Is It Better To Be At Amazon's Mercy Or Your Own?

Show notes:
Links:
Loom
Telestream
Recut
Lovesac
Comfy Sacks
Flipper

Full transcript:
Ben:
You know how we had that recent episode with John Nunemaker about Flipper and feature flags and that sort of thing.

Starr:
Oh, a podcast episode.

Ben:
Yeah. Yeah.

Starr:
I thought you meant a dramatic episode.

Josh:
It's just another episode with John.

Starr:
Oh my God. That guy.

Josh:
That was awesome. Yeah. That was a good conversation.

Ben:
We talked in that conversation about using Flipper at Honeybadger, because we've been using Rollout for our feature flags, which, if you didn't listen to that episode, you don't know what a feature flag is. It's a branch in your code that conditionally runs some feature. You can limit it when you deploy it to people and you don't have to deploy a new thing to all your customers at the same time. You can test it live.

Josh:
I'm not sure if we actually explained it in that episode.

Ben:
Maybe we did, maybe we didn't.

Josh:
This will be good background.

Starr:
I wasn't there. I'm usually the driving force behind backing up and explaining things.

Josh:
Yeah, Starr is good. Always, yeah, you've been pretty good about that. Yeah.

Ben:
Yeah. I went ahead and did that. I put a Flipper in Honeybadger and tested a new feature. We are switching from Postgres to DynamoDB for our notice storage. That's every occurrence of every error. It's a lot of data and we cut over a few weeks ago to be reading from that data in Dynamo because now it's fully populated with the past month's of data and it's being updated. We're basically writing this to two places and now it's time to read from the new place.

Ben:
I tested that with Flipper and I'm so glad that I used Flipper for that feature because it saved my bacon this week. I deployed the reading from Dynamo. Oh, actually. We've been doing reading for a while and what I deployed this week was not writing to Postgres anymore, so stopping the dual rights. I put that behind a feature flag and I turned it on just for my projects. I'm so glad I did because I found a bug that really, really would have caused issues for all of our customers if I had deployed that just willy nilly. Yay for feature flags. Yay for Flipper. Go use it. It's a great thing.

Starr:
That's awesome.

Josh:
It's willy nilly. Is that a Ruby joke?

Starr:
How much money do you think that was worth avoiding that mistake? How much would you pay to do that? A thousand dollars? $10,000.

Ben:
Yeah, it's got to be a more than a thousand dollars, for sure.

Starr:
Okay. We're trying to help John with his pricing here.

Ben:
Yeah, totally.

Starr:
I'm sure that Flipper costs a lot less than a thousand dollars. It does.

Ben:
It's worth every penny.

Starr:
Oh, look at that. Real product placement. We're growing up. Look at this podcast we're doing. We just slid that right in.

Ben:
Yeah. In other infrastructure news, I got to say that having your primary search cluster die is not a fun experience, especially when it happens at 4:30 in the morning.

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
But I will say this. Amazon, props, Amazon, because we host our Elasticsearch cluster with Amazon. Yay for not having to figure out how to be an expert at running Elasticsearch myself and having to repair things when they went sideways. Also, the tech support was great. They zeroed in on what the issue was. It's our fault apparently, or kind of. What the real explanation is, everything was looking fine to me. All the stats were green. I had monitored six different things based on the documentation that Amazon provided. All those things were fine. There were no alarms. It just died. I'm like, "What the heck's going on?" That's why I opened a ticket.

Ben:
It took them a while to find out what was going on. It took them, oh, I don't know, two or three hours because they were a little perplexed because everything looked fine. Really what it came down to was the CPU spikes that we had. We had some CPU spikes that went over 90% and this was not in their documentation, but apparently that's a really bad thing. We had enough of those spikes that it just gave up the ghost finally. They encouraged us to upgrade the cluster, which I did. Once that was all done and deployed, then everything was fine. I made a suggestion that they might update their documentation for monitoring that particular metric. They appreciated that suggestion.

Ben:
After things were all good yesterday and I had gone and I was decompressing and things were back to normal. I had done the backfill. I was feeling pretty good about where we were. It wasn't a hair on fire situation, right? The app has been architected so that even if we lost our search cluster, it's okay. The whole app doesn't die, right? You can still use Honeybadger. We're still processing errors. We're still sending alerts. People are still using the UI. The way that we decided to ingest the data into the search cluster was delayed or put in a separate queue so that we could still be processing data and we could replay that data when the cluster came back when I was ready for indexing.

Ben:
I had just spent several hours on building some pretty awesome, in my opinion, backfill scripts using SQS and Lambda. All I had to do was queue up all those things that didn't get processed and they got processed. They got back-filled, so yesterday afternoon, I was looking out my kitchen window and I was feeling pretty happy. I was like, "That went really, really well for having such a really bad thing happen."

Josh:
That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. I noticed yesterday, the outages we have been having lately seem to not usually even be our fault. It's when Amazon has an issue, which I guess, the way you look at it, on one hand, we're at Amazon's mercy now. I think that's the other side of the story, but it is nice that we're not dealing with the actual failures that you get if you're running your own box or something that you're responsible for every little, like network failures, for instance. When we used to have DNS go out or something, or those types of things, it's nice not having those types of issues. I'd much rather be at Amazon's mercy, I think, than be at the mercy of myself.

Ben:
Right. Yeah.

Starr:
I don't know, this has a little bit of a nostalgic flavor to it, right? Just a random, oh, if your CPU usage goes over X amount, your cluster just dies. That's the Elasticsearch I know and love from back in the day. It was nice. It's nice to stay in touch with our roots every now and again.

Josh:
It seems that would be the kind of thing that they could at least have a default notification for. If they know that that's a terrible situation, why don't they just have an email that automatically, it sends you and, "Oh, we noticed you're not monitoring those sorts of things." I could see why you wouldn't want to, but it just seems like it would be a nice touch.

Ben:
Yeah. That's not the way Amazon does things.

Josh:
That's not Amazon. I know.

Ben:
Yeah. They're really a sharp knives kind of company. It's like, "Here is all the tools and we'll give you some good guidance, but you have to go and look for that guidance." I mean, literally, we have eight alarms CloudWatch alarms set up for our Elasticsearch cluster. All of them came from the documentation where Amazon says, "Here, you should monitor this metric and it should not go over this threshold for this long." I'm like, "Okay," plug those numbers in and I've got my alarms but they're not going to force you to do it. Yeah, I guess a more curated experience would be, they would say, "Here. Here's all the pre-configured alarms based on our recommendations and then you can turn them off if you don't want them, but we really think you should have them."

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
Yeah. Maybe it's a suggestion I should make to them.

Josh:
I'm pretty sure they'll just laugh at you.

Ben:
They assume you know what you're doing.

Starr:
They're like, "Sure, we'll just go tell Jeff that right away." I guess he's not even in charge anymore.

Josh:
Maybe he'll work on that now that he's not CEO.

Starr:
There you go. I've got to ask, circling back to the first thing about the Dynamo. Are we storing notices now in Dynamo or did we back off of that because of the bug?

Ben:
Yeah. We've been storing notices in Dynamo for a long time now, weeks or months.

Starr:
Did we turn off the Postgres?

Ben:
No. Postgres is still going.

Starr:
Okay.

Ben:
Yeah, that was the bug where, when I stopped it for a few projects, those projects started having some intermittent problems.

Josh:
You fixed that this morning.

Ben:
I fixed that this morning.

Josh:
Yeah.

Starr:
I bet Postgres is going to feel so good. Those database servers are going to feel so good when that gets turned off.

Josh:
Imagine.

Starr:
They're just going to be like, "Oh, finally. Finally I get to relax."

Ben:
Are they going to feel a little lonely and be, "Hey, what happened? Where did all the traffic go?"

Josh:
"Why aren't you talking to me anymore?"

Starr:
We're still sending them stuff. We're still sending all our users to them. They actually get to interact with all the people.

Ben:
"Don't you love me anymore? What did I do?"

Starr:
This is why I'm not running ops.

Josh:
We've been talking about this for a long time.

Ben:
Yeah. Yeah. We have been talking about it for a long time.

Josh:
We're getting there.

Ben:
It's just part of the trend of offloading more and more stuff to Amazon so that we can sip drinks on the beach in Hawaii.

Josh:
Yeah. Does this mean that we can move Postgres to RDS or something like it?

Ben:
That's the direction we're headed. Yeah.

Josh:
Nice.

Ben:
Yeah.

Starr:
Oh my gosh. Are we going to have anything? Are we just going to be running app servers eventually?

Ben:
It's just going to be a totally virtual company. We're just going to sit back, just cash the checks.

Josh:
It keeps getting better and better.

Ben:
Yeah.

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
Speaking of loving this life, so I have a bit of an experience. I'm not going to name names because it's kind of negative experience, but I will say that for the past several years, we've run Honeybadger and from time to time, I have daydreamed. The grass is always greener, right? I have daydreamed "What would it be like to go back to a real job where I'm not in charge of everything and I'm just in charge of my little thing and I can turn off the pager and stuff," so I have that kind of wishful thinking.

Josh:
Where I could go on vacations.

Ben:
Right, right. That sort of thing. I think about that every now and then. Recently, I had an experience where I was interacting with some developers that were working on a project that didn't have a level of coordination that I'd been used to. I was not in control of the situation. I was not the boss. It was not my project. It was just chaotic, I think is the best way that I can describe this particular project. I was interested in participating, but I just, I couldn't. I was like, "No, I can't do that. My life is crazy enough. I don't need more crazy," but as I thought about it, I thought, "You know what? There are some organizations that are like that. There are some, probably many companies that are like that where the development team is just all over the place and maybe they don't have a great architecture or whatever."

Ben:
I had that experience and just made me renew my gratitude for the nice architecture that we have, for all the care that we've put into our systems so that it's, in my opinion, well designed and reliable and it's orderly and things make sense. I'm just loving Honeybadger this week.

Josh:
Nice. Yeah. Then things, yeah. Things are making more sense over time, it seems.

Ben:
Shout out to all those people who feel like they're overwhelmed by the chaos at their employer. I feel for you.

Josh:
A hair on fire company. Everyone's running around.

Ben:
Right.

Starr:
You all were talking about being able to go on vacation. I don't know if you all have heard about jobs lately, but it seems like when I hear my friends talking about their childhoods, it doesn't really seem like they get much real vacation where they're not having to be glued to a computer anyway. They're not having to be on call.

Josh:
I wonder if since so many companies have been switching to remote the past year because of the pandemic, but they don't really, they haven't figured it out. I wonder if people are really especially struggling with being glued to Slack or being just stuck on the internet. That's easy to fall into, even if you know what you're doing. I could see that, where you can't go on vacation without having Slack on your phone and checking in or whatever.

Ben:
Yeah. It's definitely a skill that you have to build up, both individually and as an organization, right? You have to set expectations. I saw this cool thing. I don't remember where I saw it, but I think it was a signature in an email or something. Basically, the idea was, this person said something along the lines of, "Your work hours may not be my work hours, so please do not feel obligated to respond to this during your non-work hours." Right? The idea being, I might be up at 4:00 AM and sending this email, but doesn't mean you have to be up at 4:00 AM to respond to this email. You can get to it whenever, right? I like the idea of just being upfront with people. It's okay to just be calm and not have to feel like everything's urgent, sort of thing.

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
Yeah. I'm loving the calm company lifestyle.

Josh:
Yeah. I was worried about that this week as I've been interacting with our awesome contracting team.

Starr:
How's that going?

Josh:
It's going really well. We've been getting a lot of work done and I've been using this, I've pretty much been centralizing everything around GitHub. I've spent the week pretty much living in the GitHub notifications tab. I did some work last week to tune my GitHub notifications so that they're not quite as overwhelming as they used to be, just unsubscribed from projects that I'm not directly responsible for or need to monitor. I can now basically keep, whatever, inbox zero in my notifications tab. I can be sure that anything that needs my attention is in there.

Josh:
I've been so excited about all the progress we've been making. I've been really on top of reviewing everything as immediately as possible. I was like, "Oh, no. What if people get used to this?" I just live here now. I now exist within the GitHub notifications tab. If I add 10 people to this process, that's going to be my full-time life. It made me just think, it is important to build the asynchronous expectation, manage that expectation, even if at the moment, you can be responding instantly.

Starr:
I've done that a bit with my blog contractors. Yeah, when I first set everything up, I was just like you are now. I was just constantly monitoring my project management and getting back to everybody super quickly and everything. Eventually, it's just like, I can't do anything else if I'm doing this. This has to be my full-time job forever if I just keep doing this. What I did is I essentially made Monday blog day and sometimes, I mean, it's still spilling over into other things, but eventually, I want most of the blog stuff to happen on Monday. What I mean by that is, so Ben Findley is going in and he's doing, if people open a ticket or they ask a question for us, and it's not something super easy to answer, it's something that requires a decision, he'll just be like, "Okay, we will get back to you after our meeting on Monday."

Starr:
Every Monday, we have a blog meeting where we just go over all the proposals, go over questions that people have, look at what drafts need to be reviewed, et cetera. We just knock them all out. Then, we get done with our meeting and I go off and do the stuff that it doesn't make sense to have Ben Findley do because it's of more of a technical nature and yeah, so basically, everything gets concentrated around Mondays. I find that this is much more sane, much more tolerable. I'm not quite at the point where the rest of my week is free for other things, but I can see it. I can see it on the horizon. I'm so close to it.

Starr:
One of the other main things that was holding me back from that was that I was scheduling, when authors get in touch with us and want to write for us, I usually talk to them, have a brief Zoom call. I was doing this throughout the day, I'm sorry, throughout the week. That was really messing with me. It was breaking up my day in a weird way. I was like, "Okay, all of those go on Monday too." Yeah. I'm really hoping that this, I don't know. In terms of setting expectations where you're definitely doing that in terms of just, I tell people, I'm like, "If you are working on an article for us and you're actively working on it, it will probably take a month from start to finish. You're not going to do four articles a month for us, because it just takes time, right? This isn't the only thing that we are doing."

Josh:
Yeah. What it sounds like is that we're finally, it only took us 10 years, but we're finally getting around to implementing that four hour work week book.

Ben:
Right. Right. Yeah. On that note, I decided, I made a, for me was a dramatic decision this week.

Josh:
What's this?

Ben:
I think it was Tuesday or Wednesday. I don't remember when, but I had this email from Postmark and they said, "We're getting rid of TLS version one." TLS is the SSL protocols that web servers use when you talk to them and version one is old and busted and we need to get rid of it. They said, "It looks your app is still talking to our API on that protocol. You need to upgrade that before we turn it off. That's going to happen in April," blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay.

Ben:
Normally I would put that off. I'd be like, "April, I'll get around to that. No problem," but for some reason, I don't know why, I was like, "You know what? I should just go ahead and take care of that." I knew exactly what I needed to do. I just needed to upgrade Ruby. I figured, "While I'm at it, I'll upgrade the Ubuntu version that we're using," because we're on an older, it's still LTS, so we're still covered, but there's a newer one since then. I'm like, "You know what? I'll just make some new images and we'll have a new Ruby. We'll have a new OS. Everything will be fresh and sparkly clean and it'll be great. It will last another couple of years and I won't have to think about it again."

Ben:
Here's where the decision came in. Normally in this situation, I would just go do the thing, right? I would make a new image, beat it up, blah, blah, blah. This time I said, "You know what? I am never going to do another thing like this again in Honeybadger without documenting it, step-by-step, every thing that has to be done, every command that gets typed in, every action that I take is going to be documented so that the next time this happens, someone else can do it without me." Yay. I know you've been wanting this for a very long time, Starr and Josh. I've made efforts to document along the way, but this is the first time that I'm like, "You know what? Everything I do is going to get documented so that I don't have to be anywhere near the thing the next time this process has to happen."

Ben:
It took me probably at least twice as long to get the task done because it was like, "Oh yeah. There's that thing. Oh, there's that thing." I had to type it in the document as I was going, but now, there's a document and now, anybody can do it and it's great. I'm loving it.

Josh:
Yeah. Yeah. I read the document and the process makes sense to me now. It's very demystified. I'm not volunteering to do it, by the way, but it's definitely the sort of thing that you could just take that piece now and plug that into our system of work and have a contractor or an employee or whatever do it. Yeah. As long as they're familiar with Amazon, I mean, it's all very straightforward. It was more straightforward than I imagined. I think in a lot of cases, all you got to do is write it down and it starts to make sense.

Ben:
Yeah. I'm pulling back the curtain. You can see how the sausage is made now.

Josh:
Yeah. Now the key to the success with this strategy is, maintaining that document has to be part of, that should be a step in the document because then you have whoever does it next time needs to prepare the way for the person that does it after them. As long as everyone keeps that documentation up to date from that point on, then the torch gets passed, basically, because processes do evolve and I'm sure it won't be exactly the same next time potentially.

Ben:
Right. Right. Yeah. You can follow that principle of, leave it better than you found it, kind of thing.

Josh:
Yeah, yeah. That's a good ...

Ben:
I'm going to go add a note to document right now, right at the end saying, "If you got this far and there are any changes, go back and document those changes."

Josh:
Nice. Yeah, that's good.

Ben:
Yeah, so I'm feeling pretty good about that. We'll see if I really stick to this resolution. It's going to be tough, but I'm feeling pretty committed because I do want to get to a point. I guess I'm getting jealous of Starr's infrastructure and Josh's budding new infrastructure. I want my own infrastructure like that where I can just have everything like that.

Josh:
Yeah. I see this as, this is an agency, this ability to outsource work within Honeybadger. I want to add more to it over time. We've got authors now, writing is outsourced and then we've got specific pieces of work, development work within the company currently, we're able to outsource and the more we can plug into that system, the less we have to be responsible for. I really like the idea of thinking of it like we're building our own little software agency inside of Honeybadger where Honeybadger is the sole client and we can basically can just funnel work to it.

Starr:
Yeah. I think of it, the stuff I've been doing, I've been thinking of it almost like an engineering project. I'm building a machine that creates blog posts, right, or creates some sort of content because you can point the machine and whatever, and yeah, the downside of that is it takes a lot longer than just making a blog post, right? It takes a lot of time to do that, but, eventually it gets going and it's nice. One thing I just wanted to throw out there with regards to documenting things, and I'm not sure if is the right choice for the stuff you're doing, Ben, or not. That's up to you to decide. One thing I found useful and I might actually do more is just a video for recording. How do you do a thing on a website and then what series of steps do you do, just taking a screen cast of yourself doing it. When I remember to do it, I'm like, "Oh yeah, this is way easier than if I was trying to explain it to somebody."

Ben:
Yeah. I love that idea. I hate the idea of recording myself, but I love the idea of having that recording. Yeah. I think that provides a lot of context and I think there's value. It reminds me of the DHH's video when he introduced Rails, his, build a blog in 15 minutes thing, and there are parts in there he's like, "Oops," where he made a mistake, right? I think even in the mistakes of those kinds of videos, there's a lot of valuable info. It's like, "Oh, I was going to do this.," or, "Oh, I forgot about that," and stuff that just doesn't really come up in a document like they do when you're watching someone do that thing.

Starr:
Yeah. Totally. If those really bug you, we can get an editor. We have got a podcast editor and they can just edit out all the oopsies. You're just in the matrix. You're Neo.

Josh:
We can have it transcribed too. We would get the actual guide from it as well.

Starr:
That's true.

Josh:
It could just be our internal. Yeah.

Ben:
Yeah. Then you have to, and then you should record your Team X session or whatever so you can have all those commands recorded for you and you just copy and paste them in.

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
Yeah. It sounds great.

Josh:
We'll call it Ben Curtis University or Honeybadger university.

Ben:
Well, that's the other thing, I guess, aside from being recorded is, it feels like the most boring thing in the world to have someone watch this, right? Upgrading Ruby, compiling Ruby, and updating our Ansible scripts. All those things to me just seem exceedingly, so crushingly boring to watch. I'm like, "Why would I inflict this upon anyone?"

Starr:
Not if you're me who is trying to figure out how the hell to do it. That would be exactly the video I wanted to see most.

Josh:
Yeah. Yeah. For sure. I think there are some newer screen recording, screen casting software. I think there's some software out there, the newer things that people have been building that make it a lot easier too. I don't know. I forgot. I've seen a few. I don't remember their names, but it seems like if it was just easier to record and maybe do some quick editing along the way or pause it while the compile is happening and then resume. Okay, it's finished now and now we're back. Little things like that make it a lot easier to do that on a regular basis.

Ben:
I'm going to have to, I'll think about that. I think I've seen Loom referenced for that.

Josh:
Yeah, Loom, that was one. Yeah. Loom scared me because I tried it. Did I tell about this?

Starr:
No.

Josh:
Loom, I did a trial of Loom and I had left it installed on my computer and the app had had some glitchy behavior that happened a couple of times and I didn't think about it, but then one day, it was, I forget exactly what it was doing, but I noticed it. I was investigating basically, I think how to quit it or something. It opens up the Loom website and there an eight hour video of my screen because it streams to their service and that's not cool.

Ben:
That's not cool at all.

Josh:
No, it's not at all. It's not cool. I literally panicked and I mean, deleted that, deleted my account and I have never used Loom again. I'm a little bit skittish on Loom now. Yeah.

Starr:
There is also, you just quick time record and then Dropbox or Google Drive or whatever.

Josh:
Yeah, yeah, but then, you lose a lot of the nice features I was talking about. I think Loom is one of the ones that does have, the ease of use of being able to just quickly do a screencast and it puts your little, your face down in the bottom and it has some of those, I don't know, editing or screen casting features.

Ben:
I have ScreenFlow, which is a Mac software that allows you to do recordings pretty easily.

Josh:
The classic one, huh?

Ben:
Yeah. It's awesome. It's great, and I got it specifically to do, back in their freelancing days, actually, when I was showing clients stuff, like, "Hey, here's how this works," and I would just walk them through something and, yeah, it's fantastic. I haven't used it in awhile. I can't remember if it has the watch your face and do the screen at the same time thing. It probably does by now.

Josh:
Yeah.

Starr:
I mean, really, we don't really need to see your face, Ben. You're upgrading Ubuntu. Your face is fine, nothing against it, but I mean ...

Ben:
You don't want to see the pensive, or the utterly bored stuff like that? I just saw, I have to look this up because I can't remember the name of it, but I just saw on Twitter, I think it was Alex Hillman. I think he was talking about this video editing thing that came out. Maybe he's on product hunt. I don't know. Basically, it takes out all of the pauses. It just automatically cuts out all the silence for you. Apparently, it does all that annoying stuff. I'll have to check that out. Maybe that would also be something that we can help make that a nicer experience rather than just sitting there and watching me blink.

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
Yeah. The one snag is I typically do this stuff, again at 4:00 AM, 5:00 AM and the rest of the family is not awake. Having me giving the monologue about what I'm doing.

Josh:
It's okay. You can whisper.

Ben:
I can whisper, yes.

Starr:
That would be amazing, actually. That would be be amazing.

Ben:
Don't forget to use Sudo. That's a whisper. That's so awesome. I'm going to have a YouTube channel.

Starr:
Well, the big thing in my life this week has been, there's a company whose name I'm really embarrassed to say, so I'm going to try to avoid it. It makes giant beanbags. As you'll know, I recently finished building a sort of backyard office and it's a little bit larger than just a desk. My desk and stuff takes up about, I don't know, a third of it. The rest of the space, I really wanted to be a nice reading nook type thing where I could, basically where anybody in the family could be like, "Okay, I want to be in a quiet place and not be surrounded by clutter," because we got a small kid, so of course, everything in the main house is just a disaster.

Starr:
I got this gigantic beanbag. It's six foot diameter and it's amazing. It's amazing. I love it. I also got a matching ottoman. I got a rug to put under it and it's covered in this white stuff that looks, if you've ever seen raw cotton or something, it's kind of furry, it's kind of swirly. It's really nice. That's my ...

Josh:
Cozy.

Starr:
That's my fun thing. Yeah. I can go, I can finish, I don't know, working on some Honeybadger stuff. I want to take a five minute break and I can just go plop down and this gigantic thing. It's glorious.

Josh:
Yeah. The way I'm picturing this is, your desk takes up a quarter of the office and then the other three quarters is the bean bag. Is that-

Starr:
Pretty much. I mean, the bean bag takes up about a quarter of it.

Josh:
Oh, okay.

Starr:
Yeah. I've got a room divider, so I can't actually see the beanbag from my desk. It's actually turning out very nice, the setup. I'm usually terrible at interior design or whatever, but this is actually turning out really, really great.

Ben:
Does, does it have a freshmen dorm room kind of vibe going?

Starr:
Oh no, no, no. We're much classier than that.

Ben:
Okay.

Starr:
No, no. It's kind of a, I don't know, a hippie lady vibe going.

Ben:
Okay. Yeah.

Starr:
I'll take a picture.

Ben:
Cool. I love interior design stuff, so I'm all about seeing pictures of people's places.

Starr:
Cool.

Josh:
I'm considering a giant bean bag now.

Ben:
Yeah. I've thought about doing that. Our couch needs to be replaced in our living room. We seriously thought about, get rid of the couch, just get one of the huge beanbags or maybe two, right? We haven't pulled the trigger on that yet.

Starr:
Yeah. The thing about the thing about this is you wouldn't want to sit on it with somebody who you're not comfortable snuggling up to, because even if you're sitting separately, you're still very close. It pushes you together.

Josh:
I'm sure your kids will love it, Ben, having a single bean bag.

Ben:
Exactly. They're playing smash. I'm sure they're going to love that.

Josh:
Turn into literal smash.

Starr:
Oh my God. Yeah. That's been great. I'm really loving it.

Josh:
Nice.

Ben:
That's cool. Now, you can grab the book when you need a break and just relax.

Starr:
Totally. Oh, the other thing I've noticed, I hope none of my authors are listening to this right now because I realized I can be like, "Well, let's make this an audio call," on my author calls and I can just go sit in my giant beanbag during these calls.

Ben:
Real nice. Yeah. I've done a lot of calls this week, more than usual because I'm ramping up the whole sales thing and figuring that out. I'm getting a lot of advice and talking to people and one of the calls, I was arranging the meeting and I said, "Should we just leave it as a phone call? I don't know about you, but I've had enough Zoom," and the person's like, "Yes, totally. We should totally just make it a phone call." It was nice just to be able to stand by the window, look out the window and look at the trees while I was talking as opposed to having to stare at the screen. It was nice.

Josh:
That's cool.

Ben:
Good change of pace.

Starr:
Yeah. That's very nice. That's very nice. Should we wrap it up or do you have anything else you want to talk about?

Ben:
Hey, let's get people to recommend their favorite beanbag chairs to us if they have them.

Starr:
Oh yeah.

Ben:
I'm in the market.

Starr:
Okay. Yeah. Recommend your favorite beanbag chairs. I can also go offline and tell you which one I got.

Josh:
Can we put it in the show notes? Is it that embarrassing or can we put it in the show notes?

Starr:
Oh, it's fine. Yeah, we can put it in show notes.

Josh:
Awesome.

Starr:
All right. Well, you have been listening to Founder Quest. I got it right. I got it right this week. I didn't say Honeybadger. If you like us, go and leave us a review on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts and we will see you later.

Episode source