Code and the Coding Coders who Code it
We talk about Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, and everything in between. From tiny tips to bigger challenges we take on 3 questions a show; What are you working on? What's blocking you? What's something cool you want to share?
Code and the Coding Coders who Code it
Episode 44 - Adam McCrea
What if you could scale your SaaS platforms effortlessly across diverse hosting services? Join us as we welcome Adam McCrea, the brilliant mind behind JudoScale, who takes us through his fascinating evolution from being a Rails developer to creating a cutting-edge autoscaling solution. Adam opens up about the technical challenges he faced while adapting JudoScale for platforms like Render, Fly, and Railway, and how Heroku's unique architecture initially shaped his approach. His journey is one of innovation driven by necessity, as JudoScale originated from a need to optimize costs more efficiently than existing solutions.
Our conversation doesn't shy away from complexity; in fact, it embraces it. Adam shares his experiences of grappling with AWS integration, navigating the intricate maze of ECS, EC2, Fargate, and IAM, all driven by customer demand. We explore the strategic shift from metered billing to flat-tiered pricing and the hurdles faced while setting up a staging environment on Render, ultimately reaffirming Heroku's smoother experience. This episode promises valuable insights into the strategic decisions and architectural reimaginations that keep JudoScale ahead of the game.
Adding a creative flair, we delve into the entertaining world of infomercial production, as Adam recounts his experience crafting a humorous Billy Mays-inspired ad for JudoScale. With the aid of AI tools like ChatGPT and Descript, Adam turned a fun concept into an engaging reality. As we wrap up, Adam shares his excitement for RailsConf in Philadelphia and the significance of fostering connections through digital networking. Whether you're a tech enthusiast or a developer seeking innovative scaling solutions, this episode is brimming with insightful takeaways and creative inspiration.
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Honeybadger is an application health monitoring tool built by developers for developers.
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Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Code and the Coding Coders who Code it. I'm your host, drew Bragg, and I'm joined today by Billy Mays or Adam McRae I can't remember which Adam. For anyone who's not familiar with you, would you please introduce yourself?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I'm Adam. I created a SaaS app called JudoScale in 2016. It was originally Rails Autoscale. We renamed it in 2021. It's an autoscaling add-on, originally an autoscaling add-on for Heroku, and now we're expanding to other platforms like Render and Fly and Railway. Yeah, I've been a Rails developer since 2007. So, yeah, I've kind of been around, done a lot of things and landed on JudoScale, which I've been doing full-time since 2021.
Speaker 1:2007,. That's pretty OG. So the way this is going to work is I'm going to ask Adam three questions. I'm going to ask him what he's working on, what kind of blockers he has. If he doesn't have a current blocker, he can talk about a recent blocker he had and how he went about solving it. And then the last question, my favorite, is what is something cool, new or interesting that you've recently learned, discovered? Interesting that you've recently learned, discovered? It doesn't have to be coding related, but it can be. So let's dive in, Adam, what are you working on?
Speaker 2:Last year we did our first platform expansion outside of Heroku. We integrated with Render and we integrated with Amazon ECS and it works fine. But we made some decisions that I'm not entirely happy with. So right now I'm peeling back some technical debt. Basically, when we originally built Rails Autoscale, it was all Heroku. Everything in our app was modeled after Heroku stuff. We got dynos, we got apps, we got processes All the Heroku terms, the Heroku concepts were like baked in.
Speaker 2:And then when we did render our first expansion beyond Heroku, that required a lot of refactoring, peeling back layers of the onion and just finding all these places where it's assumptions of heroku built in. And one that made that particularly challenging with render at the time is that render just has a flat list of services, whereas heroku has apps with processes in it. You got your web and your worker processes within an app. Render, at the time at least, was just a flat list of services. There's no notion of an app. So you got your web and worker services all mixed in with all your different other web and worker services, and the way we ended up modeling that in Judo scale is kind of making it difficult to now expand to other platforms. So basically, I'm totally re-architecting how we model our render data within Judo scale to make it easier to expand to other platforms, because we're currently building integrations with Railway and Fly. So I'm working on a lot of kind of tech debt stuff right now.
Speaker 1:That's interesting. The not just oh Heroku calls it a dyno and another company might call it something else. We need a universal term, but straight architecture decisions being influenced by what you're trying to integrate with. You can talk about how you're doing it now, or you can talk about how you did it with render, but are you almost treating them like separate apps or just an entry point with a facade, so that everything kind of works the same way, but under the hood it's drastically different? What was the approach there Within Judo?
Speaker 2:scale, there's always going to be a grouping of processes and on Heroku that grouping is an app and the processes are processes. On something like Railway, they have notions of projects and environments and within those environments you have services. So in that case, your project environments, your judo scale production, that's your environment and within there you've got services. It seems to work well that each platform we integrate with has some kind of grouping for their services. Like I said, render at first didn't, but now Render has very similar to Railway. They have projects and environments that you can group your services into. So them adding that I think they added it last year, maybe earlier this year is kind of letting us be more consistent with how we model this stuff in Judo scale. Behind the scenes in Judo scale we're still kind of using some Heroku terms. We've got apps and processes Depending on which platform we've integrated with. We'll just call it different things on the front end, because each platform calls it different things.
Speaker 1:Okay, I want to go back, probably a little further than that. How did the idea to build an autoscaler first come to you? Was it just you needed it and you built it, and then other people were like that's cool, I want it, or was it? No, I think this is definitely a business I could run. Let me build this thing out A little of both.
Speaker 2:I was working at a small company at the time. We basically generated leads for real estate agents and when I joined they were running on Engine Yard. I kind of spearheaded a move from Engine Yard to Heroku. Because we were just paying an insane amount for Engine Yard for not a whole lot, that we were getting Moved to Heroku, because we were just paying an insane amount for Engine Yard for not a whole lot, that we were getting Moved to Heroku and it was great for us. Everything worked really well. We saved a lot of money in that move.
Speaker 2:At the time we were running eight dynos 24-7 for an app that's primarily just used during the day. It's sort of a back office system kind of thing. I knew we wanted to autoscale it to be able to avoid wasteful spending on our hosting and we tried a couple of the auto scalers that were available at the time. This is 2016. And there were only a couple and they just didn't work very well. They were painful to use, they were confusing, they weren't very reliable and I had some ideas on how to build a better auto scaler.
Speaker 2:So I was like, what if I just did this as a side project? It sounds fun, we could use it at the company I was at. If it works out, then maybe I throw it into the Heroku marketplace as an add-on and see what happens. So I asked my boss do you care if I do this as a side project and I own the IP, but we use it if it works? He doesn't care.
Speaker 2:It was a super small company, very casual about all that stuff, so I built it, we used it internally and it did work great. So then I started integrating it as a Heroku add-on and that launched in 2017. And at that point I definitely had the dream of going full-time on it. But I wasn't the type of person that, like I'm not going to burn all my nights and weekends on this thing to make it happen as soon as possible. I was kind of content to just let it grow slowly. So I kept working on it, but not at an exhausting pace or anything like that, just kept it going as a side project where it just kind of slowly grew in the Heroku marketplace.
Speaker 1:When did it become kind of evident that, okay, this is my full-time job, now I need to spend full-time on it to keep it up, or was it more of a? I can now spend full-time on it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's never been the kind of thing where it's needed full-time attention. Fortunately, it runs really reliably. It does not get a lot of support requests. At this point, we've got upwards of 800 customers and we get maybe five support tickets a week, something like that. It's a really low maintenance, low support app, which has been wonderful.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, 2021, that was the year that I went full time on it. Building up to that, 2020 was a good year. It grew pretty well. I had a number in my mind where I wanted to hit where I'd be comfortable going full-time on it. At the time, my wife wasn't working, she was back in school, so I was the only income. And the problem is lifestyle creep is a real thing and I had been a software developer for a long time, so I was making pretty good money as a software developer. I can't make the leap to full-time until this product is making pretty good money, if I don't want to tell the family hey, look, all these things we're used to, we're going to cut back and I didn't want to do that.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, 2021, two things happened at the same time.
Speaker 2:Revenue hit a point where I would have been comfortable going full-time on it, but it would have felt like a little bit of a risk.
Speaker 2:And at that time I actually applied to TinySeed, which is, imagine, a Y Combinator accelerator, but on a much, much smaller scale, for bootstrap companies, so companies with one or two co-founders that want to build a company that is profitable and want to grow it but not grow at all costs like a VC funded thing. So, tinyseed the way it works is they give you a little bit of funding I think they're public about it it's 120K for solo founders, 180k for multiple founders and they take a little bit of equity for that. And then you're in a program where you have mentorship and you have community and they help you out. And so I got accepted into TinySeed, which gave a little cash infusion, gave complete confidence that I could go full-time on it with almost no risk. And so, yeah, that all happened in 2021, made the leap to full-time on it and, yeah, did the company need my full-time attention? It didn't. It was kind of my dream that I wanted to be doing my thing full-time, so I was eager to do that.
Speaker 1:That's awesome, and is that kind of being able to work on it full-time because of TinySeed is that what drove you to be like, okay, where else can we stick this? Or was that a? There's a lot of people who were like I don't want to be on Heroku anymore, I want to be over here. Can I please use your service?
Speaker 2:The customers who were leaving judo scale. When we reached out to them and they replied, the usual response was oh, we love judo scale, we're leaving heroku and we're going to. At the time it was aws or was render all right. Well, these people want to keep using judo scale, so let's build something so that they can. So that was what motivated those. Since then, we've had more and more customers asking about railway and fly, so that's basically what drives these decisions are what our customers are asking for, and usually they're not asking for new features in the app. Usually it's a handful who are leaving Heroku, want to go to a different cloud provider and want to be able to keep using Judo Scale.
Speaker 1:The biggest challenge with the move is how everybody names and architects their particular services. We've already discussed how much learning did you have to do going to render. Is it once you figure out their naming scheme and setup, scaling up and down and infrastructure is basically the same across all, or is there even more layers of complexity once you get past naming and organization?
Speaker 2:It's pretty consistent. They all work a little bit differently in a few different ways, but at the end of the day, you're deploying containers and scaling them up and down and it's not that difficult to migrate between them and build a mental model between them. With a big asterisk, the one that was a pain in the ass, unsurprisingly, was AWS.
Speaker 1:So, shocking.
Speaker 2:I avoided that for a long time and eventually just had enough customers who had left Heroku to AWS and wanted to use JudoSkill. I'm like this is stupid, that we're not taking the time to investigate this and build something. So, yeah, that was more challenging because I didn't really have any experience with AWS beyond, like creating an S3 bucket. That's the extent of what I had done in AWS at that point. So, yeah, kind of had to learn how ECS worked and the difference between using it with EC2 and Fargate, all the acronym soup that's in AWS. Oh man, the permissions with IAM, all that stuff. That was a painful integration for sure, and I still dread anytime I have to get into AWS for anything.
Speaker 1:Is it to the point where you're like, okay, that's done, I can mostly just let it sit there. Or is it? No, there's still a bunch of stuff to do, but it's good enough for now. I can just touch it when I'm feeling. Pain is going to be fun today, I don't know.
Speaker 2:We've got a list of quality of life improvements we want to make on that platform and, more generically, on sort of all the non-Horoku platforms that we've integrated with. It just works and we don't really have to dig into it for the most part Just a lot of little improvements that we want to make. And then the biggest change that is on our radar that I either want to make this month or next month is redoing our pricing for the non-Horoku platforms On Heroku. Because we're in the marketplace, we're pretty much tied down. We have to do monthly tiered fixed price billing and when we did our rendering, ECS integration made the decision to go with metered billing based on how much compute usage only because I couldn't think of a good way to do the flat tiered billing because of the way ECS and render work.
Speaker 2:But it's been a pain. Meter billing is such a pain I want to throw it out and we're going to throw it out. We're going to migrate to just flat tiered pricing. It'll make our life easier. It'll make our customers' lives easier. It'll make it easier to understand what your price is going to be before you sign up for it Another one of those decisions that I'm having to undo from the initial render and ECS integration I feel your pain.
Speaker 1:Billing anytime is scary and difficult Figuring out how to do billing and then, even whenever you implement anything, any change feels dangerous because you're dealing with people's money. It's terrifying.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that was one of the best things about building on Heroku is that we didn't have to think about billing. Heroku handles all the billing. They charge a premium for it. It's an app store like Apple where they take a 30% cut. But the reality is I wouldn't be doing this full time if it weren't for Heroku's add-on marketplace, because I was able to just throw it in there and, with almost no marketing, people would just find it and sign up for it and start using it. So it just kind of grew slowly on its own. So I've never really had a problem paying that tax to be in the Heroku marketplace. But yeah, when we expanded beyond that, yeah, we had to handle the billing and so that was a whole new world and it is super stressful.
Speaker 1:So, now that you have to have billing outside of the heroku marketplace, is the idea to? Maybe it'll still be in the heroku marketplace? Because why not? But also we would prefer if you didn't for heroku customers.
Speaker 2:We're definitely still going to be in the marketplace and we'll still encourage that they go through the marketplace. But, yeah, for anybody who's not on heroku, obviously, when it comes to which hosting platform to use, I'm still a fan of Heroku. I still think Heroku is a great choice and we're still hosted on Heroku mostly. Yeah, we actually just moved our staging environment to render a month ago, but we're about to move it back. That's a whole nother thing. But, yeah, definitely still a fan of Heroku.
Speaker 1:If anybody's using Heroku, we're going to encourage them to go through the marketplace. We're not going to not dive into staging on render, but not for much longer. Was that an experiment? Was that just hey, let's see how render works. What was that move for and why are you moving back?
Speaker 2:It was sort of all of the above. It was my own curiosity. I wanted to see what's it like running an actual product on render. I wanted to see, cost-wise, how is that going to compare? Because our staging environment we call it a staging environment, but it's a very production-like environment Our staging app actually auto-scales our production app and our production app auto-scales our staging app, so our staging app still gets pretty decent traffic. So I wanted to see how the cost would compare.
Speaker 2:I wanted to see how the experience would compare and I'm trying to do more video content and that kind of thing and I thought this would be a good opportunity for some video content to show what's it like to migrate an app from Heroku to Render and then do some comparison there. But yeah, what's been interesting? After leaving it there for a month, I actually just got our first full month bill for the Render app and it's crazy, looking at the compute a lot cheaper than Heroku. But what was surprising is Render charges you for egress, so the outgoing bandwidth that Heroku doesn't charge you for, and that was 80% of our bill on render and that's something we didn't really account for when we experimented with the move and I'm like, yeah, if we move our product to render, it's going to be more expensive than Heroku. So that, amongst a few other, just little bumps along the road that just make Heroku a smoother experience.
Speaker 1:And I mean, if you're more comfortable and familiar with it, why not right? If it's not saving money or saving headache or anything, why bother?
Speaker 2:Yeah, but I definitely want to be able to serve our customers better. I want to be even more familiar and comfortable with all the platforms that we support, so I'm going to experiment with moving to Railway and fly, just to see what it's like.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it makes sense. Hey, these are the products we offer and here's if you're trying to move between them or anything, having that video content is always a nice thing.
Speaker 2:I appreciate video content like that we got a lot of people asking us for advice on how to choose between them, and it's hard because at the end of the day they all do the job well enough and it's kind of like try them out and see which one feels the best. It's a lot of work to try them out all individually, so maybe if I can try them all out and produce enough content to help out with that, yeah, even what you learned with render is oh yeah, the compute's about the same, so that's about the same.
Speaker 1:But if you have a high Ingress app, that's where Render gets expensive and maybe other people wouldn't know that. And that's a what is your app, what is your app doing, kind of follow-up question where we start getting into. Maybe there is one that is better than the other for certain types of apps.
Speaker 2:Yeah, one of the things that I want to build in the next month or two is a pricing calculator that covers all of the popular pass services Heroku, render, fly, railway because they all charge so differently. They all have their own pricing calculators that work differently. Some of them charge for egress, some of them don't. Some of them charge for team members, some of them don't. Some of them charge for team members, some of them don't. Especially as somebody who is still a fan of Heroku and sees a lot of the hate that Heroku gets on social media and whatnot, it's not as clear cut as you think. Yeah, heroku does have some dynos per fem that are ridiculously expensive and you should basically never use, but it doesn't mean that it's always going to be astronomically more expensive than the alternatives.
Speaker 1:Hidden costs and fees, and Ticketmaster springs to mind.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm not going to label any of them with Ticketmaster. That's brutal.
Speaker 1:So what kind of blockers do you currently have? Or, if there isn't a blocker that you're currently dealing with, what's a recent one that you had and what did you do to get yourself around it or over?
Speaker 2:it need to put some time and energy into marketing. So just making that time for marketing and forcing myself to do the hard work of marketing, that's just been a continual challenge. This year I hired my first full-time developer, carlos Antonio, who's a Rails core contributor, and I worked with him at a previous job. He's working with me full-time now. So that has helped me put some more time into marketing because I know he is going to keep moving the product forward even when I'm not Even with that.
Speaker 2:It's hard, because I really really like working on the product. There's a lot of things that I want to get done. One thing that I'm starting just this week actually, is a couple of friends of mine, colleen Schnettler and Leanna Patch. They are starting a new thing they're calling SaaS Marketing Gym, where I think it's mostly kind of solo founders like me or similar get together for an hour a day. It's like going to the gym. It's like an hour set aside where we're coming together, we have our goals in marketing and we're just going to focus on our marketing tasks and Leanna and Colleen are going to be there to help us get on, stock and bounce ideas off of and stuff like that. So actually doing my first gym session right after we finished recording this podcast. Yeah, I'm super excited about that. I think that's going to help me keep moving the ball forward on the marketing side of things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's interesting. I've talked to a few people now running their own SaaS or either as a solo or co-founder setup, but that seems to be the blocker. I don't know how to market. I don't know how I'm supposed to drive up people knowing about my product and without just talking about it 24-7, which feels weird. If I ever came up with a good enough idea to run with, that would be my big blocker too. I don't know how to tell people about my thing that I'm doing, and I wouldn't even know where to go to learn. You want to go learn how to code? There's a number of different places that will teach you how to code. Do those places exist for marketing, like a marketing bootcamp? Here's how to talk to people. Here's why this phrasing works better than this phrasing. I run into it with designers. Bump up that line by one pixel and use this font instead. The entire page changes Like how the heck did you see that?
Speaker 2:I can't see that until it's done, that is a big reason that I joined TinySeed is to get community and mentorship around marketing, because I did feel that was my huge gap, and part of it is knowing what to do, and the other part is just making yourself do it. Because, as a developer and I know a lot of developers can sympathize with us I don't like being marketed to, so I don't want to be the person who's always talking about my product, who's always pushing it on people. Obviously, there are tasteful ways to do it, there are authentic ways to do it, and so that's the challenge is how to promote your product, build awareness around your product, but in an authentic way that you're genuinely trying to help people and contribute to the overall community, rather than just tell people to use your thing.
Speaker 1:Well, I think your first judo scale commercial was a huge hit. I loved it at the very least. I got to ask how did you come up with that?
Speaker 2:You tweeted that you were looking for companies to sponsor prizes for the game show at RubyConf and I reached out to you. I was like, yeah, we'd love to sponsor some prizes. And that's when you threw out that, yeah, I've got extra time this year, so if you want to record a 30 second commercial, I'll show it on stage. The only requirement is that it has to be funny. And I was just oh well, I'm not going to do that. That's way too much pressure. I don't consider myself a funny person Like. That's not me.
Speaker 2:I was talking to a buddy of mine who actually helps me out on Judo scale. So, in addition to Carlos, who's full-time on Judo scale a friend of mine, local to central Ohio where I live, he spends a few hours a week with me on judo school. We get together at a coworking space and just kind of pair on things and bounce ideas off of each other. I was talking to him about it. One of the reasons I love working with him is he always pushes me out of my comfort zone. He always challenges me, and so I told him about this. This would be a huge distraction. I don't even know where we'd begin. He's like oh, we're definitely doing it. We're definitely doing it, yes. So yeah, he and I just went out to lunch and started throwing some ideas around.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he was the one who came up with the Billy Mays idea and then we actually used ChatGPT to write the initial script for it. We had the idea of let's have an actual scale. The actual scale is the judo scale and that's what we're selling in this infomercial. So we kind of described that to ChatGPT and it wrote the initial script, nailed the infomercial Billy Mays tone and everything. We tweaked it a ton but it really helped get us past the initial blank page. Where do we start? It gave us a starting point. We iterated on that. Once we felt good with the script, timed it and got it to that 30 second mark, we got together in his kitchen and recorded it in a couple hours and I spent maybe a day editing it. Probably didn't even need to spend that much. I was just having way too much fun adding sound effects and making the cuts and everything. It was so much fun.
Speaker 1:It turned out so great. I had that idea when I was at Railsworld I was talking to Josh Wood about a new Honeybadger was going to be sponsoring, because they sponsor the podcast now and I just, man, when I first first did this whole game show thing, I thought about having a commercial. When I first first did this whole game show thing, I thought about having like commercial. I don't know if you've ever seen any of wise old conference talks, but he was just super out there and he would throw random commercials in his talks. It wasn't a commercial, but it was like a video that came across like a commercial, but it would talk about Ruby stuff.
Speaker 1:Man, it'd be so funny to do commercials or something, and he's. I think we could do commercials. Why not? If you've got the hour now for a keynote, you could if you wanted to, and I was all right. Well, if you give me a 20 to 30 second commercial that's funny Then I'll roll with it and I'll talk to anyone else, offer it up, and I sent it to you too, and this is great way of being like thank you for sponsoring the prizes and also adding to the game show atmosphere. And, man, when I saw yours, I don't know if I could even play this on stage, because I can't stop laughing. It was so good, it's so good. I'm going to link it when I post about this. I think it's on your Blue Sky account too. You posted the full video, but I'll make sure it's in my post about this episode, because it is just so, so good.
Speaker 2:Thank you, I appreciate it. We got a lot of good feedback at the conference. The commercial didn't even really explain what Judo Scale does.
Speaker 1:Whatever, it's fun. It got people to Google Judo Scale, I guess, so okay. So the last question other than your new career in infomercial production, what is something cool, new or interesting that you've recently learned, discovered? Got into hobby-wise, code-wise, doesn't matter. What is something you want to share?
Speaker 2:It actually is related to the commercial, because I have been loving using Descript for making video content. I've been trying to make some more video content, whether it's for Blue Sky or LinkedIn or YouTube or a RubyConf commercial, and if you want to get into video content at all, I can't think of any reason not to use Descript. I'm not getting paid by them, it's just phenomenal. So Descript is a video editing app. You record in it, it transcribes your video and then you edit the script of the video and that edits the video for you. You cut out words from the script. It cuts out that part of the video. It actually does a really good job with the edit points too. Sometimes I have to tweak them, but most of the time I don't. Really good job with the edit points too. Sometimes I have to tweak them, but most of the time I don't. It can do the captions, it can do highlight reels. It can do so much. So yeah, if you want to get into video content, you've got to give Descript a try.
Speaker 1:It makes it so easy? Yeah, and I'll expand on that. If you are a new podcaster and you are not ready to have your own editor, but you want to clean up the audio feed, I used the script in the beginning too. It's really easy to reduce pauses. It'll automatically take out uhs and ums and all those filler words. Yeah, it also could edit the script right there. So you're like oh, I have to remember to take out that bumbling run-on sentence that I had there. You could just delete it and it will delete it for you.
Speaker 2:You might tweak the audio a little bit, but yeah it's a very cool application and it even has a library of sound effects and things like the sound effects that I put in the commercial. Those were in Descript's sound effects library that I was just able to throw in there. It was awesome.
Speaker 1:That's a good one. Yeah, I think that Descript is a wonderful product and has a lot of uses Video. I've used it for internal videos when I was at within three and, like we would go through refactoring, I would just record it. It was so cool because I don't know if I can do a video this is going to be crazy. But I was using Descript to do podcasting already and I was all right well, try their video feature and it made it so dummy easy to do what I was trying to do to do. I was very impressed by the final product to the point where I was wow, maybe this is a thing, and then it's not for me, but it's way too much work and I'm entirely too much of a perfectionist to do that. But yeah, it's such a cool tool. I believe my podcast editor, paul, who does a bunch of the other podcasts, edits in Descript also, so it is definitely a tool for the professionals too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the other thing I would add is, if anybody is kind of curious about doing video content but is intimidated by it at all, especially if you're thinking about needing to get specialized equipment or whatever. The other thing that I would recommend, if you have a modern iPhone and a modern Mac, your iPhone is an excellent webcam. I don't know if you published the video for these things. The camera that I'm using right now is my iPhone, just on a magnet clip at the top of my monitor, and, yeah, continuity mode is built into the newer Macs and I think it looks great. Obviously, you can get DSLR or whatever and get marginally better video, but I think the step up from a traditional webcam to using your iPhone as a webcam is huge and if you already have those things, you can make pretty good videos with minimal equipment. You got to get a good mic and a mic arm. That's the biggest thing. And, yeah, then use your iPhone, use Descript, you can make good stuff.
Speaker 1:I don't publish the videos. I've thought about it when YouTube started hosting podcasts, but no one wants to see this face. I don't want to see this face that much. So I try not to look in the mirror too often, even, but to piggyback on the. You can make minor improvements. Even lighting makes a huge difference. I have some cool lights. I can turn them off.
Speaker 1:Video is still fine, but to me it gets much better once you introduce some really good lighting too. So for sure, you know, it doesn't have to be the most spectacular camera I definitely don't have a very fancy camera but the lighting makes a huge difference. I even run the lighting just when I'm on a zoom call, just because it looks marginally better. So why not? So yeah, you can use your iphone, you can use some extra lighting. Doesn't have to be anything fancy, just a lamp with some more light will do. But yeah, I think the microphone, the audio, is in many ways the more important bit of even a video, because you got to hear what's going on. So is there anything else that you wanted to talk about? Touch on, discuss before we wrap.
Speaker 2:I'm talking about RailsConf. How are you feeling about RailsConf in Philadelphia? Does that excite you at all? I'm so excited.
Speaker 1:Could you tell at RubyConf me bouncing around like an over-caffeinated squirrel. I am pumped. We've never had a Ruby or RailsConf in Philadelphia, which is horrible in my opinion. Railsconf in Philadelphia, which is horrible in my opinion. But that will all change in July when RailsConf comes to Philly. The very last RailsConf will be in Philly. I'm super pumped.
Speaker 1:I'm actually going down to the city this weekend for a different event, but it'll be in the same area of operation as where the conference will be. So I'm going to do a little bit more than just my mindless walking around and just, oh, that smells good. I'll go in this restaurant. I'm going to kind of hit some places that I know I want to get good information on and send that back to Ruby Central to try and help make a visitor's guide and the big things like Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell People know about that.
Speaker 1:But what else is there in Philly? What's surrounding Philly? In case you're coming out for a longer period of time and you're bringing the family because it's in July instead of a weird in school month this time there's a lot of cool stuff around Philly, in Philly. So I'm very excited to do that kind of stuff, see how many people come out and go. Yeah, you're right, philly is really cool. I'm glad we had this experience here. But, yeah, great food. The area that the conference will be in is a lot of fun, so very, very excited.
Speaker 2:I'm excited too. It's going to be the first conference that we'll be an official sponsor of. We're going to have a booth and hoping to get the whole JudoSkill team out there all three of us. We're talking about being uncomfortable doing the marketing stuff. The idea of standing at a booth and having to talk to people about JudoSkill as they walk up to it is absolutely terrifying to me. It's time. It's time to force myself out of my comfort zone and do that.
Speaker 1:You can also take a page out of Honey Badger's book. I think Ben and Josh do a great job. They just have this booth with couches and they're there and they're chilling and maybe they're hacking on something with someone and they've got a banner and if someone comes up and they go, hey, what's Honey Badger? They'll get up and they'll talk to them, but otherwise it's just a cool space to hang out and chill and I feel like everybody knows what Honey Badger is. Oh, definitely that kind of passive marketing in a way at a place like RailsConf can be awesome and you'll have a TV playing your Billy Mays commercial.
Speaker 2:There's only so many honey badger ideas that I can steal before it just becomes disgusting. So I love their lounge where come, hang out and chill. We'll have to think of something unique to do with our booth.
Speaker 1:What's the swag situation going to be like? What are you doing? Don't know. Yet I start brainstorming. That's the key. That's how you get them. When you give them cool stuff, they'll remember you forever.
Speaker 2:My one rule is whatever swag we bring, it's going to be a one size fits all. We're not bringing different sizes of t-shirts. Figure, how many of each size do you need to bring? Like no, it's just going to be whatever, it is One size fits all.
Speaker 1:Don't want an extra suitcase like Josh brings of just a ton of t-shirts in a giant rolling case, because I really bring a million of them, Although I will say you do have very cool t-shirts. I love the auto scale and chill t-shirt. They're very soft and comfortable and they come in a variety of colors. But the auto scale and chill is funny to me. It makes sense and it's a very good t-shirt.
Speaker 2:I did an initial run of rails auto scale t-shirts back in the day, had them made in a bunch of different sizes and stuff like that, and then it ended up just with a closet full of t-shirts. And then we rebranded and still have a closet full of t-shirts. I decided I wasn't going to make that choice again. So, yeah, when we made the judo scale shirts, we're going to do them print on demand as people want one, which, yeah, if you're listening to this and you want a judo scale shirt, shoot me an email, adam, at judoscalecom.
Speaker 1:I'll get you a t-shirt. I recommend them. They're comfy and hilarious. So I was wearing mine at RubyConf and I will be wearing mine at RailsConf. Well, cool man, how can people find you on the internet? Yeah, I'm.
Speaker 2:AdamLogic on BlueSky. Adamlogic on LinkedIn. We are judoscalecom. If you're interested in auto-scaling your web app, yeah, I think that's it Wherever and auto-scaling your web app yeah, I think that's it.
Speaker 1:Wherever it may be hosted. Adam at JudoScalecom.
Speaker 2:I'm not covering that hosting platform. I'm still old school and love email. Shoot me an email, adamatjudoscalecom. I'd love to hear from you. Awesome, awesome.
Speaker 1:Billy.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah.
Speaker 1:So excited Yay to chat with us. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Drew, this was a lot of.
