027 — Overcoming Obstacles

Hey. How's it going? I'm Ryan Hefner, and this is the All Play Podcast. So in this episode, I wanted to dig into what happens when things just don't quite go as you want them to. So, you know, when you're out there building products or working on a project and you're trying to make progress, you're trying to, you know, you're debating, like, which one you know, which feature should I work on or should I do more marketing or whatever.

There's just this periods that of the day that just seem to kinda get washed away. You're, like, trying to run as fast as you can, but the ground is just slipping out from beneath your feet. And what do you do? And I recently had one of these things. And, you know, you know, I've been working on starter packs.

I've been trying to, basically, try to get to the initial vision for the project. And these things just happen to come up that just steal your momentum. They suck energy, and it can be really frustrating. But how do we persevere? So I'm gonna get into basically what happened with starter packs and where I think I am with it.

I'm I'm still waiting to pull the trigger on the on the pull request and merge it in. I mean, I have the pull request. I've been testing the the dev builds. We'll get into that. So, obviously, I'm trying to, get starter packs up to a point to where I can start adding features that people will start hopefully paying for.

But what happens, I'm working in a on a feature branch, and I realized that, there's something a little bit weird with some of the auth stuff going on. Let me check it out. Oh, let me just put a little a few safeguards around here for when I'm checking to see whether you have an access token and whether, the that token is still valid. And then you know what? Maybe I'll I'll ask also to check the blue sky token just to make sure that that's good.

And in the event that that's not good, let's just show that you're logged out and we'll log you back in. We'll try to clean that up, and then I'm gonna look into the queues that are running or the crown jobs that are running to kinda keep those tokens fresh. So that's what I did. I was working on a feature that I wanted to have out, and, basically, I could then start building out the account, like billing sections and setting sections and stuff. So that way I could start trying to test subscriptions and trying to see if if people will, start paying for this.

Because so far people have been logging in. I also need to add some analytics around the actual following to see how many people are actually following from the site versus, like, linking out to Blue Sky. And so I have some plans there. I'm currently using Fathom as my analytics, provider on that. So gonna do some tie ins there with their event stuff that I haven't played around with yet, but is interesting.

But regardless so I'm working on those features, see this issue with auth, figure I'm gonna go peel off a little fresh branch, fix it, push it up, all good. I go to deploy it. Deploy is fine on renders. The API is up, working fine. The fire hose seems to be up working fine.

But the site itself is running into weird funky issues only when it's rendering certain pages on the site. And I'm like, what is going on? And so I'm trying to troubleshoot it. I see a random Prisma error being thrown. Even though Prisma is not being used to fetch any of the data on a specific page, it is causing a weird new error that, magically seemed to pop up within, like, the last, you know, 5 or 6 days since the last deploy that I made, to the site.

And so these kinda little things, it's like, what changed on Vercel potentially that caused this issue? Because there was nothing as apparent in my code. And so as I'm debugging debugging, trying to follow the error, I ended up coming to the final conclusion that I needed to refactor this one little bit. And, actually, it's kinda funny. There's this the client metadata, which is, like, how you authenticate with the Blue Sky API, that, that little bit actually requires that you have a, I think it's called a node auth client.

I have to double check that. Or a node o auth client. And that client has getters and setters, basically managing the an auth state and an auth session, and that's how it does its validation. Now when I was quickly kind of throwing this stuff together, in that client specifically, instead of actually hitting an API endpoint, because I didn't really have the API at the time when I was kind of configuring this stuff, I was just directly hitting Prisma. And it turns out that something must have changed on Vercel with the way that you deploy the, like, get server side prop, methods, which typically do run-in Lambdas, but something changed within the last 5 days of how those Lambdas are configured that now that little bit of code that was accessing Prisma directly was basically pulling in prisma dependencies into the pack into the build and then causing issues on that get server side props even though Prisma was never directly called in that get server side props, Lambda.

So lo and behold, something that I was originally planning on and basically, like, refactoring and moving those calls to be made to an API endpoint and then removing the direct Prism integration ended up kinda biting me. So it was a bit of a forcing function to go in and make those updates to the API, make those updates to the the metadata client, and then getting that all working. I think I have it all working now. But the amount of energy and time and research digging into, like, what is causing these issues, the I think these are the real things that kind of, like, make or break someone sticking with a project or persevering and pushing through to try to get to the other side. And this is just an instance where, you know, unfortunately, I had to deal with it.

Fortunately, it was an area of the code that I wanted to kinda clean up anyway, so I kinda feel good about that. But at the same time, I feel like I lost, like, a day and a half. And not not these aren't full days and has. These are my over the last one and a half days, the couple hours that I have to put towards starter packs were spent troubleshooting and debugging and fixing this issue versus actually putting in the real effort of getting the real value features in that I hopefully will that I will be trying to charge for and hopefully people will pay for. So we'll see how that goes.

Again, following up a little bit on my last episode, it doesn't seem like traffic to traffic to the site is basically kind of, like, still flatlining. It's not rebounding based off of the the minor tweaks that I made to the site. So, that actually is pushing me towards thinking about other ways to try to beef up. Basically, just, like, try to draw more attraction to the site. I am gonna be trying to push it out onto, you know, try to get it in some newsletters and then also on a few of, like, the different aggregator sites of, like, new projects for people to test, like, something like beta list.

I'm kind of holding off until I actually have the paid feature because I wanna really use those as testing grounds to see if anyone will pay. I do see that people are logging in. I'm gonna add the analytics and events to see how much activity is actually happening on the site for those different follow calls or unfollows. And, we're gonna go from there. But people are logging in.

People do have connected sites. Hopefully, after this push, in the event that their token somehow expires, this will kind of safeguard them from thinking they're doing actions when they when they may not be, and we'll get out there. But, but, yeah, it's I just kinda wanted to dig into, you know, what happens or what's the mindset of going in and dealing with these kind of unforeseen things and how can you push through. And also kinda just vent on the frustration of this stuff and why why these things happen. But, I mean, if you're out there dealing with this kind of stuff, I feel it.

I deal with it too. It's real it is really frustrating when you basically had something working 5 days ago, then all of a sudden, magically, things just stop working. Looking into it, it does look like there are some references to how you would configure this for AWS Lambda, but it's not specifically for Vercel. So there's definitely something must have changed on the Vercel side of things on how they're handling, you know, their, Lambda methods or Lambda functions. But, yeah, that's just how it goes.

So I hope this was the least, comforting knowing that, you know, these things do happen. And sometimes there is a brighter side knowing that you at least put in the effort to clean up some of the old code if that happens to be the the the case for you. If not, I'm sorry that you have to deal with this stuff. It is very frustrating, and hopefully we can just push through and try to make our apps good and out there and get people to use them. So again, I'm Ryan Hafner.

This is the All Play podcast. Check it out at allplay.fm. Sign up for the newsletter because I'm actually gonna make a conscious effort of actually designing and structuring how I want those newsletters to go out. Basically, it's gonna typically be a reference for whenever there's new, any new episodes, either I'll play episodes or jam session episodes. Also check out jamsessions.fm . If you want to see some stuff go over there, I might do a livestream later today. So just heads up, and follow this, the podcast on Bluesky . So at allplay.fm Obviously, you can follow me on bluesky @ryanhefner.com and check out my site, ryanhefner.com.

Probably also gonna add the the newsletter sign up there because I want to try to start building up a little bit of a newsletter where I can send out updates about new episodes. I actually have an a few articles in the works right now. So Bobby posting up when those are going, live and even have a library that I am kind of like repackaging and trying to get out soon, which I will be using on starter packs and on all my personal stuff. And so I wanna have a channel to be able to push out those updates and update people beyond just the blue skies and maybe Twitters. So hopefully this is interesting.

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So with that, have a great one. Later.