The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Building Reflect at sea (Interview)

Episode Date: August 27, 2022

This week we're talking with Alex MacCaw — he's well known for his work as founder and CEO of Clearbit. In May of 2021, Alex shared a personal update with the world on his blog. After much reflection, he decided to step down as CEO of Clearbit to go back to his roots. In his words, "I love the early stages of company building. Hacking together code, setting up the Stripe account, getting the first customer. That's my jam." We talk with Alex about this portion of his journey at Clearbit, the Catamaran he bought in South Africa and then sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, and the new thing he's building called Reflect that let's you keep track of your notes, books, and meetings.

this week on the changelog we're joined by alex mccall alex is well known for his work as a founder and the ceo of clearbit in may of 2021 alex shared a personal update with the world on his blog after much reflection he decided to step down as ceo of clearbit to go back to his roots in his words quote i love the early stages of company building, hacking together code, setting up the Stripe account, getting the first customer. That is my jam, end quote. Today, Jared and I talked to Alex about that portion of his journey at Clearbit,

the catamaran he bought in South Africa and then sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, and the new thing he's building called Reflect that lets you keep track of your notes, books, and meetings. For our new listeners, head to changelog.fm to subscribe and for our long-time listeners hey thank you for coming back thank you for listening if you haven't yet check out changelog plus plus that is our membership it's for diehard listeners like you who want to directly support us they want to drop the ads and they want to get a little closer to the metal with bonus content and more big thanks to our friends and partners at fastly and fly.io Our pods are fast to download globally because Fastly is fast globally.

Learn more at Fastly.com. And Fly lets you deploy your app closer to users. Imagine a CDM of your entire app. That's Fly. Try it free at Fly.io. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Fly. Fly lets you deploy full-stack apps and databases closer to users, and they make it too easy.

No ops are required. And I'm here with Chris McCord, the creator of Phoenix Framework for Elixir, and staff engineer at Fly. Chris, I know you've been working hard for many years to remove the complexity of running full-stack apps in production, so now that you're at Fly solving these problems at scale, what's the challenge you're facing? One of the challenges we've had at Fly is getting people to really understand the benefits

of running close to a user, because I think as developers, we internalize as a CDN, people get it. They're like, oh, yeah, you want to put your JavaScript close to a user and your CSS. But then for some reason, we have this mental block when it comes to our applications. And I don't know why that is. And getting people past that block is really important because a lot of us are privileged that we live in North America and we deploy 50 milliseconds a hop away. So things go fast. Like when GitHub, maybe they're deploying regionally now, but for the first 12 years of their existence, GitHub worked great if you lived in North America. If you lived in Europe or anywhere else in the world, you had to hop over the ocean and it was actually a pretty

slow experience. So one of the things with Fly is it runs your app code close to users. So it's the same mental model of like, hey, it's really important to put our images and our CSS close to users. But like, what if your app could run there as well? API requests could be super fast. What if your data was replicated there? Database requests could be super fast. But if your data was replicated there, database requests could be super fast. So I think the challenge for Fly is to get people to understand that the CDN model maps exactly to your application code. And it's even more important for your app to be running close to a user

because it's not just requesting a file. It's like your data and saving data to disk, fetching data for disk, that all needs to live close to the user for the same reason that your JavaScript assets should be close to a user. Very cool. Thank you, Chris. So if you understand why you CDN your CSS and your JavaScript, then you understand why you user for the same reason that your JavaScript assets should be close to a user. Very cool. Thank you, Chris. So if you understand why you CDN your CSS and your JavaScript,

then you understand why you should do the same for your full stack out code and fly makes it too easy to launch most apps in about three minutes. Try it free today at fly.io again, fly.io. All right. Well, we have Alex McCaw here. Last time you were on the show, Alex, episode 71. I mean, this was like multiple lifetimes away. December 20th, 2011. 2011.

Yeah, it's been a while. My memory doesn't even extend back that far. Well, you were talking about spine, coffee script, writing books. So I guess writing is still a thing for you. Yeah. And looking at Twitter at the time. Yeah, coffee script writing books so i guess writing is still a thing for you yeah and uh twitter at the time yeah coffee script wow that was a long time ago we could do a catch-up but i mean how do you catch up for a decade of time i mean there's just way too many life events to even do that so let's start with where you are now i mean you're not on a sailboat it doesn't look look like, but you are on a sailboat, I guess, metaphorically, or I guess generally speaking, but not specifically

right now. Tell us what you're up to in life. Well, I would be on a sailboat except for one reason and it's hurricane season right now. So, um, between July and November, the hurricanes roll through the Caribbean and my insurance actually says that I can't be around the Caribbean. Okay. And so right now I'm in New York, and I am working on a little lifestyle business, Reflect, after leaving my bigger business, Clibbit. And, yeah, I love writing.

I still love writing. My languages have changed from coffee script to typescript and i love that and i love all these new technologies like mobx next js all these new things that popped up in the last 10 years yeah for sure well let's hover it on the sailboat because you're not on it now but but gosh, what an interesting lifestyle you've chosen. So you actually, generally speaking, live and work from a sailboat. Is that accurate? Yes. So to give you some history in the middle of COVID, I was like, you know what? It's time. I've always wanted to do this. I've always wanted to go sailing around the world and so i basically bought a boat and i went

in january i picked it up in south africa where they've been building it they're well known for building catamarans out there and in january i sailed it across the atlantic it took me a whole month 30 days at sea and from cape town all the way up to Grenada. And then I spent the summer basically sailing between all the Caribbean islands one by one, up and down, up to the British Virgin Islands and down again to Grenada. And I've been walking from the boat. And that's been quite an interesting experience trying to build a little software company from a boat yeah did you

sail before have you ever like sailed that far i've never sailed that far and i got a captain to help me sail across the atlantic okay otherwise we probably would not be talking now let's make more sense i was like wow he is bold i know was like, throw some gaps in for us here because that is crazy. Yeah. But I do grow up sailing. So my family had a boat and we were on the water all the summer holidays. And I absolutely love it. I think for some people it's just in their bones.

And I'm definitely one of those people. And so I've always had it in me. And I've like, when I was in San Francisco, I did a lot of sailing on the Bay in San Francisco, just some amazing sailing there. And then recently got my own boat and, uh,

started sailing for real. So I, uh, I wanted to get a boat that actually could sail like not not a not a sort of slow it's not a motorboat not a slow boat but one where we were primarily powered by the wind and so when we crossed the atlantic we had two days of no wind, but the rest of the time we had 15 to 20 knots. And so we averaged nine knots the whole way, which is pretty good. All powered by the wind.

We only used the engine two days. To give people a visual of this catamaran, is it roughly 44 feet? I'm just looking at them on the internet. I've been on a catamaran before so they're they're like yachts kind of they have a deck yeah give us some dimensions and understanding yeah yeah so it's about 52 foot okay and it's fiberglass she's white um and what's her name beautiful she's called stargazer stargazer i love that yeah actually your audience might appreciate this i'm a huge um tracky and captain picard's ship

for the enterprise was called the stargazer nice and and i always thought that if picard was alive in this day and age where there wasn't any space travel then he would be sailing yeah because you are really like in a spaceship basically and you you have your life support machine around you you know we literally had a water maker that our lives depended on yeah and we had to you know at one point halfway through the trip it broke down we had to, you know, at one point, halfway through the trip, it broke down. We had to fix it. No one else could save you because you're days away from anyone. Oh, my goodness. You know, days away from the nearest human.

So you got to fix it yourself. And I liked that. That's one of the reasons I also wanted to get a boat was because I'd been working in the world of bits and bytes. And, you know, I wasn't very practical. I think if my Uber Eats delivery was late, I would just starve, you know. So I wanted to change that about myself and learn the world of atoms,

learn how systems work, machines work, and also kind of take responsibility of my own life. And that, you really get that when you're sailing. Yeah. Especially for the water. If you don't take the water with you, what do you turn ocean water into? Drinkable water? That's what we do.

That's what the desalinator does. It basically forces salt water through a membrane, a very fine membrane with a giant piston, and then comes out clean water. Does it taste good or has it got a different taste to it? In the middle of the ocean, it tastes great. Yeah. Because that water is so, so pure. On one of the days where we didn't have any wind,

we actually went swimming right in the middle of the Atlantic. And you can just imagine just looking down wow and you just see miles of sea and it's insane it's uh and it's pure it's like it's it's really good quality of water out in the middle of the atlantic now if you're in the middle of an estuary or something and the water's a bit muddy then the water quality will suffer yeah it removes salt but it doesn't remove everything else i'll tell you what alex i am from nebraska and we are one of the few states that are actually landlocked on all sides like we are touched by estates we are not touched by any water of course we have lakes but that's about it and the life you're describing couldn't be further from my bones. I mean, they're in your bones, but like I have never imagined a lifestyle like that.

To me, it sounds stressful. I can see the beauty, but I also feel like I've ever been caught in like a nasty storm and you're in the middle of the Atlantic and you're like, I'm going to die tonight. Or has it been stressful at all? Well, yeah. You know, theantic crossing is pretty straightforward honestly because you have these trade winds across all the oceans you have these big clockwise trade winds and at the time of the year that we did it uh these trade winds were

pretty perfect behind us the whole time so we just put the spinnaker up and go so we never really had big storms we actually have incredible weather forecasts and we have satellites well we have satellite internet but it's not internet like you might think it's it's basically not even dial-up speed and it takes about an hour to download the new weather forecast. And if it works at all. But we have that weather forecast, which is incredible. So we will know for the next week what the wind is going to be like almost exactly in each spot. So when you say incredible, it's incredibly accurate. Yeah, it's just, I think it's crazy that in the middle

of the Atlanticlantic they can know what the wind is gonna be yeah so that's you know obviously a huge benefit for uh yeah these these days uh obviously even just having tps and for the longest time they couldn't tell longitude uh and they they didn't have clocks that worked at sea so they couldn't figure out longitude. So they just used to sail along at the same latitude until they hit something. Talk about stressful, yeah. Yeah, so it's got a lot better.

You can imagine back in the day when you didn't have a water maker. So you brought all of your own water with you and your water reserves are going down and down and down maybe you're in the middle of the doldrums which before they understood the weather patterns in the atlantic but the doldrums are basically in the center of this giant clockwise circle of winds and there's no wind in the doldrums. So you can imagine you're in there and you're there for weeks and your water is very, very stressful.

This reminds me of so much like being stranded on like a, like on Mars. Basically. I think of like the Martian when I think about like this journey across the Atlantic, like this is almost as close as you can get to being on a foreign planet. Yeah, it pretty much is.

Cause I mean, you're all by yourself. Your resources are basically none. You've got finite resources that are potentially tapping out if you don't have this water reclamation or whatever the process is for it. Yes, that's right. So, you know, the other thing we have to think about

is power usage as well. Yeah. So, and recently that has got so much better since the advent of lithium batteries it does change everything back in the day you'd have to start up your engine to buy your kettle wow and now you can buy the kettle off a lithium battery yeah so we have four or five of these big lithium batteries and then we have about 3200 watts of solar on the kind of coach deck and that is enough for most of our needs certainly cooking and the fridges and things pretty much the music the

music yeah the deep house how you gonna get in the flow without music we had a lot of music on that trip i bet you did yeah yeah we did and there was five of us on that trip and we would have two hour shifts so you can imagine there's no stopping once you get started right there's no right way you could anchor in the middle of the ocean so you basically go go go and and you have these two hour shifts and i would say like going back to your question like was i ever worried about anything i said the only worry worrying moments are on those nights when there was no starlight and there was no moon and so you were just barreling into the blackness wow and that's a little freaky and you hope all right you're not gonna hit anything you kind of cross your fingers and uh you know you have a watch so that you who's looking at the radar

and uh something called the ais to look out for other ships. But I don't know. You might hit a shipping container. You might hit a whale. I don't know. You might be the maps are inaccurate, and you hit a rock. So I would say. It could be an iceberg out there. Yeah, it could be an iceberg.

Who knows? I never get that one because it's so cold. You said you averaged nine knots. Was that correct? Yeah. Okay. So I did a Google on that. So nine knots converted a miles per hour.

I don't know if that's actually accurate to do because I know knots are way different than, but it's still speed. But Google says it's 10.3 miles per hour as an average. Yes. So I like to joke that sailors use knots so that no one else knows actually how slow they're really going um but yeah i i sail across at 10 miles an hour well now it's not so scary i get it well he said barreling right so i had to say barreling well into the darkness it feels like you're barreling when your boat weighs 13 tons. That's true.

Yes, you are barreling. You can't exactly slow it down. 10 miles an hour is quite fast, yeah. And water speed does feel faster. I mean, I've been on jet skis and things like that. When you're on the water, 60 miles an hour on a jet ski is like you're really, really moving. Oh, yeah, you're ripping. It's insanely fast.

Water motion feels so much faster than land motion. Wow, yeah. And also, there's no brakes. True, true. That's true. On a jet ski, probably. Well, there is the brakes. It's called the water, and you hit it, and it hurts.

So you were wise. You bought a boat. It was in South Africa. You went and picked it up, but you hired a captain. Yes. That was a wise move, right? I mean, because you probably didn't know how to sail that far by yourself.

Oh, good Lord. No, I would have, I don't know if I would have made it. Yeah. Could you do it on your own now? Now that you've done it and now you've sailed more?

I still wouldn't do it by myself. Having a captain is like the wisest. It's like having a pilot. If you want a plane, you can probably fly it. But like, if you have a pilot who knows what they're doing, knows the ship, knows the aircraft, knows the engine, knows all the checklist. It's like Sully all over again.

Right. I just watched that movie again recently, Jared. I watched Sully recently for. Yeah. But we were talking to Nora about Sully and checklists and like how it goes back to like incident management and resolution and what you learn from incidents, essentially. And Sully came up in that conversation. But yeah, having a captain is like you need it. So a captain is key because you can imagine that everything's under strain

the whole time, right? And the boat's moving and stuff is chafing. And the captain is, I mean, once the boat is set on a course you know you were maybe you would change the sails every hour or so but that's pretty much set but then it's a question of listening and being observant and basically looking for for these these tear signs observability even on a boat. Wow. Yes, exactly.

It's like, yeah, this is your SRE or your network administrator. But you can imagine, you know, you might interview someone for your team at your company, right? And the stakes are maybe you make a bad hire and, you know, you are slow to ship your product. Well, in this case, I was interviewing all these captains and, like, there's a lot at stake, you know you are slow to ship your product well in this case like i was interviewing all these captains in it and like there's a lot at stake you know and this is it's potentially quite life-threatening so yeah yeah i was extremely lucky to get a south african guy called pete to

help us across and then i had a a few other people brother, a close friend who's really good at sailing, and this other guy who started MakerBot. And he was like our Scotty on the trip. So he's our mechanical engineer. He was just fixing all the things. Nice. Take us to the lithium batteries, man. I mean, you were talking about solar before the call, and I'm like enamored by solar. I have an RV.

So this is as close as I get to a boat is I have a bumper pull travel trailer RV. We call it an RV. I specify travel trailer because you think motor home, you think RV. At least you do because you watch the Robin Williams movie or something like that called RV. But I've got solar. I've got a battery. I can decouple from the grid. Talk to me about what it takes to do that at sea. Yeah, so the big difference, we went from lead-acid batteries to lithium. And the biggest difference is that lithium can take a lot of power into it and discharge a lot of power out of it. It's just unbelievably good compared to lead-acid.

And so my boat, we have 12 volts for the batteries, and then you can put them in parallel to 24 volts. And then we have some basically converters that step up the voltages. So we have 125 and 240 as well. So you get to learn a lot about electricity with a boat because there's maybe 100 different machines and they all have different requirements and they're quite fussy about it and you know all for example the whole kitchen is 240 so i had to take all the appliances and everything over to sell that liquor in my bags but it's uh yeah i mean like lithium is it's really changed

the game honestly and uh and i i mean i don't know what we where we'd be without it i mean you can now really live on a boat like this is a thing that's really changed yeah you can actually properly live on a boat you just have to fish for your food right so we fished we fished the food and uh we had lots of uh sashimi it was that was that was really lovely oh yeah and uh the ultimate sashimi especially as you get into the warmer parts uh warmer climate you know um you you get some we we caught a six foot long sailfish that was, um, wow. It's a beast.

Yeah. And then once I got to the Caribbean, you know, then I started living on it for, for reals, you know, living and working on it. And that was quite interesting because, you know,

a lot of the day is dedicated to the boat. So you have to balance that and your other work you have to the boat always comes first you know so if your anchor is you know not set correctly and you're you're floating away that you need to fix that before you you know comment on that pull request uh so right you you gotta constantly be observing and uh and you know the other thing once you go to the caribbean that you have to contend with is data so for 30 days across the ocean i didn't worry about data because there was none and i just actually just read a lot of books it was quite nice but um when i got to the caribbean i had to worry about data and there's actually really good coverage throughout the whole of the caribbean 4g and 5g um data coverage is just expensive yeah

it's metered like you can't get an unlimited plan and yeah well i use google fi but every night again they shut me off because they're like oh you're not in the u.s you're uh preaching on terms right yeah the gps locates you or just based on like what you're connecting to they know where you are yeah what cell towers you're connecting to and then i have actually a device that turns my mast into a joint aerial, and that's quite useful for data as well. But when I get back to the boat, the Inheritance Season, I'm going to be using Elon Musk's new satellite, isn't it?

Okay, so there's regular Starlink, and then this is like Starlink for boats. Yeah, so there's Starlink for boats, there's Starlink for RVs, which, Adam, I don't know if you have yet. Oh, yeah? How's it going? I'm not happy with it. Oh. Don't kill Alex's dream here. He's waiting for this. Yeah, my experience with Starlink for RVs was very volatile in terms of its speed. It was either way fast or way, way slow.

And I could even in like an open field, I had trouble like getting really fast coverage consistently. So much so that I'm like, wow, this hotspot I have is way consistent, cheaper, and a much smaller form factor. Whereas the Starling required me to put a hole through the RV, all this different stuff, like, you like you know essentially damaging my membrane which is a seal to keep the RV you know climatized and what not same thing with the boat very similar properties really when it comes to like an RV or a boat very similar in terms of like your seal and all the different things you want to have to keep your climate good so my experience

I hope you have a better experience though but my experience with it was like yeah it's expensive and it's spotty but i i admire the innovation direction i think it's going to go there it's just not there yet for me yeah that's my opinion on startling so far yeah that's fair enough and it still is not going to work in the middle of an ocean yeah right i think until they get that laser antennae grid going. When you say expensive, Adam, what, give us some ranges. Because I know like residential is like 500 bucks and then whatever, 100 bucks a month or something. Well, I think there's a premium plan for residential is 500 bucks a month.

But the, you know, it's 130 bucks a month for the service. And you have to buy the gear. And the gear for the RV is? Well, the gear for, I guess, have to buy the gear and the gear for the rv is Well the gear for I guess in any case is the same cost like this the gear you would use for the rv is the same For the home. It's the satellite. It's the wi-fi I don't know what you call I guess a modem of sorts And then the ability to plug it in we're talking like 800 bucks for gear 130 bucks a month for the service Okay, it's the same gear though. I thought that would be like RV-specific gear or something.

Mm-mm. No. What about for the boat, Alex? Is there like, because this is like, what I've seen is like Starlink for yachts, and I think maybe they just know yacht people have money, so they're going to charge more. But is it the same stuff? Yeah.

I'm not sure they know what they're doing. I mean, suddenly just going off the images in the marketing, which maybe were just not, you know, the real images. But it looks like the household. The exact same stuff. They're stalling. It looks like the same thing. And if that is the case, that's not going to work.

You know, you're talking about the most corrosive environment in the world. Right. It has to be hardened or something. Yeah. I mean, essentially you have a satellite, a cable coming from the satellite that plugs in. It's basically a USB-C plug from the satellite. Well, actually it's built into the satellite itself and then the other end

is USB-C that goes into the modem or whatever you would call the actual strugglingling device i think even their industrial design on the modem could have been better it could have been a different shape it's like this i don't know like a like a trophy you know like it's it's big i don't know if it's on purpose big but like it's not even a nice shape you can't rack mount it you can't like tuck it away it's kind of i'd even see you can't even like adhere it to the wall via screws or something like that. Like it's kind of like, really?

Does it need to be that shape? I mean, I love the idea of it like looking cool and stuff. And it's got like, you know, celestial looking design on the front of it. But I'm like, can you just give it to me where I can hide it? I just want to tuck it away. I don't want to see the thing ever. Well, on a sailboat, I don't think hiding it matters all that much. But I think on an RV, if you're driving down the road.

Well, I mean, you got a gear rack, right? You got places you want to put it. This thing is like, it's worse than a cable box. It doesn't sit flat. It stands up like a trophy. It's like vertical. Maybe they think you should have a trophy, you know, like you've earned it. It's a strange thing.

I don't know. You win. You win. You win one Starlink trophy. Do you have like a local area network, Alex, on your catamaran? Do you have like Ethernet and Wi-Fi? I do, actually. I figured. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Unify, what's your system? Yeah, we have a little router and it's actually kind of a crazy system because the thing that hands out IP addresses is right at the top of the mast. So if you want an IP address, it's coming from the top of the mast, which is kind of bizarre. But, yeah, we have the whole boat is bathed in Wi-Fi, and then that system connects to the phone networks via a little sim card yeah so you ever to climb up there and reboot it i haven't yet but it's gonna it's gonna happen

at least like i got the extender so i didn't have to climb out there to put the sim card in it which right i was wondering if you set up a sort of like smart swapping or anything, you know? So I had a similar, I had internet problems when I first moved out here in the country. And so I had, you know, it's not the same, but it's like, I got a hotspot and then I got this other thing and it works sometimes. And I can, I can hook to my phone as well if I need to. And I had this, you know, kind of a Rube Goldberg setup in order to just do my work.

And so I can at least commiserate a little bit on that end. But I never got it set up to where I could be like, it would smart switch between networks or anything. Is it all manual? Like, oh, this cell network's gone.

We're going to switch to this other SIM card, go plug it in. Or did you ever get any sort of setups where it could like detect connectivity and switch things i'm constantly turning it off and on and smacking it and cursing uh yeah but that's just boat life you know it's right at any one point in time and well something is broken so this episode is brought to you by our friends at FireHydrant. FireHydrant is a reliability platform for every developer.

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Thank you, Robert. If you want to operate as a calm, cool, collected team when incidents happen, you got to check out Fire Hydrant. Small teams, up to 10 people can get started for free with all the features, no credit card required to sign up. Get started at firehydrant.com. Again, firehydrant.com. Again, firehydrant.com. so we have the practical stuff like batteries you know like electricity and connectivity but there's probably other things when you're talking about you know the people that you're

collaborating with on software they're not living on a sailboat, right? So you're connecting, you know, having these sailboat issues. I'm just wondering, is it any different than any other kind of remote work where you have special concerns or things that you have to get over because you're on a sailboat in order to collaborate with people who are maybe in New York City, maybe they're in San Francisco, maybe they're in London? Yeah. Well, I'm very fortunate in the way that my company's designed is that it's totally asynchronous and i don't think the way i do it certainly it would be possible if it wasn't asynchronous i you know you never know when you might be traveling between anchorages or your sales reception might drop out or what have you. And so having any kind of Zoom calls or anything just doesn't work.

So, I mean, with Reflect, my new company, we have an engineer in Slovakia and an engineer in China. And so we have, you know, our time zones are bananas. Yeah. And so the company has to be asynchronous. Right. No pair programming. Yeah, no pair programming. And we actually use WhatsApp to communicate because it's just unscalable.

And I specifically wanted an unscalable chat so that we couldn't scale the company and hire more people because I just love the small team. And then we use a bunch of other tools which I can go into, but yeah, we keep the company totally asynchronous. And I think that's what you need to do to make it work on a boat. So you want to keep a small team in previously clear bit was your business. Tell us the difference between clear bit and reflect in terms of, you know, it seems like you have a change of mind about things or at least the way you want to live your life.

Yeah. So you're really kind of at the mercy of your business model when you start a company. And I think you realize this properly as a second-time founder. As a first-time founder, you kind of stumble into some kind of business that's working and then scale from there and you kind of you have to deal with with it you know regardless of what you'd rather but clear bit my last company that company required a b2b sale so the company you know we sold business data and licenses started at $12,000.

So that means as soon as that happens, that means you have to have a sales team and then you have to have all the support for the sales team. And then you have to have a marketing team. And basically the, the more revenue that the business makes, the bigger the team you need to have. And,

and it's just the classic B2B business. And so by the time I left Clearbit, we'd scaled it to about 100 people. And don't get me wrong, I absolutely loved working with these people. But when I looked at myself in the mirror and thought about what the company needed for the next few years and saw what was staring back, I realized that that guy was not the CEO of a 100, 200-person company. It was just not for me. And I just love engineering. I love coding every day.

I love setting up the know the css design uis i even like doing things like setting up the tooling and the atlas account and figuring out all the tax structure and things i'm like a like a one-man band and i just love i love i love doing everything myself and so one of the sad things about you know if you're a founder ceo and you scale the business then very quickly you your job just turns into management and the vast majority of your day turns into management and I really gave it a good shot at becoming a good manager. I got a coach. I even ended up writing a book on management with my coach. But ultimately I decided it was time to get back to my roots,

my zone of genius, which is small companies and starting going from zero to one. And so we actually found another CEO to run the business. And I wish we did it when we were like 20 people, honestly, because that chap has done way better than I was doing at the stage. And the company's happier and I'm happier. And quite frankly, it was the best decision. The only reason that we didn't do it earlier is because of my own ego. I'm happier. And quite frankly, it was the best decision.

The only reason that we didn't do it earlier is because of my own ego. You know, it's, it's, it's hard. Yeah. Hindsight helps out. It's hard to make those decisions when you're in the fog of war. Did you consider maybe bringing in a CEO, but staying on as an engineer, you know, like still, and not just, or are you done with the business model in general and just kind of ready to move on well i wouldn't wish any i wouldn't wish that on any ceo uh i uh having a founder as a subordinate is already hard enough to to run a company without me engineering it

so yeah no i know i i'm the kind of guy that's like 100% in or not. Having said that, I am on the board. I'm still quite involved in the kind of long-term prospects of the company and the vision setting and what have you. But the day-to-day operations are completely removed. And I've said the expectation that if Reflect grows to more than 20 people, I will replace myself and we will have a new CEO. What's it like, I guess, hiring a CEO?

What's involved in that process? There's maybe somebody listening to this show that's like, for now and in the moment, I'm a future future one man band, a future Alex, for example. Right. And at some point, they may grow a company and have to hire a CEO. Like what is involved in it? Do you have to hire a headhunter? Do you have to interview a bunch of people?

Are you personally involved? How do you remove your ego? I mean, there's a lot of questions, but like, it seems so challenging to be in your shoes and your position and hire a CEO. Yeah, it's incredibly difficult. The ideal situation is if you've got someone internally who you think could be a CEO and everyone else thinks could be a CEO as well. So it's not a nepotistic move turning them into, promoting them into a CEO. As long as they've entered and everyone else around them

views them as a CEO, then that can work out really well. And they already have the context of the business and that's a very smooth transition. So that's kind of your first, should be your first plan. And then there's other ways of doing it. So you can go and buy companies

and make the the founders running those companies the ceo of your company uh you can get bought and then if those are not on the table then yes you should go and look for a ceo and use a search firm and if any of your listeners are going through this then they can reach out to me and i'll introduce them to the search run that I used. I'm very happy with. Okay. So you did the search then?

We did a search. And I think it took about six months. But we found someone incredible. He'd never been CEO before, but he had run a massive business. He basically ran survey monkey and uh so he was absolutely qualified but it doesn't matter how many qualifications someone has how many times you interview them at the end of the day it is a bit of a leap of faith. Yeah. And we just got so lucky with Ross. He was, yeah,

he's worked out incredibly. Well, congratulations on being able to make that move because that is a challenging process. I can only imagine having to hire because like I think about buying a house, like all the stressful things you ever do, buy a car, buy a house. Even when you buy a house or sell a house or something like that, there's a lot of stress in that. Like that like you know is this going to be the house i want like all

these different things but like when you hire a ceo it's like very much a leap of faith like you had said like how do you even get assurances from that person right like you have to totally put a lot of faith and trust in that process and all the work it took to interview them and to define the criteria and whatnot like how did you even define the criteria did somebody help you with that this firm searching or did you and the team define criteria to say okay this person should have these attributes and these moral values or these business values or whatever well you definitely try and reduce the risk as much as possible and the way you do that is with systems because systems basically get around human biases and we're all biased and

we we're all susceptible to making the poor decisions based off this biases so you put together these systems and actually one of the parts of the book that i wrote a management called the manager's handbook that i'm most proud of and it's free online if you want to search for it is the section on hiring and it will take you through how to create a hiring system and one of those things is putting together a scorecard and all the attributes that you're looking for and then you can score all the candidates that go through the system as subjectively as possible at least against these attributes nice so you've you've moved on from clearbit you've decided to start reflect you're going to be a one-man band, but not really because you're going to have a band behind you.

You have employees or you have, I don't know if they're co-founders or whatever you have. You're going to describe the team. How did you find this group of musicians? Did you just pull out the manager's handbook and read what you had written? Or are these friends of yours? Just curious, when you're starting fresh all the way over what do you do well so you're right i have an amazing supporting team it's tiny is it's there's just three of us but they are just incredible engineers that i work with and we just code it day in day in out on the product and we do all the support as well

so how do i find these engineers well i found one of them through twitter just by tweeting and he reached out to me one of the nice things about being in the note-taking space is that there are a lot of engineers who are really interested in it and they have little hobby projects on the side where they make notes apps so a lot when you go out and hire engineers often it's quite interesting problems you're dealing with like end-to-end encryption and real-time sync and dealing with sync conflicts and i know that some people really enjoy that stuff obviously the downside of that is that you get a lot of competitors started by similar engineers, but there are upsides. And then, so that's one engineer.

And then the other engineer I found through an open source project that we heavily relied on. So if you think about a notes app, which Reflect is, I'm not sure if we've elaborated on that, but yes, it's a little note-taking application. The biggest part of it is the rich text editor. So making sure that you pick the right library is incredibly important. And we had a few false starts, but eventually we picked a project called Remarrow. And I noticed there was an incredible committer

to Remarrow who was just pushing really really good code and so i reached out to him and hired him so that those are two ways that i hire people i often will just keep tabs on open source projects that i really admire and see who's pushing really good stuff to them and then i also just keep a list of people that i want to work with and i've been creating this list for years and it has engineers on there and designers and whenever i have a project i will reach out to people on this on that list and i honestly have a near 100 success rate of working with those people um are very very fortunate how do you do that how do you how do you get 100 success rate how do you approach somebody

and say you're telling me you got a sailboat come on i got a sailboat sailing yeah you use the implication well yeah I would say part of it's the projects. Part of it's the sell. It's unique each time. You've got to figure out what someone wants and if what you're offering fits in with their life plans, essentially. Sure. But I think software engineers like working with other good engineers

so if you've got a good team and also if you're a good engineer as well i think that helps if you i mean it's it's unusual i think for a highly technical ceo to be reaching out personally and working with people and like in the trenches together so yeah i think all that helps but also maybe it's just like the draw i don't know uh it could be and all i know is i got incredibly fortunate to work with with some amazing people and i owe almost all my success to those people yeah who's reflect for i mean i know that you say on the site thinkers, and I think, and I take a lot of lists. So I'm a big things user. And I said before the call, I know of reflect, I haven't used it yet, but I've been paying attention to your journey. I remember when it was just a landing page. It was early, early ideas. And I was surprised to go back recently and see end to end encryption. Like that was super cool. But it's always been fast. But I can remember the early days, like, I don't even know where this thing's going to go. I just have this idea. I want to take, I want a place to put my notes, and

nothing really fits. I'm paraphrasing months and months of me paying attention to your moves. But who is this app for? Who should use it? If I'm a things user, which is basically just tasks, and tasks to me are kind of like notes, but not writing. What should I do? What direction should I go?

And in some cases, I can take notes within it. But if you're a things user who's getting things done like that, or a thinker, in this case, who is this app for? It's for me. Okay. Honestly. I'm trying to basically make the perfect notes app for me. And it's just my passion project.

And I'm hoping that there are enough people out there that are similar to me that people will pay for it and we've got just over a thousand customers now so it seems to be working but i mean to answer your question in this in a slightly more expanded way i think the type of people who like reflect are generally the ones who are moving off Apple Notes. So if you are a note taker and you love writing markdown and you like customizing your tools and writing little shell scripts and things, then I point you towards Obsidian because I think that is Obsidian because I think that's the best for that crowd.

If you are a bit more of a visual person and you like just writing in a beautiful interface and not writing markdown and you want everything handled for you and you want integrations into Kindle and all the other places that you use that you write notes or that you use to collect your thoughts, then Reflect is quite a good option. But the thing is, these notes apps are very, very personal things.

People really care about them. And the people that use them, use them religiously. It's a part of them. And that is why I say to people try it you know there are lots of notes apps out there yeah and uh you will find one that works for your brain and maybe it's reflects maybe it isn't but just give it a shot so what's interesting about your particular view of the notes landscape it's for you so what is a shot. So what's interesting about your particular view of the notes landscape? It's for you. So what does Alex like?

Like what's your taste? What's your, you said it works with your Kindle. That's not something that I would have ever thought of, but you apparently like to read your notes on your Kindle. Like that's one, one example of the kind of stuff I'm looking for. Like what makes reflect unique and what's your view of the world of notes?

Yeah. So in regards to the kindle sync actually it's taking your highlights from your kindle books and pulling them into your notes oh it's pulling them in okay you could read your notes on their kindle i got you okay the hard to use at that point that's how you fake write a book you know write some notes get on the kindle that's right what i did mom wrote a book. It's right here on my Kindle. That's right. Now, I find it's really nice highlighting inside the Kindle and then just having those highlights being added to your brain index,

basically. Gotcha. Yeah, it's a cool feature. Whenever you search, you'll see those notes. But I really care about design. I really, really care about design. really really care about design i care about speed i care about simplicity we actually have published our product values and we run every single thing that we build by the values first so you know one of our values one of the most important ones

is speed and if we're going to build a feature and it's not really fast we won't build that feature and we i also also just want to strip out features because there's no code faster than no code so so that's like i love having these guiding principles and then security is something i really care about you know when i was sitting out to build a notes app i was thinking to myself what are the worst case scenarios and i was like man what if one day this thing gets hacked and all your friends notes published across the internet that would probably be the worst case scenario and you i you know i don't know if you'd have any friends left uh so i didn't i don't know this is how i think it might be a little crazy but so I from day one we put end-to-end

encryption in the app so none of the data sees our servers I mean at least not in any plaintext form and I can tell you it makes it about 10 times as complicated because you have to start running data migrations on the client. And that is so difficult to get right. But I still would do it. I still would do it. I think it's so important. And there's very few Node apps out there that actually have that kind of security.

Yeah. There is one, I think it's called Slight, if I recall correctly, that has end to end encryption. It's either slight or something else that's similar. It's like network docs for teams, but like at some point with note taking, you're either with the individual or you get to a point where it's like,

even with things, for example, for me, I'm like, I kind of like want to have, you know, a team in there to some degree, but then I'm like, no, keep it simple. At some point, like with notes, I kind of like want to have, you know, a team in there to some degree. But then I'm like, no, keep it simple.

At some point, like with notes, you have to almost get, you have to push back on the complexity. Because you want to now have a team. You know, like with craft, for example, is a beautiful iOS focused note taking docs. Very notion like similar. But it got complex. And it's just too much for me. So I had to bail on craft even. And I feel like anywhere I go with my notes is somehow goes down a path that

maybe reflects this for me because I always get on this path of like complexity, jumbo interface, you know, differently like that. And I want end to end encryption. I would like to have, you know, speed obviously is kind of primary to that, but more than that, like a, a really good user experience in the actual app. And I feel like when you're in this note-taking space, you almost have to go down, not have to, but like maybe because they're a first-time founder or something like that. Like by way of success, you're forced down a road that you may not actually want to go down. So maybe the fact that this is for you helps you be so simple because you have such a simple focus for you as an individual

versus you as, it's not you plus Alex's team. It's just for Alex in your brain. Yeah. Well, you actually, you caught on to a very important point there, which is the incentive system. So the problem with a lot of these consumer apps is that they raise venture funding and then the incentives change and the incentives are basically to grow grow grow whatever the costs yeah and the way that you grow grow grow is you add team features and if you look at like notions history they have gone from the

single player application to the multiplayer application and that's a much larger business it's a lot more successful but the single player always suffers in that scenario and they just i see it happen time time time again and the thing about reflect is we do not have traditional venture funding and we don't intend to raise traditional venture i think maybe a crowdfunding round could be in our future but i want to pay dividends i don't want to grow grow grow i don't want to do round after round after round because that's what i did my my previous company. I've done that. I don't need to do that again. And when you change the incentives like that, it actually changes everything right down to the way the product works.

Because it can stay more in line with the user that you intended versus the original user that kind of gets left behind in some cases. I mean, some products can get it right and go team and still, like I use Notion as an individual and maybe because I use it in our business too. As a team, I understand its shortcomings and drawbacks, so to speak. I still thrive inside of Notion personally. It's not for everybody personally. It's certainly not a great note taking app because it can do it, but it's not. It's just good enough, basically. It's too heavy for that. Yeah, it's a little a great note-taking app because it can do it, but it's just good enough, basically.

It's too heavy for that. Yeah, it's a little heavy for that. It's good for a knowledge base where after your thoughts are formed and you want to share them, you can put them into Notion. But for me thinking, it's too much. Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think of it as a wiki rather than a note-taking tool. And one of the biggest differences is hierarchy.

In Notion, everything has a hierarchy. In Reflect, everything is flat. And things link to each other. And notes are associated with each other. And that's kind of how the brain works. You have these associated thoughts. But it doesn't have a hierarchy, which is quite important. It comes back to speed.

Speed doesn't just mean the speed of the apps the user interface of the app it also means friction like overhead mental overhead of entering data and if you have to think about where something goes whenever you enter something that's a little bit of friction that takes a toll. And it gets in the way of flow. Like I really care about it being an amazing writing tool. So that's getting one of the differences. But Notion's great. And like I said, we all think differently. If Notion works for you, that's amazing.

Use Notion. You know, we all say different. You're saying a lot of things that remind me of Jesse Grosjean, Adam, who we had on the show from Hog Base Software. Alex, he does, you know, what he calls tools for thought. And he has a macOS native app called Bike, which is an outliner. But a lot of the exact same principles, I guess, or ideals he shares with you and goals. Now he's never done the big startup raise money company. And then he's been doing the same thing the entire 20

years of his career, like solo indie. You should acquire him and hire him. Very talented guy. And he pushes back. He actually talks about the perfect 1.0 product and how what happens with him over time is he, he, he begins to dislike his product as he adds things to it. Cause actually it was perfect when it was 1.0, which is an interesting view. Like, uh, sometimes adding stuff actually just ruins what you, what you created. And so that'd be at least an interesting conversation for you to go back to listen to you. Actually, you should talk about Jesse and talk to him. I think you'd have a lot in common, but we, we talked to him about this as well as like this incentive for him. Like I really like bike. I use it as an outliner. And it actually is kind of a way I think, cause I kind of think it outlines just inside of a,

a text file. But then all of a sudden you're like, well, I want to share this outlining with Adam, you know? Cause we're, and he's like, yeah, but think about all the things that I have to do to get that done. And like, that's a lot. And that made me think of my notes app. I'm just an Apple notes guy. It's just, I'm fine with it. Uh, I don't love it. I don't hate it, but it's there. And so that's friction for me is like installing something, using something. I'm just okay with Apple notes, but then you go to try to share an Apple note and you add a collaborator and the thing just slows down as it like does its whole, who has access? And now this person's editing it and it's like trying to do a non-web

based sync collab thing that even Apple's best engineers, I'm not sure if their best engineers are working on notes, but great Apple engineers can't seem to get right. But you have an advantage. You have a web-based tool, right? So you doing web have you considered i mean i know you don't want to go teams because that's like not incentivized for you but have you thought about sharing because sharing is pretty big deal so we do we do publishing notes so if you want to publish your notes you can do that and as soon as you click publish we decrypt the note and stick it on our servers and then anyone with a secret URL can get to it but yeah I just don't I mean I don't want to add that stuff yeah hey if you want to if you want to collaborate on a note use google docs it's great for that

uh you know it's so painful yeah so different tools for for different jobs maybe maybe. Yeah, I think so. I mean, and I can understand why Apple is struggling. CRDTs, which a technical term basically means the data structure that you use for conflict resolution. This is extremely, extremely difficult. I was chatting to the author of YGS, a famous library in the CRDC world, and he was telling me that in order to get perfect merging of merge conflicts, you actually need an AGI.

Oh, really? Yeah, that's why... We don't have one of those yet. Well, that's why Git uses the AGI to do merge conflicts. Oh, I thought you mean artificial general intelligence. Yeah, I mean, well, it uses the... Oh to do merge conflicts. Oh, I thought you mean artificial general intelligence. Yeah, I mean, well, it uses the... Oh, it uses us. I got you.

I didn't follow you there. I didn't have my AGI there. Gotcha. Yeah, we have to do our own merge conflicts because there is no AGI. I'm with you. Exactly. Not yet.

But yeah, that's the one thing I'm looking forward to with the AGI. Forget all the living forever and so on. Get conflict merging. Get conflict, yeah. No more GitHub co-pilot. Just GitHub pilot. Just go ahead and do the merge conflicts for me. I don't want to talk about it.

That's right. This episode is brought to you by Sourcegraph. With the launch of their Code Insights product, teams can now track what really matters in their code base. Code Insights instantly transforms your code base into a creable database to create visual dashboards in seconds. And I'm here with Joel Kortler, the product manager of Code Insights for Sourcegraph. Joel, the way teams can use Code Insights seems to pretty much be limitless, but a particular problem every engineering team has is tracking versions of languages or packages. How big of a deal is it actually to track versions

for teams? Yeah, it's a big deal for a couple of reasons. The first is, of course, just compatibility. You don't want things to break when you're testing locally or to break on your CI systems or test systems. You need to have some sort of level of like version unification and minimum version support. And all of that needs to be, you know, compatible forward. But the other thing we learned was that for a lot of customers, especially, you know, engineering organizations that are pretty established, they have older versions of things or even older versions of like SaaS tools they don't use anymore that they haven't fully removed because they're like not sure if it's still in use or they, you know, lost focus on that. And they're spinning up old virtual machines

that they're still paying for. They're using, you know, old SaaS subscriptions they're afraid to cancel because they're not sure if anyone's actually using it. And so getting off of those versions not just like saves you the headaches and the risks and the vulnerabilities of being on old versions, but also literally the money of, you know, older systems running more slowly or the build times or, you know, virtual machines and SaaS tools that you're no longer using. Before you had this ability, we talked to teams. There are basically three ways you could do this.

You could slack a million people and ask for just like an update point in time. You could have sort of one human and one spreadsheet where like it's somebody's job every Friday or every two weeks. They just like search all the code and find all the versions and write it down in a Google sheet. Or there were a couple of companies that I came across with in-house systems that were sort of complicated. You had to know, you know, maybe Kotlin, but you didn't know Kotlin. But if you want to use this system, you had to learn Kotlin and you'd have to sort of build the whole world from scratch

and run basically a tool like this with a pretty steep learning curve. And now for all three of those, you could replace it with a single line source graph search, which is basically just the name of the thing you're trying to track and the version string in the right format. And then we have templates that will help you get started if you're not sure what that format is. And then it'll automatically track all the different versions for you, both historically. So even if you start using it today, you can see your historical patterns. And then, of course, going forward. Very cool. Thank you, Joel. So right now there is a treasure trove of insights just waiting for you. Living inside your code base right now, teams are tracking migrations,

adoption, deprecations. They're detecting and tracking versions of languages and packages. They're removing or ensuring the removal of security vulnerabilities. They understand their code by team. They can track their code smells and health, and they can visualize configurations and services and so much more with Code Insights. A good next step is to go to about.sourcegraph.com slash code dash insights. See how other teams are using this awesome feature. Again, about.sourcegraph.com slash code dash insights. This link is in the show notes. And by Honeycomb, find your most perplexing application issues. Honeycomb is a fast analysis tool that reveals the truth about every aspect of your application in production.

Find out how users experience your code in complex and unpredictable environments. Find patterns and outliers across billions of rows of data, and definitely solve your problems. And we use Honeycomb here at Change. Well, that's why we welcome the opportunity to add them as one of our infrastructure partners. In particular, we use Honeycomb to track down CDN issues recently, which we talked about at length on the Kaizen edition of the Ship It podcast. So check that out. Here's the thing. Teams who don't use Honeycomb are forced to find the needle in the haystack. They scroll through endless dashboards playing whack-a-mole. They deal with alert floods, trying to guess which one matters, and they go from tool to tool to tool playing sleuth,

trying to figure out how all the puzzle pieces fit together. It's this context switching and tool sprawl that are slowly killing teams' effectiveness and ultimately hindering their business. With Honeycomb, you get a fast a fast unified and clear understanding of the one thing driving your business production with honeycomb. You guess less and you know more join the swarm and try honeycomb free today at honeycomb.io slash change log again, honeycomb.io slash changelog. It must be refreshing, though, to be in this position, having been down your road and determined that being a CEO is not what you personally want to do and having the courage to go through the process of, you know, dropping your ego, as you said before, like your ego held you back from doing it at

20 count versus whenever you did it in the outcome to now be doing something that is totally focused on your specific desires with note-taking and And then even pushing back on Jared saying, no, no, no, if you want to share a doc or collaborate, use Google Docs. Which as a guy who likes design, I don't know if that's a sincere recommendation, but I'll take it. I think it was.

I think it was. But that shows the sign of somebody who really knows what they want, right? I mean, that must be a refreshing place to be in in life. Well, I can tell you going through the roller coaster, in inverted commas, of starting a venture-backed company and growing it and along that way having a lot of help and a lot of people giving you a lot of feedback every step of the way

and having therapists and coaches and so on, it helps you know yourself as one big benefit that you walk away from that with like i really feel like i've got a good handle on myself and as you say it is really nice to be back in my what i call the zone of genius which i'm not trying to toot my own horn is a term that i use when someone is good at what they do but also that thing gives them energy i think that's the key that's the key thing a lot of people forget they generally know oh i'm good at math or i'm good at this or that but they and then they then they kind of pick their career around that but they don't think about what gives them energy. And it's so important.

It's such an important part. If something gives you energy, you can just keep on doing it and you love every second of it. Self-sustaining. On the note of mental health, since you kind of alluded to that, how has Reflect helped you? I guess maybe what did you use before Reflect to notate? You seem like a good notatee. I know you were a svelte blogger prolifically. I guess maybe what did you use before Reflect to notate? You seem like a good notetaker. I know you were a svelte blogger prolifically. I'm sure we've even covered you in news over the years many times. And I know you're a good writer and I've seen your book and I think it's super cool that you've actually did a podcast

around the Manager's Handbook. I think that's phenomenal that each chapter sort of has its own podcast. I love that. Yeah, that's cool. But that you were a noteter beforehand, before Reflect, how has your ability to think and process your thought and keep that thought? Because one of the things I think that makes us human or really good humans, like superpower humans, is our self-awareness, right? You mentioned therapist and counsel and people who give you advice.

All these people make you more and more aware of who you are. And the more you are aware of who you are, the better I think you can be. You, really. So self-awareness is a superpower. I got to imagine that note-taking has been that superpower for you because it lets you put out your thought, critique it, fine-tune it, edit it, even revisit it or reflect back on it whenever you go back to your old notes. How was that for you? Yeah. I did a lot of writing and I love writing. And I actually think that writing and software engineering are very similar. So I think it's no coincidence that I love writing. But to your question, I didn't really have a tool.

The only tool I had was a little Heroku bot that would email me once a week. And it would say, hey, how did your week go? And I would respond to this email. And I would write a little paragraph or two. And it would save it in a Postgres database. But the neat thing about this service was that it would send a random email from the past, like a random diary entry from the past.

And it would include that when it would prompt, like, how's your week going? And it was very nostalgic, just saying like, oh, that's kind of the space that i was in a year ago that's what i was thinking about and there's a little pattern or maybe some rut that i'm in some thought that i can't get out of but it's it was a really good tool but now now i feel like reflect to have like this superpower because i mean i don't want to say this is just a reflect thing. A lot of these notes apps are very, very good.

And I highly recommend you use one of them at least. But now I just, everything I read, every thought I have, everyone I meet, and then I connect these ideas with something called a backlink, associates these ideas. And it just means the recall is incredible. I have a very bad memory. And so I really lean on Reflex and I'm just typing up, typing in people's company names to find all people work at that company when I forget someone's name, but I can remember

where they work. Or the same with the location. If I just type New York City, I can see all my friends in New York. It's kind of like a little mini database for my mind. Yeah, that's the way the brain works. It's like, I know where, I know what movie it was, or some sort of like, basically,

some sort of like location marker, right? Yeah. Even when you go through a town like, oh, make a left at X, right? Some sort of mile marker or historical landmark or just some sort of landmark in general, like gives you a point of reference. And it's like, oh, okay, from there, it's this, this or this. Or I know those people over there. That's how your brain works.

It's like a graph, essentially. That's interesting that you put everything in there. That's how your brain works. It's like a graph, essentially. That's interesting that you put everything in there. I can even see how your Kindle notes make sense because for me, when I use my Kindle and I note take in there, at least highlight what I'm thinking about in there, I want a good way to search those, especially when it's a brainy book. Something that doesn't require it obviously isn't that pertinent, but something where it's maybe a... I've read books about the brain from daniel siegel for example where it's like super deep thought thinking of like what it means to be mindful or these different things that think in the present and all these things that sort of anchor you to now versus like the fear of the past or the fear of the future which causes anxiety like these are things i want to reflect on and get those notes

somewhere else. And the search engine for Kindle is terrible. Terrible. So if having them in a different engine and they're the same notes and I can use them, that to me is a really interesting feature. Yeah, it is honestly great being able to export those. It's a shame they have no API.

I had to do some heinous things to get that working, I can tell you. But yeah, we basically have kind of hacked together an API in terms of what they provide. But it's really nice being able to pull out all of that out. In fact, I've been thinking about this idea. And you know, when you search for a book, what's the first result? It's an Amazon page, right? That's kind of crazy. guess it should be a wikipedia page it should be a wiki page with a synopsis of the book and links to other relevant material other things the book has pulled on maybe a few reviews in there but we needed something

better i mean i mean mulling over this idea in my head and maybe one of your listeners wants to try and create this company, but I really think we need something better here. I think Goodreads tries to do some of that compete. Amazon's really tough to compete with when it comes to an Amazon bought Goodreads, didn't they? They did.

Oh yeah. Yeah, they did. And then it's a sad story. They haven't really done anything since yeah i don't know if book authors would like us to land anywhere but the amazon page you know maybe their own page but i think they're happy that is true i didn't think of that that's very true i've been taking this idea one more step actually there's this book called the beginning

of infinity that is this incredible incredible book book by this physicist, David Deutsch. And it is all about human progress and how progress happens and our unlimited potential. It's a really amazing book, but it's very, very dense and it's hard to read. So I actually created a website around it. You can check it out, thebegin out the beginning of infinity.xyz and i created in this new ui this new format that of exploring books through a graph database and you can get kind of drilled down into each each idea so you have the page which is you could read the synopsis of the entire book it's you know not that long and then you can drill down into all the concepts and i wonder if i've been playing around with this

idea and i wonder if we should make more books into more of these websites that would be really cool well it certainly makes finding them easier and digging into them a little bit more useful because i mean i guess that's the point of the book is you have to kind of read it to get what's in it. Right. It's kind of a modern version of Cliff's notes. Yeah. Modernized for the web.

Yeah. Yeah. A lot of these nonfiction books are three times as long as they should be. Oh yeah. And we should just have the Cliff note page and then totally, you know, be able to drill down into anything we don't already understand so not a sponsor but i have talked about blinkist in the

past and they do this in audio style where they'll give you the 15 minute rundown of an audiobook and a lot of the business books are like two or three good ideas maybe one good idea and a couple adjunct ideas and then example example example, because they have to have 200 or 300 pages to sell it to you. If it's like a 70-page book, I was just talking to somebody about this the other day, where they were initially complaining that this person's book, oh, I know, it was Darren Murph's remote work handbook or something, and it's like a 70-page book that Darren Murph wrote about remote work. And this person was complaining, which is a natural reaction of like, I was impressed that he wrote a book. And then I was like, this is only

70 pages. I'm like, yeah, but what if he had just said, fluffed it up with examples to 300 pages? Like, would that be any better? And they're like, yeah, you know, you know what? Actually now I'm happy. That's only 70 pages, you know? Yeah. So we have these artificial limits. Yeah. Maybe you should judge more for a smaller book. Yeah, exactly. it's like that old saying like i'm sorry this email this letter so long i didn't have time to make it any shorter you know yeah like it's actually harder to think in a condensed way in a way that's actually efficient it's easier just to spew yeah but this is cool i like this idea so blinkus does that it's

like a they'll give you the 15 minute synopsis in audio 10 to 15 of all the high points of the book without you having to read it and if you want the full book then go from there but even that's audio i like this you could just scan this real quick and decide if it's worth a read or not yeah cool idea is this open source or anything like the way you're building it yeah it's all open source and also a lot of the ideas were stolen i mean mean, of course, not just the book contents, but the structure of the UI. It's all in the about section. So you can kind of...

Yeah, that's why I'm asking, because if anybody wants to kind of like take this idea and run with it, I mean, this is a great starting point, right? Go for it. Yeah, it's just markdown files. So it should work for any book. Is this meant to be written from a singular person,

or would this be similar to Wikipedia, where eventually editors and other authors can contribute to whatever this becomes? Yeah, it's a good question. I don't know. I mean, maybe, ideally, it's written by the author, but like you said, a lot of them are trapped into this kind of publishing incentive system that makes them a bit too verbose so i i don't know i mean i am starting to write another

one on a book called scale that i really like it's about cities and systems and bodies biology and um yeah i'm just gonna run with with this idea and see if anyone likes it hmm very cool maybe eventually you will have a small list of books you've read and then written this thing for and others will contribute and do the same for their books and maybe that's the way you scale

it because you know you read a couple books and you're like man put my thoughts out there and here's the way you do it and then you could do the same if you want to contribute to it. Maybe there's like two versions, like somebody does the beginning of affinity that you've done. And there's Alex's version of it, there's Adam's version of it. And maybe you can get something out of it. I don't know. That's an interesting thing. Then you can rank the curators, curate the curators at that point.

This could be a cool feature of reflect, you know, like here's your notes on it, like export this kind of a thing. Well, it's funny you mentioned that. Yes, it's got,

it has gone through my mind. Yeah. Yeah. That's, I can see that being a tie together for sure. Cause they're especially coming out at both coming out of your mind. I think it'd be, it would make a lot of sense.

One last question about reflect before we let you go, Alex, you are trying to get more people living this lifestyle, maybe the sailboat lifestyle, but also just like the live where you want to live and, and work from where you want to work. Lifestyle is reflect local first. Cause here you are disconnected at many times. And I think a local first would be like something that you would want but

i'm wondering because it's also hard to do especially with end-to-end encryption does it work offline it does work offline it works quite well offline we've put a lot of effort into it but it's meant for a plane ride or a not a trip across the atlantic not a trip across the Atlantic. Not a trip across the Atlantic. Yes. You know, maybe I should have made it offline first. You do get a lot of benefits, though, from the sync and having it all on all your devices. Right. And I found that people would hack that sync on later.

Often it doesn't work quite as well. And we actually used Firebase for our storage, but we had to have a lot of things on top of it to get it performant and to get all the merge conflicting working and what have you. You know, there are some really interesting ideas out there right now.

There's a library or a company called replicash that is trying to solve this exact problem and i do think this is going to be the next wave of internet applications especially ones that are kind of pseudo desktop web that kind of you know writing that line where you expect the desktop performance, the instant access and so on. And Jugga Reptile Cache, we may end up using it at Reflect, honestly, because they do all the much conflicting and syncing and all that jazz, and they do it all. And it would be nice to outsource that. You know, I think a Firebase built today

would be offline first and deal with all that. And, you know, what would be amazing is if I could just power the UI, my React UI off a local SQLite database or maybe something a bit more object-orientated, but basically a local database, and do all my writes and reads from that database, and have it reactive. So whenever that database changes, my UI automatically updates. And then something deals with all of the synchronization. And would be amazing and i think that is the direction

that we're going in well if you're thinking about synchronizing sqlite databases or sqlite databases uh check out what ben johnson's up to he's been working on that kind of thing with lightstream and his other more recent efforts and because sqlite's becoming like maybe the next big database even though it's already a huge database with our ability to distribute it around the world and have it and on all the edges and synchronize it around there giving us finally like a globally distributed synchronized lightweight SQL database interesting times for alex anything we haven't asked you about talked to you about wondered about when you're getting back on the sailboat i guess november is that what you said you are you chomping at the bit are you liking life on land or you can't wait to get

back on the ocean it makes me really appreciate all the things you know i have a shower on land and i don't have to worry about the water being depleted so or i have a nice steak it's hard to find in the caribbean or what have you so i just definitely appreciate it but i am my best self on the water i just love it it is my thing so yeah i will be back yeah i don't know what else we haven't covered. We've covered a lot. But all I will say is that I hope it's not another 10 years until I'm back on the podcast. Let's definitely not do that. Let's catch up more often.

I would love that. I'd love to hear, especially, I mean, your brain. I've got to imagine at some point you may do something with solar too because, I mean, you seem so enamored by the lithium battery and the possibilities. I've got to imagine once you get 20 people well you won't be seeing you anymore of reflect and you'll move on to innovating on solar or something like that who knows right who knows yeah anything can happen that's i'm enjoying that that's uh that idea too because it's solar is a really interesting

thing i'm liking it for my rv and i'm it for my future home. I'm in the process of building. So we'll have solar there and be able to go off the grid. And it's just a cool thing is like not being in tethered. The freedom of that lack of tether is really interesting to me. I gotta imagine that's why

you like the boat so much. Yeah, for sure. I do think there's an argument to be made that solar is our future. So who knows? Maybe I'll be doubling around in it alex has been awesome man thank you so much for your time man appreciate it thank you so much appreciate it well that's it this show's done thank you for tuning in hey it was fun talking

to alex it was good to catch up after so many years and reflect on where he's been where he's going and where he might go. If you have thoughts to share, comments, whatever, a link to the comment section is in the show notes. A big thank you to our friends and our partners at Fastly and also Fly.io. Breakmaster Cylinder keeps our beats banging because, hey, Breakmaster makes banging beats and we love them. And of course, thank you to you for listening to the show.

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