Daniel (00:00.168)
recordings of myself just saying, yeah, megabyte meter is sticking out.

Dave (00:00.353)
chromes.

Dave (00:06.433)
I've hit record on the show Daniel, where it counted down just then if you didn't see it.

Daniel (00:13.414)
no, I haven't seen it. So we're live. Dave, the bit of the week, the bit of the week, I'm writing these down and then I'm not telling you. The bit of the week is this week, we need section titles for every section of the show.

Dave (00:16.489)
We are live.

Dave (00:21.567)
Go on.

Dave (00:28.193)
Section titles for every section of the show! How... How... No!

Daniel (00:33.067)
You

Daniel (00:37.624)
All right, first section is introduction. Hey, welcome to Waiting for Review, a show about the majestic indie developer lifestyle. Join your scintillating hosts, and Daniel, and let's hear about a tiny slice of their thrilling lives. Join us while waiting for review. Dave, how are you?

Dave (01:00.865)
Kia ora Daniel, I am good. Yes, it is. I want to say a sunny morning here in New Zealand. It is not a sunny morning, but that's fine. We've had some sunny mornings lately. But yeah, no, I'm good, mate. It's been a good week. How about yourself?

Daniel (01:18.446)
Fantastic to hear. I'm exhausted. I'm good. I worked so much and I was so motivated. I was so incredibly motivated, but now the weather has suddenly changed. It fell from 35 degrees centigrade to 15 or so. So from, I don't know, topless weather to sweater weather. And I'm just like, my body is not dealing with it well, I tell you that.

Dave (01:37.087)
rough.

Dave (01:42.959)
Daniel (01:46.796)
I am exhausted, although this show is actually giving me energy. So that's kind of nice.

Dave (01:50.689)
Hey, that's good. Yeah, not that we want to make this the weather show, but what you've described that temperature change, you're reminding me of when we moved from the UK to New Zealand and we did that flight to come here to live and getting on the plane in the UK, I think we were up there in the 29, 30 degrees and then landing in New Zealand in sort of the middle of winter. It was more like three or four.

and I remember how much I felt that so if you've had that just being at home in the space of a day or two yeah it's a rough ride man

Daniel (02:26.594)
Yeah.

Daniel (02:29.922)
Yeah, I don't like over the weekend, like it was super hot, sunny. And then I think I want to say Sunday, Sunday night, it started raining and then just like it dropped like crazy, like bananas. But well, this is not the weather shown.

Dave (02:41.535)
Yep. Bananas, mate. It's not, no. But yeah, how things been going telemetry deck wise? New section, maybe. Yeah. Don't worry, I'm playing along at home.

Daniel (02:55.318)
Is that the title of the section?

Daniel (03:01.386)
Fantastic. right. How have things been doing telemetry wise? Things are like I did so many small things. Like I have a have a GitHub board that's called bugs and paper cuts. And the last few weeks, I've been able to just like throw so many things off of that off of that board. Like tiny bugs.

small little support requests that were like, hey, like for example, the animation on the overview is not quite right if this is happening or like sometimes the resizing doesn't work. Small things like for example, that when you create filters, then you kind of need to know what kinds of parameters a telemetry signal has, even though the system should know that. And so I've created a auto suggestion fields.

Dave (03:55.59)
Mm

Daniel (04:00.238)
Because it turns out HTML does that now. HTML has so many native controls now these days. Like you can have native models. I replaced our dropdowns with native dropdowns and they are now animated and slightly more pretty. So much. like, let me have a look. I'm writing a blog post right now. The blog post is called Telemetry Tech Version 7 because

Dave (04:00.393)
Bye.

Dave (04:15.563)
Nice.

Dave (04:23.904)
Okay.

Daniel (04:27.47)
Public facing version numbers are completely meaningless to me in virtual imagery deck at least, but it's really good for marketing and it might even make a press release. And so I can actually have look at the blog post and see like what I did. yeah, I put in a paragraph about the new visual query editor that I already told you about, the JSON schema based one.

And also, we have a recommendation system,

which is a thing that I wrote because I found out that 90 % of people using the Swift SDK are using Swift SDK version 1 .5, whereas 2 .3 is the current version. And I only noticed that because I noticed that most people, I was like, telemetry dig, ingestion API version two has been out for one and half years. Like how many people are using that? 10%.

Dave (05:14.549)
Okay.

Dave (05:28.245)
Yeah. Ouch. Okay.

Daniel (05:32.138)
So one of my goals is now to get people to move to the new API because it's way more performant. It uses less traffic. And also it has a few convenience methods that will convert data from the old style to the new style with the names based, parameter names and stuff like that. And so I wrote a thing that I have a, I actually have this thing already. have a, it's called a job in Vapor.

Dave (05:40.427)
Mm

Daniel (06:00.942)
Like you can just have a, have a function that gets called every say like every config, like any like a cron job basically, like this one runs every 30 seconds. It picks the last, the, the, the, the organ one organization at random ordered by has most recently, least recently been worked on. And then it does all the things that they can do. call this a method, the organization janitor.

It counts the signals, it sees if it needs to remind the owner of the organization to update their plan or whatever. But what it also now does is it goes through the individual apps and then checks for various recommendations that it can give. So the two recommendations that it can give for now are A, you are obviously sending web analytics signals, but you're

Dave (06:28.469)
Ha

Daniel (06:53.774)
overview pages set to app mode and you're missing out on the cool charts. So click here to switch that. And over half of the people who got that recommendation have actually clicked on the switch that button, which is really, really nice. And the other is, hey, you're using an older version of the Swift SDK. The newest version is 2 .3. Consider upgrading.

Dave (07:00.683)
Okay, that's useful. Yep. I'm probably one of those people.

Dave (07:17.439)
Right. So yeah, I was wondering about that. I was wondering how you were going to contact people and let them know. That is obviously a very good one, identifying it and emailing them.

Daniel (07:27.586)
Yeah. I am actually not emailing this. It's just a little red bubble in their UI. But I should probably email them as well.

Dave (07:38.919)
Okay, so the other thing I was thinking of was that could you have something that spams Xcode's log, like in debug mode, where if the telemetry deck SDK registers and then realizes it's out of date, it tells them there and then in the console.

Daniel (08:01.73)
Hmm, maybe. I don't know. I consider it. Like maybe this is already enough just because just based on, just based on like people want to get rid of the annoying orange dot in there, you know, like their badge, badge with a number and I want to really get rid of that in their user interface. But yeah, sending that out as an email is definitely a good idea. And also,

Dave (08:08.182)
Yeah.

Dave (08:18.292)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Daniel (08:28.066)
Like, your idea is also good. I just have to think about how to do that because GitHub get very annoyed with you if you send too many requests towards their API.

Dave (08:32.512)
Yeah, yeah,

Dave (08:41.395)
Okay. Well, anyway, that was just me sort of thinking out loud really is that my mode for getting that worked on would be compiling and spinning up a new version of my app. And then at that point, if I see it in the log, I'll be like, okay, let's update the package and see what happens. So that could be an angle, but in any case, this is not the Dave Gives Daniel work show today.

Daniel (09:02.818)
Yeah, I think about it.

Daniel (09:09.934)
Well, that section is canceled for today. I do, yeah. I have another section, but maybe we do one of your sections now. And then we can do it. So the next section title apparently is Dave has commissioned a designer.

Dave (09:12.393)
You have enough on your plate. Yeah, we scrubbed that one out.

Dave (09:20.875)
Go on.

Dave (09:27.753)
Yes, yes. So, OK, let me explain myself just quickly. And this could be a show and tell, actually, Daniel, because I've got a design to walk through. But let me lay the context. So I have been thinking for a while that I wanted to work with a designer friend of ours, Chris Lasinski. Chris is an awesome guy. runs Next Planet is his app business.

Daniel (09:36.108)
Mm -hmm, please. All right, cool.

Dave (09:56.769)
and he has various apps in the store. He's got a games score counting app called Skaro all the way through to an expenses tracker app called Numi and various various others as well. I think Chris has got four or five apps in the store now. But anyway, talk to Chris fairly often.

Daniel (10:21.727)
They are well designed.

Dave (10:23.647)
They really are. And Chris is my co -admin, maintainer of the Discord group that we mentioned on this show. So if his name sounds familiar, it's probably for any of those reasons to people listening. anyway, engage Chris because I have an area of my app, the effects selection part of my video mixer app.

which gets the most feature requests and noise and can you, could it do this sort of stuff from customers. And I have been annoyed with it since I built it. So I said, this is going to be show and tell. Maybe I just share the FIGM presentation because me and Chris caught up, had a good chat about the constraints and the issues and the things with the designers it is.

But I think if I just, let me boot this up here. Live demos always awkward.

Daniel (11:28.014)
Can anyone see my screen? Is Helen here? Is Figma in the room with us right now? We don't know.

Dave (11:30.119)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Who started the music? One second. All right. OK, so I'm sharing I'm going to share my screen.

Daniel (11:41.518)
In the meantime, like if you take a few more seconds, then I will tell you the joke that Lisa told me that apparently Taylor Swift tells when something goes wrong on stage and she needs to kill 10 seconds or so, then she tells this joke about a that walks into a library and says, hey, can I get a cat's antenna? And then the librarian says, hey, this is a library. And so the cat is like, hey, can I get some?

Dave (11:45.417)
Go on.

Dave (12:11.681)
I had no idea where that was going to go.

Daniel (12:13.218)
You

Dave (12:16.385)
Fair enough. Damn you library cat. You've made me laugh. That was just the right amount of time as well because here goes. Yeah. Yeah. I say that every day. Here we go. Okay. So I'm sharing the Figma prototype that Chris made for me. And let's have a look. This is the current design today. And I'll give a bit of a...

Daniel (12:26.104)
Thank you, Taylor Swift.

Daniel (12:38.966)
Mm -hmm.

Dave (12:45.089)
audio descriptor for everybody who's not watching the YouTube. So what we have here is the users entered into the effect selection flow in my app. And you can see here it's a it's a sheet. You can clear the effect. We've got some controls down the bottom here and we have a grid three by 15 of all the effects that you can select. And down the very bottom we've got

Daniel (12:57.175)
Right.

Dave (13:12.501)
these four tabs so you can select four effects and they chain from one to two to three to four. And that's it. That's the effect selection as it is today.

Daniel (13:23.049)
okay, so use those to layer the effects on top of each other, basically.

Dave (13:26.326)
That's right.

Yeah, so what we've got in terms of constraint, as I put this to Chris, is like, well, I've got this three by 15 grid here. Three by five, yeah, it gives me 15 slots. And I'm fed up with it. If I want to add a new effect, I've got to decide, do I make this bigger? How does this work? Do I make this scroll? Do I get rid of it completely and replace it with some other flow?

Daniel (13:38.094)
three by five actually.

Daniel (13:48.428)
you

Dave (13:58.633)
and so we talked through my issues and Chris, you know, probed and added notes on his side, took everything into account. The other, bit that I had with this is I want to be able to have this effect, the control at the bottom, the effect control bit down here, sliders, can be sliders. can be.

Daniel (14:19.145)
Mm -hmm. The sliders.

Dave (14:24.819)
anything, you could have a circular control in there or toggles or whatever. And I wanted that to be just a little bit more dynamic. At the moment, it's got a set space in screen and it fights the rest of the components for space. One last constraint before we look at the designs Chris has come up with. Users want to be able to toggle the effects on and off. And at the moment, that doesn't exist. So if you select an effect, you can't just

tap it again to turn it off, you've actually got to clear it. And if you clear it in the process, then it actually changes the parameters you've got set. So if you've set this slider up here, it's not good.

Daniel (14:55.97)
Mm -hmm.

Daniel (15:02.712)
That's not good. That's not good. And also people want to preview, right? Like, I mean, you said that at the beginning, but I want to kind of see what's happening.

Dave (15:07.173)
this is, yeah, this is the, yeah. And the previews at the very top here. and that is, that is essentially working today, but yes, you should be able to see what you've done. So if I look at the design here, we've got several versions. Yeah. Yeah. Version one is a little bit of a tweak.

Daniel (15:29.516)
Right, you get version one, version two, version three.

Dave (15:36.565)
where you can see here we've got this search that might then enter into

Daniel (15:37.154)
Mm hmm. All right. There's a search bar at the top here. What does it search for?

Dave (15:43.681)
It'll search for effects. So you'll be able to filter the effects. Now this was one view to sort of say we could keep the grid, but then go into a list when you go into search. I don't think I want to do this. This would be a sort of the user still gets the top 15 effects to select. But the UI is perhaps not as clear as it should be. Let me go to the one I want. The one I'm really, really happy with is

Daniel (15:49.816)
Mm

Daniel (15:53.816)
Mm

Daniel (16:11.106)
Mm

Dave (16:13.381)
we, and this, this is the thing, right? Chris is a pro for Chris is on top of his game here and he's given me options. and that's been the best part of this whole process as a, as a developer who can barely design. That's nice to have engaged the designer.

Daniel (16:25.165)
Mm -hmm.

Daniel (16:29.358)
Right, so now version 2, you've replaced the grid of effects with a list and then the configuration of effects kind of floating on top of the list apparently.

Dave (16:35.019)
That's right.

Dave (16:39.881)
Yeah, and you can see here that can flip down. So the effect controls, the sliders has a little down arrow on the top of it and it can be dismissed down like another little sheet over the top. Yeah, and obviously we don't animate that in SwiftUI, make it beautiful. We've got some other things that it could do there. This is for future features.

Daniel (16:54.626)
Right. That's pretty neat.

Dave (17:08.833)
But the other thing is, is we've gone from a sheet over the top to full screen because it gains a bit more real estate. And yes.

Daniel (17:16.14)
still has the preview and the preview seems to be floating above everything. Same as the configuration. If the configuration is visible, then it's kind of floating above the... So it's a bit more three -dimensional.

Dave (17:20.405)
Yep.

Dave (17:25.621)
That's right. Yeah. So yes, a little bit more three dimensional and it lets people in the flow of using it, do what they need to do because when you're selecting the effect, you probably don't care about the controls at that point. You just want to find the effect so you can get that out of the way. You can scroll and do the previews pretty much got to be there to be honest. So you can see what's going on.

Daniel (17:52.162)
Hmm.

Dave (17:55.243)
But what I like about this.

Daniel (17:56.928)
It could probably move to the top right corner.

Dave (18:02.209)
Funny you should say that. That's the other iteration in the design.

Daniel (18:05.397)
there's version three. And there the preview has moved into the top right corner. I think I saw this somewhere, the screenshot that you're now sharing. This is a refined version of the previous one with the preview in the top right. like most of the list is visible. like the design, like the colors are bit tweaked. And I think the UI elements were also a bit tweaked.

Dave (18:08.161)
Did you know?

Dave (18:14.249)
I might have shared this with the, yeah.

Dave (18:20.949)
That's right.

Dave (18:32.673)
So the other change here is that this becomes more of a control at the bottom on the controls. So if you dismiss it, it pops down to a little icon. I think I'll be merging the two because I quite like on version two, I quite like this pane here. Yeah. Damn it. So that's the design and...

Daniel (18:50.754)
You like the pain? Yeah, I get that.

Dave (19:00.959)
You know, like what I love about this is that it gets me everything that I've been after. Right. All those constraints we talked about at the beginning is here. Chris has given it a little bit more pop. He's took my corner radiuses in a bit more. And I really love how slick that's starting to look there. yeah. And the other thing here that I wasn't doing that Chris has added is this concept of if I'm controlling colors.

Daniel (19:21.026)
Yeah, it look very slick.

Dave (19:30.517)
You can see I've got red, green, blue there. Why not color the sliders so it's clear to the user what's going on.

Daniel (19:39.03)
Although, like if you are actually controlling colors, like why not have a, you know, one of those fields where you just like can pick a color.

Dave (19:47.125)
Well, might be, that might be, mean, in this context, it wouldn't be the case. This is actually controlling color levels. So you would want the separation, but there are some potential effects that would use a color picker for sure. And that's the other thing. I've got a bit more flex now in the design to go and add those things.

Daniel (19:56.941)
Not fair.

Daniel (20:03.234)
You got so much room for activities in that screen. I like that.

Dave (20:06.783)
Yeah, yeah. So I'm going to stop sharing now, but shout out to Chris. I very much appreciated his work and this actually

Daniel (20:17.9)
I didn't know he was a designer too. I thought he was just a developer, but I stand corrected. Fantastic.

Dave (20:21.697)
No, he's multi -talented. Yeah. But it's a big deal for me because this marks the first time that I have officially contracted out anything like that for Govj for my app. And I've been really pleased with the results. This was a, you know, like a 45 minute conversation between me and Chris. Chris has gone and done the work I've paid him for. Now I have a beautiful design to start.

Daniel (20:34.019)
Mm

Dave (20:51.925)
building. I wish I'd done it sooner in some way. Yeah, because my own designer skills are always a work in progress. My strength is my code and design isn't. So it's been good to get the help. And I think I'm at a stage now with things with this app where that makes sense.

Daniel (21:21.688)
Fantastic.

Dave (21:23.615)
Yeah. and bonus. The bonus thing about this is that I should be able to pull some of this into Govj Pro as well. which is the new app on the horizon. Yeah.

Daniel (21:25.74)
Nice. Bonus. -huh.

Daniel (21:37.09)
Very good.

Dave (21:42.527)
Hmm. I love that your, yes, your co -host chipped in on your side.

Daniel (21:43.786)
I just heard the tiniest meow.

Co -host has entered the... Can you see her on the screen? cannot. Come. Come. Come say hi.

Dave (21:52.145)
I cannot. hang on, which one have we got there?

Daniel (21:58.382)
It's Mimi.

Dave (21:59.787)
Hey Mimi, I heard a purr.

Daniel (22:02.378)
Yeah

Dave (22:04.233)
Yes, waiting for review. The show, not about weather, sometimes about apps, sometimes about sass, and definitely about cats whenever they show up. Yeah.

Daniel (22:05.368)
She understood the assignment.

Daniel (22:13.536)
almost definitely. We got the cohost and everything.

Dave (22:18.827)
So I reckon we could have one last section maybe for a slightly shorter show. What have we got?

Daniel (22:23.522)
Mm -hmm.

Daniel (22:28.3)
you sent out an email and I actually got that email. I was like, I want to talk to you about that.

Dave (22:32.485)
go on. Yeah. So wanted to talk to me about it just in general, or did you spot anything you wanted to talk about inside of it?

Daniel (22:40.302)
No, I was just like gonna congratulate you. Hang on, let me pull up the email. I got an email that says, govj3 .2 is available now. And my thinking was, my thinking was, this is a really good email because it's well written and it has the right level of enthusiasm. And yeah, Dave, you're a good copywriter. It's just nice. Like.

Dave (22:51.566)
Mm

Dave (22:57.536)
OK.

Dave (23:01.365)
Yep.

Dave (23:05.714)
thank you.

Daniel (23:06.644)
If I could afford to hire you, I would hire you as a developer evangelist or something. And you'd have to write so much copy for our website because you're just good at it.

Dave (23:13.611)
Yep.

Dave (23:19.034)
thank you. Yes, I'm just looking down the email again now.

Daniel (23:23.182)
See, the email even includes the screenshot. That's where I saw it.

Dave (23:28.671)
Yes, yes it does. this is the other thing is I'm definitely trying to just engage with my, my users and my, I want to say with my audience. And that's actually quite an interesting, sort of tweak in my, my thinking. you know, I've been posting things to Instagram and tech talk over the last couple of weeks here and there.

Daniel (23:45.219)
Mm

Dave (23:53.089)
I'm actually thinking that one of the best routes for me to market this app is going to be to just build an audience on those platforms, potentially. But anyway, I digress. I'm looking at the email now, and I've got a mailing list with about 270 people on, I think. A reasonable.

Daniel (24:18.254)
That number has grown. Like last time you said a number, it was like 39 or something.

Dave (24:22.845)
Yeah, it's grown pretty significantly. I put the Govj Pro landing page up at the beginning of the year. And that has continued to be a bit of a lead magnet, as it were, in terms of pulling people in.

Daniel (24:36.244)
Nice. Should probably put that on Kickstarter or something.

Dave (24:41.385)
Maybe, mean, again, just looking, looking down at the mail, though, I'm absolutely using this as an opportunity to just tell people about what's going on and how I'm doing it. And whenever I send an email out, I seem to get a sale on something within a bit of time. So there's there's some positive reinforcement, if you like, going on. Yeah, so.

Daniel (25:01.068)
Nice.

Dave (25:11.093)
Definitely email your peeps. I would screen share, but we've done enough of that on the show. yeah.

Daniel (25:16.686)
We've done enough of screen sharing. But since we're in the email section, I recently realized that for about the last three months, when you registered an account for Telemetry Deck and then clicked the, like check the box for yes, I would like to receive the newsletter, you wouldn't, like you didn't get added to the list for newsletter subscribers. So I wrote a quick function that re -added everyone, like the people who...

because that value still gets stored in the database. So I was like, OK, everyone who is not on the list but has the checkbox enabled and now gets added. a few more people will get emails next time we send out a newsletter.

Dave (25:47.541)
Yep. Yes.

Dave (26:02.427)
well, at least you've caught it now and you've been able to rectify that.

Daniel (26:06.54)
Actually, Lisa caught it. She was like, I noticed that the number of newsletter subscribers hasn't has barely changed. Only the people who actually like found the very hidden page on the website and then entered themselves.

Dave (26:15.646)
Mm -hmm.

Dave (26:20.673)
You

Dave (26:24.257)
That's funny. You've now got a cohort in that period of time of people who did that, who are super motivated to hear from you.

Daniel (26:35.874)
Yes. But now we also include the people who are slightly motivated. Because they still manually check the checkbox. I think it's even in EU law, you have to leave that checkbox unchecked by default. But it just feels right to do so as well. But the people who did check that checkbox, that's a strong intent, right?

Dave (26:37.727)
Yeah.

Dave (26:42.965)
Yeah,

Dave (27:00.491)
That's cool. That's really cool. You've reminded me that I need to actually think about putting in an email sign up into the app itself. I'm kind of missing something there, which I don't know if I can do. Actually, I know apps do do it, but I don't know how much, whether that will cause me any hassle on App Store review or not. If I don't do it right.

Daniel (27:21.698)
I mean, you gotta try, right?

Dave (27:25.237)
Yeah. Yolo.

Daniel (27:28.012)
Ha ha ha ha.

Dave (27:30.573)
but, I'm, I'm crowbarring into a new section and I'm not sure the sections concept really helps us Daniel. feel like sections should just be a natural flow, but,

Daniel (27:44.856)
Hmm, maybe the sections need to be more, like more encompassing. Like what if we are in the email section, then we can like talk about all the email related things that we have.

Dave (27:57.035)
Well, I have an email related thing to ask you because again, this is me crowbarring in Segwayim, but we've got a note here about when is appropriate to reply to customer support.

Daniel (28:10.86)
Right. Like this is an ongoing discussion I have with Lisa basically, which is, or maybe one that I need to have with Lisa. Like I know that she sometimes listens to the show, so I can't just put words in her mouth. So right now, we are very much motivated and we very much try to answer to each customer email that reaches us.

Dave (28:12.48)
That needs expanding. Yeah.

Daniel (28:41.846)
I don't know, even if it's like something that is maybe like something that will definitely not lead to a sale or something that is very complicated to answer. Like sometimes it takes a while, but we eventually get to everyone. And I'm feeling I want to think about slightly stepping away from that. And I think I made some moves towards that already.

hosted about it on Mestelon, think I told you even, but I kind of didn't stick, so now we're back to answering everyone. But I think I'm wondering how do I say, hey, there's too much email and I'm gonna, like some things I will just read and then like nod to myself, maybe make a bug ticket if it's a bug report, but then not answer. Like what is a friendly non -asshole way to say that?

Dave (29:40.762)
You

Daniel (29:41.326)
Because I don't want to be an asshole. When I'm writing to an indie company, if I were to write to cultured code or off the top of my head, revenue cat or whatever, I would be happy for them to answer me, but I wouldn't really expect it. Especially if I wrote them with, I want to be a customer and I want to spend a lot of money with you, of course I would need an answer.

or what I'd expect an answer or if I had a serious bug or something.

Dave (30:09.866)
Yeah.

Dave (30:14.655)
Yeah, I don't know. Right. So this is the thing is that, you're right. We don't always expect to reply. Sometimes it is just a, you know, for your information kind of thing that people are sending stuff through. and it's a very tough one to call. think very obviously, I, it strikes me in your situation. You, you want to be able to direct people to existing.

resources to answer their questions. I think, and that could be part of this, right? Is that sometimes when you send an email through to somewhere or you make contact, one of the first things that happens is, it certainly happens to me quite a lot is that I get an email almost within like the minute and that email is an auto reply. And that's auto reply thing gives me

That auto reply then sets my expectations. So if it is a complaints or customer service type scenario that I'm contacting, typically you'll end up with the, email is important to us. Somebody will get back to you within 24 hours, 48 hours or whatever their, I guess their industry standard is.

Daniel (31:27.022)
You

Dave (31:36.425)
And so it manages your expectations. So you're not screaming into the void in the meantime, right? Because you did this complaint scenario. This could also apply to support though. And these sort of general inquiries, you could actually use an auto reply to set some expectations.

Daniel (31:52.453)
But wouldn't that feel super corporatey?

Dave (31:55.753)
It is a little bit, but there's a reason for it. Your time is limited.

Daniel (31:59.074)
Like basically it feels like this is just one step away from having that little chat bot in the bottom right of the website. And it's like, yeah, yeah, you are totally talking to an actual human being. Is your problem answered by any of these documentation pages, by the way?

Dave (32:09.035)
Yes.

Dave (32:18.581)
Yeah. So yes. but I think, I think there's a way of landing it. No, but I think the vision I've got here is more about managing people's expectations about whether to receive a reply or not. there's a, you know, so it becomes an automatic acknowledgement, but you can sort of say, look, we, you know, as you can say anything, you could tell people we are still a very

Daniel (32:21.768)
And that's something I don't really want to do.

Dave (32:48.531)
small startup of a company. We are tiny. Our time is limited, but all feedback is greatly appreciated. If this is a new bug or issue or something like that in language, you could say, if this is something new, someone will

Daniel (32:51.512)
We're tiny.

Daniel (33:14.541)
Yeah.

Dave (33:17.363)
someone may reach out to you. Otherwise here's our docs and thank you very much. But that, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's probably a way of doing it without being too corporate. For want of a better phrase. Maybe you could commission a copy editor here. Maybe I'm making a job for myself, Daniel.

Daniel (33:25.56)
I'll think about it.

Daniel (33:35.299)
yeah.

Daniel (33:43.682)
What's your hourly rate?

Dave (33:47.725)
many, many, many, many, sure we can figure something out, no, seriously though, I think like, if I don't receive a reply, that auto reply that kind of tells me that at least lets me know that it's gone somewhere, you know? so there's a point where like, okay, I've sent you an email and, you know, I've never heard anything back.

feels negative and the auto reply can offset that a little bit. It's very tough balance. People interpret all of these things differently and personally, right?

Daniel (34:29.518)
I mean, yeah, because you feel like you have this at least parasocial relationship with a company, especially a tiny one such as ours. And then you want to talk to us, and then just nothing comes back. That's kind of negative. But at the same time, on our end, like, yeah, I've read that bug report 17 times. How do I answer?

Dave (34:37.963)
Mm

Daniel (34:56.63)
in a friendly way because that person wrote it just once, right? But me, I'm like, can I please go back to fixing the bug?

Dave (35:01.301)
Mm -hmm.

Dave (35:05.238)
Yeah.

Daniel (35:07.36)
So yeah, what I really would like to do, but that's not possible, right? But what I would really like to do is have actually a page or something that says, if you are actually reporting a bug, this is the issue tracker. Here's the open ticket, please. If you have a user interface questions, here's the docs. And if you still can't figure it out, then come back. Because sometimes the user interface is just lacking.

Dave (35:23.297)
Mm

Dave (35:30.017)
That's another way of handling it.

Daniel (35:35.234)
So it's actually good when people tell us these things. If you want to give us lots of money, please write an email directly. But that's not possible because it's not possible to put that in front of an email because the email address is just there. It's info at telemetrydeck .com. So thanks for even more email now. But yeah, maybe the auto reply will help a little bit.

Dave (35:54.975)
Yep. I'm going to do one after the show.

Dave (36:05.353)
I think again, you may well have just

Daniel (36:05.634)
Like the audit or the reply code could just say that like, hey, in the meantime, while you're waiting, like have a look at the docs, have a look at the issue tracker. Maybe your issue is even there already. Then you can just like upvote it or add an emoji or something.

Dave (36:09.387)
Yes.

Dave (36:17.377)
Mm

Yep. Yep. So I think you've just described the first cut of your auto reply there to me. It's everything you would want to say ahead of somebody sending an email, but can't. Yeah, but I struggle. If I come back to the original question, when is appropriate to reply or not, really it depends.

I think it is appropriate to ignore some email requests and things. again, it's a tough one because you want to help people, but your time is precious and should be, it helps people more that your time is focused on working on the product.

Daniel (37:09.89)
Yeah, and at same time it's good to get all this feedback, you know? Like sometimes people are just getting all these paper cuts. Like that's what I call the board. Like it's not even a bug. It's just like something that's just this friction and removing that friction is good. And I sometimes only can remove the friction if I have gotten enough friction in form of friendly but insistent emails. wow. I'll think about it some more.

Dave (37:13.12)
Yes.

Dave (37:34.239)
Yes, yes, and to that, yeah.

Daniel (37:37.403)
I think it's a good idea to like, you're coming around to maybe having an auto email. And so yeah, I think I thank you.

Dave (37:44.385)
I think it's at least worst if you get the wording right. You can be non -corporate in that reply and still keep the spirit light. I just wanted to say the thing that occurred to me as we were talking, I kind of feel like maybe Sondrine should be replying to me. You're a little icon for Tlemishydeck.

Daniel (38:10.05)
Maybe. But maybe Sandrine only speaks in binary or something. don't know.

Dave (38:11.861)
Yeah.

Dave (38:15.91)
true, true. Well, it could always be your and Lisa's faces on the email then maybe.

Daniel (38:23.98)
Hi, you've reached the answering machine of Daniel and Lisa.

Dave (38:31.197)
Ha ha ha ha.

Daniel (38:31.394)
We're not at home right now. Please leave a message after the beep. Dave, just got someone sent me a link to a Macedonian post of someone I don't know and who doesn't know me, apparently. And they write, tried out telemetry deck, like two words somehow, for the first time today. Pretty cool. First impression. Sending signals is super easy. Creating custom dashboards is quite technical, but I'm sure I'll figure out that part too.

Dave (38:42.666)
Mm -hmm.

Daniel (39:01.058)
Aww.

Dave (39:02.443)
That's lovely. That's awesome. It's awesome when you can hear the other side like that. You would almost, I feel like I would almost rarely get a direct email like that, but I will hear about support requests. So maybe that offsets that. I hope that's offset some of the friction you've been getting in your inbox.

Daniel (39:04.0)
Aww. Yeah.

Daniel (39:29.883)
Yeah, like the friction is not even like I'm not saying I dislike the people like quite the contrary, like I'm, I'm just trying to find a way to be polite, but still allow myself to to not answer sometimes when it's like, okay, yeah, this information has been transmitted like, you know,

Dave (39:36.011)
No, no, no, no, no.

Dave (39:50.613)
Yep. Yep. Thank you. Received. Well, Daniel, we are at the outro section of the show. It's time to time to wrap. So to make me feel.

Daniel (40:00.162)
Fantastic.

Daniel (40:05.979)
I can't rap, I don't have a beat. I can perform under pressure if you like.

Dave (40:11.393)
I'm not going to beatbox on the mic either. Nobody needs that from me on the show. But do you want to read the outro, Daniel?

Daniel (40:15.134)
you

Daniel (40:18.966)
I do, yeah. Hey, hey listener, thanks for listening. Please, read us on iTunes and YouTube. Send us emails at contact at waitingforreview .com. Only Dave gets those, luckily. And join our Discord. The link is in the show notes. And people can find you, Dave, where?

Dave (40:31.893)
Yes.

Dave (40:40.031)
You can find me on mastodon at Dave at social .lightbeamapps .com. And of course you can find out all about my apps at lightbeamapps .com. And if you go lightbeamapps .com slash govjpro, you can sign up to my mailing list and see my copy whenever I send it out.

Daniel (40:58.264)
and then Dave can send you email.

Dave (41:02.655)
Yes, exactly. Boots on the other foot. So Daniel, where can people find you?

Daniel (41:09.438)
I'm not going to say the email address again. the thing is the info at emails, they go to Lisa first and then like she deals with the first level. It's like only the second level that goes to me. I mean, that's too much for me. I'm just like a delicate flower apparently. But yeah, people can find me at daniel at social .telemetrydeck .com or just go to telemetrydeck .com and sign up for the newsletter and I can send you emails too.

Dave (41:14.976)
Ha

Dave (41:27.476)
Yeah.

Dave (41:37.845)
Awesome.

Dave (41:40.437)
Well, take care Daniel. Yep.

Daniel (41:38.808)
All right. Have a fantastic day, Dave. I am going to say goodbye and we're going to see you soon. Byeee