034 — Who’s ready to Jam!?

A quick update on this glorious hump day, just in time before I head out to the Atlanta PHP meetup (https://phpxatl.com).

Tomorrow, May 21st at 11:30am EDT I’ll be chatting with Brian Casel (https://briancasel.com) about his recent launch of Instrumental Components (https://instrumental.dev). Join us in the stream and if you have any questions for Brian or myself you can get them answered live!

Subscribe and join the stream: https://youtube.com/live/LyMjPhkHk3k

I am also going to be streaming to https://stream.place, a new streaming platform geared towards the Bluesky/ATProto community. So it should be fun adding another destination to consume the stream from. And, I floated the idea out on LinkedIn to see if people would be interested in watching the stream there, but just waiting to see if I can get a good signal from there or not to justify adding it.

Weigh-in on the LinkedIn stream: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ryanhefner_jam-session-launching-instrumentaldev-activity-7331038582549147650-CmcP

So, with that said, hopefully you can find the stream wherever you prefer to consumer your streaming content and we look forward to seeing you there.

And, on the Starter Packs front, https://www.starterpacks.net, I ended up getting a pretty big hosting bill last month that would make the project unsustainable if it were that high moving forward, so in an attempt to reduce costs, and because I was meaning to explore it anyways to make navigating the site potentially faster, I converted all `/profile/...` pages to use ISR (Incremental Static Regeneration). My hope is that by rendering and caching these pages indefinitely, I will serve more cached versions of the pages and reduce some of the edge requests and function invocations previously required to serve those pages. It does introduce some complexity when it comes to revalidating those pages in the future, but this is just a means to try to cap costs, and if it works I can figure out how to keep everything fresh, while still being optimized. So stay tuned...

Other links:
https://www.skylounge.social
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanhefner

To follow along, you can find me at https://www.ryanhefner.com, follow me on Bluesky @ryanhefner.com (https://bsky.app/profile/ryanhefner.com) and keep up with the show on https://www.allplay.fm and @allplay.fm (https://bsky.app/profile/allplay.fm).

Help yourself, while supporting the show, by trying some of the services that I use, and highly recommend:
Transistor FM (https://transistor.fm/?via=allplay)
Fathom Analytics (https://usefathom.com/ref/EKONBS)

#buildinpublic #podcast #startups #webdevelopment  #webdesign #bluesky #indiedev #bootstrapping #indiehackers

Episode Transcript

Ryan (00:00):
Hey. How's it going? I'm Ryan Hefner, this is the All
Play podcast. So I wanna do aquick little episode and drop it
in the middle of the weekbecause there's just just some
stuff going on. So first andforemost, I'm gonna be chatting
with Brian Casel again.
He was actually on the last JamSessions episode that was
recorded back in January, andthat's when we were talking
about, you know, our plans forthe year and the stuff that

(00:23):
we're gonna be working on andtried to make some commitments,
to one another as far as, like,what we wanted to try to get out
and launched over the next likethree or six months. And so it's
pretty cool. He's actually helaunched, Instrumentl
Components, which is atinstrumental.dev. And I'm gonna
be catching up with him as asfar as like, you know, how he
thinks the launch is going,everything that went into it,

(00:44):
what you're gonna get. It'sbasically a starter kit plus
kind of UI components and, youknow, for for the rails world.
And, you know, he's he's he'strying to make it easy for
everyone to just build reallygood, rails apps. And so it'll
be fun to talk with him. I guessI'm gonna have to do a little

(01:08):
reflection on myself as far as,like, what I've been able to
achieve over that time. I didend up putting pricing on,
starterpacks.net. I wouldn't sayI officially launched it yet.
It is up and and out there, but,I don't think I've really kinda
juiced it. So I got I assume Ihave to be real with myself on
that front. But very cool.Excited to talk to him and catch
up. And also wanna try to getsome more jam sessions going.

(01:31):
So if you happen to be workingon something that you'd like to
talk about and share on theshow, I'd love to hear from you.
So just get in touch with me onBlue Sky or wherever, and we'll
see where it goes. I'm alsogonna play might play around
with streaming this one. Well,both our new destination will be

(01:52):
streamplace. So stream.place,which is basically a blue sky at
proto at protocol, focusedstreaming service, which is
cool.
So that's gonna be, streamingthere tomorrow. And I don't
know. I floated the idea onLinkedIn. We'll see how it goes.
I'm not sure if anyone's gonnacomment on the the post I made,

(02:14):
but who knows?
I don't know. Get weird. Try aLinkedIn stream or something.
See how it does. Obviously,still will be on YouTube and
Twitter, but gonna play aroundwith a few other destinations.
And Twitch, actually. What theheck? These are just options.
You throw them in there, youstream it out, see how it goes.

(02:35):
As long as I got the bandwidth,guess we might as well use it.
Speaking of bandwidth, I alsowanted to do a quick little
update on starter packs. Soyesterday, you know, in the back
of my head, basically the siteended up racking up a kind of a
crazy bill last month for thehosting. And, it's mostly, at
least from what I can grok fromthe from the logs, it's mostly

(02:58):
bot traffic. I think I'mactually gonna have to download
those and do a little, like,user agent review and see where
things are stacking up. But fromwhat I can tell, it seems like
these this the site is I maybemade it a little bit too
crawlable, because it's beingcrawled by a lot of bots and
it's costing, a pretty goodchunk of change.
So one of the updates I ended uptoying with yesterday that I

(03:21):
ended up pushing out was I Inoticed that the majority of the
traffic seems to be focused onthe profile pages. I updated
those to where they are nowusing incremental static
regeneration. So essentially,the first time that page is
requested, a cached version isis generated, and then for every
subsequent quest is gonna usethat cached version. I'm not

(03:43):
doing any revalidation at thispoint. I just want to see if
this basically stops some of thekind of cost bleeding that is
going in to hosting the app.
And then I also need to lookinto, like, maybe I need to
tweak my robots file, to see ifI should be, you know, limiting

(04:06):
some of the bots. But at thesame time, you know, I'm I'm
seeing bots from, like, anAmazon bot. I'm seeing a chat
GBT bot. Obviously, Google botis crawling it. So I want those
pages to be indexed.
So that's, like, the wholereason why I kind of did this,
like, crawlable optimization tothe site. So that way Google
could find more pages because Iwas basically getting the most
amount of traffic when I had theorganic traffic. I guess I don't

(04:32):
know if you call it organic, butthe Google search traffic that
was driving people to the site.So we'll see how that goes.
Since rolling it out though,this is not the maybe the best
sign.
It's already generated over3,200,000 pages. So I've already
blown through my, 2,000,000,rights, allotment for the

(04:56):
subscription. So I need to do alittle back of the napkin math
to see if this is gonna be acheaper solution. But I do think
where that might help out iseven though it's it's done
3,200,000 writes, a hundred asfar as the the ISR reads, which
is the, you know, anytime a apage is read after it's been

(05:16):
written, those are at a 17,000.So I'm hoping, like, as more
profiles kinda get written toand cached, then the reads will
kinda go up and then balance itout.
And then I have those 10,000,000reads, and maybe that will then
reduce just like the number ofedge requests and all that other
stuff. But we'll see how itgoes. Again, last year or last

(05:39):
month, I had way too expensiveof a hosting bell. I'm just
gonna write it off as far as itbeing, you know, in the ultimate
goal of getting the pay youknow, the site, more indexed.
But I think I'm gonna have tokinda tune things a little bit
to keep it under, you know, likea reasonable threshold for, for
what it where it's at right now.

(06:00):
Now, obviously, if I could getfour or five sponsors on the
site, that would obviouslyreduce the pain and, you know,
make it justify kinda keeping itup. I am gonna be leaning into
starter packs on for Sky Lounge,and I'm I'm as as the days go
by, as I'm building Sky Lounge,I'm finding more and more

(06:23):
potential opportunities of doingkind of, like, cross pollination
as far as certain statuses beingreflected on starterpacks.net,
as well as being able to thenhave starter packs being
displayed and linked to andassociated with stuff that's
going on at Sky Lounge. So Ithink that's still cool. I don't

(06:44):
wanna obviously shut down astarter packs, but I definitely
also don't want it to just beeating up more money than it's
worth. So all that's good andwe'll see where it goes from
there.
That's about it. Gonna try tokeep this one quick. Please join
us tomorrow, 11:30AM EasternDaylight Time. So wherever

(07:08):
you're at in the world, youknow, I hope you'll tune in.
I'll have the the link to theYouTube video, in the in the
show notes so you can, subscribeand get also get notified when
that stream goes live.
I'll post updates as well if Iend up choosing to also do a

(07:31):
LinkedIn stream. I don't know.We'll see. I do see that you can
actually kind of set an eventand have that be a live stream.
I'll set to make sure that thatworks with, like, Ecamm since I
didn't initiate it throughEcamm.
Not really sure how that stuffkind of syncs up. You know? It's
just kind of creating this stuffout there. And I don't know if
it needs to really have, like,ID back to it to associate it to

(07:54):
a specific event or anythinglike on LinkedIn. I know that it
works for YouTube.
However it works, it's working.But, but we'll see. So, yeah,
that's about it. Once again, I'mRyan Hefner of the See All Play
podcast. Join us tomorrow duringdiscussion because we'll also be
taking live q and a.
So wherever you're chatting,whether that's on X or Twitter

(08:17):
or YouTube or Twitch, we'll getthose in during the stream and
we'll answer those questions.And I hope to see you there. So
alright. Again, Ryan Hefner, AllPlay podcast. You can find
episodes at allplay.fm.
And with that, have a great one.Later.