Reactor

Mark's #1 goal of working on Phoenix Igniter has been elusive. Structured procrastination hasn't exactly been the plan, but he's been working on just about every other goal instead—recording videos for Alchemist Camp, writing blog posts and interview prep, and more. It turns out that being an "international candidate" means a surprise interview added before the onsite he thought he'd been accepted for. He's completed the extra interview but is uncertain about how well it went. Again, the algorithm side wasn't too challenging but he was a bit rusty with JS's standard library.

Justin, despite an explicit goal not too, has gone even deeper into the world of Roblox game development. He's now learned how to create jump pads that players can bounce onto and off of. The game's physics engine is unrealistic in a few ways for playability reasons, but that makes it a bit more complex to create things players can bounce on.

Great news! People are starting to create accounts and comment on previous episodes at Reactor.am! So far, most of them know one of us. One of them, Mark's German friend from his digital nomad days, is even competing with Justin in a very indirect way in the task management / productivity space.

Video version at https://youtu.be/Ijh-J--L1n0

Comment at https://reactor.am/podcasts/26

Recorded on 2020-08-12

Mark's Absinthe GraphQL tutorial series is started and people are retweeting it! Justin has LAUNCHED the bootcamp! Mark's new blog post is at #2 on HN! Things are moving!

Justin's been looking at how Nugget users go through the educational content, and how many continue from each step to the next. He's been getting positive feedback, but it's always a challenge to optimize a lesson and decrease dropoff at each step.

Microconf is going to be remote this year, which means Mark will actually be able to attend it finally!

Video version at https://youtu.be/unIQKk-nKGM

Comment at https://reactor.am/podcasts/27

Recorded on 2020-08-12

Show 25: Too many jobs

Justin's been doing a lot of performance work at the day job. He's been doing some strategic caching and optimizing of queries and has managed to drain a job queue from over 42,000 items, down to about 10. The problem may not be fully solved, though.

Mark failed to hit his primary goal, but he did a bunch of other stuff, including Manning's Rust in Motion which was an explicit goal not to get too sucked into. He also had quite the HN adventure, submitting a post that quickly got to #2 and then flagged off of the site. After a few revisions to make it a bit more personal and re-posting it, it went up to #2 again and did much better the second time. Also, the Facebook interview went well and they've invited him to a "virtual onsite" interview.

A fairly successful indie hacker who runs a site called Semicolon and Sons strongly recommended Rob Walling's book, Start Small, Stay Small to Mark, and its lessons on out-sourcing in particular. Mark never read it, but did see a lot of similar advice in 4HWW around the same time and Justin's had a great experience with outsourcing work on his upcoming Roblox game.

If you're coding everything on the back-end for it anyway, is it better just do all life-cycle emails from a transactional email service? Justin's considering moving all of Nugget's marketing off of Drip and just using Mailgun for everything. Speaking of email software, Noah Kagan has been promoting a new service called Send Fox. It may be worth keeping an eye on, given his success with his SumoMe suite of list-building tools.

Video version at https://youtu.be/6GUXIgFd_4M

Comment at https://reactor.am/podcasts/25

Recorded on 2020-08-05

Justin is keen to hear about how Mark's technical interview at Facebook went yesterday. In a lot of ways it was less stressful than he'd expected based on his previous experiences. It seemed to have gone but they haven't given any feedback yet. There are still more steps in the process and he'll also have to find out if their remote policy is global or if he'd be required to leave his pandemic free residence in Taiwan and head back to the US.

Justin shrugged off his primary goal of working on his Nugget business and instead has gone even deeper into the world of Roblox. The development of his new game is well under way, and his 6 year-old is giving feedback. Interestingly, when he plays Roblox, his in-game communication is all with speech to text tools. Nugget is still slowly moving along though. One of the members Justin has been helping settled on a new product, had a successful launch on HN and is now revenue positive!

Mark got some interesting feedback from an Elixir learner on Alchemist Camp—"Don't give so much away for free!". This question around how best to do a freemium service is a tough one. Making more premium tutorials leads to more users choosing to pay, but the more tutorials are free, the faster the total audience grows. Justin's advice was simple—create a super premium tier for businesses and price it at $99/month.

Video version at https://youtu.be/OSOXl72iiH4

Comment at https://reactor.am/podcasts/24

Recorded on 2020-07-29

Justin's at grandma's house this weekend, enjoying a spacious backyard with a barbecue grill, but despite his hopes, it's not nearly big enough to grow enough maple trees for a steady syrup supply. Nonetheless summer is here and the yard is a nice change from LA lock-down.

Mark's been doing a little bit of algorithm study for interview prep. Justin's not a fan of that kind of interview since it's so far away from what kinds of work people do on the job. Mark agrees, but seen it useful at one old job which was flooded with applicants who couldn't fizzbuzz. Not by modulo, not by nested loops and not by a big while loop with multiple counters!

Please go to Reactor.am and leave comments on the episodes if you feel so inclined!

How much has YC changed? One former founder on twitter feels they've lost their soul. He loved the tight network and personal attention from people like PG and Jessica Livingston. Now, the batches are huge and attracting a different sort of person (see link below). We know nothing about YC internally, but it reminds Mark of what he saw happen at his old coding school. When he was a student, the founders were putting everything they had into making sure he and his classmates succeeded. Later batches were larger, students were more risk adverse and more credentialed.

Justin's come up with a name for his Roblox game and is now putting together sound effects and music for it. He's got an outline for the game map done and is now starting to work on getting the polish on the center part of it up to a release-quality level.

Mark's been thinking about different kinds of content he can make for Alchemist Camp to help the top of the funnel. The full-on screencasts are what people pay for. However he could write four technical tutorials in the time it takes to make a single screencast. Non-technical writing is even faster and more easily shared, but also less valued. What's the idea balance?

Video version at https://youtu.be/3Y6YfZFV_Qw

Comment at https://reactor.am/podcasts/23

On Apple Podcasts at https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/reactor/id1500109358

Recorded on 2020-07-22

VS Code updates that break a key part of your editor workflow suck! Previously, opening and closing the integrated terminal was cmd + backtick, and Mark used to hit it constantly to switch back and forth between code and the terminal. In VS Code's monthly update, they silently changed that shortcut to switch between multiple VS Code windows. The result is constant frustration from hitting the shortcut out of habit and disrupting the recording of screencasts.

Justin's wife has been intermittent fasting and has lost a lot of weight! Amazingly, she's only eating in the mornings rather than the evenings like most intermittent fasters. Justin's gonna give it a try.

Mark's been thinking about an idea from an old TechZing episode—enthusiasm half-life. The people he's known who have tackled something difficult like learning Chinese or starting a business have fallen into one of two groups. Most people seem to start off full of enthusiasm, like a cannon ball shooting into the sky and then gradually lose motivation and crash into the ground. A few people have their own fuel and just put in a regular half hour or hour per day for years, but they're not the norm. The key for the majority was making meaningful progress before hitting their enthusiasm half-life. Getting to a win of some kind or another often brings more motivation!

Justin is still working on getting more prospective female entrepreneurs to join Nugget (his training site / community). He's also considering opening up its slack group to free users as well as premium members. More discussion and more people sharing entrepreneurial ideas, advice and success stories is probably good for everyone.

Justin has also hired a recent to start building a Roblox game! After digging into the development environment and getting a feel for what was possible and what the learning curve would be like, he impressed with the Flash-like development experience, the built-in Lua scripting, the assets and everything available. Making a simple game was easy! It was seriously tempted to build a commercial game himself, but thought better of adding yet another time commitment of that sort.

Video version at https://youtu.be/eFksdBvVxyA

Comment at https://reactor.am/podcasts/22

Recorded on 2020-07-15

The site for this podcast is live at last, so Justin has a link to tweet! The screencasts Mark has been making about making the site with Phoenix LiveView LiveView is nearing an end as well. All that's left is a tiny bit of recording and then editing a few videos. After 15+ videos of a single series, it's going to be great to switch things up and teach a new topic.

Justin's been working hard to try to get an even male/female balance in solo entrepreneur academy, Nugget. He's started revising the copy in earlier lessons and has gotten some helpful feedback on it from his sister. He's revised the copy for his first three lessons to make them a bit more engaging and has a plan for most of the remainder of the lessons. Another idea she mentioned was that Nugget is applicable to info product makers, not just coders!

Mark has been very inspired this week, first from his buddy Liam's 30th birthday party and then from rereading a very old book by Gary V. The book was actually a more interesting read that in would have been a decade ago, because he wrote almost exactly the plan he executed on over the next several years.

Nothing was as inspired as Justin and Mark's (mostly settled) differences about how to design a podcast listing page!!! Justin wants a page that drives users towards commenting and Mark wants an information fire-hose interface, not just for this podcast but for every site he frequently uses.

Finally, we talked a bit about coding interviews, how unlike most programming work they are and why Mark is still grateful for them.

Comment at https://reactor.am/podcasts/21

Video version at https://youtu.be/W653wtuVW8E

On Apple Podcasts at https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/reactor/id1500109358

Recorded on 2020-07-08

Not even an ill-timed decision to update to Ubuntu 20.04 update could stop Reactor.am from going up tonight! It did require Mark retyping a tedious four-word command, but thanks to his pile of Ruby & shell scripts, that was the entirety of the cost. However, Justin still won't add intro music to the show until 10 people email [email protected] and ask for it.

Justin's got Nugget ready for review, but it's been surprisingly tough to get it reviewed! Mark invited three relatively successful boostrappers he knows, but no bites yet. On the good side, Justin's gotten a couple of positive reviews through his network.

Mark's gotten two more videos recorded but still not edited or published. Phoenix Igniter hasn't gone as well, though. He's had a harder time setting aside time to work on it due to the fact that there's no front-end setup that would satisfy everyone. Many customers want a fairly vanilla back-end MVC app with "JavaScript sprinkles", many others want a fully separated SPA and still others are excited about going all-in with LiveView.

The 4th of July is coming up and this is a leap year in the Chinese lunisolar calendar! That means lots of big meals in a short time for Mark, but not quite at the level of the epic feat he pulled off a decade back in which he managed to partake in a Dragon Boat feast in Taipei, a Canada Day BBQ in Toronto and then a 4th of July in Boulder.

Justin has gone DEEP into the economics of Roblox and has started messing with Roblox Studio and seeing what it would take to make a game his son Jack would enjoy. He's keeping a lid on the details for now, but a side-side-SIDE-SIDE project may be underway.

Video version at https://youtu.be/Kpnwr8xL3Kk

On Apple Podcasts at https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/reactor/id1500109358

Recorded on 2020-07-01

Comment at https://reactor.am/podcasts/20

Life is going well for Mark! Thanks to cleaning out his air conditioner, the appartment is now a cool 26 degrees Celsius instead of the 33 degrees it was last week! Rather than endure that furnace, he spent most afternoons last week at coffee shops. He can't take his Mac mini, monitor and ergonomic keyboard to them, but he did take his Kindle and ended up reading three full books. He also hit his health goals and a new milestone for Alchemist Camp subscribers!

Justin has gathered half a million carrots in his son's video game, but his automation efforts haven't been entirely wasted. He's been inspired by in game success and has started automating parts of his wife's online business and created a self-serve version of her course for therapists. It's generated seven sales at $499 so far. He's also been tweaking a few things in the Nugget bootcamp based on what he's seen of from one of the students progress so far. Along a similar line, Mark's been very gradually automating a free intro email course he offers his email subscribers. It's still a mostly manual process but the part that accounts for 90% of Mark's manual effort is automated.

Justin talks a bit about the struggles of juggling contracting, entrepreneurial work and being at home with a young kid during Covid.

Mark gives Justin an on-screen tour of Reactor's stats, both in terms of Podcast listens and YouTube and then Justin show the current state of the Nugget bootcamp. Mark is a huge fan of the atmosphere added by the old school 8-track cassette tape on each page that play "Justin's bootleg notes" when you click on them. He wants the Justin's unreleased Speak product that powers it for his own site... but Justin's a bit hesitant about digging too far into opening it up to the outside world for a while. Mark sees it as a powerful tool for increasing conversions but Justin sees it potential business but one that would be better with funding behind it.

Video version at https://youtu.be/8ZpimVlL-8E

On Apple Podcasts at https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/reactor/id1500109358

recorded on 2020-06-24

Mark's sleep has been suffering from the summer heat and 100% humidity of living on a semi-tropical island, but it's still been a productive week... The Reactor site is ready to launch! It took more than a screencast's worth of code to implement sessions, auth, email resets, permissions, etc, so he tried doing something different. Instead of showing himself type in every line of code as in his normal screencasts, Mark tried doing a "walk-through", where the code is already written and he goes over it and explains it to the viewer. It was much easier than making the 3-4 screencasts it would have taken to cover the same material, so it will be interesting to see how the audience responds to it.

Justin has pushed the boundaries of virtual carrot farming still further and set up highly optimized vertical farms so he can generate 65,000 carrots per night in his son's video game. There was a game update that complicated things a bit, but his virtual carrot farming operation is simply too powerful to stop.

The Nugget Bootcamp is ready for review! It's been a bit difficult to keep the lessons short enough to fit into just seven pages, but Justin is happy with the work so far. He's been adding voice recordings to each page, using Speak, and it's a huge improvement. Feedback from some founders who have taken a look at it so far has also been good. The plan is to release all of the new bootcamp for free, and keep the existing paid material as a followup for the most motivated and successful segment of the free bootcamp learners. It's always a trade-off between reach and protecting the value of the paid product when doing freemium, but Justin's not too worried since his main goal is to reach a larger and more diverse group of potential founders.

With the site for this podcast done, Justin's going to set up an email account for the hosts and Mark will deploy it sometime this week.

Video version at: https://youtu.be/SHmn1oERZWU

recorded on 2020-06-17