134: The Edge of Safety  🔗 **Source:** [134: The Edge of Safety](https://share.snipd.com/episode/adb00c69-0d75-48b5-9974-d81ed6b2d9bf) ## Highlights - **Building Outro Replaced Trello** - Aaron describes building Outro from scratch and preferring it to Trello because it centralizes ads, timers, and sponsor workflows. - He used AI (the Gopher) to auto-generate ads from a copy-paste of ad text, speeding weekly ad prep. Transcript: Ian Landsman It's been great. Whoa. I'm using it. It's helpful. I'm looking at it right now. We've got all our stuff lined up. We got the ads. How are you feeling about it? Aaron Francis Good. I still don't know if everything's dialed in exactly where I want it, but I feel like it works well. I like using it. It helps the show. And that's like the core. If I got that core, then from there, whatever, like I can add things and tweak UI and fix stuff, whatever. But like, I don't want to go back to using Trello. Like I like the ads here, right? Like we have a who's reading the ads for Token Town. We have even more that we're doing timers and stuff and like we're using all the things. So I think the core is there. I think the ideas sound. So that's good. I still have a little work to do. We'll talk later about some technical stuff I did. But I like I'll be happy to get some other people in there. It'll be interesting to get some other feedback, I think. Yeah. I'm ready for that to happen. Ian Landsman No, we're not doing that. That's content. That's the best content. We got a little while to go. When are we going to get one more podcast? It could be a friendly. It doesn't have to be Stranger Money. When are you going to get one more podcast on here? I don't know. Aaron Francis I want to see how this big, I did this big, I gutted some stuff this weekend. I want to see how that goes for us on Token Town this week. Because it's going to flex that more than what we're doing right here. And if that's okay, ([Time 0:02:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3519d934-bc62-44e0-ab8f-d32fa5e419ed)) - **Kelsey Landed A Hark Labs Offer From X DM** - Ian recounts hiring Kelsey via a cold DM on X after she proved skills on a public agent challenge and later leaving for a high-paying AI engineering role. - Kelsey solved an aggressive popup/browser challenge with an agent, DM'd the poster, and landed a job at Hark Labs after sharing her screen recording. Transcript: Ian Landsman My Kelsey is gone. No. She's gone. Aaron Francis What happened to your Kelsey? My Kelsey got a job. Okay. Oh, shoot. I just continue. I screwed up something here, but we're good. Ian Landsman So this is you're going to love this. This is the power of X.com, the everything app. Okay. Yeah. So first of all, Kelsey got her job with me, with Steve and I at the time through X, right? She listened to the podcast she sent me a dm that was like hey i think i'm perfect here's why and that was it she was perfect she was right that's why she was perfect yeah um just a cold outreach Just a cold tailored outreach said i've been listening to the pod. Here's what I think you need. Here's why I think you're, or I'm the right person to do it. Flawless execution. Aaron Francis This is why you should have a podcast, by the way, too. Ian Landsman Yes. This is why you should have a podcast or advertise on our podcast. Even better. ActuallyTechnical.com. So I should have known that Kelsey was not long for try hard studios. She's too qualified. She's too good. Okay. So she comes to me maybe a couple months ago and she's like, Hey, I'm going to be out of town all next week. And I'm like, that's awesome. Have fun. Enjoy. And she said, I'm actually going to be out of town because I'm going to California to do this contract job. And I'm like, that sounds amazing. Tell me more. Like, what's the story? So, dear Kelsey, Kelsey was on X.com, the Everything app, and she saw someone post. And I'll tell you who in a second. But she saw someone post a challenge, basically. And the challenge was like a screen recording of a browser with like super offensive, not like super egregious pop ups. Right. Like you basically go to like any news website and you'll get like 50 pop ups. Right. So the screen recording was of that sort of thing. And the challenge said, hey, if you can get your agent to solve this, basically like this uncontrolled, aggressive browser environment, if you can get your agent to solve this, I've Got a job for you. It said something like, I've got a $200,000 a year plus equity job for you. And so I saw this post. I saw it come across my feed. And I was like, oh, that's actually pretty cool. And we'll put a link to this post in the show notes. But if you look below the post now, you'll see a reply from one K.R. Petrick, who is Kelsey something Petrick. And so she replied and said, hey, I took a crack at it and i think i did it here you go here's my screen recording and the original poster responded something like i dm'd you or dm me basically Like you got it this is it this is perfect so kelsey on a lark figured out how to make some agent i don't know which one figured out how to make some agent navigate this super hostile browser Environment. Posted posted proof that she did it and got the job. That's crazy. She got the job. So she's like somebody. She's like a member of the technical staff. You know, she's been doing operations and stuff for me but for this company she's full-on like technical engineer yeah wow and yeah so she came to me she came to me after you know she told Me up front and then came to me after a while and was like man this is going good like it's going really well they want me, because at that point she was a contractor and she'd been out to California A few times. And she said, they want me, they want me full time. Like they want to hire me as an engineer. And I was, and I was like, Kelsey, you have to do it. Like you have to do it, obviously. And so, you know, she told me like, I know how much i'm paying her and she told me how much they're paying her and i was like kelsey you would be insane not to do this you have to quit and of course She wanted like she wanted to take the new job but i think she really enjoys like us working together and so she's been super generous with i'll help you transition and like i'll write Everything down she's been nothing but professional uh and i'm i'm super thrilled for her but so the the job that she took listen to this you know have you ever heard of brett adcock the Figure robotics guy uh sounds vaguely familiar not somebody i like follow but so brett brett adcock has a company that makes humanoid robots um so already has a soft spot in my heart because You know i love you i love a human robot it's a great form of suit nothing's better than that dude nothing better than that so uh brett brett adcock started a new company called hark which I believe is going to be like the software side of it um and hark is hark is the company that she is working for and so the other day brett adcock tweeted a picture out and kelsey was there It was like it was like yeah it was like this billion dollar founder and these of these three other dudes and then kelsey and they all just have their laptops and it's just like, what's Up? Part of the team, baby. Yeah. Isn't that the craziest thing you've ever heard? So she works for Hark. Let me see. It's in her bio now. Hark Labs. Hark says, we are building the most advanced personal intelligence in the world. They just raised a series a hark just raised a series a of 700 million dollars at 700 million or they raised 700 million must have been at 700 today we're excited to announce over 700 million Aaron Francis In series a funding holy cow that's crazy yeah holy cow that's crazy and kelsey is those good stock options she is in before the series a that's a good spot to be in at wow so what is this as Ian Landsman As i feared we will all end up working for kelsey day. Aaron Francis That was my fear from the beginning. Just for your AI. Hold on. Hark sits between your AI models and real workflows for scalable, expert-controlled decision-making. Ian Landsman Yeah, who knows what they do? Aaron Francis Who freaking knows? I got no idea. But it's worth $6 billion dollars so you can't be mad about that i mean i think you know kelsey if you get the chance to take a little taste off the top when they do the series b you know i'm Just saying you might want to cash in a few bucks you might want you know there's ([Time 0:12:17](https://share.snipd.com/snip/956fbe57-2bb8-4b16-b470-e7e05e5faec8)) - **Hire A Trusted Operator To Run Everything Else** - Ian hired Sam as a full-time Director of Operations and instructs her to centralize all non-creative tasks, including payroll, contracts, taxes, and boosting household income. - He requires strong trust, shared team 1Password, and onboarding to handle invoices, sales, and personal financial coordination. Transcript: Ian Landsman This person her name is sam okay and sam is uh actually very similar to kel in that she is ruthlessly competent. She can just do the job and do it well. Okay. So I've known Sam for eight years now. Okay. I used to work with Sam. Sam was my first hire at the property tax firm. Not the first person hired, but my first hire when I was in charge. And Sam was originally hired as like office manager, basically. So she came in and she basically ran the office, ran the front desk, which in our case was mostly phones, not walk-ins. And from, you know, the first day that I hired her until the day that I left, she just accumulated more and more power by sheer competence. Yes, she's just good at her job. And so by the time I left, I left as COO and Sam was my right-hand person. She had graduated through customer service office. She was basically managing all of the customer service team and most of the non-property tax agents by the time that I left. And so I completely, completely trust Sam. That's the big part of it. Because if I'm going to hire someone to basically run not only the business, but run my life, I have to, it has to be somebody that I trust. Wait a minute, she's running your life too? She's running my life. We'll get there. Yes. Yes. All right. So Kelsey right now, Kelsey has access to my personal email. Oh, right. My work email. My LinkedIn, my Twitter. She has access to it all. Okay? Yeah. And that came with time with Kelsey, right? Because I haven't known her for a decade. So I had to find someone that I super um because i'm going to basically let them rob me blind if they want to so i had to find someone i super trusted and someone that was ruthlessly competent And sam and i we get lunch maybe you know once a quarter two three times a year just to like hang out um and at one point she was basically like, man, property tax after eight years is not that It's not that exciting anymore. I don't want to do property tax. The excitement's worn off. Yeah, exactly. You know, it used to be so sexy, but now and so it just kind of worked out that she was wanting to quit at the same time Kelsey was moving on. And so it just it just happened like the timing just lined up perfectly. And so she's going to start today. She's coming over to the apartment after the podcast and we're going to get her set up on everything. And I have told her that her her mandate is one. She's just going to run the business right she is going to be um everything that is not the content or product creation and so that means that means taxes invoices uh contracts sales uh For frontline customer support all of that stuff okay um and she's basically going to be my manager and keep me on track because i need somebody to be like dude this course is due and you Have to start on it oh that's a good point um but her mandate is to make the francis household more money and so her mandate her mandate all the way to our personal bank account, our personal Taxes. I don't like any of this. I know you don't. Our personal taxes, my personal financial advisor. So I'm going to put her in touch with my financial advisor. And stuff like, Hey, I want you to talk to our, our tax lady. And I want you to talk to my financial advisor guy. And I want you to figure out should try hard, try hard, try hard studios, the company hire our personal babysitter on try hard payroll, like figure out if that's legal, figure out if that Would save me money. Figure out if that ends up with more money in my bank account at the end of the year. Aaron Francis You got to do the R&D credit. Are you doing the R&D credit? Sam, are you listening? We got to do the R&D credit. Do the R&D credit. That's the one you're going to make the most money on. Everybody gets caught up in these like, should I hire my babysitter bullshit? That's just going to get you put in jail. First of all, how dare you? Ian Landsman Second of all that's a great idea to hire the r&d credit is what you want to do that's the biggest bang for your buck you're gonna so i told i told sam her job on day zero uh is to set herself Up on payroll like that's what i'm talking about i can't i can't i just can't do it i can't do i can't do any of it i just can't and so yeah she's gonna be she's gonna be in charge of everything Um i think her her starting official title is like director of operations but that's only because she needs room for title growth and promotions and raises. I mean, at some point, ideally she's president of the Francis empire. She's, she's my Tom Crary, you know, that's what I, that's what I'm hiring for. Um, so yeah, she, she's going to come over today. We're going to get her logged in to one password and everything. And yeah, she's going to start, she's all these tasks that I've been putting off, including, you know, 100 unread emails. I know. Aaron Francis Isn't it great? It's great. I don't know. You're not getting my total stamp of approval on this. I mean, on the tryhard side, I think it's great. Like all that stuff, that all sounds very good. I'm down with all that. Definitely need somebody to do those things. ([Time 0:24:56](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5332bd58-6c2b-47e9-91c6-afe0c03186d9)) - **Access Expands Your Attack Surface** - Aaron warns that giving an assistant full access increases attack surface and phishing risk, even with 2FA. - He recommends operational controls, separate accounts or isolated user sessions to limit blast radius if credentials are compromised. Transcript: Aaron Francis It great? It's great. I don't know. You're not getting my total stamp of approval on this. I mean, on the tryhard side, I think it's great. Like all that stuff, that all sounds very good. I'm down with all that. Definitely need somebody to do those things. Somebody to say, hey, you're on Hell Week 3. We need you rested up and ready for the big game next week. Let's not do Hell Week 4 this week, and let's be ready to go. So I think that could be good. Somebody to help keep you in line. And all your personal stuff, your personal email. I don't like it. Because here's the thing. It's not just about do you trust her, which is a separate issue. And I'm going to go back to this thing I've been talking about a lot lately. I'm going to keep hammering it to all the listeners and to you, which is you have security issues now where the phishing emails are incredibly good. The hacks are incredibly good. They're only getting better. You're now increasing your attack surface to a whole other person who has access to all your stuff. They're going to be logged into everything. And now if she gets hacked, not only is her stuff gone, but your stuff is gone. I don't like it. I don't like it. It's too much access. Ian Landsman Well, we'll have to have good operational controls in place. Aaron Francis It's going to happen. There's no way around it. There's no way around it. I just can't do it. I think there is a way around it. She can be responsible for all that stuff without your personal email. I think your personal email should be yours. Ian Landsman I'm sensitive to don't give her my Gmail password, but giving her access to my inbox is a necessity. It really is. Cause I get, I get a lot of business emails to my Gmail inbox that just kind of get lost. Aaron Francis What, what about, I mean, but if she's logged into your Gmail, it doesn't matter if she has the password, right? Like if somebody gets it to her computer, they could just do anything they want. They, they're logged into your email so they can like reset your passwords and they can do all the stuff. That's how it goes. Ian Landsman I don't like it. I don't like it. You got to risk a little to get a reward as the old saying goes. What about this? Aaron Francis What about she sets up Aaron Francis 2 at gmail.com. Okay. Okay. And you auto-forward all your email. I don't like that either because then they're still going to let somebody hack you. Same thing. Yeah. Okay, I don't like that. What about, I don't know. There's no good way around it because it's a bad idea. We're trying to invent a way around this bad idea. Ian Landsman I don't like it. No, it's a good idea. No, it's a bad idea. We're just trying to make it a better idea. Aaron Francis Okay, what about this? Here's a way to do it quasi safely. A separate computer. Not her computer. She has a computer for her stuff, and she has a separate computer that's like pretty much for your business and personal emails and like doesn't really do anything else but that. Ian Landsman I'm amenable to that. But then I'd have to buy her a second computer. Aaron Francis Well, use for that you could even use like uh you know some virtual whatever potentially maybe i'm amenable i'm not i'm not sold but i'm open to it gotta watch your blast surface or or she Could do what i do with the ai which is she can have a second account on her computer that she goes over into fast user switching and that's where she does the aaron francis personal email That i'm open to yeah you need the isolation you don't want something that something stupid happens on one account and it crosses over into the other account it's bad that i'm open to Ian Landsman Okay we'll see yeah i still retain two factor auth on almost everything. So like if some, if some bad actor got access to her computer and then through her computer got access to my email and then through that got access to my GitHub, they still can't publish A release or anything because I have two factor auth set up. Same for like Cloudflare login, same for Capital One login. So I still have two-factor auth for most of that stuff. Aaron Francis Yeah. Could they? Yeah. That's probably. That's good. We're right at the edge of safety there. We're at the final run. Yeah, but that's what the two-factor is for, the edge of safety. And she's not going to have access to your 1Password because you were saying. Ian Landsman No, we have a shared, we have a team 1Password. Aaron Francis If I need to, I share passwords in the vault with Kelsey. Yeah, that's good. So definitely want to separate that. Yeah. Okay. That's better. I can live with that. Ian Landsman Okay. We got him to I can live with it. That's where we stop. We don't push any further. We got an I can live with it. We count that as a win. ([Time 0:30:52](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4498f201-0a43-4c32-baca-d9fafcaeb5f8)) - **Isolate Sensitive Accounts With Separate Machines** - Aaron suggests isolating roles by using a separate computer account or a dedicated machine for sensitive work to reduce cross-account compromise risk. - He also recommends keeping 2FA enabled and using team 1Password vaults for shared credentials. Transcript: Aaron Francis A separate computer. Not her computer. She has a computer for her stuff, and she has a separate computer that's like pretty much for your business and personal emails and like doesn't really do anything else but that. Ian Landsman I'm amenable to that. But then I'd have to buy her a second computer. Aaron Francis Well, use for that you could even use like uh you know some virtual whatever potentially maybe i'm amenable i'm not i'm not sold but i'm open to it gotta watch your blast surface or or she Could do what i do with the ai which is she can have a second account on her computer that she goes over into fast user switching and that's where she does the aaron francis personal email That i'm open to yeah you need the isolation you don't want something that something stupid happens on one account and it crosses over into the other account it's bad that i'm open to Ian Landsman Okay we'll see yeah i still retain two factor auth on almost everything. So like if some, if some bad actor got access to her computer and then through her computer got access to my email and then through that got access to my GitHub, they still can't publish A release or anything because I have two factor auth set up. Same for like Cloudflare login, same for Capital One login. So I still have two-factor auth for most of that stuff. Aaron Francis Yeah. Could they? Yeah. That's probably. That's good. We're right at the edge of safety there. We're at the final run. Yeah, but that's what the two-factor is for, the edge of safety. And she's not going to have access to your 1Password because you were saying. Ian Landsman No, we have a shared, we have a team 1Password. Aaron Francis If I need to, I share passwords in the vault with Kelsey. Yeah, that's good. So definitely want to separate that. Yeah. Okay. That's better. I can live with that. Ian Landsman Okay. We got him to I can live with it. ([Time 0:33:28](https://share.snipd.com/snip/afac1bbc-3db3-4d6e-a9dd-8e4838bbe48f)) - **Switched From WebSockets To 0.5s Polling** - Aaron replaced flaky websockets and broadcasting with aggressive client polling every 0.5s for Outro’s Livewire pages, trading elegance for reliability. - He stores lightweight state in Redis so polls hit fast and avoid DB load, improving perceived responsiveness. Transcript: Ian Landsman Is a little a little old man screams at cloud get ready and screams at cloud a little bit. Aaron Francis You know, we've been using it. And it's like you, me, and producer Dave. And we're in there. We're clicking things all at the same time, which is always an annoying thing to make work on the internet. You know, it's like feels like it should be a solid problem, but it's not totally solved. So I had pusher set up. I had web hooks and things are web sockets, not web hooks. Web sockets or sending messages and things are happening. Just all a little flaky, a little funky. So I decided to try something different. I ripped it all out and I replaced it with just polling. Everybody polls and we're polling right now every half second, which I think on the IR page, I might want to even go faster. But it's polling. It's just slamming the server. Just pull, pull, pull, pull, pull. And it seems much better. Like it's just reliable you have the one central point uh it's much faster because i think i was using i'm using it with livewire and the way it was working was not sending the actual content Through the web socket but it's just like basically an event that's like hey this updated and then so we have to receive the event and then livewire would have to go and refresh and then Come back um i don't know if that was some of the flakiness but anyway the polling seems better so far it's definitely simpler and the polling endpoints very fast the there's like a thing In redis so it's not even hitting the database on every poll And so far, so good. The AI did a nice job swapping it out. Ian Landsman Yeah, so I'm looking at the network requests right now, and you're polling an endpoint, or maybe Livewire is called LiveState. It is polling, I think you said every, I don't know, it makes it hard to say. Every half second. Yeah, that looks about right. I will say each poll takes 260 milliseconds. So it's not nothing. Not nothing. But you are sending back one payload. I'm looking at the payloads now. One payload with all the segments and their data structures, scheduled episodes, running segments, server time. So, yeah, you're getting the whole page. You have some sort of like probably HTTP resource, or I guess it's Livewire, so something else. And you're polling every half second to get the whole state of the page, and then presumably Livewire diffs that state and brings the UI into the format. Aaron Francis You're not getting the whole state of like... You're not getting all the HTML. It's just like a JSON thing of like the segments and their IDs. Maybe you have to... So if I was to edit... Ian Landsman If I was to edit a segment, would you get the live update on your side or would you have to refresh? Aaron Francis No, I'll get because the poll, the poll is just getting a like, like a counter of what's if something has changed and then if it has, it will then refresh. Then Livewire will refresh. I see. Okay. Ian Landsman I don't know if you don't, if you don't like me giving Sam access to Gmail, I don't like you ripping out WebSockets for polling, if I'm being honest. No? No? Too old school? Too old school. Aaron Francis I'm only getting 160 milliseconds, you know, but I wonder, you're even closer, I think, than I am. That's kind of interesting. Ian Landsman Who can say? So, I don't like it. It's fine. I don't like it. I like the direction you were headed with the WebSocket basically sends me kind of like a notification that something has changed. About WebSockets is trying to keep the shape of the payload the same across the WebSocket and wherever the data came from in the first place, right? Typically, the HTTP sends out the shape of the data, and then the WebSocket, if you want to just get live updates, has to send that exact same shape out whenever something changes. That's more doable with something like a DTO or a HTTP resource or something but I have always found so back to property tax we had a lot of this live updating stuff and basically what we Did was uh we ended up in a spot where we had model listeners um we had model listeners like at the Laravel level. And anytime a model changed in any model that was like opted into this system, anytime a model changed, we sent out a small like identity event that said, here's the model class and here's The ID. And it was just updated. If any front end cares about any of this information, you have to subscribe to it and then you have to refetch. And that kept our whole system live because then every page could optionally opt into, all right, well, I have, you know, this user and this property and this invoice on this page. And so I'm just going to subscribe to those three events. And wherever in the system they got changed later, a web hook, or I'm sorry, a web socket would go out and then that page would refetch its own data. That's what I like. So how was that? It sounds like that's what it was doing. Yeah, so how did that fall apart? Aaron Francis I don't know. It just was like a little flaky. But there is, I was using the like way you officially do it with Livewire and like, and the Laravel event system and all that stuff and broadcasting. So I don't know. There's a world where like I did it down at the more native level and then just kind of manually fight which is in some ways kind of how this works now and just had a little more control over When things were fresh as opposed to like assuming the orchestration of everything because you kind of get into the situation where like there was a whole bunch of stuff listening for A whole bunch of different listeners and it's like right like oh I gotta listen to these seven different listeners now I'm listening for seven different events now. This one thing. And I give all this stuff, listen to all these different things. And like, it was just all a little flaky. But maybe there's a world where like I do it at a different level and maybe it's even less granular. And it's more like, hey, like something changes episode. Like go refresh the whole thing. Right. Possibly. Although that seems not ideal also. I don't know. We're going to try the polling because I can go back to WebSockets, but the polling, I love the central sort of, which is how the events was supposed to work too, but I don't know. We saw a lot of flakiness with it. Could be implementation sure. It's because you're using Claw and not Codex. Codex checks everything I do. What are you talking about? Codex doesn't escape. Back then, maybe. Well, Codex might have wrote some of that back then. But I don't know. ([Time 0:42:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2b2270a3-0bd7-480a-b1c1-8a7023cd7694)) - **Polling Beats WebSockets For Low Concurrency** - Aaron and Ian highlight that polling can be simpler and more robust than WebSockets for low-concurrency collaborative pages, reducing edge-case flakiness. - They note websockets add reconnection and tab-suspension complexity that polling sidesteps for small teams. Transcript: Ian Landsman I don't know if you don't, if you don't like me giving Sam access to Gmail, I don't like you ripping out WebSockets for polling, if I'm being honest. No? No? Too old school? Too old school. Aaron Francis I'm only getting 160 milliseconds, you know, but I wonder, you're even closer, I think, than I am. That's kind of interesting. Ian Landsman Who can say? So, I don't like it. It's fine. I don't like it. I like the direction you were headed with the WebSocket basically sends me kind of like a notification that something has changed. About WebSockets is trying to keep the shape of the payload the same across the WebSocket and wherever the data came from in the first place, right? Typically, the HTTP sends out the shape of the data, and then the WebSocket, if you want to just get live updates, has to send that exact same shape out whenever something changes. That's more doable with something like a DTO or a HTTP resource or something but I have always found so back to property tax we had a lot of this live updating stuff and basically what we Did was uh we ended up in a spot where we had model listeners um we had model listeners like at the Laravel level. And anytime a model changed in any model that was like opted into this system, anytime a model changed, we sent out a small like identity event that said, here's the model class and here's The ID. And it was just updated. If any front end cares about any of this information, you have to subscribe to it and then you have to refetch. And that kept our whole system live because then every page could optionally opt into, all right, well, I have, you know, this user and this property and this invoice on this page. And so I'm just going to subscribe to those three events. And wherever in the system they got changed later, a web hook, or I'm sorry, a web socket would go out and then that page would refetch its own data. That's what I like. So how was that? It sounds like that's what it was doing. Yeah, so how did that fall apart? Aaron Francis I don't know. It just was like a little flaky. But there is, I was using the like way you officially do it with Livewire and like, and the Laravel event system and all that stuff and broadcasting. So I don't know. There's a world where like I did it down at the more native level and then just kind of manually fight which is in some ways kind of how this works now and just had a little more control over When things were fresh as opposed to like assuming the orchestration of everything because you kind of get into the situation where like there was a whole bunch of stuff listening for A whole bunch of different listeners and it's like right like oh I gotta listen to these seven different listeners now I'm listening for seven different events now. This one thing. And I give all this stuff, listen to all these different things. And like, it was just all a little flaky. But maybe there's a world where like I do it at a different level and maybe it's even less granular. And it's more like, hey, like something changes episode. Like go refresh the whole thing. Right. Possibly. Although that seems not ideal also. I don't know. We're going to try the polling because I can go back to WebSockets, but the polling, I love the central sort of, which is how the events was supposed to work too, but I don't know. We saw a lot of flakiness with it. Could be implementation sure. It's because you're using Claw and not Codex. Codex checks everything I do. What are you talking about? Codex doesn't escape. Back then, maybe. Well, Codex might have wrote some of that back then. But I don't know. Polling is so simple though, you know? Polling is so simple. There's not like, oh, I got disconnected from the WebSocket. Like, there was a bunch of code for, like, sometimes you, like, tab away, and then you come back, and it doesn't just automatically refresh sometimes. And then you're just in a dead state, and you're not getting any WebSockets. Like, we had that happen. Like, so there's a lot of, like, these little edge things with the WebSockets that I don't really love. ([Time 0:44:58](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a5990217-41db-41df-8499-b4f4537067c3)) - **Pay For A Queue Floor To Avoid Cold Starts** - Aaron wants managed queues with a configurable floor so workers never scale to zero and avoid startup latency; he’d pay for a persistent baseline worker count. - He recommends Laravel Cloud add an option to keep a minimum number of workers running. Transcript: Aaron Francis So I haven't even really played with them. I just threw them on last night, but I was like, yes, I had some like worker cluster. The old way they did stuff like with kind of hard to see what was going on in the queues. So this new way seems great. I haven't played with it much, but they have managed queues. You just say, this is my default queue or this is my named queue. Give it all the like, whatever, based on back pressure, up and down. And it's all magical. And even better than that part is just that, like, you can just go in and see what failed jobs there are. And it's got like graphs and stuff. So you can just see what's going on in the queue, which is so it's kind of like a horizon-y yeah sort of thing and then um the other bit uh yeah so the only thing that i would have seen so far That and taylor even sort of mentioned it in a tweet this morning or linked to a blog post that mentioned it i should say uh which is they're working on like when you go to zero how to like Increase the startup time or whatever, because it can take like 10 seconds, I guess, to if you have like a not that busy app, which right now I do. But see, I think that they should just let you have a right now go zero to 25 or something of simultaneous workers. But I just want to be able to go stay at one. Like, just give me one all the time i'll pay the 10 bucks or whatever like just let it be running all the time then i never have any startup weight which is what i would like so if any of you Out there listening give me a one option let me have a floor you have a ceiling let me have a floor so i can always keep x running no matter what and that would be cool but uh and that's just Ian Landsman Money in the pocket at Laravel Cloud. You want to pay more. Yes, let me pay more. Aaron Francis Yes, I just want to raise the floor a little bit and never go to zero. Ian Landsman And this is why you never ship software because users always have more requests. ([Time 0:51:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2088da74-31c9-4100-b9b1-378af593d095)) - **Backstage With Kelsey Hightower On Set** - Ian judged a Jason Lengstorf-produced developer competition in Portland hosted by Kelsey Hightower and described high production values and backstage mentorship. - Kelsey gave Ian tactical career, contract, and billing advice and offered ongoing contact by phone. Transcript: Ian Landsman After Token Town on Thursday, I ran out the door and got on an airplane to portland i know this is a big secret we nobody even knew nobody knows you just showed up you were like hey i'm recording Something here and i'm moving silence yeah um so first of all portland is somehow like austin but weirder okay i've never been to Portland or Austin. It's very weird. It's got that Austin vibe, but maybe even more so than Austin. Austin's gone a little corporate with all the money. Portland is not corporate. So I went to Portland because, have you heard of Jason Lengsdorf? I have. Yes. He makes these highly produced, basically like TV shows for focusing on developers. Uh, long time ago, I was on one called the web dev challenge. I was on with Kent C Dodds and went out to San Francisco to record it. Super fun four hour builds thing. He's doing a new show that is being recorded over multiple weeks. I don't want to give too many details. Multiple weeks and requires judges. And so I was not a contestant on this when I was a judge, which is awesome. Aaron Francis I love that. That is awesome. I love that. That's way better than being a contestant. Ian Landsman Way better than having to do something, show up and criticize everyone else. So the host of this show is none other than Kelsey Hightower who is internet famous very very prolific inspirational speaker engineer developer now retired from Google. Was it Microsoft or Google? Aaron Francis It was Google. Ian Landsman Really? Yeah, I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure. Kelsey Hightower. What is Microsoft? He's the big, cute guy. No, distinguished engineer at Google. Aaron Francis Yeah. Oh, okay. Maybe you started at Microsoft? Maybe I'm making this whole thing up? Ian Landsman Maybe you're making the whole thing up. That could be. So Kelsey Hightower was the host, which is awesome because I've never gotten to meet him in person. And I have a huge amount of respect for him. Turns out he's even better in person than I imagined online. He seems like a great guy. Oh, dude, he's fantastic. So, you know, he was the host and I'm one of the judges. And then Jason, the show creator is the other judge. And so while these people are doing their tasks, we're just hanging, like we got nothing to do, which is awesome. And so at one point, you know, I grabbed Kelsey and I was like, Hey, I just want you to business dad for a second. And he was like, come on, let's go. And so like, we were backstage he's like let's go out here and so we walked out to the you know the area where we could talk and we sat down and i just basically told him what i'm up to and told Him what i want and he got his phone out and started showing me like here's my one page contract with these conferences here's where i keep track of stuff here's what i bill here's how i Negotiate here's like maybe the playbook dude here's how i invest as a solo like a single member llc here are the tax structures in which i invest you got to get the sephira you got it because If you do that you can pull it out and he's just like for like 30 or 40 minutes, he was just dropping bombs on me. And then I was like, okay, I know you're not on X.com. Like, I'm barely on Blue Sky. Can I get a hold of you there? And he was like, oh, just get out your phone. And he, you know, did the little Apple magic thing. And he's like, there's my contact. Just text me anytime you need me. I'm like, dude, this is the nicest guy in the world and like if there's if there's anyone that i could pattern a career after it would be kelsey like super smart amazing engineer but has Turned that into more of the like public speaking uh conference content kind of stuff um it seems like a nice vibe if you can kind of come up with a shtick that like yeah exactly you can reuse Your stuff kind of across conferences and like get well known enough across industries exactly so that part was incredible just being able to like be a part of something with him and Hang out with him and talk to him um and then seeing how this operation ran i mean they had probably five camera operators two audio engineers three or four lighting people um it's aws Sponsored now or something this is yeah so jason tweeted that this is an aws sponsored show um and so it was a it was a big production um and it was, it was a lot of fun. It was super, super fun. I love being a 70s movie star. I would go on set. You know, somebody, somebody would come out and touch up my makeup and then let my shirt. Yes. I'm dead serious. They were like, Oh, let me get you some eye drops. So let me touch up, you know, the bags under your eyes. And it's like, Oh, I got two kids. And then somebody would come out and roll my T-shirt for Lent. I was like, this is incredible. Wow. Did you have to go back? Or you did your episode? So I was there. I'm a guest judge for a one week, like one episode. And so Jason and Kelsey are consistent throughout all. I think it'll end up being six episodes and then I'm on one week of the show, one episode. So I stayed for two days. Friday, Saturday, we did filming and so I came back on Sunday. ([Time 0:54:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/85e60cde-6613-4c24-baba-178f81b11306)) - **Create A Static SlashBrag Directory** - Ian bought slashbrag.com and asks the community to add static slash brag pages via PRs to a simple JSON directory hosted on Cloudflare. - The schema: name, URL, 200-character description; deploy as static site (Vite/Hono) with PR-based updates. Transcript: Ian Landsman We didn't cover it last week because I was here with Jesse. A couple of brag pages have shown up in the wild. So two episodes ago, I think we talked about the idea of a date me doc, but slightly more professional. And we landed on the slash brag for your personal website. And a couple people made some really good ones. Yeah. They showed up. And I looked at them and I was like, yeah, this is exactly what I was thinking. So on that note uh someone also dm'd me and was like hey slash brag.com is available uh you should buy it and of course i bought it because it's a domain i love a domain yeah so now here my call To the audience. I want you to go to nownownow.now. And don't take any inspiration from the design here because this is a disaster. But this is a listing. This is a public directory of people who have slash now pages, which is Derek Sivers thing. So I have slash brag.com. I want someone to make a static site that I can deploy to Cloudflare. So it needs to be like, I don't know, Vite or I don't know what Hono is or something like that, that I can deploy to Cloudflare from GitHub that people can add their slash brag pages to, to Be the brag directory. So if somebody wants to spend some of their hard-earned tokens on spinning up a nice-looking directory page, it doesn't have to be categorized by state, like now, now, now is. I just need a listing, and the schema should be basically like person's name, link to their slash brag page, and 200-character short description of who they are and what they do. And then we'll have a brag directory. Aaron Francis I love this. So then maybe we could do, we could do, yeah, they should, if you build this thing, you should give yourself some credit at the bottom. We'll have to figure out like, you know, created by mostly technical, built by this person or whatever. I need the right terms there, which would be cool. And then, yeah, I guess there'll just be a public GitHub page and people can send in their polls or whatever. Ian Landsman To add their information to a simple JSON doc. That's all I'm after. I don't need a database. I just need a place where people can add their information via PR to JSON. Aaron Francis All right, let's do it, people. Get in on it here. Be part of the movement. Ian Landsman Send me a publicly available URL. It doesn't have to be a vanity URL. It can be a Cloudflare dev URL. Just throw it up somewhere. Yeah, URL. ([Time 1:06:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c31a5b0a-cb86-4dac-9ed1-18b65e5593a0))