Facebook Stole My Idea

welcome to dogelog index six this is the series where i share the development and the business process of taking a project i started as a joke called doge house and turning it into a billion dollar unicorn company that is going to the moon we have to talk business first because there's some urgent news doge talk has been officially zucked by the one and only mark zuckerberg for the past couple of weeks i've been talking about how dogehouse could solve the problem of discoverability for podcasts or audio content in general by creating an algorithmic audio feed inspired by tick tock play the clip i kind of want to experiment with a feed that's entirely just short audio sound bites whether it be 30 second funny bits or maybe clips taken from a longer podcast and then those are used as gateway drugs into longer form podcast episodes then i see an announcement for sound bites facebook's new short form audio product will serve users a stream of brief clips zuckerberg says this product is like an audio version of its tick-tock-like video product reels users can share individual clips to their news feeds or they can consume a string of audio clips joined together and algorithmically distributed in a feed hmm that sounds a little bit familiar i wonder where i've heard that before so it appears me and zuck are on the same wavelength down to using the same terminology which is pretty scary but maybe it'll be scary in a good way the press release made it seem like they're going to be integrating this into facebook or instagram which i'm surprised they're choosing to add even more features to both of those two apps if i was zuck i'd be launching this as a separate audio app called face talk for two reasons one you ignore the negative stigma of facebook at least a little bit i know people that hate facebook but still use the messenger app but more importantly the facebook and instagram app have become so bloated with features instagram has a main feed a reels feed a search feed and a shopping feed and now they want to add an audio feed if you ask me that's way too many feeds for a single app so make facetalk its own app with its own identity you can even add some crappy facebook integrations just like how instagram has it so facebook's kpis are still happy and i think that is a much better direction or you can just acquire dojos either way mark if you end up using my idea you can send my consulting fee of one million dogecoin to my dogecoin wallet right here thanks you know what they say you either zuck or you get zucked so now i have to zuck the zucker by putting doge talk in doge house and here's my plan on integrating that in right now there are two main pages the dashboard where you can see a list of the active rooms sorted by the most popular and then the room page itself which you know when you join a room you see the next two big things that are going to be added to this are recordings of rooms and clipping the audio of those recordings and what we'll probably do is set up a page just temporarily where you can see the top clips of the day or something like that once we've built up a giant repository of clips that's when we're going to introduce the feed doge talk is going to come alive and that's how you can consume the clips and if you enjoy what you're watching or really listening to then that's going to be associated to either a recording of a room or a live room so you can listen to more that's all in the future though let's talk about the present i made a very big decision to not raise money for doge house and instead bootstrap this was a tough decision i was dead set on raising because it's what you're supposed to do to create a billion dollar company but after doing a bunch of meetings and learning more about it i came to the conclusion it's not really what i want to do right now the entire process of applying to accelerators making pitch decks weaseling with vcs was entirely uninteresting to me and i felt myself going into the mindset of just going through the motions and playing a game that i don't want to play i was worried that one day i would wake up and start keeping track of useless statistics that i would then use to justify business decisions that increased those useless statistics and i would start flexing the upward velocity of my kpis because that's all i really have to talk about and inside of me i know there's no meaning to them but it's all i have and i didn't want i didn't want that life okay now i know there's other ways to accept investment and i was considering them for a little bit but all of them have a giant commitment that i don't want being able to rage quit an entire project whenever i please is very important to me for whatever reason when i don't have to do something i like doing it even more but as soon as i have shackles attached to me that are forcing me to do something i start to immediately dread it so yeah i have commitment issues in the dev world we have bugs on bugs on bugs popping up in doge house apparently when you have over 300 contributors working on the same project that stuff breaks and it breaks a lot so most of my week has been fixing bugs and writing tests we got a pull request for deafen so you can now mute and silence all sound with a click of a button unfortunately this pr did break doge house for a little bit the api expected you to send whether you were deafened when you authenticate which was for reconnection purposes but whenever you do an update in the web dev world not all the front-end clients get the update right away and they didn't know that definite existed so they tried authenticating without saying whether they were deafened or not and it didn't work we got another pull request that implemented the new design for the profile page including a banner you can add to your profile which surprisingly broke doge house's chat system it basically boiled down to a type error where a function was returning four things and the caller was expecting three things and i know some of you are probably laughing at me right now as you should because i'm using a freaking dynamically typed language i'm most definitely feeling the pain right now elixir is great for a lot of things i'm enjoying it but at least 20 percent of our bugs are from things that a statically typed language could catch on the spot theoretically this should soon be a thing of the past as our test coverage is at 71 and climbing so instead of getting a nice squiggly in my editor telling me exactly where i should fix things i get to parse through a disgusting elixir error message and try to figure out where the bug is but nonetheless no more type errors i'm a fan of moving fast and breaking things but i'd like to get doge house to a place where when i merge a pull request it doesn't break something big i'm cool with some edge cases slipping in here and there like it happens but let's not have one pr take down the entire chat system obviously i've been doing a poor job of reviewing so i can be more diligent on that front but i also want some automated tests to help me out which is why i've started to do some end-to-end tests with cyprus the purpose of these tests is to emulate what a regular user would do in their browser when using your website so what i do is i annotate different parts of the website with ids and then i tell cyprus to select these elements and click it like they're a regular human or fill out forms and submit them and this is what it looks like when it actually runs so it has like a little ui over here here my tests on the left and then the right side is it legitimately going on the website and clicking things so we can run these and we can see first it's going to log in using a test user and then it's going to basically press a bunch of buttons on the form see it's filling out to create a room and then it's going to mute itself define itself invite by the way if you saw a page hang for a second there that's next.js being super slow navigating pages and there you go unfortunately i can't use this for everything i realize this halfway through that i'm gonna have to switch tools to maybe like playwright or something for some tests because cypress has a big limitation you can't have multiple windows or tabs at the same time but doge house has all these concurrent users in the same room that like to test hey mute him kick him out ban him and i need multiple tabs for that i did get around to adding a baby feature if you share a link on social media to a room that you're in it'll actually show a preview with the actual name of the room and the description now that doge house is using next.js this is pretty easy to set up i only want a server-side render for link previews so i'm using git initial props and i check if we're on the server and if we are we make an api request to get the room data and that's just a regular get request but if you're already on dogehouse's website and you navigate to a room i just use your websocket connection that's already open to fetch the room but that's it for this doge log stay tuned until next week where i'll be fixing probably even more bugs because programming is just fixing bugs you

Channel: Ben Awad

Views: 150,374

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Id: EoebziXTglk

Length: 8min 52sec (532 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 26 2021