017 — Flow like water

Hey. How's it going? This is Ryan Hefner, and this is the All Play podcast. It's, been a minute. I did end up going on that trip with my friends.

I had a great time. It was a a great, Labor Day weekend. We grilled out over, open fire and, also made a bunch of delicious food. Got to hang out outside, get some swimming in, get some, walks in, some running, hikes, and general just like hang out jam time, with the you know, it was just a bunch of people that I love. So it was rad.

And coming back from that though, I don't know what it is, but I've just been, like, so exhausted and yeah. I don't know. Like, the kids have been kind of, like, having some colds and stuff. It's probably, like, the change of the season that I'm trying to figure out what's going on. But just like and and also, I guess, like, some project like, some client stuff has, I guess, just been, like, eating up more time than I than I think it really should just because I don't know.

On one of the projects, I'm dealing with some, user permissions and then having to test out a bunch of different configurations against the data that's there both in my local and like in the UAT environment. And on the other client, I've been, trying to wrap my head around how to get this kind of, state machine, this kind of, like, constantly running state machine, which basically is just like a series of, like, triggers and, like, trips kind of, to work with an async audio sync up. I don't know. My head's all over the place. But, and all the while still trying to make progress on, you know, the products that I wanna work on.

And that's kinda where the conversation is going today is it's so tricky. I I I can definitely can just sit here and try to focus on one project at a time. But when my head is over on another pro like, thinking about something else, it's so hard to really make any sort of, like, meaningful impact on it. And is it even worth it? Or should I just go, you know, flow like water and go towards, like, the path path of least resistance.

And as long as I'm consistently flowing somewhere, hopefully, I'll end up where I wanna go. I mean, I don't know. I could end up in a a cesspool somewhere, where I could end up making my way to the ocean. But I guess that's to be determined. Hopefully, I don't end up in, you know, some, mosquito filled water that's just laying stagnant.

Hopefully, I keep flowing and finding other waters that are moving that can kinda pick me up. But, yeah, that's just where my head's at. And it's like trying to keep momentum, trying to, you know, be positive and and not get too frustrated about any sort of, like, analysis paralysis. And, yeah, it's so tricky. But, definitely embracing this kind of transition in the fall even though it doesn't quite feel like it.

Finally, the temperatures have started to drop from the their 90 degree zones here in Atlanta and are, you know, dipping down into the eighties and even the seventies at times. So finally getting a little bit of that fall feeling, which is cool. Had to make some, chili just to kinda chilli and watch some football just to kinda make it feel like, like some fall time coming in. And trying to for whatever reason, every year on, you know, like, the start of school time is when my mind starts going rampant with just projects, you know, ideas for projects. Probably coming off of just a weird wild summer and, trying to do some stuff there.

But yeah. Just, you know, I was trying to flow on it. So the latest thing that I've been working on is trying to basically migrate link cards off of that old service, the, the Laravel app, and port kind of like rethink some of it. I actually almost have the the fundamentals done. I'm gonna try to link up the project images to the projects and see if I can do an early deploy on the app and start running some Open Graph image generation through this initial version.

So I can basically, I have it set up to be able to create projects, Gonna have the images being linked to those projects and then thrown off into a CDN somewhere. Still debating whether I should I'll probably just end up using Cloudflare, but we'll see. I'm gonna try to just make sure that I'm being smart with where I'm throwing these things. Because right now, actually, link cards are still kinda running and it's in the last week, it's already generated another 200,000 of the package stats, images. So at some point, I'm either just gonna wash those away and and basically set up a new endpoint and start generating another 2,000,000, I guess, images, for for that site, or I'm gonna try to figure out a way of migrating those from the digital up DigitalOcean storage that I have to wherever I'm going or who knows?

Maybe have that as like a a fallback origin or something. Gonna have to play around with the configuration on that. But I feel like the link card slash open graph stuff has been a little bit of a detour, and that's where this whole kind of, like, flowing like water. I really would prefer to probably be working on transmits and really thinking about the positioning on that, which I'm still trying to get my head wrapped around. It's kinda funny.

I was talking with my friends over that over the the weekend, the Labor Day weekend. And I was like, it's so funny when you're trying to explain something that you're working on, and it seems so small. Like, you know, I mean, I guess I'm working on this, you know, web based recorder. That's working fine. The fact that I wanna do, like, the WASM or web assembly, like, local offline transcription stuff, I think that'll be cool, but it's not that crazy.

I mean, there's Descript and stuff. I I don't think they do their stuff locally, but, and there's also I I'm noticing some other, notes tools that I've kind of come into contact with. They're doing similar stuff, but not the same what way I wanna do it. And then there's the whole bigger picture of distribution and sharing and and not necessarily discovery, but, you know, just being the platform that can you can both record on and share on and can, you know, collaborate on, I guess. And even though that's not super fleshed out yet, it will be, but, you know, it's just all like stacking these blocks and just trying to figure out how to talk about it in the immediate term and how to talk about it in the long term.

So I don't know. But anyways, going back to open graphs, feel like that's been a little bit of a detour, but at the same time, I am exploring a lot of stuff that I will end up being applying to transmits as far as how all the authentication's working. Actually kind of like building all of the API stuff out in individual packages. So I should be able to just take that auth package and potentially just port it right over to transmits and should be good. I've also been kind of playing around with just, like, how to structure the underlying data models.

So I have, you know, like, users which are associated to an account via an account member role. And then I started playing around with, like, teams, but then I ended just ended up making that optional. I was like, can't think about teams right now. But I do like the idea of, you know, within an account, to be able to potentially have other subgroupings of people, whether that's a team or a group or whatever. But, I don't know.

Not for right now. So trying to punt on that a little bit. And really just, right now, I'm currently using SQLite as the local kinda just development database. I would love to be able to just go all in on SQLite as the the production version too, but at the same time, I have some reservations. And I don't know.

So I'm not quite there yet. So it's all those little, you know, those little trade offs, those little decisions, those little questions that pop up that there's just a lot of stuff to, think about and maybe try not to think about and just do it and then deal with it later. But trying to be smart, trying to think this stuff through, that's kinda where I'm at. Trying to flow like water, find the, you know, the path of least resistance, and see where it goes. But making good project or progress on, this kind of, like, rethinking of link cards and migrating migrating it over to open graphs.

And hopefully, in the wake of that, also generating some stuff that I can repurpose and reuse for transmits. But, I'm gonna stop it there. It's been a little bit of a whirlwind recording, but I wanted to get something out, earlier or I guess mid this week. But, hopefully, I'll also do another one later in the week and maybe even have some updates on early, early images generated via open graphs, from an actual, like, production hosted version. So we'll see.

Alright. Have a great one. Later.