WEBVTT NOTE This file was generated by Descript 00:00:04.285 --> 00:00:06.055 CJ: Welcome back to Build and Learn. 00:00:06.055 --> 00:00:06.989 My name is cj. 00:00:06.989 --> 00:00:07.979 Colin: And I'm Colin. 00:00:07.979 --> 00:00:12.479 And today we are talking about whether you should build versus buy software. 00:00:12.484 --> 00:00:16.029 It's that classic build versus buy decision that, you may or may not 00:00:16.029 --> 00:00:17.379 have encountered in your day to day. 00:00:17.739 --> 00:00:20.259 But we're gonna dig, dig into it a little bit today. 00:00:20.329 --> 00:00:23.329 What kinds of things have you been up to since we last chatted last week? 00:00:24.394 --> 00:00:26.134 CJ: We're kind of winding down the summer here. 00:00:26.134 --> 00:00:29.614 Our kids are getting ready to go to school, so we're, Yeah, we're kind of like 00:00:29.619 --> 00:00:32.344 starting to enter into hibernation mode. 00:00:32.664 --> 00:00:34.624 , I guess, like cleaning things up. 00:00:34.624 --> 00:00:34.784 Colin: coming. 00:00:35.329 --> 00:00:37.699 CJ: Yeah, winter is coming eventually sometime. 00:00:37.699 --> 00:00:42.000 We haven't experienced a fall in New England yet, and so we see some trees 00:00:42.000 --> 00:00:45.180 starting to turn and we're getting nervous about how many leaves we're gonna have 00:00:45.180 --> 00:00:47.790 to pick up and like all of this stuff. 00:00:47.795 --> 00:00:50.460 So yeah, we're getting, we're getting ready for that transition. 00:00:50.490 --> 00:00:52.260 I think the kids are excited to go back to school. 00:00:52.260 --> 00:00:54.370 Third and fourth grade, it's, good times. 00:00:54.940 --> 00:00:55.420 Colin: Nice. 00:00:55.525 --> 00:00:59.425 CJ: I know at this time of year also that like right at the end of summer, 00:00:59.425 --> 00:01:03.025 beginning of fall, a very special thing happens in Northern Nevada. 00:01:03.325 --> 00:01:07.675 And so , you know, if you're going to unr, students will be off campus. 00:01:07.675 --> 00:01:10.165 They're just gone Teachers too, right? 00:01:10.345 --> 00:01:13.615 If you're in, if you're in and around Reno, you start to see all of these 00:01:13.615 --> 00:01:18.325 like really wild looking vehicles passing through and, you know, there's 00:01:18.325 --> 00:01:22.435 a lot of dust on the road, , so there's a special thing coming up. 00:01:22.435 --> 00:01:23.905 What, what have, what have you got going? 00:01:24.575 --> 00:01:25.895 Colin: Yeah, I feel like we're lit. 00:01:25.955 --> 00:01:26.285 Lit. 00:01:26.285 --> 00:01:28.145 I mean, we are in different parts of the country, but. 00:01:28.790 --> 00:01:31.760 You're talking about leaves turning and I'm thinking about how hot 00:01:31.760 --> 00:01:33.470 it's gonna be, out in the desert. 00:01:34.070 --> 00:01:35.930 Yeah, so Burning Man's coming up. 00:01:36.020 --> 00:01:39.320 I know it's a pretty popular thing in, in tech circles. 00:01:39.370 --> 00:01:43.210 There's a lot of like preconceived notions of what Burning Man is as well. 00:01:43.210 --> 00:01:45.820 And, you know, it's, it's definitely a lot of fun. 00:01:45.850 --> 00:01:48.245 This is gonna be my eighth year since. 00:01:48.395 --> 00:01:52.325 I guess my first year was in 2008, so I've been going for a while kind of 00:01:52.325 --> 00:01:56.915 off and on and have run theme camps and really big groups out there. 00:01:56.920 --> 00:02:00.905 And I'm kind of now like more of one of the, the veteran curmudgeony 00:02:00.905 --> 00:02:04.745 burners that, you know, just wants to go out and build my shade structure 00:02:04.750 --> 00:02:06.125 and, do our own little things. 00:02:06.125 --> 00:02:09.335 So no, like official like duties that I have to do while I'm out there, 00:02:09.335 --> 00:02:12.945 other than like build my shade, build my structure, and make sure 00:02:12.945 --> 00:02:15.495 I have enough food and water, and then just kind of enjoy the whole. 00:02:16.345 --> 00:02:16.705 CJ: Nice. 00:02:16.705 --> 00:02:21.685 Do you bring out water to bathe with or like shower with or are you like 00:02:21.685 --> 00:02:24.895 one of the hardcore people that are just, I'm gonna be dusty and I'll get 00:02:24.895 --> 00:02:26.665 super, super dusty when I get home I'll. 00:02:27.105 --> 00:02:29.175 Colin: Yeah, I mean, what's interesting about it is it's, 00:02:29.205 --> 00:02:30.946 it's like an alkaline dust. 00:02:30.946 --> 00:02:33.796 It's, it's not like if you went camping in the forest where like a 00:02:33.801 --> 00:02:35.686 few days you're gonna feel like dirty. 00:02:35.718 --> 00:02:39.468 It's really interesting cause it's like, think about like Mad Max or, you know, 00:02:39.468 --> 00:02:41.898 like it's just like very fine baby powder. 00:02:42.688 --> 00:02:46.053 and it's very easy, like you actually feel kind of clean in a weird way. 00:02:46.053 --> 00:02:47.643 Like you might be covered in dust. 00:02:47.973 --> 00:02:52.143 So some people try to like do all sorts of cleaning regimens out there. 00:02:52.143 --> 00:02:54.723 It baby wipes are your friend, basically. 00:02:54.723 --> 00:02:56.913 Or like the really large format ones you can get. 00:02:57.174 --> 00:03:00.107 Yeah, some people try, they do like solar showers and stuff. 00:03:00.107 --> 00:03:04.304 The issue is, Bringing out enough water cuz you're already wanting to bring 00:03:04.304 --> 00:03:07.326 enough water to cook and, you know drink. 00:03:07.589 --> 00:03:09.719 And so it's part, and then you gotta deal with the water. 00:03:09.719 --> 00:03:12.569 Like you need to try to like, deal with your waste water after that. 00:03:12.569 --> 00:03:15.269 So you're not supposed to pour things onto the ply like that. 00:03:15.269 --> 00:03:18.780 We could go on and on for a whole episode on, on this, like because a lot of people 00:03:18.780 --> 00:03:22.230 just think it's like a, you know, party in the desert, which it very much is, but. 00:03:22.457 --> 00:03:25.517 A lot of people who have never been before don't realize how harsh of 00:03:25.517 --> 00:03:27.077 an environment it is out there. 00:03:27.407 --> 00:03:31.127 And yes, you can buy ice and there's people, your neighbors are gonna 00:03:31.127 --> 00:03:32.657 help you if you forget something. 00:03:32.657 --> 00:03:37.743 But it is one of the more inhospitable places on the planet to go to 00:03:38.245 --> 00:03:39.565 CJ: You've gone eight years. 00:03:39.565 --> 00:03:41.285 Are you doing a theme this year or 00:03:41.566 --> 00:03:46.332 Colin: I am with a, yeah, I am with a camp, but it's like, again, a camp 00:03:46.332 --> 00:03:49.212 of people who have done it for so many years that we don't really want 00:03:49.212 --> 00:03:53.612 to, like, some camps have dues and you gotta sign up to do group cooking 00:03:53.612 --> 00:03:55.208 and like events and all that stuff. 00:03:55.213 --> 00:03:59.070 And so our camp, we actually record like on behalf of the, 00:03:59.190 --> 00:04:00.463 the Burning Man Organization. 00:04:00.695 --> 00:04:02.666 Things at Burning Man in vr. 00:04:02.666 --> 00:04:04.746 So 360 degree video. 00:04:05.014 --> 00:04:07.526 We're gonna be out there with I think it's like. 00:04:07.780 --> 00:04:11.371 Oculus Goes which are like an older version of the Oculus that's like really 00:04:11.371 --> 00:04:13.211 lightweight, indestructible version. 00:04:13.211 --> 00:04:14.951 Doesn't have to be tethered to a computer. 00:04:15.311 --> 00:04:17.771 And it is, you know, I thought it was a little bit corny at first. 00:04:17.771 --> 00:04:19.931 It's like you can't, like, why not just enjoy it? 00:04:19.991 --> 00:04:21.101 Why try to capture this? 00:04:21.101 --> 00:04:24.311 But the people who started it are literal, like librarians and 00:04:24.311 --> 00:04:28.938 documentarians who are trying to create an archive of what's going on out there. 00:04:28.938 --> 00:04:32.148 And so they get invited to go out in the middle of something. 00:04:32.808 --> 00:04:36.138 You as even an attendee aren't allowed to be in the center of 00:04:36.468 --> 00:04:38.748 and get to capture that in, in 3d. 00:04:38.748 --> 00:04:40.557 And then teaming up with other groups. 00:04:40.557 --> 00:04:45.230 There's a group called BlackRock B R cvr, that does more of the like 00:04:45.260 --> 00:04:47.720 3D metaverse avatar side of things. 00:04:47.960 --> 00:04:52.565 So you get to actually like, If you're not on ply, you can on 00:04:52.565 --> 00:04:56.255 your Oculus at home and, and be part of the, of an experience out there. 00:04:56.255 --> 00:04:59.795 And it's kind of interesting cuz it's like obviously never gonna replace what it, 00:04:59.915 --> 00:05:03.920 I mean it's hot and dusty and all that stuff doesn't come through obviously. 00:05:04.211 --> 00:05:07.053 But like half of it is like getting through the day cuz it's hot and you 00:05:07.053 --> 00:05:10.383 get to see all these amazing things and you're running into people and then at 00:05:10.383 --> 00:05:12.093 night you get to go out and it's just. 00:05:12.813 --> 00:05:17.274 Every l e d that you've ever seen on the planet, all in one place and fire and 00:05:17.424 --> 00:05:19.134 just, it's a, it's a really good time. 00:05:19.134 --> 00:05:19.524 So 00:05:19.739 --> 00:05:23.009 CJ: Something that I've heard is that you can't actually buy anything there. 00:05:23.009 --> 00:05:24.479 It's all like a barter system. 00:05:24.869 --> 00:05:28.859 So in today's episode of Build versus Buy, literally you have to 00:05:28.859 --> 00:05:32.069 build everything . You can't buy anything or you have to train, right. 00:05:32.354 --> 00:05:33.884 Colin: Yeah, we can jump into the theme. 00:05:33.884 --> 00:05:36.835 But yeah, that one also gets a little bit of misinterpreted 00:05:36.895 --> 00:05:38.725 because they do sell ice. 00:05:39.041 --> 00:05:42.061 Just because it will be very hard to be out there, like, I'm 00:05:42.061 --> 00:05:43.381 gonna be there for nine days. 00:05:43.816 --> 00:05:47.536 You can be really good at packing a cooler and nine days you just, 00:05:47.541 --> 00:05:49.276 it's gonna be melted no matter what. 00:05:49.281 --> 00:05:52.606 So you figure out things that don't require refrigeration 00:05:52.606 --> 00:05:53.836 and ice and things like that. 00:05:53.836 --> 00:05:55.096 But, you know, having a. 00:05:55.546 --> 00:06:00.886 Beer on ice is also a luxury to have, so they do sell ice, but it's 00:06:00.886 --> 00:06:04.966 more of a like a gifting economy and that there is no real economy. 00:06:04.966 --> 00:06:08.926 It's just that some people will bring gifts, quote unquote, and that 00:06:08.926 --> 00:06:12.016 gift might even just be helping you build your shade or build your camp. 00:06:12.021 --> 00:06:12.136 Right? 00:06:12.136 --> 00:06:14.986 It doesn't have to be a thing, and it's not an expectation that 00:06:14.986 --> 00:06:16.306 you're giving something back, right? 00:06:16.306 --> 00:06:17.056 In some cases, this. 00:06:17.641 --> 00:06:19.021 Open source if we want to go there. 00:06:19.021 --> 00:06:23.761 Like there is a lot of reasons why I think developers and, and community 00:06:23.761 --> 00:06:27.736 minded people are attracted to it is that, Yes, you gotta buy a ticket. 00:06:27.736 --> 00:06:28.186 Yes. 00:06:28.186 --> 00:06:30.586 Technically going to Bernie man in general is expensive. 00:06:30.586 --> 00:06:34.096 Like it is a privilege to go because you gotta have the 00:06:34.096 --> 00:06:35.606 time to go, the money to go. 00:06:35.657 --> 00:06:39.105 You know, unfortunately, you know, it, it ends up skewing towards 00:06:39.105 --> 00:06:42.630 the demographic that is allowed, like, is able to make that work. 00:06:42.630 --> 00:06:45.960 Once you have paid to go and you get there, you're not spending 00:06:45.960 --> 00:06:49.425 money, someone might just make a bunch of stickers and pass them out. 00:06:49.485 --> 00:06:52.315 It might just be an act of kindness that they're doing. 00:06:52.496 --> 00:06:56.666 And then some people go all out and, you know, cast little figurines out of 00:06:56.666 --> 00:07:00.836 silver and you know, randomly you might, you know, just because you talked to 00:07:00.836 --> 00:07:04.946 somebody that did that, they might give you on and it, you know, you're not doing 00:07:04.946 --> 00:07:08.816 anything out there with expectation and you're not trying to, you know, collect 00:07:08.816 --> 00:07:10.406 all these little gifts or anything. 00:07:10.406 --> 00:07:14.165 It's just an interesting thing of like, you know I'm not gonna 00:07:14.165 --> 00:07:17.765 be doing this with an expectation of return or something like that. 00:07:18.005 --> 00:07:20.525 CJ: I also am really intrigued by the way that it's set up 00:07:20.735 --> 00:07:23.195 like the, the actual layout of. 00:07:23.705 --> 00:07:29.135 The city because it is a city, and I think someone recently shared a, an 00:07:29.135 --> 00:07:33.905 image of like Mesa, Arizona, which is also sort of laid out in a circle 00:07:33.905 --> 00:07:39.275 where everyone is, it's easier to sort of like cross the city to any point, 00:07:39.695 --> 00:07:42.875 rather than having it laid out in like a perfect like rectangular grid. 00:07:44.255 --> 00:07:48.207 Colin: Yeah, an architect designed that and or many architects probably. 00:07:48.207 --> 00:07:51.718 But it was, it's interesting cuz the, yeah, the way that your addresses are 00:07:51.718 --> 00:07:56.712 actually based on the hours of a clock and then, Rings inside of that circle are the 00:07:56.712 --> 00:08:01.122 different streets from A to H, and so each one has a different name, but you can just 00:08:01.122 --> 00:08:05.562 say like three 30 and a, and if you're at 12, midnight, right, midnight, then 00:08:05.562 --> 00:08:09.162 you can figure out where three is, and it's pretty interesting way of doing it. 00:08:09.907 --> 00:08:14.437 There've been some like competitions and, and to like redesign the city 00:08:14.437 --> 00:08:18.607 and you get all sorts of interesting things, but then you end up realizing 00:08:18.612 --> 00:08:20.887 it's like, okay, now to get from one side to the other, it takes you 00:08:20.887 --> 00:08:25.087 twice as long or you don't know where you're at in relation to other things. 00:08:25.087 --> 00:08:28.807 Like it, it is a really interesting thing and like clocks exist around 00:08:28.807 --> 00:08:32.686 the world, so it's pretty easy for, you know, a global audience to pick 00:08:32.691 --> 00:08:34.666 it up and know what, what that means. 00:08:34.666 --> 00:08:36.766 But yeah, so. 00:08:36.946 --> 00:08:38.986 CJ: it's, it's like a, it's an annual. 00:08:39.346 --> 00:08:42.136 Beta test of like how you should lay out a city. 00:08:42.976 --> 00:08:45.616 Colin: Yeah, I think it would be fun to change it every year. 00:08:45.621 --> 00:08:47.326 But yeah, I think everyone would get super lost. 00:08:47.716 --> 00:08:48.206 CJ: Yeah. 00:08:50.062 --> 00:08:50.542 Cool. 00:08:50.592 --> 00:08:55.987 Colin, at Rails Comp this year did a talk about build versus buy, 00:08:56.467 --> 00:09:01.633 and a lot of it was around sort of stuff at your current role. 00:09:01.919 --> 00:09:06.530 But yeah, just kind of curious like Where we should start and maybe we can 00:09:06.530 --> 00:09:11.090 like set the stage and talk about what the difference is or maybe kind of 00:09:11.090 --> 00:09:13.310 like who might be making this decision. 00:09:13.640 --> 00:09:16.430 Colin: Yeah, I mean my, the talk that I did was specifically like 00:09:16.430 --> 00:09:19.700 build versus buy on rails, which we can talk about in a little bit. 00:09:19.994 --> 00:09:23.410 That one was kind of funny cuz I was like, is this resy enough for rails comp? 00:09:23.410 --> 00:09:27.340 But I think, you know, I, I did pretty good justice there because 00:09:27.370 --> 00:09:30.580 it is a decision that everyone will eventually have to make. 00:09:30.940 --> 00:09:32.500 And it might not mean that you're physic. 00:09:32.955 --> 00:09:36.397 Taking your wallet out and buying something, it might mean using an open 00:09:36.397 --> 00:09:41.294 source library or a gem or, you know, whatever modules are in your language. 00:09:41.294 --> 00:09:44.954 But to kind of set that stage, it's any time that you can think about 00:09:44.954 --> 00:09:46.844 building something from scratch or. 00:09:47.260 --> 00:09:49.408 Buying something, using something off the shelf. 00:09:49.468 --> 00:09:53.158 Or I would say the third pillar would be inter implementing 00:09:53.158 --> 00:09:54.598 something from off the shelf, right? 00:09:54.603 --> 00:09:57.778 So you might use something off the shelf or buy something, but you 00:09:57.778 --> 00:10:01.588 still have to build to it or, you know, implement it into your system. 00:10:01.588 --> 00:10:06.328 So build versus buy kind of simplifies it where it's like something like Zapier is 00:10:06.328 --> 00:10:09.268 something you're buying and you don't have to necessarily write any code for that. 00:10:10.268 --> 00:10:12.038 But you know, is it enough? 00:10:12.068 --> 00:10:14.618 I would say like in the topic of integration, some companies 00:10:14.618 --> 00:10:17.078 just say we have Zapier, right? 00:10:17.078 --> 00:10:20.708 And in some cases that means that they did have to do some work to build to Zapier. 00:10:20.965 --> 00:10:22.086 But they did that once. 00:10:22.146 --> 00:10:25.026 And now Zapier's gonna build all the integrations points. 00:10:25.416 --> 00:10:29.136 And for some companies, you know, like an indie company might love to 00:10:29.136 --> 00:10:32.286 do that in indie, customers might love that, but an enterprise company, 00:10:33.006 --> 00:10:36.726 You know, saying like, Here, go use Zapier probably isn't gonna work. 00:10:36.726 --> 00:10:39.652 And so that's where that starts to evolve a little bit. 00:10:39.891 --> 00:10:40.236 But yeah. 00:10:40.236 --> 00:10:43.566 Has this kind of come up for you in your work or like the decision in 00:10:43.566 --> 00:10:45.726 your role, or how does that come for 00:10:45.821 --> 00:10:49.423 CJ: I mean over, over the years I've definitely run into this a bunch 00:10:49.423 --> 00:10:53.623 of times where, I mean, probably the earliest instance I can remember was. 00:10:54.010 --> 00:10:56.710 Trying, just trying to save money on little side project 00:10:56.710 --> 00:10:59.170 ideas that I was building myself. 00:10:59.170 --> 00:11:04.282 Like I was spending a ton of money on Heroku and so I was like, Hey, I bet I 00:11:04.282 --> 00:11:07.432 could use a digital ocean droplet for way. 00:11:07.754 --> 00:11:12.992 Less money if I can just build some of this stuff myself with open source tools 00:11:12.992 --> 00:11:16.172 like Engine X and whatever other stuff. 00:11:16.172 --> 00:11:19.082 And it ended up being like a giant pain and it was totally worth 00:11:19.082 --> 00:11:22.292 just spending the money on Heroku for hosting instead of trying to 00:11:22.292 --> 00:11:24.582 build all the like, infra myself. 00:11:24.815 --> 00:11:26.655 Colin: Yeah, so you had a trade off there then. 00:11:27.340 --> 00:11:27.970 CJ: Absolutely. 00:11:27.970 --> 00:11:28.150 Yeah. 00:11:28.150 --> 00:11:30.070 There's always gonna be a trade off and. 00:11:30.206 --> 00:11:31.376 It's really hard. 00:11:31.376 --> 00:11:35.726 I think, I don't know, it's, it's really hard for me personally to not build 00:11:35.726 --> 00:11:39.836 something , and so right now I am. 00:11:40.094 --> 00:11:42.644 Thinking through my content process, for instance, right? 00:11:42.644 --> 00:11:47.474 Like if I'm, once I make a video, I want to transcribe the video, I 00:11:47.474 --> 00:11:52.364 want to use that transcription with open AI to generate tweets and video 00:11:52.364 --> 00:11:57.374 descriptions and titles, and then I want that to pipe into TikTok and 00:11:57.494 --> 00:11:58.874 all these other social media things. 00:11:58.874 --> 00:12:01.228 And I wanted to track the analytics for all of that. 00:12:01.228 --> 00:12:03.718 And so my immediate first. 00:12:03.915 --> 00:12:06.825 Reaction as an engineer is like, Okay, I can go build this. 00:12:07.365 --> 00:12:13.935 But in reality, what I'm now, like literally today, setting up is air table 00:12:14.265 --> 00:12:18.015 so that I can just use a bunch of tools that are already built in to air table. 00:12:18.015 --> 00:12:20.145 It's like this, no code off the shelf thing. 00:12:20.205 --> 00:12:24.195 Maybe I pay 10 bucks a month, but now I don't have to maintain my own 00:12:24.200 --> 00:12:29.565 hosted Heroku Frankenstein of like, Okay, here's my video workflow. 00:12:29.565 --> 00:12:30.045 So, 00:12:30.315 --> 00:12:30.765 Colin: Right? 00:12:31.056 --> 00:12:31.416 Yeah. 00:12:31.416 --> 00:12:34.566 I think what you touched on there a little bit is what some people have 00:12:34.571 --> 00:12:39.846 called like not invented hair syndrome, and as engineers, we really do enjoy 00:12:40.166 --> 00:12:41.606 building things and it's very easy. 00:12:41.869 --> 00:12:45.079 To trivialize how easy something will be, right? 00:12:45.079 --> 00:12:47.996 You're like, Oh, I can do this in a weekend and it's gonna be 00:12:47.996 --> 00:12:49.376 worth saving all this stuff. 00:12:49.376 --> 00:12:52.916 But you, you don't have the knowledge of everyone who's come 00:12:52.916 --> 00:12:55.016 before you who has tried to do that. 00:12:55.339 --> 00:12:59.740 And it almost always, You know, I, this is even in building features. 00:12:59.980 --> 00:13:04.150 Like I try not to ever say that will be easy, like ever because there are 00:13:04.150 --> 00:13:08.230 edge cases and gotchas that, you know, even sending an email, it's like, 00:13:08.260 --> 00:13:10.630 Oh, I can just do SMTP by myself. 00:13:10.630 --> 00:13:12.640 But like Send Grid exists for a reason. 00:13:12.900 --> 00:13:13.510 CJ: Mm-hmm. 00:13:14.020 --> 00:13:16.540 Colin: There are issues with deliverability and there are issues 00:13:16.540 --> 00:13:19.180 with like even just making sure an email address is a real email 00:13:19.180 --> 00:13:20.792 address before the email goes out. 00:13:21.099 --> 00:13:22.823 You end up paying for and it's a trade off. 00:13:22.823 --> 00:13:26.633 But if you try to do all of sun grid yourself, that's when I start to 00:13:26.633 --> 00:13:29.033 argue like, Should you be doing that? 00:13:29.543 --> 00:13:32.783 CJ: There's a funny story that I heard when I was working at this 00:13:32.783 --> 00:13:36.833 robotics company a long time ago, and it was a, a story about a monorail. 00:13:36.923 --> 00:13:41.063 And so there's like some airport and the problem they were trying to fix 00:13:41.063 --> 00:13:44.213 was like, Oh, we don't have enough parking and so we're gonna build a 00:13:44.213 --> 00:13:46.223 parking structure like really far away. 00:13:46.733 --> 00:13:50.082 And then you know, oh gosh, how are we gonna get the people from the 00:13:50.082 --> 00:13:51.822 parking structure to the airport? 00:13:52.152 --> 00:13:53.502 And so they. 00:13:54.102 --> 00:13:57.792 Instead of just being like, Oh, let's make like a road and use buses, and 00:13:57.792 --> 00:13:59.442 we'll just like buy a bunch of buses. 00:13:59.712 --> 00:14:02.262 They're like, Oh, immediately we're gonna overengineer this 00:14:02.262 --> 00:14:03.702 and build our own monorail. 00:14:03.972 --> 00:14:06.642 That's gonna be like super epic, and it's gonna have all these bells and 00:14:06.642 --> 00:14:10.512 whistles and there it'll be unmanned and automated and all this stuff. 00:14:10.517 --> 00:14:14.948 So, you know, like I don't, it, it's, it's a really good story when 00:14:14.948 --> 00:14:18.518 you're thinking to yourself, Should I build this as an engineer and be 00:14:18.518 --> 00:14:19.988 like, Okay, is this a monorail like 00:14:20.423 --> 00:14:20.693 Colin: Yeah. 00:14:20.693 --> 00:14:22.193 Am I building a monorail right now? 00:14:22.328 --> 00:14:22.718 CJ: Right. 00:14:22.718 --> 00:14:22.958 Yeah. 00:14:23.350 --> 00:14:25.450 Colin: Especially relevant if you're using rails. 00:14:25.580 --> 00:14:26.070 CJ: Yeah. 00:14:27.900 --> 00:14:28.830 . I didn't think about that. 00:14:29.095 --> 00:14:32.841 Colin: Yeah, I think I saw someone in the community was tweeting about how 00:14:32.841 --> 00:14:37.641 we should have a hackathon on a train, and I swear I've seen this before, but 00:14:37.641 --> 00:14:39.081 they were like, Let's do rails on rails. 00:14:39.086 --> 00:14:40.521 And I was like, I swear this is a thing. 00:14:40.521 --> 00:14:44.841 Like I think there was a caboose comp for something like that one year that 00:14:44.841 --> 00:14:49.341 was like a conference after Rails Comp, which was like super hilarious. 00:14:49.671 --> 00:14:53.170 But like, I would do a rails on rails like sign me up. 00:14:53.441 --> 00:14:58.082 CJ: I think the maybe combining rails on ails, like the beer conference, 00:14:58.082 --> 00:14:59.972 like rails on ails, on rails, like 00:15:00.167 --> 00:15:02.237 Colin: Yeah, we stopped at micro bruise along the way. 00:15:02.492 --> 00:15:03.392 CJ: Yeah, exactly. 00:15:03.716 --> 00:15:08.111 Colin: Yeah, I mean, It has to be on a monorail and majestic. 00:15:08.201 --> 00:15:09.491 Majestic monorail, right? 00:15:09.772 --> 00:15:12.332 That's gonna be the new Monorepo is a, is a monorail. 00:15:12.649 --> 00:15:16.969 But I, I see this a lot at companies, especially for engineers who don't 00:15:16.974 --> 00:15:20.929 talk to customers or aren't in touch with the business side of things. 00:15:20.959 --> 00:15:22.549 It's very easy. 00:15:23.089 --> 00:15:24.529 You know, build stuff. 00:15:24.589 --> 00:15:28.540 And the thing that, that I've really come to, and you see this on like the 00:15:28.540 --> 00:15:33.070 more indie hackers side of things too, is like you as a business, you have 00:15:33.070 --> 00:15:37.330 an infinite or so, you have a finite amount of time and capital probably. 00:15:37.600 --> 00:15:41.110 So like your time, a developer's time, if you're hiring someone to build 00:15:41.110 --> 00:15:45.370 something, you have an in, like a limited amount of money to spend on it. 00:15:45.610 --> 00:15:48.550 And you really in general have a limited amount of time to prove. 00:15:49.230 --> 00:15:52.620 Like a thesis, you know, you're building something that may or 00:15:52.620 --> 00:15:54.970 may not be what a customer wants. 00:15:55.278 --> 00:15:58.169 And so what you really have to think about is should this 00:15:58.169 --> 00:15:59.909 be a core competency of yours? 00:15:59.909 --> 00:16:03.479 Like, should I be doing all of my own payment rails? 00:16:03.749 --> 00:16:07.409 Should I be doing all my own Twilio, like SMS stuff? 00:16:07.712 --> 00:16:11.054 Or I guess the other way to phrase it, like, is this what 00:16:11.054 --> 00:16:12.524 a customer's hiring us for? 00:16:12.554 --> 00:16:12.794 Right? 00:16:12.794 --> 00:16:14.564 Like if your tool. 00:16:15.159 --> 00:16:20.109 Is for like in the case of orbit, managing a community, but then we do 00:16:20.109 --> 00:16:21.759 like 10 other things on top of it. 00:16:21.789 --> 00:16:26.889 Well, it's like maybe we need a few of those 10 things, and so it makes sense 00:16:26.889 --> 00:16:30.799 to do, use a gem or use an open source library for those kinds of things. 00:16:31.439 --> 00:16:36.629 Whereas the core competency of ingesting events and identifying members and 00:16:36.629 --> 00:16:39.959 that stuff should be like our core competency is thinking about like 00:16:39.959 --> 00:16:41.939 what your unique value proposition is. 00:16:41.939 --> 00:16:46.199 And so again, like if you're not an email company, probably don't send, don't 00:16:46.204 --> 00:16:47.909 try to be the best at sending emails. 00:16:47.914 --> 00:16:49.499 Let's send Grid do that for you. 00:16:49.540 --> 00:16:53.170 I think Stripe is really interesting place cuz most people can't go 00:16:53.170 --> 00:16:54.820 build their own payment rails. 00:16:54.820 --> 00:16:57.940 So it's like a really defensible thing to be honest too. 00:16:57.940 --> 00:16:58.180 Right? 00:16:58.180 --> 00:17:01.810 Like if you're building a company or you're working at a company and you 00:17:01.810 --> 00:17:05.680 are this engineer, like I sometimes, you know, I, we don't yet know if this 00:17:05.680 --> 00:17:10.240 audience for Build and Learn is engineers at a company or Indy founders, right? 00:17:11.085 --> 00:17:15.465 You want to think about what's defensible, and if spending a whole month on building 00:17:15.465 --> 00:17:19.125 the most amazing reporting engine is what you do, but then you have no 00:17:19.125 --> 00:17:24.015 customers for your main product, that's probably gonna be a bad use of your time. 00:17:24.015 --> 00:17:28.215 And so looking at some of these, like drop in report builders or drop in 00:17:28.220 --> 00:17:33.345 query builders, or even an output to air table, right, might be the answer. 00:17:33.709 --> 00:17:39.301 CJ: Yeah, I think the point you made about having a finite set of money 00:17:39.301 --> 00:17:44.491 and time is really interesting because I think the amount of money you have 00:17:44.671 --> 00:17:47.431 also influences your decisions a lot. 00:17:47.431 --> 00:17:50.851 Like if you are a startup that has zero money and you're just by 00:17:50.851 --> 00:17:55.593 yourself and you have a lot of time, then you know it might make sense to 00:17:55.593 --> 00:17:58.893 save a little bit of cash to build. 00:17:59.628 --> 00:18:00.468 A few things. 00:18:00.468 --> 00:18:04.758 Whereas if you have, if you just raised like a hundred million round and you are, 00:18:04.938 --> 00:18:08.178 you have like, I don't know, 10 years of runway or something really great, 00:18:08.178 --> 00:18:12.768 then maybe you're at a point where you can buy, Or even like, I guess, yeah, 00:18:12.768 --> 00:18:16.308 if, if you like zoom out a little bit, now you're talking about like buying 00:18:16.313 --> 00:18:21.018 potentially even like competitors or acquiring other companies in addition 00:18:21.018 --> 00:18:24.798 to just like buying software or paying for software that you want to use. 00:18:24.798 --> 00:18:27.708 So yeah, I guess that that gets really interesting. 00:18:27.948 --> 00:18:31.608 Colin: You may also not be able to hire the people that you think you can hire. 00:18:31.608 --> 00:18:35.178 And so it's like, okay, do we wanna hire, In our case, when we think about 00:18:35.178 --> 00:18:39.618 integrations, When you think about build versus buying integrations, 00:18:39.858 --> 00:18:45.278 it's a very, very large iceberg of problems that are below the 00:18:45.278 --> 00:18:46.928 surface when you build integrations. 00:18:47.318 --> 00:18:50.138 And so you need to have a purpose built team for it. 00:18:50.138 --> 00:18:52.598 They need to be care and fed for after you build them, right? 00:18:52.598 --> 00:18:55.508 Maintenance is something we haven't really talked about yet, but once you bring it 00:18:55.508 --> 00:18:57.878 into the world, it doesn't just exist. 00:18:57.878 --> 00:18:58.748 You gotta take care of it. 00:18:58.748 --> 00:18:59.612 You gotta maintain it. 00:18:59.816 --> 00:19:03.668 . But you may not when you're first starting out, and you may not have, like, maybe 00:19:03.668 --> 00:19:07.838 you're an indie hacker that's getting started on your own and you don't have 00:19:07.868 --> 00:19:11.314 the dollars, but you have the time maybe you're a founder who's not a developer, 00:19:11.314 --> 00:19:16.680 you may not be able to hire a developer and so you might need to pay for an 00:19:16.680 --> 00:19:20.627 integration platform or you know, even hire a contractor temporarily to 00:19:20.627 --> 00:19:22.427 get you to that integration platform. 00:19:22.667 --> 00:19:25.247 And then that person, you know, is gonna teach you what you need to 00:19:25.252 --> 00:19:26.867 know just to maintain it or whatever. 00:19:27.812 --> 00:19:30.812 It's a trade off of time and money for sure. 00:19:31.052 --> 00:19:33.807 And you bring up a good point, like I do see I think a lot of 00:19:33.807 --> 00:19:36.747 people in the reverse side of that, like they might raise a lot of. 00:19:37.482 --> 00:19:40.422 Build a whole team and then also build everything from scratch. 00:19:40.962 --> 00:19:43.962 And now you're like moving pretty slowly because everyone's building 00:19:44.262 --> 00:19:46.332 and reinventing the wheel again. 00:19:46.782 --> 00:19:49.302 Whereas things like email, I'll just keep coming back to that. 00:19:49.302 --> 00:19:50.622 It's like, that's a solves problem. 00:19:50.892 --> 00:19:54.492 Let's not figure out how to send emails all over again. 00:19:54.771 --> 00:19:58.251 And figure out again, what kind of no code or like, really, I think the 00:19:58.251 --> 00:20:02.541 guiding principle for a PM or, or even an engineer would be to speak 00:20:02.546 --> 00:20:06.731 up if you think like, This, You know, a customer at the end of the day is 00:20:06.731 --> 00:20:10.241 not gonna be like, Wow, I really am glad I use Stripe for their reports. 00:20:10.751 --> 00:20:11.051 Right. 00:20:12.371 --> 00:20:12.641 , Right. 00:20:12.641 --> 00:20:15.341 Or like, Oh yeah, Stripe really sends those emails really well. 00:20:15.341 --> 00:20:17.951 Like, that's not what people remember. 00:20:18.161 --> 00:20:18.491 Sure. 00:20:18.491 --> 00:20:21.521 It's important that the emails get there and the reports are there, 00:20:21.526 --> 00:20:25.871 but they're not, you know, as worried about where those came. 00:20:26.661 --> 00:20:27.171 CJ: right? 00:20:27.201 --> 00:20:27.681 Yeah. 00:20:27.921 --> 00:20:30.471 Would you like, I, I guess I'm, I'm wondering if there's like a 00:20:30.471 --> 00:20:36.991 rule of thumb here, and I'm also nervous by the possible answer being. 00:20:37.881 --> 00:20:40.941 Default to always buy because that doesn't sound fun to me. 00:20:41.386 --> 00:20:46.611 . But like I wonder if the answer is like, by default, you should probably hire some 00:20:46.611 --> 00:20:52.851 SAS to do a job for you, unless it is like the unique thing that you're building 00:20:52.851 --> 00:20:54.451 and you should buy everything else. 00:20:54.736 --> 00:20:57.674 Colin: That's interesting thought experiment because. 00:20:58.664 --> 00:21:01.334 In our case we did for building integrations. 00:21:01.334 --> 00:21:03.074 We'll give a real use case here. 00:21:03.584 --> 00:21:07.824 We have integrations to like four community tools or four 00:21:07.824 --> 00:21:12.174 or five when we started like GitHub, Slack discourse, discord. 00:21:13.029 --> 00:21:17.769 There was something else in there and we knew that we built all those by hand. 00:21:17.829 --> 00:21:22.402 So that was, we started off with built and to get to the next 20. 00:21:22.678 --> 00:21:25.168 We were looking at whether or not we pay for these. 00:21:25.173 --> 00:21:29.534 There's now services that are like a integrations like Stripe type platform. 00:21:29.834 --> 00:21:31.454 And so we evaluated a lot of them. 00:21:31.514 --> 00:21:34.514 They still were gonna require a lot of work on our end. 00:21:34.514 --> 00:21:38.654 Like you're building to their APIs, you're building them into your product. 00:21:38.904 --> 00:21:40.314 Can you switch away from them? 00:21:40.314 --> 00:21:41.934 Switching costs is gonna be an issue. 00:21:42.210 --> 00:21:45.210 Theoretically, they're all like, Yeah, you could leave at any time. 00:21:45.210 --> 00:21:48.090 It's like, well, once people have authenticated with us, there's 00:21:48.090 --> 00:21:49.080 no way that they're leaving. 00:21:49.080 --> 00:21:51.600 Like, we can't just make everybody re off. 00:21:51.890 --> 00:21:54.920 So it became a situation where like the, the. 00:21:55.430 --> 00:21:59.156 Spoiler here is that we went with built, and what we did though is that 00:21:59.156 --> 00:22:02.396 we decided to look at all the five integrations that we had already built, 00:22:02.846 --> 00:22:07.376 and we came up with the common framework amongst them, and then we then were 00:22:07.376 --> 00:22:10.946 able to build, I think we now have, it took us like a year to build five, 00:22:10.951 --> 00:22:15.296 and now we have in like six months, another 10 because of that framework. 00:22:15.296 --> 00:22:19.691 And that framework was not, You know, it was very mvp. 00:22:19.811 --> 00:22:22.601 It was, we've been adding to it as we add each new integration 00:22:22.601 --> 00:22:24.251 that has like a little edge case. 00:22:24.461 --> 00:22:27.476 And again, like every one of these is like, Oh, of course this 00:22:27.481 --> 00:22:31.242 company has decided that OWA works this way And so you're almost 00:22:31.247 --> 00:22:32.202 trying to create this standard. 00:22:32.202 --> 00:22:36.852 And the issue is, I think like IBM has this old ad of like the universal 00:22:36.852 --> 00:22:40.662 business connector and it's like a giant plug and it's got every plug on 00:22:40.662 --> 00:22:42.852 it and like that thing doesn't exist. 00:22:43.160 --> 00:22:47.060 . But in the same vein of this conversation, there's this phrase in the industry 00:22:47.060 --> 00:22:52.460 called no one ever got fired for hiring IBM or paying for ibm, right? 00:22:52.465 --> 00:22:56.810 Is that like, if you choose to do build and it's wrong, oftentimes people lose 00:22:56.810 --> 00:23:00.525 their job or the company lost a lot of money, or they just lost a lot of 00:23:00.555 --> 00:23:02.595 time and they still could go back and. 00:23:03.575 --> 00:23:03.770 , Right? 00:23:03.830 --> 00:23:06.980 It, or in some cases I've seen people will do both. 00:23:07.430 --> 00:23:10.460 They will build and they will buy, and then they'll pit them against each 00:23:10.460 --> 00:23:14.469 other, and then you can keep moving forward with whichever one wins. 00:23:14.739 --> 00:23:17.889 And maybe you decide that they both win and you keep both of 'em in there 00:23:17.889 --> 00:23:19.329 and they make you go faster that way. 00:23:19.573 --> 00:23:23.473 CJ: That again, comes back to that default, should you default to buy. 00:23:23.863 --> 00:23:28.843 And I'm also trying to think about like, have I ever regretted buying. 00:23:29.593 --> 00:23:31.783 Something instead of building it. 00:23:31.813 --> 00:23:36.793 And I don't think I can think of a single instance, but I can definitely think of a 00:23:36.793 --> 00:23:41.773 bunch of stuff where I built my own hacky thing and it was fragile and broke all the 00:23:41.773 --> 00:23:44.443 time, and I was super frustrated with it. 00:23:44.443 --> 00:23:46.963 And then ultimately at the end of the day, just like, you 00:23:46.968 --> 00:23:48.253 know, threw it away or whatever. 00:23:48.283 --> 00:23:48.793 So 00:23:49.783 --> 00:23:50.443 Colin: That's interesting. 00:23:50.443 --> 00:23:53.113 So like how much of that was like a maintenance over. 00:23:53.449 --> 00:23:55.279 CJ: A huge part of it is maintenance overhead. 00:23:55.471 --> 00:24:00.871 Colin: Like, think about Heroku, like what you get for a paid Dino is a DevOps team 00:24:01.231 --> 00:24:03.751 and deployment and simple tools, right? 00:24:04.591 --> 00:24:09.056 There have been things, there's a tool something called Doku, D O K U. 00:24:09.566 --> 00:24:14.396 It is a docker version of Heroku that you can spin up on your own box. 00:24:15.581 --> 00:24:20.161 To call it a direct replacement though, like it doesn't have, I think I, I 00:24:20.166 --> 00:24:23.711 don't know if it might now, but like rollbacks and like all these features 00:24:23.711 --> 00:24:25.470 that, that Heroku has added over time. 00:24:25.702 --> 00:24:30.698 And you just couldn't, like, as a, especially as a single developer, 00:24:30.698 --> 00:24:33.818 like you couldn't get that much power even if you did build it right? 00:24:33.848 --> 00:24:36.698 It's like if you do that, you're not building the thing you set 00:24:36.698 --> 00:24:38.048 out to build in the first place. 00:24:38.378 --> 00:24:40.688 You're now building a Heroku competitor instead. 00:24:41.333 --> 00:24:41.783 CJ: Right. 00:24:41.788 --> 00:24:42.143 Yeah. 00:24:42.143 --> 00:24:44.993 And if you, if you think about like a lot of these other companies 00:24:44.993 --> 00:24:49.253 like Versace or Super Base or Yeah. 00:24:49.283 --> 00:24:53.243 Like where they're enabling you to do things that you wouldn't have been able 00:24:53.248 --> 00:24:58.689 to do before, like deploying all these things to the edge and you know, like 00:24:58.839 --> 00:25:03.369 having all kinds of automated systems for managing all of your assets for you, 00:25:03.369 --> 00:25:06.759 your images and whatever, like there. 00:25:07.219 --> 00:25:12.349 Yeah, I, I think the gap between host it yourself, just like spin up and like your 00:25:12.349 --> 00:25:16.249 own thing on Amazon and host it yourself, like that is starting to go away, right? 00:25:16.249 --> 00:25:21.499 Like there's all of these porcelain beautiful solutions on top of AWS that 00:25:21.499 --> 00:25:25.879 take away so much of the work that you would otherwise have to do to build up all 00:25:25.879 --> 00:25:28.559 of your own infrastructure inside of aws. 00:25:28.564 --> 00:25:33.559 That for me, that seems like the best example is like, don't use, I 00:25:33.559 --> 00:25:39.535 don't know, in, in my experience, I don't think I Should build on aws. 00:25:39.565 --> 00:25:42.115 Instead, I should always just buy something that is going to give 00:25:42.115 --> 00:25:45.715 me like a nicer interface into AWS and do other things for me. 00:25:46.075 --> 00:25:51.175 Especially because it's, it's like even, even these layers, these thin layers 00:25:51.175 --> 00:25:56.305 like Heroku cell, nullify, whatever, they themselves are also being commoditized. 00:25:56.365 --> 00:26:00.355 Like they're not that much more expensive than just doing it directly on aws. 00:26:00.355 --> 00:26:05.215 And so sure they can take a sliver of my tiny little startup, but like at the 00:26:05.215 --> 00:26:06.775 end of the day, that doesn't matter. 00:26:07.195 --> 00:26:07.685 A ton, 00:26:07.945 --> 00:26:10.135 Colin: Well, and they're counting on you getting big, right? 00:26:10.135 --> 00:26:13.825 So they want to give you credit, they want to give you a free site on Netlify, 00:26:13.825 --> 00:26:17.605 and they hope that you need their, you know, whatever their paid services 00:26:17.605 --> 00:26:20.525 are once you like get to that scale. 00:26:20.761 --> 00:26:23.371 This kind of brings up this concept of innovation tokens. 00:26:23.371 --> 00:26:24.631 Have you seen this blog post? 00:26:24.946 --> 00:26:26.566 I'll have to find it and put in the show notes. 00:26:26.576 --> 00:26:27.476 CJ: I don't think so. 00:26:27.476 --> 00:26:27.626 Yeah. 00:26:27.626 --> 00:26:28.026 What is. 00:26:28.486 --> 00:26:32.101 Colin: So this is essentially like, Let's just pretend that 00:26:32.101 --> 00:26:34.981 you only have three innovation tokens and you wanna spend them. 00:26:34.981 --> 00:26:39.227 You don't get to build your own database from scratch, Write 00:26:39.227 --> 00:26:40.397 your own programming language. 00:26:40.457 --> 00:26:44.447 And some the third thing, like you get three things that are novel and new, 00:26:44.777 --> 00:26:46.007 but you can't spend them on everything. 00:26:46.007 --> 00:26:50.066 And this is where I think you see some startups today, like Jason Warner 00:26:50.186 --> 00:26:53.606 previously of GitHub, he's, he's been pretty public about like, if you're 00:26:53.606 --> 00:26:56.846 a series a company and you're using Kubernetes, like you probably have built 00:26:56.846 --> 00:26:58.346 that monorail that you were talking about. 00:26:58.351 --> 00:27:04.076 Like you probably have created complexity for yourself that is not needed, right? 00:27:04.081 --> 00:27:09.476 Like, why are you using Kubernetes when Rails on Heroku should be 00:27:09.476 --> 00:27:12.986 able to get you to product market fit and customers paying you? 00:27:13.481 --> 00:27:16.301 It's like, Oh, now our API can't handle it. 00:27:16.301 --> 00:27:21.101 So maybe now it makes sense to go to AWS because the traffic through Heroku like, 00:27:21.431 --> 00:27:24.101 We'll just give a 32nd time out on Heroku. 00:27:24.161 --> 00:27:25.601 That's a problem for some people, right? 00:27:25.601 --> 00:27:26.471 And it's like, well, why? 00:27:26.501 --> 00:27:29.441 Why is our API taking 30 seconds to return in the first place? 00:27:29.441 --> 00:27:33.851 It's probably a better question, but like it, there's a point at 00:27:33.851 --> 00:27:37.091 which it makes sense to go down to the rail, like the literal bare 00:27:37.091 --> 00:27:39.371 metal of AWS or whatever that is. 00:27:39.619 --> 00:27:42.319 But in this case, it's like, okay, we're gonna spend an innovation 00:27:42.319 --> 00:27:46.129 token on Kubernetes and we're gonna go do microservices. 00:27:46.159 --> 00:27:47.779 It's like, okay, now we just spent two. 00:27:48.199 --> 00:27:51.182 And the complexity of the code base is so out there. 00:27:51.580 --> 00:27:55.210 That now onboarding a new developer's hard, knowing how 00:27:55.210 --> 00:27:56.710 to add a new feature is hard. 00:27:57.160 --> 00:28:00.190 And so you wanna make sure, and I think that it's captured better 00:28:00.190 --> 00:28:02.380 in the blog post, so I'll, I'll put that in the show notes. 00:28:02.385 --> 00:28:05.380 But it is just a good thing where it's like, let's just 00:28:05.385 --> 00:28:06.820 say you do have five features. 00:28:06.820 --> 00:28:09.790 You can't reinvent the wheel for all five of them. 00:28:09.880 --> 00:28:10.090 And. 00:28:10.335 --> 00:28:13.335 I would even argue maybe you don't reinvent the wheel for any of them, 00:28:13.335 --> 00:28:15.975 like you said, like default to buy. 00:28:15.975 --> 00:28:19.305 Like, and again, buy doesn't mean spending money here because 00:28:19.785 --> 00:28:21.975 you could go grab a gem, right? 00:28:21.980 --> 00:28:25.005 Like it doesn't make sense to build your own markdown, Previewer. 00:28:25.590 --> 00:28:28.650 When there are 20 in Ruby alone, right? 00:28:28.650 --> 00:28:30.540 So like, let's go use one of those. 00:28:30.834 --> 00:28:33.337 Because again, like someone might wanna use Markdown, but like, you're not 00:28:33.337 --> 00:28:35.227 a Mark unless you're a Markdown app. 00:28:35.287 --> 00:28:39.067 Like, then I would say maybe we should make your own Parer, but like, only if 00:28:39.067 --> 00:28:41.047 there's a compelling reason to do that. 00:28:41.265 --> 00:28:44.184 CJ: I think it's, it's been interesting to see from the inside 00:28:44.184 --> 00:28:48.504 of Stripe how much stuff we've built like ourselves instead of buying. 00:28:48.594 --> 00:28:51.204 A great example of that is Mark, Doc. 00:28:51.234 --> 00:28:55.944 I mean, when you mentioned markdown, like this spring to mind, Mark Doc is this 00:28:55.944 --> 00:29:03.558 framework for authoring documentation that that we built and it is a React framework. 00:29:04.473 --> 00:29:09.903 That allows you to author most of your content in markdown files, and 00:29:09.903 --> 00:29:13.383 then you can build components with React that you can then sort of 00:29:13.383 --> 00:29:14.823 sprinkle throughout your markdown. 00:29:16.443 --> 00:29:20.703 We found that like, okay, none of the markdown things worked the way that we 00:29:20.703 --> 00:29:23.133 liked it, , and so we built it ourselves. 00:29:23.133 --> 00:29:26.373 And so there's, there's actually like quite a few instances of 00:29:26.373 --> 00:29:30.423 that across the organization, but that is a really massive, 00:29:30.423 --> 00:29:32.193 successful work that's doing that. 00:29:32.193 --> 00:29:35.943 And so I would say that most, yeah, like most of the time 00:29:36.978 --> 00:29:38.388 Colin: Well, Stripe didn't start with that, 00:29:39.003 --> 00:29:39.393 CJ: right. 00:29:39.558 --> 00:29:40.458 Colin: important to know. 00:29:40.998 --> 00:29:45.548 You get you like, when I think about this article and I just pulled it up they 00:29:45.548 --> 00:29:50.258 talk about choosing boring technologies and embracing boredom, and that means 00:29:50.258 --> 00:29:51.998 like maintenance and all these things. 00:29:51.998 --> 00:29:56.918 It's like the more things you add, it's going to become more intense to maintain. 00:29:56.918 --> 00:30:01.101 But in the case of Mark Docs, Stripe has kind of always been known as 00:30:01.131 --> 00:30:04.821 like having great docs as marketing and great developer experience. 00:30:05.151 --> 00:30:09.171 I'm sure if we go far enough back in the way back machine, like it probably wasn't 00:30:09.176 --> 00:30:13.371 always that way when it was like slash dev slash payments or whatever, right? 00:30:13.371 --> 00:30:17.901 Like you probably could find a doc site that feels like any startup 00:30:17.901 --> 00:30:21.531 today, but they chose to make that a differentiator and that's where. 00:30:22.041 --> 00:30:25.371 Is this our core competency and is it our unique value proposition 00:30:25.371 --> 00:30:28.191 comes back in because they're like, Okay, people love our docs. 00:30:28.191 --> 00:30:34.491 Now how can we make our docs process better for us as a team to make that 00:30:34.496 --> 00:30:36.741 continually better for the customer? 00:30:37.191 --> 00:30:38.151 That one makes sense. 00:30:38.151 --> 00:30:39.621 And it's kind of a mote, right? 00:30:39.621 --> 00:30:42.891 Like we won't mention names, but like there's some other companies that 00:30:42.891 --> 00:30:46.551 don't have really great docs that accomplish similar things, right? 00:30:46.551 --> 00:30:48.891 So that becomes a really important thing. 00:30:48.891 --> 00:30:50.121 And you do see c. 00:30:50.871 --> 00:30:54.111 There's literally a company that builds itself as Stripe Docs 00:30:54.111 --> 00:30:56.721 as a service from Y Combinator. 00:30:56.721 --> 00:30:56.931 Right. 00:30:56.931 --> 00:30:57.981 And so it's like, yeah. 00:30:57.981 --> 00:31:00.591 And it, it's almost, it looks identical to Stripe Docs. 00:31:00.591 --> 00:31:03.861 I'm like, well, I don't really want strip docs as much as I 00:31:03.861 --> 00:31:06.111 want good docs that are my own. 00:31:06.141 --> 00:31:08.183 But it's still a cool idea. 00:31:08.183 --> 00:31:11.903 And the fact that a whole company now exists similarly to don't 00:31:11.903 --> 00:31:16.043 do your own email, like at orbit we're like revamping our api. 00:31:16.688 --> 00:31:20.018 And we made that decision like we are going to revamp the api. 00:31:20.018 --> 00:31:24.668 We are not throwing away all the tools that we use to do the docs 00:31:24.668 --> 00:31:27.608 and the API and all of that because like we already know them, so let's 00:31:27.608 --> 00:31:29.378 just use them and maybe use them. 00:31:30.218 --> 00:31:35.678 10% more, like there's 10% more features in these tools, like R Swag and swagger 00:31:35.678 --> 00:31:39.488 and all this stuff that we just aren't using that could make our docs better 00:31:39.848 --> 00:31:44.468 instead of like, we're not gonna go build our own static site generator and like 00:31:44.528 --> 00:31:48.878 we could implement Mark Docs, but like, it's, it's a new, it's an innovation token 00:31:48.878 --> 00:31:50.678 for us that we probably shouldn't spend. 00:31:51.218 --> 00:31:56.719 Maybe when we're profitable and the docs are a clear value provider, 00:31:56.719 --> 00:31:58.369 then it would make sense to do that. 00:31:59.299 --> 00:32:06.859 CJ: So I am now I'm wondering, I remember playing around with the API reference 00:32:06.859 --> 00:32:10.669 for Orbit and you can kind of like enter in fields and test out requests. 00:32:11.824 --> 00:32:14.584 Is that something that you bought or something you built? 00:32:14.584 --> 00:32:15.904 Is that open source? 00:32:16.129 --> 00:32:17.149 Colin: That is something we bought. 00:32:17.154 --> 00:32:17.299 Yeah. 00:32:17.299 --> 00:32:19.879 So we use readme.io for our docs. 00:32:20.199 --> 00:32:21.189 CJ: The YC company, right? 00:32:21.459 --> 00:32:22.329 readme.io, Yeah. 00:32:22.494 --> 00:32:24.654 Colin: Or even read it might even be readme.com now 00:32:24.992 --> 00:32:25.425 CJ: Okay. 00:32:25.605 --> 00:32:25.815 Yeah. 00:32:25.815 --> 00:32:26.475 Stepping up in the 00:32:26.640 --> 00:32:27.403 Colin: stepping up. 00:32:27.629 --> 00:32:31.124 But I think that that IO domain signals that you're a developer company, so you 00:32:31.364 --> 00:32:31.604 CJ: Yeah. 00:32:31.724 --> 00:32:32.204 Colin: keep it. 00:32:33.164 --> 00:32:35.954 CJ: I think I saw the, they posted a hiring. 00:32:35.984 --> 00:32:39.563 They're also hiring on like the hacker News who's hiring 00:32:39.638 --> 00:32:42.428 Colin: If you love docs, it's, it's a really cool tool. 00:32:42.433 --> 00:32:47.108 And I will admit, like I did go into it with like, I hate our docs, like, 00:32:47.108 --> 00:32:51.908 because I didn't realize we weren't using enough of readme's features. 00:32:52.088 --> 00:32:55.478 We weren't using enough of open API features we weren't using. 00:32:56.048 --> 00:32:59.498 And then, so like in, in some cases it was like, let's just re-look 00:32:59.498 --> 00:33:02.978 at the tools that we have and we are paying for it, but it's also. 00:33:03.968 --> 00:33:06.668 I don't have to think about where the docks get deployed. 00:33:07.208 --> 00:33:08.378 They just exist. 00:33:09.263 --> 00:33:12.833 You know, that also means like we also wanna build out more of like what you 00:33:12.833 --> 00:33:17.483 guys have at Stripe with the more like guides and tutorials and stuff so that 00:33:17.483 --> 00:33:19.313 people get a better sense of the concepts. 00:33:19.313 --> 00:33:20.873 And they do have that in Readme. 00:33:20.873 --> 00:33:21.893 We just don't use it. 00:33:22.403 --> 00:33:26.663 And so like we have a whole separate web flow website that does that right now 00:33:26.783 --> 00:33:30.803 and like we're just gonna put it all in, read me so that it's all in one place. 00:33:31.283 --> 00:33:31.913 And. 00:33:32.258 --> 00:33:37.148 Again, like we have to invest in writing and copy and documentation, but we're 00:33:37.148 --> 00:33:42.308 not gonna blow an innovation token on, you know, building a Jam Stack website 00:33:42.308 --> 00:33:46.448 and pulling in from yard docs and all this stuff that we could pull in, but, 00:33:47.198 --> 00:33:50.918 CJ: So it seems like the takeaway there is that if you are going to 00:33:50.918 --> 00:33:55.478 buy, it's worth investing in learning about the thing that you bought. 00:33:55.748 --> 00:33:57.428 So that you can actually take advantage of it. 00:33:57.428 --> 00:34:00.458 I think that's like where the entire industry of customer 00:34:00.458 --> 00:34:01.958 success like came from. 00:34:02.378 --> 00:34:07.358 It was like, how do you make sure that you increase the adoption of all the 00:34:07.358 --> 00:34:10.568 different features and the attach of all different features for your product. 00:34:10.749 --> 00:34:13.149 So yeah, that's definitely something to keep in mind, I guess, like. 00:34:13.839 --> 00:34:15.429 Colin: Well, I, I imagine like. 00:34:15.789 --> 00:34:19.059 If I was using one, like I signed up for Stripe and I used the one 00:34:19.059 --> 00:34:21.669 thing that I cared about when I joined, I may not be paying 00:34:21.669 --> 00:34:23.379 attention to all the other features. 00:34:23.769 --> 00:34:24.039 Right? 00:34:24.039 --> 00:34:26.589 And so that's where I think CSMs can help and be like, 00:34:26.589 --> 00:34:27.789 Hey, we know you're using this. 00:34:27.789 --> 00:34:29.559 Did you also know you could do this? 00:34:30.039 --> 00:34:31.929 And your team is really great at that, right? 00:34:31.929 --> 00:34:34.509 As you roll out these new beta features and stuff, you're. 00:34:34.999 --> 00:34:37.789 Looking at who's using similar features and saying, Hey, do 00:34:37.789 --> 00:34:39.409 you want this to be 10% better? 00:34:39.859 --> 00:34:41.059 Come check this thing out. 00:34:41.389 --> 00:34:44.389 And it almost always is like, this is the thing we've been waiting for. 00:34:44.394 --> 00:34:45.559 Why hasn't strip do this? 00:34:45.559 --> 00:34:48.499 And it's like, Oh, here it is, you know, for you to try out. 00:34:48.949 --> 00:34:55.279 And with Readme it was more of, I was like, why can't I just write in here? 00:34:55.279 --> 00:34:59.897 Like we, we deployed to Js o and Js O gets ingested by Readme. 00:34:59.897 --> 00:35:03.257 And then that, and we'll do a whole episode, I think, on docs for sure. 00:35:03.262 --> 00:35:03.437 But. 00:35:04.342 --> 00:35:09.262 Why can't I also put like written pros in here to help developers understand 00:35:09.262 --> 00:35:14.212 and maybe even drop in a video or, you know, a, a diagram because the open API 00:35:14.217 --> 00:35:16.642 spec, to my knowledge, doesn't have that. 00:35:17.182 --> 00:35:17.542 Right. 00:35:17.547 --> 00:35:19.762 And does that belong in the code and all that stuff. 00:35:19.762 --> 00:35:22.732 But then I was like, Oh, read me, has an editor right here, and if I write in here, 00:35:22.737 --> 00:35:24.712 it shows up above the generated stuff. 00:35:24.712 --> 00:35:28.132 So it's like, We, that was like a light bulb, but also like, wow, how 00:35:28.132 --> 00:35:29.833 did we not know that this was here? 00:35:30.518 --> 00:35:33.128 In our case, maybe we have a CSM with readme. 00:35:33.158 --> 00:35:36.368 I don't know, maybe we're not paying them enough for that kind 00:35:36.373 --> 00:35:39.458 of attention, but like it's just nice to like get into the tools. 00:35:39.458 --> 00:35:43.148 You have what you mentioned about defaulting to buy. 00:35:43.208 --> 00:35:44.588 I think that's a smart thing. 00:35:44.588 --> 00:35:47.168 Like I would say definitely don't default to build. 00:35:47.588 --> 00:35:49.238 At least go get a spreadsheet. 00:35:49.688 --> 00:35:53.318 Do a little column, pretend you're buying a car, you know, and figure out 00:35:53.318 --> 00:35:57.518 like, if I do this, if I do this, if I do this, And I would also ask like, 00:35:57.548 --> 00:35:59.888 what would, what, what could go wrong? 00:35:59.918 --> 00:36:02.588 Like if this, if we get this wrong. 00:36:03.398 --> 00:36:05.228 Is it the end of the company? 00:36:05.228 --> 00:36:06.848 Is it, am I gonna get fired? 00:36:07.478 --> 00:36:07.658 , Right. 00:36:08.046 --> 00:36:11.916 Hopefully you're in a company that celebrates learning and failure 00:36:11.921 --> 00:36:12.996 and you're not gonna get fired. 00:36:12.996 --> 00:36:16.416 But I think making sure that everyone knows, like what 00:36:16.421 --> 00:36:17.736 the stakes are, is important. 00:36:17.826 --> 00:36:20.046 And then the other side of it is what could go right? 00:36:20.076 --> 00:36:22.626 Like if we pull this off, how great is that? 00:36:22.626 --> 00:36:27.396 And you know, for us, building integrations has, I think we're still 00:36:27.396 --> 00:36:30.602 gonna wait to see if it pans out as being the right choice, but like, If 00:36:30.607 --> 00:36:35.312 we had to continually pay more and more and more money to companies based on how 00:36:35.312 --> 00:36:39.332 many people are integrating, it feels like a good value metric to go off of. 00:36:39.332 --> 00:36:42.902 But like, you know, when time, like right now with the economy being what it is, I 00:36:42.902 --> 00:36:46.082 think we're really excited that we don't pay more money for our integrations. 00:36:46.082 --> 00:36:50.502 Like the, the other way to think of buying is that you're renting versus owning. 00:36:51.136 --> 00:36:54.106 And as a homeowner, you know, like owning a house means 00:36:54.106 --> 00:36:55.816 taking care of the house, right? 00:36:55.816 --> 00:36:56.056 Rent. 00:36:56.791 --> 00:36:59.401 Sure it might be a little bit more expensive per month, but you're 00:36:59.401 --> 00:37:00.541 not taking care of the house. 00:37:00.541 --> 00:37:03.311 You're not having to deal with all the stuff that goes into that. 00:37:03.781 --> 00:37:09.721 CJ: So that reminded me of another concept, and I'm curious how 00:37:09.726 --> 00:37:12.751 you're thinking about this, and that is around platform risk. 00:37:13.111 --> 00:37:16.651 So if you decide to buy and you go all in on a platform, and then that 00:37:16.651 --> 00:37:21.961 platform either just like increases your prices, By some crazy amount 00:37:22.051 --> 00:37:26.341 or they discontinue a service that you're using and depending on, or 00:37:26.341 --> 00:37:28.351 that your entire business is built on, 00:37:28.561 --> 00:37:29.791 Colin: Or they go outta business. 00:37:30.121 --> 00:37:31.231 CJ: right, or they go outta business. 00:37:31.231 --> 00:37:38.821 So maybe this is like another potential warning for buy is try to validate the, 00:37:38.821 --> 00:37:41.971 I don't know, like make sure that the company you're buying is legit . The 00:37:41.971 --> 00:37:43.531 software you're buying is gonna last. 00:37:44.086 --> 00:37:46.396 Colin: Yeah, you kind of hit all the heads there for that. 00:37:46.912 --> 00:37:49.326 Definitely consider that as a risk. 00:37:50.676 --> 00:37:54.246 Technically, if they're building and growing as they should, they're trying 00:37:54.246 --> 00:37:58.407 to get the word that they'll never use, but it's called vendor lock in, right? 00:37:58.797 --> 00:38:01.497 They want to provide you more value so that you willing, 00:38:01.497 --> 00:38:03.297 like you gladly pay for it. 00:38:03.297 --> 00:38:08.097 But it does mean it's going to be harder to leave one day, and maybe that's okay. 00:38:08.577 --> 00:38:10.587 That's just something that you have to kind of think. 00:38:11.242 --> 00:38:11.852 CJ: Mm-hmm. 00:38:12.117 --> 00:38:16.737 Colin: When I was building, I was a Techstars company called Cloud Snap, 00:38:16.737 --> 00:38:21.747 and we were building an integration platform as a service back in 2012. 00:38:22.302 --> 00:38:25.092 We only had raised $500,000. 00:38:25.182 --> 00:38:30.732 So how many companies do you think were willing to put our code into their code 00:38:30.852 --> 00:38:37.602 or to talk, you know, to build to us and create those integrations that we required 00:38:37.602 --> 00:38:42.192 you to kind of follow a little bit of a stripe model for like, We're gonna 00:38:42.192 --> 00:38:46.722 give you a customer token and, and we're gonna hold onto all their oau tokens and 00:38:46.722 --> 00:38:48.372 we'll handle refreshing them for you. 00:38:48.372 --> 00:38:51.012 And it's kind of like a credit card in that respect. 00:38:51.012 --> 00:38:54.942 And who, Yeah, not a lot of companies were like, it's like maybe if you 00:38:54.942 --> 00:38:57.642 guys go out and get your Series A, then we'll, we'll chat again. 00:38:58.002 --> 00:39:01.872 They just wanted to know that we had the runway to even exist, let 00:39:01.872 --> 00:39:03.872 alone the technical side of that. 00:39:05.427 --> 00:39:08.457 CJ: Yeah, that's interesting too because it, when, when you were 00:39:08.462 --> 00:39:12.143 building clouds snap if I recall correctly, like one of the first 00:39:12.143 --> 00:39:14.063 integrations was sale Salesforce. 00:39:14.068 --> 00:39:14.693 Is that right? 00:39:14.933 --> 00:39:16.923 And so I'm in the back of my mind. 00:39:16.923 --> 00:39:21.841 I'm like, I wonder if going for the enterprise integrations first. 00:39:22.663 --> 00:39:26.443 Was something that caused the companies who would use those enterprise 00:39:26.443 --> 00:39:32.573 integrations to question versus going for like more indie stuff first. 00:39:32.573 --> 00:39:33.563 I have no idea. 00:39:33.983 --> 00:39:34.733 Yeah, exactly. 00:39:34.733 --> 00:39:39.082 Like it's also interesting because I feel like where you're at now, And 00:39:39.082 --> 00:39:44.602 Cloud Snap and my VR and like a bunch of tools that we use are all like very 00:39:44.607 --> 00:39:49.942 similar in that they live at the seams between two giant systems or like between 00:39:49.942 --> 00:39:51.352 lots and lots of different systems. 00:39:51.352 --> 00:39:55.495 And yeah, like there's definitely so much value in being that glue layer 00:39:55.825 --> 00:39:57.745 between all these different useful tools. 00:39:58.195 --> 00:40:01.015 But yeah, trying to figure out how to build a company around it is 00:40:01.015 --> 00:40:02.635 definitely challenging for sure. 00:40:03.175 --> 00:40:06.175 Colin: Yeah, I think you and I might be gluts for punishment there. 00:40:06.175 --> 00:40:09.625 Like being on the seam is a pretty terrifying place to be 00:40:09.625 --> 00:40:12.595 like, cuz things are always breaking, things are always trying. 00:40:12.625 --> 00:40:14.545 It's like a multiverse of apps, right? 00:40:14.545 --> 00:40:14.905 It's like 00:40:15.235 --> 00:40:15.655 CJ: Yes. 00:40:15.685 --> 00:40:16.405 It's, yeah. 00:40:16.405 --> 00:40:19.135 It's like choosing to build a house on the San Andrea's fault, 00:40:19.135 --> 00:40:23.065 because like everything is around is shifting and like maybe your house 00:40:23.065 --> 00:40:24.205 is gonna fall into the sinkhole. 00:40:24.210 --> 00:40:24.445 Who knows? 00:40:24.805 --> 00:40:26.485 Colin: But it's something that a lot of companies do. 00:40:26.485 --> 00:40:30.175 So anyone who solves it, you know, whether it's internally, like at 00:40:30.175 --> 00:40:33.205 my vr, it was trying to figure out how to do that for themselves. 00:40:33.205 --> 00:40:36.475 But for us it's like, Oh yeah, customers build your houses 00:40:36.475 --> 00:40:37.615 on the San Andreas fault. 00:40:37.645 --> 00:40:39.505 We will handle all the issues. 00:40:39.535 --> 00:40:40.855 And you're just like, We can't 00:40:41.955 --> 00:40:45.265 And I think that there still is, like, I still think that integration 00:40:45.265 --> 00:40:47.095 as a service thing is interesting. 00:40:47.395 --> 00:40:49.375 There are a few companies doing it today. 00:40:51.265 --> 00:40:54.325 Kind of, are they how I would do it? 00:40:54.445 --> 00:40:54.925 No. 00:40:54.985 --> 00:41:00.081 Like that was the ultimate reason why we didn't go with them was it required 00:41:00.081 --> 00:41:02.331 our team to know their tools so well. 00:41:02.331 --> 00:41:07.146 So it's kind of like, Do we wanna become consultants of this tool? 00:41:07.566 --> 00:41:11.616 And then if those developers ever leave, now we have to train someone else on it. 00:41:11.994 --> 00:41:14.844 Whereas what we ended up doing kind of to round it out here is 00:41:15.234 --> 00:41:16.794 everything we built is in Ruby. 00:41:17.214 --> 00:41:19.314 Every one of our engineers is a Ruby engineer. 00:41:19.554 --> 00:41:22.534 Everything is not in unfamiliar to them. 00:41:22.758 --> 00:41:24.569 We can do code reviews, we can check it. 00:41:24.569 --> 00:41:26.639 It's not like talking to some. 00:41:27.569 --> 00:41:30.839 Thing on the other side of the fence that we don't know if it's gonna go down. 00:41:30.839 --> 00:41:32.339 We don't know if how it works. 00:41:32.559 --> 00:41:35.167 We don't know if it's gonna go outta business, like all those different things. 00:41:35.167 --> 00:41:39.037 And that was where I kind of ended my talk was that it's at the end of the day, 00:41:39.037 --> 00:41:41.377 it's Ruby, It's Rails, it's convention. 00:41:41.377 --> 00:41:44.437 It's a lot of different things that like we're used to. 00:41:44.797 --> 00:41:48.709 And so we don't need to reinvent the wheel every single time we do it. 00:41:48.941 --> 00:41:52.721 But we also do get some satisfaction outta getting to build it ourselves 00:41:52.721 --> 00:41:54.191 and own it and invest in it. 00:41:54.465 --> 00:41:56.305 So yeah, integrations. 00:41:56.988 --> 00:41:57.438 All right. 00:41:57.438 --> 00:41:58.998 So I think that's a great place to wrap. 00:41:58.998 --> 00:42:02.958 We hope you enjoyed our deep dive into build versus buy, and you got a little 00:42:02.958 --> 00:42:05.000 bit of Burning Man envy as well. 00:42:06.110 --> 00:42:06.680 CJ: Right on. 00:42:06.680 --> 00:42:09.950 Next time we're gonna be back talking again about code reviews. 00:42:09.955 --> 00:42:14.150 This time talking about how to review code rather than authoring a pr. 00:42:14.450 --> 00:42:17.870 And as always, you can head over to build and learn.dev to check out all the 00:42:17.870 --> 00:42:19.730 links and resources in the show notes. 00:42:20.464 --> 00:42:21.694 Colin: That's all for this episode. 00:42:21.694 --> 00:42:22.954 We'll see you next time. 00:42:23.230 --> 00:42:23.830 CJ: Five friends.