Our Daily Drivers: Hardware and Software Edition

CJ: What's up, Colin? How's it going?

Colin: good. Pretty good. You got your microphone facing the right way this time.

CJ: Oh my gosh, I was looking at the mic last time because we were going to talk about tools. And I didn't notice in the past that there was that directional, there's like a little directional icon helper thing. And yeah, I've been talking into this mic backwards for five years. So hopefully this sounds a little better, a little less echoey. Yeah, it also helped to like read the manual and see like how they sort of expect you to, you know, talk into this thing. So hopefully it sounds a little better. We'll

Colin: what mic are you using?

CJ: This is the Shure SM7B. So it, I think it's the same one that's pretty popular among podcasters. And when I got it 2020 ish, I guess it was one of the, Best ones you can get. The thing that I don't like about this is that it requires so much gear. So on my desk, in order to use this mic, I have a cloud lifter and a focus, right? Which are two other devices that are required to get it, to plug in via USB and have all the right power and everything. You know more about the cloud lifter than I do for sure. And like this whole setup, I just know that this is like, what's required to get it going and yeah. So, I don't know. Maybe let's start with yours too. Like, what are you rocking over

Colin: Yeah. So I have a kind of industry standard. This is like the microphone that you'd see on any stage at, you know, open mic. It's the sure. S SM 58 or just maybe S S 58. Yeah. SM 58. It's, you know, indestructible for the most part. I don't believe it needs phantom power like yours does. So yeah, yours requires, phantom power and it's so gain hungry that you have to have the cloud lifter. I think mine doesn't require it, but I have and I think this is the first time I think you could be able to see it. This thing in the center is my cloud lifter, but it's called a Triton fat head. It was just cheaper than the cloud lifter and I didn't want something else on my desk. So it does make my mic really, really loud. Phone like comically long. Cause then I've got the XLR cable players into that. But that gives me more gain. Just like your cloud lifter gives you more gain so that we don't have to like try to boost our audio and posts. Sometimes I. I have people working in offices next to me. So I sometimes like in subconsciously tone down my, my speaking too. It's something I'm trying to work on. And just like not care, just be louder. But so yeah, I've got the sure. I've also got the focus, right? Scarlet solo on my desk. I kind of wish I didn't have to have that on my desk. That might be something I changed. I'm going to be moving. my office, which is always fun to like figure out what, what's going to be the refactor of the gear. What's going to, you know, what's going to work for me there. And then, yeah, I think like a quick rundown, what other things do you have audio wise

CJ: I would say other like audio, like stuff, I guess I'm using oftentimes in videos or shorts or kind of like any other content. The, the audio stuff that comes to mind is 11 labs for generating voice And then I also use like the YouTube studio, creative music. That's all like creative commons and available for anyone to use. I find that's like plenty. It's not, it's not tons and tons of tracks, but it's plenty to what I need done. And then recently I've been playing around with Google's sort of experimental music effects thing. So we'll drop a link in the show notes, but there's like a pretty cool generative tool where you can type in, like, I want it to sound like lo fi. I want some lo fi beats with some piano and whatever on top of it. And you can kind of like generate tracks. So there's a, yeah, there's a few different companies like that, that, that generate tracks. But a lot of the times I'm cleaning up the audio with Descript. So Descript is the, the software that I use now for everything audio and video. So whether I'm editing a screencast or I'm editing a podcast, I'm using Descript for both. And it's just gotten so good that I haven't needed to drop into anything else like ScreenFlow or any sort of Adobe tools. So.

Colin: Got us both. We're both paying for it.

CJ: yeah. What about you? What else have you got got on your desk

Colin: I guess video wise I do, I do, I have an Apple cinema display in front of me or I guess the studio display which has a camera in it, but my old monitor did not. And I already have it set up. So I'm running a Sony, a 6, 100 with a cam link. And this is one of those things where like, I don't know if the focus, right. Is the thing that's stealing all the power from my monitor. But the cam link with. Like the one cord into the laptop and the focus, right. And the cam link, all these things, like I have to plug my mouse into my computer or it will not work. And I don't know

CJ: Mm.

Colin: why. So that's where like I would love, like Sony now has a new camera where you just plug USB straight into the computer. You don't have to have a cam link, which is an extra expense. So I don't want to buy a whole new camera just for that. But if this, for whatever reason ever takes a dive, I think that's on the list. Or maybe just the studio display camera might just be fine too. So that's video. And then I have two Elgato key lights on either side of me. And I use their like little app to set it to like a white. I guess we can even dial in, what is this? About 4, 800 Kelvin light. And then like when I'm coding, I dim them down to like 2, 900. Just cause I can't deal with the blue light all the time, but it makes us look

CJ: Nice. Yeah, the, it's surprising, I think when you first get into making content for YouTube or whatever, how much goes into lighting and audio and you don't need it. You can get started without any of this stuff. Like you could just use your iPhone to shoot any of it. But then like, yeah, like going down the rabbit holes that that exist around making your content higher quality is pretty interesting.

Colin: Oh, and I mean, the iPhone is probably one of the best cameras you could use for it now. Like a lot of people are using that as there's like an actual mode in the iPhone now for that.

CJ: Have you ever used a, like a teleprompter or do you use any like software to do like pre recorded or pre written, I guess, scripted content?

Colin: have not. I, I'm very curious to try the Elgato one. It's pretty cool, but I have not, I usually do things pretty live. So like I'm sure that it would be better for it. Like I know a lot of YouTubers or course creators try to script it and then just try to read it. And then it's a skill to learn how to talk to a teleprompter without just like Looking super creepy, but yeah,

CJ: the, the reason I asked is like, I, we have, or I, I've been using a teleprompter for like a couple little things where I used it for things that Stripe for some prerecorded content. And it was great at like looking down the barrel and, you know, saying what you need to say, but it also was so much extra stuff just hanging around and on top of the camera so that you can get. This thing set up and then you lose your phone. You like lose access to your phone or an iPad or whatever. But for me, I was just using my phone as like the kind of the teleprompter screen. Does the Elgato one have a screen on it? The, the, okay. Yeah, that's

Colin: I've, I've wanted it to maybe like just throw discord up onto it. So I'm not reading from it, but that way you can see the people that you're talking to. Like if you use a prompter that way, you're actually looking at the people you're talking to. Or you could put chat on it so that then you still, if you're doing streams or live events, you still have your full monitor. You can still do things. And then you have chat up on the teleprompter, which can work too. I guess they also sell some really narrow screens that can go like below or next to your monitor. And you can just pin chat to that, which is kind of fun. But yeah, then you get into like your desk looks like command center with all that

CJ: Yeah, exactly. Speaking of command center, have you seen the the stream deck, like the Elgato stream deck? It's just like a bunch of keys that you can press. Yeah. I think so Aaron who ran for many years, the air table. Streams and now he's at Webflow. He has the sickest setup where he has like all these OBS scenes like built into his stream deck that helps him flip between them. Very cool. I think it's a lot of work to get set

Colin: It is.

CJ: you want it, you know.

Colin: I have one and I had like a first gen one that died and then they sent me a new one because it just totally went like blue screen of death on me. Like you could see the panels turning on. But then I got a new one and I just haven't figured out what I would use it for. And on this setup, my power hungry things are already an issue. So like I didn't want to add yet another thing in the mix, but it does work nicely if you have the prompter or the Elgato key lights, like they all work in that same world. There's also. A little discord plug like a discord extension now, so you can like mute and unmute and discords join certain channels and stuff like that too, which is nice.

CJ: Very cool. Yeah, I think, I don't know. If you were getting started today and you had, you wanted to like not go crazy on the budget, what would you recommend people get into?

Colin: Yeah. I mean, I would do honestly that if you are already on a Mac book pro or like, like M whatever, M one, M two, M three, the microphone on the Mac book pro, like if you had to is kind of amazing. By itself. The problem is if you're typing, you're typing right next to the microphone. So if you had to, I would just do that. And then I would use your iPhone as. the video mode, webcam mode. If you wanted to go a little bit up from that, I honestly, a good light is like, just one Elgato key light. I think they're like 60 bucks or something. Lighting is going to make your crappier camera better no matter what. And then this microphone is like 50 bucks. So I think the problem with this is XLR. So like getting, There's a audio technica USB mic. That's like, if you Google it, you'll find it as like the entry mic that everyone recommends. And honestly, for the dollar and gear you know, relatively, you're not going to see that much of a difference. It's audio technical. I think it's the AT 2020. Oh, that's a camera.

CJ: What do you think about the like blue Yeti USB

Colin: They're kind of awful.

CJ: Okay.

Colin: I think as long as you can figure out how, like you were talking about the top of the show, as long as you talk into it correctly, it can be good, but there, they are kind of pricey for what they are. And I want to say it's the Audio Technica AT, it's like the AT line. So like AT100 or AT1000, something like that, those are, you're going to, and I'll actually will share a link to like, there's a podcast guide that is pretty nice for being able to, to get started. I don't know. What about you? What would you start off with?

CJ: I think the first investment I would make is audio. I think you can get pretty good video out of you know, your iPhone or even like basic webcams, you know, like the Logitech I forget it's like the nine 20 C or something like that. Just like the USB webcam is plenty good to make content for YouTube and the internet. I would, yeah, so I definitely start there and then. I've had, I don't know, I had like pretty decent success with the blue Yeti early on, but I, this was like when I, I mean, this wasn't, this wasn't when I knew nothing about audio because I still know nothing about audio. So I, yeah, I mean, it worked, it worked fine for the like small use cases that I had, but yeah, there was definitely some, I remember there were some issues because our, Team and specifically like the video editor was like, no, you got to upgrade that to the sure. So blue, blue Yeti was what we were using in the very beginning. It's funny. You can look back at the Stripe developers, YouTube channel, and like the first videos that we made in 2019 where the lighting is literally, I just took like a desk lamp and shot, like pointed it at myself. And then, you know, I got feedback, Oh, the lighting is too. Glary on one side. So I just got another desk lamp and shot it at the other side. They were like, Oh, I got to soften it. So I just like hung tissues over the, over the bulbs and like kind of made my own soft boxes and it was so hacky. But yeah, starting from those early days with, yeah, you can, you can get started however, right. And then just build

Colin: Yeah, and I mean I agree like audio, so let's just say like if you made a video people can get through watching a bad video, but as long as the audio is amazing there's something about listening to something that's grading on you or just hard to hear that just doesn't work. So if you, and to get practice, like just podcasting and just doing audio, like we record this, the video and the audio and we dropped the video. But doing just the audio will get you a feel for it. Like I used to edit And wow, I can't remember the name of that software audacity which is free to use for editing and you get a sense of waveforms and what happens when you adjust things and a level it and all these different things. If I was starting over today, Not necessarily budget, but it's not too expensive. I would probably replace all the mics, the XLR cables, the Scarlett with the Shure MV7, and that is basically your mic, but USB and you just lose all the stuff that could go wrong or fiddling with knobs and just taking up space. So that's, I think you probably would see that Mike a lot. It runs like, I guess there's a few of them. There's the MV7X, like between 170 and 270 for that mic. But the, I mean, cause the Focusrite is over a hundred dollars by itself. So, you know, you could easily replace all those things for the same price and just have one MV7.

CJ: There have on the focus, right on the front of it, there's a button in order to like increase the gain. I have to push this button that says 48 volts. If I don't push that button, then the computer doesn't pick up any

Colin: Yep.

CJ: And I sometimes forget to do that when recording videos. And it is such a painful experience to record an hour long tutorial. Go to edit it and realize that, Oh no, your microphone just like turned itself off and you didn't capture any of the audio and you've got to start over. So that, yeah. Definitely been bitten by that in the past. And so I, I've now have like this nervous habit of like peeking over to see like, is my 48 volt button, you know, like lit up. So

Colin: Well, this is, this is an excellent segue into software that you kind of have to have on every machine that you, you start. I have been looking for this. If someone has heard of this, please let me know. I think it's something I'm going to have to eventually just build. But what I really want is Because I have this for video. I have a monitor that is called hand mirror and it just, you click on hand mirror and it just shows you in your menu bar what the camera sees. And so I use this before I join calls. If I want to just see what the frame is, I can just like click on it and it peaks in the camera and shows me what it sees and you can switch between cameras. I want that for audio. I want a level meter. That and I was like, I've looked in the app store, I've looked all over. It doesn't seem like it'd be that hard because it's not, it's just, I don't know that people have built it. Cause they probably don't think they can charge money for it. I think hand mirrors premium now has what I'm talking about. I just have not tried it yet. So I'll have to play around with that. They have a mic check feature, but what I want is like an always on screen.

CJ: hmm.

Colin: Meter. Because then you'll, you don't have to be like, you'll, it'll just be flat if you forget to push that button. So

CJ: Yes. Yes. And one of the features that I love of ScreenFlow for recording is you do have like a monitor, they have like a monitor feature where you can turn on this monitor thing and it'll show you your video and your audio levels. And I like usually drag that off screen. Descript does not have this. And it was like one of the things that when I started using Descript to actually record the video or the screencast, I started digging around and looking through help articles and wondering like, what, like, where can I find the monitor, like the self monitor? So does hand mirror work? Like, well, it works at any point, like while you're recording, while we're on a call right now. Nice. Okay. Yeah. That might be the thing that I start using then with Descript.

Colin: it only I don't I will have to test the audio levels feature because I think it's like you're doing a mic check I don't know if it's always on but I haven't tried it. So we'd have to test that But yeah, I'm actually surprised because even in here we get like a little three meter like it. It's not that helpful in In the web app. Cause I don't trust, I want it at the system level to know, like, is the computer getting the audio versus, you know, an app asking permission for your microphone and all this stuff that could go wrong between, between the two. So that's kind of video stuff. Hand mirror gets installed instantly. Yeah. Clean shot for screenshots is something that I use extensively. I think we've talked about that in the past. Taking a screenshot, marking it up, doing gifs, doing videos, stuff like that.

CJ: Are you, do you use clean shot also for video? Is that what

Colin: yeah, you can clip a part of the screen and record it as either a video or a gif. So I use that a lot. Dropping in, like reproducing a bug or something like that.

CJ: Very cool. Yeah. I've been using Descripts like quick recording for like, instead of loom, you can do a quick recording and put it up and they host it and share the link and everything. And what's cool about that too, is that. Even if it's like a, a two second thing that I want to share, I can still go in and like edit in Descript before like, you know, uploading or republishing or whatever. And so I

Colin: you get your transcript and all that stuff.

CJ: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But I, yeah, I usually use sketch for marking up screenshots and this is an old school Evernote tool that I probably installed in 2015 and just keep, keep around. But I recently have been wanting to do some more pro looking like screenshot markups and sketches. Like default arrow and boxes and, you know, like a bubble font is pretty basic. And so I, I don't know, like, it seems like clean shot might be a better option for like more yeah, like more design friendly marking up. I don't know. What do

Colin: pretty powerful cause you can set settings about like do you want it to drop the background? Do you want it to put it on in a browser window? Like there's, do you want to shadow it like automatically so you don't have to go in and edit it yourself. And sometimes I use it just to like throw screenshots into discord, but then you can edit it. Highlight arrows, all the stuff you can do in sketch too. So yeah, I think you probably are on the last leg of sketch. Like I am seeing like someone being like in March of 2024, I just got a new MacBook pro and can't find sketch too.

CJ: Oh,

Colin: So you better hold on to whatever you use to install that with, cause it's probably a rare commodity now.

CJ: yeah, I, I'm ready to move off of it. Honestly, like, yeah, we'll talk about this in a little bit, but I've been building a tool for creating friction logs and one like massive part of that is I want to provide screenshots and I want this, like when I put an arrow in a screenshot, I want it to look on brand for the site that I'm using to host the screenshot thing. And so I want it to have like a certain flavor that I'm just not getting from Sketch. So.

Colin: We kind of run into that at discord. Like the screenshots in our docs are all sizes, all resolutions, all different. They do not feel cohesive. And like sometimes even in the same article, they're not the same. So something I'm thinking about too. What else are you using?

CJ: is, yeah, let's see. So for my terminal, I've been using warp for a while and there was a bunch of controversy around privacy and some other concerns around warp. I didn't pay attention to any of it. And I think it's still amazing. Because it has built like a built in LLM integration. So when I'm at the terminal, I can hit pound sign and then type in, like, write me the command to delete all of my. Local get branches that have already been merged to main and then hit enter. And it just goes out, finds the right thing, comes back, puts it in the terminal. And then I just hit enter. And so I don't have to remember all of those. So it's not as there's not as many like customizations as I termed to, which is what I was on before. But it is fine. And like the themes are fine. And I basically live in warp. Like that's kind of where I spend all my time. Yeah, like that between warp and Chrome, I guess, or like kind of where I spent 99 percent of my time on the

Colin: Nice. Well, yeah. And you're probably, are you using NeoVim or just

CJ: Yes. Yeah. I, but I just use it inside of warp. Like I'm using NeoVim, but I'm like, yeah, it's just like built into the terminal editor.

Colin: Yeah. If you haven't seen. CJ code, he doesn't need to leave warp because everything is in NeoVim. And yeah, it's amazing to watch. I need to play around with them more so I can get there too. But we do a lot of stuff in VS code and some people do like VS code with the VIM bindings and things like that too. But I usually install an iTerm2 on this computer. I am trying out Alacrity and I don't know why you would need Alacrity when I read what it is. It is a free and open source GPU accelerated terminal emulator. focus on performance and simplicity. It does not support tabs or splits though. So I find myself opening a bunch of windows. I don't think I'm using it right. Cause you can team X. So I think it's just, it's written in rust. It's supposed to be super performant and fast. I installed it. And then I also like added a bunch of Zish things that has completely changed my terminal to the point where I'm like, not. As comfortable. Like when I'm on my personal machine, that's still an iterm and still has all my old, like, Oh, my Z, Z shell stuff. It's a lot different. So I actually have been going between two different environments, but I'm trying it out. I'll see if I can undo some of the things that I've done, like just lots of very cool terminal helpers and stuff that I added that sometimes do some magic for me, but mostly live in. A terminal at just like with other apps.

CJ: yeah. And the so the, when you're in Alacrity, I've never actually heard of this terminal, but so if you wanted to do Yeah. Like if you have two terminals running with different processes, you just have two separate full windows open. Okay.

Colin: And I think most people are doing NeoVim with Tmux and just doing it at one window.

CJ: I see. I, yeah, there was a period of a few years where I use T MUX pretty regularly. And in the same sort of view, I would split and on the left, I would have like my, all my VIM splits. And on the right, I would have like several sort of just like terminal, whatever shell windows open for running different processes. But recently I've just been like using tabs, like just tons and tons of tabs. So in work, we'll have like five or six different tabs open. One's running the web server. One is like rails console. One is Vim. And another one inevitably ends up being Vim. And then just like whenever I need a new terminals, like open a new tab and it works fine and inside of them, I'll, I'll use splits, but I don't use tabs. Inside of them. So it kind of like, that's my separation is like splits in the editor tabs in the terminal and that's it. And yeah, it seems to work pretty well, but yeah, jumping between different windows might be tricky.

Colin: Usually when I do different windows, it'll be like, I put Ngrok in one window and then I have my app running in another one. So it's usually not like client running in one back end, running in one, or hopefully it's like. I can do use yarn to run both in one window or something, but

CJ: And then how would you say, like, are you using that on top of the terminals inside of VS code or do you use the VS code

Colin: I do use the terminal and VS code as well. On this machine, we actually work in coder instances. So virtual environments. So like. We're using VS codes, remote explore to like SSH into a full environment. And so I will use the terminal there because I am not on my machine, but you could also just go from your terminal and remote in, like if you were running everything in warp, you could just do that instead. We just, all of our tooling is built around VS code. So most people are using that. So yeah, there's that. And then like in. This alacrity test that I was doing, this is a, this actually affects all my Z shell stuff, but I have zoxide, which is like a better CD. I have as a, which is a better LS. I have F F ZF for fuzzy finding, and then a bunch of Zish, like auto suggestions, syntax and highlighting stuff. My, my terminal looks completely different now. And I'm like, not sure which one of these things is changing what. But it's. Pretty cool to be able to like alias CD into Zoxide and not even be using the real CD anymore. Can be a little bit weird when I want a machine that doesn't have it because I get used to, like I can just type in a folder I've been to recently and I'm just there. So, it's kind of nice.

CJ: Nice. Yeah. I was chatting with my teammate drew a few weeks ago about his setup and he's been like tweaking it and trying to build it out of time and learning them. And he's really into Raycasts right now. Are you using like a Raycast Alfred type situation?

Colin: have Ray cast and I use it purely to open other apps. Like I do not use 99 percent of it. I'm like, you know, command space, notion, and like, that's it.

CJ: got it. Yeah. Same. I tried for a while, but I found that Raycast was like too many clicks almost. Right. Like there's a lot of extensions and anybody can build an extension. For it. But the way that it works is like you open your command palette, you type the name of the extension, you hit enter. And that brings you like into the extension, it kind of like opens the extension. And then you have to like type again, or like arrow up and down again to do something. I'm like, if I'm gonna, if I need to like arrow around, I might as well just do this from the browser. And most of the things that I need or would need from it are available either in the browser or in the terminal. And so I'm like, okay, I've already got the tool. So, yeah, I don't know. I, I wonder if there's parts of my process that could be sped up by using Raycast or any of those like spotlight type situations. But yeah, I haven't, haven't really

Colin: like, just, just be okay with not optimizing everything.

CJ: Yeah, I

Colin: The another one that's on this list for me is Fantastical. It's just my default replacement for calendaring. Mostly because when I'm usually on a, I even put it on my work machine because I, have you used Fantastical?

CJ: have not

Colin: it lets you create like a grouping. So I have like the ability to see all of my calendars, like my personal ones, the reflective ones, the discord ones, or I can create like a discord Venn diagram and a personal Venn diagram and I can toggle between them and it like turns on and off different calendars. So I can see, like, I don't want to see every calendar at all times. I don't want to see the discord PTO calendar at all times, stuff like that. So just more probably creature of habit. And the last one, which I'm really trying to replace with what we're going to talk about next week, which is the second braining type thing is that I installed text mate on every machine purely as like a scratch pad because it's like super fast to open as many windows as you need to. And it does mean that I usually have like 10 unsaved text mate windows open at any given time, and I'm hoping to put those in a system that is a little bit more organized and. Like if I lose my, my machine restarts, I don't lose all my notes and stuff like that. So,

CJ: Yes. That would give me some heartburn for sure. Like not having those saved. So,

Colin: sometimes I save them all as just like, whatever the date is and that never go back to them. So,

CJ: Nice. I agree that TextMate is wicked fast to open. And yeah, it's like a classic, right? Like, the, the, the shortcuts or whatever, like the, the early TextMate shortcuts plus nice syntax highlighting. It had like the, the early theming. And there were a few Ruby devs that used it early on. You've watched like old peep code videos with yeah, some, some early Rubyists text mate was the go to and yeah, I still, I guess have some nostalgia for it. So yeah, it's

Colin: You can still install it. It still

CJ: yeah, yeah, yeah,

Colin: Nice.

CJ: So yeah. What are you working on with jumpstart? This is exciting.

Colin: I've I've had jumpstart for a while and not really built anything with it. And I've decided to start working on my own thing on the side to just have it. And instead of like figuring out when to find time for it, I've, anytime I wake up early and just like. There are some days where I wake up early and I can just pop up and it's my day. And sometimes that's at six 30. So I've been trying to use that time instead of like, just scrolling on the internet or doing whatever it's like time to time to code. So now I'm gonna talk about what I'm building yet, but I was pretty impressed with how quickly I have it running and being able to OAuth with your Gmail account so that. That's like all done. Now I'm starting to think like how to approach accessing your Gmail data. So that's, that's what I'm working on.

CJ: hmm. Yeah. Very cool. Very cool. Is it, are you finding that the early mornings is working, working well for your energy for the rest of the day too? Like

Colin: It's, it's been helpful because I know if I want to work on it, then it makes me make decisions the night before about. If it's like, I know that I can't do both. So if I'm going to stay up late, well, then I'm going to lose project time in the morning. And I'm not doing project that night and projects in the morning. So it's usually going to be like, I'm trying to get away from computers after work and stuff. So usually like after work, I am not in a place where I want to go code. So this is kind of like the paying yourself first type thing. I'm just working on my own thing first. And we'll see if it turns into a thing that just as a toy for me to play with or something that maybe I can make available to other people.

CJ: nice. Yeah. I definitely have started to recognize how much energy I get from making, just making stuff for myself or, you know, like working on stuff that's like No judgment, no input from anybody, no questions, no like bureaucracy, no slow down, no nothing no critique.

Colin: You can just do

CJ: just like, I don't know. Yeah, exactly how freeing it is. I'm like, yeah, I like this font. This is a cool ass font. I'm going to pick this font, you know, like, or I don't know, whatever, you know so yeah, I started building out a tool for, for building friction logs. It was actually kind of inspired by these like second brain, Tool or like the second brain editor style. So we'll, we'll talk about it obviously more next time, but the building in these chunks or blocks like log seek has kind of inspired a pattern that I want to use for friction logging. So more to come on that, but yeah, it's been fun to kind of like, just build a little, build a little toy.

Colin: friction logging tool is a personal project.

CJ: Yeah, so I think. For, for a long time, I have wanted to build a service for developer products companies to provide them with developer feedback. So I am going to create like a first look video that goes over a bunch of You know, early observations about their getting started, and then I'm going to build a friction logs for them. So it'll be kind of like super detail. Let me go through an entire product experience and end integrating it, and I'll take copious detailed notes as I go, and then the last will be like a zoom call. And then I'm going to be working with them to like, just go over all the findings, make recommendations, suggestions. So this is, it's a service that I'm working on building out. And so as part of that, I want to provide friction logs in a way that is digestible by engineering teams so that they can like take the content of it and easily action it. In the past, I've just written them into a Google doc as like, there's just giant stream of consciousness almost. And at the end of that, Sometimes they're like many, many pages long. So that's right. I, there was one that was like 20 something pages long and you just give it to an engineering manager and they have to kind of like go through each bullet, pull it out, make a JIRA ticket assigned to the right person and whatever. And so each of those, my thought for these friction logs, I'm going to build it in such a way that like each of these chunks can be actionable so that from the UI you can click like add to linear or add to JIRA and it'll open a ticket automatically for you for each of those things. So.

Colin: it. It's got the why. Yeah. All of that.

CJ: Exactly. Screenshots, like the whole shebang. And

Colin: I remember, I remember working on the Stripe premium app for Orbit. We had a friction log in a Google doc and it was, it was painful. Like, and like even being able to do back and forth comments with, with the person who provided it and then the PM or the engineer and assign it. That's pretty cool. I can see it.

CJ: So heckin on that. Similarly, yeah, just on the side when, when I've got free time. And in the past we've talked about how like we, we like these side projects, but the way that I procrastinate a side project is by doing work, like actual work. And so we'll see how much actual work gets in the way of the side project.

Colin: Yeah, for me, it's been go reorganize the kitchen drawers, or, which I can't do at 6 30 in the morning. So it's good. I'm like, Chanel's asleep. I gotta, gotta work on quiet things. So very cool. Well, I think a good way to wrap this too, is we talked about a lot of things that we use. You have a users page on your website, cjav. dev slash uses. I need to eventually build my own website. I have like a template up that I want to create my own users page as well, but we'll. Put links to a bunch of the things that we talked about, a bunch of the gear. Don't go buy all the stuff we use, go find something that works for you. But yeah, I think that'll do it for this episode.

CJ: Awesome.

Colin: Cool. Thanks for listening. And as always, you can go check out notes for the show at build and learn. dev. We'll have links to all the things that we talked about. We'll catch you next time.

CJ: Thanks for listening. Bye friends. All audio, artwork, episode descriptions and notes are property of CJ Avilla, Colin Loretz, for Build and Learn, and published with permission by Transistor, Inc. Broadcast by