Episode 58: Releases, Growing Our Teams, and the Dangers in Assumptions

Brad Touesnard and Pippin Williamson talk all about WordPress development.

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This is the last episode before we retire the podcast. Many people have enjoyed the podcast and we’ve had a lot of great feedback and a lot of fun, so we’ve been asked why we’re...

Episode 83: Finale

This is the last episode before we retire the podcast. Many people have enjoyed the podcast and we’ve had a lot of great feedback and a lot of fun, so we’ve been asked why we’re retiring. Ultimately, we just needed to make a change and it’s time to move on. Be sure to listen to hear about how things have changed over the past couple of years and why those changes have led to us retiring the show.
For our last episode, we’ve decided to answer some of our listeners’ questions. Some of the highlights of the show include:

Regrets that Brad and Pippin have had regarding not building a plugin they’ve had an idea for.
Why it’s important for companies to start new projects frequently.
Advice Brad and Pippin wish they could give their younger selves when it comes to development, projects, and processes.
Some thoughts on pricing: How data, psychology, and strategy play into it.
Takeaways Brad and Pippin have learned that have come about by sharing business ideas with others.
Thoughts on hiring developers and setting salaries.

Links and Resources:
Pippin’s Blog Post: Get Better at Saying No
Derek Sivers: Hell Yeah or No
Brad’s Blog
Pippin’s Blog
Apply Filters on Twitter
ApplyFilters.fm
Amazon SES service
Blog Post on Why It Took So Long to Release WP Migrate DB Pro 1.8
 
Transcript
INTRO:	Welcome to Apply Filters, the podcast all about WordPress development.  Now here’s your hosts, Pippin Williamson and Brad Touesnard.
PIPPIN:	Welcome back to Episode 83 of Apply Filters.  This is going to be our last episode before we retire the podcast.  We announced about two weeks ago that we were going to retire the podcast and stop recording episodes, and so this is the last one.  When we announced that, the predominant question we got was, “Why?  Why are we retiring?”
There have been a lot of people that have enjoyed the podcast.  We’ve received a lot of great feedback over the last two years or so that we’ve been doing it, and it’s been a lot of fun, so let’s start by answering that question.  Brad, why are we retiring?
BRAD:	Yeah.  I think there’s probably a few reasons.  It’s funny.  I think we should maybe let people know that we knew something had to change, for sure.  We’ve been discussing that for quite a while that something had to change.  
	We discussed getting our teams involved in the podcast and having them run the show, maybe.  Then ultimately we came to a point where we were just like, maybe we should just let it go.  Maybe we should just retire it, and we could do something else later if it made sense.  
	That’s kind of where we ended up.  We felt that it was time to move on.  We’ve been doing this for a couple years now.  When we started, it was a lot of fun.  It was very exciting and new.  
	I know I personally was in a very different place than I am now.  When we started this, I had just launched Migrate DB Pro, like a few months earlier, and I had one developer.  Now we’re up to nine developers, or nine people: one marketer and eight developers.  My days are mostly managing that team, whereas back then I was writing code, and I had my hands dirty every day.  And so it was really easy to talk about development challenges and things that we were struggling with.  It was just easy to jump on a call with you, Pippin, just hit record, and just talk about what’s been going on for the last couple weeks.
PIPPIN:	Yeah.  We could very easily just chatter on, “What did you work on this last two weeks?  What was the code that you were working on?” because you were the developer, and I was the developer.  I think we have very similar changes that have happened over time, like my day is not made up of code any more.  My day is managing and overseeing the overall projects.  Then most of my team members write most of the code now.  
	When I get to write code, it’s a pleasure, for sure, but it’s not very often.  That made it a litt

This is the last episode before we retire the podcast. Many people have enjoyed the podcast and we’ve had a lot of great feedback and a lot of fun, so we’ve been asked why we’re retiring. Ultimately, we just needed to make a change and it’s time to move on. Be sure to listen to hear about how things have changed over the past couple of years and why those changes have led to us retiring the show.
For our last episode, we’ve decided to answer some of our listeners’ questions. Some of the highlights of the show include:

Regrets that Brad and Pippin have had regarding not building a plugin they’ve had an idea for.
Why it’s important for companies to start new projects frequently.
Advice Brad and Pippin wish they could give their younger selves when it comes to development, projects, and processes.
Some thoughts on pricing: How data, psychology, and strategy play into it.
Takeaways Brad and Pippin have learned that have come about by sharing business ideas with others.
Thoughts on hiring developers and setting salaries.

Links and Resources:
Pippin’s Blog Post: Get Better at Saying No
Derek Sivers: Hell Yeah or No
Brad’s Blog
Pippin’s Blog
Apply Filters on Twitter
ApplyFilters.fm
Amazon SES service
Blog Post on Why It Took So Long to Release WP Migrate DB Pro 1.8
 
Transcript
INTRO:	Welcome to Apply Filters, the podcast all about WordPress development.  Now here’s your hosts, Pippin Williamson and Brad Touesnard.
PIPPIN:	Welcome back to Episode 83 of Apply Filters.  This is going to be our last episode before we retire the podcast.  We announced about two weeks ago that we were going to retire the podcast and stop recording episodes, and so this is the last one.  When we announced that, the predominant question we got was, “Why?  Why are we retiring?”
There have been a lot of people that have enjoyed the podcast.  We’ve received a lot of great feedback over the last two years or so that we’ve been doing it, and it’s been a lot of fun, so let’s start by answering that question.  Brad, why are we retiring?
BRAD:	Yeah.  I think there’s probably a few reasons.  It’s funny.  I think we should maybe let people know that we knew something had to change, for sure.  We’ve been discussing that for quite a while that something had to change.  
	We discussed getting our teams involved in the podcast and having them run the show, m

Today, Brad and Pippin will be talking about what they’ve been up to the past few months, including things that have been going well and things that they’ve struggled with. Some of the highlights of...

Episode 82: The Future of EDD, Mergebot Updates, and Creating Your Own SSL Cert

Today, Brad and Pippin will be talking about what they’ve been up to the past few months, including things that have been going well and things that they’ve struggled with.
Some of the highlights of the show include:

The challenges that EDD faced when developing Commissions beta 3.4, as well as why the release was planned and developed.
What EDD is planning to release over the next year or two.
Brad’s newest blog post about creating your own certificate authority.
Details about Mergebot’s launch.
How Serialized Editor has helped Brad.
Details of the 2.8 release of EDD’s core plugin.
The status of the Migrate DB Pro release, including details of the new import feature.
The importance of not working in a vacuum.
The features of Restrict Content Pro 2.9.

Links and Resources:
Commissions
Easy Digital Downloads Development
How to Create Your Own SSL Certificate Authority
Pippin’s Plugins
Mergebot
Laraval Spark
Serializededitor.com
EDD 2.8
Migrate DB Pro
Restrict Content Pro 2.9
If you’re enjoying the show we sure would appreciate a Review in iTunes. Thanks!
Transcript
INTRO:	Welcome to Apply Filters, the podcast all about WordPress development.  Now here’s your hosts, Pippin Williamson and Brad Touesnard.
BRAD:	Welcome to Episode 82.  This time Pippin and I will be talking about what we’ve been up to in the past couple months, some things that worked out for us, some things that we struggled with.  Pippin, what have you been up to, man?
PIPPIN:	Well, it’s been, I think, almost a month and a half to two months since our last episode when we interviewed Matt Mullenweg, so quite a bit has actually happened in that month to month and a half.  I kind of forget how fast things move until you look back and think, that wasn’t very long ago, and then you look at all the different things that happened in that time.
	We’ve had three major updates that we pushed out in the last couple of days.  Actually, all of this week, I think.  Two of them went live yesterday and one the day before that were all the culmination of anywhere from one to six months of work.  
	All right, let me give you a quick back story.  Five years ago, we started Easy Digital Downloads.  And, like a lot of people in the WordPress world, we were very excited about what custom post types allowed us to do.  There was this general philosophy that proliferated the WordPress development world that you should use custom post types for anything and everything, and so we used custom post types and post meta to store transactional data for Easy Digital Downloads: payment records, logs, et cetera.  Well, that was five years ago.  
As a lot of people who have used a WordPress e-commerce plugin, whether you’re talking EDD or WooCommerce or any of the others that also use custom post types or any similar scenario, we’ve discovered that there are significant problems and side effects posed by putting that data in that database.  It basically comes down to you’re storing a whole lot of data in a super inefficient manner in a way that it was never designed to be used for.  You’re putting a square into a round hole is what you’re trying to do, basically.  
	The reason we did it, the same reason everybody else did it, is that it was super, super easy to do.  There was almost zero learning curve to do it, and we could do it.  Anyway, that was five years ago.
	We’ve had serious — there’s been a lot of serious problems caused by it, especially with performance and scaling.  Well, for the last two years, we’ve been planning how to get that data out, how to move it into custom database tables that are precisely designed for the schema that we need, precisely designed for the purpose that the data has, what it is, where it needs to be stored, what we need to store, how we need to store it, what kind of relationships we need, et cetera.  We’ve been working on slowly planning this out for two years, and yes

Episode 58: Releases, Growing Our Teams, and the Dangers in Assumptions

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