The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Sustaining Open Source Software (Interview)

Episode Date: June 5, 2015

Mike Perham joined the show to talk about sustaining open source software, living a healthy life, how to treat one another, and more.

welcome back everyone this is the changelog and i'm your host adams dekoviak this is episode 159 and on today's show we're talking to mike parham the maker of sidekick, Sidekick Pro, Inspector, and Inspector Pro. And this is more of a conversation show than we might normally have. Jared, myself, Mike, all talking about sustaining open source. We teetered off the subject a little bit here and there, but for the most part, we were focused on what it takes to sustain open source, avoid burnout, and hopefully you love this show. We have three awesome sponsors, CodeChip, TopTow, and DreamHost. Our first sponsor is CodeChip.

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Head to code ship.com slash the changelog to get started. Tell them we sent you and now onto the show. All right, everybody. We're back. We've got a great show lined up today. We've got Mike Parham here today. Jared Santo, of course. Jared, what's up, man?

I'm here. I'm excited. I'm ready to do this. You don't sound excited. You've got to sound excited. I'm here. I'm excited. I'm ready to do this.

Mike, are you excited? I am pumped, guys. Pumped. This is the best part of my day right now. Right. I'm here. I'm excited. I'm ready to do this. Mike, you excited? I am pumped, guys. Pumped. This is the best part of my day right now. Right. Awesome. Awesome. And it's Friday.

You know, it's TGIF. The best day ever. The best day ever. So the conversation today, this is, so for the listeners' sake, this is a lot more of a roundtable than I think some of our other shows might be. A pretty near and dear topic to any of our hearts here sustaining open source not just sustaining open source but just sustainable lifestyle sustaining anything the changelog open source projects a business and some recent events

brought this to mike's attention mike tweeted out uh that he wanted to talk and we said hey let's talk and here we are so So what do you think, Mike? That's a very accurate summary. So sustainable open source, what is it that prompted you to tweet what you tweeted? So I tweeted what I tweeted because Steve Klabnick recently sort of rage quit Twitter. And this made me profoundly sad. I mean, I've met Steve before, a really nice guy, really smart guy.

And he's one of the good guys in open source that is not only incredibly productive, but he is, I think, a good role model for other people who are looking to get into open source. And so for him to sort of quit open source in frustration really worried me. And I think it is, I'm assuming that he, yeah, I can't really speak to why he quit per se, but I know that open source has a serious problem with sustainability in people working on open source projects for months or years and then giving up on them because they simply don't want to put any more time into it because it's so frustrating. And so I wanted to have that

discussion about things that you can do to minimize that frustration and things that you can do to ensure that not only are you treated with the most respect, but your users are treated with respect. And everybody tries to be as respectful to each other as possible. Well, I was going to say, let's maybe, as a group, try to reflect back on those we can remember or moments we can remember where burnout happened besides Steve here. This is the most recent one, but you got things like,

I'm not sure if why I ever left Ruby because of burnout or not. I, I think it's sort of up in the air. If you, if you, that's an opinion, maybe not so much a fact unless anybody has proof. And he said,

so behind the scenes, Lee Hambly with Capistrano, we had a conversation on that just recently, just yesterday, Unless anybody has proof and he said so behind the scenes. Lee Hambly with Capistrano, we had a conversation on that just recently. Just yesterday we released a show or recently we released a show with – I had a conversation with the CEO of Joyent, Scott Hammond. And we talked about Ryan Dahl having issues with burnout and then stepping away from Node back in the day. And that sort of helped begin some long-term fracturing, not so much, you know, he himself, but just his departure and, you know, removing himself as the BDFL. And then, you know, what, what examples can you guys come up with?

The one that I can think of offhand was James Tucker, who is also known as Roggie. He used to maintain Rack and he sort of, he joined Google, I think a year or two ago, and he's sort of minimized his open source work over the last two years because he's been so frustrated and feels like he's been so frustrated and, um, and feels like he's just putting in a lot of work, uh, for maintenance and, you know, and drudgery, um, without any sort of reward or recognition. So, uh, I, I don't know that he is like tweeted out enraged things, but I know he has in the past. I don't necessarily have someone else to add to the list. One fine point I wanted to make about Steve's recent departure. As many listeners know, Steve's kind of been involved in the changelog over the years, and so he is in our Slack room tweet where he says, I feel the need to say that this has been a few years coming. If you're just reading my timeline, you probably don't get it.

And then he said to us, this is me needing to chill out after years of stuff. It's not any particular thing. So I just wanted to throw that in there. When you go to – when you get the pedal to the metal and your car goes 120 and you're going 120, I love analogies. Yeah. I mean, you don't, you don't, you don't burn out overnight, right? You burn out day after day after day for months and years. Um, your, your sort of frustration level grows every single day. There's, um, the burnout doesn't happen overnight. So maybe we can talk about some things that attribute to it. So there's a couple of factors.

You got one self-inflicting things that you can do, right? The ways you live your lifestyle, the choices you make. And then there's the other side, which is the way the world perceives what you work on, whether it's in recognition or adoration or put downs or requiring too much from you and, and treating like a God and expecting more from you than you can actually, you know, put out sustainably for long periods of time. So maybe let's start with the, the ones you do self-inflicting. What,

what are some examples I think of that you can think of that are self, self-inflicting towards moving you towards burnout? Well, the easiest thing to do is just overwhelm yourself with work, is to just keep saying yes to new features, yes to the growth of your own project that you may be working on. If you want to start building your own language and interpreter, that might be a fun weekend project. But if people start using it, if you want to start using it at your work, maybe for some custom business purpose, now all of a sudden you've got users.

You've got something to maintain. People start asking for more features. Now that weekend project has gone from something that you can throw away to something that other people start to depend on. And that brings up a question of how long, how are you going to support this thing? And sometimes that, um, those responsibilities can, can even surprise and overwhelm somebody who never expected their little project to go so far. And all of a sudden, now you have all these users. At first, it's fun. Somebody's paying attention to something you built. Of course, that joy of having something you made

being used in the real world, we've all probably felt that, and it feels pretty good. And you start to have a certain sense of responsibility that you probably weren't prepared for. And, uh, how you react in that moment, or maybe like you said, it is over time, but how you react to those types of pressures, I think can lead you one way or the other. Right. People start seeing you as an expert in that space, whatever that space might be. And you don't want to lose that respect. And so by telling people, no, you might be worried that

you're going to start losing that respect. And so a lot of people tend to just start saying yes to everything. They don't want to turn down PRs. They want to answer every support question as fast as possible. Yeah, it's a tough – once you have that ball rolling, it's going to roll on its own. That inertia is going to keep going on its own. And it's hard to stop that. As a – I guess an experiment in preparation for this call, I went on Hacker News and searched for burnout, just the word burnout. Not a ton of results, but enough to alarm anybody. 331 results.

I don't know if somebody's go back a couple years. And then I went to the next place somebody might rant about burnout or talk about burnout, which is Medium. And the list is just way too long to even go through like it's just creative burnout uh all all angles of burnout talked about on medium so clearly this happens every day clearly people are having this issue and and clearly it's it's going to keep happening because that's what the past says in the future. You know, the past predicts the future. So. Right. If, if some of these things are self-inflicting, what are some of the things that are, are not self-inflicting where the,

I guess it's the thing where, you know, we have pride. We're like, okay, great. People love what I've done. I'm thinking, you know, when you guys were talking, I was thinking about Flappy Birds. Like he didn't expect that game to get crazy. Right. And then what happened to him? He was was like i'm not making games anymore i didn't follow the drama but it it broke down to some real serious drama where this game took off and then he got a lot of hate for the game being too close to warrior brothers and then it was just the coolest game ever because no one could win it and so then it was about trying to win this game and and all he was trying to do is just have fun and release something silly to you know the app store

neither was responsible for the game you know that was one of the fastest forms of burnout i've ever seen i think it was uh yeah where'd he last uh three days it was not very long he pulled the game from the app store and then that's when everybody got really mad, right? Well, he couldn't take the attention, right? I was telling Jared this too. That's one of the concerns I've had with the changelog is I'm a pretty private person. I like to share what I do in my life, but there are certain lines I don't cross, not because nobody deserves a no or I've got some secrets. It's just that there's things that are private and there's things that are public.

And I didn't want the success required of the change log to sustain it, require me to become more and more of a celebrity, which I don't desire. Or Jared to become more and more of a celebrity so that when we go places people know us, that's nice. But I don't want it to be like, well, the change log is going to exist forever. It's going to be the greatest show every time we do it. And then you've got this mountain that sort of starts mounting up against you. And you're like, I can't live up against that. So do you have that problem, Mike, with your work? Celebrity status, people expecting the greatest thing ever from you.

I don't, I don't think I have that too much. And I try not to, I try not to lead people into thinking that, you know, my way is the best way ever. I, I, I try to make it clear that what I build, here's what it's designed to do. Um, you know, it may suit your purpose or it may not. Um, I, I do have a little, little bit of the celebrity thing in that when I get, like, when I went to RailsConf last month, um, it was ridiculous because a lot of people knew me and I know nobody. Right. So, um, for instance, I, you know, I'd just be talking to a bunch of a bunch of people at the happy hour or whatever and they'd say hey what do you do and i say well i i wrote sidekick i maintain sidekick is my full-time job now and all of a sudden these guys want to get a photo

with me because they use sidekick they love sidekick and they can't believe that they just met me and you know i so i i don't know any of these guys, but they all know me, right? So that's kind of the definition of a celebrity where people just already know who you are. There's no introduction sort of necessary aside from just acknowledging, yeah, that's me. But what was I gonna say we were we were talking about flappy bird and i had something to mention and and i lost track i'll throw one thing in there and you can think about that for a second i i've gotten it where i was standing in line for a drink at a pre-party or after party to conference and i'm talking to somebody and somebody turns around they're like

hey are you adam stack you know they don't even call me by my name they call me like my internet hand or whatever and they didn't know me but by what i was talking about they knew me by my voice and i was like that's me you know like what am i gonna say no it's somebody you know but but yeah i've had something similar and my wife was with me and she was sort of freaked out by it not not in a bad way she was like he really is googleable that's that's a long story short jared you might be able to laugh that because we told you the story before but when i'm a longer version yeah i'll embarrass myself by saying when i first met my wife um one of the things i said to her and depending on how you take it it could be it could be thinking like i was trying to like I was cool, but I wasn't.

I meant that I was trustworthy, that anything you want to find out about me is on Google. So I said I'm highly Google-able. Go on Google. You can find out pretty much the kind of person I am by the links that link back to what the internet says I am. So you can realize that I'm not this jerk. Right. Anyways, sidetrack. I'll just say one more point around the celebrity thing and then we can put this to bed and talk about sustainability. I think Mike has some good ideas around it.

But internet celebrity is different, right? And I think it's better in the terms of overall celebrity. Of course, you're not on the network news or – well, actually, usually if you're on the network news, you're in trouble. You're not on uh yeah entertainment tonight and whatnot but those celebrities they can't escape it like you can't like when you reach a certain level of people knowing you and you're not knowing them there's no privacy for you anymore you can't actually get away from it and uh internet famous uh you you can always just you're always normal in the real world like you know when you unless you're at railsconf right like i assume when you go to your local apple store or target people aren't saying hey it's mike param i'll use psychic

right um so it's nice in the sense of you know rails, perhaps it'll even more enjoyable for you because you meet people who enjoy your work. That can become overwhelming. And then what we do in response to that, because we can, is we just leave the internet because that's where the pressure is, right? And it's a nice, it's actually grace for us that we can, we can, we can just leave the internet and we're okay. But that being said, you leave all of us behind who adore the work that you do on the internet. And so it ends up being a loss for the community but necessary for the person who is leaving.

Very true. But to move to something Mike said earlier. Wait, Mike, did you think about your thing, Mike? No, no. I didn't get your point. It's long gone. Do you want to do the sponsor break. Wait, Mike, did you think about your thing, Mike? Oh, no, no. I didn't get your point. It's long gone. Do you want to do the sponsor break real quick, Jared, and then come back? Sure.

What's the next topic? What do you want to bring up? Well, something Mike said earlier about pre-call, which I think we should talk about, is goals. Right. And I think that's a major linchpin for gauging success and failure and, you know, whether or not you can sustain something. Good deal. All right. Let's let's take a break. We'll come back and talk about what Jerry just said. And we'll be right back. You've heard me talk about TopTal several times on this podcast, but today is different.

I've got a special treat for you. I went out and spoke with a listener who a year ago had never heard of TopTile. He listened to the show just like you're doing right here, right now, today, and heard us talk about TopTile and what they're all about, and he decided to get in touch. And now he's living the dream as a freelance software developer with TopTile. His name is Daniel Elzon, and I sat down and I talked with him. I said, hey, what is it that you love most about TopTile? Take a listen.

Well, for me, the thing about TopTal, which I thought would be very hard for me personally as I transitioned to a more consulting role, was the way I would have access to new clients and what quality those would be. So I found that I've had access to awesome clients through TopTal and it hasn't been that hard to find because they have a lot of choice. And even more than that, there's enough choice and I can actually be a little selective about what kinds of things I want to be working on. So I use that as a way to sort of hone my skills and, you know, go towards the technology that I think are worth investing in for the future. So whether it's including new front-end frameworks

or doing a little DevOps work on the side, I usually am able to find clients who have the needs of the things I want to get better at. That's been truly useful. All right, that was Daniel Lausanne, a listener of The Change Log and also a freelance software developer with TopTal. If you want to follow in Daniel's footsteps, go to toptal.com slash developers. That's T-O-P-T-A-L dot com slash developers to learn more about what TopTal is all about and tell them the ChangeLog sent you. All right, we're back.

We're talking about how can you sustain open source projects. We're here with Mike Pera. Mike has a few ideas, and one of those is around goals. Can you speak to that, Mike? Sure. I think a lot of burnout comes from the fact that you as a developer or as an engineer just don't see the light at the end of the tunnel for your project. You don't necessarily see where you're going and when you're going to achieve that goal. And so setting some realistic goals for your project,

like what you want to happen based on all the input and all the work that you're doing on the project can really help because you're not, you don't see it as an endless time suck anymore. You see it as the work that you need to do to get to some point at the end, but you see the light at the end of the tunnel. So a lot of people, when they create an open source project, they just say, I want to create this thing and then I want people to use it. But the problem with that is that that becomes an endless time sink where people may be using this thing for five years from now. Are you going to be around five years from now to support it? And if you acknowledge that, yes, I'm going to be around five years from now, that's fine.

That actually helps your mental attitude so that you understand that I'm going to do what I need to do to reach that goal of supporting it five years from now. But if you don't have those goals in mind, you can easily be overwhelmed psychologically in just all that you have to do. And it just keeps piling up. Um, and you're not really seeing any, any, uh, positive outcome, uh, for all the, the input that you're putting into the project. So the thing I think is what you get by doing that is something Matt Vasquez taught me when I started working at pure charity with Matt. Um, Jared, you know, Matt back any of you guys know matt by any

chance i don't think so um super smart guy um i think he's it's called scrummage is is the app he's making get scrummage i believe is the url if it's not scrummage might lead you to his actual project but he worked with me at pure charity lead dev uh turned cto i think at some point i'm not sure if he was actually cto or not but nonetheless he was the person in charge of the development team but i learned so much from matt about setting expectations i used to get angry at people for not for not delivering what i thought they should deliver and he would say well did you set some goals for them right so what you said, like setting goals for yourself or for other people, it it sets expectations. If I do this, I can expect, you know, to come close to this result or not.

But that's what I'm expecting to do. And because you set the expectation clearly enough, it's easy to have a waypoint or, you know, like a positive or negative emotional response to where you're actually trying to go and for me that was everything was like setting expectations for me and for others has been huge so anytime i feel angry at somebody i'm like i internally before i get mad at them and say lash back which i never lash back anybody but let's you know my own version of lashing back i ask myself did you set expectations well enough for them if not you're wrong right so how how how explicitly do you set expectations that i mean you like make a list or i mean you know use your own judgment but like, for example, I'll use this example and not because it's a real issue whatsoever, but only because it's the most relevant issue or the most relevant point I can make.

Today, we released a show. Every Friday, we released a show, right? end of Thursday night and end of Friday morning, and Aaron hadn't finished the file or finished the edit, then I would say to myself, well, it's in Aaron's court. He's the last person to touch the next step for this project to go out. And I would say to myself, if it isn't completed or done, did I tell him what needed to be done? Is it clear what his next step should be? And if that were the case, then I have reason to say, well, he's got an issue. But if the ball's in my court and I didn't set expectations clearly enough,

then it's my fault, right? So that's what I mean by that. So if it's clear what the next step should be and they have onus of it, then that to me is clear enough expectations. But Aaron, you're awesome, dude. You're just a good example to share. I'm just saying that. That's all.

It's a good example. We shipped it first thing this morning. Yeah, it was awesome. Everybody loves the show. It's great. And expectations are something that you're going to – I think that's a great point, Adam. You're going to use it anytime you interact with people on your open source project.

Even a PR, PR feedback is setting an expectation, right? Yeah. Here's the three things that I don't like about this PR that need to get worked on. You're setting the expectation that I'm not going to accept this PR until these issues are dealt with. And that just makes everybody happier. That way the PR is not sitting there in limbo. And the person who sent the PR understands that they're going to have to put a little more work into it if they want it to be accepted.

Right. If the code review is required for a PR to be accepted, which is pretty much every PR, and it has been done and the PR isn't accepted yet, it's clear why it's not accepted. Somebody hasn't reviewed the code. Nobody plus one'd it. The community hasn't approved it, and that's why it's where it's at. And then you flip that to someone setting their goals. Now, since Steve is your example, use him. Like if he set his expectations, which he has with this recent rage tweet that he's put out to step away for a bit, he's made it clear like, hey, this is what you expect from me.

I'm going to be on GitHub. I'm going to be here. I'm going to be there. But I'm not going to be on Twitter. I'm not going to be on Hacker News. So if you call, I'm not answering. Now the expectation is set clearly now later on when he comes back and he's revived himself he's got clarity on his next steps and he can set some more expectations saying hey i'm back um or it's

another good example ryan bates right we engaged ryan base we said hey dude so glad you're back we sent him a dm we were trying our best to be not too excited that he was back to push him back into the corner again. We want to say, hey, we missed you. We appreciate the work you've done. Whenever you're ready, the door's open. Give us a shout. We'll be here. We'd love to talk to you on the show, whatever.

And he set up expectations. I'm only on Twitter for now. I'm just kind of lurking here and there. I'll engage as I can. But for the most part, this is what you can expect from me. And I think that expectation is both for people, you know, engaging you as well as what you expect from yourself. Right. Yeah, actually, that's another good point. When you start an open source project, not only do you set your own expectations about what the project is going to do, but you should also list in your readme what users should expect from you.

You know, the MIT and the BSD license says, this code is not fit for any purpose. Don't expect it to be. That's setting expectations legally that you cannot hold the developer legally liable for any any issues in the same way you should set saying you read me i'm not going to support this thing you know period yeah or if you want support you have to buy an enterprise license at this url that's it or that way not accepting pull requests exactly yeah exactly that's a legitimate thing to say and you read me. Yeah, right. Yeah, and as long as

you set expectations before people start using it, they're going to be happy about that because then they can decide do I want to use this thing based on these expectations I should have.

You know, if you say I'm not going to support this, maybe a business would say, then we're not going to use it. That's fine. It's a perfectly acceptable, you know, thing to do. But it also means that you don't have to be supporting it for years to come. Well, we talked about sustainability, goal setting, expectation. Mike, you mentioned in the pre-call the care factor can you talk a bit about what you meant by that

sure I think to some amount more or less all engineers who work on open source take pride in what they've built and they see sort of any any positive feedback on it as a point of pride, but any negative feedback as you know, like you're taking one on the chin, you know,

you take it a little bit personal when somebody says this thing is junk or this thing is broken. It just doesn't work. When you, when you spend a lot of time building something for free, that's altruism that you're giving to the world. And then to be... Lashed for it. To be lashed out or to be maligned because of a mistake or something like that. It hurts.

It hurts a lot. I wish people were more kind period. I just really do wish people were more kind. People feel so much entitlement sometimes, especially when it comes to open source. Like, Hey, you put this out there. You should expect to support this thing. What are you thinking? I think a lot.

I think everyone wants to be a nice guy or everyone wants to be a nice person. Everyone wants to be seen as a positive. But a lot of people get frustrated and they lash out without thinking. They don't have that internet skill of writing something, deleting it, walking away, and then writing it again 24 hours later. You know, they'll tweet because they're enraged, or they'll write a GitHub comment on an issue that they just discovered that cost them three hours this weekend, and they'll say, this just cost me three hours, and it's such a huge pain in the butt.

Why, you know, kill yourself. And they're super frustrated. But you're right. There is a sense of entitlement to insulting somebody like that. But again, it's faceless communication. We're not talking to each other face-to-face, so it's so easy to get a flame war. Oh, yeah. I mean text is – I will just downright say it.

Okay, I'll say it. It's impossible to understand whether or not you're trying to be nice or trying to be mean or even malicious because you can't see body language. You can't hear tone in the voice. All the things we use as waypoints to determine whether or not Mike's trying to be a jerk to me are gone when it's in text. The only thing that sort of adds it back lately is an emoji. But the other day I got a thumbs up after something and I was like, is that like shoving it up my, or is it like, is it like really a thumbs up,

man? Like, and I had to like back away from it and not, and it was a little thing. And I shared it like a sarcastic smiley face. Yeah. Legitimate smiley face. Or is that a sarcastic smiley face?

And I share my negative concern with my wife and she's like, Adam, chill out. It's not that big of a deal. Yeah, that's the way to burn out, man. You got to think the best of people, right? If it's unclear which one it is, just assume the best of people. One thing that we don't think about is, sorry, Mike. One thing we don't think about oftentimes when we're on the receiving end of a flame, right, is what's going on in that other person's life. Yes.

Like what brought them to that point. Right. To where they say something that's incredibly offensive to me or attacking me. And, you know, we don't know about that pressure they have at work or their spouse who's in the hospital. Right. Or that bill that's, you hospital, right? Or that bill that's three months late. Yeah.

Whatever it is that's bringing them to a point of lashing out, we assume that they're just a jerk, right? Right. And maybe legitimately so in certain cases, but we tend to give ourselves the benefit of the doubt and nobody else. And on both sides of that, in the internet, it's just bad news. That is absolutely right. I always think of it like, I don't know when it changed for me, but I can remember clearly that something in me changed that whenever I would go to, let's say, a convenience store to get gas, and it's before the days where you can pay at the pump. Right. So this is back in the day. Um, you know,

and I go into the convenience store and I go to pay and then maybe I get some gum and I get a Snickers cause I love Snickers. Who doesn't love Snickers? Right. Always satisfies. That's right. Right. This is not an advertisement. This is not an advertisement for Snickers, but I love Snickers. That's a free ad.

Snickers. If you would like to sponsor the changelog, we'll definitely consider. Folks, please pause the podcast right now and go buy a Snickers. That's right. That's right. Get yourself a Snickers. That's a free ad. Snickers, if you would like to sponsor the James Log, we'll definitely consider. Folks, please pause the podcast right now and go buy a Snickers. That's right. That's right. Get yourself a Snickers. And when you buy the Snickers, be nice to the person behind the counter. You never have any idea.

I always like to say hello to the person. They wear their name tag for a reason. If their name is Ben and it says Ben on their on their name tag hey ben how are you be polite to people and and i always think of it like the point i'm trying to make here is that you know i don't know that person they don't know me but i get you know 30 seconds of their life and they're working and they got to deal with the the public say say polite things like hello how are you good to see you you know whatever it is because you never know that person may be dealing with what jerry was just saying like maybe a bad bill or you know their boss is gonna fire him this is their last

shift who knows and you may not be the reason they do it but you may help enforce their negative attitude to go home and kill their wife or their you know or do something crazy that just shouldn't be done because you could have controlled yourself better or been a more polite social human being and just said hello and use their real name not just like uh stick of gum snickers here's my card bye you know be right be a little generous with with your love and give some love to people yeah and you just got to try extra hard on the internet because like you said we don't have yeah those other forms of communication that you have in real life right with the eyes and the body language and so we have to be extra you have to

take special care with how we craft our sentences and like mike said you know take that that one you put together sometimes i'll just stop and reread a few times and say, how could this possibly be misconstrued, right? Could this, which is either a joke or just constructive criticism or feedback, which is something that is valuable, how could this be taken wrongly? And try your best to improve your communications. There's a lot of really heated debates, though, on the Internet, too. And those get going real fast. I don't want to bring up any particular topic, but some that have been there lately in the news has been inclusivity, gender bias, feminism where men aren't treating women well, a lot of these issues. And they escalate so quickly because there's some inherent pain and inherent hurt from

previous engagements around the scenario, around the topic. Yeah. And somebody might indirectly take all the pressure and all the pain that someone's built up, not saying it's wrong or right, not saying that they're not deserving of that feeling. But sometimes we also get, you know, just like I just lay it all on Mike. Hey, Mike, you're taking it all because you're here today. Right. And that's not right either.

That's interesting. Talking about the flame wars that come in, people are so passionate about certain topics, and it's because they identify one way or the other. They identify themselves with I'm this or I'm that. Right, right. It's a tribal response. It is. And in software, we identify with our code.

And I know there's even been conversations back and forth about whether or not you are your code and these types of things. One kind of shining anti-example to burnout is a recent guest, Daniel Stenberg. Yes, that's true. The show we did on 17 Years of Curl, which everybody enjoyed. I actually went back and re-listened to that show, and he's just a very interesting person.

He said some things like, I enjoy working on Curl now more than I did when I started. And, you know, he's been doing it at least two hours a day, roughly, for 17 years. So I started thinking, like, why? How did Daniel make it so far? And one of the things he said is, he said, this is my life's hobby. Like, Curl is me. And he identifies, like, Curl as, like, his life's hobby like curl is me and he identifies like curl is like his life's hobby

and so he has a level of dedication and identity wrapped up in that project that i think um you know you could say maybe is or is not healthy in certain times but uh has allowed him to sustain through all the pressure and all the times where he doesn't want to be coding and what have you. And I think that's just an interesting data point. What do you guys think about that? I like the fact that he calls it his hobby. Yeah. And not his life's work.

Yeah. That is sort of an implicit sort of end goal that he's setting there, which is that I'm not going to support myself through this. It is a hobby and I'm going to treat it as such, which, you know, sort of implies a level of support and a level of activity that can fit into an hour to a day and not eight hours a day. One of the things he did to just is – or not explicitly is focused. He doesn't have curl plus 10 other things.

He's known for curl and I guess subsequently lip curl, but it's sort of the same camp. So he's got a level of focus too where he hasn't spread himself too thin. And maybe that's some self-identification of like where his strengths and weaknesses are. Maybe he's not okay with multitasking and working on 10 things at once. Maybe he's okay with full-time employment that's enjoyable and his lifetime hobby. And so something I learned from doing founders talk for years, the, like, if anybody asked me, Hey, Adam, you interviewed all these founders of these companies that do great things.

What's some things you took away? The number one thing I took away was focus. Every one of them focused on their goals. They set some goals and they focused. They didn't do 10 things at once. They didn't do 15 things at once. They set some goals and expectations and ran towards those expectations and as they got closer and closer to them self-analyzed am i closer or further away what's

bringing me closer further away and took the necessary steps to correct their course towards their goals and focused and i think daniel probably has done that based on 17 years of girl it's crazy yeah mike, interesting to hear maybe your thoughts on that in light of Inspector and the fact that, you know, you had Sidekick and it's not just your life's hobby, right? This is actually how you make a living. You had Sidekick, you added Inspector, I think it was maybe six or eight months ago. Has that changed your focus? Have you been able to handle two projects at once or how's that going? Right. So, yeah, I mean, once I started Sidekick full time, then, you know, when I was supporting Sidekick in my spare time, it was taking a lot of my spare time.

Once I had once I was doing it full time, then I realized, well, this isn't taking eight hours a day. Maybe it's only taking four hours a day. So I did have a little bit of, of bandwidth to support a second product. So I started building inspector and, um, and you're, you're absolutely right. It was six or eight months ago, something like that. October is when I released it. Um, but just, I also did it as a way of diversifying. I didn't want to put all my eggs in one basket. You know, who knows how Sidekick will do in the future. So I thought, well, let's build a second product and see what happens. So I've done that.

In practice, though, Inspector has not taken a lot of support time. It's still Sidekick that dominates my time. And Sidekick also dominates my income. So I've refocused on sidekick and i am working on prototyping uh some new functionality in in the sidekick space that i will be hopefully releasing sometime this summer we'll see just to get a little bit technical for a little minute for a minute here uh interested why why you think sidekick uh dominates your time is it the threading is it you know where rehearses go or or just because you have so many more people using it uh i think there's a lot more people using it i think inspector will uh slowly rise in users over time, but it's not a grand slam hit like Sidekick just sort of took off.

And also, Sidekick is just inherently a lot more complex. It's a framework, so your code is running within Sidekick, whereas Inspector is kind of like this black box. You configure it, set it up on your machine, and it just runs. So Sidekick is just inherently a lot more complex and doing a lot more things. So when you started Sidekick, did you follow the advice that you now have? Did you have set goals? And did you have expectations that you followed up? Well, I had one explicit goal, and that was I did not want to work for free for the rest of my life supporting this thing. I wanted to come up with a way of supporting myself and paying myself

for the hours that I was spending on it. Now, what that pay was going to be, I wasn't sure. I didn't know if I was going to make a dollar an hour or, you know, a thousand dollars an hour. So I started I started Sidekick with the aim of trying to figure out some sort of business model for it. Because I knew it was it was a valuable thing, it was it was going to be my plan was to make the best background job system, bar none. And and make it a lot more efficient than the current systems that were out there. So there's inherent value in that instead of needing to run 10 machines, now you only need to run one machine. That saves, that actually saves the business a lot of money. So there's, there's some value right there.

So I had to play with the various business models for, you know, the first year of Sidekick's existence. But once I hit upon Sidekick Pro and released it, the sales immediately took off and I wasn't self-sufficient in the first year. But within, I think, two years after I released Sidekick Pro, I was making more off of it than I was making off of my full-time job. And so there was no point in working for somebody else to build their dream when I've got my own dream, which is scaling up in sales over time. Why not work on that full time and do my own thing? And so that's what I've been doing for the last year. But it does go back to having an end goal, which is if I'm going to put a lot of time into this thing, I want it to support me. If I'm going to support you, you need to support me, so to speak, right? So that's why I offer the free version and the paid version.

And a lot of businesses have said, yeah, that makes perfect sense. Let's buy this thing. We want to guarantee support years from now. And this is a very easy way to just bring out a credit card and do it. And in the past, Mike, you talked about in the past show, I'm trying to remember what you mentioned about that was basically determining what you would allow in the pro version to come back into the open source version. So if you're a listener right now and you're thinking, I got that question, go back and listen to the last show. Jared, did you have the episode number that Mike was on last time? I'll grab it. Can you find that?

Because one thing that Mike, what you said was you kind of drew the line where Pro would overlap with the open source version and what you would allow coming back in. Because obviously someone could fork it and add the same feature that you had in the Pro version to the open source version. But we talked about whether or not you'd accept that pull request and what to do with that. You know, realistically, the features that I've put into pro with maybe one or two exceptions are so complicated that I would seriously doubt that someone would just sort of randomly build an open source version of it.

Just pay Mike to build it and support it. I mean, right? It really is that simple. It really is that simple. I know it sounds dumb. I like your point, Mike. That's good. But remember, with open source, people are terrible at estimating how long this is going to take them to build.

And so I was talking with a guy just today, just this morning on Stack Overflow, who said, how do I know when my set of jobs are all done? And I said, well, that's Sidekick Pro's batches option. And he was like, well, can I just implement some counters and Redis and just sort of build it myself? And I'm thinking, and I told him up front, I was like, you can absolutely do that it will work 90 of the time and um the other 10 of the time the other five percent of the time you'll have no way of figuring out what's going wrong um it will just it'll be a time suck and you know if you're a business you're trying to solve a business problem why are you building sidekicks pros batches feature again right right that's the expectations back to that same thing we did like

hey you can do that but if you just support me and support me through buying the pro version you can have a happy life not the time suck and there's the expectation so that's back to the sustainability of that's how you make your money to i'm sure you got family right money you got wife kids yep a wife and a kid right so you got things to take care of and and you're doing work and you're being altruistic and putting things out there in the open source world but you're also putting a pro version out there that says hey here's a i've thought of the feature it's really complex you don't want to deal with it and if you support me you can get that here and support with it i think that's historically a

hard sell for developers because we build solutions you know every day yeah and it's like yeah i mean that's just it's in there right like i i think that i have to stop myself often i love how as developers i think becoming more business business savvy just as an industry over time. And yet I still have to stop myself and say, why am I hand-rolling this solution, which may take me 10 hours at this cost to my customer or what have you, when I know that the solution I saw, it was $20 a month or whatever it is. And yet I'm like, well, that's too much. I'll just spend a thousand dollars building it. That's going to work 90% of the time. All I want is a folder of files on all my machines.

How hard could that possibly be? And yet you've got people paying Dropbox billions of dollars to provide that same functionality. You know, nerds will buy a network attached storage system. They'll set up an NFS mount. They'll do all this complexity. Open up an IP back to their house. Just to provide a folder of files. But the reality is that 99% of businesses don't want to deal with that.

So they will pay for the pro version. So if somebody wants to build the batch or reliability or whatever the different pro features are someone wants to build that and release it themselves they can totally do that i don't i don't care it's you are free to write whatever code you want um the the question though is are you going to be around three years from now to support that code are you going to support it as years from now to support that code? Are you going to support it as Sidekick changes over time? That's true. So, you know, businesses aren't just paying for a feature.

They're also paying so that they know that someone is going to be there to answer questions, to deal with migration. Businesses and people, though, because businesses pay for things, but people pay for things with their choices, right? Sure. So when they choose to use Sidekick, they're choosing to follow you in a trusted way. You're not going to go anywhere, and they can even trust you more because you do have a business model that is sustainable to the point where you can long-term support the open source version. I mean, in terms of not so much, hey, you got a problem, here's how you fix it. But you're making sure that if things break or if there's something that goes wrong with it, you're there to fix the open source version of it and re-release it because you've got

a sustainable model. Right. So to bring the conversation back to the topic at hand, which is burnout. Yes. I knew that when I started Sidekick that this was a big enough project and my aim was to make it successful enough to where if I didn't have some way of paying myself to support myself in doing the project that I was going to burn out. There's no way I could support Sidekick as well as I do today without having it be sort of a job that is paying me money. And so that's how I dealt with burnout is I turned it into a job. And now I'm happy to devote eight hours a day to supporting Sidekick because I know that it's my full-time job and it's supporting

my life. So that goes back to those setting expectations of, hey, my goal here is to not just develop another open source project. It's also to develop a business and possibly a life around this work. Yeah. So that's, I guess, where I deviated from what Daniel did with Curl. He made it his life's hobby. I want to make Sidekick my life's work. Hmm. I wonder if he could make Curl some sort of paint model i imagine right jared because

he says he's got facebook and all these gigantic companies using it he's gotta they gotta have features that that uh they need to pay for think about that daniel get back to us well i know he has that i know he has had paid opportunities to work on it, which makes him very excited. Right now he's adding some stuff to HTTP2, some additional HTTP2 support, like on a contract type of deal. So he has had opportunities where it has made him some money. But because he's in his mind, it was still that hobby. It's not all of a sudden now he expects it to make money because if he did, he may be down at that $1 an hour rate. And he can make a lot more than that working full-time for mozilla um for those of you who are interested in the full story on uh inspector and sidekick uh check out changelog.com

slash 130 nice where mike and us go deep into those topics let's take a break hear from a sponsor and we'll be back in a bit. DreamHost now has managed VPS hosting built for speed and scalability, including solid state drives, and that's awesome. These VPSs are built for open source developers and now include one-click installs of Node.js, custom Ruby, and RVM support. Speed, speed, and more speed is what it's all about. Their VPS servers use SSD hard drives and are 20% faster than traditional SATA drives. All virtual private servers from dream host include SSD storage, a boom to 1204 LTS web-based control panel,

scalable Ram, which is super awesome. You can go from one gig of Ram and easily scale up to eight gigs. If you need it, no GS one click install Ruby version manager, All right, we're back. That was a fun break. The funnest. Yeah, that was the best break ever. The best break ever. No, it really was a good break, and now we're here to talk about moderation.

So we've talked about lots of different things, and moderation could have been in some of that that conversation but directly speaking like what kind of what kind of things have you done personally to like practice moderation in your work uh well moderation we all know that burnout happens faster the more you the more you push yourself into something right um if you spend 12 hours a day working on something it's it's very easy to get burnt out very quickly. So I tend to think of moderation as a way of pushing back burnout, of easing up on the gas, so to speak, to use that car analogy, so that you're not going 100 miles an hour, but you get a chance to do other things in your life and sort of, you know, change mental gears, that always helps with the burnout. So moderation is all about, you know, spending an hour or two a day and not four, six, eight hours a day, especially if you're got a full-time job working in software, where then you go home and then you work with software for another four or six hours. That's a recipe for burning out really quick.

And many people do that. Yeah, Lord knows computers can be frustrating. Also the sitting position, too. You think about the moderation on the brain, but on your body. If you study, Jared, I know you stand. Mike, do you sit or stand? I sit, but I also exercise a fair amount. So I run.

You're a runner. That's right. I know you are. I climb. What else do I do? Push-ups. Do you do that kind of stuff throughout the day or at the weekends and stuff like that?

Like throughout your day? I usually do one of those a day. So before the call here, I'm generally throughout the day or at the weekends and stuff like that. Like throughout your day. I usually do one of those a day. So before the call here, I ran for 30 minutes. Cool. And then yesterday I was at the climbing gym climbing. So, and then the day before that I was out racing my motorcycle around the racetrack. So weren't you, you worked at the climb, right? That was okay.

I'm, we had so many guests on, I'm trying to remember who was it. So, and that was all about being active and outdoors and stuff like that so exactly exactly so i definitely fit into the brand there yeah yeah that's that's another thing i mean i think you can try to stand you can minimize some things to step into moderating what it is you do with your body but yeah if you are the person who's working 10-hour days and then going home and working on open source and you're sitting 14 hours a day and then you're sleeping, you never really give your back or body a chance to sort of stretch out and just be a more healthy body human being.

People think their mind – I'm probably hijacking what you're trying to talk about, Mike, but I'm just thinking out loud here. People only think about – especially intellectual people. They think, oh, I've got a good mind. They forget about their body. They forget to eat right. They forget to go to the gym or just not so much to be like a fitness nut but just to move your freaking body. And I'm actually going through this myself because I was in that space where I probably was a bit too into the intellectual

side of moderating my lifestyle. And now I've realized that I've got to balance things out. I've got to make time to go to the gym several times a week. I've got to make time to do these different things. And I've got to eat right because if not, geez, I mean, I can get sick. And I don't know if you guys know this fellow, but, um, Ian Warshack, does that name ring a bell to either of you? Yeah. He's a friend of mine. Okay. So, you know, his story, Ian, uh, you know, love the guy, but, uh, a real quick snapshot. He was probably living

a good lifestyle and I'm not sure what the situation was that, that made him get so ill, but he'd gotten so, so quickly. He'd gotten a cold and went to the hospital. And before you knew it, it was severe, it was serious. And he was just like you and I, all of our limbs, all of our fingers. And he came down with a sickness. I'm not sure if it was because of moderation. So I'm not trying to place that on him, but it's something that can happen to every one of us where in a moment's notice your body can can turn on you your body cannot react the way and even your brain too with alzheimer's and different diseases so i think moderation isn't just in what we do with our lives you know or what we do with our day-to-day coding habits but also just how we

play out our lives and just to wrap up uh i story, uh, he ended up losing his hands and his, he was his amputee, uh, amputated from his knees down. And not that, not that he's not living a good life because dude is strong. He's, he's, he's, uh, he's got a great family. He's got a great support system around him. He's happy. He's doing great things and he's not down in life, but easily he could have been easily. He could have had these things that were so precious to every one of us taken away from him and just went into a hole, but he's

strong and he didn't do that. But I'm sure he's learned some things he can share with the rest of us about moderation, about living a healthier lifestyle that doesn't let your body turn on you like that. You know, he's an amazing person. He actually just opened up a, a go fund me a thing cause he wants to hike or he wants to climb Kilimanjaro. I hadn't heard about this.

So I, I actually donated to his, his cause there, but I'm sure we can put a link at the bottom of the show page or whatever, whatever you guys do with the links. We can put a link to Ian's thing because he's, uh, one of the nicest guys I've, I've ever met. Um, completely like totally humble person. And, um, just, yeah, you're right. He, he got this illness out of the blue for no reason. It could happen. It's one of those things where it could have happened to any of us, and it just happened to happen to him. And so he's made an amazing recovery.

And yeah, I guess he owns his own business. He still codes Ruby. Still codes iOS, Ruby. I don't know how. I mean, I'd love to hear. Actually, you know what? I just said this the other day to Daniel Lauzon who, just to plug a sponsor real quick, listened to the show, got interested in TopTal. Now he freelances through TopTal, which is one of our sponsors. But I was talking to him yesterday, telling him Ian's story, and I was like, we need to have Ian on the show.

So we'll make that happen. And of course we have to let him accept our invitation, but we'll invite him. And if he comes on, we'll, we'll help tell his story, but yeah, strong dude and much love for Ian. And it could happen to any of us if we don't live healthy. For sure. But yeah, I mean, so to get back to the subject at hand, um, you know, we've all had those incidents where we take a shower and all of a sudden a problem that has vexed us for hours, all of a sudden the way to fix it becomes clear. And that's because you're sort of, you're changing your pace, right? You're letting your mind go to a different place rather than just code 24 hours a day.

It's always in the shower, isn't it? Or overnight, right? You go to sleep and you wake up and you just have the answer. I've dreamt. Honestly, I've dreamt about sometimes solutions to things. And it's like, what? How did I dream that? Like that was in my dream.

That's crazy. That's the moderation, right? You've got to change gears all the time. And eight hours of sleep, man. Work eight, play eight, sleep eight. Yeah. sleep man work eight play eight sleep eight yeah but um so moderation is is not just uh your own habits uh or or how much work you do but it's also how you relate to others because open source is sort of an infinite uh time suck and if people are just constantly peppering you with requests and questions, you will find yourself

spending all of your time dealing with that. And so that's where part of moderation is being able to say no to people. It's being able to say, I don't have the time to implement that feature. Or no, this PR is not something that I want to maintain because I have to consider the support costs of this change. And I don't want to support it for the next five in years for the length of the project. And so there's a large number of reasons why you might say no to people. And you need to consider that as part of moderation you need to moderate your own time as part of a project so we uh we'll say this you are you are all here on the air because uh jared is so awesome and he googles well jared you're good at that

right thank you that's i do it for a living some Some would say. Some would say. So it's GoFundMe.com slash Ian Hikes. I-A-N-H-I-K-E-S. Ian Hikes. Right now his goal is $6,000. The amount raised is $725. We need to push that up. We need to push that up and make this dream come true.

This is, you know, I can't wait to have him on the show now. I'm excited. But, geez, man, what a goal to have. Moderation. What a good conversation. Ian is not moderating his goals there. No, he is leaning far into them. Hiking the trail behind my house, that's a moderate goal.

Yes. Hiking Kilimanjaro, that is not a moderate goal no that's that's extreme yeah sometimes though you know and that's the thing too right is part of moderation comes wise choices wisdom i think i think wisdom is probably the thing that sits beneath everything we've talked about today because you can you can have moderation that doesn't mean always plan it safe there's times to take risks and i'm sure you can have moderation. That doesn't mean always plan it safe. There's times to take risks. And I'm sure you can attribute that, Mike, and you as well, Jared. And there's times you go above and go to the extremes, like climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. There's times you do that.

But then there's times when you moderate your life a little bit more and you do things that allow you to have more flexibility and more focus in certain areas. Goal setting, I think, is super, super important to all these things. But the wisdom to know when to go to the extremes or hang out in goal land and keep doing what you're doing there.

So, any closing thoughts, Mike, Jared? Say no to drugs, kids. Of course. Of course. Say of course of course say say no to pull requests say no to pull requests indeed the world's most dangerous drug yes no i mean uh you know i i think moderation and and learning to say no and being realistic with what you want to do and what you want to achieve is, is that part of that wisdom? It's part of the experience you get over being in, in being an open source developer for a number of years,

you start to learn this stuff. I got something that I think might be, and you guys might like is sometimes we're our, our own worst enemies, right? And you got your buddy to your right and you got your buddy to your left. I learned this own worst enemies, right? And you got your buddy to your right and you got your buddy to your left. I learned this in the army, right? You got those people around you that you can trust. And if you're someone someone trusts, so in this example, let's say the three of us here, right?

I'm someone you guys trust. And if I think Jared is doing something that is abusing his moderation, abusing his goals, if I know his goals and I'm there as a support person in his life because I'm close enough to him and I see him stepping out of line, help – I would say help people that either you look up to or you know and you're close enough and you can say this to them, help them moderate their life. Help them not go too crazy. Help them realize, hey, you said you were going to focus on these goals, and I see you doing this, this, and this. Not saying you're doing anything wrong. You might want to just double check back to your goal list. Are you actually going towards where you're trying to go? Because sometimes I'm my worst enemy. And my wife, man, if I didn't have my wife have this sometimes, I know for sure I'd be on the ground. I just would not be who I am because she knows me so well.

She knows what my goals are. She knows who I'm trying to be. She knows what kind of man I'm trying to be. And if I didn't have her as a support system, if I didn't have her as her advice, I would make unwise choices all the time, every day. So maybe as a call to arms for people is to watch out for our fellow developers out there, our fellow friends out there, whether you, you know, how close you are to them is your choice, but help others not go towards burnout. Don't push them to burnout.

Yeah. See, if I have a closing remark, it would be back to the point about a hobby versus a living. And the goal setting can be simplified down to is, am I doing this as a hobby or am I doing this as a means of making a living? And I think determining that and holding strong to it, of course, you can switch at a certain point if you want to, but knowing what it is helps you moderate because a hobby has got to be fun. It's got to be fun, it's got to be interesting, and it can't consume your life. Now, a job, sometimes you just got to do the job, right? Right.

It's work, and that's why we call it that. So I think that's a good way to judge this idea you have. Is it worth it? Or this project you just started. And what you're getting yourself into is, how do I approach this? Is it a hobby or is it a job? And I'm going to approach it appropriately for each one. That's a good way of thinking about it. I think from a technical engineer's standpoint, what's fun to me is writing the code what's not what's never fun is supporting

uh users just because you know i don't have that problem and so when they come to me and they that i'm solving their problem that's work i'm working for them to solve their problem and so you have to be very clear uh yeah with open source especially around support how long are you have to be very clear with open source, especially around support. How long are you going to support this thing? How much of an effort are you going to make supporting it? What channels are you going to support it through? Otherwise, it'll suck all the fun out of the project. For example, not Twitter.

I saw you tweet just yesterday as I was kind of like coming back to your timeline to prepare to see if there's anything else you, any recent, you know, sustainability nuggets you've shared that we should point to the conversation. And you were like, hey, I don't do support on Twitter. Go here. Right. And you said it in a polite way. You didn't say it as mean as I just said it. But you made it clear. You set expectations that support doesn't happen on Twitter.

Don't ask for it. It's a nightmare, right? 140 characters. Come on. That's not realistic. No. Half of support is getting the user to define their problem. Oftentimes, when you force somebody to write out what the problem they're having is, they can solve it themselves.

Yeah. It's almost like rubber duck debugging, right? Yeah. Like it's, it's almost like rubber duck debugging. Right. Yeah. But you know, someone asking a question, 140 characters, I'm going to give you 140 character answer, which is not going to be very useful. So yeah, I, I try to make it clear to people. And, and I don't, I don't, I'm not mean about it, but I just be matter of fact, I don't use Twitter for support. Twitter's here for, you know, retweeting stupid stuff and cat pictures and that sort of thing change all posts or change all posts

that's the stuff you gotta retweet right there well that was the stupid stuff, I'm just kidding well cool, any other closing thoughts before we trail out? this has been a fun show for me to have a discussion it's not often I even get to talk this much but it's been fun, I liked it

thank you for jumping on the subject and allowing me to come on. Actually, let me open up Twitter real quick because there's another person we should thank here on the show because they are the reason I even saw your tweet, which it was Marcelo. And I don't know how you say your last name because you're from my favorite country, Brazil. But Marcelo, I'm going to say that, and you're M-A-R-C-E-L-O-C-G on Twitter. Marcelog. Goncalves? Marcelo Goncalves? That's probably not right. Yeah, without the proper accent, you can't say that name so i won't attempt it and i'm already uh known to be a bad last name

butcher i just there's times i can't say my own last name i'll just say his last name is utf-8 compatible because i've got some that c's got some crazy there you go yeah he uh he retweeted your tweet mike and then i was going back through at mentions for our old twitter handle so if you're listening to this and you're still tweeting at the changelog on on twitter we've moved to at changelog because uh it's you know it's shorter saving three characters saving three characters that's right so we did that and but we we check uh at the changelog mentions from time to time and marcello retweeted yours, and I was like, what is this? And I was like, oh, okay, cool.

And I was like, no one's responded to Mike? Hey, we've got time tomorrow. You want to come on the show? You're like, yeah, sure. Yeah. Johnny on the spot. Johnny on the spot. I like it.

That's the best show is the impromptu, unexpected, great shows. And Mike, you're always a great guest. This is, what, your third time being on the show? Third time. Third time's a charm. We'll have to make you a... I just love the gab. Yeah, you do.

We're going to get you that smoking jacket. You've earned it. Yeah, that's the truth. We'll have to send a t-shirt. Do you have a t-shirt? I'm wearing a t-shirt. But do you have a change log t-shirt? Do you have a change log on it? No, I don't have a change log t-shirt. We're going to correct that. We're going to send you a t-shirt? I'm wearing a t-shirt. But do you have a changelog t-shirt? No, I don't have a changelog t-shirt.

We're going to correct that. We're going to send you a t-shirt. Fair enough. When we're done here, we'll get your address. We'll ship you out an awesome, comfy tee. And if you don't have a changelog tee, not to Sony, but you could go buy one if you wanted to. changelog.com slash store. They're only $20.

I think they're $20. Has worn by local Ruby celebrities. That's right. That's right. That's good. And they're super comfy. American Apparel.

Some of the best shirts out there. But anyways, let's tail this off. Great. I really did enjoy this. This is so much fun. So if you were listening to this

and you'd like to see us do more discussions like this, encourage us. Tweet at us. Not negatively. Positively. Right? Be nice.

Share your love. But with that, let's say goodbye, fellas. Bye. See ya. We'll see you next time.