S4e27 (00:00.334) Don't count down Wayne, don't count down. Daniel (00:03.584) down countdown? What's that from? What's that from? I don't recognize that. I didn't get the reference. S4e27 (00:05.581) Yeah. S4e27 (00:09.774) I'm showing my age. It's wines world, which is now 30 odd years old this year Daniel (00:13.745) I Confession Time, I know of that movie and I basically know what it's about, but I've never seen it. And a few years ago, was like, should probably see this just because I wanna be, a lot of people have been influenced by this movie, but I'm like, just, I don't know. I didn't find the motivation to watch it. At some point I probably will. S4e27 (00:20.303) Okay. So. S4e27 (00:38.254) There's bits of it that definitely would still hold up, I reckon. But there's also bits of it that will have aged hideously because it's a 90s film. So there's always that. in terms of the reference, there's a point in which their show that they had that they were running from their basement gets taken over effectively. They get some investment, they get to go to a new fancy studio. Daniel (00:48.172) Probably. S4e27 (01:08.558) And they're doing the countdown to the camera being on. And the last few bits of the countdown is silent. Right. And he's like sitting there watching the great countdown. Yeah. And he's nodding his head and they're like, Wayne, don't don't nod your head. We can see that. Because as soon as it goes live, his head's still like, yeah. And so whenever we count down to record this show, I end up feeling the same like I'm trying to count down. count down, but I'm aware. Anyway, listeners, you won't get to see me bobbing my head in a silly fashion or making any sense of this references, but maybe YouTube folk might get, get what I'm saying. What show is this anyway? That's a great question. Daniel (01:51.468) What show is this anyway? What show is this anyway? What show is this anyway? I think this is Welcome to... Hang on. This is Waiting for a Review, a show about the majestic indie developer lifestyle. Join your scintillating hosts Dave and Daniel, and let's hear about a tiny slice of their thrilling lives. Join us while waiting for a review. Hey, Dave. S4e27 (02:15.192) Hey Daniel. That was a very good read. Straight into it. Straight into the voice. Love it. Daniel (02:20.012) Gotta do the really good segways. S4e27 (02:26.242) Yes, yes. I don't miss segues to be honest. It me about storyboards for a second. Daniel (02:30.57) Like the... that kind of those kind of segues. I was thinking about like the two wheeled vehicles. S4e27 (02:35.552) Yeah, yeah, yeah. S4e27 (02:40.099) no, they're okay. They're okay. I guess. Daniel (02:41.788) I've never, I kinda wanna write one of those. Do you write segues or do you drive them? I guess you write them, S4e27 (02:45.56) Yeah. don't know. The thing I feel about that is intuitively I'd want to go as fast as I possibly could on one just to see what it was capable of. And then I think damage would incur, you know? Daniel (02:58.86) You Daniel (03:03.338) Yeah. We see like what gets damaged first, the device or you. S4e27 (03:05.281) Yeah, totally. Yeah, why not both? Yeah, yeah, indeed. Daniel (03:10.9) Why not both? Porque no los dos? Anyway, how's it going? What are you doing? S4e27 (03:18.956) What am I doing? Oof. Daniel (03:20.16) What kind of energy are you bringing to the show today? S4e27 (03:23.638) possibly, a little bit of, of headless chickening on my own direction for my own apps and where things are at. And, combined with a healthy dose of, cynicism about Apple's direction at the moment, or maybe an unhealthy dose. I'm not sure it's, actually benefiting me to be so cynical right now. Daniel (03:38.006) Fair, fair. You Daniel (03:45.611) Is it getting into cranky old man territory? S4e27 (03:48.534) Yeah, definitely. Definitely. I've hit middle middle age, Daniel, for sure. Daniel (03:55.455) Do you want to just start talking about it? what are your cynical thoughts? S4e27 (04:01.914) well, we've spoken about it on the show before, and I think, like some of this is about Apple's direction in general. And for me, it's sort of, got, certainly got triggered for want of a better phrase, by how Apple looked like they weren't really operating in good faith with the EU. and everything around that and, and now that's exhibiting still today, like when the new, Apple intelligence powered things start to happen. I've been reading accounts that the EU won't get that right now. That's, yeah. Yeah. And, you know, we're going to see more of that, I think, from Apple before they start, before the penny sort of starts to drop, that you're really just burning goodwill. It's odd. Daniel (04:40.458) Yeah, that's just, that is so petty. S4e27 (04:57.422) But then yeah, combine that with with other things like we've seen in the news in the last week. And this will date the show, but fair enough. Patreon and the way Apple are trying to claim revenue from all of of Patreon's interactions that pass through iOS, anything that sort of touches it, they want they want to have some level of cut from that. You might be able to describe that better than I just have, but I've read Daniel (05:24.406) Yeah. S4e27 (05:27.49) bits and bobs about it and it's definitely looks like, God, do they have to do this? This sort of seems a bit negative. Daniel (05:34.068) Yeah, they have like basically the backstory is there's a link. There's going to be a link in the show notes, but basically the backstory is Apple now has seriously claimed as far as I understand this. If I understand this correctly that because Patreon has an app on the app store, Apple is entitled to all like to a cut of all money that goes through Patreon. Like boggles the mind. Did you know, by the way, that if you listen to this podcast, S4e27 (05:39.683) Mm -hmm. S4e27 (05:59.436) Yep. Daniel (06:03.532) On an iPhone, that means that we are now entitled to 30 % of Apple's revenue, like minus the 20 billion that Google pays them to keep their monopoly, I think. S4e27 (06:14.142) Yeah, that's been the other thing in the news recently, Google's antitrust in that whole relationship. I feel like, I mean, we could go all over the place on the show with these things, but I kind of want to just sort of summarize with, it leaves me feeling like there's, kind of, for me now, there's a duality of Apple and perhaps for other people, this has existed for a long time, but I think I've come to this conclusion late. in some ways. And that is to say that there's the, there's the Apple I love in terms of, you know, their products and even all the way through to the development environment, Xcode's issues to be damned. I still love using it. You know, I forgive it for not auto completing as well as it might and other issues, but There's that Apple, there's the Apple where I get in my developer flow with Swift and Swift UI and I'm making cool things and I'm having fun and I love the products. And then on the other side, the other wolf, as it were. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The other wolf is the one that's basically behaving like a mafia boss over these things, right? And trying to go, well, you know, that's a nice revenue model with their video. Shame if somebody cut off your access. Daniel (07:20.332) there's two wolves inside of Apple. S4e27 (07:37.452) You know? Yeah. And I find it hard to square that. I really do. feel like, and you know, there's other things where App Store review is routinely a hurdle for people rather than necessarily being a positive experience, right? I expect to get rejected with every new app I put in the store now, first time around. Daniel (07:40.233) Yeah. S4e27 (08:06.366) And, and, know, almost every dev with an app in the store has a bit of a war story about that. the amount of which usually end up with, and I didn't really have to change very much if at all, it was just a case of convincing the reviewer. Like, so any one of these threads I could pull. but I think it's the, it really is the duality. There's the, love the tech. I love the, the, the, dev and then, yeah. seeing news articles where Apple's kind of behaving, I think, quite poorly in terms of how they're operating over revenue and their commitment to good faith working within the EU. I think I call that very much into question. It looks like they're trying to be deliberately obstructive. You know, and I can't make excuses for it. I'm not a John Gruber of the world or whatever, right? I can't just... Daniel (08:54.092) Yeah. S4e27 (09:05.4) drink the fruit juice and... Daniel (09:06.944) Yeah, the pendulum that has always existed within Apple between like hyper capitalist and very principled has swung over so far into hyper capitalist territory that it doesn't feel as good anymore. It doesn't feel as nice. It almost feels like Apple is not the default choice for people like us anymore, or it might be in the future. I've seen a post the other day. S4e27 (09:15.715) Mm S4e27 (09:32.002) Yes. Daniel (09:34.352) a friend of ours was going to a developer meetup with a lot of Apple or Swift developers. And one of the main topics of the whole meetup was like, so where do we go now? Do we leave? Do we stay? There's a sort of feeling within the larger community, seems. Not everybody, of course, but enough people are like, does this have a future now? And I think even if Apple kind of pulls through and finds itself again, S4e27 (09:40.312) Mm S4e27 (09:46.616) Yeah. Yeah. S4e27 (09:59.402) Yeah. Daniel (10:03.574) This is going to have long lasting negative consequences for them. S4e27 (10:07.35) It will, it will. And actually you've reminded me of something within all of this, which is I feel like I've kind of seen this exhibit in another area of my life with Apple in the past. So one of the things about my, the apps that I've got in the store, one of the reasons I play with real time video is cause I used to be, you know, part of the, and still am I guess, part of the real time video VJ community as it were. And these are These are guys who, you know, they run the visuals at shows. They go and do all that sort of event video production where you've got projectors and all the rest of it going on. And I remember maybe, I feel like probably about 10, 12 years ago, there was a shift. And you had, at one point, the MacBook Pro was sort of the ideal, the default, because of what it was capable of and the consistency and everything else. the video architecture as well was pretty good for that end of stuff. So you had a lot of things that you could play with as well that all ended up very well. And then there was a shift and Apple started to burn some goodwill and it was largely around things like the graphics cards and that end of stuff. Right. And desktop machines not being able to have, you know, update their GPUs very well and external GPUs never really happened. Yeah, yeah. And it all got a bit odd. And the fallout of some of this was that people started to build Windows machines and go over to having Windows rigs. And so Daniel (11:46.689) yeah, I remember they had beef with Nvidia or something, right? Like they still have. S4e27 (12:04.158) I think for me, conceptually, it went from being a community that was very focused towards, know, the Mac is what artists love to use and a really lovely environment to play in through to people then going, well, I can't really buy the kit at the level I want for a decent price here. I'm going to go and build a Windows machine because like the main software that people use for this runs on either. And now Yeah, Apple is a much smaller part of that community these days. so, like, you know, people still use MacBook Pros, but a lot more people are also using Alienware laptops or building, you know, machines that run in rack mounted setups that they can then just wheel out and are nicely transportable and that sort of thing. Yeah. So anyway. Within all of that, guess I feel I've seen a shift there before. And what you end up with on the other side is a lot more fragmentation. And you end up with, from a software development perspective, I think you end up in a situation where you need to be available in more than one place to be very successful. And I think this is going to apply to more niches over time. and probably does apply really to a lot more niches. And I think. Daniel (13:33.974) Yeah, because this time it's about everyone who makes money in the app store, You include it. how do you feel about, do you feel threatened right now by this development? Because right now, nothing has changed for you, right? S4e27 (13:38.284) Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so it's for, yeah. S4e27 (13:48.386) Yeah, nothing's really changed for me and I can keep making my apps and they're doing okay. And, know, that's fine. There's a route there, but I think looking at the, the mafia boss behavior, if you like, I look and I'm like, huh, there's, there's, I could build certain things and then not know whether, you know, Apple's going to say, actually we reject you because of blah, blah, blah. And, and, you know, the similar cut is desired. If, for example, I've thought about having a, a content delivery system where people can buy video content to use within my apps, I'd probably have a backend for that. And I, on the one hand, I can do all of that with in -app purchases and that's probably a really good way to do it. And actually to use the in -app purchase to unlock the content of the server. I feel like I either do that or then I do it entirely on the web outside of Apple. And it's literally just, I've got a login screen if you have an account and I can't advertise it then in the app because of Apple, right? Because if I do, they're going to want their cut. And even if I have the login and the rest of it, if, if on review, I get somebody goes through and looks at the sites and they decide that according to Daniel (14:59.734) You S4e27 (15:11.51) you know, item number, blah, blah, blah, in the app store rules. I'm sort of stepping out of line. Boom. Do I lose my app? Do I just not get the next build through review? You know? Daniel (15:25.664) Yeah. At the same time, like, I'm not saying you're wrong or anything. I'm just like trying to explore this because that was the case two years ago, right? Like two years ago it was the same, but at the same time, the feeling has kind of changed. S4e27 (15:33.048) Yeah. I was going to say that's not new. It's not new. Yeah. So this is the thing. know if I wanted to pinpoint it, the feeling that's changed is a view that there's good faith or a view that there's stick to the rules and everything will be okay. Well, I'm sure Patreon were feeling they stuck to the rules, you know? And one of the things I've read is that you know, they've sort of been in a bit of a gray area for quite a long time with stuff. Well, yeah, okay. but that means they were still getting stuff approved. They were still operating in this space. and that's the bit that gives me unease, right? It's like, yeah, something could shift and all of a sudden, all of that effort, all of that time that I've put into. to building my apps up and building this business up is effectively what it is. mean, it doesn't feel like it right now because I'm still at such a low level with everything. It's a hobby that's bringing in a bit of extra revenue, if I'm honest right now. But there's that feeling I can do all of that, all of that effort. And then Apple just decides, yeah, now off you go. or. know, if I don't build in a way that considers what Apple might do then I run incurring some risk myself and again none of this is new but seeing how they operate at a higher level in the news definitely lets you, lets me then feel like right I haven't got a lot of trust here I think is probably what it boils down to. Daniel (17:10.305) Yeah. Daniel (17:21.042) Right. feel like Apple used to be mostly the good guys. Ish. I mean, of course, still a large, U S American corporation or whatever. What's the like, you, you, you had like a certain, a certain amount of, yeah, they're mostly doing the right thing. They have some principles and now they seem to be going into just, yeah, let's just rent seek as much as we can and consequences be damned. We just want to extract the money as S4e27 (17:25.666) Yeah. Yeah. S4e27 (17:46.776) Mm Daniel (17:50.061) efficiently as possible and that makes you lose a certain respect. S4e27 (17:56.876) Yeah. Yeah. And if I think about, look at this just purely as a user even, we're seeing this now with the next version of Mac OS and the amount of people who compared it to Vista in terms of the amount of sort of like pop -ups that occur when you try to, I think it's installing an app that's not notarized. It's more obstructive. So I think the thing I saw, I've not installed the betas, I've not been playing with it right now, but it was something like you could give permission to be able to run this app, but then it's still going to ask you a week later. Right? It's not a permanent thing. Yep. Thank you. Help me. Yep. Okay. Daniel (18:39.172) no, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I actually looked into this and you're conflating two different things. So the week later thing is about screen recording and it's still very unclear. Like people are still trying to figure this out because what we know right now is on the current beta. So I haven't run myself. So this is secondhand knowledge, but on the current betas, if you have an app that wants to record the screen for example, if you want to share your screen on a zoom call or whatever, then S4e27 (18:56.707) Mm Daniel (19:04.748) The screen has changed from, can Zoom record your screen, yes or no, or enable this in the settings. It has changed from that to, all right, allow the app Zoom wants to use the unsecure way of recording your entire screen instead of using the native window picker to select a window to share. Do you still want to allow this, question mark, and S4e27 (19:28.354) Okay. Daniel (19:32.0) That will ask you every month or after every reboot. However, there is no currently as far as I've heard, there's no secure window picker thing. Apparently, maybe that's an API that hasn't been implemented yet, or it hasn't been discovered yet, or it hasn't documented yet. There's also talk about an entitlement that basically allows an app. S4e27 (19:49.826) Right. Daniel (19:57.472) that it's just a named entitlement that names there's named something like, can always record the screen without having to like ask every time or whatever. And that is present and you can in theory could request it, but no one knows right now, like should apps request that? And so it's very in transparent. And I think, so I think this is part of the, what I call the conscious principle part of Apple still, because of course these screens are super annoying and the communication around it is horrible. S4e27 (20:22.872) Yeah. Daniel (20:27.744) But at the same time, it feels to me like this is something that actual security people dream dreamt up for like actually improving your privacy. But at the same time, said that I said this to you before the show, but I want to like repeat it on the show basically is the last few episodes. I've been always defending Apple about privacy. Does it privacy or privacy privacy? and because I said like, yes, actually I, to me, it feels like there's a lot of like principled people. S4e27 (20:37.398) Yeah, yeah. S4e27 (20:42.51) Mm S4e27 (20:48.195) Yes. Daniel (20:57.514) working at Apple who do their best to actually really, really secure privacy for its users. And I still believe that, but at the same time, I'm also coming around to your point of view that Apple on top of that, at the same time is sometimes using privacy as an excuse to follow its business goals. Like for example, they're using privacy as an excuse to why you cannot link out to an external store or payment link from an app because S4e27 (21:04.621) Yes. S4e27 (21:19.32) Yes. Daniel (21:26.912) that might be able to endanger the user's privacy. And I mean, in theory, it could. But people have been buying stuff online for a while. That is something that is possible. So yeah, that feels way more like an excuse. So I'm coming around to, I still think that privacy -wise, Apple products are the least worst. Well, at the same time, the S4e27 (21:36.259) Yes. S4e27 (21:42.776) Yeah. S4e27 (21:52.458) Mm -hmm. Yeah, I'd agree. I definitely agree on that. Daniel (21:56.684) There are things like the incessant, or not incessant, but like the repeated notifications and screens, info screens that just inform you helpfully about the services that Apple provides with Apple One and whatever. And at the same time, just like preventing others, like competitors from doing anything that might just hinder Apple from getting its 30 % cut. And that feels very cynical to me. S4e27 (22:08.056) Yes. S4e27 (22:22.488) Yes. Absolutely. And I kind of want to move on from the subject in a sense of, like I said on a previous show, a lot of this for me is vibes driven, right? And I think there's a nice way of me dressing up the fact that I haven't looked in too deeply into some of these issues specifically. You know, I'm picking up on what other people are saying, filing that against my own sort of view of like, God, again, you know, it's like a laundry list of petty grievances. Daniel (22:29.195) Mm -hmm. Daniel (22:50.913) Yeah. S4e27 (22:55.15) But I think, know, again, just to summarize this really is a case of like, just acknowledging those, those two wolves for me in a lot of ways. Right. And, yeah, I wrestle with that. You know, I was, I was never happy with the way Microsoft were behaving in the antitrust era 20 odd years ago now. yeah. Daniel (23:22.764) Yeah, they're doing way better these days. Like, Microsoft is doing just as much to secure market dominance, but they're doing it way smarter in a way that makes them seem like the good guys way better. S4e27 (23:25.229) Yes I are. S4e27 (23:35.564) Yeah, yeah, for sure. Daniel (23:36.682) Like they don't want to be the desktop people anymore. They're just like, they just want to be in every development stack with Visual Studio Code and the GitHub and everything. like they're doing a great job at that. a bit, this is a bit scary actually how good a job they're doing. But yeah, like they're getting good vibes right now, whereas Apple is collecting negative aura points. S4e27 (23:48.611) Yes. S4e27 (24:00.15) Yeah, yeah, for sure. And all of this is, is, it feels like a bit of an amorphous blob that I'm sort of working around mentally, I guess. But I think it, it just coalesced into a point of view that you've seen with me where I'm looking at things like Kotlin Multiplatform and that sort of stuff. Like, is there a future to just like skipping out all of this and going, well, okay, I've got this Multiplatform stack. I produce apps, I produce software in this area. And Apple then just becomes just another syndication point effectively of that software. And, you know, I'll do my best to operate within the app store. Honestly, I'm a little guy in all of this. I'm probably not going to get, you know, like treated too badly overall. and just keep moving on in life, right? Like this is just the game. This is the way things are. and Google is then just another syndication point inside of all of that. And, you know, ideal world, I'd probably have something on Linux as well, although that's a whole other kettle of bananas. You know, like I say, to just keep trucking. Daniel (25:06.23) Ha ha. Daniel (25:09.907) Dave, can't expect me to write all of these down in the titles documents. S4e27 (25:14.222) I love that. I like taking a common phrase and not saying it quite right. yeah, and there is no point to what I'm saying here at the moment. I'm not decided, right? There's no like, my God, this is the future. I've got to jump on it. I've looked at Kotlin Multiplatform and Compose. It looks lovely. There are some bits within it for what I want to do that are not as developed as I might want. So actually, working with real -time video and filtering and that kind of stuff, there'd be a lot more that I'd have to take on in owning the stack. And that feels a bit prohibitive. So I might like the UI, I might like the actual language, but do I really want to build AV foundation, core image, all the way through to metal? Daniel (26:09.289) tricky. Have you considered looking at Flutter and Dart? S4e27 (26:10.488) Probably not. S4e27 (26:14.986) A little. Yeah. So funny, you should mention a little bit. So I've been looking at that because we have a weekly developer call operating out of the discord that we link in the show notes here. And it occurs on Monday nights, New Zealand time, Monday mornings for a lot of people in the EU. And on that call, A couple of people have been looking at Flutter. One person in particular is a Flutter dev. And we try not to discriminate. They're more than welcome. And like I say, on those terms, Discord is not exclusionary. So it's quite nice. Daniel (26:51.912) I am employing that person, I think. As a Flutterdash. S4e27 (27:09.068) What I have seen Daniel from those people talking about it is just the sheer joy they've had of some of the developer experience, like hot reloading as they go with the UI. So every time you save a file, the simulator or the device hooked up just refreshes and shows it you. That's stuff's really neat. And then as I dug a bit deeper myself, what I've found is there's a lot of packages out there. There's a lot of bits already formed. at quite a good level of maturity in the stack. I've kind of blinked and missed this over the last however many years since Flutter came out. Daniel (27:47.724) Yeah, because it seems like a very Google centric technology, right? So us very apple centric people are usually dismissive, but yeah. S4e27 (27:56.172) Yeah, yeah. Daniel (27:58.176) I've seen good things as well, especially because it seems to be like multi -platform from the start, which among other things mean that you can decide at some point in your stack, like, hey, if I want this operating system, then just switch to native code for this operating system and then like implement something twice or three times a week. S4e27 (28:03.917) Mm -hmm. S4e27 (28:16.588) Yes. S4e27 (28:20.14) Yeah. And there is that potential route. The other thing that gives me a bit of an angle for what I love is that the real time video, the accelerated GPU shaders kind of story, if you like, it's not as well formed as Apple's, right? So don't get me wrong, AV foundation and core image, they solve. a lot of problems that I don't think is always acknowledged really. But over on the Flutter side, the GPU shader story is looking quite interesting. They're moving to a new stack. The promise is that you'll write your shaders once and it will compile down to something that's optimal. So for example, it's a metal backend on Apple. Yeah. Daniel (29:15.51) cam. S4e27 (29:18.766) And, you know, there's a bit of work for to be done over there or whatever, but it's heading in a direction that I think is quite positive. So I don't know. I think this is me going, yep, there's another thing to explore when I have time. It looks quite interesting. And it's not going to be no work, but it might be more accessible for what I want to do. So. Daniel (29:44.908) Cool, yeah, so maybe keep an eye on it just in case. S4e27 (29:48.226) Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I'm not done with my Apple dev, right? To be clear, I've got apps in the store, I've got packages that do lots of stuff to get things done. And I love working with it. So, you know, I think I'm going to just keep cranking on that, try and ignore some of this noise as best I can. Whilst also looking at things like Flutter and seeing what I might do if I wanted to be in more than one place. Daniel (30:17.952) Yeah, yeah, I get that. get that. I'm like in the very lucky position that I can kind of look at this from the sidelines. Like the telemetry deck currently doesn't have an app in the app store. There was a plan for an app at one point and that kind of still exists in some test flights, but like, please don't use it because it's very unfinished and incomplete. But at the same time right now, like we have the web interface, which is S4e27 (30:25.57) Mm Daniel (30:46.432) Of course, not as polished as an app would be, but it's very usable. You can use it as a web app on your phone even. But yeah, I can just do payment via Stripe. We are on again, off again, discussing how to update the payment model to a more volume -based payment model, but that's neither here nor there. But if we decide to do that, we don't have to discuss with Apple. We have to talk to our customers or potential customers, which is... S4e27 (31:13.656) No. Daniel (31:16.684) a way more direct conversation. And I don't have to be afraid that Apple will suddenly decide that I can't do my business anymore. So that is really nice to not have that worry. And at the same time, like a lot of the code that I write is still in Swift, which is a fantastic language and written in Xcode, which is a pretty good IDE. No, Xcode is fantastic. I love Xcode, especially like I've started, I started using the 16 betas now for S4e27 (31:25.112) Yes. S4e27 (31:34.242) Mm S4e27 (31:38.446) Yeah. Daniel (31:46.784) like beta, like ever since like beta five came out, because that's stable enough to actually use. Auto -completion has gotten a lot better and that is without the AI stuff. It's just like the, like, it's just like source kit interpreting your source code in a better way. And yeah, it is like mighty fast. Compilation times are slightly down. It's stable ish, so. Yeah, for me at least like writing my Swift packages, it is very good. Yeah. S4e27 (32:18.776) Awesome. And that's the thing, right? It's not any one, there's no clear perfect route between all of these balances of things. But like, if you're enjoying the tooling, you're enjoying the language, you're having fun with what you're doing. Like, I think it's legitimate to ignore the other wolf, as it were, that we've described. Daniel (32:44.204) Hmm. S4e27 (32:49.004) You know, cause you're not going to change it. You're not going to solve it. think we can voice a bit of disquiet on it for sure. And so I'm saying this makes me uncomfortable. I worry about that end of stuff with Apple, but like certainly in your situation, you're outside of the payment system and that side of stuff and adjacent, but you're able to have a lot of fun with that. That's to me, that's living the dream. Like this is why that's that. Go on. Daniel (33:11.02) I tell you what I miss though. I tell you, I miss working on native apps. Like JavaScript frameworks are pretty good these days and you can do a lot. But it just, I every other day or so I'm like writing, I'm working on the UI and I'm like, this would be so much cooler in SwiftUI or even in UIKit. But it's not, it's just like the reality that I live in. S4e27 (33:20.45) Mm -hmm. Daniel (33:41.223) But yeah, this is something that I kind of miss a little S4e27 (33:45.612) Yeah, no, I hear that. And, you know, we've talked before about how much I don't really suit web development. You know, that endless stuff always kind of trips me up every time I've got to make a new landing page or whatever for my apps. And I hit that. I hit that wall of like, I wish I could just do this in SwiftUI. Maybe one day I'll be saying, I wish I could just do this in Flutter. And then the answer to that is you can. Because Flutter has a web story to it. Hmm. But I think. Daniel (34:19.734) No, I'm not rewriting my entire front end in Flutter today. No, I am not. I am not. I am not. Maybe. Should I maybe rewrite everything in Flutter? Maybe I should rewrite everything in Flutter. S4e27 (34:23.274) No, no, no, no, no, no, no. And that will have a load of edges and corners on it that we don't know as well. So. No. Daniel, I'm saying no. You've got a working stack and you know that that same logic should apply to me, right? There's no world in which suddenly rewriting everything I've got in Flutter just because is kind of a great use of my time. There's a... Daniel (34:36.0) Fine. S4e27 (34:52.248) There's a world where I explore a proof of concept. start to build something else on the side and then maybe one day transition over to it or something new is done in it. But I think, yeah, I should be looking at this. I keep talking about it. I keep having these misgivings and I probably need to come out of the theoretical and find a project that lets me explore the code. And then I'll have a much more informed decision about what the other side like is the grass greener or not I think is the the question I need to ask answer for myself. But yeah, I'm gonna need it. Daniel (35:29.228) Good luck. We'll be right along on your journey. S4e27 (35:33.934) But I want to talk about a couple of other things Daniel. I'm looking down our show notes and yeah yeah yeah exactly. Yeah 35 minutes in according to the counter here. I'm sorry dude. But yeah so what is going on on your side? I've got a note about you did a TikTok and it's linked. Daniel (35:42.883) yeah, let's begin the show. That was How Are You, Dave? So now let's get into the show. Daniel (36:00.096) I did a TikTok. So I've been debating and I think even on the show, like what's my story after Twitter? like, actually today I talked to a potential customer, large company, like it would be really nice to get those people as a customer. And we asked them, like, how did you hear about us? And they were like, yeah, one of our developers just like threw you guys into the ring. when we were talking about like what analytics stack to use. And I'm like, this is so nice. So we should continue. We should continue like connecting with developers and being in a developer space because even though like many people who actually use analytics are in marketing or BI or whatever. I like that. This is a space where I feel very, very welcome. And it's a space where I feel very at home because I am a developer. S4e27 (36:32.14) Word of mouth. S4e27 (36:44.034) Mm -hmm. Daniel (36:54.004) So yeah, so we're going to continue being in that space. And I feel very vindicated. But anyway, the discussion was how, because it used to be, I'm on Twitter, I'm just live tweeting my anguish and pain and also successes in developing TelemetryDeck. And that is just something that feels very natural to me and is very cool and gets reach and gets word of mouth. S4e27 (37:01.154) Lovely. S4e27 (37:22.531) Mm Daniel (37:24.492) Everyone is happy. Now the thing is this weird guy bought Twitter. I don't know if you heard about it. And now it's kind of like an alt -right hellscape. So we are not really on Twitter anymore. Like there's an auto post of the post, the blog post, I think. And so, but the thing is like not everyone left Twitter. There's like, I want to say 20 -ish percent of the, of the, of my developer bubble are still on Twitter. Then another 20%. went to went to mastodon. Then some people went to blue sky. Some people went to threads. I still can't really figure out threads, but I try to be on there every now and then. And it's like, like the rest kind of went into discord or slacks or just like dropped off the face of the earth kind of like is not is not enough in the public internet anymore or is on Reddit or whatever. everything's kind of splintering apart, right? So I'm like, I've been discussing with also with Lisa like what like which channels should we be really present on? Because we can't be everywhere because that's just like too much work. Should we be on YouTube? Should we be there? Should we be there? And I was thinking, like even our automated clips from our podcast, right? Like even those posted to TikTok get pretty good views. Like people kind of hear about our podcast this way, also on YouTube. So I was thinking, Maybe the future of social media is now short form video, as much as I kind of am afraid of that, because I don't feel as photogenic as some people. But I do have a blue beard, so that gives me plus 10 advantage already. So I've been thinking I should just experiment with that. So Telemetry has a TikTok account already. And so I was like, OK, what can I post on there? S4e27 (38:56.248) He S4e27 (39:00.33) man. S4e27 (39:04.002) Yes, it does. Daniel (39:18.508) And so my first post was kind of like, or not the first first, but the post that I made was a three minute explainer video on how Apple does phased rollout, where we can see in the telemetry data that they kind of roll out to 5 % ish of device. Like new updates are usually rolled out to around 5%. Then a few weeks later, they go to 25%, then 50 or 60 or 70. Like it's a bit unclear. S4e27 (39:31.426) Okay. Daniel (39:47.988) And then just like up to everyone else. And then you just have a few stragglers who kind of click on not now every time. And I kind of tried to connect this to the CrowdStrike outage because that's exactly what CrowdStrike did not do. They released the infamous update to every single device that's connected to them at once. that was like the biggest problem with that whole outage. S4e27 (40:03.895) Yes. S4e27 (40:14.336) It really was. Yes. Daniel (40:15.542) And so yeah, that was actually very successful because like, I don't know, a thousand views, it goes like a bunch of reposts, like not so successful for a big TikTok account, but for no one knows this TikTok account, this is actually like, this makes me wanna like at least continue doing this for a while. So yeah, I feel emboldened and I'm like, okay, I need to find more ideas to talk about. S4e27 (40:28.195) Mm Daniel (40:43.604) And I think I'm overthinking this. think I just like just every day sit down and be like, hey, I can explain this because it's on my mind right now. And it's like tangentially related to analytics just because I work in the analytics space. And so that's the goal. S4e27 (40:57.154) You gotta go, I think you gotta go with whatever feels like straightforward. Daniel (41:02.858) Yeah, because it needs to be, it needs to feel authentic. S4e27 (41:06.946) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I had some plans to pull together a lot of like how -to videos for my apps and stuff that I still haven't done. I think there's value to me doing it and actually doing it as sort of short form video and syndicating it out to TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. And that's the thing, right? You can actually produce once and send many to some of this fragmented landscape. Daniel (41:17.814) Hmm. Daniel (41:32.192) Yes, I did that. I posted the same video on Reels and YouTube shorts. Well, I didn't put it in YouTube shorts because YouTube shorts have to be below a minute. I don't know what to do about that. I could post it as a video, but it's it's portrait. So it doesn't really feel right. So yeah, I've been, I have to think about this some more, but like on Reels, it kind of didn't get any traction, but yeah, I'm going to continue posting them on Instagram Reels as of course as well. S4e27 (41:36.162) Yep. Yep. S4e27 (41:49.676) Yeah. Yeah. S4e27 (42:02.252) I was going to say for the sake of, of, of an upload and copy and posting the description or whatever, like it, to me, feels like it's worth being in multiple places, but perhaps, yeah, swerving, swerving your ex as it were on that one. Not that people are really posting short form video there on the regular, I guess, in the same way as TikTok, but it's interesting to me. I think. like you said, okay, you went from having a small account, no real followers to then suddenly getting a thousand views with that video. And then what it says to me is that TikTok's algorithm's pretty bloody good at surfacing stuff to people that are interested in it, I'd guess. Daniel (42:51.532) It is like, mean, of course I'm very sure that if I continue posting, then it will be even better. But I think what it does is like, will just like randomly show new videos to 200 ish random people. And then kind of based on whether they continue watching or if they like the video, then like kind of decide which bubble to post it to. And that's like super interesting. It kind of works like on me too, like on my private YouTube, TikTok account. Like I get a lot of stuff that is actually interesting to me. So. S4e27 (42:58.402) Yes. S4e27 (43:04.728) Mm Daniel (43:21.29) Yeah. Also on watching it back, realized I sound bad because usually when I even, when I hear my voice, is recorded through this here microphone. So it sounds pretty good because it's like a decent microphone, right? But like that was recorded just through my bill phones built in microphone. And now I know why so many tick tock people have the, have like some kind of Bluetooth microphone, like just held up to their, to their mouth. S4e27 (43:22.638) That's cool. Daniel (43:51.02) because it just sounds way better. Or the other thing that TikTokers do is like they have the plug -in Apple EarPods with the microphone pod and just like have that very close to their mouth. And so what I did was I used the business Amazon account to order a plug -in Apple Earphones for 15 bucks. S4e27 (44:03.928) Yes. S4e27 (44:11.368) Ayyyy. That's a Daniel (44:12.96) That's my investment in the future of this company. S4e27 (44:16.288) Right. And the future of this company is short form video. Daniel (44:20.236) Let's see about that. I'm still finding it very hard to get over the hump of like, yeah, I'm just going to post something because I can't just dance because I'm not a very good dancer. And even that, of course, lot of preparation, think. huge amount of respect to the people who do these really complicated dances and choreographies. S4e27 (44:30.305) Yeah. Daniel (44:47.468) But no, I have to have something to say and that needs to be reasonably thought out. like it's basically you have to put in the same amount of thinking I think like as you would in a Twitter thread. But then you just like write down the Twitter thread and then you kind of or at least like have it in your head and then like just read it off or like to say it out. And I feel self -conscious Dave, I feel so self -conscious. S4e27 (45:07.736) Yeah. S4e27 (45:13.134) Ha ha. Daniel (45:13.982) So yeah, I'm just going to try and have fun with it. I'm not take myself too seriously and at the same time explore what's out there and also find ways of like getting over that hump of self -confidence, con concience. I mean, it worked for this podcast, right? S4e27 (45:29.89) have some ideas of approaches you yeah yeah and I was gonna say like there's so if I think about what works with this podcast is there's two of us and we bounce off each other and certainly if I was to be and I've tried this right I had a solo short podcast that I called iterate and I managed about seven or eight episodes at most I think before I canned it because it just felt weird talking to myself like I didn't enjoy it Daniel (45:55.476) Yeah, I get that. Yeah. S4e27 (45:59.682) But I think maybe there's a thread to pull there. Like I'm not suggesting you start a telemetry deck specific podcast or like a show that's just about it. But like, if you think about the sort of typical questions you're getting asked, like if there's commonality to some of those, you people are always asking you how to go and do blah. If you think about the, Daniel (46:27.39) that's tricky. S4e27 (46:28.79) the monthly reports that you write up, the industry reports and things that you do to sort of break down operating system splits. So I guess I'm sort of saying anything that might become a blog post could be something you kind of talk to because you've already done that thinking. It's just that it doesn't exist in video form. That could be another way of getting a bit of bang for buck on that sort of thinking. The reason I suggested answering typical questions is because then the users, customers asking questions becomes your cohost, becomes the thing you're bouncing off. Daniel (47:04.364) I've been thinking about that. The thing is, either our user interface is now good enough that people just like are able to deal with it or that it's so bad that they kind of give up and don't even ask the questions. But the questions that I get are mostly like, how do I write this very complicated query, which I can answer. And I have actually have built something new that will help. S4e27 (47:23.181) Yeah. Daniel (47:28.488) answer me these things faster. But at the same time, it doesn't really lend itself to video content or short form. Yeah. S4e27 (47:33.298) No, no, and it's not good for lead generation. guess it's more in the support category because lead generation really, I guess you should be talking about the type of problems customers have before they come to you and then how that can be solved with telemetry deck. Daniel (47:51.808) Yeah. But maybe I can take inspiration from customer calls, like the one I have today. That might be cool. S4e27 (47:58.166) Yeah. Yeah. So from, from some of your sales calls here. Yeah. Daniel (48:06.154) I got to tell you about the thing I built. close the TikTok topic, open the Daniel built something cool topic. S4e27 (48:11.29) Mm And let's and let's close out on this topic because I'm going to have to start the rest of my day shortly, Daniel, if we're recording early in the morning here for me. But go for it. Go on. Daniel (48:21.344) Right, okay, give me five minutes just because I am incredibly, I feel like I feel so smart right now. I feel galaxy brain smart. So, telemetry queries, you can use the editor to query the telemetry database, but it is limited. It doesn't have the full feature set. But if you wanna have the full features that you kind of have to write JSON based queries by hand, right? And that's very complicated because, You don't really know. There's documentation that we have. you don't really know what are all the options. And also, for each thing, even I always have to look up, OK, I'm using a selector filter. Is the property named value, or is it named something else? Is it named field or whatever? And so for ages, I've been pushed ahead of me the idea of creating a user interface that creates this complicated code. telemetry query structure for me. But the problem is, it is just a lot. Because I would basically need to write a component for every property that a query has. But these properties can have subcomponents. For example, I don't know if our filters. Basically, we have a filter editor that works that way. But for the whole query thing, it's just too much. And so last weekend, I was like, it's the weekend. I can just noodle around with stuff. I don't have to work on productive stuff. I'm just going to have like, do an experiment. And I was like, what if I define a schema and then the user interface kind of builds itself after that schema. And so it turns out there's a thing called JSON schema that describes how JSON, like how a JSON object needs to be specified. Like it would, it's basically like how you define a struct in Swift, right? So you say like, okay, it has these, these four properties and these properties have these, like are these kinds of structs. S4e27 (49:48.93) He he. Daniel (50:18.186) And this is required. This is not required. This is a string. This is an int, whatever. And from that definition, you totally can build an interface. So now I've not created one component per thing, per property for that. I built a string editing component, a int editing component, and components for managing arrays and objects, which then are kind of recursive. worked surprisingly well over the last week. One of my projects that I worked on off and on whenever I was not doing anything else was actually finishing that. And now you can, if you have a custom query in telemetry deck, you can actually now use your mouse to edit that query, even though it is JSON behind it. And I'm mighty proud of that. It's not the best UI yet. S4e27 (50:48.462) Hell yeah. S4e27 (51:10.158) That's fantastic. Daniel (51:15.148) As in it feels a bit clunky and it has a few more, too many lines visually and stuff like that. But it's way better than writing them by hand and I kind of optimize from S4e27 (51:25.646) Do you have a post, a video or a blog that I could link that talks about it? Okay. Well. Daniel (51:29.74) Not yet, not yet, not yet. But I'm so going to have to write something. But the other thing is like my coworker Chiat has been writing, like working a lot on the Swift 6 features for the telemetry SDK. And so we have a blog post about that and that kind of takes precedence. Oops, I touched my computer. S4e27 (51:50.732) yeah, yeah, yeah. I just want to show listeners of the show something visual as to what you're talking about, like a mustard on post or something. Yeah, toot will do. A toot will definitely do. Daniel (51:59.026) Hang on, I have a toot. I have a toot that I can link. Tootle do. You have to talk for two minutes while I find this toot. But I'm done with this topic, so yeah. S4e27 (52:10.644) Okay, well, let's wrap the show. You can find the toot. So yeah, I'm going to read the outro while you're toot finding Daniel. So yes, thanks for listening, dear listener. And please rate us on iTunes and YouTube. Send us emails at contact at waiting for review and join the discord. It's linked in the show notes and we Daniel (52:24.62) Please do. S4e27 (52:40.29) definitely love to have new people joining that discord who are in the community. It's awesome. But yeah, before and now it's written for you to read at Daniel. So it's where where can people find you, Dave? And you're still finding. So I'll answer my own question. This is kind of fun. You can find me on Mastodon at Dave at social light beam apps dot com. And you can find me on Instagram as lightbeamapps .com or one word dot com is spelt D O T com. And yeah, that's me. Daniel, where can people find you? Daniel (53:20.108) Go to TikTok and search for telemetry deck. S4e27 (53:24.01) Ooh, feed that algorithm. Love it. Love it. Well, you've... Excellent. Right, well, take care, Daniel. Catch you soon. Daniel (53:26.369) You Yeah, I did find the toot. I added it to the show notes so we can like, we can just link to that. Daniel (53:40.512) Yeah, see you soon, Dave. This was fantastic, see you soon. Bye. S4e27 (53:44.856) Bye bye. Daniel (53:48.428) now we don't stop recording because this is the inofficial after show that only if you are a Patreon subscriber that at least gives us like don't know 500 bucks a month is that how much we're selling this the after show for S4e27 (54:02.862) Yeah, I guess so. And we're going to do everything outside of Apple so we get 100 % of the cut after Patreon. Yeah. Yeah, nice one. Daniel (54:04.32) Ha ha. Daniel (54:09.078) Nice. Nice. Well, this was a nice show. I like this. I kind of didn't grab my beer during the show because I didn't want to have it on video, but do see that fantastic logo of this guy? S4e27 (54:15.788) Ha ha ha ha! S4e27 (54:21.184) Yeah, just hold it back just a little bit, a little bit further back. There we go. you. Yeah, you do. Damn it. Daniel (54:24.46) no, I think I have background blur on. Hang on, hang on. Yeah, portrait. It still has background blur. this is better. S4e27 (54:32.468) no that is clearer, that is clearer. Hey! Okay he's happy, he's got a beer. Brilliant. I'm trying to think of what's going on in my workspace that doesn't get shown on the show. It's only something I've got. I may need to do the blur on mine as well but I have a transformer. Daniel (54:37.484) It's just a little just a little drunk guy Daniel (54:57.185) I love that. I love that. S4e27 (54:58.806) Yeah, yeah, he's like my new desk buddy. His name's Bulkhead. Yeah. Daniel (55:02.942) he's so cool. I've been taking space shuttles into the new office. Turns out I have a lot of space shuttles. I didn't even realize. I still have the big Lego one here, but I have the plush one in the office now. And I have this one. S4e27 (55:12.684) Nice. S4e27 (55:16.278) If you can take them into the office and then not feel bereft of space shuttles at home, then you've definitely got many space shuttles. That's cool. Daniel (55:23.436) Yeah, no, I have like enough space shuttles. I also have my space shuttle cup that I still have at home S4e27 (55:28.312) Mm I forgot Dundee, have you seen a space shuttle launch? Daniel (55:35.05) No, my space age kind of started after they shut down the program. S4e27 (55:42.702) Okay, that's a shame. That was a shame. Daniel (55:43.948) Which is such a shame. But yeah, kind of became, like as a kid I was like super into space, but like I kind of became space aware when I was starting like really getting into Kerbal Space Program. And then I kind of hyper -focused on the whole topic for a long time. And I kind of still am, but yeah, it's been, I don't know, like when did the last space shuttle fly? Like 2008, 2009, something like that. S4e27 (56:13.108) Yeah, I don't know. Daniel (56:13.372) And I didn't even think of going there. S4e27 (56:20.92) We have a family friend who did at the time, saw one of the last launches here, spent a lot of time in that part of the world at the time and we were getting photographs back. Daniel (56:30.336) Yeah, when I spent some time in San Francisco, kind of wanted to, like every time they announced a space launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base, which is kind of a few hundred clicks south of San Francisco, sometimes they they launch northwards if they want to go into an orbital trajectory that kind of takes them over the poles, right? Because that's perfect for spy satellites. And so like whenever a launch was announced, I would go up to Twin Peaks, which is these S4e27 (56:54.008) Yep. Daniel (57:00.308) like two little hills above the city and try to see, but they always got either canceled or like were covered by cloud coverage. and therefore invisible. So that was kind of sad. But at one point, I really want to see a spacecraft launch. That would be really nice. S4e27 (57:18.102) Yeah, yeah for sure. We get them here, we get satellite launches and stuff going up. Daniel (57:25.211) you got that, what was that called, Adam? No. You got that. S4e27 (57:29.164) Yeah, I don't know. on the South Island somewhere, I think. Yeah. Daniel (57:31.914) Yeah, yeah, yeah. what's it called? What's it called? I don't know. I don't know. But yeah, those are cool. Augsburg has its own space company now, RFA, Rocket Factory Augsburg. They launched from Scotland though. S4e27 (57:38.115) Yeah. S4e27 (57:47.362) Yep, now that makes sense. Daniel (57:48.288) But they built the rockets here, which is kind of nice. I've been kind of like, can I somehow get in that factory and just get to know people just because I'm really into that kind of thing. So far. S4e27 (57:51.566) too. S4e27 (58:01.831) Are they interested in privacy -first analytics? Daniel (58:04.684) So what I did actually was I met at a business event, actually at the fuck up night, which is where startups tell, like go on stage and tell about their biggest fuck ups. S4e27 (58:20.174) But, yep. Daniel (58:21.348) I met, a, an, an intern who was working there. So I know I have one LinkedIn contact with the company, with the intern, with an intern. So, so I'm working my way up the chain. S4e27 (58:30.638) Okay, okay. Well, yeah, yeah, you should. I've got visions of you then pivoting into like, yeah, telemetry onboard these things. Daniel (58:49.92) I mean, that was like the startup I tried to do before telemetry. S4e27 (58:55.18) Yeah, for space. Daniel (58:58.3) not telemetry, like, basically like managing data in space. Like, have I never told you that story? S4e27 (59:08.354) No, no, I remember the libido app and I remember you had a privacy search thing. Yeah, yeah, keep going. Daniel (59:12.182) Yeah, the libido app was afterward. that was kind of, Yeah, yeah. So before the libido app, think that was before, might have been like in parallel, but basically I was unhappy with my job. And then a friend who like from a, like who I from a previous job was like, Hey, are you still really into space? And I'm like, yes, why? And he's like, yeah, because I have this buddy and he kind of wants to create a startup. S4e27 (59:42.893) Mm -hmm. Daniel (59:43.692) And so I met the buddy and he was like, did you know, do you know what a CubeSat is? And I'm like, I do know what a CubeSat is, but like for you, basically it's a satellite that is 10 by 10 by 10 centimeters. And it's usually built using phone hardware. So it's very cheap to build and it's also less than a kilo. So it's actually very easy to launch and like hundreds of these things, these things regularly get launched as secondary payloads. they just like to take a ride in any rocket that goes up. S4e27 (01:00:13.08) Yeah. Yeah. Daniel (01:00:13.612) because of just a few cubes. They don't have a huge amount of power because they only have the solar panels that kind of fit to the outside of the cube. they don't have a lot of heat dissipation so they can't... Sorry? S4e27 (01:00:24.758) cute they're cute they're like these little just these little things floating up there you know Daniel (01:00:30.367) Yeah. Yeah, the biggest thing is actually heat dissipation because you can get a lot of energy from the sun, but if you use that energy, then that generates heat, which in space, it's very hard to dissipate. And so because of that, they cannot use very strong radios. And so the problem is the thing kind of gathers data for a whole orbit, but is only above its ground station for 10 minutes or so of that orbit. S4e27 (01:00:40.6) Mm Daniel (01:00:58.86) where it has like the angle is good enough so it can like beam down data with lower low energy. Right. And so that will never get down all the data. Like you will get about 10 to 20 % of the data that the thing collects, you will actually be able to use, which is a, which is a shame. And so, and so this guy was like, Hey, I am the, S4e27 (01:01:13.046) Okay. Yep. Daniel (01:01:22.376) He was a rocket physics, like an engine physics guy, explosion physics guy at Ariana space, right, for the Ariane rocket. And so he's like, I have connections into the space industry and can we build, we can build like slightly bigger satellites that speak the same radio frequencies and then kind of receive the data from the CubeSats. And then because we have bigger satellites, kind of beam them down, we'd be the relay satellites. And so we had. S4e27 (01:01:44.855) Yep. S4e27 (01:01:48.44) Yeah. Yeah. Some sort of mesh type scenario kind of springs to mind here. Yeah. Daniel (01:01:52.712) Right, right. And so we kind of got into that. The company was going to be called Orbital Data, which is now the name of my part of the telemetry company, actually. And so we had the original buddy who kind of introduced me to the other guy who is a embedded systems programmer. We had a guy from Apple who did a lot of work on XServe. S4e27 (01:01:57.966) Ahem. Daniel (01:02:23.029) and on disk drives and stuff like that, because like in space, you kind of need to take store data very like in triplicate or more because like there's like just like free ions whizzing through and they kind of flip your bits, right? S4e27 (01:02:32.716) Radiation. Yep. Yep. That sounds fun. Daniel (01:02:41.602) just getting my bits flipped. We had someone else. Anyway, we had another embedded systems guy. And so we had we within. S4e27 (01:02:53.378) How far did you get? I've got to know how close to launch. Daniel (01:02:56.426) Yeah, we had a deal with, not very close, but we had a deal with OHB, which makes satellite buses. So basically empty satellites. It's like a satellite that does nothing except keep itself in space. it has solar panels. It has a tiny engine. It has reaction control systems, like that. And you can kind of put in your own payload in there. So we had a deal with OHB, which is a Bremen based company to build these kinds of things, to supplies with a few of those. We were at ESA, the European Space Agency. They were like, we're not going to give you money, but we're going to give you access to experts. And so we had a few Airbus employees and a few ESA employees just on speed dial, basically, for questions, which was very nice. And also, they got us access to their laser terminals, which is basically one way to get data from space is not via radio, but... S4e27 (01:03:46.926) That's cool. Yep. Daniel (01:03:55.5) If you buy one, like if you attach one one, a freaking laser, like the things like a tube, there's like 10 centimeters across, right? And I want to say 30, 40 centimeters long. And that thing can like send down data very quickly to earth. But you, of course you have to, or to another satellite. they have, ESA has relay satellites to receive these laser beams in geo. And so you kind of just beam to them. S4e27 (01:03:57.324) parking lasers. S4e27 (01:04:05.944) Mm -hmm. S4e27 (01:04:10.126) That's fun. Daniel (01:04:22.166) But the thing is, we had a prototype of that laser thing in the office. it's like you were not allowed to put your finger inside the laser because that would actually hurt you properly. And what we also had was prototypes for ETL pipelines. That was kind of my whole thing. ETL is Extract Transform Load. And so I was trying to build an infrastructure where most of that stuff was happening on the satellites. S4e27 (01:04:22.574) Surely. S4e27 (01:04:40.514) Yeah. Yeah. It's a martial the daughter and bring it down. Yeah. Daniel (01:04:51.04) so that you could write algorithms to decide whether the data was worth it for you before incurring all that bandwidth costs of getting stuff down. But you could totally just download everything because we got it from the CubeSats. And of course, you have all these modules that work together. But every step of the way, you need to do the calculations and replicate as well and then do a vote on the result and stuff like that. And so that was my contribution to the whole thing. S4e27 (01:05:00.632) Mm Daniel (01:05:20.998) And we went as far as there's a thing for startup founders called Exist, which you apply for, and then they help you founding the actual corporation. And also, they pay your salaries for a year, which is very cool, of course. And the thing is just, S4e27 (01:05:44.046) That's very cool. Excuse me. S4e27 (01:05:49.742) This is standing desk. Daniel (01:05:50.181) What are you doing? I can do that too, you see. Because I can move my chair. S4e27 (01:05:59.244) Yeah, the other one is like Daniel (01:06:04.541) Nope. S4e27 (01:06:06.22) Yeah, anyway, you were mid -flagged, so keep going, man. Daniel (01:06:08.332) one of the possible co -founders was just getting really on my nerves. Because he kind of discovered that I get really annoyed when people, like this was during the Trump presidency, right? And so he discovered that I get really annoyed when you continually say Trump slogans at me. S4e27 (01:06:16.952) Ha ha ha! S4e27 (01:06:25.72) Yeah, Daniel (01:06:36.228) And he thought this was like super funny to be like, haha, you know, I'm just like saying like slightly racist shit, like because, just because it gets a rise out of you. And in the end, that was kind of like, there was like a time where I was like, okay, I need to decide now whether to get off this ship or go full steam ahead, right? Because once we apply for exist, you cannot basically per person, you can only apply for that once, even if you create another startup after that. S4e27 (01:06:45.699) See ya. Daniel (01:07:05.856) So I like, if I burn this exist chance, then this has to be it, right? And after a few days of soul searching, I was like, I do not want to spend the next five years in an office with this person. I wouldn't be happy. So in the end, I was meeting the other people and I was like, I'm out. I'm sorry. Here's all my code. Here's everything. S4e27 (01:07:12.588) Yeah. And you were getting signals that it wasn't going to be it. S4e27 (01:07:33.678) Yeah, yeah. Daniel (01:07:34.614) But the thing is then like most of the, like all the other people also like, if Daniel's not with us anymore, yeah, you know, which was good for my ego. And so that's kind of why I kept the, kept the domain name and the company name. Yeah. That was the story of how I almost founded a space startup. S4e27 (01:07:41.227) yep, yep, yep, yep. Yes. S4e27 (01:07:51.518) I have to go. I'm sorry, Daniel. I've got to run. S4e27 (01:07:58.348) Are you still kind of a kid in the future? Nothing stops you from having a side quest later on? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Daniel (01:08:03.148) telemetry deck in space. Yeah, I'm just going to buy SpaceX at some point. S4e27 (01:08:10.478) I'm trying to think there's a way there of like it's what is it in space nobody can hear you scream and mentally I'm kind of linking that to the fact that telemetry deck doesn't record stuff that is unnecessary like nobody can hear you no I can't get there there's almost a link yeah but yeah yeah Daniel (01:08:31.02) Yeah, but I can see where you're going with this. All right, I'll let you go to work. I'll let you go to work. It's like 20, 22 midnight here, so I probably need to go to bed. S4e27 (01:08:40.418) But yeah, but dude, lovely to catch you as always, man. And the holding the microphone thing, it's a game changer. It's nice. Yeah. Daniel (01:08:47.101) And I'm really sorry for, it's nice, isn't it? It feels like I've seen this on TikTok actually with like other podcasters who are more conversational, less tech focused. And I think we're somewhere in the middle there. We are tech focused, but we are all just like having a conversation as well. And it feels more loosey goosey. can do fun stuff with S4e27 (01:08:55.373) Yeah. S4e27 (01:08:59.896) Yeah. S4e27 (01:09:07.128) Yeah. Yes. So on that note, take care and I look forward to speaking to you soon, All right. Bye. Bye -bye. Daniel (01:09:13.942) You See you mate. Yeah, bye.