Aug 21 2020 43 mins 1
Show Notes
Links:
_why
Ruby's Exceptional Creatures
Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method
Audience Ops
Notion
Honeybadger Developer Blog
Full Transcript:
Starr:
I wonder if any of our listeners are too young to know what SOAP is, like SOAP?
Josh:
I'm guessing so.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
SOAP is what we have before REST APIs and JSON. It was interesting.
Ben:
It was hell.
Starr:
Yeah. I dipped my toes in that water a little bit and just gave up.
Ben:
Every time I hear SOAP I think of DHHs slide at that one RailsConf early on where he had the WS-Death Star. It was great.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Because all the... I guess I should explain that. It's all of the, I guess, it was schema domain or the name space, everything started with WS, and so they started referring to the different... Because there was, I don't know, 10 or 20 or whatever, there were a lot of them, and so they called them WS-Star, to represent all of his schemas that went into that whole SOAP definition. So DHH made fun of it by calling it the WS-Death Star.
Josh:
I see.
Starr:
Oh, I get it. I didn't get that joke to begin with. And the schemas are XML schemas.
Ben:
Right. Yeah, it's all... yes.
Josh:
It's all the good stuff.
Starr:
Yeah-
Ben:
All the fun java land things that you could ever want.
Josh:
I feel like I remember having at one point to take a SOAP endpoint and build a REST wrapper for it or something so that we could interface with... I don't know, I can't remember exactly, but I feel like that happened.
Ben:
That's a special level of pain.
Josh:
It was terrible.
Starr:
Did you use to do some freelance work for the mouse?
Josh:
Oh, yes. Mickey Mouse?
Starr:
Yeah, that mouse.
Josh:
Yeah, uh-huh (affirmative).
Starr:
That just sounds like something they would have had you do, I'm not sure though. I don't know.
Josh:
Yeah. We're not saying their name just in case they decide to sue us, right?
Starr:
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Ben:
At some point, we may want to monetize this podcast, and we can't have the copyright taking us down.
Josh:
We can't have the... Yeah.
Starr:
Well-
Josh:
That does sound like something that they would do.
Ben:
Yeah, it does, yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Well, today, I don't know if we've had unanimous consensus on this, but I think we're going to talk about blogging and content and I've done a bunch of paid content acquisition recently, and y'all want to talk about that stuff?
Ben:
Oh, yeah.
Josh:
Sure.
Starr:
All right, I don't know, there was a time back when blogs were the thing. You started a company, then you need a blog. I'm thinking 2005-ish, 2007, and I remember getting started blogging, I didn't know what I was doing then at all. I produced some terrible content with no real purpose, and since then I've learned a lot, like you do when you, I guess, do something off and on for a decade. Even if you don't really try, I guess you learn some stuff. Y'all had blogs too, right? Your personal tech blogs.
Ben:
Yeah. And it's sad, they're pretty lonely these days, somewhat abandoned.
Starr:
Oh, yeah, me too. Me too. I think starrhorne.com is still up, but I don't know. Don't go there, don't go there anybody. Anyway when we started Honeybadger, obviously, we had to have a blog and we just took the approach that I think a lot of people do, which is you write a blog post about what you're working on, you write a blog post and you do a new feature and you want to talk about it, or when... I don't know, just something occurs and... That did fine for a while, the main problem I found with that approach though is that everybody just gets too busy to write blog posts.
Starr:
Yeah, I feel like back in the day there was this real feeling like, oh, everybody's having blogs, it's this community thing, you'd link to your-
Josh:
You've got to have one.
Starr:
... blogs... Yeah, yeah. And you're having discussions by writing blog articles back and forth, and people don't really do that anymore. Since then, it's become a lot more, I don't know... When I look at a lot of company blogs these days, I just see, pardon me French, garbage.
Josh:
The earlier days of blogging actually were kind of cool, because everything was still... there was no standardization, everything was unique and... Actually, I didn't even have blog, initially, I had a weblog, I'm pretty sure. Pretty sure it was a weblog.
Starr:
Oh. Yeah, I don't know, it seemed much more of a discussion, because I guess there was... people weren't just uniformly on Twitter or I guess, Reddit or whatever people use these days. I don't know. I don't know what the children are using.
Josh:
The were on all those things that we talked about last episode.
Starr:
Exactly.
Josh:
Or whatever, BBS's
Starr:
Yeah, they fall in with just having everybody do a blog post when they feel like it, is that that nobody really feels like it kind of thing, because writing is hard and it's... I don't know. Plus when you're starting company, you have a billion things to do and a lot of them feel more important than writing some blog post, especially when you don't have a strategy or anything around it.
Starr:
Then, I don't know when this was, it was around the time when we started going to a bunch of conferences and stuff. I decided, okay, Starr, I'm going to write one blog post a day. And so I had a flurry of activity for about, I don't know, three, four, five months, where I just turned out tons and tons of blog content. And actually, I was really surprised, that started getting some results. In terms of people coming up to me at conferences... I'd never had that happen before where people come up to me and say, "Hey, you're Starr. You wrote this thing. That's cool." And it floored me the first couple times it happened, and then-
Josh:
That started happening to me too, by the way. Where people would come up to me at conferences and be like, "Hey, you know Starr?"
Starr:
Oh, really?
Josh:
Uh-huh (affirmative).
Starr:
Oh, my gosh. I guess I'm famous.
Josh:
Yeah. People would always mention your blog posts, still do.
Starr:
Yeah, that's amazing. Some people still reference these blog posts I wrote years ago.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
So I guess the one thing I learned there is that posting frequency is really important, probably, more than quality even. I'm not going to say that, but getting stuff out there frequently is important. And I actually did some stats analysis type stuff of our overall revenue. I did this about a year ago, and showed that growth in our revenue was correlated to growth in posting frequency during at least a time when I was doing a lot of posting, which was kind of strange to see. I don't know ...
