Andrew just made a life changing sandwich and is finally using Cursor (and it's living up to the hype). Meanwhile Sean has been working on cutting SaaS costs for Miscreants and gets nostalgic about Flask (the Python framework).

Links:

For more information about the podcast, check out https://www.smalleffortspod.com/.

Transcript:
00:01.41

Sean

Oh, I'm like that for me. Oh, there it is. Okay.

00:03.89

Andrew

Hey, there we are.

00:03.96

Sean

How you doing?

00:05.100

Andrew

I'm good.

00:06.84

Sean

Good to see.

00:06.90

Andrew

Dude, I just made the best fucking sandwich.

00:09.78

Sean

Okay. about

00:12.87

Andrew

uh so we we just bought a cookbook this guy he's like a sandwich influencer i don't know he makes he makes youtube videos and like clips something Han i think and his whole thing is like sandwiches like he he's made like 300 sandwiches or something so he finally came out with a cookbook i love a good sandwich bought the cookbook First recipe, pretty fucking good.

00:39.11

Andrew

It was like a so homemade pesto on sourdough with like a chili crisp mayo and turkey parmesan crisps where you like fry parmesan until it becomes like a crunchy wheel of cheese, red onion, banana pepper.

00:51.55

Sean

Okay.

01:00.70

Andrew

Really, really good. Like maybe the best sandwich I've had in the last at least six months.

01:10.24

Sean

okay I've never heard of this guy in my life, but yeah, yeah, I thought of him.

01:13.81

Andrew

Did you find him? What's his what's his name?

01:16.50

Sean

Owen Han. Owen hahn on Han, the sandwich king.

01:17.52

Andrew

Oh, Owen Han.

01:22.24

Sean

Interesting.

01:23.23

Andrew

What a great niche, right?

01:23.43

Sean

Interesting.

01:25.22

Andrew

Like I want to be the sandwich king.

01:25.77

Sean

Yeah.

01:27.09

Andrew

Like that's such a fun place to live in and play in.

01:29.79

Sean

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You just gotta be like a chiseled Asian guy.

01:33.15

Andrew

Yeah, I mean, he is he is jacked and very attractive.

01:33.90

Sean

Great hair.

01:36.98

Sean

Yeah.

01:38.15

Andrew

But yeah, I mean, he just makes videos of himself making sandwiches and eating them, which is like. I'm sure it has its own ups and downs and pressure and whatnot, but as content creation niches go, it seems like a pretty decent one.

01:55.09

Sean

I don't know. I feel like you might run out of sandwiches. I mean, I guess not, but...

02:01.08

Sean

I don't know. I mean... What am I to say? I don't know shit about content creation.

02:08.27

Andrew

Yeah, what do you do when when making sandwiches is no longer fulfilling for you?

02:09.84

Sean

It just...

02:11.79

Andrew

You've got to got elevate your game somehow.

02:14.06

Sean

Yeah. It's only filling, not fulfilling. I don't know. Switch the wraps. There we go.

02:21.23

Andrew

What's going on with to you?

02:21.23

Sean

yeah take over another um um well speaking of food i've gotten really into liquid death i've probably drank at least 50 worth of liquid death in like the past week yeah multiple in no no the flavored ones the flavored yeah there's like tea there's like some that have tea but they're like low sugar so um

02:33.05

Andrew

God damn. Yeah. It's just, you know, you can get that stuff out of the tap in your kitchen, right? Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. Uh

02:47.01

Sean

I got like a tall boy here that's like green tea. made like a so flavored soda sparkling water, which is like two grams of sugar. They're not very good to be honest with you. The other ones are better.

02:54.95

Andrew

Yeah.

02:55.69

Sean

There's like a lime seltzer one. That's really good.

02:58.05

Andrew

Unfortunately, sugar is like part of what makes things taste good. So when you do the low sugar stuff, it just doesn't taste as good usually.

03:04.24

Sean

Oh, I think it doesn't taste good because, I think it actually, they lie about it or so they're not, they're not, they don't lie about it. They're, they're. being intellectually dishonest about it.

03:15.29

Sean

They say two grams of sugar and then a fuck ton of Stevia.

03:17.90

Andrew

yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

03:18.42

Sean

but oh

03:20.44

Andrew

I noticed that I've been drinking some of the, the fair life protein shakes.

03:21.68

Sean

yeah

03:25.61

Andrew

And I was at first, I was like, holy fuck, how do they get 42 grams of protein into this thing and make it not taste like butt?

03:31.39

Sean

Right.

03:33.99

Sean

Right.

03:34.41

Andrew

and then afterwards I was like, I know that aftertaste.

03:38.16

Sean

I see.

03:38.31

Andrew

So they're like, they're yeah, they're doing the same thing.

03:39.74

Sean

Microplastics. Nice.

03:41.03

Andrew

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Also, it's like number one microplastic thing or whatever.

03:42.49

Sean

Yeah. Yeah.

03:45.59

Andrew

It has more microplastics than anything on Earth or something.

03:48.59

Sean

I see you've been on your gym journey.

03:49.91

Andrew

Yeah.

03:51.91

Sean

Welcome to the fair life.

03:53.15

Andrew

Try it a little bit, you know, here and there.

03:53.24

Sean

There you go.

03:56.70

Andrew

I tried this one protein powder that's like chips Ahoy, has like real pieces of chips Ahoy cookie in it.

04:03.59

Sean

Interesting.

04:03.65

Andrew

It is revolting.

04:06.02

Sean

ah Yeah.

04:08.94

Andrew

I ordered it because it had like really good reviews and I was like, I don't know. Maybe I should try it.

04:13.95

Sean

All right.

04:14.14

Andrew

And the first time I drank it, I was like, oh, that was like surprisingly good. It kind of tasted like milk and cookies. And then the second one, I was like, no, this is bad. This this is really bad.

04:23.27

Sean

I see. I see.

04:25.45

Andrew

It's disgusting.

04:27.14

Sean

OK, good to know. We'll try it. We'll keep streaming my liquid death.

04:29.48

Andrew

Yeah.

04:31.43

Sean

Speaking of spend, my entire week has just been spent.

04:38.68

Sean

We are trying to consolidate a lot a lot of our SaaS spend.

04:42.29

Andrew

Yeah.

04:43.08

Sean

The nice thing when you hire high like like a great sign of high agency people is that they just will like blow their own money on like a tool if they need it, right? They're like, I'm not gonna fucking wait for you to get me this thing. I'm just gonna buy it bad thing is as a company, you don't like you kind of want some level of like You, I don't know.

05:00.76

Sean

I don't think my designers should be paying for their own AI tooling and whatever.

05:04.23

Andrew

Yeah, they definitely shouldn't.

05:05.33

Sean

Yeah. Yeah.

05:05.99

Andrew

They shouldn't be.

05:06.92

Sean

Um, that being said, I have to wrestle some of it away from them. Like, just let me pay for it. You you have, you, everyone has a card here, like but with a budget that they can just spend on tools, but, think they feel bad, but so, so we're trying to centralize it.

05:22.56

Sean

We, we just dropped a bunch of money out.

05:23.73

Andrew

Wait, I don't have a card.

05:27.37

Sean

you don't come to our you don't come to our lunch and learns that's the wrong that's your if you came to our everyone has a card so that they can order lunch for themselves just saying but yeah

05:27.44

Andrew

I'm teasing.

05:32.43

Andrew

All right, noted. I didn't realize that lunch and learn actually came with lunch.

05:43.53

Sean

Yeah, yeah, yeah. People don't really eat on the call, they can kind of just order it afterwards, but same diff.

05:47.30

Andrew

Yeah, fair.

05:51.07

Sean

Just spent a bunch of money on Cloud and then just had one more pitch. See, this guy from Figma has been blowing up my phone for the past two plus weeks.

05:59.21

Andrew

What is Figma wants you to spend more money on? like you're What do you get for that?

06:02.16

Sean

To go from like professional organization plan, you get like shared libraries, shared fonts, better like workspaces and stuff.

06:10.40

Andrew

Shared fonts would be kind of nice, actually. like I'm constantly opening files that designers create and then being like, fuck, I can't edit the text.

06:13.26

Sean

It is.

06:18.66

Sean

Yeah, yeah, but that's like that doesn't have to be in Figma.

06:22.51

Sean

You know, you could just have better like like running your font, your own font server, for example, is not the worst thing in the world. A lot of agencies do it from what I hear or just like Google Drive and everyone can download it and then it'd be, you know, it would be fine to use.

06:39.13

Sean

some kind of iffy on it. You get like shared libraries, which is nice, right? You can't like accidentally import a different client's library into your, this one, because we organize clients by folder instead of workspace.

06:50.71

Sean

So you get unlimited that. Yeah, you get like, there's like nice things to have. I'm not positive.

06:58.57

Andrew

Yeah, it definitely seems like kind of you know thinking putting my product hat on and like wondering what it's like to be in Figma's shoes totally makes sense that they're trying to create more revenue expansion by you moving people up pricing tier.

07:04.98

Sean

Hmm.

07:12.10

Sean

Right.

07:15.80

Andrew

And it sounds like it's primarily feature gated. I think everyone gets unlimited projects and files and stuff in Figma. so interesting yeah it sounds sounds like i can imagine there are lots of conversations happening in figma right now that are like fuck our our pro plan or whatever isn't good enough like and yeah it kind of sounds like it isn't

07:24.52

Sean

Yeah.

07:37.09

Sean

Yeah.

07:41.31

Sean

yeah yeah yeah i think yeah it's not as bad as netflix right with the whole yeah extra dollar every couple years or something like that yeah uh i kind of want there's also branching emerging for what it's worth which is kind of nice kind of not i don't know i i haven't really i haven't made my decision yet this the price difference is not we There's also one more nice thing about this like legacy pricing.

08:10.69

Sean

There's this idea that your billing cycle is 90 days instead of monthly. So we add a lot of clients in our workspace. We are really bad at cleaning that up, which is on us.

08:22.57

Sean

I feel like this would not be a problem if we just clean it up all the time. But because we don't clean it up, we get billed for a lot of clients who are just editors in our spaces who don't do anything and they don't go inactive.

08:30.74

Andrew

Oh, yeah.

08:33.36

Sean

All right. So last year we had 57

08:34.26

Andrew

Yeah, I got the DM from JJ. I told her she could turn some people off.

08:38.59

Sean

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We had 57 like edited design seats we paid for last month. Like that's insane.

08:43.36

Andrew

Yeah.

08:45.03

Sean

we don't even like, we don't talk to 57 different people as an agency, even with like the larger companies. So.

08:51.46

Andrew

That that is actually talking about revenue expansion like Figma by doing that designer seat thing, Figma did create a ton of revenue expansion.

08:55.83

Sean

Yeah.

09:00.78

Andrew

The problem is it's not directly aligned with their users getting more value.

09:03.50

Sean

Yep.

09:04.50

Andrew

And so it's like it ends up feeling kind of gross and icky.

09:08.100

Sean

Yeah, yeah. yeah Anyway, considering it, it's it's you know the the plan is like a more than double jump. So we'll see. Oh, the nice thing is that you know because we have 90 days, we have 90 days to remove them. And if they're removed any time before the next billing cycle hits, then we're not billed for any of that. So all of that like all of that usage was effectively free the entire time.

09:34.35

Sean

Which is nice, and that's only available for the next eight days, and or they switch to the new plan, which is some other fucked up like pricing stuff that they want to do, so... Anyway, how is...

09:44.26

Andrew

Pricing's hard, man.

09:45.70

Sean

Yeah, I was gonna ask how how any new thoughts on MetaMonster pricing?

09:50.03

Andrew

I think we've got it pretty much figured out, least like where we're gonna start.

09:54.42

Sean

Okay.

09:55.21

Andrew

The only thing is, so let's see. i I've been building the pricing page for the like signup process.

10:09.46

Andrew

So we've got starter, business, agency, and scale as our four base plans. Starter is $25 a month.

10:17.51

Sean

Hmm.

10:17.74

Andrew

Business is $50 a month. Agency is $100 a month and scale is $200 a month, tied to page crawls. And then everyone gets unlimited generations, unlimited sites, unlimited users, except for starter who just gets one site and one user.

10:31.06

Sean

I see.

10:32.67

Andrew

So the idea is basically like starter is just kind of an experiment to see if if like solo in-house small businesses, like solo founders in-house small businesses will like

10:45.87

Sean

of it.

10:46.43

Andrew

find use out of this, yeah, and pay for it. My gut is no. Shout out to Mike Privet, who he was he's been using the tool a lot.

10:56.15

Sean

Nice.

10:56.73

Andrew

And so I asked him for feedback on pricing the other day and then was like, you want to buy? And he was like, yeah, no. And I was like, yeah. I would not buy if I were in your shoes.

11:07.68

Andrew

so But I had to ask.

11:10.22

Sean

Yeah.

11:11.65

Andrew

It was good it was good to ask.

11:13.70

Sean

For now, for now, actually just counterpoint, Beehive has the whole like website creation thing that's come out. So I hope to see more and more creators have like actual newsletter creators have actual websites will care about their stuff indexing.

11:28.33

Sean

Mike's different because his stuff is like literally and weekly.

11:30.15

Andrew

Well, he's actually he's actually been making a lot of changes based on the stuff he's seeing in MetaMonster and he's been seeing results.

11:31.12

Sean

So. Oh, yeah.

11:37.17

Andrew

He's been seeing like, you know.

11:38.41

Sean

And he doesn't wanna pay for it that bastard.

11:41.26

Andrew

But the thing is, so the reason he doesn't wanna pay for it is because this is more of like a one-time thing to him.

11:44.49

Sean

Yeah.

11:47.86

Andrew

Like he's not publishing so much content that he can't do this himself moving forward.

11:48.30

Sean

Yeah.

11:53.14

Sean

Right.

11:53.61

Andrew

Or if he does do it himself, he's not gonna use anywhere near the like, 500 pages, he would use like, you know, a couple of pages a month or something like that.

11:58.20

Sean

Yeah.

12:03.62

Andrew

And so he he was like, I would maybe pay for like credit packs if I, if there was like a free account with credit packs, but that's just like not a route that we want to go down.

12:12.85

Sean

fair.

12:13.70

Andrew

so honestly, the only thing I'm debating with pricing right now, I feel good enough about these tiers to start with. I, you know, they're fine. It's basically like.

12:24.29

Andrew

a small business tier and then three different agency tiers. The only thing I'm debating is I've been thinking of this as our beta pricing, and then thinking of like our launch pricing as double.

12:37.78

Andrew

And then I went back and watched some of Rob Walling's course and forgot that he says, don't do lifetime discounts. Just don't do it.

12:48.64

Andrew

like fine He quotes Seth Godin saying, discounting is lazy marketing.

12:55.19

Sean

right

12:55.76

Andrew

And so now I'm like, Should I just launch with 50, 100, 200, 400?

13:04.42

Sean

I think you should. I think the thing is you can always relaunch, but it doesn't work. you know

13:08.01

Andrew

Yeah. See if people buy at that price. If people buy at that price, it gives us a lot more room to play.

13:12.87

Sean

Yeah. Yeah. Uh, I just learned that, you know, Oodoo or Odoo, the, uh, the, like everything, it's like a Zoho, almost like a Zoho competitor or like an a SAP competitor.

13:19.21

Andrew

Uh-uh.

13:24.76

Sean

It's like, you get a CRM, you get a website builder, you get, uh, email marketing, blah, blah, blah.

13:27.16

Andrew

Okay. Yeah.

13:29.48

Sean

You get the first one for a dollar and the rest of, yeah, yeah, yeah.

13:30.54

Andrew

I know the type. Yeah.

13:32.57

Sean

But, uh, they, they did 500 million in revenue last year, uh, coming off of in 2023, 200 something million.

13:42.35

Andrew

Whoa.

13:42.91

Sean

I know fucking crazy, right.

13:45.09

Andrew

That kind of growth at that size is nuts.

13:45.10

Sean

and so Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's wild. But the point being is that they, uh, they apparently they would change their pricing like every year because they like couldn't

13:59.24

Andrew

sounds awful.

13:57.60

Sean

Um, which also so really fucked them for what it's worth.

14:01.47

Andrew

Yeah, that sounds awful.

14:01.49

Sean

Like, yeah. Yeah. I was listening to the 20 VC podcast. I don't know how I feel about a lot of their decision-making. They're like, um, But, you know, maybe he hasn't found our boat.

14:11.41

Sean

So, yeah.

14:12.24

Andrew

Yeah. So i I have been building out this sign up flow.

14:14.23

Sean

oh

14:18.78

Sean

and

14:19.83

Andrew

Austin and I looked

14:20.31

Sean

That's right. We jammed on it the other night.

14:22.57

Andrew

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we did.

14:23.29

Sean

Yeah.

14:24.73

Andrew

Austin and I um looked at like what's the bare minimum we need to get to paid beta, and it was basically like,

14:33.66

Andrew

We decided we wanted signup. Even if you don't technically need it, we were like, this is janky. We want signup.

14:39.87

Sean

Yeah.

14:39.97

Andrew

So we were like, let's go ahead and do signup and payments. And then let's like make super sure the crawler is stable. So thats he's working on evaluating third-party solutions this week.

14:50.87

Andrew

And I think so.

14:54.76

Andrew

I think we're leaning towards fire crawl.

14:57.49

Sean

Okay.

14:58.49

Andrew

But there's a bug.

15:00.59

Sean

Oh.

15:01.64

Andrew

There seems to be a bug where it has like a flag for like don't crawl off-site links.

15:01.57

Sean

Uh oh.

15:09.09

Sean

Hmm.

15:09.86

Andrew

So basically, like if you link to something not from your page, you can accidentally kick off infinite crawls where you're crawling like site after site.

15:15.90

Sean

Right, right, right. Right.

15:19.50

Andrew

And that flag doesn't seem to be working.

15:21.88

Sean

Oh.

15:22.56

Andrew

which is not great, because that would drive our costs way up and also just like be a bad user experience.

15:24.58

Sean

Yeah.

15:27.37

Sean

Yeah.

15:29.78

Andrew

like We had to fix that in our own crawler.

15:30.21

Sean

Yeah. Yeah.

15:32.79

Andrew

So he's trying to like talk to customer support right now to see if we can get that fixed. And if we can get that fixed, I think we're going to go with Firecrawl. We also looked into the one you sent me, Gina.ai, which doesn't do crawling, but just does scraping.

15:43.39

Sean

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

15:48.50

Andrew

The only problem is, So we have one user right now whose site handles 404s in a really weird way.

15:58.01

Sean

Hmm.

15:59.70

Andrew

and gina sit Our crawler doesn't recognize them as 404s.

16:05.15

Sean

Yeah.

16:06.53

Andrew

And so it's like they're hey their crawl results are littered with a bunch of 404 pages.

16:08.81

Sean

Right, right.

16:12.13

Sean

Got it.

16:12.90

Andrew

And then Gina didn't couldn't tell they were 404s either.

16:17.41

Sean

Right, right, because it's not a crawler, it's just... I see.

16:19.48

Andrew

Yeah, I think so. I mean, it it sometimes can pick up on 404s. So it has something to do with like some of the nuances and how the redirect, like whether it's, I think it's like, it's not fully a redirect.

16:25.91

Sean

I see.

16:30.33

Andrew

Like I think they're, they're loading the page.

16:31.66

Sean

Yeah.

16:32.89

Andrew

They're just like swapping out the content with like, they're, it's something weird and with how their CMS handles 404s that makes it kind of hard, slightly harder to detect.

16:38.34

Sean

Okay.

16:44.91

Sean

I see.

16:46.16

Andrew

But yeah, so FireCrawl can handle the 404s.

16:45.85

Sean

Interesting.

16:50.58

Andrew

But just yeah, this weird there's there's this weird bug.

16:51.87

Sean

It's got outbound links.

16:54.80

Andrew

So yeah so Austin's been since been working on that.

16:54.80

Sean

Interesting.

16:59.33

Andrew

And then I've picked up the signup and payments flow. And the fun thing is I've been using Cursors agent to build this whole thing.

17:10.19

Sean

Nice.

17:12.86

Andrew

And it's been pretty impressive and like really fun. it feels almost like building something in Webflow to me.

17:24.74

Andrew

Because like you know I'm not really writing a whole lot of code. I'm just like telling the agent, move that button here, move this here, make that pink, make this black.

17:36.20

Andrew

you know I'm just giving it very like short instructions and like slowly tweaking the page until I get it to what I want.

17:40.50

Sean

Right, right.

17:44.12

Andrew

And then like I had it generate. like I've definitely run into your classic AI problems where it Yeah, hallucinate stuff or get stuck in kind of a loop.

17:51.56

Sean

it's technical. but i

17:55.68

Andrew

I found that like at least once it got stuck in this loop where it kept recommending the same incorrect solution. And so then I went and looked at the docs and was like, hey, here's what I think you need to do.

18:06.46

Andrew

Now do it. And it it did a good job with that. So yeah, I've been having really fun. ah ah I've been having really fun. I've been having a lot of fun playing with cursor.

18:20.21

Andrew

And I mean, I think it's perfect for this kind of stuff, too. like It's probably going to struggle to build your crawler, like build a really sophisticated crawler, but a fucking sign up flow, yeah.

18:27.33

Sean

right yeah yeah yeah anything that's like lowest common denominator stuff that yeah i'm with you i'm with you saw you using cursor and i have mentally decided to give you another shot i haven't built anything since

18:38.00

Andrew

Yeah.

18:44.01

Andrew

Yeah, I will say like. So I think Cursor works well for monoliths. So like yeah i'm using we're using Nuxt. And so I can generate the API and the you the views in the same project. And so it has context of both, which I think is really helpful. So I think that's that's good. And then, too, I started using it once Austin had already done a lot of work to

19:17.07

Andrew

build out styles and like create some components and stuff like that. And so then it could just pull from some of that stuff, which just makes it more likely to get generate the right sort of style and everything that we want.

19:33.06

Andrew

So yeah I'd be curious if it were would be as effective going from 0 to 1 versus now like tweaking and tacking stuff on.

19:43.68

Sean

Yeah. Speaking of frameworks, I have a friend who just started learning flask. um And I just haven't heard I just haven't thought about flask.

19:54.82

Sean

It's so long, like a whole decade.

19:56.43

Andrew

funny.

19:59.63

Sean

Um, I feel kind of nostalgic for it. I kind of wanted to just build everything in Flask. It would made my life so easy back then, you know? And like, I'm pretty sure Pinterest was built in Flask for the longest time until they switched.

20:08.03

Really?

20:09.07

Sean

Yeah, I remember some, uh, like there were a couple of apps. I mean, it was, you know, 20, 20, 10.

20:15.24

We. you We built a couple of apps in Flask because like our first back end dev at crit liked Python.

20:17.53

Sean

Mm-hmm.

20:25.42

Sean

Hmm.

20:26.18

And so he started off in Flask and then eventually moved over to Django.

20:31.54

Sean

Yeah.

20:31.63

And then we were we were essentially a Django shop until we shut down Django on the back end and then like eventually view on the front end.

20:40.55

Sean

Oh, I didn't know that.

20:41.99

Yeah.

20:42.71

Sean

Cool.

20:43.27

Yeah, we would use Django in like API-only mode. So we we lost some of the benefits of like building a true monolith.

20:46.59

Sean

Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.

20:50.81

Sean

Hmm.

20:51.99

Yeah, Flask is cool.

20:53.27

don't remember much about it other than like he built in the first API he built it, and it was just like, because it didn't.

21:06.29

It wasn't very opinionated it didn't enforce enforce standards, and then like we were all brand new developers and so like.

21:07.80

Sean

Right.

21:15.52

some of the API was like camel cased and some of it was snake cased and like stuff was just all over the place and then I was using ember at the time which was super opinionated and so it like was so hard to get ember to work with like I had to figure out how to hack ember to get it to change its paradigms based on what it was looking at and it was such a pain but

21:29.54

Sean

Right, right.

21:40.50

Sean

Well, anyway, I just and just had like a moment of nostalgia. It really just it brought me back to like the good old times when I still like open VSCode every day and and did things.

21:53.31

Yeah.

21:54.34

Why do you think so much of the security community has like consolidated around like Python and then go?

22:02.79

Sean

Oh, because we don't like oh carry on.

22:05.90

Yeah. I feel like so much of the, of the security community, like it was Python for a long time and then started moving to go.

22:09.57

Sean

Hmm.

22:13.29

And now like the, the hipster trendy kids are moving to Rust.

22:17.20

Sean

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

22:18.42

And like, that's, that's a totally different paradigm from like most other industries.

22:22.84

Sean

mean, one, front I think front-end was never a big concern. Two, Python is easy because Python is almost like, like security people don't use Python and like,

22:30.10

Mm hmm.

22:37.20

Sean

one usually a pythonic way and two in like a like a real like software engineer built the thing that way like we use it for scripting and it's great for it's it's great for that it's great for doing it quickly and uh i mean like yeah you would do ir with jupiter notebooks and and and python i think that and also a lot of the people in security i think got into security because they weren't software engineers and

22:45.57

Yeah.

23:04.69

Mm-hmm.

23:05.24

Sean

and weren't necessarily that and you think yeah yeah exactly exactly yeah that new pearl maybe yeah i mean if you ask any a lot of the kids that i went to school with back then so why'd you get into here it's like oh i didn't want to code i wanted to like hack shit

23:06.53

Like they were interested in tech. They were often like sys admins or like came up through IT t help desk. And so they, they knew some scripting and some like basic config stuff and like understood, understood how networks were architected and stuff like that.

23:22.55

But.

23:29.69

Mm-hmm.

23:30.53

Sean

cause you don't really technically need, like it's changed, right? It's, it's moved also securities moved a lot, ah ah like away from like the network and like, like infra layer and like that system thatis sentiment thing into, uh, more and more app stuff and everything's in application layer.

23:46.19

Sean

And like now, no, having software engineering, so like understanding means you get to think about business logic, which means you get to like find not just, you know, XSS, but you can finally real business logic flaws.

23:57.93

Yeah, I think one of the things that was so hard for me about moving to full time at Grey Noise was Grey Noise is not that way, because Grey Noise is all about the perimeter.

23:58.97

Sean

So.

24:08.41

It's all about the network. And so like to thrive at Grey Noise, you really need to be able to think like a sysadmin or like a network architect.

24:16.58

Sean

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

24:18.08

And I came in like, oh, I'm technical. I'll be able to do this. But i'm like I am application technical more than I am

24:26.10

Sean

Yeah.

24:27.02

And even then, I'm like, I was always more of a front end guy. So like, start getting into the low level, how do applications work, and I start falling asleep a little bit.

24:33.95

Sean

Sure.

24:36.05

But um yeah.

24:36.50

Sean

Sure.

24:38.64

Sean

For what it's worth, same. I mean, like, uh, one of, I think one of my weakest parts of security or was one of my weakest parts of security took a lot of learning was like. like the software, like SCAs, like S-bombs, like all the the apps then like application security posture management stuff that's happened. Always more doing like endpoint things or... um Yeah, yeah, yeah. and now Now I'm also like front end and thinking about pretty pixels and all that stuff. so

25:12.60

Sean

abstracted, I've also just feel like I've abstracted any amount of like front-end engineering into Webflow. But anyway, I want to bring Flask up because it's just like, if I think Flask definitely ignited some level of like software engineering, I don't know, lust or interest and then Uh, it died on the vine when I had to go and it died on the vine when I had to go work on like, uh, like go Google's open ID connect at an internship and I didn't know what was going on.

25:43.88

Interesting.

25:44.81

Sean

It was like a very like random project that they didn't, it was like a, anyway, it kind of died on the vine there. And then, and then I got into Webflow and all that sort of stuff. And I haven't kind of revisited a lot of this.

25:55.55

Sean

then now the world is all like fucking next JS larval roof, like and all that stuff. So.

26:00.40

Yeah.

26:01.21

Sean

Who's going to go back? To fully answer the question, I think they went from Python to Go, because Go compiles. So it was faster as they kind of learned more of that. And then Rust was just always like, new Go, better Go.

26:13.73

I do wish there was less, this is not a new take, but I wish there was less religion between frameworks.

26:16.72

Sean

Yeah.

26:20.29

You know what I mean by that? like

26:21.58

Sean

yeah i mean But the thing is, you know you spend so much time learning one thing and getting good at it. You don't really want to like, Yeah, you're not gonna shit on your own, but you're gonna...

26:29.85

Yeah, but I just like, you know, like I've been listening to mostly technical a lot lately and they're, they're both big Laravel guys.

26:29.95

Sean

so.

26:35.16

Sean

Uh-huh.

26:37.95

And like, I think Laravel's dope.

26:38.03

Sean

Yeah.

26:39.40

I would love to learn Laravel at some point and like build something in it.

26:39.48

Sean

Yeah.

26:42.40

I've always thought the rails world was cool and like in thought rails developers were interesting and neat.

26:46.03

Sean

Yeah. Yeah.

26:49.39

and they like, you know, to them, JavaScript people are like the trendy new kids who like,

26:55.55

Sean

yeah

26:56.20

like Vercel, Superbase, Next.js, Nuxt.js, like those are the trendy new kids.

26:57.98

Sean

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

27:02.43

And they're like, they're always like, new kids think we're lame and like think we're stupid and like, but when have you ever seen anything real built in Nuxt.js? And I'm like,

27:13.66

Come on, man. I'm just using this shit because it's like I'm a front end guy. So JavaScript is what I know. And I'm like trying to move as fast as I can.

27:19.99

Sean

and

27:22.50

And so it's faster for me to like write shit in JavaScript than it is to like learn PHP and a new framework at the same time. It's like, I think you're cool.

27:35.49

Why you got to shit on my thing?

27:35.95

Sean

Alright, for what it's worth, JavaScript for kids on Twitter do shit on, and and do shit on Laravel and Ruby.

27:37.26

Why you?

27:42.74

And that's lame.

27:42.73

Sean

Like, often.

27:43.78

Laravel and Ruby are dope, but everyone should just use whatever is easy easiest for them to build stuff, and then you should just build more stuff.

27:44.16

Sean

Yeah.

27:51.46

Sean

yeah Yeah.

27:52.25

Building stuff is the cool thing, not the fucking framework you choose.

27:55.42

Sean

Yeah. Yeah, I also think you're like, I mean, it's just X. I think it's mostly X, anything X loves rage bait, you know.

28:02.69

But this is yeah this is on a podcast that i they're saying this shit, not on not on X.

28:05.57

Sean

Ouch, I see.

28:08.33

Sean

Sure, sure.

28:08.37

I mean, they might have also been saying it on X, but I'm not there anymore, so.

28:10.38

Sean

Sure.

28:13.13

Sean

Fair. Fair. Well, it's a shithole on there anyway, so.

28:16.87

Yeah.

28:17.49

Sean

Do you still log in on Blue Sky?

28:17.85

Anyway. Occasionally, yeah.

28:20.67

Sean

Okay.

28:21.33

I ah ah deleted all scrolly apps from my phone, all the scrolly ones.

28:24.80

Sean

That's right. That's right.

28:27.52

But I still check LinkedIn and Blue Sky and still kind of use those. I really want to do a ah little social campaign this week.

28:37.29

I want to just post something where I say like, Send me your website and I'll tell you what MetaMonster has to say about it. and And see if I can get a bunch of people to reply with just like their website and then send them like, okay, here's how many missing Meta descriptions you have.

28:45.32

Sean

and

28:52.28

Here's what MetaMonster generated.

28:54.54

Sean

Roast monster, monster roast.

28:56.89

Yeah.

28:58.16

Sean

Neither of those are good names, but nice.

29:01.32

But yeah, yeah, yeah, like do like a little tear down for people in public.

29:01.92

Sean

Cool.

29:05.87

Sean

cool let me know when you do it i'll throw my sight at the wall yeah i'll pretend you know cool nice valentine's thing i like it i like it yeah uh yeah sharing the love five out of five hearts don't you don't have to make it you don't have to make it like a roast it could be all love it could be positive

29:08.70

Sick, sick, sick, sick. Yeah, I think I'm going to try to do it on Friday. So yeah, a little Valentine's Day roast. Maybe I can use that somehow. Sharing the love.

29:30.06

Yeah.

29:31.82

Sean

Yeah. Cool. Sweet. I think we're almost out of time. So, we'll call it.

29:37.59

Yeah, cool. Yeah, we can keep this one short and sweet. what are What are you gonna do next week?

29:40.96

Sean

Cool.

29:45.44

What are you gonna do between now and the next podcast?

29:49.04

Sean

Get into another fight with you, obviously. No, no.

29:57.67

Sean

Let's spend the five minutes we have left thinking about this.

30:02.12

I'm going to try, I want, I want you to hold me accountable. By the time we record our next podcast, I want it to be possible to sign up for MetaMonster and start a paid for like a free trial with a credit card.

30:05.35

Sean

OK. OK. OK. Like the the feature. OK.

30:23.82

Yeah. The thing I'm working on, I want it to be done by next week.

30:27.65

Sean

OK, I'm writing it down. And big marker on my notebook, you see. no one No one can see this on the podcast.

30:34.44

okay

30:34.45

Sean

Andrew can, but I don't know. What am I going to do next week? You want a Valentine's Day date?

30:40.83

Ooh, where you going?

30:42.14

Sean

I have no idea. I do. I do know. Just just like pizza in Brooklyn and stuff like that. Nothing. Yeah.

30:49.35

Okay, all right.

30:50.78

Sean

It's just nothing like a good New York slice, you know?

30:52.95

I mean, you're not wrong, as long as y'all are both into like lowkey chill dates, then that's perfect.

30:54.30

Sean

and

30:57.64

Sean

Yeah, I think, I think lowkey, probably like play video games together or something like that. You know, nothing, nothing crazy.

31:04.25

Sounds like a nice thing.

31:08.79

Sean

nice.

31:06.33

Yeah. I think we're just going to make dinner at home. I'm going to make, make a steak with like a, this red wine cherry sauce that I haven't made in a while.

31:15.35

Sean

Oh, not a sandwich. It's not a, is it a steak sandwich? No.

31:19.49

Nope. Not a sandwich.

31:20.15

Sean

Okay. Okay. what am I gonna, what am I gonna get done by next week?

31:26.52

Sean

It's really sad that it can't give you a straight answer by the way.

31:29.01

I mean, you've got a million things going on with you're going to hire somebody. You're go to going to like make a budget for the SaaS thing. You're going to roll out a new feature on Copywork.

31:39.72

Sean

No, it's JJ.

31:41.94

like but What are we doing?

31:44.39

Sean

No new feature in copywork. JJ is out next week so I'm trying not to do the SaaS stuff without her.

31:50.70

OK.

31:53.19

Sean

Maybe I'll work on like PRD stuff or I mean I've been okay this is another stupid project that I've set myself up on.

32:02.21

Sean

I've been dreaming about is like this like Webflow changelog thing not for like a not for our customers just as I've been

32:05.96

Hmm.

32:09.14

Sean

like realizing that we need some level of like governance because people just people are just out here pushing things man like like clients should be out here just hitting publish and then they're like what is why is this problem here I'm like because CSS classes like

32:12.50

Hmm.

32:23.79

Yeah, dude, I would love for you one of us to release like a step one business, like release a one-time payment Webflow app or something like that.

32:24.22

Sean

you make a change

32:33.80

I keep wanting to to turn, take what I built with chart juice and see if I can build a little one-time payment like graph generator for, for Webflow. But I just, uh, haven't made the time yet.

32:47.58

So I would love for one of us to build a little, a little one-time payment bit of software and see if we can sell it.

32:53.52

Sean

mean one of the things we run into is like brand like brand kits with clients right now we have to so that's another idea this is this is part of like like me thinking about flask as well because it's such a simple like it's just a place where you can log in and and Choose the colors, upload a logo, put some files up there, and then give it to a client. They can download it, then they can share it around and download it whenever.

33:18.28

Is that not best solved by like a Google Drive folder?

33:21.42

Sean

and It's different. It's not like a brand one pager. It doesn't feel like a, you know.

33:26.64

Okay.

33:26.75

Sean

It is, it is, you're right, you're right. It is solved by Google Drive. Yeah. Okay. Fine. Fair. Fair enough. It is how we currently solve it for what it's worth, but it's not like, I don't know.

33:36.90

Sean

It's not like nice. You can't also choose like the colors there and like copy the hex or like see what your Pantone colors are.

33:42.65

That's you.

33:43.32

Sean

You still have to give them a PDF.

33:43.41

Yeah.

33:44.66

Sean

So it's just a digitized version of that PDF.

33:47.99

I mean, seems like a fun idea to build.

33:50.49

Sean

Yeah. Yeah.

33:51.28

I feel like Ian and Aaron on Mostly Technical talk about how Ian is always like the no man. And I feel like I am 100% the no man for our relationship.

34:01.29

I'm like, that's Aaron, I think.

34:01.49

Sean

which one is Which one is the one's glasses?

34:05.63

Sean

Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

34:08.07

Yeah. Yeah.

34:13.58

I'm the old soul who's like, Sean, I spent years making you know wasting time on ah andsh shit that never went anywhere.

34:24.07

Don't waste time. Just make money. Just take all the money out of MetaMonster.

34:28.65

Sean

yeah,

34:29.08

I feel like that's my usual refrain.

34:31.37

Sean

Yeah, I feel like I feel like the note, what what what is his name again, Ian, right?

34:35.01

Yeah.

34:35.84

Sean

He's the one who did the course first, right? Because they both run courses.

34:39.92

you know ian Ian has run a SaaS business for years.

34:44.28

Sean

Oh, okay, for some reason, I thought like, I thought that one of them had a Postgres course and the other one or a SQL a course and the other one had like, something else as well.

34:54.90

I mean, Aaron has multiple courses. He has a SQL late course and a screencasting course.

34:57.01

Sean

Maybe that's

35:00.99

And like he's building a whole like course thing course business.

35:01.53

Sean

Okay.

35:04.60

Sean

I see.

35:05.47

Yeah.

35:05.51

Sean

I see, I see, I see. Okay, maybe maybe that's where I got it confused.

35:10.23

All right, I gotta a bounce.

35:10.83

Sean

Alright, I'll see you later. Goodbye.

35:12.69

See you, man.

35:13.27

Sean

Bye.