's just an added feature that works well with the main purpose of your, of your product.
exactly. And I think that was I also want to buy by not committing to building a on time tracking system, but what's the what does a time tracking system look like in the context of dot plan? And, and it did take, Took a good few weeks for me to figure that out, even at just a high level, you know, sketch view. And then seeing it actually come in and just be there and it works. It's, it's nice. It feels good. So I'm, I'm kind of interested to see how this works out just as a yeah.
It's, it's been an interesting experiment for sure.
Yeah. Sounds like it. That's awesome.
Anyway, how's your what's been going on there.
So Haven't had any time to work on product. I need to, I think I talked about this last time. I'm still working on other things besides the product itself. I'm getting a little impatient and I need to get back to working on the product itself. And so I think I'm going to be doing that, this week next week, the latest, I've been focusing on the marketing website. I got some feedback from some folks And it was good feedback to, improve the marketing site improve the message.
so I've been working on that and one of those things was. Include a video, which I was planning to do. And we talked about that so, I finally spent some time recording a video for that. it's just a quick demo of how fusioncast works from logging in creating a podcast entry, creating a session, joining a session, have someone else a guest join and. Just showcase real quick, you, know, backup, recording, progress, local recording in progress. It's uploading at the same time And that's it.
And, just showing the recordings I get generated from that quick session, you know, It's about three and a half minutes or so. I'm still editing a few parts here and there. It's almost ready to go. And as soon as I finish it I'm going to update the website with that, And I have data to copy a little bit on the website. a little bit of styling as well, just to make it a little more, alive. One of the, yeah, one of the feedback that I got was that it was a little too grayish you know, kind of
that was good. That was going to be my only response to it is yeah, it, it needs a bit of color and that needs to look a lot. I mean, it's. it's. Especially with something like a podcast that you don't want to it to feel like a a boring corporate thing, right? The people who are recording podcasts are generally a bit more lively And, upbeat, right? So you want to fall into match that, right.
Yeah. Yeah. So I did add a little bit of more color to it. Not, not, yeah, not a whole lot, but
not being a designer at color is, I mean, that's one of the reasons DotPlan is blue and purple is it's difficult to make a massive mistake. All of a sudden everything's indigo. Right. And I experimented briefly with trying to do a dark theme and I'm like, okay, I need to learn a few things before I venture into that world. Yeah. It's without having any design background it's it's very easy to screw up with a color, right.
Yeah. Yeah. Dark, dark mode presents a unique challenges and I've experimented with that a little bit with my own website. I created a dark theme. if your system is in dark mode, then my site renders in dark mode, but it's a really simple design. I don't, I didn't use that much color. And kept it really simple because it is challenging to have color on a dark mode, a
Yeah, exactly. And it's even, even some of the big sites, you know, like I mean, get to a bar now has a dark mode and stuff and some things work well and other things you're like, nah, it feels just feels off, right?
Yeah. Yeah. They, sometimes they use, these sort of neon colors on dark mode on dark themes and, it doesn't look all that great. It looks really colorful, but it's a little too much, you know,
Yeah. There's a fine life. W what, that's actually, one of the things I'm trying to add to a to dot plan at the moment is, so at the moment, the only place color is used outside of the purple is for your, like the default user icons. So, you got a little circle.
So I'm trying to add this as a, an identifier, a way of, Identifying visually projects from one another, because projects are becoming like the, say, like a core aspect of the, the, of the check-ins and things now I want to try to tie colors to those too. So at the moment I'm just doing it as like a I wrote a thing which basically takes a string, does a hash, And you get a a, a hue based on it. So you can set the saturation and yeah. You know,
Yeah, oh
hue, saturation. Yeah,
a hue saturation. and what is it, contrast?
Maybe something like that. so so I just vary the hue, Based on so it always looks ish, right? Because it doesn't look too stand out. It's just reasons subtly enough that it's it looks colorful, but it doesn't look too out there and then have it. So you can just choose a different one later. But at the moment I'm just taking the the ID and something else and creating a hash from it, using that To see the to create a hue. And, and it's nice.
Just, Just, actually suddenly having a bit of color appear on the screen in both tags. And, Like the, the project view it's suddenly gives the, it makes it feel more real. And, and it also, I feel like I'm my boring indigo and white or rather gray 100, Background certainly paid off because the colors all work, having just colors. If I'd already gone with a strong opinionated color scheme for the rest of the project, it would be like, oh my God, someone just knocked over a box of Crayola. Right.
But because everything is kind of blend to start off with having just these little injections of color, actually, I was pleasantly surprised how good it looked and I'm like, okay, this I feel like, I, I feel like I planned it, but I didn't it was just.
Yeah. Yeah. Color can be tricky and design as a whole is, is just. a whole other field, especially for us coders.
Adam's a refactoring UI book.
I have the book I haven't gone through most of it. I only started and did a little bit of
I read it when I first yeah. When he first released it. So I'd probably go back and reread it, but it's interesting how certain things a bit.
wait, I'm sorry. No, I don't, have it. I was thinking of a refactoring to collections. The older book that he wrote, not you're talking about the UI.
did, Oh, Okay. I knew, I don't know that one though.
I don't have that one.
It's highly recommended. Cause again, I read it first when it was, when he first released it And And I, I, found it again the other day. I was tidying up some file system and I'm like, oh yeah, I forgot about that. And, and it's funny how certain things seem to have, I have actually learnt it as in things which he's mentioned. I'm like, I do that now.
It just, in terms of there, there was one of the, I think it was very early on, simple thing about just using as opposed to using texts to as headers and things as in like, you know, title project, and then I think using the colors, weight, and, And colorize weight and layout to to almost like state what this is. And there is a relation to the item. I've been trained to do that a lot more and, and I didn't realize that I was doing it, but it, was just reading it.
You know, I just scanned through the file when I found it. I'm like, ah, I I, apparently I learned something there.
you internalized
apparently. So, That just really stuck with me that like, oh yeah, I'm labeling everything. Why am I labeling gala the fields when it's obvious when you weight things and you lay things out properly that you don't need the label. Right. So I that apparently stuck with me. So I feel as though there's a whole lot more that I should review in there and learn again. So it's, it's again, I like the style of that, just in terms of the, Kind of like the, not cookbook, but a reference thing.
You, you th there's, there's just things to learn, not like, It's not a Woody you know, like novel, it's say. Read these things, internalize them, be a better designer. That, that, that resonates with me. I like that style. And if I was to write another, yeah, exactly. I supposed to write another book again which I've set up set twice. I'd never do. And I ended up doing but I really like to do something in that style.
That is, is something That you can refer to and, you know, spend five minutes looking through it and go, oh yeah. Okay. I got something from it. you know, and, and it's, it's not you don't have to sit down and work through it. It's just like something that you can pick up at any page and learn something. I like that that style.
Yeah. Color is and design as a whole is a whole other world. And, I've been trying to get better on that and little by little, you know, every project anything that I work on, I try to learn something new and apply it and, improve in that side of things, but still.
to that also, do you use like Figma or a design tool to S to sketch, to, to design your layout before implementing it? Or do you just use it designing code,
Sometimes I use Figma. And sometimes I don't and I've been trying to use it. even if I don't use it. even if I don't do a lot in it. I at least start and kind of get an idea of what I want to do. And then I just jumped right into The browser and just design in the browser, especially with tailwind is a lot easier, you know?
Yeah. exactly.
So, if I'm working on a project for a client or, you know, or something like that or for work, I usually do go more in depth using Figma. but for my own stuff, I usually just start, you know, I just start with something And once I, I know I get an idea then I, just jump right? into code.
There's been times that I've spent more time on Figma, just designing a small feature, like subset of a page, you know, like, a row of, items with buttons and I just want to see how they line up and, what spacing to use and what little icons to use as labels kind of thing, instead of words, just using icons and you know, that. kind of stuff. but yeah, I, I go back and forth between Figma and just, designing in the browser.
right. I, I guess the my reason for asking is because I don't use Figma at all and, and I don't, And, I'm not comfortable familiar enough with it. I tried using it a few days ago, a few weeks ago and realized that I couldn't get it to do anything. And I'm like, okay, do I invest time to learn Like a prototyping tool or I literally just, you know, right in tailwind now it's like, well, I know I need a box here and it's this wide and this things are going to go at this corner.
and I just write it with that with tailwind and from a sketch. So I'll just sketch on, paper and then go, okay. I know kind of how this is going to work. and then visually I'll go, okay. That needs to be wider. This needs to be, so I only. do go direct from a paper high level, weekly line script sketch to, To code. And, and I'm wondering if I'm missing out on something it's like, do I you know, spend a few days becoming good with Figma?
You know, what will that make me w in the end, hopefully be faster and getting to the better design quicker. And then I'm just implementing the final design as opposed to fiddling, which is what I do currently is like, I'll get it working. And then I'll spend, you know, far too much time fiddling with it to make it look right. So I'm just curious as to whether I should invest the time in.
I think it would be a good idea for you to invest some time to learn the tool a little bit it can be useful, I guess it really depends on the feature or what it is that you're designing sometimes the color and, the icons and all that, helps a lot to do it in a design tool like Figma. and it saves you time, but, in other situations, it, kind of slows you down a lot because depending on what it is that you're working
I mean, I, I sorry. I was just gonna say the end In previous company. Yeah. We, we, I would design effectively done by a designer in, in design and then going from that, and it's like, okay, I know exactly what I need to implement. And then sometimes it's like, but I can't implement that based on the system we have currently, you know, it's like, well that that's not gonna fit. and then you end up with this back and forth.
So I'm just, I think maybe Figma handles that better maybe than in design. Whereas I think in design. is a more just graphical tool. I'm not too familiar with the difference. So I don't know.
Hm. do you mean like interactivity or
I guess, I guess my lack of understanding of Figma was when I started using it. My assumption was that I could design it and it gives me HTML and apparently I was way off.
Yeah, I know it doesn't work
Because I see people do all these Figma designs and I've seen things shed, and then I'm like, oh, interesting. And then it's like, hold on. This is just a picture. Oh yeah. It's just a picture. Which it was a a completely incorrect assumption on my part.
It doesn't do that. It's just a design tool, but you do, it does have features or it does have a feature where you can, create some interactivity so that if you hand this off to a client, for example, you want them to get a feel for how the website navigates. It can navigate from one page to, another.
a prototype kind of tool. Right, right.
a prototype. Yeah. You can have links that are. Live, you know, sort of speak and navigate the site. So it gives you a, good, kind of a good sense of what navigation is going to be like. that you can do, but it won't do code for you. We
I discovered this quickly,
yeah, yeah,
yeah, I guess it's it was just a poor assumption on my part. And then I, my question was, yeah, like, well, where does this fit into my process? Because at the moment it doesn't fit into my process at all. So it's, so it's like, do I change my process and learn to use that as a, okay. Do this before I start coding. And you know, I'm, I'm always keen to improve my process and techniques, so it's like, okay. Do I say was probably, probably not a bad waste of an afternoon, right.
Yeah, yeah. And Figma. has a YouTube channel with a ton of videos. Yeah. I'll see if I can, I probably have a bookmark somewhere and you can go in there and learn real quick the basics. They have a ton of videos on
Cool
Yeah, I think it would be good for you to become familiar with it I find it that it's more useful when you have to show a design to someone like a client
Working with a client or something? Definitely.
Yeah. then you definitely can take advantage of it and show a client what a design will look
Before you go And, spend more time actually building it and fiddling.
Yeah, but with, with our own projects sometimes. doesn't work to spend all that time, just in design when you can, once you, get an idea. and that's why I was saying the way I use that as I start and I kind of get an idea. And once I, I kinda like what I see on Figma, I just leave it and jump on onto coding and designing in the browser. It's rare that I spend too much time in Figma for my own stuff. I also use paper and pencil quite a
going to say there is a there's an interesting tool. I don't know if it still exists, but when the very first iPhone came out, Oh, not very first, but when you could start writing applications for it, there was a, a prototyping tool that you took a photo of a sketch and you could effectively assign hot zones and say, okay, if you push this thing, transitioned to another sketch. And so effectively created a prototype based on sketches on your PLP prototype on paper.
I think it was called problem probably still exists or something like it. And so the one of the first iPhone apps I designed, I did that. And that was interesting because it was such a designing for such a different format was, was a big deal at that point in time. Right. You know, responsive sites just didn't really exist. And trying to design for like. 320 pixels when you used to 1024 was was a hold on VR.
I don't even know how I'm supposed to put things on the screen, this small whereas now it's, you know, the opposite, right?
Yeah.
yeah, It it, that, that was, that was fun. I remember doing that, but yeah, especially again, if I'm, if you designed it, for different break points, then being able to, to do that visually and try different things without, Having to fight with CSS is probably probably worth doing
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Let's see, where were We I was telling you about the website and so I
was, we got distracted by
Yeah. Oh, yes, that's right colors. I kept it simple still because I, again, I just want something that works, good enough for now that is aesthetically pleasing, but maybe later on, once I have revenue coming in, I can hire a designer and create something really nice, but for now, simple is good enough. let's see what
going to have to start getting clients soon. I'm going to keep harassing you about this each call. It's going to have start selling it.
Yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to get there. and, trying to get there. I did onboard one more podcaster. yeah, got some good feedback already from them. And I'm trying to get back to the product side of things to work on some of, those. And,
so close to the product, man. It's so close.
I know, but You know, this all of a sudden, for example, today, it was supposed to it's it was supposed to start recording automatically and, it did it for you. and so now I'm like. I'm thinking what's going on. I need to go back And take a look at that
It's these little books. I found one little thing on one edge case on, on dot plan last night, and it's driving me up the wall. Cause I'm too busy to go and, look at it, but it's like, I know if you push that button and it doesn't appear very often, but it's going to break. It's really bugging me that it's like, nobody's probably gonna hit that button. You know anytime soon, but it's really bugging me now. Like that century alert is just there in my email at the top.
And I'm like, ah, I don't know why that's not working. I have to go deeper
Yeah.
I need that, that stack overflow, AI code gen, to go and fix it for me. Right.
Oh yeah. Right. I saw that.
That's got implications. I'm not sure what's, what's going to come with that. But that's a, that's a whole bunch of ethical and technical worms there kind of was, they just opened. Right. So
yeah.
don't even want to think about that, right?
it looks very impressive and it looks like
great demo. Right.
It's a great demo. and I'm sure a ton of work went into it. AI powered and all that, but I don't know, it just makes me, I'm very skeptical when it comes to tools like that. Anything automated, at least judging by things that have come in the past, like,
getting syntax, highlights in working sometimes, you know, it screws up all the time and I'm like, you know, if syntax highlighting can't work, is it going to write my code correctly for me?
Yeah. Yeah, And, you know, remember tools like Dreamweaver and you know, all these tools that generate code for you and you end up with a mess or you end up with stuff that you still have to rewrite or remove, or, you know, it's like, I dunno, I don't, I don't have much faith in these kinds of systems, even though now.
I think, there's going to be, it's super interesting to see and to as a, like a taste of potential futures, but yeah, my, my more immediate reaction is like the, the ethics or the you know, this has been trained on open source code. Suddenly this whole clean room codes thing is blurry. You know what happens? That there's a potential for like, Back doors to get learned. You know, we already know that this is a real problem in the world already. And yeah.
I'm, I'm, less skeptical that it's not going to work. I think in certain cases it will probably work too well, maybe. I'm worried about the implications of it with relating to software development as a profession and in terms of security and people taking shortcuts when probably they shouldn't, because we already know people do that if it's an option. So,
Yeah.
and that goes any chance of yeah. Code testing is like in terms of like interviewing, if people are doing like oh yeah, write this code. I'll just get the AI to write it for me. See if we can get to that. That'd be an interesting bot. Right. See how many jobs a, an AI bot could get based on code interviews.
Yeah, right.
get copy AI to actually answer the interview questions and this thing to, to write the code for me and see if I can get a job somewhere based on. that.
yeah, yeah. That would be interesting. let's see, what else? I think that's all I have, on my end of things, part of the website also, I'll going back to the website is I created a change log so that I can record, things that. change from version to version and
Oh, nice. That looks good. The you just, you said you're using Statamic.
Yes. For the marketing
Nice. Cool. Cool, cool. Yeah. Cause, I I know I need to do some kind of change, like things as well, especially since we experimented with this at my previous place and I forget the name of the, did we use a service? I think we started using, the service, then we brought it in-house because it's like, we don't need, like, this is like a list of things.
Yeah.
and we had it in the UI as like a notification bell thing. Which, which, worked well, as well, just because you know, if you're adding a feature or changing some part of the UI, you want to draw attention to it. Without being too yeah, if it's out there on some of the sites somewhere, it's probably never going to get looked at for. So yeah, some way of showing it in the UI is probably where I want to go as well. I haven't, haven't gone down there yet.
I'm still, I was looking at 'em cause onboarding is still a, I say a, work in progress. It's, it's, it's more of a, a massive overthinking in progress, I guess. And that was watching a funder site SaaS, something I can't remember the name of it, but it basically does, Like reviews of onboarding for other sites. and it's, it's super interesting to go through And you know, basically calls out patterns that they're using or like, you know, just how are they.
People both in terms of signup and the instruction process. And that's like, I think I've, I think I've done too much and I just need to build it. Now. Platoon was recently got to the point where I questioning every single thing I do now, because it's like, I've looked at too many examples and, too many different ways of doing it that I'm like, I have no idea what's right anymore.
It was just so again, I probably just need to do version one and then iterate based on, you know, how that feels to me just cause there's, there's no standard way. Right. so everybody does it differently and everybody is some have pros and cons and trying to come up with a hybrid of all of them. It's just the, I don't have time for, so I'm just going to do something and, yeah,
sure.
it's hard though, again, especially with something like dot plan, that is one of the things that makes the onboarding different or difficult is I'm not just telling you how to use the product, I'm telling you what you should be doing in the product. And that's the point which I keep sticking on is I think I talked about it last time, as well as that, you know, I don't feel confident enough in telling someone what they should be doing with their day.
But I also want to present this in a way that makes them feel that there is a system to follow. Right. So, That's the bit, which is, is just difficult to, to write. so but again, I think I should probably just commit to what I've half done and And then see how that goes. Cause it's better than what I had on what I have at the moment, which is nothing, which is reselling them an email saying, this is what we probably should do.
Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a good idea to just commit to something and just stick to it. People will find ways to use the product. I mean, it's already happening where people are using it in different ways. And you can probably address that with your either documentation or knowledge base, and screencasts where you could potentially show different ways to use the product, you know, like, you know, different, quick demos and, you know, you could use it like this, you use it like that.
But Yeah. sticking to.
What are you using for your knowledge base? By the way? Something
It's part of Outseta.
Oh, okay. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Nice.
Yeah. It's part of Outseta. And so I haven't done much there yet, but that's the plan.
because we've been again, my wife has been, working on Japanese, like instructions effectively, and I'm like, okay, I want to take this out as we've just been doing them on separate pages within What's the website thing using the London page thing I'm using. And and it's great because she can just go and create a web page and build this. I'm like okay, is now there's enough content there that it makes sense to bring it into like a, a knowledge base based on that.
So I'm going to shop around and see what options I have there that
Yeah.
something that I w actually this I've got, don't try and make us another side project is I'd love a directory. Indie alternatives. Right? Because I know that there's going to be somebody with a, you know, a side project that, that is a, you know, $10 a month knowledge base that I would love to support. And I'm like, you try and search for knowledge based software on Google and in our, even in alternative to, or whatever the, you know, they've review sites are.
And there's just so many that, and they're so flooded by the big players that if someone was like, this is an Indy, like this gets a, an official indie approval stamp of approval, then I'd be like, yeah, it may not be the most featureful or complex, but it's, I would like to support the creators. Right. So you'd like an Indy directory in the alternatives or something like that.
Yeah, that would be great. I wonder if indie hackers has anything like
I
Cause that was that's, you know, it seems like that would be something, I, mean, people do have. Their projects on indie hackers. Cause you can create a profile for your project. And so I wonder if that's
Yeah. Yeah. I'll go and poke around on any hackers. There's probably a good place to start. But yeah, don't make, it's just resist. Don't make it, don't make it Alex.
Yeah. You can't focus on, on that right now. Stay the course stay the course.
I was so bad at like, I mean, as a side thing on that as well. It's, it's amazing to me, just how You know, I, I think I said before that, like, you know, ideas working on something begets more ideas and, you know, you th when you start, you know, you, if you're starting a project, you're like, I don't know what to build. As soon as you start building something, they it's like a virus. And it just spreads all of these potential things you could build. Right?
Because you hit so many ideas and roadblocks, or like challenges, and you're like, oh man, this should exist. And I wish I had had that And the list of potential projects just explodes. And it's amazing to me, the, the same thing happens with like, just opportunities and context as well. Right. You know, if you somebody is looking at going freelancing or something, it's like, but I don't know who to you know, I don't have any clients or any contacts or anything.
By just suddenly announcing and talking to people about what you're doing, like a side project or something like this. It's amazing how many people have just reached out to me about other work as well. And it's like, nah, I'm that, that the whole point is I'm not doing this, but it's a, it's, it's really it. I can, I know this, but I'd kind of forgotten it by just being in a, in a, in the zone in terms of working for other people.
I kind of to come back to this and also to come back to this like eight or nine years later, just how much more there is as well. You know, like when I was more public about what I was building, you know, eight to nine years ago, there was so many like, you know, requests, requests for coffee.
Yeah.
You know, brain picking as, as a service. And whereas now it's, it's, it's insane. There's just so much work as so many more people wanting to build things that it's, it's crazy, you know, that your moment you say you're building something, everyone's like, Ooh, we should talk. And I'm like, no, I'm building my thing. So it's, if there is anybody that's Yeah. Like on the fence of, you know, not knowing what to, what to build are being scared about, you know, finding contacts and things.
It's just like it's things
Oh
the moment you start them
yeah. That reminds me you had this other idea. You had this other idea with
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I did fall. I that's, that's progressing slower slowly, just because of time. But yeah, I kind of. I demo to it, to some people the other week. And they were all like, oh my God, where do I buy this? And I'm like, okay, I really need to finish that up. It's a really easy sell, which is kind of Surprising, right? Yeah, exactly.
It's so yeah, I kind of, I should get, get on that and and get it out because it's working, it just needs wrapping up into a like, you know, product page. And now as I've got paddle access, that's a very good point. Now, as I'm a puddle approval a person, then I could sell it. Right.
Did they have to approve the product
Probably. Yes. Yeah, because actually that's a good point because this has no, it doesn't have physical thinkers, just QR code. Right. So I can, yeah, I should check on that because if I'm sure if it's, it's no big deal because it meets the same list of requirements as the as dot plans, so, huh. Interesting. Yeah. cause that was one of my things is like to set up billing is always like a little, but I guess once I've done it for one thing it's easy to do for another.
Yeah, Just watch out for getting derailed,
yeah, I know this
on that instead of your main, main project.
Cool.
Yeah.
All right.
Yeah.
Me. I'm just trying to my I'm having computer problems. So I'm on battery at the moment and it's just down to 5%. So I'm just going to see if I don't
Oh yeah, no worries.
Let me just find a what's the easiest way to do this. Maybe if I put this in, hold on. Okay. Maybe that will work. So yeah, I can't run my, I can't. Oh, hold on. It's going to pause for a minute while it does something.
All right.
I don't know what it's doing. Everything's just hung so I can hear you, but I can't see anything.
There you go. It's
I back.
I can see you and I can hear
I've got black screens at the moment, so, oh, here we go. You're over there.
Ah,
So yeah, my 16 inch MacBook pro I don't know whether it's the heat or what, but I can't run the internal monitor and the external monitor at the same time. Without.
Oh, wow. Ah, I see. Can you hear me?