Episode 93
· 34:37
One thing I really truly believe in is dogfooding. Using your product, being your own customer, and, like, filling that role makes you better at your job in immeasurable ways. Because I can, like, talk to the CEO and be, like, these are my use cases. These are must haves. The all these things.
Jack Bridger:Because you're actually talking as a customer.
Andrew Lisowski:Oh, yeah.
Jack Bridger:Hi, everyone. You're listening to Scaling Dev Tools. This is a really cool episode because I'm joined today by Andrew from Dev Tools FM, which is one of my favorite podcasts, and you should absolutely listen to. Andrew, thanks so much for joining.
Andrew Lisowski:Thanks for having me.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. So just for background for people that haven't heard of Dev Tools FM. So Dev Tools FM, do you wanna go in and give an intro to it?
Andrew Lisowski:Yeah. Sure. I'll say our tagline. Dev Tools FM is a podcast about developer tools and the people who make them. So that really encompasses all of the stuff that we do is we wanna focus in on a person who is making something that helps developers' lives easier.
Andrew Lisowski:And then we also try to, like like, go into who they are, where they came from, if if it's an interesting part of their story, and how that kinda, like, led into what they're making now.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. And I think, like, as one of my favorite episodes is the one that you did with Mitchell from HashiCorp. Mhmm. And from what I remember, it was, like, they're kinda you were talking about, like, the origin story. You were talking about, like, the licenses.
Jack Bridger:You're also talking about Mitchell's flying. Yeah. I feel like that was a lot, actually. That was that was that was awesome to hear. Like, the man loves flying.
Andrew Lisowski:Yeah. It's cool it's cool to dig into people's other hobbies, especially if they kinda, like, tangentially connect with, programming. Like, he had built out, like, a flight panel for himself, which is I I love creating software for your own personal needs. Like, I've tried to make startups maybe in the past, but they've all just turned into, like, personal tools that I use to, like, enhance my life, and then I might share them with my friends sometimes.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Do you wanna talk about a little bit about, like, some of the projects that you've felt? Because you've maintained and built quite a lot of open source projects yourself. Yeah.
Andrew Lisowski:So my first delve into open source was was with a project called Gimp. It's the JavaScript image manipulation program. It was created by a guy in Ireland who is now a politician. So the, the library had basically languished for, like, 2 years because this guy was transitioning from being a developer into being, like, a person in political office and caring about Cork Ireland. So, like, the the project was in need of a of a maintainer.
Andrew Lisowski:There were hundreds of issues, and I was like, I wanna dip my toe in this. Like, at the time, it was early in my career. I kinda idolized these people I saw in, like, the MPM package authors field. I was like, cinder, he's like a titan. He is like a a sizable percentage of the ecosystem.
Andrew Lisowski:I just kinda wanna, like, tap into that, and Jimp definitely allowed me to. Like, through Jimp, I have, like, billions of MPM downloads, and it's just because I I maintain this thing and kinda, like Yeah. Kept kicking the can down the road of, like, making it making sure it worked on, like, latest node and make sure that it, like, actually was, like, a fun thing to use.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Maybe that's such a, like, a good question. Not everyone would know what it's like to actually, like, maintain a popular open source project.
Andrew Lisowski:It it's rough, and that's, like, one of the the main themes of my podcast is, like, maintaining that open source because, like, everybody who, like, likes programming can probably get a library out the door, but, like, maintaining it and, like, taking feedback and knowing when to say no, like, those are all hard things that you learn by doing doing the thing. So it's like, when you first start out, you make a package, you're like, oh, people have come to this. They want me to do things for them. They want me to enable things for them. But as you get further along in your open source career, you go, oh, new additions, I'm, like, more scared of those.
Andrew Lisowski:Because it's like, now it's when someone contributes code to your project, they're it's more like you're owning their code for the foreseeable future and the features that they brought. So it's very easy to fall into the trap of, oh, I'll add all the things for you and then you kinda get stuck into this place where it's like, well, I've added so much stuff that I don't even really care about that I now have to maintain and I have to like, now if I wanna make a break in change, I have to care about all that stuff. So it's just like learning to say no was probably the hardest thing for me at the start. And some of my projects you can see that in where it's like, oh, there's a lot of features here. There's a lot of stuff in core that doesn't need to be.
Andrew Lisowski:And where I'm at in my career now, I'd probably say no more.
Jack Bridger:And, like, does it like, on a weekly basis, like, how much time do you think you spend now?
Andrew Lisowski:I don't do it as much as I used to. At my old position, I was more, like, officially, like, paid to do open source, so I did a lot of it. I I would just, like, openly just, like, create lots of packages, take on lots of maintenance burden. But then when I got to my new job, I was much more product focused, so I've spent a lot less time on it. One one interesting phenomena I heard about before I experienced it myself was GitHub notification anxiety.
Andrew Lisowski:Like, people with, like, crazy amounts of libraries, their GitHub notifications are, like, thousands and thousands of pages long. And it's just people complaining at you or requesting things of you, and it's a very kinda, like, thankless thing. So, like, over time, I that that red dot on GitHub started to give me more and more anxiety. So now I I I back up and I try not to engage as much, but I'll come through, like, maybe, like, once a week, once a month, and, like, see is anything crazy wrong? Usually, it isn't.
Jack Bridger:So what like, when you see, like, people creating issues and stuff, like, yeah, like, how like yeah. How PR
Andrew Lisowski:is welcome.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. PR?
Andrew Lisowski:I've typed though those two words more times than I can count. And when a PR comes in, I prioritize PRs. So if there's if there is a PR, I will go review it. I if it's a thing I'm okay with, I'll merge it. If there's an issue, I'll breathe through it lightly.
Andrew Lisowski:Go, yeah. That seems like a problem other people experience too. If you wanna fix it, feel free to.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. That makes so sense. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And do you think that there's something that, like, dev tools, maybe don't typically understand about, like, open source?
Jack Bridger:A
Andrew Lisowski:lot of dev tools companies these days are doing it right. Like, they're focusing on DX first. Like, I look back to, like, before the Internet and, like, dev tooling was, like, archaic and, like, hard to use tools. Like, you had to be a genius to, like, even read through the docs and understand what's going on. So I think dev tools companies nowadays really do have that focus on, like, just, like, making the the simple case simple and making it just obvious.
Andrew Lisowski:Like, that's also what I like about the JavaScript ecosystem is that, like, for what for all you can say about it, we have great documentation practices compared to everything else. Like people put up whole static websites just to like show you how to use their React component or just like Yeah. Like, how to use their CLI library. In the past, you just have to go read a bunch of, like, code examples or, like, try to find something, but it was hard.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. I I see what you mean there. That's I didn't realize there's, like, so much of it. I never considered that. There's a big difference between the JavaScript ecosystem.
Andrew Lisowski:In my opinion, it it's huge. Like, other ecosystems feel like almost like they're adversarial to the developer. Like, they assume you know a lot, but JavaScript is kind of this, like, lingua fact of, like, programming languages. Yeah. So, like, people when they do their docs will literally, like, point them at, like, complete beginners.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Andrew Lisowski:And, like, in other programming paradigms, I just don't see that as much. They kinda, like, assume you're, like, a senior level already and you know how all the things fit together, but that's not really true for everybody.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. So what made you wanna start a DevTools
Andrew Lisowski:class? I didn't at first. Like, by by virtue of myself, I'm a very lazy person and, like, what
Jack Bridger:Everything you've said so far doesn't point to that.
Andrew Lisowski:Yeah. It might not, but, like, something that stuck with me early in my career was, like, the best programmers are the laziest, and those are the ones who are gonna automate things. And Yeah. When it comes to a lot of things, I'm very lazy. And when I was approached by my cohost to to start the podcast, my first thought was, like, I don't wanna do that.
Andrew Lisowski:But, like, one thing I really truly believe in is dog fooding, using your product, being your own customer, and, like like, just filling that role makes you better at your job in immeasurable ways. Like, of the things I took from Intuit, my first job Yeah. That was the biggest thing is be the customer, have customer empathy. So when I started a new job at a podcasting company and a random person online said, hey. Wanna start a podcast?
Andrew Lisowski:I went, I don't want to, but, that sounds like it'd be great for my career in, like, a bunch of different ways. So I I did, and it was it was amazing for, like, my job. Because, like, I I've probably put the most hours in in the product of any engineer at the company, and, like, it just helped me kinda, like, grow my grow my cred there too. Because I can, like, talk to the CEO and be, like, these are my use cases. These are must haves.
Andrew Lisowski:The all these things.
Jack Bridger:Because you're actually talking as a customer.
Andrew Lisowski:Oh, yeah. It was so cool, like, in the first few, like, months of dev tools and d script where I'd be, like, there's this feature, there's this workflow that doesn't exist, and it's making my life terrible. The the one that that it was was we had just integrated video and you could have sequences where it's like, it's your face and my face. And how we wanted to edit it was your face is on screen when you're talking, my face is on screen when I'm talking.
Jack Bridger:Yes.
Andrew Lisowski:Just that alone, doing that for my 1 hour podcast took me an hour and a half of just clicking, and I could feel my wrist starting to hurt more and more. So I was like, one weekend, I was just like, I'm done. I'm coding this.
Jack Bridger:Really?
Andrew Lisowski:It will take me
Jack Bridger:code.
Andrew Lisowski:Yeah. It it is going to take me as much time to code this as it is going for me to do this this time. And, of course, that wasn't true. We all know with automation, you think you're gonna save a lot of time, but you really just invest a whole lot of time upfront. And so that's what it was here too.
Andrew Lisowski:But with that feature, I think I'd probably save our customers, like, thousands of hours of just, like, mindless clicking in the app, and error prone clicking. So, like, being able to do those things at this new job was just so fun, and it's so fun to be able to tie it back in the podcast. And literally every week as I'm editing my podcast, I probably file 3 on good weeks, 3 bugs. On bad weeks, I can file, like, a dozen bugs.
Jack Bridger:Seriously?
Andrew Lisowski:Yeah. Wow. But I have, like, laser vision for, like, what the product should be at this point. I also built the design system. So, like, during that, I was at, like, my pixel vision, like, honed in.
Andrew Lisowski:Like, I could see, like, oh, that's 2 pixels off right there. Like, that doesn't line up how the system should be. So, like, I I can look at the app and probably find a few bugs, like, even right now.
Jack Bridger:That's so funny. So what was the impact? Like, you just people you were just suddenly did you become, like, the kind of
Andrew Lisowski:It's it it has been weird because, like, I have, like, this large body of work that's, like, Descript specific work, basically, and people know about it. So people will just randomly come up to me and be like, hey. Can I use your podcast files for x, y, or z? And I'll just see myself pop up in places. So, like, the CEO is doing some product announcement videos.
Andrew Lisowski:Oh, there's my face because they needed a multi track sequence project to, like, show off this new capability.
Jack Bridger:Really? So you're kind of like the darling, the showcase podcast.
Andrew Lisowski:I'm probably, like, the the most known podcast internal one. Yeah. But yeah. Like, I'll see product managers use my videos for test stuff. One thing that really, like, tickled me was our AI team.
Andrew Lisowski:Like, we have a AI clips feature now.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Andrew Lisowski:And I was at the off-site. I'm like, I don't use it much yet. And they're like, what are you saying? Like, you're the one person that should use it. We trained on your shit.
Andrew Lisowski:Like, if it's gonna work well for anybody, it's gonna work well for you. And it just, like, it kinda blew my mind. It's like, wow. My my my dog fooding exercise has become integrated into this company at a very weird scale.
Jack Bridger:That's, like, seriously cool. This is, like, such a cool, like, career tech or whatever. Like, just like dog food. Life is the same for start ups. Right?
Andrew Lisowski:Yeah. It's the same for developer tools. It's like, auto, that automated release tool. The reason we built it is because we needed it. We're Yeah.
Andrew Lisowski:We're developing a bunch of monorepos Yeah. That needed to have automated releases, and we wanted them to be, like, easy to use. And we used it a whole lot and got it to the point where it's, like, this thing's solid as hell. We can open it up and start, like, adding other languages because we know, like, the core is built really well, battle tested, works on our complicated repo. So dog food helped a lot there too.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Do you think do you think dog fooding is like is that has that been one of have you seen that in a lot of the successful dev tools?
Andrew Lisowski:I I would say, like, I don't think you can make a good thing if you don't use it. Like, I it it would be hard for me to work in an industry where it's like, oh, you're making, like, accounting software for, like, professional accountants. And it's like, well, I can't dog food that. I can't really understand the needs of the customer at all. So, like yeah.
Andrew Lisowski:In dev tools, though, yeah, it's it's a great way to go.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Kind of like a broad question, but, like, from the guests that you've spoken to, have you spotted any kind of patterns or things that you would do for your own dev tools?
Andrew Lisowski:One that one that struck me is just, like, people will have obsessions, and, like, those obsessions might not yield a company or a tool like year 1.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Andrew Lisowski:It might take them till, like, the 6th time they've rebuilt it
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Andrew Lisowski:To, like, find a thing that's, like, oh, I the this is what I wanted. This is, like, a useful thing. It's taken all of your those past failures and kind of, like, rolled them up into, like, the the new great thing.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Andrew Lisowski:And I think that is a a great theme across most development. Like, when I'm talking to juniors, like, the basically, my only advice is go build a bunch of side projects. They're all going to fail. They're all going to go nowhere, but you're going to learn a whole lot. And I think that's true of dev tools too.
Andrew Lisowski:It's like I've purse like, my personal obsession problem is static site generation and storybooks as of late. I've built if you categorize the storybooks as static site generators, I've built 8 now. And it's like, I've just and even though none of those things have become like a tool that anybody other than me and maybe some people at Intuit still use. I learned so much throughout those. Like, I learn like, the fir my first documentation generator, that is how I learned webpack.
Andrew Lisowski:Like, it was all done through webpack plugins. I had to learn every single part of the config just to, like, get it going and, like, that that work paid dividends. Like, nobody told me to do that. I didn't need to do that. Literally, now part of my job is, like, I'm the Webpack guy because, like, I've just I've been I've been in those trenches.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Yeah.
Andrew Lisowski:And that's been done through side project after side project just, like, making things that nobody really cares about.
Jack Bridger:Interesting. So making the things that nobody cares about.
Andrew Lisowski:But you care about them.
Jack Bridger:Care about them. And eventually
Andrew Lisowski:Eventually, it might become a company. Yeah. Probably care about them. Or a dev tool. Like, my current iteration of the static site, storybook generator is called Floosh.
Andrew Lisowski:It's a a fast storybook, so Foosh goes goes right by you. And the first time I built it, I built it right when Veet was coming out, and, I tried to make that work. And, like, it did work, but I had to do so much, like, bundler stuff that it just became by the time I was done, I had it done. Like, I looked back on it, and it's, like, full docs, full working examples. It just felt icky to me in the end and I'm like, do I wanna support this?
Andrew Lisowski:Do I wanna take on that those GitHub notifications and people coming to me wanting to use my thing and me not really caring or wanting to because it's gotten to a point where I don't like it anymore. So I shelved it and 2 years later, which is around now, I got interested in it again and built it all on React Server Components. Even if I never shipped this thing, I've learned an immense amount of knowledge about how server components work, where they make sense, why they're actually cool.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. And are you gonna try to get people to
Andrew Lisowski:This time around? Yeah. Maybe. The the things I've built it on are still experimental themselves. Yeah.
Andrew Lisowski:So I'm still not quite comfortable, like, releasing a storybook replacement tool that's built on, like, a React RC at this point. Yeah. There's still lots of, like, hard edges around it, but it is, like, also very exciting and very promising. Because, like, with Storybook, like, the hard part is, like, the main problem is slow startup slowness in general, and it's because it basically has to statically analyze everything, and then serve you a page based on that. With React Server Components, you can do you you can basically just simplify the model where, like, say for property, property documentation generation, how it works in story book is they have a web pack loader.
Andrew Lisowski:It goes, oh, it's one of the files I want to generate docs for. It it does that. It inlines it in a global in the file, And then how it works on the front end is it looks for that global in the file and then strings it all together. And it's just like you look at it from afar, you're like, that's kinda icky. Like, in all senses of the word, it feels like it's hacks.
Andrew Lisowski:Hacks upon hacks. With server components though, it's like what essentially we were doing there is, like, we want to run code on 1 computer, serialize the result, and then show it on another computer. And we were doing that through the bundle at this point. But with server components, you can just go, oh, they're just React components. Here's a boundary.
Andrew Lisowski:Render suspense boundaries, and it all comes out nice in the end. And all you're all you're left with is, like, it's a React component that calls some node APIs, hands it over to the front end, the front end does front end stuff. So, like, I I've been very excited about React server components since then because it's just like the the world of possibilities open up. The the downside of that right now is it's just like the only way you can use them is Next. Js, and, like, it's very frustrating for that to be true.
Andrew Lisowski:There is a thing called Waku, which is, from Daishi. He's the guy who does, like, val 2 and Zus stand and, like, all these different state management things, but it's basically, like, React server components without Next JS. This is what it would look like in, like, a clean room setup. And it's just, like, oh, it it all makes so much more sense now. Yeah.
Andrew Lisowski:And I I just wanna see projects like that kinda, like, go mainstream because, like, Next. Js is a great tool. It's powerful, but, like, I don't want it to be the only way to build a modern React app. That's that seems so backwards to me. Yeah.
Andrew Lisowski:Even though I know, like, core team members are at Vercel right now.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. And so if you were gonna put it out there, like, how would you do that now?
Andrew Lisowski:I wouldn't put it out there until I'd fully integrated it into our design system and then ran with it for a while.
Jack Bridger:Side dog tested it.
Andrew Lisowski:Yeah. Yeah. We we would dog food it for for quite a while before, I I would release it. And then once I release it, I probably just, like, tweet it and then just be good about saying no. Because, like, a lot of people are gonna wanna add a lot of stuff, and I'm gonna have to be the arbiter arbiter, the benevolent dictator for life saying yes and no to what what I think spins in the project.
Andrew Lisowski:But I haven't done that yet. We'll see. I got I got sidetracked by another open source problem I wanted to fix.
Jack Bridger:What what was the other one?
Andrew Lisowski:Just like, there's, the pattern where you have a bunch of resizable panels in, like, a page. There's a nice React component, for that from Brian k or I don't know if it's k. Brian Vaughn, from the he used to be on the React team, works at Remix now. It's really good, but it doesn't support pixel values and all of my designs come in pixel values. So it just doesn't work and I kind of like I forked it for Descript and added all that stuff that I wanted, but it it got again to that point where it's like, yes, it works.
Andrew Lisowski:Do I like looking at this code or reasoning about it? No, I don't. So I I rebuilt it in the way I would build it with pixel values and all that. It has x state in there too. So it's, like, just one file, a long file, but it's easier for me to understand.
Andrew Lisowski:I I think I'll probably get that out before I get a flu shot.
Jack Bridger:That's really cool.
Andrew Lisowski:But I'm easily distracted.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. No. No.
Andrew Lisowski:No. That's
Jack Bridger:that's super, super cool. Sometimes people ask me about, like, podcasting. Like, dev dev tools say, I'm interested in starting a podcast. Like, should I start a podcast? How should I start a podcast?
Jack Bridger:I'm sure you have a lot of thoughts on that.
Andrew Lisowski:Yeah. It's a lot more work than you think it will be, and it's always more work. Like, it's very rarely are you gonna go, okay. I got bigger, now I do less. Like, even if you even if you hire an editor, that just frees you up to do more different things.
Andrew Lisowski:So, like, if you don't have, like, 4 hours a week to devote to it, you probably shouldn't do it because it it it's gonna take at least that long. A a great way the how we started out was by doing it every other week that lessen the burden on us a lot. But if if people wanna go out there and podcast, I would encourage them to do it because, like, it's been a a great experience for me. It's grown me so much as an engineer. Like, when I started, I was very much only versed in, like, front end tech and, like, the the new hotness there.
Andrew Lisowski:Now I'm just, like, looking everywhere for, like, is that a cool thing? Is that a cool thing? Like, local first, I didn't know anything about that. I probably would've never been interested, and now it's like, oh, those are really cool technologies. And, like, the the growth I've experienced as an engineer is has made it all worthwhile.
Andrew Lisowski:Just being able to know about all these cool tools and how to use them and how the people that made them reason about them Yeah. Is, invaluable to me.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. That that makes sense. And do you think that there's been other benefits around? Like, you were mentioning, like, all the people that you've met and, like, the conferences and
Andrew Lisowski:Yeah. I it's it's crazy the people I've met at this point. Like, when when we started, like, our first three episodes was just like us, and then we interviewed one of Justin's coworkers, who made Patch Package, and then we interviewed my co one of my coworkers who were just, like, doing random stuff. And I would have never thought it would get to the point where I'm, like, interviewing Guillermo Rauch of Vercel. Yeah.
Andrew Lisowski:And it's just, like, those conversations are, like, they're very fun to have, but they can also be very stressful because, like, we are the producers. We have to keep the the conversation going. Dead air is is the enemy. Yeah. So so there there definitely has been some, like it it's sometimes hard to grapple with that.
Andrew Lisowski:Like, it's very stressful sometimes to hop on a call and it's like, well,
Jack Bridger:I'm talking to DHH for an hour today. Yeah.
Andrew Lisowski:Wow. Yeah. How did you prepare for the DHH call?
Jack Bridger:For him,
Andrew Lisowski:it's basically the same process as everybody. I I I start by going to your Twitter.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Andrew Lisowski:I open up every link I can find on you, and I just start reading. So, like, with him, a a lot of that episode focused on his recent, like, spicy programming takes. So I just, like, went into those, read the blog post about them. Like, I I I was there for the typescript dramas. So, like, I had my questions to ask.
Andrew Lisowski:That interview was interesting because, every guest that comes on our our podcast, we say I say at the start, please talk as long and as deep on any subject as you want. You can never go too long on anything. And he was one of the ones that just, like, ran with that. Like, there were 20 minute stretches where me and Justin said nothing. Yeah.
Andrew Lisowski:And, like, in that situation, it's like, we're just trying to get the best out of him. So it's, like, kinda like just like poking the bear to go in the direction that we want him to. Like, there are a lot of stuff a lot of things I wanted to say during that. That episode is, like, kind of retorts to, like, what he was was saying. But I was, like, best to not just, like No.
Andrew Lisowski:Let it Yeah. Let it ride. Yeah. People were crazy entertained by that episode. It the the following that that man has, I don't think anybody else in tech has.
Andrew Lisowski:It is it is a crazy Really? Amount of fan worship. When Oh, just go to the the comments on the YouTube video. Like, literally, everyone is like, oh my god. I love this man.
Andrew Lisowski:I love every word he says.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Andrew Lisowski:So it's it's it's very interesting to see how people react to the different creators.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Was that was that by far the kind of, like, most
Andrew Lisowski:that was that was probably our biggest episode as of late just because he has such a huge following. But, like, we've had a few ones that pop off, but they're always just, like, big people. So, like, we had Evan Yu on, like, episode 13.
Jack Bridger:That
Andrew Lisowski:was a good episode, but it had really bad audio. So I was, like, damn. Oh, my
Jack Bridger:yeah.
Andrew Lisowski:Wish it could have been better. We we had Rich Harris. He also had bad audio. It's, like, the higher profile of the person, like, it seems like the worst setup they have. Like Guillermo Rausch, he was in, like, a skyscraper.
Andrew Lisowski:You can see all of San Francisco behind him. Terrible mic. Potato quality, camera.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Someone someone needs to get the DevTools founders, Successful successful guys, better mics.
Andrew Lisowski:Yeah. Please don't use your AirPods on my podcast.
Jack Bridger:They're the worst. Yeah. So what what do you think makes a good, if someone's gonna start a podcast for their developer tool, and they're like, you know, Andrew calling, like, what what what should I do? Like, give me what
Andrew Lisowski:Like, if you were start you had a developer tools company and you want to start a podcast for that. Yeah. I think the Jam people are good people to look at for community building. I think a lot of dev tools and probably especially dev tools startups are all about community and building a bunch of people that are excited about the thing that you're making, and they're doing really good at that. Like, they have their own podcast.
Andrew Lisowski:They bring on people, I think, that are users and, like, kinda, like, dive into the stories and, like, they're basically just hour long testimonials, but they all they also do, a lot of, like, events and community stuff that way where they just get a lot of people out there, which can't be bad.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. True. That makes subtle sense. Yeah. And, like, what what do you think makes, like, a good podcast episode?
Andrew Lisowski:That's that's a hard thing to answer because, like, during the episodes, as I mentioned, I have kinda, like, producer anxiety. So sometimes I'll finish recording an episode and be like, that was terrible. Like, I said one thing wrong and the whole episode was off. Then I'll go back and, like, watch it during editing. I'm like, okay.
Andrew Lisowski:That that was an interesting conversation. Yeah. But I it's it's hard it's almost hard for us to have bad episodes because, like, most people are pretty interesting. And if you just ask the right questions, they'll probably say interesting things.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Andrew Lisowski:I I rely a lot on research and, like, looking into their passwords. So a lot sometimes I'll ask questions and it's like, I I know the answer answer, or I know this is, like, stupid in x, y, and z ways, and you're gonna react to it in these ways and go on the rant I know you're gonna go on. So, like, it it's good questions are almost like manipulation.
Jack Bridger:Interesting. Yeah. Manipulation. Do you think when when developers are, like, listening, like, why do you think developers listen to podcasts, actually? Do you think do you have a goal of, like
Andrew Lisowski:that's a very good question because I, myself, do not listen to many developer podcasts.
Jack Bridger:Do you
Andrew Lisowski:listen to them?
Jack Bridger:No. So I Do you listen to any podcast?
Andrew Lisowski:Not developer ones really. True. Of course. Like, maybe some comedy ones. Yeah.
Andrew Lisowski:But even those I don't listen to too much. Like, my podcast was started as a dog food exercise. Someone on the Internet said, hey, you wanna make a podcast? I wasn't at all really, like I I can see the value in my own. Like, I try to just make good content, like, have good conversations.
Andrew Lisowski:Like, I know what a good interview is. Yeah. But, yeah, I'm not much of a podcast consumer myself, which is, like, a very odd thing to say when people ask me.
Jack Bridger:Sense because some people are, like, creators, but they don't really like consumers, I think.
Andrew Lisowski:Yeah. And I I especially with the guests that I have on my podcast, I try not to consume other podcasts from Really? Yeah. Like, I don't wanna be influenced by
Jack Bridger:someone else.
Andrew Lisowski:In the questions that I ask this person. In the past too. I want I want it to come from, like, my interest. So a lot of the episodes are, like, fueled by what I'm actually interested in at
Jack Bridger:the time.
Andrew Lisowski:Like Yeah. We had the creator of Stylex on, and I'm interested in CSS styling. So, like, I could go very deep and, like, we often get, like when we prepare for an episode, I create a GitHub discussion. I put, like, 15 questions on it, and the reaction we always get is, wow, this is so thorough. And I'm like, okay.
Andrew Lisowski:I I did my job this time.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Yeah. That's amazing.
Andrew Lisowski:Yeah. It sucks when I get to the end of the doc and I don't have enough questions. I'm like, what's your favorite plug in to your thingy?
Jack Bridger:Right. Yeah.
Andrew Lisowski:Yeah. But sometimes that has a good answer too.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Yeah. Do you have a goal of, like, like
Andrew Lisowski:With money?
Jack Bridger:Kind of effort. I don't know. Like, just in general because you've got, like it feels like it's kind of like your the work you're doing is the is the goal and the career is like you're kind of doing the podcast to help in the in the job and stuff.
Andrew Lisowski:Yeah. We've we've made money off the podcast. Like, another thing to consider when you're starting a podcast is it's not free.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Andrew Lisowski:Like, you're gonna you're gonna end up paying for a lot of things. Yeah. Whether it's equipment, whether it's software, whether it's people, you're gonna pay for something. Yeah. So, like, with that in mind, if you're like, oh, I want a podcast indefinitely, it's like, oh, do you wanna pay $2,000 a year for the rest of your life to do something?
Andrew Lisowski:Sure. So at that point, it's like, well, we we gotta make money off of this. Yeah. And, like, at dev tools, we went through a bunch of different, like, phases of that. So at first, we are like, we're not gonna do that.
Andrew Lisowski:And then we saw the bills and we're like, oh, we kinda wanna do that. We don't wanna, like, like, we wanna up our release schedule also. We are on a 2 week release schedule. So it's like, how do we get to a week? Well, getting to a week is not saying, Andrew, go do this every week and edit everything.
Andrew Lisowski:It was like, okay, we need an editor. Yeah. How do we get an editor? We need money. Yeah.
Andrew Lisowski:So the first the first iteration of that was we tried Patreon, which I would say don't do Patreon unless you have an enormous following already. It's very hard to grow that
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Andrew Lisowski:In itself, and it feels like you're, like, you're hurting your own content. Like Yeah. The way we structured it was the free episode was, like, around 45 minutes. And then how I would get it down to 45 minutes is that I'd try to go in there and, like, cut out large chunks that, like, could still flow, but still kinda leave you hanging. And it felt icky.
Andrew Lisowski:Yeah. Because it was, like, we're we're not releasing something from, like, this person that gave us their time. So it feels like wrong to them a little bit because we, like, hid some other words for profit, which sounds Yeah. Sounds odd. And then also the other side of it is we're charging, like, just regular people.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Andrew Lisowski:Like, why should we take our our, like, fans' money?
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Andrew Lisowski:It's it's a it's an odd relationship. So we tried that for, like, a year and then ended up going, okay. Sponsors is probably the way to do it. Yeah. We've been doing Patreon for a year.
Andrew Lisowski:We're getting a $140 a month. Yeah. That's, like, okay. That kinda pays for an editor for maybe one episode. Yeah.
Andrew Lisowski:Still not getting us there. So we we ended up going with, sponsors. We're really lucky in that we announced that we wanted sponsors, and Raycast signed up for 20 weeks. That's right. Like, didn't didn't really ask questions about our price or anything, and that that, like, it definitely legitimized it.
Andrew Lisowski:Because before that, it was like, well, can we get sponsors? Can we show that we're, like, people are listening to us or that the the advertisers are gonna get any value out of this? And I had a lot of anxiety about that too because it was just like, what if they give us an affiliate code and they're gonna track it and be like, oh, you ran one ad, you didn't it didn't do anything so we're not gonna give you any more. That's true.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Yeah. But you did well on that.
Andrew Lisowski:Yeah.
Jack Bridger:Right? So
Andrew Lisowski:Yeah. When we sign people up, we usually sign them up for like 10 weeks.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Andrew Lisowski:And so we had Raycast for 20 weeks. We had Codecrafters for 10 weeks. We just had Clerk for 10 weeks.
Jack Bridger:Oh, did you? Oh, nice. Yeah.
Andrew Lisowski:And then the next 10 episodes are sponsored by Mux.
Jack Bridger:Oh, nice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool.
Andrew Lisowski:Very cool. Yeah. And it's very hardening when we have somebody on, and they're like, oh, I saw you have sponsors. We want a sponsor. And I'm like, yes.
Andrew Lisowski:Thank you.
Jack Bridger:In 10 weeks.
Andrew Lisowski:Yeah. See you in 10 weeks.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Yeah. That's so good. That's great. Well, it's a great show, and I think it's very unique.
Jack Bridger:And, I'm not surprised everyone wants to sponsor it.
Andrew Lisowski:Well, I think you were our first Patreon subscriber, if I'm not if I'm not wrong.
Jack Bridger:And I've got the for anyone watching, I have got the DevTools FM shop.
Andrew Lisowski:Yep. Shop.devtools.fm. Shop.devtools.fm
Jack Bridger:for your developer tools merchandise.
Andrew Lisowski:Yep.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Andrew, I think we're probably out of time, so I think it's probably time to get some pizza.
Andrew Lisowski:Yeah. I'm down.
Jack Bridger:Thanks so much for joining. It's so cool to kinda have you on. Yeah. Thanks for making a great great show.
Andrew Lisowski:Thanks for having me on. Yeah.
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