Takeaways from MicroConf Europe

Welcome to Slow and Steady, the podcast where you get to follow along as we build products in public. Each episode gives an honest peek into our lives as we share our struggles, our wins, and everything in between. I'm Benedicte, and I'm feeling focused. And I'm Benedicte. Today is October 14th. This is episode number... 230 and i am recovering what are you recovering from

I kind of want to say microconf, but I guess I properly recovered from microconf already. And I was a little bit worried that I got sick at microconf again, because I think last year, yeah, last year I got COVID. at MicroConf or right before MicroConf. I'm suspecting the airport in Frankfurt when we were leaving for Dubrovnik last year. And I had a little bit of a stuffy nose at MicroConf, so I was like, meh.

Maybe I got sick again, but I tested myself. Everything was fine. But then the week after I got sick, it wasn't COVID. But yeah. Didn't feel well. Had a little bit of a headache. Runny nose and all of it. Itchy throat. It could still be post-conference vibes. Maybe, yeah. How long has it been? Is it two weeks? Yeah, right now it's two weeks. A week and a half? No, it's exactly two weeks. Exactly two weeks, yeah. Because I think that first week just was a wash for us.

yeah yeah same uh i got home on wednesday and then luckily friday was a public holiday around here so i did some work on thursday just like catching up on things, reading emails, answering support tickets, stuff like that. But then enjoyed a very long weekend. I went to a concert on Sunday. So maybe I got it at a concert. I don't know. Anyways, I wasn't feeling too well last week, especially at the end of the weekend. And over the weekend, we visited my sister and celebrated my nieces.

fifth birthday um so that was a lot of fun while feeling a little bit under the weather but by now i think shout out to your sister Happy birthday, as I like to tell the mothers, because I now know she listens to the show. Yeah, from time to time she does. That's true. Yeah. We figured while talking at MicroConf that if you want to know what's going on in our lives, you've got to listen to our podcast. And I'm trying to tell Ula.

He needs to listen to the podcast because then he'll get my form-related thoughts about what I'm doing and what you're doing. And what the plans are and stuff like that. And what the plans are, but he's not convinced. So maybe I'll just need to have AI write a summary of what I've planned that he should do.

for sure yeah it's from these recordings the problem with these recordings like for me it's like when we are recording i'm so used to doing this and just talking about this stuff like just talking to you that I sometimes, as you said, forget to tell other people that this is the plan or whatever. I remember a couple of years ago when someone on our team was like, oh, it would have been nice if you had told us as a company that...

This thing happened, but you didn't. You just started two weeks after on the podcast. So yeah, I should probably remember to tell people stuff that I do more in person, I guess. But anyways. So I picked that up and you picked up at the microconf that Ula and I got an engage, which I did forget to talk about on the podcast because I was going to tell my family first.

And now I don't really remember if I have told them. So if any of my family is listening to the show, then they now know that Ula and I are engaged. Woohoo! Congratulations! I mean, we toasted to it a little bit at MicroConf because by then it was already like two weeks old news, something like that, right? I think maybe like three weeks. Oh, even worse. I don't remember.

I'm not that good about dates, but we were joking that that was our engagement trip because Ola and I both went to MicroConf and we also spent... like a full four days before the conference in istanbul so we had like a week um on our own in Istanbul or like child free child free and not not on your own at least at the end of it at the end of it no but uh you know we could both stay out late we could both just like you know do whatever

we wanted like we didn't have to talk about like well you know if we go to conferences we've gone to quite a few tech conferences with Lillian but it always like you know, if I'm going to go to speaker's dinner, like he'll have to watch her. And then if he wants to hang out with somebody in the bar afterwards, like I'll, you know, I'll hang out. And then she, you know, sometimes she comes along, but like you always, one of us has to kind of keep an eye out, you know, for.

for her needs, which is totally valid and how it should be. But every once in a while, it's nice to just have a week where you're just like... all in like grown-up mode and celebrating that we are now gonna marry next summer do you have a date yet we have very little plans so far

But the pirate princess is very excited and she might become the officiant, like not the official officiant, but we want to just do it at home. That's, that's as far as we've gotten. Like we want to do it at home and she really wanted to do like a speech and yeah. that's the second thing we've decided we want to do it at home um and we don't want speeches but she really wanted to do a speech and then i was like well maybe you can like stand up there and be like

the person that marries us. And she was like, yes, that's exactly what I want to do. That is cute. That's so cute. i like it yeah so because a lot of people here in norway that don't do church weddings they um just go to the courthouse and kind of do it do like do the legal part and then kind of have a ceremony uh wherever they want that is where friends and family are watching so nice yeah don't kill me family if you haven't heard this

You're all invited. Or maybe not all of you, but some of you. We'll see. We'll see.

I love it. But it is hard to keep track of. And, you know, circling back to microcom, there was a lot of talk about AI. And I don't know if you saw this, but at least one person. was wearing those things like a necklace that is an AI recorder, like an audio recorder that stores every conversation that you have with them. Yes. And, you know. And then can remind you about what you spoke to people about.

So, you know, that's what I need. Like, what person did I tell this to? And who have I forgotten to tell this to? But I noticed that I felt a little weird.

You know when I realized that's what he had around this neck I was like Because I could see what yeah, and I'm like are you recording this and he was like Oh, I forgot to turn it off because he would have like business conversations with people and then seemed to me he would say like can I record this and then like just press the little thing on his kind of necklace or whatever we want to call this and then record a conversation so that he can follow up later but

You know, he had forgotten to like de- or unpress it, deactivate it. And I don't trust these deactivation buttons anywho. Well, we are all carrying microphones with us all day. Yeah, that is true. But yeah, that's a little, I mean, good thing that you can turn it off and it's actively blinking. So it's indicating that it's recording. So that's good.

Otherwise, that feels like a violation of trust to me if someone's secretly recording every conversation I have with them. I'm not sure about that. Did you meet the person who was wearing the... glasses that would live transcribe the conversations? Yes. And those didn't make any light. I didn't see any light or anything on them. I just thought they were regular glasses. So same thing, right?

Where is all of this conversation streamed to get the live translation? Yeah, that was wild in a different way, I guess. Yeah.

Anyways, we're living in the future. We are living in the future. And there are some movies that show us how this can... Potentially go. Potentially go. That's a conversation for another time. But I also talked to your friend, Christian, from Covetto. They do recruiting software or SaaS. And I think he spoke to you, too, about creating an MCP server. we just i just like i made one yeah i was like i made one and it's not that hard and blah blah blah and then

He was thinking about it, and then he came back to me one of the other days, and he was like, yeah, talk to Benedict about it, and maybe we can just generate it from our API. And then when I got home... I think he'd been home like 24 hours. I got a message. He's like, I did it. Yeah. I just did it. The funny thing about this, like. Christian was talking to me, but all I was doing was relaying your experience in different words back to him again.

So it's not like I had anything contributed to this. It was maybe just like rephrasing what you told me. So that was fun. And I didn't really know if his customer needs it or not, but he was also talking to Ola at one of the dinners about it before he realized that... I made an MCP server, but they were like talking about it. And I was like, well, if you can just do it, what will your competitors?

Like, do any of your competitors have one? Will asked him, and he was like, no. And Will is like, well, maybe you should make one then.

you know and just experiment because either they'll look at it and like spend resources on it and if it's not a success you can just like quietly you know face it out because he is a technical founder right he can do these experiments without deploying like five developers to like do the work um and he was like yeah yeah well now i guess i spoiled the whole thing but

Hopefully his competitors are not listening to this. Or maybe it's just useful. Or maybe it's useful. Yeah, cool. Any other takeaways from MicroConf you had?

Yeah, I was like, okay, I'm not going to do any of my side sasses. I'm going to focus, which we've had this conversation before. So talking to people.

kind of realizing like how far we are without Sera and like spend more focused time on the work that I do without Sera. And then also, you know, do... do the work for we i guess like i've it's not like i haven't been doing it but i think just focusing on those two and like table everything else for you know six months at least um it's good would be good

For everyone, just for, like, comedy and inspiration. Or not inspiration, like, you know, if you focus on something, you get, like, better ideas for those things. Or that's what people say, at least. yeah context switching is expensive yeah so i think you know so i'm it was funny i like i i think i wrote down there was like d inspired

Like not inspired to create my own sass. I was de-inspired. Because I think I set out after I was, I think maybe that was after I was at the MicroConf where I got like this free ticket. that diversity ticket that listening to the talks and talking to people like it's super hard like there are a lot of people who are um like not like i guess they're struggling but they're uh like It's not like you go there and they're like, yes, make a sass. It's more like, you know.

This is hard. Are you sure you want to do it? Do you have the resources to do it? Do you have the distribution? Do you have all of those things that you need to have in place and think about before you do it? It's not like... just like you know most people are um i don't think they regret it because it's been worth it because if you can afford a microcom ticket like it's been worth it but they're

I think there's a lot of people along the way where it ended up not being worth it. Anyway, it got me. It got me thinking. It is a lot of work. It is a lot of work. And it sometimes doesn't work out, I guess. And I think even the verdict on user list is still out there if it's going to work out in the long run, even though it has been eight years. We celebrated. Our founder agreement anniversary, I think on Friday. So yeah, eight long years.

And for the Taylor Swift fans out there, it's kind of like the latest song on the latest album, which is called The Life of a Showgirl, where she talks about watching... This artist on stage and coming up to her after the show, giving her flowers and saying like, I want to do what you do. And the more experienced artists being like, no, you don't. But then she was like, yes, I do. And obviously now she is.

you know, the biggest in the world. But in the song, like talking about it hasn't just been like, you really, really, really do want to live that life. And with all of that, it's like, you can't just take that. Like the fun and the money. You have to do all of the other things. There's more to this, right? Yeah, for sure. I just wanted to leave that in there since I'm very current.

Yep, yep. I have no idea about Taylor Swift at all. But anyways, I appreciate the story. You should listen to the song before the next episode. I probably should, yeah. Anywho, what did you get take out of MicroConf? Any ideas for user lists? Well, I guess we took away a little bit from Mark Thomas's talk about emailing people more. We kind of knew that he was...

That was the thing these days. But Jane is this week and next week, I think, working on redoing our own email marketing and email automations a little bit to keep that in mind. We got inspired to just do more mini launches. So we're going to launch all of those tiny little things that we have behind feature flags and just...

Ship them more or less how they are right now. Maybe polish a little bit here and there, but get a lot of stuff just out there and tell people about it and just email them more. Also, from Leticia of Decent Simple, I got a tip to look into our Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools, actually, a little bit more to figure out how we got affected.

from AI summaries. And I just earlier spent a couple hours just digging into the data. And it's wild. Our Google search impressions went way up over the last couple of months. while the clicks were going way down. But in September, the impressions also dropped significantly by almost half. So there's stuff happening and I have no idea what to make of it and what to do about it. But it's at least interesting to get a better pulse on...

Or a better idea on why I feel like things have been moving slower recently. I guess this is a huge part of this that I hadn't really realized. Because while we do...

While we do look at those metrics month over month, I had not looked at an entire year. So I didn't really notice that the changes were that significant until... until now so i should probably make a habit of like looking at larger scales a little bit more but yeah um that was kind of like part of the a like i felt like there was a lot of

chatter about ai like i mentioned mcp server but it was also that like you know a lot of i think a lot of people in the microcom community has relied on seo and has have been really really good at seo and now that is just like a rug pull it's just like yeah You know, good riddance. I don't think it's that, but the rules have changed, right? The landscape has changed. Because I think fundamentally...

It's still about getting discovered by machines, right? Just that the machines are different now and stuff is working differently and you need to figure out. how to get back on top again or in there at all. I think getting on top is maybe not even the biggest challenge. The biggest challenge is probably just getting mentioned at all. Yeah, let's see. There's new opportunities out there as well, I guess. But the advice, who had the AI getting cited by AI talk? Jesse Schoberg? Yeah.

And I don't know if it was you who said this after his talk, like all of his advice was talk more like a human. We've been like writing this SEO language for so long that we think that is like a natural way of.

organizing our articles and and but I felt like a lot of the things that he was saying like answer the question first not like in paragraph 10 or 100 at the bottom of the page um and things like that that would actually benefit a human reader as well that was the advice to be picked up by um yeah these agents or like ai whatever you want to call it agent optimization age eo aeo no I think this is like a good proxy to tell like how...

new and uncharted everything is that we cannot even agree on the right term for this, right? I've seen AEO, like agent engine optimization and answer engine. But there's also geo for like generative engine. I think, yeah, like this basically sums it up perfectly. We don't even know what to call the thing. And we don't really know.

But that's the same thing with SEO. We don't know how long it's going to work. So you kind of have to have a plan that is not just to get into the AI or the SEO, like the articles. You need to have a larger strategy so that the articles, whatever you write or output, is more than just getting cited for the next month. We talked about this briefly with Jane just before this recording.

Jane was like, I was telling what I found and like showing the numbers and she was like, well, good thing I'm not looking at those on a day-to-day basis because that would be... immensely frustrating and depressing um and the second thought was maybe we should just not do any of it and figure out something else like i don't know just Completely different strategy and ignore all of the SEO, AEO, GEO, whatever. All of the O's.

Do door-to-door sales or something like that. I mean, this is sounding very close to enterprise sales. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She's not wrong. Let's put it that way.

So, yeah, that's some of the takeaways. And I guess the main takeaway for me, for my conference, always just meeting a lot of nice people that... get what we are doing and are on the same wavelength. And it was so nice to meet. I know I'm repeating myself every year, but it was so nice to meet old friends again that I haven't seen in a while. Some of them haven't been to...

Recent microconferences showing up again and just talking to them, seeing them again, hugging them, sharing a nice dinner with them. That's always nice. And I also enjoyed meeting a couple of new people. I made a friend in Iceland, for example, and just met people that I hadn't known before, had interesting conversations with them, learned about interesting.

Interesting thing, even outside of our bubble of software, I talked to an artist who's been working with researchers and going on a sailing trip. to do art based on other people's research and stuff. It's super interesting. So I always enjoyed that part. And overall, I think we had a good time. I mean, we had a nice...

A nice dinner together with some friends. And yeah, overall, going there for the people at this point. Yeah. But also a good city. But I don't think I would have seen much if we'd just been there for... for microconf i didn't see much of it so i guess you definitely have a better better pulse on the city uh than i have um Well, it was definitely an interesting city. I feel like in a lot of ways, it's not a type of city I've been to much before, or at all. It was a lot of new...

new things that I hadn't seen before. It is so large. We were talking to a taxi driver and... And we were like, yeah, like how many people in Norway, you know, in all of Norway, it's about 8 million people. And he was just, he just laughed. Like, he was just like, you know, because he said like, I think we're, he was like, I think we're 25 million. in the city yeah yeah that is so i i think it's it's like on a scale that is totally different from

from what I'm used to. And also because it's on, you know, two continents and, you know, there's so many like bridges, which kind of divides it, but then it's also united. It's super, it's in like the rich history where, yeah, it's hard to, it's like before I went there, you know, people would say that like, oh, it's got such a long history. It's got, you know, and it's very diverse.

You understand that in theory, but I felt like when we went to one of those guided, like with microcom, there was like a little guided tour. And the guide is just like casually mentioning things. that has been like super important for for europe that oh that happened here like you know that and yeah same i had the same experience yeah

So I think that was, I really want to go back. I want to bring Lillian at some point and just like have a look at some of these buildings that have been standing for as long as they have. Then I also thought like going to micro comp, I really, really enjoyed.

just hanging out with so many different Europeans. There were obviously some people who were not from Europe there as well, but sitting kind of at the end of Europe or up at the top or to the side, I don't know what we want to say with Norway. We've always had... you know, as a nation, lots of relations with other countries back in the day because of votes.

since we have a long coast like we did travel and meet a lot of um other people like historically sometimes stole them with us but um But hanging out with people from so many different European countries. all interested in the same topics and kind of like working in the same community while being from all over. Like I really needed that right now. Yeah, it just gave me like a like a trust. I don't know. It just gave me a boost that we can all be different, but also the same.

I guess not very profound, but I really felt that. And that was different from going to a lot of the conferences that I've gone to. Not a lot, but that was different from MicroConf in the U.S. when I went there and some of the larger tech conferences that I've been to in the U.S. because it's been, you know, most Americans. which is also fine but you know this is these are the people closer to home um and it was really nice to hang out yeah agreed it's still one of my favorite conferences and

Not because of the content at the talks. It's not bad, but what makes this conference is the people and the community. And just general, why? Because I think of Ruby conferences at... It's kind of open and inclusive most of the times at least. But still, even though the community is open as well and friendly, I don't get to have the same type of conversations.

tech conferences. It, for some reason, just does not work this way. And I'm wondering if it's a little bit because of a lot of people in a micro-conf community just like... being on their own or like with very like small teams and like everyone's kind of lonely most of the times and so this is like the place to be to not be lonely whereas with like the tech conferences Usually people are part of a team or work for someone. It's not like a freelancer-type conference where everyone's sort of...

on their own, but in the same sea or something like that. It's more like everyone is on their own cruise ship, something like that. So you don't get to mingle as much. But yeah, I don't know. Just my overall feeling. I also think that people that choose to do that do do that, like start their own company or work on such a small team or in those kinds of businesses. You have to be interested in more than just the tech.

Because there's so many, you can't be like, oh, my only responsibility is the tech. And I think that might be like a big difference from tech conference. I mean, there are well-rounded developers.

obviously um but when they come together at the tech conference i do think we often forget about those other things that we do because it becomes like very tech focused and and you kind of forget about like showing up with all of those other facets but when you go into a conference like this where you have to wear many hats and you might be really bad at some of them

it just becomes like more honest and you end up sharing more of your story than if you are at the tech conference where like you feel like everybody's really good at the tech and you kind of want to, you know, you don't want to.

you know admit that you don't know your stuff or um you think that everybody like else might think it's weird if you know if you're into improv or if you you know you have other things that you want to talk about but here it's like you have to be interested in multiple things otherwise you wouldn't sign up to be like the marketer the developer the strategizer the hr department you you you know you wouldn't

try to walk down that path if you weren't interested in in more than the tech so that might be a little bit why we don't have time for status updates benedict we don't like who who says we don't can't

I mean, do you want to wrap it up? I'm fine either way. We can go a little longer. I have to go to Ikea today. But other than that. How long? When does Ikea close in Norway? Oh, it doesn't close, I think. 9 or 10. At night, but I have a pickup thing and also I have a daughter who's waiting for me. Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest update was Microsoft anyways. The other thing...

Two things that I want to mention as sort of my update since is, one, we built a Postdoc integration. Postdoc seems to be the new cool kit on the blog when it comes to analytics. Or, yeah, everything at this point, it's a wild product. Like, on one hand, kudos to whoever is managing that and building that. It literally does everything you could possibly be thinking about. But then again, I had to build a postdoc. So basically, cycling back a little bit, postdoc integration for user list means...

allowing people who send data to Postdoc to also forward it to user lists from there. They have a CDP platform thingy in there so you can track events and user data and stuff like that and then forward it to different tools. And we wanted user list to be one of them because it keeps coming up in conversation with leads and stuff like that. And the way to do this is postdoc is open source. So you clone the repository and add it to the code. This was...

Probably the worst developer experience I've ever had. It took me probably a week of on and off work to get the thing even started. So there's no plugin directory where you just upload your code. You have to merge it into their code base. No, it is literally part of the code base. And to test it or to run it or whatever. You have to set up the local development environment and boot the thing in there.

They have a Codespaces thingy set up, so you don't necessarily have to install everything on your machine in specific. You can do the Codespaces thing and get the Docker container where you get everything in there.

and there's a little bit of documentation on their website on how to do this but i just want to say it's outdated and it does only do half of the stuff and uh yeah it is yeah In my books, if I do a Codespaces thing, then when you click the running Codespace button, it should just configure everything. Why not? It's all configurable and scriptable, so why not configure it to a state where you can actually start using it? Wasn't the case with them. Had to install a bunch of stuff.

in the already set up code space follow some of the tutorial like there's a tutorial for like how to use it in code space and then there's a tutorial for like how to use it on your own machine i had to basically follow like set it up in Cospace and then follow the On Your Own Machine guide to get everything working. And the other thing that I don't tell you is that when you start it and try to access it, it will just take forever.

Like stuff looks like it's up and running, but it probably still takes another minute or so before it's actually up and running. And that makes it just a horrible experience because you're looking at the thing and you get a white screen and you're like... Is it working? Is it broken? Will something happen? Eventually, I figured out there's a difference of accessing it using localhost and port as the URL.

127.0.0.1 and a port. Because with the IP address, it doesn't work. With the localhost, it does. I don't know why, even though the docs say something else. And then you have to wait forever until everything compiles in the browser because it's using Vite. And eventually it shows up and then you log in and then it's there. And you start using it and suddenly it stops. And you have no idea why.

And for the longest time, the only thing I could figure out how to make it work again was shut down the entire code space, boot it from scratch, start everything from scratch, wait those 10 minutes for it to boot again. And then suddenly you're in there again and it could continue working until it stops again. At some point I figured out it was something with like...

you made changes to the Python backend and then the Python server would reload and sometimes wouldn't properly reload. So I had eventually figured out I only have to restart one particular thing, but it was a mess. And then it's like... I mean, user list is like one monolithic backend and you boot that and then the API is there and then you boot the frontend server and those are the two components plus the database. But Postdoc has like...

I want to say at least 20 different services that have to be running at the same time. It's wild. And then you have no idea. You look at the thing, and you have no idea what service does what. I figured eventually that there's a plugin server that apparently is the thing that sends data to the destinations, like user lists and stuff like that.

And that might report that it's up, but actually it's not because there's an error message hidden in the log somewhere where it tells you that it didn't properly boot and stuff like that. I don't know. I keep ranting, but long story short, this was a horrible, horrible, horrible experience. To this day, I have to admit that I have not been able to send a...

Tracking requests to PostHoc, have it processed internally and then send it out to user list, wasn't able to get it work. There's a test mode in PostHoc itself, so I was able to test. the outgoing stuff with that, but why my events that I manually track in post hoc don't actually get forwarded to anything, I haven't figured it out. No idea. Eventually I was able to.

I was able to write some tests and submit a pull request. And this might be on me or this might be on Codespaces. But by the point I was like, okay, this is ready. I can commit this. It took me two hours to do the... effing commit like i was like git commit message enter and then just some checks and stuff like that and then it was like

Signing failed. I'm like, what do you mean signing failed? Do it again. Okay, still doesn't work. Then look at some logs. User does not have push permissions to the repository. Okay, sure. Okay, I cannot push to the official one. You have to fork it. I forked it and then rewired it to point to my fork. Try it again. User does not have permissions.

I think in the end, I think it was because my Codespace Instant was not logged into my GitHub account, which is weird because it was using my Git credentials. It was using my name and everything. And I created it on GitHub and it's connected to my account. But for some reason, I wasn't authenticated, apparently. Software is hard. I was at least able to do the commit. And now there's a pull request.

And I hope it gets reviewed eventually, but who knows? It's already on page three or four of open PRs on Postdoc because there's so much stuff going on that I have just... Very little confidence that it will get reviewed and merged at some point. Because I've heard so much good stuff about PostHog, like being a user of PostHog, not an integration maker.

but just using it in your app. Like I keep hearing it, like just, you know, popping hot post talk, popping post. I like, um, people have been loving it for like years. i mean they just got their newest founding round but they've been around for at least two years now i think i've been in one community i mean this guy is just like he's using it for everything and he loves it um so i think like

Having a website and adding it to your website or adding it to your app to track things seems like that is super smooth. And I think that's where they focus their money. on but i honestly don't know they i think they are unicorn right now with the latex funding round so yes you know insane valuation ship fast break things isn't that ship fast and break things like yes and i think the other thing is yes it's open source and yes you can in theory

hosted yourself but i don't think they have any incentive of making this easy but i feel like that's a trend like super base is also open source but who's gonna run super base on their own servers like i don't I think I've never heard anybody do that. Like if they end up not wanting to use the Superbase service, they migrate off of Superbase because it's based on Postgres. They do their own Postgres and then they migrate off of.

um super base but it's it's this thing that is being kind of stamped on products where i feel like at this point it's kind of mislabeled where you say oh it's open source like you could say useless is open source clone my repository And I'd say it would probably even be easy to set up because I don't hate yak shaving.

yeah whatever let's not get down there but i but i can feel because you know coming from a front-end world where we used a lot of services for everything all the time um and the issues we've had with We, this has happened in we, like tiny little we, we have almost no customer when it comes to SaaS scale. And we were using Superbase just to send out... one-time OTPs. What's it called? Passcodes. One-time passcodes. Passwords. And I think me and AI did that in Laravel and like, I don't know.

I don't think I did anything. I think I told Sean Claude to do it. And it was working. And even with Heard, that I have installed a machine, that kind of runs my Latin. Don't quote me on anything later, because I am still a noob, and that's also why I love the AI, because I don't see the issues of how it does it, perhaps. But at least I got really far. And with the herd...

it intercepts like the email. So I just get the email there with the OTP token. While testing this, when you're using Superbase, you have to have a separate, you know, a completely separate... superbase instance where you turn off OTPs or I don't even know how like we had no testing on that for for for we but having this all in a tiny little layer of a laugh on my machine it's so easy like things are just so like refreshingly simple um yep and so tried and tested that i i actually think you know

some of, you know, a lot of the AI things. I'm, you know, I look through everything. It looks super organized, super structured. You know, all of the controllers look the same way. It's like, you know, these are proven patterns. And it's just been a joy, actually, to work with. Fully sold. Yeah, it's actually quite nice. Not having to use a million services.

actually a good thing. Because at this point with Wii, so the focus I've had since MicroConf on Wii, which kind of was the plan for this fall, is that I've been kind of working up a little bit of... I wouldn't say overtime, but I've done a lot of outside of work so that I could have some weeks where I could focus more on we. This is something I'm going to try and do moving forward. I still have to do support on both.

but trying to kind of do more of the, like the focused real work, working like in the business work, um, or on those anyway, um, more like have more focused time. And now I've lost my conversation. Yes. So we are replacing the logged in pages or my we. And it's like, we're almost done. It took.

It didn't take that much time. And getting all of that out of the next application. And then it's the actual website. Because at this point... we can't do any changes to the content structure because if you want to do changes to the content structure we have to upgrade our sanity project to the next version which will have breaking changes

And I don't have time for those breaking changes. And like all of those things, like, and we might get there with Laravel too, like there's packages and there, but it just seems a little bit more stable and it's all in your own monolith where like you have more control. of it because I am just sitting here waiting until sanity is like we're shutting off this old version you know it's gonna happen and we won't have any say in that and yeah and just like

removing the services. So we're completely off of Superbase now. And we're soon to have replaced the whole logged in pages or my we, and even added new functionality around payments because that is, is everybody who owns a SaaS knows it's a pain when people stop paying. and usually it's because of you know their card has expired and you know it's usually not bad faith and uh as we mentioned before with a sass you just turn off their access with the bike

They still have the bike. So we need it to be much easier for our operations teams to have. our customers like, you know, have that in their face. Like if they're logged, not that they log that much in, but we can then, we have SMSs that we send to them.

where it's like you're late and then we just want them to have one central place to log in and they can see all of their unpaid invoices and a place to you know go into stripe billing portal and we had that before but then you had to log in via the stripe login which is like give them your email address but today you know now i have i create a session because you're already logged in and you can head on over to stripe and

you know, all of this like easy stuff. But just so much easier now that I don't have to make sure four services are running before I can see the logged in pages. And I can only... you know, log in on, you know, into my own account. Otherwise I would be sending OTP keys to... random people but now i can actually log in as one of our customers to see how this will look for them because they're not getting the you know they're not getting sms's and emails while i'm in development mode yeah yeah

That's so nice. Yeah. Cool to see that you're coming around to being a back-end developer. I'm going to start bugging you about the whole, should it be in the model or the controller or the view questions? Yep. Yep. Bring it on. I'm open to discuss that any day. One last thing. Bring it on and discussing. The last thing I wanted to mention is I started a challenge with Jane. So we have a friendly competition.

And the task is who does the most user list related videos until the end of the year. There's a minimum of 10 each, but the winner is the one who makes the most videos. I would love to hear some ideas, either from you or from listeners. There's no rules about the format or the length or whatever. It just needs to be user-list-related and video. I have some ideas, thinking of doing a video on how API works and how that informs how our filters and filtering UI works.

I'm open to ideas. So if you have any good ideas, let me know. And the easier and quicker they are, the better. Because it can be 10 short videos, I guess. It doesn't have to be 10 minute long videos. So yeah, if you have any ideas, let me know. I feel like this should be the opening of our next episode, next recording. So we'll clip this onto LinkedIn where you're asking for ideas and maybe you'll get some and then that will be your first video.

And then I'll think I have to do a video this week because. I think it's only 10 weeks to the end of the year by now, or even less. So I need to get started on this. I cannot wait until the next episode. Okay, now I've got a panic attack. No, I mean, it is, isn't it? I don't want to talk about it. Yeah, it's 10 weeks. This is like, yeah. see you around the interwebs see you around the interwebs bye bye