Tomorrow - Episode 92: Ivar Vong Has Gone Off the Rails

Episode Date: May 9, 2017

On this week's [NOUN] Josh chats with Ivar Vong, CTO of The Outline and a [ADJECTIVE] software genius. Ivar tells Josh a [ADJECTIVE] story about his journey from [NOUN] to professional photographer to mastermind behind the [NOUN] of The Marshall Project and The Outline, an amazing, [ADJECTIVE], awarding-winning site. So nerds, sit back as Josh [ADVERB] talks to Ivar about code, [NOUN], mad libs, and Ikea. Episode 92 is pure [ADJECTIVE]! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey and welcome to tomorrow, I'm your host, Josh Wittepulski. Today on the podcast, we discuss elephants, mad lives, and the future. First, a word for response. Whether you're a small business owner or a first time blogger, like myself, a hostgator has all the tools you need to build and host your website. Hostgator's 24-7 expert support is always available

to assist you via live chat, which I love to do, or email, which I don't like as much. Anytime you have a question, there's even a 45-day money-back guarantee, so if you decide it's not for you, there's no problem. Go to Hostgator.com slash tomorrow to sign up and get 60% off. My guess today is a fantastically talented, terrifically talented, extremely intelligent, very wonderful, very handsome man named Evar Vong, who also happens to be the CTO of the outline.com and independent media, and also happens to be a person that I consider amongst my close personal friends, not just because we work together, though, he may have a differing opinion.

Uh, if our thank you for being here. Hi, Josh. Thank you for having me. How do you feel about that intro? Uh, it's very generous. Yeah, very generous. They, I don't think we're that close to friends. I mean, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we know each other a little bit better than

most normal work people do, I think. Yeah. I mean, I don't really know you that well. No. We don't know that much about each other. I mean, you could be a serial murderer for all I know. I'm not really know you that well. No. We don't know that much about each other. You could be a serial murderer for all I know. I'm not.

Are you? No. But we don't have any evidence that you're not. That's not really how that works. That's exactly what you would say if you were a serial killer. Well, it's just a great story. We can't be sure. Anyhow, Yvr is a mad genius.

I'll tell you one thing, he is a serial genius and a serial creator of wonderful things. Listen, he's killing it one way or the other. That's right. That's right. One way or the other, or something is dying, which is, which is, I don't know what, but anyway, Evar is, it was formerly at the Marshall project. He built the Marshall project's CMS, which is called End Run. It was through the Marshall project and Evar's work there that I became aware of his existence. Then eventually I met you. We talked. Well, I DMed you.

Well, yeah, you DM me. I wrote a thing. You DM me about the thing. Then we decided to make something together, which is the outline, which is pretty cool. Yeah, I think. Well, yeah, it's pretty cool. It's funny because when we first started talking, it was like, wow, this is like a really cool idea. Just how old and then I was like, oh, I guess all like take this job and then it was three months of, it was kind of hard. Yeah, I mean, we should say, I wanna say a few things here.

So we built a new platform, you build a, I mean, I was involved. No, it was all of us. We built a new platform from telling stories on the internet, like a whole new way to do it. A CMS, as some might refer to it. Yeah. Or a product stack, or there's all sorts of fun ways.

I like to call it a content creation system. Although I hate the word content, so now that I think of it, I don't like to call it that. It's story creation system. But we build a new platform that's very, I think, a very expressive and very interesting new platform for making things on the internet, on the open web, a new ad platform that's adjacent, that's actually part of it. And all sorts of like tools to do things that are typically very hard to do on the internet. And we did it in, according to my notes here, we built the platform in three months. Is that correct? Well, I started in mid August. Yes. And we launched the first

week of December. That's just like, so August to September, September to October, October to November. So it's like three and a half months. Right. But we hired people in September. So it was like, it was like three months. Yeah, so I don't know a lot of people realize that because I had been talking about the outline for a little bit longer than that. I'm trying to think of when the announcement was about the fundraising was August.

Sounds right. No. Was it August? Yeah, okay. At any rate, so, and then I wrote this thing last April, which I'm gonna write something new about this week, which you guys will read soon about, it was called your Media Business, when I'll be saved, which is why you DM me.

Anyhow, so Evar has a background in making journalistic technology. Talk to me about that. Well, I went to college from math, which is exactly as nerdy as it sounds. And I started working for the college paper as a photographer because... Because as we all know, mathematicians love to take photographs.

Yeah, well, I was really interested in storytelling and visual storytelling. And so I was a very bad math student in college because I was much more interested in photojournalism. But you're very good at math. I'm okay at math. I like problem solving. Math and journalism are somewhat related in that regard.

You're just taking problems and trying to break them down and make something out of them. Yeah, but one requires real skill. The other one is journalism. Well, yeah, I'm a journalist and I pull my phone out to like, do like, what's the tip? Well, I mean, it's a good line. I'm going to use that more often.

So I started like doing both of them together a little bit more and like started building websites at the college paper. Very, very poorly. What was the first thing that you built? The very first thing that I built? Yeah, what was the first thing you built on the internet? Do you remember? On the internet?

Yeah, why not? Well, the first thing I ever built was a madlib program when I was nine years old. Please explain. Well, do you know what a madlib is? Oh, yes, I know what a madlib is. Let me explain to the listener if they don't know what a madlib is.

Yes. And you tell me step by step. You tell me if I madlib is. Yes. And you tell me step by step. You tell me if I get it wrong. Okay. So a madlib is essentially a story. You're given a story, but not all of the words are filled in. Some of the words are blank and they could be like, oh my god, I built a CMS.

That's not it. So you know, it's like, we need an adjective here. We need a noun. we need, right? A verb or whatever. Those are all words that make up what we consider to be a language. Those are the words that describe the language, which is funny, because you have to use the language

to use the words anyhow. A mad lib is you get a story and then you fill in those, they could be any noun is fine, but you have to put some noun in there and then it makes a story. So you ask like you're like playing it with people, somebody has the pad with the story on it, and you're like, I need a noun and then people shout out a noun and you put it in the thing.

And then when you're done, you read back the story in a hilarious because everybody used like the word penis and like other crazy terms that would never make sense at a normal story. Yes. Yeah. Well, so the way the program worked, and I was in elementary school, so that wasn't the word, but it was like adjective, you type in an adjective, noun, and you do that. And at the end, it just prints out the madlib. Yeah. So it would take a, so you had to, would you, did you manually input the madlib? Yes. So you did you manually input the madlib? Yes.

So how did you make, what language did you make this? Quick basic. Quick basic. Is that like basic but easier? It came with Windows 3.1 or whatever. What are the best Windows? Yeah, definitely. Anyway, one of the first things I built on the internet

is actually a photo assignment system for the college paper. So I was a photo editor and I was like, this is very annoying to use Google Docs, which back then Google Docs were bad at like multiple editors. Yeah. So I built this system where people's initials like I could dispatch them photo assignments.

But it was quickly like very, very bad because initials are not a good way. Why the hell? Why the hell? What are the whole names? I was like, and I had initials. You had initials are good enough. So then eventually I hired someone that had the same initials and I was like, wow, okay, we have to move from a two initial system to a three initial system. I don't understand. So explain how the system works. So I'm an editor, and I want to have somebody, there's a game, a football game tonight. And I want to have somebody, there's a game, a football game tonight.

And I want to have one of our photographers, this is for the college paper, correct? I want to have one of our photographers go down there and shoot it. Yeah. And so tell me how your system worked. So I was, I was assigning like 20 or 30 assignments a week to like five or six photographers and I was doing it like in a, in a text file. You were assigning. Yeah, I was a photo editor. a text file. You were assigning. Yeah, I was a photo editor. Oh, okay. Did you say that already?

I thought I did. I'm bad at listening, so. Yeah. I mean, yeah. I'm listening. It's what I built the system where everyone could log in and they had their account and they would get assignments like I could give them assignments like it's you what they had and but it was it barely worked.

But it did work. Did you ever fix it so it used more than initials? No, we just added the middle initial and then it was fixed. Why not name it? And the lesson is this is how I've built software the entire time. It just barely worked. So it'd be bad and then make it a little bit better and then it'd be a boom.

Yeah, it's a CMS. Exactly. So that was my first CMS. But I think it's notable to say here that the outline was founded on this concept that, well many concepts, but one of the, I think, unifying things that brought a lot of people here, certainly, I think you was this idea that we have been building bad and old systems for a very long time to make things on the internet, and particularly when it comes to journalism, that there are ways

to build new and interesting things to make things in journalism. And one of the things that we did, I mean, not just because we had a timeline that was very tight, but also I think because we wanted to do this, and correct me if I'm wrong, is we built something that was built on purpose to be not, we weren't trying to build something perfect. We were trying to build something different. I mean, not just randomly different, but we essentially were like,

what's important right now is that we build in some of these really key differentiators, as opposed to going like, we gotta make sure that we've got author pages which we don't have right now as an example. We did not. You can't click on an author's name and go to not now we have all that information stored in a database so we could make one probably pretty easily at this point.

But you know a priority was like okay a normal CMS you have like a tagging is really robust tags you got to do and then you've got like this this like image this asset manager that's built into it and all these like different things. And like you had, you spent a lot of time rebuilding tools that people have built before. Yeah. And we made some decisions. Can you talk a little bit about making the decisions to build what we built versus what a typical CMS might be? I don't know if this is a good question or not. No it is. I mean, if you remember very early, it was like, we're gonna do WordPress, and we're gonna build a site on top of WordPress.

Yes, that's right. My pitch to investors was like, we're not gonna build anything we don't need. We're gonna probably use WordPress. We'll build a bunch of custom stuff on top of it. Well, I mean, WordPress is great, but we're not trying to build a blog. And I think, I mean, we got as far as setting up WordPress.

Remember, we were actually writing into WordPress. And after a long time, I was like, Evar, can you set up a WordPress instance? You begrudgingly did it. I did. But I didn't have a better option yet. Right. I don't remember anything about that era.

I told you my memory is very bad. It's definitely. I told a lot of that. See, I didn't remember who I told, but I was saying today that my memory is very bad. Maybe I have a problem. I'm not really sure. But I do think that is useful when you're trying to do something to not have to think too much about the stuff in the past.

Yeah, short-term. Yeah. But right, so we're trying to build something very, very different, I think, on the internet. Yes. I would agree. I think we somewhat succeeded. Oh, I would say we did. And to me, the kind of the crazy part of it is how do you push design tools out to reporters and editors?

You know, like things are normally treated only by like designers and developers building stuff. How do we build a system that works for them? And if you're going to build that tool, that's what we invested so much time into and what makes the outline so consistently distinct, I think, visually. Yes.

Well, you have to really own the technology piece of it and bolting on tools on top of tools that aren't quite suited for it. It's very hard to get there, I think. Yeah, I mean, we had a conversation, I'm trying to think of how early this was, but essentially you came to me and said, WordPress is not going to work for what we want to do.

And so our idea is that we build a new CMS from scratch. And I was very, I rate, I was very angry. You were like, why? Well, I was, you know, to me, it just seemed like I didn't want to get caught in that trap of doing what everybody else had done, which is like, got to rebuild all this stuff. And then you would give us a week or a weekend. I'm trying to think of what the timeline was pretty short. Was it a week or a weekend?

I think it might have been a weekend. That was when we were working weekends. Yeah, I think it was like Dave, one of our developers, Dave, Uchiha, amazing person, an amazing person, an amazing programmer. But first and first, an amazing person was, I think, was like, I'll make something over the weekend as like a demonstration of what we might do. I think it was closer to a week, but regardless, like, I don't know. We built the core of the CMS in two weeks.

We were like, let's do it. It was disturbing. We worked with Code and Theory here on the design and we worked with them throughout the project as we were building. And I remember the Code and Theory team were like, I think they were all looking at us. We were out of our minds.

I think they're like, okay, you're gonna build a CMS, have fun with that. But that's like the right reaction. No, it is definitely the right reaction. No, it means it'll ludicrous thing to do. I'm not trying to pat us on the back because like we built like something that is incredible, but also like we built something that was built in a short period of time.

And so there's plenty of stuff that we need to do to make it better. So I'm not knocking it. It's wonderful. So much. I love our content creation system. Actually, this is great. We should talk about the name and we should do it. We're gonna get to that in a second, but But you know the point is that it turns out that if you start from scratch Really from scratch and it's like you're building on really modern technology and we built and I want to talk about what we built with

But you built like really cutting-edge stuff like you can actually do things that are, we can do things that are kind of crazy, like our visual language is much more diverse, like our ability to tweak posts and rearrange things and put them together. We have this system where we can stack things and group our cards into individual stories and like it's a really interesting malleable way to to work and I think for it's daunting to even look at and think about now because it is so, I mean, it is so alien and so foreign compared to most CMSs, but also it's like incredibly, it's an incredible beginning of something.

And I think what's so insane to me and what I never will fully understand is how you guys arrived at a feeling of assurance that you would be able to build a completely functional platform in the amount of time that you build it. How is that? How do we not,? How did this thing not blow up? It's a good question. I mean, if it had blown up, that would be a different question. So this kind of stuff would be a different conversation.

Yeah, we might have it. We might have it. We might have it. We might have it. We might have it. We might have it. We might have it. We might have it.

We might have it. We might have it. We might have it. We might have it. We might have it. We might have it. I really believe in incremental product development. Right. And I think I wouldn't have just said, hey, we're going to do this eight week, 15 week, whatever it was for the CMS build. And at the end, we're going to launch it. It's like, we made a prototype in a week. And this feels like it's probably going to work. And we built out complexity within that. So maybe we don't have to build all five car types.

We can build one and be like, okay, we understand how this thing feels. Like, we understand what the guts of it are. We can go and show it to you. What was the first car? Headline card? Yeah, headline card. It was the easiest. It's actually not the easiest.

To not? Well, yeah, I think quote cards easier, actually. Like, headline card has squiggles and like a lot of stuff and it's got a lot of, anyway. We like, we tried it. And if it had gone totally on its face, we would have been like, well, we're going to back up. I mean, it would have been, I mean,

I think now like what an important and fateful decision for us making something new. I mean, the plan was always down the road to build a completely new platform. Like that we were always going to build from scratch. But the idea was, well, we're getting started. We want to get started quickly. And so we'll use WordPress as many publishers do.

Yeah. Right. Most publishers use someone else's platform. Part of the concept of the outline and independent media by extension is we wouldn't just do the thing that everybody else does because that's often not the right thing for the actual task at hand. Sorry, go ahead. It's not just to do it differently, so you own it. I think it's really about owning the way your data is set up is like owning your future. Like the company is the data

that it creates and you can change the front end, you can change the CMS, but like the way you store data, the way you structure fields that the story like goes into, like that's the guts of what you're trying to do. And if that's tacked on to someone else's decisions about how data should be stored, you're just kind of fundamentally at a second rate position, I think. Which is like, there's a lot out of the shelf off the shelf solutions, whether open sorts are not that are very sophisticated tools for content management. This is not to knock any of them.

I just think that when you're trying to do something that's so out there, you want as much control as possible around how to shape that. With the goal being reducing the amount of kind of converters that you need to get from what you want to have and like what the, where the data goes. Like you want to reduce the number of adapters by just like going straight to what you need.

And we're storing all of our data in a Google sheet. Is that correct? Just to be clear, we have one elaborate Google sheet where everything gets dumped. Right, it's like, well, it's one tab per story. Okay. Right. And then it's a, it's just continually growing the tabs in that sheet. Right.

Are we going to take a quick break? Because we're going to get into some real nasty details here in a minute. We're going to take a break and then we'll be back with more Evar Vong after this break. And these messages that are important for you to listen to. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ innovation on yesterday's technology. So, I leave and come in and around the world, trust the couch-based data platform to power their modern web, mobile and IoT applications. Couch-based offers unsurpassed agility, unparalleled performance at any scale, and it's easy to operate platform, plus it allows you to manage billions of

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your customer experiences today. Learn more at couchbase.com slash tomorrow. That's couchbase.com slash tomorrow to learn more about how you can build web, mobile, and IoT applications with couch base. We're back. We're back. We're talking to Evar Vong, the CTO of independent media, slash the the outline and also a human. Now, EVAR is it true that there is a shelving system

that they sold at IKEA that has the name EVAR? Yeah. I do not own it, although I have considered it. How can you buy it? Well, I think it's a good solution. I don't really have enough space for it. Can you describe it? Could you describe what the EVAR is?

It's a modular, it's a modular shelving unit. So there's a lot of configurations. Just a lot of like a good content management system. Yeah, I mean, it looks interesting. Yeah, is it wood? I honestly don't remember. Solid wood. It's a nice, it's a nice wood.

Solid can it be stained? Yeah. Oh, really? Interesting. Okay. The E-vars, Shelby's is about Ikea. Pick it up now. We're not sponsored by Ikea by the way, but we are sponsored by EVAR Vaughn. So anyhow, so let's talk about this. I was just thinking back as we were talking about the CMS, which I don't know if this is boring or not, by the way. I think it's very interesting.

I love CMS. Yeah, I so do I, but I don't know if I actually don't love them. I think most of them are pretty bad, but I love the idea of them. What's interesting to me is that, okay, this is, media is a really fucked up business. And we've talked about this a lot, but me, but I don't know if I've talked about it that much on this podcast where it's like, so, so it's really weird to be in news on the internet because if you're making something from scratch, you essentially have this weird thing where you've got two customers. One customer, or the people, is the, is the people? Are the people, I should know this as an editor,

but anyhow, one customer is the people, are the people who's reading, what the fuck, who need the website, or whatever it is that you make every day, and they have to get information from you and see things, and experience things, and interact with things, and whatever. So that's one customer. So like, then there's this other customer, which is the,

which are, I don't know, anyhow, the people who use the CMS to make the things that people read, right? So and you have, there's completely different sets of needs for both. And you have to like build a system that functions in one highly specific way for one set, but produces something highly specific for another set, which to me seems really weird.

Like, I feel like Instagram has one customer, right? Instagram has, Amanda, they have advertisers now or whatever, but the advertisers are essentially using Instagram. Instagram's like, we have a person who wants to put photos in a feed. How do we make that experience really cool? Like, that CMS is the app, right? There's no like separate CMS, that's just one thing.

Twitter. Yeah. Twitter is the all one thing What's weird with Twitter and Instagram is that lots of celebrities do spawn con but they don't get a cut of that They didn't build in any way for themselves to make any money on the Instagram If I'm if I'm a Kylie Jenner, which I am by the way and I'm like I'm like thank you and I'm like check out my new lip kit hashtag lip kit or whatever Yeah, yeah I mean Twitter might actually make some money off of the hashtags or something.

No, they make money when you promote a tweet, but you could post whatever, like, Tavi Gevens and posting about her stupid apartment building, got a free apartment building, but nope, yeah, she got a free, like, penthouse apartment for tweeting about it. It's great. I wish I could do something. Yeah, I would say the thing. If he's so great to be, to not have any of the things and not have to worry about it, just be like. I wish I could do something. Yeah, I would say if he's so great to be, to not give a, just not have any I think is an after worry about it, just be like, I'm advertising for things. Hashtag spawn. That's enough. But they don't make any money on that because they didn't build it in. You're just using

their CMS. It's interesting to think about that, actually. I've never really thought about it from that perspective that like they created these systems where anybody could just use them to I mean, it's basically what we do actually. Yeah. Like if we put a story on social, we're basically advertising for a story, our story, but anyhow, so like, so, so, so building a CMS is really cool and but also a very difficult thing to do.

And ours is, we're like, what do you think? 5% of the way there? 2% of the way there. Yeah. Right? I'm glad that we're close. Oh yeah. I'm glad I was like, what, we like 25% of the way there?

We're 90% there. We're done. We're done. But like, we built like a pretty crazy new thing that is imperfect, but very, very good in my opinion. I think it's pretty ambitious, right? Like it really solves for this. How do you, how do you pull apart things that are not just a headline and a deck and a blob of text?

Like having the having the top of story experience, what we call cards, right? Having a bunch of different versions of that, they're like story-calling driven and not like technology driven. It's not like, here's a hero image. It's like these are editorially created, like, ways of presenting information that aren't just necessarily, like, please scroll. Like, it's a standalone piece of content.

We built a system that, first and foremost, does that, right? It puts that at the very center of the tool. It gives you live preview on mobile. Like, it's really trying to put content creation on the real time. It's basically real time. I mean, here's something about R CMS that's crazy that you can literally, I mean, I don't know if there's a way

we could actually do this. I'm sure that there is, and we just haven't, we don't implement it. But if you make an update to something, it's instantaneous. Like, there is no delay, nothing has to like, cat, there's no cache. It actually goes to the server and back, every keystroke, it still feels instantaneous.

Like when I'm writing a story, we see a live preview, when I'm writing, it's like live, but if you publish something and you make a change, that's as soon as you save it. I assume we could actually do it live. I've never, we've never really talked about this. We've talked about doing some real-time stuff. How hard would it be to just say people could see me typing while I'm writing a page?

Yeah, we could do that. Goey, that'd be sweet. Seriously, we should do that. That'd be an amazing tool, actually. I think we should have a homepage version that just turns off the homepage and it's just like a it's like a my lock. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good every keystroke. It's kind of like any how. So so that's an incredible thing. But like what's really cool is that like so you know people for a long time talked about these everybody. So in mobile OSs and I think a lot of our conversation

early on was about obviously mobile. we're very much a mobile focused enterprise though, I think we have a great desktop experience. But in mobile, you hear people talk about particularly the biggest of the big businesses, mobile OSs, iOS, Android. They talk about a concept of cards of information being compartmentalized into these cards that are like, you can shuffle them, you can stack them, they can be grouped together,

and you see an implementation of that system, you see abstractions of that all over mobile OSs, and you see them all over mobile apps, and you see them almost not at all on the internet, essentially. There's no concept that information can be compartmentalized and stacked and moved, right? It's like all like, here's a page full of things and maybe there's another page full of things adjacent to it or whatever. And so one of the, like the way that our system is built is that like you have, like you

mentioned that we have these cards, but the cards themselves are like units of information and they are like live, stackable, remixable, shuffleable, like they can be joined together to make a story, they can be broken apart to be separate things, they can be displayed in all sorts of different ways, they can be like a grid, they can be a fan, they can be up and down the page or anyhow. The point is, what's really interesting,

they can be really big, they can be really small. What's really interesting is that I don't know that, and we haven't yet, we've yet to, I think, fully express what this system can do, because we're early. But this idea that you start with making a story not from the basis of, okay, I have a lead, the lead paragraph, and then the headline, there's a deck, there's a photo, there's a deck is what we call a subhead if you're not a journalist nerd.

We basically are breaking out all of those components as sort of separate and secondary the basics and making this whole other set of components that can be, that are a totally different like path. And that's no pun intended, but we call when you're flipping through cards on the site a path. And I'm just rambling now, there's no point in me saying this, but the way that we did it, I guess my point is, I'm sorry, I feel like I'm talking a lot and not letting you talk about our CMS,

but the way that we did it is really interesting that we are not using, like, we've already said we're not using WordPress. But can you talk about the technology that we're using that is actually the basis for our CMS and for our systems? Yeah, I think before that, there's one thing that is very different for me, like having built technology other places in that the design system that we have was very thoughtful, I think, compared to a lot of story-centric design systems, meaning we do this system where you have a quote card,

and that can live in a dozen different ways between, it can be huge on desktop, it can be in a stack on mobile that you flip through. And we separated the content from that card, whichever type that is, and the actual visual treatment. And we used permutations of small multiples to build like tens of thousands of variations. Right. So for example, like often you would build, hey, this is the top of a story. We're going to do a beautiful design. It's going to be a one off.

We're going to take time to make it work responsively. But how do you scale that kind of thing out, not just to like one story, but in a way that can work for thousands of stories? that kind of thing out, not just to like one story, but in a way that can work for thousands of stories. By separating the content from this modular design system, we allow editors to make things that look beautiful without being designers, because they can plug these pieces together. And that's actually a pretty amazing thing, having gone from seeing it in mockups to teasing apart what those different blocks are that are composable to actually building the system that as we as we add components gets

like much more complex in terms of the visual things we can do. Yeah, so the underlying technology is important but to me that kind of design system that works across editorial advertising content like that is really interesting thing that we did that I haven't seen anywhere else. I agree. Before you get into the tech, because I do want to talk about it, but one thing I'll say about that is, I think there's always been in various newsrooms, there's always been for me this struggle about, how do you make something look? How do you tell a story differently or make something look compelling where you don't have to involve another group of people where you can go direct from, I have an idea or I wanna put something out there

to experiment with it and to essentially releasing it where it doesn't require that you stop that process and one of the things that has been consistently amazing, I feel like we're just patting ourselves in the back, but whatever. We haven't talked about this. We haven't really talked about this at all in public. Is this idea that like, you don't, like I can make something really crazy looking and I don't have to ever talk to a designer.

Not that I think design is not important. It is very important for us, but like that system of, it's beyond templates. And I think a lot of good make the mistake of going like, oh, you've got templates, but they're actually not their components and makeup permutations. Right. So it's not that it's not design. It's just the designers created this system that the pieces always fit together. And so instead of having, for example, well, yeah, we have bad combinations. That's fair. But instead of saying, hey, what font size do you want to type it in? 72 pixels, it's like, there's options that are preset.

Instead of saying pick two colors and we'll build a gradient out of it, there's predefined colors that look good. I will say this, I often, I think, fondly of the early, early demo that EVAR made, personally, which was like a car to color pickers. It was like a color picker to make what we call a duo tone, which is how we treat our images. Which by the way, is rendered within our CMS. Those aren't like, we're not applying colors.

This is, I think this is something that I feel like people don't realize. Like when we change colors of things or when you see like an image, like the image processing is done server side. I mean, it's like, So very early on, we built a prototype that used SVG filters

to do the color transformation. And basically what Ado-Tone is, you take a normal color image, you make it black and white, and then you say, okay, black is gonna be this navy color, white is gonna be this yellow color, blend between them, right? Right. We have that exact color scheme. We say, royal, royal is going to be this navy color, white is going to be this yellow color blend between them, right? Right.

We have that exact color scheme. It's like royal, royal and yellow. Yeah. You can actually do that with SVG filters now, which is crazy, right? Like modern browsers do amazing things. We had this prototype, and it worked, but it was so slow. We couldn't use it. You'd scroll, and scroll performance would just die.

Yeah, I remember this. I was like, very dark time when I was like, this is never gonna work. So I built a, like an image service that wraps graphics magic, and it converts this duo tone, it doesn't on the fly. So we just have this thing. I actually haven't pushed go to it in four months.

Like it just like, it's just been like hanging out doing great. They were explaining why I'm so mad about a lot of the, no, it's great, it's awesome. But, you know, those that are rendered on the server, they're just normal JPEGs that come down. So even though SVG filters are sweet, like we can't use them yet, because browsers slowly do a crawl.

But not just JPEGs. I mean, we can apply them to GIFs. I think we can apply them to video, right? Well, we can apply them to GIFs and those get turned into video. Right. But it doesn't work on Mp4. Oh, I see. Okay. But we had a version that did work on Mp4. Well, early on. What it actually did is it converted Mp4 to GIF and then did the conversion

and the convertive back, which did not work for it. Really, very bad for bandwidth. Okay. Talk about the tech that is the underlying tech, because this is not the frameworks with which we built the outline are not that common in media. Not common, yeah, at least one of them isn't. Or even on the internet, are they? It's early. I'm very excited that we're on it, because I think it really is the future. But there's basically three subsystems that are we're talking about.

One is the public-facing front end, which is what you see when you go to theoutline.com. It's fairly simple in that it's Redux, which is a way of managing state. It's often used with React. We use it without React on the front end, which we can get back to. Yeah, I mean, you are already up. The second component is the CMS, which Josh loves more than anything in the world.

I love the CMS. I love all CMSs. Well, yeah, so, and that's React with Redux. This is all I can't do. We can't get exactly what React are not on the public faces Redux. This is all we can get. Exactly what React are not on the public faces. More we definitely should. We definitely should. I know you're excited.

I am. And the third piece, which is what you're alluding to, is Elixir and Phoenix, which is the back-end technology that we use. So we have a monolith that runs both front-end code bases and the the back-end code base. One repo deployed to Heroku. Of course. So Elixir Phoenix, why Elixir Phoenix? Why notN-A-Rails, Y-N-O-JS, Y-N-O-JS is so great.

I think every listener right now is like, Y-N-O-P-H-P. Y-N-O-P-H-P. Yeah, I mean, PHP is great. More than half the internet runs on PHP, right? So here's my pitch for Alixir. As a someone that was a Rails dev for a long time, freelance Rails dev, Marshall Project was Rails like blah, blah, blah. I love Rails. Rails is an amazing tool. It's got a tie on Rails dev for a long time. Freedance Rails dev, Marshall Project was Rails like blah blah blah. I love Rails. Rails is an amazing tool.

It's got a tie on Rails right now. He's doing a rant. Rails is sick. There are problems with Rails, right? You end up building all this stuff around it to support it, not unlike building WordPress with like a front end and having to manage all of the complexity of multiple systems. Elixir is a programming language created by Joseph William. Hopefully I said his name right.

That'll be embarrassing if I said it wrong. Sorry. We'll overdub it, Ryan, up to your voice on top. Please, I'm excited for that. And it's built on this virtual machine. You and I have had this conversation before about virtual machines. This is where he uses things. VM, here we go.

It goes off the rails. Get it? Oh. Oh. Okay. So if you've heard of Erlang, which you probably haven't heard of. You all have heard of Erlang. Invented by Ericsson in I think the late 80s, you probably know my facts.

Ericsson, that Swedish company. Yeah, exactly. Erlang Ericsson sounds like a Viking who discovered something. Well, Erlang, and it was built to power like telephone switches. Yeah. And this is cool. I mean, this to me is cool. By the way, it also reminds me of like when switches. Yeah, and this is cool. I mean, this to me is cool. By the way, it also reminds me of like when BlackBerry switched to its QNix platform,

which is like, QNix is like built, was built to like operate power state. This is by the way, I'm not comparing this to BlackBerry in any fucking way, but there's something really interesting about this idea that there are certain technologies, and I don't think BlackBerry did a good job of implementing this, and I think we've done a good job of implementing it. They're technologies that are old as fuck that are actually really awesome. Yeah, because they're like, they're like, they're bad old guys.

Exactly. They're like, built for speed and they're built for low bandwidth and they're built for like, all the things you need to make something fast and modern. So Erlang was like, hey, how do we build phones which is for like millions of people and they have to all be connected and it has to be really low latency. It has to like, you know, hey, guess what? That's like what the internet is, except it's not phones and SMS, it's HTTP.

The problem with Erlang is it's not a very fun language to work in. But. That is a problem. If you've heard, I mean, it's just like not very ergonomical for developers. I don't even know what that means. Give me an example of that.

It's just, well, let's move on and come back. Okay, fine. So there's a company that you may have heard of called WhatsApp. It's built on our lane. WhatsApp. Massive. Huge.

Turns out, similar to what Erlang's original use was, which is basically soft real-time systems, meaning lots and lots of messages being passed, again, same as the internet. Right. So, these rails, billions of messages. So many. So these rails, they're like, hey, Ruby's really cool. Rails is great. But what about this, like, what about this early thing? What if we built a new programming language, which

took everything we love about Rails, which makes it so amazing for small teams to build things quickly? And we like built a new language that sat on top of this multi-decade battle-tested software that's really good at real time and low latency and huge scalability. And turns out it was a really good idea. And that language was Ruby on Rail. Ruby is a programming language. Yeah, but Ruby is playing Rails for a second for the uninitiated. Ruby is cool, but there's shortcomings of Ruby, right? You have to use message buses behind it.

You like, it doesn't scale well, you know, blow. Message buses, the worst. Yeah, go ahead. Background jobs are hard. So people from the Ruby world, including Jose Vellim. Jose was like, let's build a lecture. Is it Jose? I think it's Jose. Really? I'm pretty sure. Okay, I don't know. Is this spelled J-O-S-E? Yeah. Oh, okay.

Pretty sure. Jose on the pussycat. This is like such a weird mixture of personalities, right? If I'm wrong, I feel like my Twitter notifications are going to be so bad for this car for sure. Me and E and he get along great. That's true. That's true. So, build a brand new programming language with the best parts of Ruby,

but built on top of this battle tested. This is what I would say, just saying. That's what I said. Oh, well then you were right. That's literally, isn't that what I just said? It's like they built a rails, but for Irlang. Oh, yeah, yes. So it looks like a really great language, Ilang. Oh, oh yeah, yes. So, so Elixir is like a really great language, I think.

And it really is very nice. I have to believe that because you build our system on it. And it's also, you know, Dave Lucia, amazing person and developer, was like so stoked to come right Elixir code. Like I, and if there are other people out there that are excited to write Elixir code, we are hired. We are hired for people who are loved to write code.

Yeah, I mean, part of what people, including, also for myself, we're looking for like, I want a functional programming language, I want good support for concurrency, I'm interested in like, immutable programming languages. Ruby, you can do that, but it's not the same as having one

that has like, is a real functional programming language with pattern matching and blah, blah. I could go on and on about how great I could. You really could. So it, I think it really allows us to write less code and like more concise like good code. If that makes any sense, which it probably doesn't make sense to me. It's bad code. No, I believe me. I know about that.

Like very, like, so I'm very happy with like building the back end for CMS and for a media website in elixir because I think it's a great way of expressing like the kinds of problems that we're solving. It certainly would excel at solving like much more complicated problems because honestly a lot of what we do is like, here's a database right to it, read from it, render some strings out. I mean, that's pretty tough one. But it's really lovely to work in, and that sounds probably insane to me. That sounds great.

It sounds like this language, but it's a beautiful language. That sounds wonderful. I think that we should strive to find beauty in all things, as far as I'm concerned. Now, we can get into the really important conversation, which is we have been, oh, I should say this. So I should say that, you know,

you built an incredible system, which I love and people here love, but also it's an award-winning system. And we have an award-winning website. We just, you and I were just in North Carolina, getting a Society of News Design Award for World's Best website. Is that what the word's called? I think it is. It's the exact name, right? Now, let's get to the real. Let's talk about the real problem that we have.

We need to put it out there into the world. We can't decide on a name for the CMS So can I talk about this? Yeah, how do you feel about it? I feel like it needs a name. Well, we haven't named it and I have a name. Well, we haven't named it and I have a name Oh in mind. I know you do for the for the system for our system of That's just what it's gonna be. No, I don't think so maybe not I would like to call our content creation system our vast and and incredibly intuitive and

And brilliant tool. A name that is appropriate for, that says, it sends you a message immediately about the power. And I think it should be a little bit enterprising. You want to feel private. You don't want to platform. I want to call it Cyberdex 6000. Eva wants to call it proprietary content platform PCP. Now, I'll say this, I like PCP is funny.

It's probably not right. And also, I do think it's reflective of our content creation system, our CCS, because it's like when you use it, it's like you're whacked out of your mind on drugs and you can like lift a car. You feel like you have the strength. Yeah, you feel like you're in one, you're on strong drugs and two, you have more strength than is humanly possible

when you use it. So PCP is a pretty good name. But let me give you my arguments for Cyberdex 6000, okay? One, Cyberdex 6000 is sweet of applications, okay? Yeah. Our, for instance, our ad product is called Cash Machine. That's a capital C, capital M, camel case, one word. That was K, Cash Machine.

Yeah, so you got to show why not? Why not? Cash Machine. Yeah. Our, the actual editor component is called blog blaster. Capital B, capital B, capital one word, obviously. And then our video platform is vidX4, VID EXX4,

number the number four. And so I think when you present the suite, when you present all the components of Zyrex, the modular, like the E-Var shelving, a modular system, I think it's very good. We could just call it the E-Var. You only have, no. You only have, I originally wanted to call it WAPER. Oh, yeah.

I like WAPER more, but you should explain what that means. Well, WAPER is the computer from War Games, which is the war operations protocol and response, I think is the, is what WAPER, it's W-O-P-R. It's planned response. Plan response, maybe something like that. what WAPR, it's W-O-P-R. It's brand response. Planned response, maybe something like that. I should know this. You probably should. Anyhow, the one thing I can tell you about WAPR is that it's a bad-ass computer system

that answers to the name Joshua. And that sounds just like our CMS. It's like a lot like what's going on here. Wargames was a formative film for me. We could call it How. You've never seen it. No. How has played? I like W Howe. You've never seen it. No. Howe is played.

I like Whopper. You do? See? The fans have spoken. Do you really wanna call PCP? No, I don't. I'm joking. Here's the, all CMSs sound stupid.

That's true. They all have dumb names. Yeah. We wanna give it a different name. Kinja. Well, Kinja, yeah, Kinja's like, well, I don't know what. Kenja's like, I don't even know what that means. Like Ninja with a K, like, I don't know what it's,

does it mean something? It means garbage. Wow. So Ryan is strong feelings about Kenja. Do we have any other name? I wish we had a live, I wish this was live. Dude, we should go live on Facebook right now. And we have a call in.

Ugh, nah, I'm joking. That would be bad. I mean, I think Wopper's okay. You could call one of the products Big Mac, another one quarter founder. That's a horrible idea. And I'm offended. Wait, isn't Wopper Burger King? It isn't Big Mac.

Yeah, you're wrong. You're wrong. Fuck it, this is how it went. Let's go from place to place. No, what you call it. One per fast food joint. Oh, yes, you're saying. That's what I'm saying.

That's what I'm saying. I don't eat meats. So I don't know where they're from. I was going to go like, can we go Blizzard? Does that have to be on the on the burger? Wapper Blizzard. Yeah, they was like not burgers. I think it was the other things. That's really good. Blizzard would be a good name for our five guys. It's very good. That's very good. A happy meal. A happy meal is where that's our self-serve ad platform. A happy meal. The ice cream machine is down.

I like that. I like that. I like that. I like that. I like that. I like that. What does the thing call when you do all of the different sodas? It's called suicide.

Yeah. What is that? I don't know. That's like that card editor is called suicide. That is kind of what it feels like. No, it feels like a dream. It feels like a dream. Anyhow. Yeah.

All right. So let's talk about next steps here. Okay. This is like about our four point plan to make this name happen. Okay. Here's what I think. Listaries of the podcast of which there are several, send in your suggestions for names for our content management system.

Our platform. Our platform, our stack, our full stack. Yeah, yeah. Our modern stack. Yep. Here's some, here's some name options that we've bandied about. Here's some here's some name options that we've we've bandied about.

Whopper. Oh, what would WOP are PCPAK proprietary content platform. Yeah. Cyberdeck 6000 featuring the products, cash machine, blogblaster, and Vitex4. And that to be something apart from 1998 that was sold in an info-mercial. It's like that story about early AR that we did with like the crazy computers on people's heads. I feel like those would be cool. That was what was that call ranking? Look that up, that had a great name. It was called like the,

I don't know how to really get a name. Now here's some other real names that have been bandied about. Should we talk about these or should we not? No, we should definitely talk about them. Priority. Oh yeah, no, priority is great. I don't like priority. Well, you only have to...

The joke about priority is that everything, that I am, I think it's a joke about me. It is. That I was, somebody was like, we need to prioritize and I was like, everything's a priority. Correct. Yeah, that sounds like something I would say. Cyber not.

It's like, you're a cyber not. Which by the Yeah, that sounds like something I would say. Cyber-not. It's like your... Cyber-not. Which by the way, that's like very... Very similar, but I have to say, Cyberdex 6000 existed before Cyber-not was in my view. So, maybe four came in a view on your cyber-not. Yeah. ...in my heads up display. Your mobile assistant is on a call.

All right, so let's see, the New York Times has a thing called scoop. Yep, right. And a thing called scoop. Yep, right. And a thing called oak. Let's talk about oak, doesn't make any sense, but scoop. Yeah. Sure.

Let's say about other platform names. Of course. Vox is called chorus, and then everything about is like, is war, is like singing or it's like him, him null is like their ad product, is all like singing related. Which is good. That's a good idea.

I think it's good. Like you should a unified, that's what I'm interested in also as a unified system. Like a suite of things. Well, I think if you have, if you have blog blast, you have to have cash machine. That's the way I feel. So, is that brand safe though? No.

What are some other, what are some other CMS wordpress? Yeah. Drupal. Drupal, it sounds like a... What about movable type? Like dongles, like dongles, cousin, lame cousin. What if we call it dongles? It's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like,

it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, Facebook. Yeah, I see a lot of you know, I used to own Facebook with eight days.

Did they take it away? Facebook. I think I just let it lapse. Maybe I still own it. I get what do you need your product? It's not that idea. I don't think that would work. I've owned a lot of bad and useless website URLs. Don't talk about any of our don't don't mention, I know you have some. I don't want those out in public. Okay. But I feel like we've gone along enough now

without having a name that we should be a little more transparent with the people and tell them that we don't have a name. What are other names that we've talked about? I like, I think priority is funny. It's not that good. You just don't like it because it makes me make you funny. No, I don't care.

Look, I don't think it makes fun of me. I am impervious to damage. Okay. We should talk about how you beat me at NASCAR simulator. Hey, so I thought you were just going to have beat me. I thought that bad. It's not that bad. Yeah. Oh, so we should talk about it. So we went to this thing, the S. N. D. Awards. And we went in the ward, which is very cool for world's best website. No big deal. Our competition was in New York Times and Washington Post and Courts and the Intercept. Anyhow, but we went down to North Carolina where they were holding it.

The ward's show was at the NASCAR Hall of Fame, which I didn't even know existed. But it's amazing. Nord did I know it was in North Carolina. It was like, we were there at night. First of, anything that's like a museum at night, I understand night at the museum now, the movie series, it makes a lot of sense. It's a cool place to be.

So the NASCAR Museum in North Carolina is lit AF. And it's a little lingo, internet lingo for you kids. And they have NASCAR simulators. We were drinking. Oh yeah. But they also have NASCAR simulators that are pretty hard to drive. It turns out like, you think it's easy to drive a NASCAR simulators. We were drinking. Oh, yeah, but they also have NASCAR simulators that are pretty hard to drive. It turns out like you think it's easy to drive a NASCAR. No, it's

hard. It's not easy. It's hard work. Yes. I mean, it's not just, you know, just jump in and fire up the car and get on your way. We even practiced. Yeah, we did a practice round. But then we got in the, and like they have seven real NASCAR cars. Yeah, and then you get in the car They have computers inside of them. It's a VR experience. Not VR. Well, just screen. It's like a you race Well, you feel like you're you know, yeah, no you are Littering immersive. It's an immersive experience. Yes, not VR, but an immersive. It should do it in VR And I put my name down as Josh Smith for some reason. I don't know why I think I was worried about having to explain to the The person who in North Carolina what my last name was. I don't know why. I think I was worried about having to explain to the person

who in North Carolina, what my last name was. I think it was a lot of fear there. And you were not even I've been far. People, which was happen all the time, right? Well, with handwriting, which it was handwritten, like they write and then type it down. Let me write this down. Persevar looks a lot like an N.

Well, if it's lowercase. Curse of all. Not ever read some of the all calfstrasher. I don't even know how to do a V.I. It's like a, like an end. If it's lowercase, cursive, not even a recent long calfstrasher. I don't even know how to do a VI. It's like a, yeah, okay. I don't. Anyway, long story short, there were 14 people, 14 people in this race.

So I just got third, I got fourth. I, were you in fourth place? Yeah. Just shows how close we are really in so many ways. I don't even know. I, I was driving backwards for several laps, so I'm not sure I had it up in the third place. I think it's a test of it. It's like that thing about the fastest, about the, if you're running from a barrier, you don't need to be, if the fastest runner,

you just need to be faster than the slowest person. I feel like that's what was going on. And yeah, okay, now before we go, let's talk about some, let's talk about EVAR, the man. Okay, now before we go, let's talk about some, let's talk about Evar the man, okay? You were born in Corvalus, Oregon. Corvalus, Oregon, which is no longer, it doesn't exist anymore. It does. Corvalus has been, my parents live there.

Your parents are living Corvalus. This is, can you give us the exact address? We'd like to get some of the listeners over there as soon as possible. I don't wish to do that. All right, so you look up the Vonges and Corvalus, anyhow, you were born in Oregon. Yeah. You went to school in Oregon. The University of Oregon, Eugene, so you look up the Vongs and Corvallis, anyhow, you're born in Oregon. Yeah.

You went to school in Oregon. University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon. You have a hoe. Do they call it? You have a unit for term today? No. OK. What was your major?

Plied mathematics. OK, and what was the hope at the end of the applied mathematics sequence of events? Oh, there was no hope. I mean, what do you do with a math degree? Well, so my father is a research scientist. He studies atmospheric chemistry. It's amazing. And also beyond my comprehension. And my mother teaches a parallel design. So math was like, math is always like

round. I remember Derat is a sonerdy. I remember deriving the staggering theorem on a white board when I was like small with my father. Do you see we're in the presence of a genius here? No. People don't realize. We're talking about, right now. No, I'm talking to a guy. It's like a beautiful mind is right here

in the podcast studio with me. That's so not fuck you. Okay. There we go. Yeah. So I was like math is cool. I like math. I had a, and again, really nerdy.

I had an amazing calculus teacher at my freshman year of college, house of Ophsky, house the fucking man. And the best. But then after sophomore year, I was like, I don't care about this. Really? I was like writing code.

I really wanted to be a photographer. Like I really did. And I graduated and I was freelancing. Well, you take beautiful photos. I even shot a handful of assignments to the New York Times. We should say, you've published a photographer in the New York Times. Yeah, you take beautiful photos. I even shot a handful of assignments to the New York Times. We should say you've published a photographer in the New York Times. Yeah, a couple of times.

But it just like software always kind of pulled me back. Like it's that in college and right after college, it was like I really care about like making pictures. Like that's what I wanted to do. But I eventually took a job as a developer in Eugene, working for a small non-profit. It's actually the student paper, but it's a 501c300 profit,

so it has like a full staff positions there. And so I was running technology for the business side, we're trying to like invent new digital products that were not print advertising revenue. As the wallpaper needed to diversify its revenue stream and that's when I started building CMSs for real. We built several kind of small businesses within that and that's when I think I kind of understood

that one of the most interesting things to work on is this intersection between storytelling and understanding and really caring about visual storytelling and technology. And one or the other, you can absolutely do. But the center of that is really, really interesting to me, which is why I went to the March project and why I came here is I think there's so much potential there, especially on the internet, right? Like, videos and mate, like there's so much great work all over the place.

But like the internet just feels like we haven't really gotten anywhere near what we can do. It's so fucking boring. Yeah. I mean, you see like it's funny. You see on like designers' websites are like, holy shit, that's awesome. Like all the time, like we have our design director is DeFan Al-Baz. I hope I said that right. I've actually never said it out loud. I don't think he started a room in our Slack called Type Beast. And in Type Beast, we just drop in like crazy type, crazy typography. And you know, the other day we were looking through websites

and he's like, he's like crazy, beautiful, like incredible design, like magazine, beyond magazine design, like live, moving, interactive, like really incredible stuff that's built like web, it's built like web native, it's not like a flash file, it's not a video, it's like a thing that is, like it's funny I was talking to Iastafon and I actually had a kind of debate about this,

like why make it live versus making it a video, like I was complaining about Snapchat where it's like all these like looping videos and we're making stuff that does what Snapchat does but it's live on the web and becomes this responsive, malleable, incredible object and app unto itself. But one of the things about the outline, I think, what got us both excited to make it is that very idea, which is like we're so set in the old ways of doing things and we're

using so much old technology and stuff that's very crafty and very replicated and regurgitated that we're not like, wait, let's just do it differently. And so what we're doing, which is I think can look very messy at times and feel very like off the rails, no pun intended, is exactly getting at that exact thing, which is like, how do you make something new?

How do you try to make something new, even if it doesn't always work, even if you are going to have to learn something hard, how do you do that on the internet so you don't keep repeating what has come, but you try to find what the new things are. Absolutely. One of, I think the most important, the most important moments for me was when I was in New York for the very first time for a Tribeca Film Festival with Andrew Devigall. And Jonathan Harris was speaking after Andrew. And I can't quote this directly, and I wish I could, I should reach out to Jonathan. But he basically said, like, the tools

that you have are so important because what you ultimately make, like those are like replicas of the tools that you have. Right. And that, I think crystallizes why I keep building CMSs. Yeah. Right. If you have a headline field and a subhead field and a block of text, like what you make is fundamentally constrained by what the fields you have in the CMS, even though that sounds so oversimplified, the tools that you have really do limit you. And you have to control that limitation to build

things that are different, which is why we built a totally custom authoring tool. And the other end of that is people that just build stuff from scratch over and over and over. And to me, that's frustrating from a technology standpoint because you're not using as effectively as a technology. Well, it's not a tool, is it? It's just like a blank canvas. Yeah, I mean, like if you build something from scratch, it's like you're building, you know, I know there's no, and now I was going to use a tool analogy, but like an actual tool

analogy, but like there isn't really a good one. No, there is. I think it's really like hand tools and power tools. If you're recreating stuff all the time, you don't have software, really good software, Kena is a power tool. You can really get some stuff down with that if you build up on that. Really advanced CMS is where you can compose these different objects. You have so much more power.

I think even having live preview in our CMS makes you write in a different way, because you're not like, let me switch to preview. It's just like, it's so, the speed that you have so much more power. Right. I think even having live preview in our CMS makes you write in a different way because you're not like, let me switch to preview. It's just like, it's so, the speed there's important. And it's different because there's unlike, non like, well, medium, which is a totally different thing, but like there's like, okay, well, everything you see is real time, but what you make in real time is so,

single track. It's like so on, again, rails, no pun intended. It's totally watered down for what like- But it's like, it's like, here's a, here's a post, here's what goes in there, even if you get all these different elements, there's very little you can actually do with it. Like, and there's no real, like, emphasis put on the creativity

of that piece of it. It's like, well, okay, it makes it easier to see what you're doing in there for, like, that's a better experience. But ease of use, I mean, I've said this for a long time, but ease of use and better are not connected. That like, I think actually one of the things, sorry, I'm gonna go off on a slight tangent here.

One of the things that really annoys me about modern technology is that we tend to go simple as better. And actually, if you look at the web and you look at people's websites, it's like there's this minimalist, very refined, very obvious web tube, I call it web 2.0. Whatever happened with the second boom of the web, it created this, it's the appleification of all design, which is like clean, soft, minimal. It's like kind of like taking Scandinavian design,

not to go back to the Evar Shelf in the unit, but taking Scandinavian design to this like digital place, where it's all, but it also is weirdly playing into the deficits and deficiencies of the internet in its infancy. Like the early internet couldn't do a lot of things very well. Some minimal layout made a lot of sense because it's like a big image, some clean text, a line and it's like, okay, that's like really good web design when you don't have a lot

of bandwidth and you can't put anything interesting on the page. But anyhow, like I think that I just completely lost my train of thought, but the point is that people keep repeating those things, and I think that it's really important for experimentation even if it's chaotic. Totally. And we see on the far end of the spectrum, these crazy ambitious projects, but they're totally outside of any productized or platform system. They just live on their corner of the web, and maybe they get social traffic, but they're not part of a product. They're not thoughtful in the way that I think we've attempted at least to build a system

around those ideas. From those two ends, how do you start to walk that toward each other? How do you do really ambitious, interactive things that use the gyro on your phone, things that can't be video, things that are like really engaging. How do you do that in the middle between something that's fully templatized and the CMS with checkboxes and drop downs and whatever, and something that's totally freeform that takes weeks and weeks to build? Technology is really amazing.

People build insane stuff. We can build CMSes that like walk toward the center of that, that make those things easier and easier to build over time. That's, I think, what's really exciting about what we're trying to do, because we have this group of people that are not just engineers, they're not just designers, they're not just reporters. Like, I think we have it the right group of people to really try to tackle that problem with the intersection, which I think is where all the really interesting work happens. I agree.

I couldn't have said it better myself, and I think, so I don't screw anything up. That's a pretty good place to leave this. Now, there's a bunch of other things we didn't talk about. We'll have to do it on another, when there's many things to talk about. Well, if there's another podcast, luckily we are going to be in close vicinity for a long time. It's true. So having you in the podcast will be very simple. Any, any parting words to the listener, anything that you would like them to know about Evar, the person, or anything you'd like them to know about how good or bad Cyberdex 6000 is as a, as a name for the CMS. I, man, I, I think the name doesn't matter that much.

You don't? I do think it's not a CMS. I think it's so much more. What are we going to call it? What is it? It's a lot. Okay, we should end this episode with the hit 90s. The It's It. What is it, Saga? Featuring or? Featuring or thank you. It's called Apec. Is the name of the song.

Do you know the song? Just play it for a second. Okay. You know the song. Everybody knows the song. And if you don't, you got to get schooled on this. I don't think I'm seriously just wait. It's a huge get in like the late 80s early 90s. I was too small. Massive hit. Right now.

Thank you for having me, Josh. Okay, great. I'll leave it there. Evar, thank you for doing this. Thank you, Josh. We've talked about this for a long time. I think this is the first of many encounters. I hope so. In the podcast booth.

Me too. Which is the name of my new podcast that I'm doing. The podcast booth. It's a night kind of a sexy, it counters the podcast with my sexy podcast. This is not it. Well, I was about to say we should co-host it, but no, I don't think so.

That's the perfect show for us to co-host. Okay, anyhow, thank you. Thank you. Well, that is our show for this week. We'll be back soon with more tomorrow. And as always, I wish you and your family the very best. Though I've just heard that your family's pull request was rejected because Isolant has failed. you