CJ Avilla

AI launches, Docs, Calendars

Show Notes

In this episode, we catch up on recent tech events, discussing in detail the AI launches at both OpenAI and GitHub. We chat about the Hu.ma.ne AI pin, and touch on GitHub Universe. We also talk about Docs implementations and the challenges of managing and maintaining code snippets in documentation.

Show notes:
Full Transcripts

Colin: Welcome to Build and learn. My name is Colin.

CJ: And I'm CJ. And today Colin and I are just catching up. We're talking about an onsite that he went to. There was a whole bunch of events that happened this week. GitHub universe, open AI, the humane, crew launched their AI pin. So we'll get into details about all that. Yeah, let's talk about the on site. where is HQ, or like, where is your team based?

Colin: yeah, so the team is spread out all over, and we have an office in San Francisco. So the onsite was there. And, just, it was just our team. So the kind of apps, spots, APIs, public facing stuff, DevRel, that kind of thing. So yeah, it was good to get the crew together. And even though we're always connecting online. Get through some stuff that just seems to be easier when you're in person. and then just a bunch of, fun kind of team bonding stuff. We've had, I think one or two people joined since the last time we got together. I was not the new person this time, which was nice too.

CJ: Do they always tend to have the on sites, like at the same place, or do you get to go travel other places for on sites, or?

Colin: Yeah, there was a big push to try to do it elsewhere this time, but we have an office and they don't have to pay extra to book like a conference. room and figure out how to get a bunch of people to a place that, doesn't have as much infrastructure for like we have facilities and stuff to do food and conference rooms and all the tech and stuff that we need to, cause we still offer the onsite virtually for people who can't make it out for whatever reason, if it was just bad week or something. so we still like have discord up with. People joining virtually, and then having the team in place. so yeah, this was more like strategy and focused on more work on this onsite than like just team bonding and stuff like that. But

CJ: Got it. I feel like some on sites where you focus on work a ton, you come away and you're just like, okay, we could have maybe done that remotely. and then other onsites where you're doing a lot of team bonding, it feels really good to just come away feeling connected and rejuvenated and like energized and, I think ideally you get a mix of both, but, I've definitely been to some offsites, at Stripe where it felt awesome, right? You come away feeling super connected and, and then I've also had some onsites where it's oh, we were planning on getting like a lot done. At this and yeah, maybe things weren't as organized or whatever, but, it's hard to strike that balance for sure.

Colin: I think there's different kinds of work, so I think things where you're getting people in a room to brainstorm plan for future quarters, future, things like that are good. I wouldn't say that we'd all want to be in a room, coding necessarily. We can do that back at home. But yeah, whatever is added from FaceTime, just being able to hang out and some people show up wanting to talk about things that, you know, you just don't get to, you don't have the hallway chatter when you're online. and I know a lot of companies that don't have any offices, they, Do move their onsites around the world, especially depending on how, global they are. So you've got like onsites in Portugal and things. we had that with orbit. That was some work, some brainstorming, like hearing from the team, like what do you think we're building? Being able to. work with leadership to get a sense of this is what we think we're building. Is this aligned with what the team thinks we're building? this is maybe, you know, a chance to, to whiteboard, which as much as I love FigJam, it's not a direct replacement for being in the room for some of that stuff. And then we had a crochet time. We all had these little woobles, like crocheting, kits that we got to pick, and just. and just bonding time, which it was good. There were a bunch of people that I did not know that I just don't interact with that are on our activities team. So in discord, there's these activities like games and, there's actually like a whiteboard type activity in their, watch together, just more like a game studio inside of discord. So that team I hadn't worked with very much. So it was good to, to do that. And, we had hot pot. And so like myself and the vegetarians were on the other end, which were a bunch of people I hadn't met before because, it was like, this is the vegetarian hot pot and this is the non vegetarian section. So it was fun.

CJ: Awesome. Yeah, there, there was a talk. It's interesting that you mentioned crochet because there was a talk at RubyConf 2022, by Tori, and we can link to it, but it was about how crochet and code, are very similar, and it was an awesome talk. I really enjoyed it. yeah, and also like just generally, I feel like all of those fabric, I don't know, like fabric arts remind me so much of coding just, there's just, instructions that you follow and there's patterns that you can follow, or you can be creative and make whatever you want. And there's just, there's like fundamental, pieces of the puzzle that you can apply in any, combine in different ways to make different things. fun.

Colin: I've been to a conference, I think it was NodeConf, where someone found a, a knitting machine that they could reprogram and they were talking about a lot of the things that you're, I'll try to find it and put it in the show notes, but, um, basically making like a 3D printer for a knitting machine, right? So like how do you translate the image into something that's a little bit more 8 bit and then into The stitches and then actually having it print using Arduino and Node or whatever Language and yeah, like you gotta be really passionate about that. I'll find it and put it in the show notes

CJ: Yeah, super cool. When, um, I think when people bring their passions , into tech.

Colin: Yeah, I mean, you're going to spend more time figuring it out because you care about it, right? It's like you want to figure out how do I can I'm sure they enjoy crocheting by hand too

CJ: So did you see the launch of the humane AI pin thing that just came out?

Colin: you are the second person to have sent me a link to this and I have I had not clicked on it yet But I had seen Rumors of this a few weeks ago

CJ: Yeah. Similarly, I heard a bunch of waves and I was like, AI pin, what the heck is this thing? Or initially, I think when I first heard about it, I think the way that it was explained to me was that it was going to be like a necklace, like a medallion that you wear and it's always watching. But, yeah, if you go head over and watch the kind of like launch video, it's more like a lapel pin that you snap on.

Colin: I think those might be two different products.

CJ: Oh, really?

Colin: Yeah, I think I know what you're talking about. And it's like a, it's like a necklace medallion. It's they're trying to also be a little bit jewelry like, and it's like auto transcribing conversations that you have and things like that, which I think I mentioned to you makes me want to move to a forest. but this could be a successor to it. It could be a competitor to it. and it, I appreciate their domain name, even though it's hard to explain to people. It's H U dot M A dot N E, we'll put a link in the show notes, but their website is very interactive, very interesting. So for those people listening at home, what is the AI pen?

CJ: yeah. So it's this lapel pin that has a camera, microphone, speaker, and like laser projector thing built in. it has, access to the LTE network. And they have a partnership, I think, with T Mobile. the company was founded by a bunch of ex Apple folks that worked on iPhone and they are partnered really closely with open AI. So it is like a new type of consumer device that is all AI driven. And, I don't know, there's a few different interfaces, so like it can talk to you obviously, but you can also hold out your hand and it will project. Something in, just one color, basically, onto your hand, and then you can, move your hand around or use gestures to control it um, and a lot of it seems like it's voice activated, so you can say, take a picture right now, or, uh, some of the features that were like most mind blowing was like, in the demo, he holds out a handful of almonds and he says how much protein is in this or something. And it's Oh, there's 15 grams of protein. And then he says, I'm going to eat it. And then he just eats it. I'm like, this is what I've been wanting for like the, my fitness pal, like it's like super charged, right? Fitness pal thing, just watch all the stuff that goes in my mouth

Colin: Just watch my mouth until

CJ: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Colin: it bothers you like CJ. Are you eating something right now?

CJ: yeah, exactly. It's Oh, you shouldn't put that in your mouth. You're over your calorie limit for the day.

Colin: yeah, I didn't get a chance to watch the whole video yet, but I don't know. I just, I wonder who this is for a little bit because I have a drawer of devices like this from, 10 years ago, they're not anything like this. I guess we talked about the Ray Bans AI glasses from Meta. I have this brain sensing headband, this arm gesture, finger sensing. Like I have literally a drawer of tech that's I think some of them still might be in business, but barely supported. I think a lot of it was from the first VR wave of where you're wanting to get input. And I think AI is probably making these a little bit more realistic. those were inputs, but they weren't smart. They required a lot of apps and tech built around them to even be useful. when the headband company went out of business, it's now I have nothing to do. Like it's a piece of plastic and a bunch of chips that I can't use. what makes this something that like, do you think people want this

CJ: I think that something that I was talking to Nicole about was how we're already struggling with our kids sort of addiction to screens, right? Like they're always want to be on screens. I definitely am addicted to it. I'm like, Oh, there's, you know, a 10 second break here between when my coffee water is heating up and when, the, whatever is going to be done. Let me pull up my phone and get a few quick hits in of tick tock or whatever. Like it is super, super addictive. Because this thing does not have a screen, I feel like it almost does give you back a little bit of your humanity in a way. that said, I don't know if it'll be enough to replace a phone. And so I think, I don't know if, it has the potential to replace a phone for many people, but for. Us who are on it all the time, using it for work, using it for, lots and lots of different use cases. I think it's going to take a while for the features of something like a pen to catch up with the utility of a phone. they had a few apps out of the gate. I can't remember, it's not Spotify, but they're partnered with some music. Yeah. With title. and they're with, just like a handful of companies that will have.

Colin: and slack.

CJ: Yeah, they're going to have stuff out of the gate,

Colin: I don't want my slack notifications following me everywhere I go.

CJ: the one, I did like that. He was like, Oh, summarize my day or what do I need to attend to? And then it like looks at all your inbound stuff and figures out how to give you a breakdown. It's like having a secretary maybe

Colin: Yeah. imagine, I'm sure it knows where you are. It's like you have a meeting in an hour across town and you're not anywhere near it. And you might not even remember. You're eating almonds. We can see that you're eating almonds and you're not. You might need to get to this meeting like, hey, by the way, you have that lunch with somebody. there's things like that don't always end up on my calendar. I guess if it doesn't know about it, it won't be able to tell you about it. But being able to have some context around the world. your phone can do a lot of that today, but like you're right, you're pulling out your phone and how many notifications are we already getting? I think the thing that I think most people are concerned by is the privacy side of this and I know that they have a light that's the trust indicator but like I don't think I feel better having a light on when I just don't know what conversations are being recorded and which ones are.

CJ: totally. Yeah. It's going to be like a giant privacy nightmare. And they, like when in the demo, he says trust like 10 times, because I'm sure like, that's a lot of people's concern. And yeah, it's definitely something where you're walking around with a camera that's watching everything that you see and definitely not everything that I see. I want available for the internet to know about.

Colin: I'd say between that and. the glasses. we already have microphones and cameras all over the place, right? Like on one bus, if every person has a phone, there's that many phone, there's that many cameras and at least that many speakers and microphones in the room. So it's not necessarily new, but it's more obvious when someone holds their phone up to your face.

CJ: it's, it reminds me a lot of like police body cam footage, like police, whether you agree or not with how the footage is used, like someone who's on duty might behave differently because they have a little big brother accountability situation going on all the time, and so yeah, it might change your behavior.

Colin: interesting. Yeah, I'll have to watch this full video and get, I'm keen to see what the internet is reacting to this. I'm curious what people listening to this are thinking.

CJ: Yeah, it was funny too. In the, in the presentation, he said something like, he's like very calm and, almost like monotone. He's tell Colin that I'll be over for dinner. And then it says okay, I've, constructed a text message to Colin telling him that you'll be over for dinner. And then he's now make it sound more excited.

Colin: I was going to say the one, the little bit of the video I did watch, I was a little surprised that he was, he's probably one of the founders,

CJ: he must be, the

Colin: not a lot of stage presence there.

CJ: Yeah. But it was like, Oh, okay. So this is a cool use case that I think will flow to all messages. Eventually it's tell so and so something and then. It reads off the message and then you just say make it sound more fun or make it sound more plucky or, convey that I care about my parent this way or that way, or I don't know, like just, using GPT to rewrite content, uh, in real time, based on suggestions instead of having to edit,

Colin: this feels more like the Tony Stark, right? Dream, the Jarvis, the Friday that you have with you and they have their own voice. Cause I, there's some friends that I have who are like very, they, if they're texting more than one or two texts back and forth, they switched to voice messages, which I never reached for voicemail. It's just like very foreign to me, but I guess, I don't know, kids, do kids these days prefer the like voice? Memos that you're sending back and forth?

CJ: I think it's a cultural thing based on like ages, but I think it's also a cultural thing depending on what language you speak. Like I've definitely noticed certain culture, like where it's really hard to type. I don't know if it's some sort of some languages where you have to search like a bajillion characters to find the one thing that you're trying to say. I think in some cases, like it's just way more ergonomic to just say what you mean. So I don't know. We'll see. We'll see how it goes. But I, yeah, I have not picked up that habit yet, but we do have a lot of friends who we communicate with over Marco Polo, which is just like the video version of that. And so yeah, I don't know. It's like FaceTime, like messages instead of FaceTime, like a live synchronous call.

Colin: Yeah, it's like ZipMessage.

CJ: I haven't used ZipMesh, is that,

Colin: ZipMessage has been renamed since... It's something else now, but yeah. It's called ClarityFlow now.

CJ: Ah, okay.

Colin: cool. what else came out this week? A lot of AI stuff. So we talked about human AI, the AI pen,

CJ: Yep.

Colin: there was also the OpenAI announcements. And GitHub Universe was like almost an extension of OpenAI's conference, like more AI stuff.

CJ: exactly. Yeah. Satya Nadella just making the rounds. He's like on a podcast circuit, but instead of podcasts, it's like keynote speeches for GitHub universe and OpenAI DevDay I watched the keynote for OpenAI DevDay. I watched some of the GitHub universe one, and it seemed a lot like we're adding Copilot to everything. And not too much more depth than that. And so I expect that we'll see new buttons and things all over the place. speaking of it, Descript has like a new ask AI thing that is also powered by open AI, where it's just give me show notes for this episode, or think of a title for this episode, or add chapter markers for this episode. And it will just edit like your, composition in line, which is pretty sick. But. Yeah, OpenAI, the OpenAI Dev Day announcements, I think were pretty cool, mostly because the 32 K context, restriction for GPT four was pretty limiting for a lot of cases and quad two, which is like the anthropics version of GPT four has been out for a long time and I think they have a hundred K context and so you can just. Do so much more with a hundred K tokens than you can with 32 K. And so that was a big part of it. And then they also announced, GPTs and assistance and a couple other things. they're also decreasing pricing across a bunch of stuff. I, yeah. So I went in and I played with creating assistance, which, shout out to. the folks working on the Ruby open AI gem, because someone had a PR up like within a few hours and it's not merged or it wasn't merged when I was going to play with it, but I was just like, Oh, we'll just use their fork and start playing with the stuff that's there.

Colin: Use bleeding edge. Yeah.

CJ: Yeah. And there, I had a couple of different takeaways, like I thought that the way that you created messages and completion or like chat messages and completions before through the API was pretty simple and like easy to understand. It's just Oh, you pass a chat and here's all the messages for the chat. And then it gives you back. This is the next message that's in the result. And then you can use that however you want. Whereas now with assistance, there are like, there's assistance and then each assistant can have like threads. And then within those threads, you can have runs in those runs might do like some function calling or some retrieval or some other stuff. And the APIs are definitely still pretty primitive and there's a lot of APIs. So like you're calling a whole bunch of things just to make one small thing happen. It's If you haven't already got to create your assistant, that's one API call. Then you got to create a thread and that's an API call. And then you got to add messages to the thread. And then you got to create a run, which is like a run on a thread with a message. And then that will kick off some background tasks that may need some input from you. So it's definitely, there's like a lot more to it now. so

Colin: That's a lot of the stuff that people were building, right? Like you had to manage all those contexts and then do the run yourself. And now we're like, okay, let's give everything to them and get the full window.

CJ: Exactly. Yes. Especially the retrieval part where that was, I think I put up a video like nine months ago with pine cone and I just, I couldn't get it working as expected. I didn't understand a bunch of pieces of it. And so having open AI, just take care of it is going to be awesome. And having them deal with, the window buffering, they will figure out how to remove the old messages or compress them or whatever, so that you can keep the same sort of context and information. so yeah, a lot of those really tricky bits are going away. Uh, they also came out with GPT 4v, which is like the vision tool that's built in. And I think that's going to be pretty sick. So you can give it images and ask about, uh, InLine,

Colin: I think Westboss had tweeted, this was in October, so only a month ago, right? Yeah, the, an hour long podcast, how many tokens of input and how much they would cost to summarize that podcast and all the different models, we can put a link to this. But with this announcement, they said that it took it down to 18 cents for an hour long podcast. probably because there's also a larger token context now. So you don't have to try to do this in multiple contexts and merge them or any of that stuff. obviously if you spend more, I think there was like some of the GPTs costs like 66 cents and you end up with like better quality, more of a limit takes a little bit more time. so yeah, it's interesting to see. I don't know. I haven't been following the implications of what all this is like where the Total compute that's just being burned on AI stuff has got to be insane. And I know NVIDIA is riding that wave right now, but all of these announcements, I just think it's good to be a GPU creator right now.

CJ: Totally. Yeah. We'll see. I feel like didn't their stock price just took a huge hit too, right? Nvidia?

Colin: I think so.

CJ: maybe their backup.

Colin: Looks like they're back on top.

CJ: They spiked back in May. And then it's been really wavy since then. I think that holding like the top spot is going to be tricky now that everyone is gunning for like how to create the right,

Colin: but the price was a third what it is a year ago, It's 300 percent up from last year.

CJ: Yeah, not too shabby, right? yeah, it would be good to work at Nvidia,

Colin: It's, it's still not quite the price of one share of Chipotle though. Chipotle, I don't know when they're going to do a stock split or what, but one share is 2, 111 right now. 2,

CJ: wow.

Colin: 100 for a share of a burrito.

CJ: Nice. But yeah, Chipotle is like 57 billion market cap and Nvidia is 1. 2 trillion market cap, so

Colin: different. Little

CJ: yeah. But still yeah, I think when I was, or like whenever I heard about the drop, they had gone from like the 1 trillion down to whatever the 900 billions again. And yeah, everyone's Oh no, did they actually do the thing?

Colin: So now that my chat GPT can search the internet, the recap of GitHub universe was more co pilot, like you mentioned, co pilot enterprise, which I think is a chance for them to just charge enterprises more, give them more security, more Things like that where they're not as worried about their code being leaked. AI security features, vulnerability, prevention, identification. That stuff is always good. Like when you leak a token or you accidentally put, some sort of a SQL injection in your code, like GitHub could actually tell you that's present, I'll have to watch the video, but like I could see it's some really cool co pilot for PRs. Tooling as well.

CJ: Yeah, so Mike and Tristan, guys I worked with at my VR are working on a new tool called gitcontext. Which is like a PR tool. So you can manage PRs. I am in the super alpha and still trying to figure out how to get it, get some of the basic stuff working, but I'm excited for where that's headed and totally agree. there will likely be a lot of companies built around, like, how can we. Help you write code, which probably starts with PRs. Like, Oh, you describe the PR that you want it to make. And then it just opens a simple one, kind of like depend a bot style, but it's like, Oh, fix this in plus one query. And we'll just go in and add the includes for you or yeah. add a log statement every time I do X PR that does that for you.

Colin: Nice. It looks like some of this like GitHub copilot workspace offers AI bridge to help developers from issue to pull requests, which will be available in 2024. So yeah, we'll have to check out the videos. If anyone was in the GitHub universe audience be please send us some links, send us some things that we should look at. I did share these. fonts that were released. So some free, super fonts for programming. So very monospaced, very programmatic. It looks like programmatic because I can change the weight and the font size and the width all with like sliders and the font changes.

CJ: Yep. Very beautiful website, monospace. githubnext. com., I don't know, there's some really crisp stuff in here. Gotta burn some time figuring out how to make them work in Vim. yeah, we'll see.

Colin: Yeah, if you haven't been to githubnext. com, that whole site is just, they have a team of, researchers and, staff level folks who are just, what if GitHub did this? And they just do it. And it's just, a lot of really cool researchers and UX people and just trying to push the boundaries of, developer tools is pretty cool.

CJ: Totally. Yeah. And it's this site is so sexy. Like when you hover over some of the fonts, like the weights trends, like they have the CSS transition, like on the weight of the font. So I don't know, it's fun. Go play around with it for sure.

Colin: Definitely. So what else are you working on this week? What are you learning? What are you building?

CJ: I put up a video earlier this week about setting up Jupyter notebooks with rails. so Jupyter is a really popular, tool inside of the Python ecosystem. And, using Jupyter notebooks within Ruby, you can do by installing a Ruby kernel. So the kernel is like. The thing that communicates between your language, like your backend language, and these notebooks, which are typically run in like a web interface. And so you'll have this web interface where you can have different cells that you run and you can run like the whole sheet, or you can run one cell at a time. If you're familiar with rails, you might think of it as like having a rails console, but being able to edit and rerun and Manage the each line of code that's in some kind of like little script. there's also like really cool things built into Jupiter for visualizations and you can embed HTML and Markdown and things like that. it's really popular in Python for academic things and, like displaying Matt. matplotlib type charts, where you'll see like scatter plots or line charts or bar charts or whatever, as part of data sciencey type things. And so there's a way to do that with rails, and there's some gems that are useful. so played around a lot with that, trying to get that working so that we have a similar data science experience when inside of, the Kraftwerk code base, as you might have, in Python land. And then, yeah, it's also just like a cool way to teach, I think. So if you look up YouTube videos about open AI, like most of them are in Python and most of them are just using Jupyter notebooks to walk through, like I did this and then I did this,

Colin: because you can write prose, right? You can explain and then have code that runs right in, in context.

CJ: Yeah, you can have like markdown cells and things like that. And then they also end up looking great on GitHub. Like when you push them up, like they look like documentation with code snippets, but then you can download them and run them. And I think even like in Google code lab or whatever, that's the experience too, that you'll get if you're running. Inside of, inside of their using their GPUs or whatever. So that's, yeah, that's been a fun part of the week. So

Colin: Cool. I'll have to share that video

CJ: yeah. What about you?

Colin: I've been going down the rabbit hole. whole of like, docs. I think we talked about diet taxes a few weeks ago, but just figuring out not only like how we want to redo the information architecture of our docs, but what tools we're going to use if we can do it. Don't think it's ever a priority like we're not going to ever have a team that's going to get to go to rebuild it all. And so I'm looking at all the different JavaScript frameworks and all the static things out there. And like Astro has this thing called Starlight that's specifically for a docs template. Basically, Tailwind UI has protocol, which is just like a really nice doc site. There's Docusaurus. There's all these different tools that people have used for a really long time. And so looking through those and trying to figure out, can we use something off the shelf? do we really need to reinvent this wheel or do we want it to just be a really good experience? Angular has some new docs, angular. dev. And I really like how, if you go to their website and you scroll, it's just a really fun design, but then on the side you have their stuff divided up by tutorials, there's a playground, there's a reference, it's very obvious, What like the division of stuff is there right now, our docs, you have like prose mixed in with reference mixed in with Hey, don't forget to include your token. there's just a lot of little call outs that if you're not paying attention, you can forget something. sometimes you're like, is this a tutorial or am I being explained how WebSockets work, right? It's There's different outcomes. and what I really like about Diataxis is that they have a distinction between tutorials and guides in that a tutorial is meant to teach and a guide is meant to get something specific done. So once you have your bot, how do you host it? That might be more of a guide. You're learning how to host, but it might be more specific to like how to host this on a Cloudflare worker, how to host this on Heroku, how to host this on specific things. And so just thinking through all of that, there's a lot of content on the current doc site. So we're just trying to think how to move that around. and I think like most folks, there's like more stuff that we want to do than we have time to do. So what can we do first?

CJ: Totally. A benefit that. I would not have thought about a year ago is by using something off the shelf There is likely going to be like easier integration with ai tools and so Lang chain, like the Lang chain Python library has built in docs, parsers for like the top end documentation website things. And so it already knows Oh, I'm going to read a whatever docusaurus type site right now. And I know how to pull out the parts that are important for chunking this document and then using AI to like generate completions based on that. And so I, yeah. A year ago, I probably would have been like, Oh yeah, let me just use markdoc and build my own custom thing that looks, cool. And now I'm like, Oh, using something off the shelf would make it standardized and standardizes might be a good thing because now you can plug into like lots of different ecosystems. So I don't know. Yeah. That's, it's tricky.

Colin: I think Starlight supports MDX and Markdoc too. So there's some of that okay, they've already done the integration. They've, there's support for localization. There's support for light and dark themes. there's a lot of table stakes there. thinking about SEO, like whatever the SEO we have today is going to have to change if we move stuff. And so like thinking about all of that is also important. We have this thing right now. We, our docs are in public markdown files that the community can see. And I think what's interesting about that is anything that we put into a PR, they can see once it's merged, it's in the docs. There's things that we can't necessarily like a future feature can't go into those PRs until it's ready to be talked about. So like we can't even really start to work on the docs until we can talk about it, which is also an issue. So it's not that we want to keep things hidden, but some things we have to keep hidden until it's More well formed and we know we're actually going to release it. We have staging servers for all of this stuff, but like on internal versions so that we can see it, get ahead of it. I started thinking about what does this look like in code samples? What does this look like in reference? Things like that.

CJ: Even just like getting feedback from beta users, right? if you can't write about a beta, then, yeah, even at Stripe, like sometimes we would send a Google doc to early, like alpha users and be like, here's what our docs might look like, give us feedback. And then once we had something, then we would write some beta docs, put them behind a feature flag and. You know, let certain people into the beta and we considered the documentation part of the product so that they would give us feedback

Colin: with the same feature flag, right?

CJ: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, they were, it was exactly the same. Yeah. It's Oh, if you're in that flag, then you get the docs and you get the feature,

Colin: I would love that.

CJ: Yeah, it's it was pretty killer. And obviously there's a whole team. There's like a whole engineering team that built docs

Colin: Right.

CJ: a whole other team that wrote docs. in particular, my buddy Dave, who used to work on the angular docs. And so something that I remember him telling me about was that. Their docs all have tests, like the actual examples are tested with whatever angular test framework they have. So they know like for sure, all the code snippets work and are like legit and, perform as expected, which that's like another huge challenge is like, how do you manage and maintain code snippets and samples inside of the docs? Which I find particularly interesting.

Colin: Yeah. That is a challenge I look forward to once we get there. right now it's just, we want to be able to do the docs and

CJ: Yeah.

Colin: bring them to the 2020, by the time we get this out by, we'll bring them to 2024 standards. AI is a big part of that, I think.

CJ: totally, yes. One question that I have is around how, common it was for the community to make contributions to the docs. I'm assuming that was like one of the biggest goals was like, let's make them public so the community can help us maintain them. Was that actually happening or was it,

Colin: Oh, yeah. We have 40 open PRS right now. And

CJ: okay,

Colin: you're out there listening, there's frustration around how long it takes for them to close because we need to verify that what they've documented is in fact true. So there's some like chicken and egg here with an open API spec in that sometimes it's updating reference that's just out of date. Because their experience as a developer is hey, this doesn't return that thing anymore, or you deprecated this thing, or you said you were going to deprecate this thing, and you guys still haven't deprecated it yet. sometimes, we have issues and PRs. Issues tend to be real issues. this thing doesn't work, or... This is supposed to be like this. And we have engineers who do solve those things, whereas PRSs are more the dev team, the Devra team. And it might just be like, Hey, you guys never documented this feature. It's that feature's not fully rolled out. We appreciate you writing the docs for it, but we're not going to merge this until it's fully rolled out. because whatever ends up in the docs is true. Whatever's in a PR is not necessarily true yet. And it's also tricky when you're having PRs from folks to maintain a consistent voice, style guides, all this kind of stuff. I think we shipped like a table formatter that has been nuking everyone's tables in a weird way. It's like not the way that most linters lint markdown tables. And so it's I broke because the padding on this table is a little bit funny. And it's okay, that's so dumb to have to fix, but that's something computers can fix for us. So yeah, have one more week in my accountability group and I'm still trucking along on the conference room app. I'm going to do a little hackathoning on it today. finding myself, I think we mentioned last time, like I just finding myself having to build things that I don't think I need to build. So I have not moved to using rails. I'm still in. node. and so I don't have like user logins and all that stuff. I'm just making it as the demo will be like if it shows up on the Google calendar, meaning it was added by a person with auth through the Google calendar, it'll show up in the app and you can like book the room right now anonymously and stuff like that. I am going to move this to rails and use jumpstart for the actual user onboarding user off, all that kind of stuff. And I was hoping, because Cal. com has this calendar infrastructure product that they have and I was hoping that I would just be able to reuse that or Calendly or there's this thing called Nylas that does like Google calendaring, Google mail, like it's an API. For those APIs and Nylas, you could build this with, but with cal. com and Calendly, like they're really designed for booking a single person. if what's tricky about Calendly is if any of the conference rooms are booked, then all the other conference rooms will also be booked because they don't treat them as resources. They treat them as a person. And that person has a meeting at this time. So that person can't meet with somebody else. Cal. com. I would love for you guys to really have calendar infrastructure. If that's if you power all these calendar apps, like you deal with time zone issues, you deal with all the things that most developers have to deal with, that would be really cool. What I find myself ending up doing is I'm building like this abstraction of calendars and events and eventing on them. So a conference room can listen to the calendar and act on it. Like someone has this room after you do, or conference room was canceled. The conference room was extended, all that kind of different stuff. So

CJ: Cool. That's I'm like pumped to see it and excited that you're continuing to make progress. It sounds awesome. yeah, I, we have been using full calendar and every time I get a feature request. From the team that's like, Oh, can we add this? Whatever. I'm like, Oh, and I kind of grip my teeth. I'm like, I don't know if it's going to work with full calendar. And then I'm always surprised. I'm like, Whoa, I can like totally just hook into this callback and then customize that part of the page this way. Or Oh, there's a CSS class there that I can customize this other thing with. And yeah, full calendar has

Colin: was the way to go.

CJ: yeah, for us, it's been, pretty. Pretty useful, but,

Colin: Nice.

CJ: yeah, we're, definitely a different use case.

Colin: Cool. Anything else you're working on? Just going away on the

CJ: yeah, working, I like chipping away at story fuel a bit. so I'm going to say. That by the time this episode comes out, you can go to story fuel that app and submit a request on the landing page for a story to be added to the podcast. So if you go to listen. storyfuel. app, you can see some of the existing stories and listen, listen to those as podcasts and then, yeah, you'll be able to Submit a story idea that you want to listen to. It's not going to be real time, but you can say, Hey, I want to hear this, this story. So yeah, that's, it's been fun.

Colin: definitely have to talk about what you've been doing at Craftwork next time with Typeform. Because, yeah, I remember that being a painful thing at a previous company we were at.

CJ: Yeah. Yeah. It's like the same exact type of situation, moving off type form onto our own thing. So

Colin: Well, I'm excited to play with StoryFuel and, yeah, we can probably wrap it here. And, I think we should talk about how you even get this much stuff done in a week. I think that's a future topic, hacking on Jupyter notebooks and videos and side projects on top of your, all your other life stuff. So we'll have to chat a little bit about how we get this stuff done,

CJ: Yeah, that'd be fun. It'd be fun to get into for sure.

Colin: cool. Let's wrap it there.

CJ: Nice. As always, you can head over to buildandlearn. dev to check out all the links and resources and the show notes for this episode. And, that's a wrap. Thanks folks. We'll see you next time.

Colin: Bye friends. All audio, artwork, episode descriptions and notes are property of CJ Avilla, Colin Loretz, for Build and Learn, and published with permission by Transistor, Inc. Broadcast by