Founder Life Within The Coronavirus Epicenter

Ben, Josh and Starr are transmitting...err...broadcasting from deep within the COVID-19 epicenter on this week's FounderQuest. They talk about life in our brave new COVID-19 World, Tailwind CSS, and reminisce about the old freelancing days in the time of Big Mouth Billy Bass!

Show Notes
Links:
The Social Network
Tailwind CSS

Themeforest

Morpheus

Reddit

Covid 19

Basecamp

Ruby Central

Comic-Con

Tornado Alley

Second Life

Team Fortress 2

Tobi at Shopify

Stardew Valley
Bill Lumbergh

Big Mouth Billy Bass

Jeff Foxworthy

Full Transcript:
Starr:
What you were saying, Ben, about source maps reminds me of a long, long time ago, when I had this one freelancing client who ... so there was like ... right after that movie, The Social Network came out, which was about Mark Zuckerberg making Facebook, everybody who had $20-30000 laying around was like, I'm going to hire some cheap developer and have them make me some weird niche social network and I worked on several of these because I was freelancing at the time and one of them was for ...

Josh:
Those were the days.

Starr:
Yeah those were the days where you could get paid to write something that you knew in your heart nobody was ever going to use. So it was this one for nurses and so the guy was like very unresponsive to questions and so I eventually put something up. I was like, hey let's ... can you please start looking at this and tell me if you see anything wrong. Like you do in software and he was just like, it's broken, just make it work. It's like, give me the working site. And it's like, that's not how this whole process works sir. It's not like a car. You don't just go to the lot and you buy it, you've got to work the kinks out.

Josh:
Yeah, we all worked on ... well Ben and I worked on one of those too. Did Starr work on ...

Ben:
I don't remember if Starr was on that one ...

Starr:
I worked on one with y'all.

Josh:
It was fun.

Starr:
I think we're all taking pains not to name names because we don't want to shame anybody.

Josh:
We don't want to bash our past clients or anything.

Starr:
Yeah they were generally pretty typical.

Josh:
It was fun though, back when people thought that it was really just about the tech. You could just build the ... if you just built an activity feed there would be activity in it.

Ben:
And to be fair I think that was before Facebook groups so that basically killed any other type of social network that you wanted to build because everyone was like, oh we'll just make a group.

Starr:
Yeah that makes ... I never actually put that together but that totally makes sense.

Ben:
I sometimes miss those freelance days. I think though today if you're a freelancer there's so much cool stuff like the Tailwind UI was just released recently and that is just super awesome.

Starr:
What is that again?

Ben:
It gives you a bunch of components built on top of Tailwind CSS, which is a CSS framework that makes it really easy to build out designs. Anyway so Tailwind UI is built on top of that and gives you some premade components like, here's a list of users, or here's a marketing page with a pricing grid kind of stuff. So there's been templates around since forever like on Themeforest or whatever but this is the latest built on, reusable component framework idea and I love it. So I think as a freelancer today, if I was doing that today, I'd be all about that. I'd be like, oh let me just whip something up for you real quick from my UI since I'm a developer and I suck at UI.

Starr:
That's really cool. It's weird because I feel like there's been ... I don't really know what the historical progression has been because on the one hand it seems like we've gone from this world in around 2005 or whatever where one web developer with rails was basically for getting out a minimum bio of product that was pretty close to as good as you were going to get, and so you could just whip out these things, but now it seems like apps have to be so much full featured from the get-go, there's also so many more tools to do it. I don't know. I'm really ... I guess maybe it ... I'm just confused by it. I don't know what the lesson is here because on the one hand there's all these tools, but then on the other hand there's so many tools and people expect so much from new apps that it's like is it even possible for one person to do it?

Ben:
I think the moral of the story is the only constant in life is change.

Starr:
Oh that's good. You're like the Morpheus of Honeybadger. We need to get you one of those trench coats.

Ben:
Does that come with extra pay?

Starr:
Sure, yeah.

Ben:
Awesome.

Starr:
All the red and blue pills you want.

Ben:
Sweet.

Josh:
I wonder, do we even really need all these apps though? So many apps. Everyone wants a certain ... I think so many apps can exist together because there's so many people that want them. You can make an app and there's ... you have 100 users or something. You can probably find 100 people that want to use your whatever, your mobile ... your take on fitness tracking or something on iOS. But are we going to get to a point where we have as many apps as we have people in the world? Everyone has their own app.

Starr:
If the economy's growing at a certain percentage and that means the internet economy's growing at a certain percentage then you either need that ... you need the number of apps to grow at a certain percentage don't you. Either that or everything gets consolidated which it kind of has been doing.

Starr:
So I don't know, you're arguing for centralization.

Josh:
I guess I am, yeah.

Starr:
So you would rather have Reddit rather than 1000 VBBS installations.

Josh:
I haven't really thought this through Starr so don't hold me to this. I'm all for decentralization in general.

Starr:
It's all right. Welcome to Founder Quest Debate Club Edition.

Josh:
You really ... yeah. You're making me question all my beliefs now.

Starr:
There we go.

Ben:
So debate club ... I'm sorry, go ahead Starr.

Starr:
No, go ahead.

Ben:
I was thinking a debate club, if we want to have a debate we can talk about Covid 19 and should we shut down schools or not? Go.

Starr:
Oh my gosh.

Ben:
It's huge.

Starr:
It is huge. And we're at the epicenter of it. You and me Ben and Ben Finley, our marketing person, our marketing guru.

Ben:
So just for some context, I live in Kirkland, Washington, which is the ground zero basically for Coronavirus infections in the United States. As of yesterday I believe we had 10 or 11 deaths in my community due to that. Primarily f...