Podcast
Boris Local
Hosted by Boris Alva · ENGLISH
Musings on tech-adjacent topics, including product management, startups, software development, and the web (1, 2, and 3).
6episodes
Episodes
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Rethinking tech work
Jan 26, 202400:07:12Tap to summarizeI've recently discovered a pair of interesting characters, or influencers, you might say, and I've been binging on their podcasts and blog content for a few weeks now. Their names are Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, and the two are... well, they're something else.Okay, first, it's not really correct to say that I've discovered them recently, it's more like I rediscovered them. Both have been in my peripheral vision for years, and I had already read a book that they penned together. The book was called Remote, and I believe it came out about a decade ago, but I read it in 2016. So that's a few years already. Before that, they wrote Rework, which I haven't read yet, but which I think provided the bulk of material that I'm enjoying right now in podcast form.Now, eight years later, I stumbled upon an interview Jason did with Lenny Rachitsky, who hosts a product management podcast, and this started a whole binge listening experience for me, finding other interviews Jason did, and by the way, a shameless plug, if you want to listen to someone's guest appearances on different podcasts, the tool you should use is Padverb, which I helped create. I'm going to put a link to it, but anyway, I digress.So, Jason and David, what do they do? I guess it would be factually correct to describe them as entrepreneurs, although that wouldn't really do them justice, because they're more like practicing philosophers, and also because I think they would hate the very term entrepreneur, I think they prefer makers or something. On the business side, they jointly run a medium-sized company called 37 Signals, which they started, and which makes several group communication tools, products, the flagship product is called Basecamp.The company supposedly posts eight-figure profits every year, and for a company that was bootstrapped without much in the way of investments, that's pretty freaking good, and that provides the first sort of talking point, or the first received idea that they attack, is that you need to have investors to launch anything successful in this tech environment. But there are other received ideas that they attacked, and that list is long, very entertaining, I enjoyed their reasoning and how they structure... how they tell their experience, how they structure their argument.Sometimes they go a little far, sometimes, I totally agree that you don't need so many meetings and Zoom calls, I totally agree that working in physical proximity is not critical, but they've attacked in a kind of entertaining way the whole concept of the MVP, even the sacred cow of agile methodology, the two-week sprint.One thing I sort of felt they were going too far with, or rather David was going too far with, is the attack on static typing in programming languages. I'm not going to go into technical details, but there is a reason why most lang...
Transcribe →Karma, Policed
Dec 20, 202300:04:45Tap to summarizeKMO published a Substack article yesterday, which I wanted to comment on.The article deals with the decline in the quality of online discussions on any topic. So... the thrust of his argument is that the big online platforms that have been kind of accumulating more and more, a bigger and bigger percentage of our discussions, have been moving to implement various algorithms designed to optimize specific metrics. And the metrics had to do with reactions that people give in response to various posts. These reactions can come in different forms. For example, the most primitive form is the ubiquitous like button, but there are other feedback mechanisms. For example, Reddit utilizes so-called karma, which the way I understand it boils down to like a sum total of upvotes and downvotes on your posts. Now, that may seem like a logical way to create like auto-regulation for each board or subreddit, but over time what it does, it actually constructs a very effective echo chamber. And the meaning of those upvotes and downvotes becomes simply upvote means I agree, downvotes means I disagree. People who I disagree with will be voted out of this board because their posts will become invisible. And so this group devolves into an echo chamber. KMO described it much more eloquently than I just did. And I really recommend that you go and read the whole article for yourself. But I wanted to make two comments.First, if anyone still remembers a big online empire that was called Gawker that went bankrupt as a result of a somewhat frivolous lawsuit, was it 10 years ago or maybe it's not quite, maybe eight years ago, that empire was presided over by a publisher called Nick Denton. Now, Nick is a somewhat controversial figure, but it's completely irrelevant to what I'm going to say. Now, one thing to notice on Gawker properties, comments were kind of important. They were actually the main reason people often read this website. So Denton was very concerned about maintaining a certain level of vigor and insightfulness within those comments. And I think it was somewhere around 2011 when he went to the South by Southwest conference and gave an extended talk on the subject of online comments. And I think during that talk, he made some excellent points. One of them was that he was very aware of the fact that if you let people vote for the popularity of each comment or poster, which would then result in comments that represented the majority opinion rising to the top. And for Nick, with his muckraking instincts, that was the exact wrong thing to do. Now, the second point he was making, which was kind of similar, is if you keep doing it, you keep rewarding people expressing that prevailing opinion, then you're actually attracting the exact wrong type of commenter. It's the commenter who has absolutely nothing to add, nothing interesting, nothing insightful, nothing new. And if that person is attracted by having a high karma, high num...
Transcribe →Pod or Not
Dec 15, 202300:04:24Tap to summarizeMany people watching the tech media space have commented on the fact that the definition of podcast is slowly changing. The original definition was that a podcast is an audio blog that publishes what's called an RSS feed, essentially a specially formatted text file, which lists each episode with its name, description, and most importantly, the location of the corresponding media file, which is usually an audio file. So a feed like that can be added to and then automatically queried or played through pretty much every podcast player, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, whatever, there are dozens. Well, the Spotify, Spotify, the app, it used to be a music app, and now it's both a music and podcast app. And it just so happens that the company behind this app started stirring the pot in 2020, 21, when it began acquiring both podcast production companies and tech startups in the space. And most controversially, it signed a gazillion dollar contract with Joe Rogan, who prior to that signing of a contract had been duly publishing an RSS feed compatible with every player out there. But post contract, he made his show a Spotify exclusive show, meaning that he would stop publishing an open RSS feed and make his program playable only through Spotify. And that's what they pay them his gazillion dollars for, to make you go and use that app. So that created a somewhat absurd situation in which the most popular podcast out there, and by most general agreement, I think, the Joe Rogan Experience is the most popular podcast, is technically not a podcast. It's, it's just an exclusive show on a specific platform, playable only through one player. Well, he also puts his videos, short videos on YouTube, but that doesn't really matter. Like the full content is Spotify exclusive. And speaking of YouTube, YouTube got into the game too. And it started muddying the waters by claiming that some YouTube programs with videos uploaded to YouTube and playable only through YouTube are also podcasts. So there's this whole terminological singularity that is emerging, where almost anything that's personality centered in multimedia, and comes out periodically, regardless of the genre format, distribution, almost anything like that can be called a podcast. And now there's video podcasts, there are podcasts with RSS feed without an RSS feed, exclusive to one platform, all of that is called a podcast. Where I'm going with all this is that I wanted to say that I'm more than just a disinterested observer, I guess I'm more of a participant in this kind of melee. We're making tools for you to publish something that is very, very similar to podcasts. In fact, it's so similar that you can almost call it a podcast and be absolutely honest. Because by the definition of the old definition, the presence of an RSS feed makes it a podcast, you can just create your Gromco audio blog. And once you have at least one post, you can go an...
Transcribe →Where is home?
Dec 3, 202300:01:34Tap to summarizeSo, I noticed this thing yesterday, which you may or may not have experienced yourself. Just to set the scene, I'm traveling right now, and I'm actually feeling a bit under the weather. But when I arrived at my apartment, my temporary apartment, it didn't look very welcoming. The lighting was weird, the apartment was facing another building, everything was just kind of awkward, and still is, it wasn't really cozy, so I didn't feel at home. But a few days later, which was actually yesterday, I started cooking dinner, and as I usually do, I popped in a podcast that I often listen to while cooking or doing dishes, and suddenly Those familiar voices and intonations of the hosts made me feel like I was home. And I then realized that it had happened before like this, when I would become habituated to a place with the help of an arbitrary podcast or program. And I thought, you know, this was kind of weird. Has anyone ever noticed anything similar? It could very well be that I'm imagining this thing, but my hunch is that I'm not, so let me know.
Transcribe →What we are building
Nov 16, 202300:01:41Tap to summarizeSo, now that we've got this awkward first post out of the way, I'd like to explain what it is that we're building here, but I have to preface my explanation with a disclaimer that this thing is an early-stage startup project, and it just might end up doing what's known as a pivot. That said, the way we see it right now, Gromco is a low-barrier tool for publishing interactive short-form podcast-y content. Let me try to unpack those three things. The most important of them is interactive, and what it means is that each post, or an episode if you like, can, and should, invite audience feedback, ideally using the same medium – for example, voice. So this is the reply button that you see everywhere. Short-form, well, that's pretty self-explanatory, we just don't envision people posting long content, and podcast-y means that it's kind of like podcasting, but with audience participation. So we'll make this thing compatible with legacy players, like Apple and Spotify, we'll do it through the magic of RSS, and so people will be able to consume your Gromco voice blog using those apps. But crucially, you don't need to know much about these technical underpinnings, you don't need to know much about RSS, or even podcasting to start. If you can speak into a microphone and press a button, you're in. So hopefully this makes things clearer, if not, the reply button is right there.
Transcribe →Hello, world!
Nov 14, 202300:00:32Tap to summarizeWell, hello there. I guess this is the first post, which means that if we're very lucky, it may one day be auctioned off as an NFT. Maybe. Assuming, of course, that NFTs are still around when that day comes. Which brings me to the question part of my inaugural post: whither NFTs? Is there a future?
Transcribe →