Personal Knowledge Management (Second Brain)

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

Colin: Pretty good. We're back in the recording booth talking today about the para system or our attempts at organizing the chaos that both of us have for notes and all the fun things. But before we get into that, have you seen, there's like a, there's a whole interview and a bunch of little clips going around, from an interview with Lex Friedman and Pieter Levels. Have you seen this?

CJ: I haven't seen any of the clips I saw that Orlando, made a comment on LinkedIn about the fact that, Lex could get Peter to come on, which,

Colin: I feel the same like Peter going on Lex's show. It's like, I don't, I wouldn't say that Lex's audience is like software developers. So it's a little surprising to me, but awesome for Peter and the exposure and the conversation. I haven't watched all of it yet, but I've been watching some of the little clips that are making their way around Twitter. And there was one that I particularly liked that I'll just like paraphrase and we can talk about it a little bit. and he starts it off as this is his most controversial take is that there are a bunch of frameworks and I'm assuming he's talking about programming language frameworks and things like that, that have raised a bunch of money. They're open source, they're available, they're people can use them, but they've raised a bunch of money. And because they've raised money, they've now built these platforms. Those platforms are like added services and hosting and, Lambda like features in the cloud and all that fun stuff. And. Then they're going out and paying developer influencers. They're paying developers. They're paying streamers to go talk about their thing, do their thing. And their argument is that then they get a bunch of flack for using just straight PHP, jQuery and shipping and just building stuff. And in Peter's bio, there's a bunch of startups that they've built. By themselves that have the monthly recurring revenue of each of them And so there's quite a few he's known for building like a startup a month and things like that and some making like three grand a month some were making like 30 grand a month and with that you get a lot of people who I see usually on Twitter talking about tools and things and basically Calling out that controversial take. I didn't think it was that controversial, but apparently all of Twitter thinks it is all of the dev tool space thinks it is. and what it makes me think of is just that, the same thing happens with rails is, Oh, it's too slow. It's dead. It's whatever it versus just like shipping stuff for users and customers and not, rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, is the tool important Is it okay to talk about tools and craftsmanship and all that? Absolutely. But like at the end of the day, are you delivering for customers? Are you trying to solve a real problem? Does it matter if it was in PHP or react or both, or, if Ruby is a few seconds slower, in aggregate, then using rest,

CJ: Yeah,

Colin: think?

CJ: I have so many feelings about this. first of all, I don't know any indie hacker or any tech person who isn't jealous of Peter's like monthly recurring revenue from all his projects, right? Like he's making hundreds of thousands of dollars per month, if not millions per month on A bunch of projects that he's put out and a lot of them are just little AI experiments or whatever. so with that backdrop, I think a lot of people get frustrated when they learn that a lot of these companies or startups that he's built are all built with one single PHP file each or something like that, where it's like, and then, like some jQuery, some basic, like very basic HTML, And what this always reminds me about is like how much time I have spent procrastinating on shipping stuff by fine tuning tools or like just getting the thing right and getting the thing optimized and making it fast and making it,

Colin: That's bike and bike shedding, for example.

CJ: Exactly. Yeah. And for me personally, if I think really hard about it, I think it's that. I. it's like the fear of rejection, right? and maybe not like believing that the thing that I want to put out will be received well, and that I'll be like judged negatively about that or something. And so as a result, I procrastinate by yeah, like you said, rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic or, yeah. Bike shedding about, should this be in react or should it be in Ruby or should it be in whatever, yeah, I, in terms of the question about rejecting frameworks that want to become large and they do so through influencers and to try to get like more people to use them, I actually don't know what the right answer is for people who are building the frameworks. if you think about someone like Taylor Otwell and Laravel. He's making plenty of money from the small group of people that have, started to use Laravel for their startups. Like he's provided enough value that he's able to buy Lamborghinis and like all this crazy stuff. And Vercel, has built like a billion dollar plus business on the back of next JS and some of these JavaScript frameworks. And. Do I think that's wrong? I know, not necessarily. And do I also, do I, would I say that the way that Peter's doing it is wrong? No. He's clearly like crushing it as an individual, like indie hacker and copying and pasting patterns that he understands and knows for how to make money online and build businesses online. I don't know. I don't know. Like at the end of the day, we're trending towards this new, I like organization of marketing and how marketing works in general. Like we start to, now we're starting to trust and believe certain influencers and what they say and those influencers are creating the biggest brands and the biggest companies. If you look at like prime or. Joe Rogan's alpha brain or,

Colin: you talking about prime or primogen?

CJ: no, like prime is in like

Colin: That's the yeah.

CJ: yeah. like a lot of the, a lot of the times giant businesses are now being built with an influencer co founder or something like that. And so I don't know if it's. if it's bad to say that , framework and framework companies are taking the same approach of using like dev influencers to grow their brand.

Colin: and he went on to talk about Oh, you could just go spin up a digital ocean box. And I don't think it's bad that Vercell exists because I love using Cloudflare for a lot of the same things, Cloudflare workers, things on the edge, like sure, you can go put it on a DigitalOcean box. You and I have been through the days of, what, Slicehost, and all the different hosting companies, Dreamhost, all these things that have existed before. I've admin'ed boxes. I've done the Cloud DevOps stuff. I've done Docker, I've done, people are going and getting these like Hertzner boxes in Germany and stuff. And it's if you're trying to optimize for the least dollars spent on this, sure. There's a free plan on Vercel, there's a free ish plan on Cloudflare. And you can take this thing, you could host something, I don't know if you could host a PHP thing on Vercel, but you can get, there are options, even our beloved Heroku of old, there were options for doing these deploy, try things, and, this is channeling, Aaron Francis, you can just do things. It doesn't matter what language, what framework, like just try things. and Peter has made a really good effort at making a dollar on the internet and then taking that skill, like you said, and learning how to make another dollar and applying it to the next dollar. And some people like, even myself, like I'll call myself out here. Like I, I am working on making my first like pure dollar on the internet. Like I've done consulting, I've done other things, but it'd be really nice to just have a thing where you get your first sale for software you wrote, for bits you wrote. And honestly, at the end of the event, it doesn't matter what it was written in. a little bit of jealousy, sure. digital ocean and all those, I'm not going to do it all. I'm like, I'm not going to go. Deploy a cloud flare, open source option to, to a distributed, like cluster of digital ocean boxes or anything like that. So, yeah, I don't know. Pretty interesting. I'm going to, I think I'm going to have to watch the whole interview at this point, but I was trying to avoid it, but I think I'm getting sucked in.

CJ: me too. I'm definitely inspired. And the thing that. I always think about when watching Peter online is he's really great at building in public and also he's very focused like the stuff that he's shipping is not ancillary garbage features he's shipping like the core value that someone is looking for when they come to one of his businesses. So photo AI, it's like you upload a couple of photos and then you can generate new photos of yourself. And so he's just making that one feature work very well. same with nomad list. It was just like a giant list of places where you could move and some details about those places,

Colin: well, a nomad lists was like a pain he had. And intimately knew it and also traveled around the world and was able to create a lot of the data himself and then crowdsourced it and there's been lots of repeats. And I think a lot of the things I see now is that everyone's oh, he just makes AI wrappers. It's like you're trivializing the work that he did, like almost half, there's startups who are raising shit tons of money on AI wrappers too, you can't really knock it. This is I hate, I don't know, I hate the in the arena phrase too. But there's a difference between building something and then just commenting on other people building something. And it's okay if you're not building something right now. It's, maybe it's not your season of life to be building something. I have a little project list in my Parasystem little folder of projects that I could work on one day. They're not all being worked on today.

CJ: Yeah. I, a realization that I had recently was how much I enjoy building stuff just for me. And that it doesn't matter if other people see it or other people like it. Like I want to just it's holding space and creating like this safe area for me to be creative and build stuff just for myself, which is like where I have the most fun. And I think, being comfortable with putting it out there like Peter is like a D like the next step up, but like just starting with just make it for you. And if you think it's cool. And you don't care about criticism, then put it out there. And, yeah, as we'll learn about in the code system, maybe you can express yourself, through these products or whatever that you're building, but,

Colin: I have to wonder how much of this is similar to the task management stuff of telling somebody you're going to do something gives you the dopamine as much as doing it. And discussing and bike shedding gives you that I know something I can jump in and fight for my opinion or what I think should be better. And it's Is tabs or spaces really going to make a difference at the end of the day versus can someone sign up and use it? Can you use it for your own benefit? I mean you've built so much software just for yourself and I think about that a lot because it's also different than I've been helping somebody with their with a Y Combinator application and It's very interesting to watch like full on engineer brain try to explain You the thing that they've been building for four years, and why they should be in YC. And it's interesting because it felt like a lot of it was written by AI, but it wasn't. and I was like, okay, what problem are you solving for who? And I don't want to hear about another feature like pretend like we took your keyboard away and you can't code anymore It's time to put customer hat on it's time to put not even marketing But just like business model and who is it for and what problem and do they actually have? are you making a painkiller or a vitamin type? Conversation versus, it's implemented this way in the database. And like that is not the level of detail that we are asking for in a YC application. So,

CJ: They want to know like the story that you're going to be able to tell that people will see their own transformation in the story that like the business is going to make them a superpower because of X or

Colin: yeah. Or they want, they, yeah, they want to see a story, a clear path to making money. And you want people to lean in. I don't think people are leaning in when you're like, we have this like acid complete, database that stores our user table. And I'm like, ah, I think we're good there. Let's take some stuff out.

CJ: Interesting. there are, I don't know if they know about the Stripe, resources, but Stripe does hold office hours for people who want to get their YC applications reviewed. And it's, they're reviewed by people who used to work for YC reviewing applications. So it's a pretty solid resource. I don't know how many people out there know about that or have used that, but yeah, I

Colin: the deadline is in five or six days, so I don't think it's gonna happen.

CJ: All right.

Colin: But I have done my best to, to help a little bit, but, yeah.

CJ: Should we talk about, personal knowledge management?

Colin: do it. I think, I think this one is, this is a pain point I have. I don't know if this is something that you also feel deeply.

CJ: Yeah. I, the way that I would take notes, either I have a physical notebook on my desk. I never go back and read anything that I write down. It's just I don't even know why I write in it.

Colin: Yeah.

CJ: And then if I want to remember something, I just email myself, right? or I would just email myself

Colin: you use the notes app on Apple?

CJ: I do not know.

Colin: I do, but it's for like throwaway stuff, like shopping lists, packing lists, stuff like that. This is an interesting topic because it can easily become a little bike Shetty itself around what tools to use and what systems to use. I think I mentioned it on past episode where I still love text mate and I use it to just spawn a bunch of windows and have one is my work brain. One is my today's personal errands brain. And I just drop stuff there. And the problem is if I don't save them. Or sometimes I save them and never go back to them, like you just mentioned. but they're not connected. If I, or lose my computer, I lose all those notes. If I don't, all that stuff. so I've been trying to think through like how to actually start using Obsidian. just cause I like it as a tool. That's probably not the right way to choose one of these tools, but, it does mark down. It has a sidebar it, that I can just jump around in. It feels pretty comfortable to me. It's not notion, but you could use notion for all of this. so there's the tools and then there's the like process, right? There's the management systems. Which ones did you take a look at with

CJ: So I have only tried out one tool and basically if you're listening at home and you're like, what the hell is any of this personal and knowledge management stuff? Like I would boil it down to, it is like note taking with a couple extra features. So it's like, how do you do note taking? Yeah, exactly. Maybe I wonder, I'm curious, like what your use cases are. Like, what do you want out of your notes? what are you, how are you going to use them later? I have a couple, but I'm curious

Colin: so like you, I also have a lot of notebooks and I actually just moved recently and now I have an entire shelf of all of my past notebooks. It's probably 12 years of notebooks. And I don't always refer back to them I used to have one where I was always writing in it and keeping a pretty good, like bullet journal, like daily list. Going back through those now is wild because some of the there's I'll run across a goals list and some of them are like so far fetched and some of them I have done. And I think one of them was like, Speak at RailsConf. And I was like, I did that. I don't know when I wrote that down, but that's amazing. things like that, that it's just so crazy. It's like literally like a form of time travel to go back and put yourself back in those, in your shoes when you were writing those things. I have all these disparate on paper, but I also have this digital, like just landmine minefield of notes. And so I'm trying to add some linkages there around what can I find? and I picked up the book, I guess just the para method from, Tiago Forte. And I haven't read their second brain book. That would be the other thing that people might've heard of is personal management system, knowledge management, or second building a second brain. And what was, I was drawn to was just these four categories of projects, areas, resources, and archive. I'm still running up against some of the issues there where I'm just like, not, I'm like, okay, this is long term, this is a project for one of my areas, this is a resource for one of my areas, so where does it go? Does it go in areas? Does it go in resources? I'm still like just putting things down on paper and putting them in categories. but for me, it's yeah, mostly like long term storage and linkages between concepts, ideas, turning a project. That might just be a one line item as a reminder for myself into a full on project when I do decide to pick it up as a project.

CJ: So it sounds like one of the nice things from those old written ones was time traveling back to see what you were thinking before. And also one of the ways that you want to use it is to organize tasks and projects and like over time build out those tasks and projects. And then, yeah, like I, part of me questions whether I'll go back and actually read the notes, part of the notes, but. Yeah, there were, there was a, so the couple of use cases that I find that I was using like sending myself messages about one was ideas. So if I had a, if I was brainstorming something or, on the train or I'm, just got out of the shower or, you, you randomly have these ideas about whether like it's a dev problem you're trying to solve right now, business idea, something you want to try a challenge or whatever. So I would get these ideas and I would email myself and just the subject would be ideas and then I would go back through. My ideas, emails to myself to try to like mine, what should I work on next? So that was one use case. And then another was we moved across the country. And so we're meeting all these new people and a lot of them were meeting through our kids, friends. And so it was really challenging to remember Oh, so and so's friend's mom's name is this and she's into this and that or whatever. And, I, we want it to be more intentional and thoughtful about building our network and kind of understanding the people that we were interacting with. So on the personal, like friendship side, doing that, and then also on the professional side, when I have one on ones or meetings or I'm introduced to new colleagues, I like to like. try to understand their motivations and, their interests and try to find shared ground, to cover. So for me, it was, it's almost like a CRM in a way, just like taking notes about those interactions and those people. so that I can remember when I see someone after I haven't seen them for nine months, you bump into them or the kids are going to have a play date or something. You can be like, Oh yeah. Hey, how's the, the remodel going or

Colin: you gotta find a minute to duck behind the corner and pull up your obsidian to go find what this person's name is.

CJ: yeah, exactly. Yeah. and I do think it's it's a valuable thing. I think people care when you remember their name and you, when you're, when you remember things about them and it's very hard to do if you're meeting tons of new people all the time and I don't have a very good person, like my actual memory is not super great. And so I don't know, this seems to be one, way to make that a little better, but.

Colin: Yeah, it is interesting because I don't want to use it for tasks. like the way I'm doing projects. So to not to teach this, you should go read the book if you're interested in this, but like para is in projects, areas, resources, and archive. And so archive is interesting because it's literally inactive items from all of the categories. Projects is like short term and I'm trying to do it as if I am not actually working on, this isn't a, I want to work on it is, I have to be working on it. Working on it. It's in projects. it doesn't mean I have to work on it every day, but it's not like the aspirational project folder. It is the project folder. And this is across all of my areas of life, which is weird because there's a whole category for areas. And so I've been, those two things have been at odds with each other, but with areas I've been doing like long term storage of like I think of like my household operating system lives in areas like personal fitness is in areas. like health record, this is tricky because like your health records would maybe go under resources and reference. And so it's almost like thinking of a matrix of project area resource archive across multiple dimensions, like tags, categories, things like that. but like when I'm writing down stuff for a project, it's not the items that I need to do. It's. The thoughts and ideas and maybe I should try this. Okay. That didn't work. it's more of a running consciousness of that kind of stuff. And then maybe it becomes like a work log of next time I sit down to do this, especially because the project I'm working on, I don't always know when I can work on it next. So I write down okay, this didn't work. Let's try this next time. almost like future AI prompts to myself.

CJ: Yeah, okay. and so for all of, generally though, all the things in Para you keep in Obsidian or?

Colin: Yeah. So I've created four main folders. and then a fifth one that I added for inbox. So if I'm wanting to write something down, I don't have time to figure out where the heck it goes. I just throw it in the inbox and then I process that later. I found a rabbit hole of YouTube videos of people talking about obsidian and para and Zettelkasten. Very easy to fall into the trap of the tool and the plugins and making all your folders look amazing. Someone went as far as they have their own custom CSS and it makes it look like an actual physical notebook inside of Obsidian. but all I have is this. which is inbox one projects, areas, resources, and then archive. and I think that's going to work for now. And then each of those I have, for projects I've been torn on whether they should be folders or just notes. like one long note for each project or a whole folder for each one. but then under areas I have basically like work, life, fitness, health, right? Those kinds of things. and then resources, I'm honestly not using this too much, but this is like meant to be like taking other people's. Articles and just like copy, paste it in research, longstanding facts that you can refer to and catalog, which for me is usually just links. So I don't know if I'm really using that properly yet.

CJ: Got it. It's interesting to hear that you're like, like how you're organizing it within Obsidian, the way that logs, log seek, I'm going to call it log seek. I don't know if it's log sec or log seek, but the way that log seek, has its like default mode is you open up to a journal page. Which gives you like today's date in an empty bullet. And then there's not like a question of where stuff really goes by default. You like just log stuff in the, in today's date. And as I'm writing it down, I guess like sometimes I'll throw hashtags on the end and I don't even know if this is a similar, but I would say I apply the area as a hashtag to a bullet in today's journal. So I'll write down, Oh, I went for a run today. Okay. Me's felt rough hashtag fitness or something. And then like now that ends up, if I click on the fitness hashtag, I can pull up all the previous notes about fitness. Oh, I did, 45 minute leg strength day today and it was okay. But whatever, I don't know, just like random stuff about fitness. For example, for me, I actually keep. Everything about projects outside of log seek. I'm keeping it all in a personal linear. So I just have a linear org that is like my personal, like solo org, I think it's free for one person. and I have a bunch of project ideas in there. And when I think of stuff, I go in and add tasks. And if I'm working on it, then I'll put it in progress or whatever. but for me. I don't know that it's become like a habit, like a work habit that I follow. And so I'm like, let me just see if I can organize it on the personal side. But as a result, I don't keep any of the P from para in log seek.

Colin: think this is like to do Matt management. It, the best tool is the one that you use and I, it's very easy to go like the adrenaline of changing tools is always fun. You're always like, Oh, I'm being so productive. And again, rearranging deck chairs. you're like, you didn't actually do any work today, but you felt like you did. everything's perfectly fastidious and organized. Obsidian has a button, and there's so many plugins that I haven't played around with that makes this a little bit easier, but you press a button and it opens today's log, so it does have what you're talking about, and what I'm trying to use that for, because I saw another coworker do this, where they just, every day they write down a work log of, what they did, but also now when they do reviews, they have all this stuff that they can come back and like for performance reviews, they can go search stuff, but they also can refer back to like, where did you leave the end of the day? so you can get back into your flow faster. and I want that because my work, it's I also want to document how some days in dev rel, I go from one thing to a vastly different thing, to a different thing. And then I'm like, what the hell did I do today? And did I actually get any work done or am I getting distracted by things I don't need? But I don't really want to put that on para and obsidian. that's a different problem. That feels like slow productivity. That feels like that whole thing. What I'm curious about for you is like these note, they do not have just like notes, digital scraps of paper that are just somewhere that aren't in those dates.

CJ: not usually,

Colin: Cause I can give you some examples of ones that I have. like I have a code that I can use to go buy something from an e commerce store. where do I put that? So I, right now it's in my inbox because it's something I need to use soon. So it's just hanging out there and I would, should go process it. I am running a D and D campaign or I'm going to be. And so I wasn't sure if this was an area or a project, but I now have a D and D folder inside that I have a campaign folder. And I'm starting to write out like the story arc because we're not using a book where I'm like building my own world. So like I'm starting to write out the campaign arc and the themes and things are going to have to think about so that I can refer to them later. This is like writing,

CJ: Yeah. Yeah. If it, I think if it's like longer form stuff like that, I don't know, planning a vacation or.

Colin: Yeah, all the places you might stay the hotels. Yeah.

CJ: Yeah. I think a lot of that ends up in Google docs, honestly, like just because then I can share it with other people. log seek does not have great multiplayer stuff. Yeah. so there's not like any way for me to share like any of the stuff that's in there with other

Colin: Oh, I see. So you're because you'll probably be doing that like with the family. You'll want to get input.

CJ: If it's, yeah, if it's like personal, then I likely want to share it with the

Colin: Yeah.

CJ: If it's work related, I want to share it with coworkers. And so it always just ends up in some shareable place.

Colin: True. Yeah, I do have the, I have Notions and Google Docs and we have Google Docs for the show. So that's interesting too, because yeah, I don't think Obsidian has multiplayer either. Maybe there's a plugin, but I do have syncing working. So I have one vault that syncs to my personal computer, my work computer, but I have it fully encrypted. It's not always open. With that one, I have to be careful. I just don't want it to ever look like I'm ever doing non work stuff on a work machine during work time. So I have the vault like vault literally locked. interesting. Yeah. I haven't read Cal Newport's. Digital minimalism book. And I have a feeling that this will hit on a lot of this stuff too. It's just I feel like I have so many of those little digital scraps of paper and they're like, maybe there's a full thought in between 20 of them, but because I picked them all up, differently. Like I don't always connect them. And I think I also, I'm not trying to save every thought I've ever had either. so it's, it is like when I buy a really good new notebook, I'm always like afraid to write something in it. And you're like, Oh, this is only for my best thoughts, which is not what a notebook is for. again, best notebook is the one you use, the one you carry with you. So I've been trying not to be too precious with it and just throw things in here and I can, drop a tag. I think this has tags similar to what you're talking about with hashtags too. I think you just use like square brackets. and so you could say like podcasts. And then now when you click on that, it'll bring up all the notes that have. That as well.

CJ: Nice. Yeah. There's two different kinds of links or tags or something in log seek, one is the two square bracket thing. And then the other one is just hashtag whatever. I don't know the difference. there's like a concept of like pages and the concept of like links things. But, yeah, I'm like three weeks into this, so we'll see how it evolves. And yeah, are you using any plugins? I know that we skimmed right past that, but yeah.

Colin: I have a few, so I have, Excalibur as a plugin, that I'm excited about to do, brainstorming and stuff. Um, I'm using the syncing as a plugin and I'm just paying obsidian, because I want it to just work. It does work with iCloud syncing. If you're in the Apple ecosystem. I wasn't sure how. if it actually was sinking. So I'm just using the built in actual one. they tell you like, don't try to use our sink and also store it in iCloud cause it will have conflicts. so you gotta be careful of that. Some people have done get backing of their obsidian. I don't want to deal with that. So I'll just say take my money. community plugins for some reason, the thing that's not obvious to me is I don't think plugins sink. I need to figure that out. Cause I know I have them somewhere else, but there's ones that like change the colors of your sidebar and make it easier to search. And there's a command palette inside of obsidian, like there is in every app now. So you get just access to things. There's a GPT co pilot. That you can throw in your own API key and use. so yeah, it's been a fun little thing. It's weird because it syncs, but when I'm in Obsidian, it feels like I'm offline. versus if I'm in a Google doc, like I'm very much online.

CJ: Yeah, it definitely having the separation of it being a standalone app makes that feel different in a way. the only plugin I'm using, I think is a Google calendar sync. So it's so jank, first of all, like all of the plugin, the entire plugin ecosystem, super jank, all the syncing jank, the mobile app jank, like it's all I don't know if I picked the wrong

Colin: I think it's not all built in PHP and jQuery, is it?

CJ: yeah,

Colin: a beautiful

CJ: yeah, the log seek, I don't know, what I read was that they're rebuilding it to be, instead of using flat files, they're going to rebuild it to be database backed so that you can have multiplayer and you can't have all this stuff, but yeah, sometimes I'll open up the mobile app. So I only have it syncing on my desktop and on my phone. And when I open it up on my phone, sometimes it's which version do you want? I'm like, Oh my gosh, is this 2005? Like you can't figure out which one, or merge them or, yeah, which one wins? come on.

Colin: Interesting. does this actually have a CRM built in? I see there's like relationships is one of the core models

CJ: It, it might, I need to look like deeper into that. I'm just using pages,

Colin: or maybe, yeah, maybe it's just creating a page for per person and they're just saying like what you can use it for.

CJ: Yeah, I think that might be how it works. There might also be plugins that give you like templates. So like when you create a page for a person that like adds their contact details and their address and some other stuff, but I'm just like adding, like dropping in raw notes.

Colin: Next you're going to have a LinkedIn plugin and

CJ: there was a, like a personal CRM a long time ago. this is like 2012 called, contactually, I think they're out of business now maybe, but it was amazing. And it used to sync like your Facebook messages, your Gmail messages. Your text message, like it seems like all of your personal interactions with people and you could mark certain contacts as I want to keep in contact then every month or every three months or every, once a year at least. And then it would bubble up people that you haven't contacted in a long time. So you could remember to reach out to them and see how things are going. I loved it. It was awesome. But then like a bunch of those APIs got locked down more. And so they removed access to. Messages and some other features that just crippled the usability of the thing. And so I dream of getting back to that sort of CRM experience one day, but for now we're going to have to live with this.

Colin: let's just say it feels like a great rails app.

CJ: yeah. have you used any of these tools that like records or Otter. ai or one of the things that you can join your meeting and it'll write the meeting notes for you or transcribe it for you.

Colin: We have one at discord that we built.

CJ: Oh, that's right. Okay. Yeah. I forgot you guys have an internal one, right?

Colin: Yeah, I think it just uses whisper though, so like I don't think that we built the model or anything like that But we have it just for that and outside of discord I don't think I really have a need for anything like that. So I haven't really played with it.

CJ: So I built something, I played with a bunch of them and I've, we have meetings. So like the engineering team, we meet on tuple and the broader team meets on Google meet and we meet with other people sometimes on zoom or whatever. And I was like, I just want like a general personal meeting transcriber thing. And so I wrote this little script that, records calls. With, FFmpeg. And, so it will record all the audio on the machine and then it pipes the audio file to whisper and transcribes all of it. And then it takes all of the transcript and passes it to open AI to pull out, what are the high level takeaways and the action items? And it dumps that into a markdown file. That's bulleted. So I could just, after I'm done with a call, I just do control C. And then, I copy the contents of the Markdown file into my log seek. And so then I have this, like voice version of a meeting that I just had, which I, think is freaking awesome. um, I'll put up a link to the GitHub repo. it's all public. It's just

Colin: So you do this for work

CJ: of, yeah, we're like work meetings and personal meetings and whatever. Like it's just,

Colin: do you find like how do people on the call feel about it? do you tell them like hey, I'm recording this

CJ: I don't, but it's, It's the same as if I was like taking notes, right?

Colin: Yeah, it's not like you're

CJ: and I'm not using the

Colin: the audio

CJ: right? Yeah,

Colin: but does it have to join the meeting with you?

CJ: no, it like listens to the local, like local audio input output. Yeah. Microphone. It doesn't do like whisper can do the diarization or whatever to pick out different speakers, but it doesn't know who said what. And. So at the end of the day, and also it's just, it's taking the raw audio, transcribing it locally, and then taking that local transcript that's not tied to any person's name or anything, and then summarizing that and then giving me the, the takeaways and

Colin: Yeah. Ours does join the discord call, which is good. So people know it's there and then it will spit out like, these are the people who are in the call based on just us being there. We don't have to say anything. so it knows who's in the room and then it knows who talked and then it pulls out action items. Which is pretty slick. Who is gonna do them, who's responsible for them, and then, I think we mentioned it, it then creates a little screenplay based on maybe Star Wars, aliens, whatever. It just comes up with a little screenplay, it's like a little sci fi thing,

CJ: Yeah, that's fun. That's super fun. Yeah. I tried tactic, which we tried a couple of them and they all felt pretty. I don't know, if it was, if it felt intrusive or if it was intrusive, a couple of them like took over giant parts of the screen when we were in, Google meet or whatever. I think part of the, part of this solution that's nice is that it's not dependent on a browser or like, zoom app or something. It's just all just using your local audio.

Colin: Nice. in that vein, I've been playing around with some new AI, like code editor things. Have you played much with those? We can talk about this next week, but, I have started to use cursor on my personal machine and, pretty sure we're not allowed to use it at work. I've been playing with it on my personal things. I will just say cursor plus rails is awesome. Insane like holy crap so we can dig into that I already was having conversations with co pilot and stuff but like cursor just I think Brian castle is already like how do they not just get acquired by microsoft like in a weird way It's just like a fork of vs code that has ai built into it Which is what that's already a microsoft product and I guess it's the pros and cons of Open source or open sourcing your, your tool chain in general. But,

CJ: Totally.

Colin: it's been pretty good.

CJ: On your recommendation, installed and played around with cursor for a bit. And it is pretty mind blowing. And I love being able to at mention like different files and different like folder paths and things, and just be like, go find me this, or let's talk about that or whatever. very cool.

Colin: I say, let's save it for the next one. Cause, and the thing I want you to think about is whether or not you think it's like coming for your job, because I, I'm curious what you think for it, like there's all those AI developers that you can hire and stuff. So I'm curious your take on that, but. We will talk about and dive into the AI world next week.

CJ: That, that is a great cliffhanger. Thanks for listening. You can head over to build and learn. dev to check out all the links to the resources that we talked about today. And, yeah, we'll see you next time.

Colin: All right. We'll see you next time. Bye. 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