ANTHOLOGY – Self-hosted, self-confident & self-employed (Friends)

Adam Stacoviak:

Well, have you met Jerod before?

Alex Kretzschmar:

No.

Adam Stacoviak:

Well, this is Jerod.

Alex Kretzschmar:

I've heard you many times, but...

Jerod Santo:

Yes. And I've heard you many times.

Alex Kretzschmar:

Oh. Awesome.

Jerod Santo:

Yeah. Happy to meet you. Mutual fans.

Adam Stacoviak:

Alex runs -- is it selfhosted.fm?

Alex Kretzschmar:

.show.

Adam Stacoviak:

.show. What happened to the .fm?

Jerod Santo:

Too expensive.

Alex Kretzschmar:

No.

Jerod Santo:

You wanted the show.

Alex Kretzschmar:

I don't know. I just figured that .show was -- it's Self-Hosted Show, so selfhosted.show seemed to be the...

Jerod Santo:

It works.

Adam Stacoviak:

Okay. I'm not a hater.

Jerod Santo:

We have shipit.show...

Adam Stacoviak:

We do.

Jerod Santo:

...but that's because we could not get shipit.fm.

Adam Stacoviak:

Yeah. Somebody owns that. Whoever you are, give it up.

Jerod Santo:

Give it up!

Adam Stacoviak:

It's ours.

Alex Kretzschmar:

Somebody owns selfhosted.com, and I'd love to know who that is.

Jerod Santo:

Yeah. That's probably expensive. That's a nice domain.

Adam Stacoviak:

The question for you is this. Could you do, like, similar to a commercial open source company forms a company around open source, could you form a company around the podcast? Like a services business?

Jerod Santo:

Around Self-Hosted?

Adam Stacoviak:

Yeah. Could you do that?

Alex Kretzschmar:

It's an interesting one, because I think...

Adam Stacoviak:

Because you've got the media -- what is it called again?

Alex Kretzschmar:

Collection. The media collection apps.

Adam Stacoviak:

No, that guide you have. What was the name of it?

Alex Kretzschmar:

Oh, Perfectmediaserver.com.

Adam Stacoviak:

Perfectmediaserver.com. Okay. Thank you.

Alex Kretzschmar:

Yeah, it's an interesting one, because you look at the routes people come into self-hosting through, and it's typically things like Plex, and collecting media through nefarious means...

Adam Stacoviak:

Nefarious...

Alex Kretzschmar:

But I think these days there are a whole new subset of people coming in through home assistant and home automation.

Jerod Santo:

Yeah.

Alex Kretzschmar:

This mythical new Linux user that we talk about in the Linux world for years and years... It's happening through those platforms, because they enable things to run on like Raspberry Pi's, that you couldn't do full fat Windows; you just couldn't do it that way.

Jerod Santo:

Right. It's like a gateway drug.

Alex Kretzschmar:

But one of the big appeals of self-hosting is - yes, data sovereignty is important, but it's free as in cost for a lot of people, too. So they can ditch subscriptions with a lot of these apps... So in terms of like a services company, I've thought about it quite a bit, but you'd have to charge more than most commercial services, standalone services for just one thing, which is like a... Well, I could go and do it for free on Unraid. I can go and do it for free on Linux, or Docker, or like whatever. It's tricky.

Jerod Santo:

Yeah.

Adam Stacoviak:

Have you thought about writing a book, or a guide to like capitalize on your... Because you're putting a lot of information out there, and the consolidation of information enables what? Value exchange. So what happens when value exchange is? Money. A little education for you, Jerod, in case you didn't know.

Jerod Santo:

Thank you. Thank you.

Alex Kretzschmar:

I do put a lot of stuff out on YouTube these days. On the Tailscale channel, also KTZ Systems, Self-Hosted podcast, perfectmediaserver.com... It's all over. But maybe I should write a book.

Adam Stacoviak:

I'm just curious. Did you know that Alex started Linux Server IO?

Jerod Santo:

Yes, because I listened to your guys' episode.

Adam Stacoviak:

Right. Did you know that before that?

Jerod Santo:

I didn't know that before that.

Alex Kretzschmar:

It was proof you were listening then.

Adam Stacoviak:

And neither did I. Did I? I mean, I prepped for that show, but...

Jerod Santo:

What, you've found out on the show?

Adam Stacoviak:

I discovered it on the show.

Alex Kretzschmar:

I think you thought I was making it up.

Jerod Santo:

\[laughs\]

Adam Stacoviak:

I was like -- I had to check this guy.

Jerod Santo:

He's like "No, you don't...!"

Adam Stacoviak:

I paginated back to like page one of the blog... Sure enough.

Alex Kretzschmar:

Boom. Yeah.

Adam Stacoviak:

Sure enough. Right there.

Alex Kretzschmar:

So for me, a lot of this stuff started just by -- I was trying to compile a kernel to put PCI pass-through in it... Because I was cheap. I couldn't afford a second computer... I could afford a GPU though, so I threw that in my server, in my Unraid server, did the pass-through in there, and I'm like "Everyone else needs to know how to do this, because this is awesome." So I started writing blogs about it, and sharing information. And that's how it's...

Jerod Santo:

How many times have we heard something like that? Like, that story, in a different space, is the beginning for so many people. It's really rinse and repeat in your little niche, and there's not guaranteed success, but if you do it long enough... I mean, you're going to bring so much value to so many people.

Alex Kretzschmar:

\[00:08:06.22\] I hope so. I mean, sometimes I wonder who's actually listening after a while...

Jerod Santo:

Sure.

Alex Kretzschmar:

Because I feel like -- I mean, for me, the message has been the same for like eight years now. But there's always new people coming in and want to hear new stuff. So...

Jerod Santo:

Yeah. Well, you might become jaded, but your audience might not, even.

Alex Kretzschmar:

It's not so much jaded, because I mean, I still get a lot of utility out of it myself. I run Home Assistant at home, I run Jellyfin, I have Proxmox... Everything that I can self-host pretty much is self-hosted. And Tailscale obviously helps with that, because I don't need to open ports in my firewall, and all that kind of stuff. But from my perspective, it's weird to see my episode.

Jerod Santo:

Your episode's right there.

Alex Kretzschmar:

Did you plan that?

Jerod Santo:

No.

Adam Stacoviak:

We sure did.

Jerod Santo:

That's random.

Adam Stacoviak:

We have a TV to Alex's left, my right, and we have clips playing there for the audience. And there's Alex and me talking about Jellyfish...

Jerod Santo:

Great lighting, too. Very nice.

Adam Stacoviak:

Well, you were actually shooting a log, right? And then you changed...

Alex Kretzschmar:

Yeah. I actually figured out after our episode, how to get my Ninja V to output the log profile straight out of HDMI in through OBS, so... Now it's fixed. But for that episode, that was the log.

Adam Stacoviak:

It was good lighting. Good lighting, for sure.

Jerod Santo:

Yeah.

Adam Stacoviak:

What's got your interest these days? Whether it's Tailscale, or personal... What's got your attention?

Alex Kretzschmar:

NixOS.

Adam Stacoviak:

Linux?

Alex Kretzschmar:

NixOS.

Adam Stacoviak:

NixOS.

Alex Kretzschmar:

Yeah.

Adam Stacoviak:

Like the package manager, or the actual operating system?

Alex Kretzschmar:

Yes.

Adam Stacoviak:

Yes.

Alex Kretzschmar:

Yeah, because it's really -- so Nix is talking about the language and the package manager and the OS, as you say.

Adam Stacoviak:

Right. Yeah, it completes.

Alex Kretzschmar:

But I started managing all my MacBooks using Nix Darwin, and then trying to build a single flake that can configure all my different Mac systems using Home Manager. And then I've started trying to get involved in NeoVim as well, and mechanical keyboard... Like, I'm going down the rabbit hole pretty hard, of being like --

Adam Stacoviak:

\[unintelligible 00:09:56.10\]

Alex Kretzschmar:

No... \[laughs\] Factorio also. That came out this week and that's been a big time sink.

Adam Stacoviak:

Okay...

Jerod Santo:

Victoria Metrics?

Alex Kretzschmar:

Factorio.

Jerod Santo:

Oh, Factorio. Oh, that's the game, right?

Alex Kretzschmar:

Yeah.

Jerod Santo:

Like some sort of a builder game...

Alex Kretzschmar:

Yeah.

Jerod Santo:

I haven't played it, so I'm literally ignorant right here. I'm like telling you how much I know about it. You play it...

Alex Kretzschmar:

I've got like a thousand hours in this game, and I don't play video games. But that one... What's different about that one?

Alex Kretzschmar:

It's basically software development, but in game form. Like inputs, outputs, API interfaces, all that kind of stuff...

Jerod Santo:

Yeah. So Chris Hiller on JS Party is big into that game, and he was trying to tell me about it... And I was like I don't want to try playing that, because I'll probably never stop.

Alex Kretzschmar:

It kind of feels like work sometimes. I'm not going to lie.

Jerod Santo:

Like a grind? Are you grinding?

Alex Kretzschmar:

No. In just so much as the fact it's exactly like software development.

Jerod Santo:

Wow.

Alex Kretzschmar:

Like, I am building this entity, and it's got to interface with these other entities... And before you realize it, you've built basically a modular piece of code that you can reuse different -- and then you spend most of your time refactoring the base, to make it more efficient... And the analogies to writing code are very strong.

Jerod Santo:

Okay.

Alex Kretzschmar:

Very strong.

Jerod Santo:

And the joy, I guess, would be similar... Joys.

Alex Kretzschmar:

The joy is there's no boss.

Jerod Santo:

Ah...

Alex Kretzschmar:

But there is this kind of guilty pleasure in it of "I must be productive." I don't know if you guys feel that too, but I feel like I'm wasting my time playing video games, and yet sometimes I just need to...

Jerod Santo:

Right.

Alex Kretzschmar:

Whereas the rest of the time I'm busy making content, probably like you guys, thinking on it in the shower, and just... The grind never stops in that regard.

Adam Stacoviak:

Yeah, for sure.

Jerod Santo:

Yeah. I use video games now as like a decompression from work, 45 minutes to an hour after I'm done working...

Alex Kretzschmar:

Yeah.

Jerod Santo:

Put everything else away and just play for an hour, and then I can be done and move on.

Adam Stacoviak:

Have you played Geometry Dash yet?

Jerod Santo:

\[00:11:48.27\] Oh, yeah. I played Geometry Dash way back in the day. I mean, I've moved on from it, because I was kind of addicted to it.

Alex Kretzschmar:

Do you ever move on from it, really?

Jerod Santo:

Well, maybe not. I mean, it changes you.

Alex Kretzschmar:

Yeah.

Jerod Santo:

But yeah, I love Geometry Dash. I just don't play it anymore.

Adam Stacoviak:

Well, my son got me into it because he's got into it...

Jerod Santo:

Great music, too.

Adam Stacoviak:

Yeah. And he loves -- he wants to be a DJ.

Jerod Santo:

We should give BMC some Geometry Dash. Just a side note...

Adam Stacoviak:

Yeah.

Alex Kretzschmar:

I remember the first time I got heavily into Transport Tycoon, and I was about 14 or 15. It was OpenTTD when that started. We took a holiday... \[unintelligible 00:12:20.25\] lived in England at the time, in case you couldn't guess... We took a holiday in Florida, Orlando. You've got all those interchanges flying around, and I'm like looking at designs, thinking "I could implement this in the game..."

Jerod Santo:

\[laughs\] Yeah, I got big into Roller Coaster Tycoon and SimCity...

Alex Kretzschmar:

Oh, yeah.

Jerod Santo:

After that, I kind of moved away from builders myself.

Adam Stacoviak:

Yeah.

Jerod Santo:

But now it's Rocket League. My kids like Rocket League, and now I like it... And so we play it together, which is a great co-op...

Alex Kretzschmar:

Can relate. I'm somewhat of a Bluey fanboy these days myself. Yeah.

Jerod Santo:

\[laughs\] There you go. So you're talking about things, you try to self-host everything you can... What services do you not self-host and why?

Alex Kretzschmar:

Great question. My password manager. I pay Bitwarden $10 a year to host that, because if I get locked out of my vault, I can't get back into anything to unlock the vaults... And it's like this catch 22.

Jerod Santo:

Yeah.

Alex Kretzschmar:

And so I'd much rather pay Bitwarden. Because it's only $10 a year, or $12 or something for them to do it. And it's like, that trade-off is worth it for me. I still pay for Google Photos as well, for right now, at least... But Image is coming up real good, which is like a self-hosted Google Photos clone... It's got things like machine learning, face detection and duplicate detection, and all that kind of stuff in it, too. It needs a good GPU to do that, so it's properly doing CUDA library stuff...

Jerod Santo:

Oh, wow.

Alex Kretzschmar:

But yeah, I think really password managers is the only one where I'm like...

Adam Stacoviak:

"Nah..."

Alex Kretzschmar:

...cloud, please.

Adam Stacoviak:

Even though you could. Bitwarden, you could totally self-host. Easily.

Alex Kretzschmar:

Yeah, you could. Absolutely.

Adam Stacoviak:

Right. Well, can't you just like literally host Bitwarden itself? Because it's open source...

Jerod Santo:

Well, they're changing things...

Alex Kretzschmar:

Are they?

Adam Stacoviak:

Bitwarden?

Jerod Santo:

Yeah, Bitwarden re-licensed an SDK...

Alex Kretzschmar:

I thought I saw they reversed that though, because of --

Jerod Santo:

They might have since. This was like last week though. So there's news since then?

Alex Kretzschmar:

Yeah --

Jerod Santo:

Because they pushed -- there was pushback.

Alex Kretzschmar:

They got to the top of Hacker News a couple of times, and... Nobody wants that.

Jerod Santo:

Right. So they reversed course? That's cool. I'm glad to hear that.

Adam Stacoviak:

I recall, years ago, probably like at least two years ago, I was standing up my own Bitwarden, just to play. I'm with you, I don't know I want to host my own password manager, because it's just... It's too much of a -- I suppose if the tech is already secure, I don't have to worry about it. And like whoever gets access to it, you have to authenticate. So if that's good to go, whatever. But it's like if it's down, and then I have that access from everywhere... I wasn't that good at poking holes in my firewall at the time, you know? So I was like "Nah, I don't know if I want to do that." What else would you not host? You obviously host your data, right? Like, you host a ton of data, and you're cool with that.

Alex Kretzschmar:

Next Cloud is what I use to host -- that's like a Google Drive replacement, Dropbox replacement...

Jerod Santo:

Yeah. Are you happy with that?

Alex Kretzschmar:

Mostly.

Jerod Santo:

Okay...

Alex Kretzschmar:

It's a big fat PHP app. It's kind of slow, it's kind of clunky. It breaks a lot. But I have it now as a Nix module, and I just don't touch it. Now it's stable. I just leave it alone, and it just does its thing in the corner. But it's trying to be a platform for small to medium businesses, I think. You can install Office suites on it, you can install calendars, contacts, email, file syncing... There's a million different add-ons you can get for it. Once you start getting beyond the core product, it starts to get pretty crufty pretty quickly, really.

Jerod Santo:

Gotcha.

Alex Kretzschmar:

Brittle, I think would be the word.

Jerod Santo:

Brittle, yeah. Photos is interesting, because we've debated photos recently...

Adam Stacoviak:

We did.

Jerod Santo:

...as kind of a hard line of like the one thing you don't want to mess up.

Adam Stacoviak:

Mainly, my point is know what you're getting into. If you're going to self-host your own photos, and you're the arbiter of the final copy, know what you're getting into.

Alex Kretzschmar:

Yeah.

Adam Stacoviak:

Have a backup plan.

Alex Kretzschmar:

The only reason I trust myself to self-host photos is because I have an offsite server back in England that I replicate everything to.

Adam Stacoviak:

That's right.

Alex Kretzschmar:

With ZFS \[unintelligible 00:16:24.15\]

Adam Stacoviak:

\[unintelligible 00:16:25.00\]

Alex Kretzschmar:

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Jerod Santo:

Does it snapshot, too?

Alex Kretzschmar:

\[00:16:31.05\] Yeah. ZFS is cool like that. So like copy on write, all that kind of stuff. It will only sync the blocks that have changed, or the delta. So...

Adam Stacoviak:

Yeah. Send Receive is pretty cool...

Alex Kretzschmar:

I recently got Fiber as well. So I've got like a five-gig upload now, which is...

Jerod Santo:

Wow.

Alex Kretzschmar:

I've gone from 30 meg to 5,000 meg, and it's like... I upload stuff to YouTube every day nearly, and it's amazing.

Jerod Santo:

Yeah. That's awesome.

Adam Stacoviak:

What's with Tailscale these days? What's new and fresh there? What's the latest?

Alex Kretzschmar:

Still developing relations with developers, I guess...

Jerod Santo:

\[laughs\]

Alex Kretzschmar:

Yeah. It's pretty good. We just had our company offsite in Mexico... Whole company gets together once a year, because we're fully remote. So everybody looks at Tailscale being like head-officed in Toronto, and they're like "Oh, they're a Canadian company." In reality, there's four people in a WeWork in Toronto.

Adam Stacoviak:

Yeah.

Alex Kretzschmar:

And everyone else is just geographically spread. Like, I'm here in Raleigh, there's people in San Francisco... All over the place.

Adam Stacoviak:

Yeah.

Alex Kretzschmar:

So there's a lot of excitement at the moment in the company about where things are going over the next year or so... We've made a bunch of new hires, and new blood, and stuff like that. And just changing the structure, and growing into our next phase.

Adam Stacoviak:

It sounds fun.

Alex Kretzschmar:

I think it will be. Yeah.

Adam Stacoviak:

I like Tailscale still yet. I'm not a hater. I'm a lover. My use case is pretty simple though... You know, that's it.

Alex Kretzschmar:

How do you connect to your stuff at home from here?

Adam Stacoviak:

Just put up Tailscale...

Alex Kretzschmar:

Exactly.

Adam Stacoviak:

That's it. This is so easy.

Alex Kretzschmar:

And that's fine. And it's free...

Adam Stacoviak:

"Is it on? Is it connected? Okay, cool."

Alex Kretzschmar:

And it's free for you, because you're just one person, right?

Adam Stacoviak:

That's right. And I love that. And I do run an exit node at home, on a dedicated VM. I guess, could you say a VM is dedicated? It's not an Apple TV, let's just say. It's a VM that's dedicated to being -- that Ubuntu server is a VM, and it's meant to be the exit node. That's it. Tailscale makes my life simple. It's kind of boring, because it's so easy... And that's kind of good, right?

Alex Kretzschmar:

I often say it's WireGuard on Easy mode, and it sounds super-cheeseball, but it's true, right?

Adam Stacoviak:

Yeah. I mean once you're -- there's not really a lot of setup. You do all the heavylifting, and it just blends in. I don't have to think about it and worry about whether or not it is working or not working.

Alex Kretzschmar:

I remember the first time that I went to set Tailscale up... This is like probably three years ago before I worked there. I set aside the whole weekend to retool my WireGuard around Tailscale... And I was done in like 10 minutes, and I'm like "Well, what am I going to do with my weekend?" I was expecting that to be really difficult, and...

Adam Stacoviak:

It was not hard at all.

Alex Kretzschmar:

...Tailscale was just really easy.

Adam Stacoviak:

Tailscale is really easy. Dig it, man. Jerod doesn't Tailscale though, do you? You don't need to, right? You have no need for Tailscale.

Alex Kretzschmar:

What about if you need to control a mixer back in Texas from here?

Adam Stacoviak:

Don't do it. Jerod lives a simple life.

Jerod Santo:

I do. Very simple.

Adam Stacoviak:

And it's not that he tries to not be complex... He tries to be simple.

Jerod Santo:

I do.

Adam Stacoviak:

Which is a different thing, really.

Alex Kretzschmar:

That's a feature though, not a bug.

Jerod Santo:

It is a feature, yeah. I've designed my life around it. I mean, we are homebodies, we are homeschoolers, I work from home... I have one laptop, I take it with me when I go somewhere... I've got nothing to connect to back home...

Adam Stacoviak:

Yeah.

Jerod Santo:

I mean, the Mac Mini has some old movies on it, but I'm not going to watch those if I'm on the road. I'm going to watch whatever's on Netflix...

Alex Kretzschmar:

You're going to watch the world go by the window, right?

Jerod Santo:

Yeah, exactly. So young Jerod would be all about Tailscale, but old Jerod, I'm just like... I'm not a self-hoster.

Adam Stacoviak:

Yeah.

Jerod Santo:

\[00:20:00.16\] I still think it's cool tech. I remember the bad old days of Hamachi VPN, I think it was called... Which was, I think, open source, but it was definitely free. It was my closest analog to Tailscale, before Tailscale. And it was cool, because you could do a lot of the same stuff... And that's pre-WireGuard even. I'm not sure how it worked. I know it was a VPN, but... You know, we had NAS'es in different people's houses... And we were sharing backups with each other. Like, I backup your stuff, you backup mine. I did all that stuff the hard way, probably 15 years ago. And so now...

Alex Kretzschmar:

You're just not interested now.

Jerod Santo:

No. I just have different interests. I like to talk about the stuff. I like to hear what people are up to... But I just don't have that hacker mindset with that kind of stuff. I just don't.

Alex Kretzschmar:

Yeah. I think for me it's when companies like Disney just jack the price up, to be double in the space of a year, or... You're beholden to business models. And it's a trade-off that you're making of convenience versus time versus sovereignty of that data and information, and stuff like that. Your choice is time and money. My choice is "Invest a lot of time, and a lot of money in hardware", and then I also get the sovereignty of the data as well.

Jerod Santo:

Yeah. I 100% understand that. And I understand it would be cool to have a Plex library with like all the movies, and all that kind of stuff, that I own... But my choice when Disney does that - I just canceled Disney Plus. I'm like "Peace out, guys. I don't need you" you know? I'll live the simpler life...

Alex Kretzschmar:

Until the kids are like "Where's Bluey?"

Jerod Santo:

And then I tell them. "Bluey's no longer with us." \[laughter\]

Adam Stacoviak:

Bluey's no longer with us.

Jerod Santo:

You know? So yeah, I mean, that's another trade-off, right? It's like, okay, now I've got to deal with that situation.

Alex Kretzschmar:

Yeah.

Jerod Santo:

You can't do that to everything in your life, so you make choices.

Adam Stacoviak:

Yeah.

Alex Kretzschmar:

But then you end up spending thousands on hardware, and... For me it's also an educational piece, too. The skills that I've learned through building my home lab have gotten me the jobs that I've had over the last decade. And by staying true to my passions, and just doing what I find interesting, and talking about it, that comes across in all the content that I make, and things like that. And I think ultimately it makes for better content, that people can relate to better, and all that kind of stuff. As opposed to scratching around for ideas for content the whole time... It's like, no, this is what I'm doing anyway. If I find it interesting, probably at least a couple of other people will.

Adam Stacoviak:

Yeah. I had the chance to -- and I still might, actually. Do you know Techno Tim, by any chance? Tim Stewart?

Alex Kretzschmar:

Of course, yeah.

Adam Stacoviak:

So when he was on the pod a couple of times, I was like "Dude, you really need to spin off and do a podcast that's adjacent from your YouTube channel, because you're sort of like diving deep into certain things... I think there's a room there for it." And he and I were skunkworking the idea. But then I felt like... I was like "Tim, I don't know if I could be your co-host, man. I like the idea... One, I don't know if I have the time for it, and then two, I kind of feel like even though I'm a home labber, I kind of think I'm an imposter in a way, because I'm not like every day, every weekend, every possible moment am I thinking about like tinkering in my home lab."

Alex Kretzschmar:

It's a problem.

Adam Stacoviak:

And whereas Tim is. That's Tim's MO. That's his style. I kind of even felt like imposter there... I was like "Tim, I think -- I don't know if I could be your co-host, man, for this thing. I like the idea of you doing it." And I think he's spun up a couple other channels now, that's like gone from his single channel to like giving him more freedom... And I think he's kind of doing that now. But I even feel like there's times I'm like "I'm not even sure I'm home lab enough for home lab." And so like for you and your job and what you do with Tailscale and other things, like...

Alex Kretzschmar:

YouTube's a whole beast, though... And it's turned somewhat in -- I'm going to get on my soapbox for a second.

Adam Stacoviak:

Please do, get on it.

Alex Kretzschmar:

It's turned somewhat into a bit of a shopping channel, where there are these guys like... I mean, no disrespect to Tim, to Jeff Geerling, to Craft Computing, to Raid Owl, to all these guys.

Adam Stacoviak:

Those are four great channels.

Alex Kretzschmar:

They do a lot of really good stuff, but they've got to pay the bills. And so they take a lot of sponsored videos, and a lot of hardware... And woodworking YouTube suffers from the exact same problem...

Jerod Santo:

Totally.

Alex Kretzschmar:

\[00:24:14.01\] Where you think "I need this massive garage."

Adam Stacoviak:

What's the latest planer?

Alex Kretzschmar:

Right.

Adam Stacoviak:

\[unintelligible 00:24:16.28\]

Alex Kretzschmar:

Full of a bandsaw, and a jointer, and like...

Jerod Santo:

Right.

Alex Kretzschmar:

The reality is a track saw and a table saw and a couple of sanders and you can get most things done with that. And the same is true in home lab. You don't need to be home lab enough to be home lab. Like...

Adam Stacoviak:

Well, I feel like it's even gone beyond home lab. It's like, well, now it's literally a data center in your home lab.

Alex Kretzschmar:

Right.

Adam Stacoviak:

And it's almost -- and I'm not hating either. I love Tim, and Jeff, and all those guys.

Alex Kretzschmar:

Same. And I don't mean to be negative. It's just...

Adam Stacoviak:

Precisely. I think it's the nature of the content beast in a way, where there's not good enough. You almost have to like almost give it your soul, or feel compelled to. And I'm not going to do that.

Alex Kretzschmar:

Like, a 30,000 view video gets you a hundred dollars. I can't pay my bills with that. "Just get more views" is the answer, but there are only so many home lab views around. And you see these big guys, and they're getting one, two, three hundred thousand maybe. So let's just take the 30k and extrapolate to it... Well, it's a thousand dollars for one video that does really well. I'm doing four of those a month... That's still pretty tight if you've got a mortgage and a kid to pay for. So you have to take these third party deals and sponsorships... And I know you're not immune to that in the podcasting world as well. And it's trying to strike that balance between finding sponsors people find interesting, versus... And we have this on Self-Hosted, too. At what point does a hobby become a business?

Adam Stacoviak:

Precisely.

Alex Kretzschmar:

It's easy to turn a hobby into a business, and then learn to hate it because you're doing it all day, every day. I was a classically-trained musician. I hate music now, because it's just too... I love listening to it, but I don't play anymore, because it was too competitive. Too real. Too much.

Adam Stacoviak:

It demands something from you, and I think that's what separates those who go beyond all that, and "make it", and those who don't. It's not the ability, it's the desire to go through the slog of what's required to get to greatness. Perceived greatness, not literally greatness. Because it takes a lot out of you to produce a podcast for 15 years, or to do all the things you've done. It takes a lot.

Alex Kretzschmar:

And I don't think people realize the content grind of -- I mentioned the shower earlier. I'm thinking about how I'm making a Tailscale YouTube video today... I'm in the shower thinking about how I present that idea, how I make it interesting. Who's watching? What do they find interesting? Trying to second-guess every little detail that you can. It's a lifestyle. It's not a job. To be good at it, I think, it's a lifestyle.

Adam Stacoviak:

Precisely.

Alex Kretzschmar:

I hadn't appreciated that before taking this DevRel job at Tailscale and going full-time.

Jerod Santo:

Is it a lifestyle that is worth living?

Alex Kretzschmar:

I think so.

Jerod Santo:

Is it sustainably so?

Alex Kretzschmar:

If you tell 15-year-old Alex he would get paid a salary to make tech videos, I think he'd be pretty happy.

Jerod Santo:

Yeah.

Adam Stacoviak:

I dig it, man. So I was wrong, it's not a .fm. It's selfhosted.show. And I think one of the things you talked about recently was No Google November... Is that right? Or No Google October?

Alex Kretzschmar:

No Googtober.

Jerod Santo:

No Googtober?

Adam Stacoviak:

No Googtober? Okay.

Alex Kretzschmar:

Yeah. So we've been looking at a bunch of stuff. Self-hosted search... There's an app called Searxng. It's spelled Sear, like you sear a steak, and then xng.

Jerod Santo:

Okay.

Alex Kretzschmar:

It creates an anonymous Google search profile for every query you make. So there's no tracking cookies. I mean, they know your IP address that it's originating from, but beyond that it's a brand new empty search profile every single time. There's no ads, there's no tracking, there's no spyware... All of that stuff. And it presents the results -- do you remember how Google used to look 10 years ago?

Jerod Santo:

\[00:28:02.04\] Yeah.

Alex Kretzschmar:

And now it's got this AI nonsense at the top, and pictures, and... I've trained myself to scroll to about a third of the way down the page before anything interesting actually happens. With Searxng, it's right there at the top. Every time. And it can self-host it, and I connect to my instance, through Tailscale, of course, running in my basement. What I didn't expect though was to start looking at other things, like AI search, like Perplexity. Have you come across Perplexity yet?

Jerod Santo:

A little bit, yeah.

Alex Kretzschmar:

Amazing. Google must be quaking in their boots, because you can self-host Perplexity with something called Perplexica. And then you can use searching to -- Perplexity goes out to the internet and does those searches on real content, because ChatGPT is based on two years ago, right? The data they scraped two years ago.

Jerod Santo:

Right.

Alex Kretzschmar:

It'll say, "Sorry, I have no record before October 2022" or whatever. Whereas perplexity is searching YouTube videos right now.

Jerod Santo:

Constantly. Yeah.

Alex Kretzschmar:

And it's summarizing videos from like right now.

Adam Stacoviak:

In real time. That's dope.

Alex Kretzschmar:

So you're like "Is the AMD 9950X the best CPU right now?" And it will go out and it will transcribe a bunch of videos, figure out the answer, and then you can ask it questions. Google's done, in my opinion. Until a proper chat style comes out... Perplexity is so good.

Adam Stacoviak:

And so you're self-hosting Perplexi-ta? Is that right?

Alex Kretzschmar:

Perplexi-ca, yeah.

Adam Stacoviak:

Perplexi-ca.

Alex Kretzschmar:

Perplexi-ca isn't quite ready for prime time. It crashes quite a bit at the minute. And you need a GPU to do the machine learning, like the AI... Because it plugs into Olama.

Adam Stacoviak:

But the idea is there.

Alex Kretzschmar:

It plugs into Olama underneath to do the --

Adam Stacoviak:

Could you run it on like an M4 Mac, or something like that?

Alex Kretzschmar:

Yeah. Anywhere Olama will run.

Adam Stacoviak:

So maybe you can throw like a Mac mini on your network and just let that be the workhorse.

Alex Kretzschmar:

Yeah. A couple of Docker containers, Olama, and you're good to go.

Adam Stacoviak:

Dope. That's a couple down in your most recent episodes, so... Selfhosted.show. Full length, go deep, I'm sure, right? Chris is your co-host?

Alex Kretzschmar:

Yeah.

Adam Stacoviak:

So you guys go deep on that. What else you got, Jerod? Anything else?

Jerod Santo:

I'm just now realizing that I've been without Google for a long time, but I've just been suffering with DuckDuckGo. And it's like, I should just replace that with Perplexity and I won't be suffering. I've just lived without. And I've learned how to use DuckDuckGo to the best of its abilities...

Alex Kretzschmar:

Example... I was doing some messing about for my talk here, and I wanted to know the file path that the Nginx Docker uses for its default volume mapping. And I literally said, "Perplexity, what is the default Docker Nginx mapping for the HTML directory?" It came back with the slash user, slash share, whatever. Boom, right there. I didn't have to go to look at the actual Docker hub page, nothing. It was like right there, and it was...

Jerod Santo:

So non-self-hosted, what's their model? What's their business?

Alex Kretzschmar:

Perplexity - you get a certain amount of searches for free, and then you can pay $20 a month for Pro searches, whatever that means. I haven't looked at that.

Jerod Santo:

Cool.

Adam Stacoviak:

So you said Perplexi-ca is not ready for usage, necessarily...

Alex Kretzschmar:

Mine's been unstable. I mean, I don't know if that's just an Alex problem or what, but...

Adam Stacoviak:

Right. What are you running that on?

Alex Kretzschmar:

An Epic 48-core thing with like an NVIDIA --

Adam Stacoviak:

So it should be humming.

Alex Kretzschmar:

It's not a hardware problem. It could just be --

Jerod Santo:

A software problem, yeah.

Alex Kretzschmar:

It could just be that revision has a -- I don't know.

Adam Stacoviak:

That'd be dope. That's cool. I mean, especially if you're on the LAN... I suppose you can always expose that via a Tailscale URL.

Alex Kretzschmar:

Yeah.

Adam Stacoviak:

Thank you very much, Tailscale. To be able to match your own search that's self-hosted. I can get down with that. I mean, we've given so much to Google... So much.

Jerod Santo:

It's time to take it back... Take it all back.

Adam Stacoviak:

It's time to like just stop giving it to them. You're not gonna get it back, but you can stop giving it to them at least.

Alex Kretzschmar:

I can hear Tom Morello warming up somewhere over there, you know...

Jerod Santo:

There you go. Good reference. I was trying to go for a Goonies reference, but it's probably too deep of a cut...

Adam Stacoviak:

Do it. I want to hear it.

Jerod Santo:

He's like "Those dreams up there... Those are other people's dreams." He's like "Down here, these are our dreams. And I'm taking them back. I'm taking them all back."

Adam Stacoviak:

Yeah, I remember that. Yes. \[00:32:09.02\] *"But you know what? This one. This one right here. This was my dream. My wish. And it didn't come true. So I'm taking it back. I'm taking them all back.*

Jerod Santo:

That was my big cut.

Adam Stacoviak:

That was good. Sean Astin. We love you, man.

Jerod Santo:

Yup.

Adam Stacoviak:

Alright. Well, thanks, Alex.

Jerod Santo:

Yup. Thanks, man.

Alex Kretzschmar:

Thank you.

Break:

\[00:32:30.05\]

Adam Stacoviak:

Isra. Isra, Isra...

Israa Taha:

Yes.

Jerod Santo:

Yes!

Adam Stacoviak:

Here we go.

Israa Taha:

How close do I have to be? Is that good?

Jerod Santo:

It depends on how loud you're going to be.

Adam Stacoviak:

You're golden.

Jerod Santo:

You're golden.

Israa Taha:

Sweet.

Jerod Santo:

So we asked you to come on the show yesterday morning, now it's today afternoon... But you made it.

Israa Taha:

I did. I almost didn't make it.

Jerod Santo:

You're stepping outside your comfort zone.

Israa Taha:

I am.

Jerod Santo:

Do you find that hard to do?

Israa Taha:

It is, but I gave my first conference talk this year, and it was because somebody pushed me to do it... And so if I don't start to take more of those chances myself, I'll never step out of my comfort zone... And I can't rely on other people pushing me to do something until I do it myself.

Jerod Santo:

Right. We kind of pushed you into this one, didn't we?

Israa Taha:

Yeah. Well, a gentle nudge is what I like to call it...

Jerod Santo:

We gave her a nudge... We didn't require it of her, but we...

Adam Stacoviak:

Constant gentle pressure.

Jerod Santo:

...we just wanted her to come on the show. We're happy to have you. First time at All Things Open.

Israa Taha:

It is.

Jerod Santo:

Impressions.

Israa Taha:

It's great. Every day I walk through and I find more booths and more floors.

Jerod Santo:

Lots of booths, yeah.

Israa Taha:

Yeah. It's a lot bigger than I thought it was going to be. I'm used to more smaller conferences, capped at a thousand people... So it can be a little bit intimidating, but I think going to more conferences made me a little bit more comfortable speaking to people, whether at the booths or at the hallway track, just kind of finding people that you have things in common with, whether you went to the same sessions, or just at lunch... Yeah.

Jerod Santo:

Yeah. We're hallway trackers ourselves, aren't we, Adam?

Adam Stacoviak:

That's right.

Jerod Santo:

It's where all the fun is.

Adam Stacoviak:

It's where we belong, you know?

Israa Taha:

It is.

Adam Stacoviak:

It's our home.

Jerod Santo:

It's where the people are.

Israa Taha:

Yeah. I've had more conversations with people than I have been to sessions, and I think I like that a lot better. Because you can find a lot of the content online, whether it's on YouTube, or a blog, or things like that. But the thing that I miss most is that interaction with people, because I do work remote. And so I go to conferences for those connections, for those interactions, and not really for the sessions.

Adam Stacoviak:

What if we just had a conference that was only the hallway track?

Israa Taha:

That would be incredible.

Jerod Santo:

Hallway Conf.

Israa Taha:

I would go to that.

Adam Stacoviak:

That's right.

Jerod Santo:

Coming to a...

Adam Stacoviak:

Hallway near you.

Jerod Santo:

Yeah. "Don't go in there! There's no talks!"

Jerod Santo:

The nice thing about that is you don't really even need a place to gather. You just need a hallway.

Israa Taha:

Yeah.

Jerod Santo:

We don't need an auditorium.

Adam Stacoviak:

Would you have vendors and stuff, too? Would it be like this?

Jerod Santo:

Everything would be in the hallway.

Israa Taha:

But it would get pretty crowded though.

Jerod Santo:

Yeah. You would need a pretty big hallway.

Adam Stacoviak:

Would there be a revolt attempting to organize?

Jerod Santo:

What would be cool would be to put it in like an arena, but just in the hallway of the arena, in the circular... And so you would just walk in circles.

Adam Stacoviak:

The whole time.

Jerod Santo:

We'd call it Circles.

Adam Stacoviak:

A figure eight.

Israa Taha:

Yeah.

Jerod Santo:

Well, that's not how they're designed... Oh, you want to cut through the middle?

Adam Stacoviak:

Just thinking out loud, you know... \[unintelligible 00:40:24.24\]

Jerod Santo:

This is what we do. Welcome to the podcast. We think out loud...

Adam Stacoviak:

What do you think? Would you go to that conference?

Israa Taha:

I would.

Adam Stacoviak:

If we just made you walk in a square circle, or a figure eight circle, or a continuous --

Israa Taha:

Kind of like a speed networking kind of thing...

Jerod Santo:

Yeah.

Israa Taha:

Yeah.

Adam Stacoviak:

What would attract you to that conference? The hallway? Because you come here for the people that come here, to hang out in the hallway.

Israa Taha:

Yeah. I think it's a hard sell. Especially if you have like the company paying for it. It's hard to sell your employer on "I'm just going to go talk to a bunch of people." Like, where's the business value? And that is what a lot of them would probably have a little apprehension with.

Jerod Santo:

Right.

Israa Taha:

But it's kind of like a meetup, just on a larger scale.

Jerod Santo:

Yeah. Or like an unconf, Basecamp style. Basecamp? Barcamp.

Adam Stacoviak:

Foocamp.

Jerod Santo:

No, not Foocamp. Barcamp.

Adam Stacoviak:

Barcamp.

Jerod Santo:

Barcamp was a response to Foocamp. Do you know Foocamp?

Israa Taha:

I don't.

Jerod Santo:

Do you know Barcamp?

Israa Taha:

No.

Jerod Santo:

Okay. So Foocamp stood for Friends of O'Reilly.

Israa Taha:

Okay.

Jerod Santo:

And that's Tim O'Reilly.

Adam Stacoviak:

Tim O'Reilly.

Jerod Santo:

The creator of the O'Reilly Empire. Media empire.

Adam Stacoviak:

OSCON...

Jerod Santo:

And he had an event that was, I think, on his property, or somewhere near where he lives... It was very exclusive, invite-only. You had to be a friend of O'Reilly to go. And it was a camp. Foocamp. I think they camped out.

Israa Taha:

Okay.

Jerod Santo:

That part might be gray area, but the rest is true, at least. And cool for everybody who gets invited, but not cool for anybody who doesn't get invited. Right? So Barcamp was a response to Foocamp, because Foobar...

Israa Taha:

Oh, okay...

Jerod Santo:

\[00:42:07.19\] And so Barcamp became an un-conference, where anybody can come. You don't have to be a friend of O'Reilly. You can be anybody. And because it was an un-conference, there was no pre-planned schedule. So you show up on a Saturday morning, for instance, everybody gets together, and there's whiteboards, or even just construction paper, and there's a schedule, like "Here's slots." And you just show up -- a lot like lightning talks. You just show up and sign up for a slot. And then you're putting together the conference as it's going.

Israa Taha:

Yup.

Jerod Santo:

Pretty fun.

Israa Taha:

They actually did that on Sunday at All Things Open.

Jerod Santo:

Oh, yeah.

Israa Taha:

That first day there were two tracks. There was the community track and then there was a diversity track. And the community track was essentially a bunch of people writing down talk ideas or session ideas. And they just get around in a room, in a circle, and kind of talk about that one topic.

Jerod Santo:

Yeah.

Israa Taha:

That conference also does a similar concept.

Jerod Santo:

That's right.

Israa Taha:

Open Spaces.

Jerod Santo:

Open Spaces. So we went to that conference in Austin, in January.

Israa Taha:

Yeah.

Jerod Santo:

Were you at that one?

Israa Taha:

Not in Austin, but I went to the Wisconsin one.

Jerod Santo:

We wanted to go to Wisconsin. We didn't quite make it. But you did...

Adam Stacoviak:

I did.

Jerod Santo:

...a Spaces. What was that called? Birds of a Feather? Was it called Spaces? I don't know, like there was tables...

Adam Stacoviak:

It was called "Come to my table and hang out."

Jerod Santo:

And you would sign up... The tables were lettered or numbered, and you would sign up "What we're going to be talking about at this table." And Adam, you did home lab, or something?

Adam Stacoviak:

I did. I did home lab and I did podcasting.

Jerod Santo:

Was that cool?

Adam Stacoviak:

That was cool.

Israa Taha:

Did you get a lot of people come to it?

Adam Stacoviak:

Describe a lot.

Jerod Santo:

More than one?

Israa Taha:

Four or more.

Adam Stacoviak:

Oh. Yes. A lot. Yeah, it was good. We had some good conversations about both. Home lab and podcasting.

Israa Taha:

I think a lot of people are probably interested in podcasting, in some way, shape or form.

Jerod Santo:

Yeah.

Adam Stacoviak:

I did a really good job with my placard, though, because you could put it up on the board... And I decorated it.

Israa Taha:

Oh, nice.

Adam Stacoviak:

I made it look flashy, you know?

Jerod Santo:

Do you think that's how you got such big numbers, like more than four?

Adam Stacoviak:

I think it was a great topic, but it was also "Oh, look at me." I was peacocking, you know?

Jerod Santo:

\[laughs\] I guess you've gotta do what you've gotta do.

Adam Stacoviak:

Get your attention, bro, you know? Get your attention.

Jerod Santo:

So that's cool. I like the idea of -- I like improvisation, I like spontaneous things... And so I really have -- I've gone to a lot of Barcamps over the years. There used to be a Barcamp Omaha every year for a long time. And they were just fun, because you never know what you're going to get.

Israa Taha:

Right. You don't know who you're going to meet, and what you're going to talk about.

Jerod Santo:

Exactly.

Israa Taha:

Oh, that's pretty neat.

Jerod Santo:

Adam is showing her a picture of what he put on, the That Conference...

Adam Stacoviak:

It was the main thing, and I put a little subtopic.

Jerod Santo:

Let me see it. I'll describe it.

Adam Stacoviak:

Go ahead, Jerod.

Jerod Santo:

It says, all caps, in blue, across the top, "Homelab!" Exclamation mark. That's it. Oh, no. I thought those are names. I thought people signed up. It also says now, in kind of a cloudy, kind of a \[unintelligible 00:45:05.24\] "Unifi. ProxMox."

Adam Stacoviak:

Tag cloud.

Jerod Santo:

Oh yeah. It's a tag cloud. VLANs. Ultimate. Ultimate? Ubuntu. \[laughs\] Texas. Docker. Oh no, TrueNAS.

Adam Stacoviak:

Texas... Can you read?

Jerod Santo:

Your handwriting leaves a lot to be desired. Wi-Fi 6. Pi-hole. Now, did you talk about all these?

Adam Stacoviak:

Yes.

Jerod Santo:

So that's not even false advertising. Now, the other one says PODCAST in all caps, and then ing in lower caps, because I think you probably forgot to put that in there... Exclamation mark. Mics. Software. Sales. Editing. Questions. Community. Clips. Gear. That's good. That's good advertising.

Israa Taha:

I like that, because a lot of times you have a topic, but you don't really know like what they're going to be talking about...

Jerod Santo:

Almost too open-ended.

Israa Taha:

It's too generic.

Adam Stacoviak:

"Oh, I don't Unifi." Or "I know about", you know, something or other...

Jerod Santo:

Or you want to.

Israa Taha:

Yeah.

Adam Stacoviak:

Switching ports, and stuff... Come on now. Wi-Fi 6?

Jerod Santo:

Right.

Adam Stacoviak:

And they get you.

Israa Taha:

I don't know what that is.

Adam Stacoviak:

See? But you would want to...

Jerod Santo:

\[00:46:11.10\] You might show up and find out.

Adam Stacoviak:

...because you know about Wi-Fi's generally, right?

Israa Taha:

Yeah.

Adam Stacoviak:

What is Wi-Fi?

Israa Taha:

Wireless... Something?

Jerod Santo:

Yeah. I think it stands for fidelity, but I could be wrong.

Adam Stacoviak:

That's right.

Jerod Santo:

But yeah, wireless networks.

Adam Stacoviak:

And 6 is a good number.

Jerod Santo:

And 6 is just better than 5, you know? It's the next version.

Israa Taha:

Yeah. Better than 4, too.

Jerod Santo:

It's here though, right?

Adam Stacoviak:

Wi-Fi 6. It's here.

Jerod Santo:

Many devices are Wi-Fi 6 enabled, but not all of them.

Adam Stacoviak:

Yeah. It's not faster. It can do more concurrent bandwidth.

Jerod Santo:

Right.

Adam Stacoviak:

Than Wi-Fi 5.

Jerod Santo:

It's a wider pipe, but not a faster pipe.

Adam Stacoviak:

That's right.

Jerod Santo:

Cool.

Israa Taha:

Interesting. I learned something today.

Jerod Santo:

So if you were to command a space and advertise it - did you do that at that conference? Did you start one?

Israa Taha:

I did not, but I attended my first open space this year, which is surprising, because we've done open spaces at that conference for 11, 12 years, but I was always interested in the sessions, and I didn't realize that the interesting conversations usually happen in those open spaces or in the hallway. But I went to my first one this year, and it was on meetups and how to get people to show up to meetups, how to organize meetups... Because a lot of them have died down since COVID. A lot of them are pretty much gone. So how do we bring those communities back? How do we, in a sense, resurrect those meetups, and get people more involved in those things?

Jerod Santo:

Yeah. That's cool. So if you're going to start a space though, you're going to step outside your comfort zone, and next year at That Conference, I'm going to run a space.

Israa Taha:

I would probably do it on React Native.

Jerod Santo:

Okay.

Israa Taha:

I've been a React Native developer for two years now, but I'm a solo dev, for the most part, and I don't know a lot of others in the community, at least immediate community, that do React Native development. So it would just kind of be interesting to see if there are people doing mobile development, what are they using... If they're interested in React Native, I could maybe talk about that a little bit.

Jerod Santo:

Yeah. How do you keep up in the React Native world?

Israa Taha:

I listen to the React Native Radio Podcast. That's hosted by Infinite Red, who is one of the leading consultancies, actually one of the biggest consultancies in the US for React Native development. I also read their newsletter. They have a newsletter that they publish with some of the latest news. I keep up with the React Native releases. They've just released 0.76 recently... And then just kind of keeping up on Twitter, just reading up on new libraries and frameworks with Expo.

Jerod Santo:

Brand new architecture, right?

Israa Taha:

Yeah. New architecture by default.

Jerod Santo:

Yup. Do you have a take on that?

Israa Taha:

I haven't used it yet, but it's supposed to be faster, and then obviously the old architecture...

Jerod Santo:

Yeah.

Israa Taha:

So there's a lot of push for React Native packages to switch to the new architecture, because there are ones that are still not compatible with it. So if you do switch your project to new architecture, there might be some packages that kind of have issues with that. I know there's a big movement to get those packages compatible... So yeah.

Jerod Santo:

What else, man? Anything else?

Adam Stacoviak:

Is it GPT-able, React Native? Like, how do you level up and learn? Where do you get your new skills?

Israa Taha:

By doing. It is GPT-able, but some of the stuff is a little bit older, or outdated.

Adam Stacoviak:

Right.

Israa Taha:

So you kind of have to keep up with documentation, you kind of have to try it out for yourself and play around with it... But yeah, that's kind of been one of my biggest struggles, is where do I find those resources when I have questions on "How do I do this?" or "This isn't quite working the way that I expect it to. Where do I go?" And so Twitter... Infinite Red also has a Slack community of a lot of React Native developers... So if you have questions, a lot of times you can go into their Slack, ask a question, and somebody will be able to either answer, or point you in the right direction to figure out where to go from there.

Jerod Santo:

\[00:50:18.17\] Nice.

Adam Stacoviak:

What are you doing? You said learn by doing. So what are you doing?

Israa Taha:

I'm building a React Native template. So I am using React Native CLI to build a template with React Native Hook Form and Zod for forms and validation, and integrating authentication, with the idea that if I wanted to build a mobile app with React Native, these are the things that just kind of come with it... So I don't have to rebuild it from scratch. So these are things that I like to use, or would make development easier... And just kind of learning by doing. So how does validation work with Zod and React Hook Form? How does authentication work with Auth0? How do you implement state management with all of these technologies, and what's the best way to do it? So it kind of helps me learn about the technologies that I'm using, but also how to integrate them with other technologies, and have something that I can then take and use to build a real world app.

Jerod Santo:

Awesome.

Adam Stacoviak:

If you had a magic wand to change React Native, an angst, or just something you haven't learned quite as well as you'd like to yet, what would it be? How would you change it?

Israa Taha:

Debugging.

Adam Stacoviak:

Debugging?

Israa Taha:

Yeah.

Adam Stacoviak:

What's the problem there?

Israa Taha:

So I think the tools that we have today aren't like the tools that we're used to in web development. There is -- I know there's a debugger that's coming out with React Native 0.76. I've heard about it in React Native Universe, or React Universe... I can't remember the name of that conference, but it was held in Poland earlier this year. Most of my logging and debugging in React Native is console logs, and I'm sure a lot of people kind of do that... It's just not a lot of good tooling around debugging in React Native. There is Reactatron; it was also built by the folks at Infinite Red. I haven't had a chance to try that out yet, but it's one of those things where if I could know more about debugging in React Native, I'd probably try Reactatron, try out the new debugger in 0.76, and kind of figure out how best to do that.

Jerod Santo:

Awesome.

Adam Stacoviak:

Dope. Good job.

Israa Taha:

Thank you.

Jerod Santo:

Yeah, thanks for sharing with us.

Adam Stacoviak:

Now you're a podcaster.

Israa Taha:

Awesome.

Jerod Santo:

Damn. You did it. We did it. We all did it.

Adam Stacoviak:

It's done.

Israa Taha:

It's not as scary as I thought it was going to be.

Jerod Santo:

I told you.

Israa Taha:

Yeah.

Jerod Santo:

It's fun. You just talk to each other. **Break**: \[00:52:49.04\]

Jerod Santo:

Well, we're here with Avi Fernando.

Avindra Fernando:

Fernando.

Jerod Santo:

Fernando.

Jerod Santo:

We're here with -- I was about to call you Avi. I just changed the A sound.

Adam Stacoviak:

Avi. "I'm Avi now, y'all."

Jerod Santo:

Avi Fernando.

Avindra Fernando:

That's right.

Jerod Santo:

From Kansas.

Avindra Fernando:

Kansas City.

Jerod Santo:

Kansas City. Born and raised?

Avindra Fernando:

Not born and raised. Born in Sri Lanka.

Jerod Santo:

Okay, Sri Lanka. How did you get to Kansas? Are you in the Missouri side or the Kansas side?

Avindra Fernando:

I live in the Kansas side.

Jerod Santo:

Okay.

Avindra Fernando:

Yeah. So I got here when I was 19. I wanted to pursue a degree, so that's why I'm here.

Jerod Santo:

KU?

Avindra Fernando:

KU.

Jerod Santo:

Rock Chalk Jayhawk.

Avindra Fernando:

Oh, Rock Chalk. Yeah, absolutely.

Jerod Santo:

Sorry. We speak a different language here in the Midwest.

Adam Stacoviak:

What did you say? Say it louder.

Jerod Santo:

I said Rock Chalk Jayhawk.

Avindra Fernando:

Yeah.

Adam Stacoviak:

Rock Chalk?

Jerod Santo:

That's their saying.

Adam Stacoviak:

Rock Chalk Jayhawk?

Avindra Fernando:

That's our chant.

Jerod Santo:

Yeah. The KU Jayhawks.

Avindra Fernando:

Chalk's the motto. The mascot.

Jerod Santo:

They're the Jayhawks.

Adam Stacoviak:

Rock Chalk Jayhawk.

Jerod Santo:

That's right.

Avindra Fernando:

Yes. You're saying it right.

Jerod Santo:

That's what they all say to each other. It's kind of like saying --

Avindra Fernando:

Keep going, and you'll be chanting it.

Jerod Santo:

It's a chant.

Adam Stacoviak:

Give me a demonstration. Give me a demonstration.

Avindra Fernando:

Rock Chalk... Jayhawk... KU...

Jerod Santo:

I did not go to KU.

Adam Stacoviak:

Alright...

Jerod Santo:

But I've been there many a times, and I know the chants, because I lived nearby. Alright, so you're 19, moved from Sri Lanka to Kansas, of all places.

Avindra Fernando:

That's right.

Jerod Santo:

\[laughs\] And then you never go back.

Avindra Fernando:

No. Yeah. I stuck around in Lawrence, finished my bachelor's in computer science...

Jerod Santo:

Nice.

Avindra Fernando:

And then decided right after, "Let me do a master's as well." So I pursued my master's right afterwards, and then stuck around in Kansas City since.

Jerod Santo:

Got married, started a family, started a business.

Avindra Fernando:

Yes.

Jerod Santo:

In that order?

Avindra Fernando:

Eventually. Yeah.

Jerod Santo:

Eventually. Sure. Probably skipping over a lot of life there, but...

Avindra Fernando:

So my wife and I, we met at KU. We were both teaching assistants, so we started dating right around the time of graduation. So we both started at Cerner, which is a large healthcare IT company in the Kansas City area, on the same day.

Jerod Santo:

Wow.

Avindra Fernando:

So we've had a great journey from the very beginning.

Jerod Santo:

Yeah, you have.

Adam Stacoviak:

In lockstep. That's good stuff.

Avindra Fernando:

Yeah.

Jerod Santo:

And you are a React guy?

Avindra Fernando:

Oh, one of my specialties. Yes.

Jerod Santo:

Okay.

Adam Stacoviak:

What's your list of specialties?

Avindra Fernando:

Mostly front-end. Yeah. I would say React, Next.js, I do a lot of Playwright tests, Cypress for my clients...

Jerod Santo:

Yeah. And you are running your own business.

Avindra Fernando:

Yeah. Since 2021.

Jerod Santo:

How'd you get there?

Avindra Fernando:

Great story. So back when I was working at Cerner, I got to meet a lot of architects and senior engineers, which I had learned a lot of knowledge from. And then this journey goes along... At one point I decided to join another big company. At that point, I started to feel like I was attending a lot of meetups locally, because I wanted to spread the knowledge that I was gaining from the other people. And I spoke to a couple of directors at RSA, at the time, and then they were like "Yeah, you bring the meetup in-house and we'll let you host it, we'll let you have people in it..." So it was awesome. So I was really motivated by all of that. But then I realized what I'm missing is I'm seeing how big companies run, how they operate, but let me see how the small companies run. So I took the risk and I said "Okay, let me just go join a startup." A product startup. So that was my journey into seeing how a product works. And from a startup level, there was only like five people at the startup, and everyone was wearing different hats.

Jerod Santo:

Sure.

Avindra Fernando:

\[01:00:25.09\] Getting started with it. Learned a ton there. Constant innovation, constantly grinding... Great, great, great time there. What I was thinking to myself at that time was "Okay, now I've got the product startup perspective. How does services or consulting work? Let me go experiment that." So I joined a services startup, which their motto was consulting. A couple of guys, amazing, amazing dudes. Got to work with them, see how they negotiate contracts, bring in different contracts... One of the contracts was so interesting to me. I was working on an app for someone; that was his hobby. He wanted this idea of a virtual bar. So he was mapping out all the bars in the cities that they go to, and would give the ability for someone to purchase a seat in the virtual world, which was a fascinating idea. I was like "People pay for this stuff?" It's like, yeah, this is cool stuff. So I got really motivated by that. And then I eventually decided, "Okay, I'm just going to start this journey on my own and see how things go." So that's fast forward to 2021.

Jerod Santo:

Sure.

Avindra Fernando:

I worked with a client, and at that point I decided, "Okay, the project's going really well, and I think I can pull the plug on my full-time job", and took that leap and never looked back.

Jerod Santo:

Gotcha. So you were kind of a weekend warrior at that point.

Avindra Fernando:

Yes.

Jerod Santo:

You had a job at your nights and weekends...

Avindra Fernando:

Yes.

Jerod Santo:

I was wondering, because for a lot of people going into their own business, especially a services business, a consultancy, the question is "How do I get that flywheel going? Do I just quit my job and take the leap, or do I weekend warrior it for a while?" So did you have a plan from the start, or was it just kind of like opportunistic?

Avindra Fernando:

Yeah, I think I jumped into the opportunity. Maybe in hindsight I probably jumped in too early... But again, I have no regrets.

Adam Stacoviak:

It's never a good time, man.

Avindra Fernando:

Yeah, absolutely.

Adam Stacoviak:

There really isn't. You can't time that stuff. It's like the market. You can't time the entrance into a stock.

Avindra Fernando:

Oh yeah, for sure.

Adam Stacoviak:

I mean, you can, but it's hard... It's basically impossible. So just get in.

Avindra Fernando:

Yeah, absolutely.

Adam Stacoviak:

The best time is now.

Avindra Fernando:

Oh, yeah.

Jerod Santo:

And so you've been doing that for three years?

Avindra Fernando:

Yes.

Jerod Santo:

What's the hardest part?

Avindra Fernando:

Hardest part is managing the different clients, and keep the pipeline full all the time. So now, wearing different hats, not only consulting, not only coding, not only mentoring...

Adam Stacoviak:

Selling.

Avindra Fernando:

Selling. Yeah.

Adam Stacoviak:

Closing.

Jerod Santo:

Invoicing.

Avindra Fernando:

Invoicing, collecting money...

Adam Stacoviak:

Contracts are tough too, because you want to scrutinize those contracts. Those contracts are obviously like words of bond... So it's got to be clear. And you don't want your client relationship to go haywire because you did not word your contract well enough. There's always little details between each contract that changes. And there's a lot of details in that process.

Avindra Fernando:

And finding the right people who actually write the check. Some companies it's the CTO who does that, some companies it's not. The CTO still has to talk to the CFO, or the senior engineer will have to go talk to someone else... So getting everyone on board.

Adam Stacoviak:

So do you have to spend a lot of time hunting down a check? Once you've delivered your invoice, is there sometimes like "Hey, you know, y'all owe us the money \[unintelligible 01:03:44.10\] to pay us", you know?

Avindra Fernando:

I've been fortunate so far. So... Knock on wood.

Jerod Santo:

You'll hit it, eventually. Especially larger -- the larger the org, the less they care.

Adam Stacoviak:

What's your TTP?

Jerod Santo:

What's that mean?

Adam Stacoviak:

I'm making this up right now. \[laughter\] Time to payment.

Jerod Santo:

Yeah. Do you have like a net 30, or...?

Adam Stacoviak:

MTTP, sorry. Meantime to payment.

Avindra Fernando:

Mostly net 30. That's my standard. But a couple of months, too.

Adam Stacoviak:

\[01:04:10.05\] It's good.

Avindra Fernando:

But I learned a new word today.

Adam Stacoviak:

MTTP. I just made that up just now. Meantime to payment.

Jerod Santo:

Here's a pro tip on your terms. Take that net 30 and turn it into "Due upon receipt." Because if they're big enough, they're not going to care anyways. They're going to pay you when they want to. And if they're small, they'll take that net 30 very seriously, and they'll pay on the 30th day. So if you just change that to "Due upon receipt" and they're serious, they'll just pay you as fast as they can. But the other ones will ignore you anyways. They're not going to pay attention to your net 30. It won't really matter that much, but you might as well try to get paid as fast as possible.

Avindra Fernando:

Gotcha. That's what I do with one of my clients, and they're really good about it.

Jerod Santo:

But yeah, the larger ones... It's like, you're a vendor in the system, and there's some...

Adam Stacoviak:

They don't even care what your net anything is. It's like "Net whatever I want to pay you. If you're lucky, I'll pay you."

Jerod Santo:

The nice thing is though on larger ones, once you get that deal set up and you're in the system and you're on those terms, they will actually pay you reliably.

Avindra Fernando:

That's right.

Jerod Santo:

Whereas the smaller customers, they might run out of money in the meantime, or something, and just not have the money to pay you. I certainly hit that as well in my time.

Avindra Fernando:

Yeah. It's interesting, I worked with a foreign client too, and sometimes you have tax concerns too. You've got to get the right documents before they can pay you. So I had to go obtain a tax certificate saying that I pay taxes in the United States, so that I don't get double-taxed in the other country. So yeah, there's a lot of hoops you've got to jump through when your actual customers are from outside of the US.

Jerod Santo:

So when I first started, I thought to myself "If I want to work 40 hours a week, and I can bill X dollars per hour", I think it was like 75 when I started... "And I can get that 80% of the time, then I'll make this much money." Does that dog hunt? And then you look at that number and you're like "Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I can live off of that." What I didn't realize is that working 40 hours a week - if that's what you want to do, which is what I wanted to do - and billing anywhere close to 40 hours a week, those two things don't happen, right?

Avindra Fernando:

No. Very rarely.

Jerod Santo:

It's a dream. So what percentage of your working hours are you billing? Is it 50%, 80%? Because you're a solo consultant, right? So you don't have any help on anything; maybe some software doing some stuff...

Avindra Fernando:

That's right, yeah.

Jerod Santo:

But like everything that has to happen in your business, you're doing it or software is doing it. How much of your time are you billing on a weekly? Percentage-wise, don't need hours.

Avindra Fernando:

Yeah, I would say about 80%.

Jerod Santo:

80%.

Avindra Fernando:

Yeah, that's a good estimate.

Jerod Santo:

And you have a large customer, which helps...

Avindra Fernando:

Yes, absolutely.

Adam Stacoviak:

How many hours a week do you work?

Avindra Fernando:

About 35 to 40 right now.

Jerod Santo:

Nice.

Adam Stacoviak:

Self-employed? Working 35, maybe 40?

Avindra Fernando:

Yeah. Which is pretty good.

Adam Stacoviak:

\[unintelligible 01:06:54.16\]

Jerod Santo:

What are you looking at me for?

Adam Stacoviak:

Well, because I just -- I want a response.

Jerod Santo:

From me?

Adam Stacoviak:

Yeah.

Avindra Fernando:

Well, I was telling Jerod earlier that I do have a capacity. I'm always constantly looking to keep a couple of clients at the same time. So I can agree to some more contracts, and get those hours in.

Jerod Santo:

But you've got an 80/20 rule on your customers. Like, currently you have an 80% customer, and everything else.

Avindra Fernando:

Yes.

Jerod Santo:

Yes. So that helps you get to that 80% billable...

Avindra Fernando:

Yes.

Jerod Santo:

If you had three smaller customers at the same time and no larger one, you'd spend more of your time trying to fill that pipeline.

Avindra Fernando:

Yeah, yeah.

Jerod Santo:

And if that 80 turns into zero, now you've like flip-flopped. So there's risks on either side.

Avindra Fernando:

Going like on a big hunt.

Jerod Santo:

There's no perfect way to set it up.

Avindra Fernando:

Yeah. And it depends on the year, it depends on the month. All of these formulas would change, and you've got to constantly keep adapting to the new role.

Adam Stacoviak:

I'm just surprised.

Jerod Santo:

What are you surprised about?

Adam Stacoviak:

That you only work 40 hours. Not a lot of people do that.

Avindra Fernando:

Yeah. Well, there's a primary reason for that. So we have a little one at home, and I deliberately want to spend as much as time with --

Adam Stacoviak:

Good for you. That's the way to do it.

Jerod Santo:

Heck yeah.

Avindra Fernando:

With the kids.

Adam Stacoviak:

Just because you have that principle doesn't mean you get to always do it. And that's good for you that you do.

Avindra Fernando:

That's right. Yeah.

Adam Stacoviak:

\[01:08:11.21\] I'm surprised, not because I think you should, but because you don't.

Avindra Fernando:

Yes.

Adam Stacoviak:

Which is a good thing. And you're talking to two people who prioritize their family deeply. Is there a better way to say that? Deeply? Hugely? Massively? Bigly?

Avindra Fernando:

Bigly is the right word.

Jerod Santo:

Bigly is the word.

Avindra Fernando:

Yeah. I thought about it. It's like, those years of my son and my daughter...

Jerod Santo:

They're not coming back.

Avindra Fernando:

Yeah. The time, once it's gone, it's gone. It's the most valuable thing.

Jerod Santo:

Yeah. And I have a bunch of them, so the way I look at it is -- I've got six kids. And I look at it like every year I lose six years. Because all six of them get one year older. So that's six years they've actually gained on a single year, and so how precious is each one of those?

Avindra Fernando:

Oh, absolutely.

Jerod Santo:

Once they're all adults, those years won't matter quite as much. But right now, they aren't coming back.

Adam Stacoviak:

I'm about to start crying, man...

Jerod Santo:

Look at the three of us here.

Adam Stacoviak:

It's hitting me hard...

Jerod Santo:

Although Avi's got \[unintelligible 01:09:08.27\] because his kids are literally with him... Last year I had a son with me, and the year before, but...

Adam Stacoviak:

Yeah. I considered bringing my son, and I really wanted to bring him. I was just thinking... I'm just not sure.

Jerod Santo:

How old is he?

Adam Stacoviak:

Eight.

Jerod Santo:

He's a little young.

Adam Stacoviak:

Yeah. I think he needs like one more year before he can... I would not be able to concentrate, I think. And it's not his fault, it's that -- I would actually probably want to experience it with him, so I would be distracted as a dad, you know? Whereas otherwise, I can totally focus.

Avindra Fernando:

Yeah. So we pick and choose. So this is the second conference. My wife - she's speaking here too, and she gave a keynote earlier. So that's why everyone's here.

Adam Stacoviak:

Are you flexing on us right now? Is he flexing?

Jerod Santo:

He did. He literally flexed his body when he said that. \[laughter\]

Adam Stacoviak:

He's flexing. Alright, we get it. You're cool. Continue.

Jerod Santo:

No, your wife is cool.

Adam Stacoviak:

Oh, you're both cool.

Avindra Fernando:

Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

Adam Stacoviak:

You're both cool.

Jerod Santo:

That is nice though.

Adam Stacoviak:

He's cool by proxy. That's what I'm trying to say.

Avindra Fernando:

Well, the truth is we couldn't find a babysitter.

Jerod Santo:

They're still in lockstep.

Avindra Fernando:

That's true. \[laughs\]

Jerod Santo:

They're still in lockstep. Yeah, look at that. After all these years. So you're doing the consultancy. What does she do then?

Avindra Fernando:

She does very similar, consultancy as well. She does mobile, so... Yeah, that's her specialty as well.

Jerod Santo:

Alright. So you're both kind of doing everything the same.

Avindra Fernando:

Yes.

Jerod Santo:

Now, is one of you better than the other?

Avindra Fernando:

There are talks about merging the companies, because we don't want to pay the same accountant two times.

Jerod Santo:

Yeah, exactly. You might as well minimize your costs.

Avindra Fernando:

We started at different times and different specialties. Going forward - let's merge.

Jerod Santo:

Yeah, totally.

Adam Stacoviak:

Brand new company name. Maybe even like -- I don't know, what's the company's names?

Avindra Fernando:

So my company is \[unintelligible 01:10:49.13\] So we can hyphen it, maybe.

Jerod Santo:

The old hyphen...

Adam Stacoviak:

We'll have to sit down and talk about that one. \[laughter\]

Avindra Fernando:

Well, she's not here to speak for herself...

Jerod Santo:

That's right. So we need to decide right now, before she gets here.

Avindra Fernando:

That's right, yeah.

Adam Stacoviak:

See if she agrees. And if she does...

Avindra Fernando:

You're both eyewitnesses, right?

Jerod Santo:

Yeah, exactly.

Avindra Fernando:

We signed it in the document. We're good.

Adam Stacoviak:

Well, that's good, man. I mean --

Jerod Santo:

That's very cool.

Adam Stacoviak:

Power couple. It's a power couple right there, man. So much potential and possibility.

Avindra Fernando:

Yeah.

Adam Stacoviak:

That's cool, man. Good for you.

Avindra Fernando:

Thank you.

Adam Stacoviak:

And you get to have your kids with you, too. I mean, what a blessing.

Avindra Fernando:

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Adam Stacoviak:

That's where it's at, man.

Avindra Fernando:

Yeah. I'm hoping my daughter - she came to my wife's talk. She's inspired. So hopefully, she wants to be a speaker one day.

Jerod Santo:

Yeah.

Adam Stacoviak:

That's where dreams begin right there, man.

Avindra Fernando:

That's right. But Jerod - I mean, I've got to tell you. Six kids... You're a power dad. For sure.

Jerod Santo:

Well... My wife's pretty amazing, too.

Adam Stacoviak:

He's either foolish, or very smart.

Avindra Fernando:

I think he's pretty smart.

Adam Stacoviak:

A little bit of both. Yeah.

Jerod Santo:

There's a fine line between a crazy person and a wise person, isn't there?

Avindra Fernando:

Any twins in there?

Jerod Santo:

Nope.

Avindra Fernando:

Okay.

Jerod Santo:

All organic.

Avindra Fernando:

Power dad.

Adam Stacoviak:

All organic. \[laughter\] As if twins are non-organic. That's what it is.

Jerod Santo:

Well, thanks for chatting with us, Avi. It was fun.

Avindra Fernando:

Absolutely. Yeah. Well, thanks for having me.

Adam Stacoviak:

It was a blast. It was the best. **Break**: \[01:12:21.24\]

Adhithi Ravichandran:

So who are these people?

Jerod Santo:

These are people that have been on the show.

Adam Stacoviak:

Those are not you.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Oh, okay. I'm like "Who are they?"

Adam Stacoviak:

Future yous.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Oh, God. Oh, this is video. Oh, okay.

Jerod Santo:

We're not doing video here.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Oh, okay, good.

Adam Stacoviak:

Do you have a drone? I'm just kidding.

Jerod Santo:

So this will be audio only, but...

Adam Stacoviak:

What did you have for breakfast?

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Is it started?

Adam Stacoviak:

We're just sound-checking, yeah.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Gotcha. Yeah, I had scrambled eggs and coffee.

Adam Stacoviak:

You ate scrambled eggs?

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Mm-hm...

Jerod Santo:

And coffee?

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Yeah.

Jerod Santo:

Lots of coffee?

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Lots of coffee.

Adam Stacoviak:

That's a very common breakfast.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Yeah, very standard. Yup.

Adam Stacoviak:

What did you have for breakfast?

Jerod Santo:

I had two eggs, over easy...

Adam Stacoviak:

No toast...

Jerod Santo:

No toast... I had some hash browns.

Adam Stacoviak:

Light fruit.

Jerod Santo:

And one strawberry. And one slice of orange.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Wow.

Jerod Santo:

Yeah.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Very detailed.

Jerod Santo:

The breakfast of champions. I remember it like it was just this morning.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Usually, my breakfast is just leftovers from my kids.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Yeah, I know how that goes, too.

Adam Stacoviak:

Leftovers, huh? So you're a leaders eat last kind of person?

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Sort of, yeah.

Adam Stacoviak:

Tell me more.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Yeah, I have a couple kids, and just look at them waste all their food, and then I know they're not going to finish it, and then I just eat off their plate.

Adam Stacoviak:

"Give me that muffin you didn't eat... There's the half a bagel I wanted..." Right?

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Yeah, my daughter is good at loading up the plate, but she's not going to eat any of that, so yeah.

Adam Stacoviak:

Yeah, for sure.

Jerod Santo:

My mom used to do that constantly. We'd call her like the garbage disposal, because she would not let anything get thrown away... And whatever was left over, she's like "Just give it to me." She was never happy about it. She's like "Yeah, I'll eat that..."

Adhithi Ravichandran:

My mom did the same.

Adam Stacoviak:

"You didn't eat this?! I'm going to eat it now!"

Jerod Santo:

Yeah, just "We're not throwing anything away."

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Yeah.

Jerod Santo:

Which I appreciate that sentiment, but it's like "Well, you're just taking in empty calories on our behalf, mom."

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Yeah. It's got pros and cons. You don't want to overeat, for sure.

Jerod Santo:

Yeah, totally. So we spoke with Avi yesterday, and so we got his side of the story.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Okay.

Jerod Santo:

Let's hear the real story. \[laughter\] He told us that you guys met at KU.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Yeah.

Jerod Santo:

And you're still together...

Adhithi Ravichandran:

It seems like he's telling the truth.

Jerod Santo:

Yeah. Two kids. Two businesses. And so you're doing very similar things.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Yeah.

Jerod Santo:

How did you get into it?

Adhithi Ravichandran:

So I grew up in India, and my dad had a small business. He was buying and selling cleaning products to hospitals, and local companies... And he's a very ambitious person. But of course, he didn't scale up to a large company, or anything. It was just two people, my mom and dad. And he would always go meet these customers, and basically, it was more for the flexibility, and he loved being an entrepreneur... So I just kind of grew up watching that, and I knew that was a possibility, and I knew that he didn't have a boss, but he had many bosses... He was always after all these customers, and all of that. So I guess that's where I draw my inspiration from.

Jerod Santo:

Okay. And so when you graduated from KU, you had an engineering degree?

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Yes. I did computer science undergrad in India, actually... And then I came for my master's to KU. And right after that -- it was a good economy, it was 2012, so I got a job right out of college. I moved to Kansas City, went to a big corporation... So yeah, that's kind of how my journey began.

Jerod Santo:

Just one step in front of the other, huh?

Adhithi Ravichandran:

A-ha.

Jerod Santo:

And now you're doing mobile apps, or something?

Adhithi Ravichandran:

I did do that for a while, but now I'm more into like the web apps as well. So I was doing React Native for a long time. Once in a while I do get customers who do React Native. So I do both.

Jerod Santo:

Gotcha.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Yeah, React and React Native.

Jerod Santo:

And between you and your husband, who's the better software engineer? \[laughter\]

Adhithi Ravichandran:

You'll have to go scan our code and find out.

Jerod Santo:

Okay.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Yeah.

Jerod Santo:

So she's not going to answer that one.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

We try not to work together, honestly, on projects.

Jerod Santo:

Really?

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Yeah, it kind of --

Adam Stacoviak:

Why is that?

Adhithi Ravichandran:

\[01:16:12.15\] We have similar personalities, and we kind of take lead a lot...

Jerod Santo:

Right, two leaders.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

It could be conflicting, so we try to have our own customers, have our own clients. Once in a while, we would like maybe review our code or something like that. We talk about problems in our day-to-day work, but I don't think I've ever worked with him. Yeah. I work with him on like conference talks and stuff. We would sometimes give a workshop together. But like actual coding and architecture work, we don't work together.

Jerod Santo:

Because you've tried and it didn't work, or you never tried it?

Adhithi Ravichandran:

I just think there's too much -- we see each other too much. That's too much.

Jerod Santo:

Too much overlap.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Yeah. We need that space.

Jerod Santo:

Yeah. I think that sounds healthy. What do you think, Adam?

Adam Stacoviak:

It's not bad. I don't disagree. But I enjoy working with my wife, so... I can't.

Jerod Santo:

You might be missing out on something you didn't realize.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Yeah. I don't know.

Adam Stacoviak:

I said to him, I said to Avi, "Power couple." And he's like "Yeah." But you're not unified in the powering of the couple.

Jerod Santo:

Just on the business side, obviously.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Yeah, I agree with you. So what happened was I started out first, while he was having a full-time job... And I didn't have any ideas of scaling or anything like that. I just wanted out, and wanted to be an entrepreneur, but I didn't know what that really meant. And at that time, my goal was mostly I want to spend more time with my baby, and I want to earn what I was earning in my full-time... And that was my goal. I didn't have like a large-scale goal. So I was like "I need flexibility, I want to spend time with the baby, and I want to make as much as I made in my full-time job." So I just needed a company. So that was the goal. That's how it started. And then when Avi started, it was a year later, and he probably had a different mindset. So by then I was doing React Native apps. So we weren't sure if we needed different brands, or how we went, so he started his own. But technically, we're just two people, so we need to like merge together. Our future now -- I think we have more clarity now over the years, and we see our son growing up... Also we had a second baby. So maybe once he goes to daycare and has a more stable routine, I think we want to scale. And that's when we want to merge. We have no reason to have two different companies. Yeah.

Jerod Santo:

Economies of scale.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Yeah.

Adam Stacoviak:

And different baskets, too.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Yeah, for sure.

Adam Stacoviak:

Two eggs, two baskets... Not two eggs, one basket.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Yeah, absolutely.

Adam Stacoviak:

Basket dies. No good.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Yeah, we don't even -- actually, now that you guys are talking about it, we haven't even talked about it or thought about it that way.

Jerod Santo:

Oh, we're helping out then.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

We just know we're doing basically the same thing, in different names. That's it.

Adam Stacoviak:

That's okay.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

And there are times when I might be fully booked, or he's fully booked... If customers come our way, we just kind of like send them to the other person. So it's not like --

Jerod Santo:

Oh, that's nice.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

We don't really view it as two different businesses.

Adam Stacoviak:

Do you charge a referral fee?

Adhithi Ravichandran:

No. Not at all. \[laughter\]

Jerod Santo:

Dinner out, or anything? Dinner's on him?

Adhithi Ravichandran:

You guys are giving me ideas.

Adam Stacoviak:

You should do it in like marital favors.

Jerod Santo:

We are idea men. That's what we do.

Adam Stacoviak:

And there's lots of ways you could take that, obviously.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Yeah. I should.

Adam Stacoviak:

But I would leverage it. The Joker said it best...

Jerod Santo:

"Every time I send you a referral, I get a manicure and a pedicure", or something.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Yeah.

Jerod Santo:

If you're into that kind of thing.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Good idea.

Adam Stacoviak:

The Joker said it best though. He said, "If you're good at something, don't do it for free."

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Yeah. Yeah, that's right.

Adam Stacoviak:

You're referring something to somebody, husband or not, don't do it for free.

Jerod Santo:

But you have to be careful, because you know, the sword cuts both ways.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Plenty of times he sent people my way, too.

Jerod Santo:

Right. So he gets his referral fee, I guess.

Adam Stacoviak:

It could be like "Hey, you're doing dinner tonight. You're in charge of sides." That's how we are in my house. My wife is like "You're in charge of sides" or "I'm in charge of the main course." And we'll collaborate and come together.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

You're giving me ideas, yeah.

Adam Stacoviak:

\[01:19:57.29\] Or "I need you to put away the dishes in the dishwasher."

Jerod Santo:

Sure.

Adam Stacoviak:

"Thank you very much", you know?

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Yeah.

Adam Stacoviak:

Whatever it takes, you know?

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Yeah. He's been super-supportive. A lot of the risks I was able to take was also because he was in a stable full-time job, with health insurance and everything. So I was like "Alright, I'm going part-time now that we have the baby." And then I was like "Now I'm going to go to a startup." Or -- I was able to do all of that stuff because I knew I had like a support system. And then once I got the stability in that business, he was able to take a risk too, and start.

Adam Stacoviak:

What is it that drives you personally?

Adhithi Ravichandran:

I think personally, ever since I got my kid, my first kid, I kind of found more purpose in life, and I wanted to do something out of the box, and kind of be a role model to her as well. So I just don't want to do a nine to five for 30 years, and then realize that I missed out on something. So I wanted to try out being an entrepreneur, and see how that journey goes. And I think the flexibility was my first motivator; with the time, as a new mom, that was my primary goal. But eventually, obviously, it's the money, the flexibility, the happiness, to be able to see success and failure quickly, and then iterate upon that and have control. I just don't want a boss controlling my career. I want to control my career on my own.

Adam Stacoviak:

Yeah, for sure. It's been so long since I've had a boss that I can't imagine having a boss, I guess. I just can't imagine the -- not that it's a bad thing or a good thing, but it's definitely different than being your own controller of your schedule, and what happens, and what you're optimizing for, the things that matter to you, the way you schedule your day...

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Yeah.

Adam Stacoviak:

I can't imagine the opposite of that.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Yeah. I'm sort of in that space right now, too. Yeah.

Jerod Santo:

Do you see yourself scaling beyond what your parents did with your business? Because right now you're kind of --

Adhithi Ravichandran:

I do.

Jerod Santo:

...emulating that.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Because I want to. I think right now we're kind of capped out at a certain extent, and we don't have to be that way. So the goal is, I think in a year or so, we're going to have to try to scale by bringing in people who -- right now the brand unfortunately is just me and him. So we need to build that trust with our customers, and be able to train people. So it might be a journey. So we don't know what that is or what it looks like. So we'd have to train people, and bring them to the level where like "Hey, these are these software engineers we trust", and slowly start scaling that way. So it might take some time and money to train these people who we trust and be like "Hey, they are part of our brand as well."

Jerod Santo:

Right.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Yeah. I definitely see myself scaling, for sure.

Jerod Santo:

What about family?

Adhithi Ravichandran:

What's that?

Jerod Santo:

Scaling your family?

Adhithi Ravichandran:

No.

Jerod Santo:

No.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

The family's done. \[laughter\] It's just two kids. It's a lot.

Jerod Santo:

That was a quick one.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

I know you have five. You mentioned.

Jerod Santo:

Six, technically, but... You know, we don't count Ezra.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Six. Oh, my gosh.

Adam Stacoviak:

My wife is the same. She's like "Nope, no more kids. It's over." And if for some reason there's even mention of the possibility, I can see her recoil, in like physical and mental. I can see it in her. Because she's like "Nah. No."

Adhithi Ravichandran:

No, I think we're in a good -- two is a great number. I think the national average is probably two or 2.5. That's good.

Jerod Santo:

Yeah.

Adam Stacoviak:

I've got 2.5.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

You've got 2.5. \[laughs\]

Jerod Santo:

Yeah. Well, that's exciting. Good luck to you. Thanks for stopping by and talking with us.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Yeah. I appreciate that.

Jerod Santo:

Any other questions, Adam?

Adam Stacoviak:

That's it.

Jerod Santo:

Cool.

Adam Stacoviak:

Thank you. I enjoyed it.

Adhithi Ravichandran:

Thank you. I appreciate that. Me too.

Jerod Santo:

Awesome. **Outro**: \[01:23:46.12\]

Adam Stacoviak:

Butter's the key to great eggs, right? The eggs is nice and crispy...

Avindra Fernando:

Oh, yeah.

Adam Stacoviak:

Yeah. Like a small bit, or a big dollop?

Avindra Fernando:

Just a little bit. Yeah.

Adam Stacoviak:

You've gotta go dollop.

Jerod Santo:

You were doing so well...

Avindra Fernando:

Is that how you do it right?

Jerod Santo:

You were doing so well.

Avindra Fernando:

Yeah.

Adam Stacoviak:

You've gotta go dollop.

Jerod Santo:

Until the end there.

Adam Stacoviak:

Dollop is the way.

Avindra Fernando:

Awesome.

Adam Stacoviak:

Are you a butter snob?

Avindra Fernando:

No, I wouldn't say so.

Adam Stacoviak:

No? Do you like grass fed butter? You're a butter snob then, okay? You're a butter snob then.

Avindra Fernando:

Yeah, you've gotta check the ingredients.

Jerod Santo:

Grass fed butter?

Avindra Fernando:

Yeah, I'm conscious about what I put in my body.

Adam Stacoviak:

Those cows who eat grass only. Kerrygold is like a brand of choice for a lot of people.

Avindra Fernando:

Yeah.

Adam Stacoviak:

But it's cows -- I believe it's New Zealand. Not New Zealand. It's like...

Avindra Fernando:

Irish.

Adam Stacoviak:

Where's it at?

Avindra Fernando:

Irish.

Adam Stacoviak:

Irish, yeah.

Avindra Fernando:

Kerrygold? Yes.

Adam Stacoviak:

Kerrygold's Irish. Yeah. But I was thinking it was like Greenland, potentially. Like one of those... But literally it's Ireland?

Avindra Fernando:

Yeah, yeah. It's Irish butter.

Adam Stacoviak:

Really?

Avindra Fernando:

Yeah. That's what they call it.

Adam Stacoviak:

Okay. So it's cows that graze grass only, in the fields of Ireland... Then cows make butter.

Jerod Santo:

What kind of butter is this?

Adam Stacoviak:

Kerrygold.

Jerod Santo:

Kerrygold?

Adam Stacoviak:

Kerrygold. Yeah. With a K.

Avindra Fernando:

It's a pretty cool brand. You've never had it?

Jerod Santo:

Maybe I have. I'm just not a butter snob, so I don't know if I've had it or not. I think my wife buys most of the butter.

Adam Stacoviak:

If you're achieving the perfect egg, easy, over medium, scrambled... You pick your style of eggs. Butter. Grass fed butter.

Avindra Fernando:

That's right.

Adam Stacoviak:

Sorry. When I make my hamburgers --

Jerod Santo:

\[unintelligible 01:26:34.15\]

Adam Stacoviak:

Butter.

Avindra Fernando:

Butter it up. Yeah.

Adam Stacoviak:

Obviously, I toast my buns for my burgers... You guessed it, butter.

Jerod Santo:

TMI, man.

Avindra Fernando:

You can't go wrong with butter, right? It's the real deal.

Jerod Santo:

I would tend to agree that butter is hard to go wrong with. It's just really good.

Adam Stacoviak:

Butter's dope, man. Butter's the way.

Jerod Santo:

Especially grass fed Irish cows.

Adam Stacoviak:

That's right, man.

Avindra Fernando:

What do you mean, you don't do butter tasting?

Jerod Santo:

I butter taste all the time, man. Daily. Pretty much daily, I taste some butter.

Adam Stacoviak:

Butter's good. Butter's good.