FounderQuest

We originally sat down to discuss distractions and Yak Shaving. What emerged was more like group therapy for a team struggling to cope with a spate of JS dependency upgrades. We also discuss purchasing an ice cream truck. Buckle up!

Full Transcription:
Starr: So, I learned something amazing. Just before coming on here I learned something amazing. Okay, Beto O'Rourke, the presidential candidate, used to be a member of the Cult of the Dead Cow, hacking group. In, yeah the 90's.

Josh: Wow.

Ben: Awesome.

Starr: I know!

Josh: Sold.

Announcer: Three developers. One mission. Build a business to nurture personal fulfillment. It's not stupid, it's Founder Quest.

Ben: It might have to go look for his byline, what the frack?

Starr: I know, I know, right? I used to read their reports from Def Con and all the conferences and stuff. I used to be like, man these guys are so cool, they're so much more mature than I am. I don't know how they got all the money and go to Las Vegas and do things when I'm 17 and have no job.

Josh: That's kinda how you feel about the guy who's running for president now probably.

Starr: Yeah, probably.

Josh: So, I guess not much has changed.

Starr: Oh, speaking of Yaks and blockers and all this stuff, we finally have our pod cast artwork as you saw.

Josh: Yeah.

Starr: So we can now actually... This is episode number 6 of Founder Quest.

Josh: Is it? Wow.

Starr: And, yeah nobody's heard it, but me. Really.

Josh: I kinda like it like this, there's no pressure.

Starr: Yeah. Should we just keep saving them to drop box.

Josh: Yeah.

Josh: And that's it? I mean like... yeah that's cool with me.

Josh: Yeah.

Starr: That's fine they can release them after we're like dead and famous.

Josh: Right, yeah.

Starr: It's like I didn't want to set up the web site because I don't know what colors the art work has in it and you have to have ... you know, you want to have them matched colors and stuff so.

Josh: Yeah, but know we can get the first one out?

Starr: Yeah, now we can start rolling em out. See what people think of em. In slack we've been talking all morning yesterday about all these blockers we have right, because when you're doing development on any sort of bigger project, you have this idea of the real work you want get to, like the feature work, and then you have the things that are preventing you from doing the real work. Sometimes you call that yak shaving because in order to, you want a sweater, but you know you need yarn to make the sweater, then you need wool to make the yarn and you eventually end up shaving a yak. I think that's what I

Starr: Yeah that sounds about right. Is this a false distinction you guys, you think there is a such thing as the real work?

Josh: You mean like does the real work exist, or is it all just yak shaving.

Starr: Yeah, does the real work exist?

Josh: I think you could make a case that it is yak shaving to an extent like anything you would do, would be blocking something else at least.

Starr: The reason I ask is I had this bit of an epiphany when I was struggling through some random webpacked stuff where I was like man what if this is all there really is, like what if this is it guys?

Josh: Kind of like an existential crisis.

Starr: Yeah, kind of, kind of. And it was fine like I was having a good time you know, just doing my webpack updates and everything, but this idea that we have some sort of mythical real work to do.

Josh: Well web development has become, feels like to me its become a lot more complex over the years, like I don't know, that could be an illusion too you know, computers have always been hard. But it feels like the amount of things that you have to do just to do web development in the first place, has increased. I don't know, what you, how you guys feel but that's how it feels to me.

Ben: Yeah, I can definitely agree with that, I mean it's not as simple as just drawing some HTML up on the webs you now, and having people see it, right?

Josh: Yeah.

Ben: So, yeah I think when you're building on anything, right, you have to deal with all the things you're building on top of.

Josh: Kind of like when we used to write HTML and then we had to write some PHP in our HTML.

Starr: So the three of us kind of, I don't know, came of age but we really enjoyed the rise of rails, and I wonder if that was maybe some sort of golden moment in which things became simple enough you could build an entire website, state-of-the-art website, with the skills of sort of one person, right? I remember working on rails projects and feeling like, man I've got this rail stuff down, it's like I can go over here write my ruby I just gotta make a few little views in HTML got some CSS, done, like I am a ninja at this stuff. But now it feels, you know, different. It's like okay, I can work on a feature in ruby for a while, and then I'm going to have to go and redo my JavaScript tooling to make JavaScript compile, because you know something happened and there's all this context switching that maybe there didn't used to be.

Josh: Yeah, and the pace of change again, especially I think with JavaScript tooling is sped up so much and everything's changing so rapidly that I think we have to go back and re-evaluate our tooling and that stuff more often.

Starr: Yeah you're working on something right now aren't you Josh, you're re-doing some of our code on our point library for JavaScript?

Josh: Yeah, I'm working on our Honeybadger.js or our Honeybadgerjs library for a big 1.0 release finally we've been pre 1.0 all this time, but-

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