I Survived CrossFit, But Can I Survive This Zapier Dumpster Fire?

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all right the weather today is uh Seattle it's rainy and crappy but just leaving uh CrossFit sorry I was hesitating cuz the car wasn't starting that's scary um I can't see a thing in this car already I'll just wait a moment to defog this bad boy and we'll be on the way CrossFit today was good though I had a couple movements that I'm actually good at and one that I'm really bad at so I'm bad at burpees it's not changing anytime soon but I got a practice um but yeah uh otherwise I had to deadlift which I'm like 3 ft tall so it's pretty easy for me to deadlift and uh I got long arms too so that's helpful and then handstand push-ups which I'm not good at but um I guess one of the benefits is that when I first started CrossFit one of

the first workouts we had was like uh they were doing handstand push-up variations so they walked us through them and oddly enough I'm I'm more able to do the hardest variation of them which is kind of funny um so I'm not not saying that to brag cuz I can't do the the easier versions like they're significantly harder for me so it's not a it's not a bragging thing but what's nice about it is that from like a scaling perspective uh I guess like I can already start working on the hard variation which is kind of nice um so anyway I was doing that now other people in the class in total for like the work that they were getting like 40 to 60 reps because and I'm not I'm not saying I'm not knocking them like they're doing the workout properly um in like an

effective way and for me it is more like I got like 16 in total so numbers way lower but I'm doing like a uh like a harder variation so anyway the point is that I wanted to get across is that I made it through the workout was challenging but like I I didn't die so that was nice um but it's uh it's Friday morning and Fridays are nice for me because uh at work I don't really have much for scheduled meetings it's not in our in our organization they're supposed to be meeting free days um now as a manager that means I end up getting stuff scheduled I'm also noticing my gas gaug is flashing at me um so this might be one where I have to cut partway and Reserve I thought that I was going to be able to make it home for

gas but the fact that it's flashing at me I don't feel great about so I might have to be on the the lookout for a gas station but anyway uh Fridays are generally like super light for meetings in that way if I'm having them they're actually they feel like they're more tactical versus like more ceremonial if I can kind of phrase it that way so that's cool um I've been since I like stopped bodybuilding uh I've been trying to be kind of like enjoy food a little bit more which sounds funny like I didn't hate how I was eating before but uh I was very very structured now I want to get back into being a little more structured cuz I'm starting to like to really not like being so unstructured cuz it means I snack like I don't know what I'm going to eat

and like it's it's weird and then I'm like eating like a pound of Trail Mix in a day and I'm like why am I doing this and it's just cuz I don't have like other food made so I want to get better at that but the reason I'm bringing that up is like I'll probably uh I'll Pro probably order in food or something today just because it's a it's a Friday and I don't know it's kind of kind of nice to be able to do something like that tomorrow we're going to we're going to do our crossfit workout then we're going to go to crumble cookie and get the big brownie they have so yeah it's going to be like little things to look forward to like that but is that what happens when you get old I don't know like look forward to eating

cookies on the weekend that's that's my life now I'm not mad about it okay so now I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about some brand G stuff uh cuz uh this is supposed to be about software engineering topics I'm just giving you a little little bit of the scoop for what I'm up to for the day and uh because I'm not driving into the office or whatever this is all you get so um onboarding a another content creator starting yesterday um we got to chatting it's a a buddy I know from LinkedIn and uh we I wasn't pitching this to him uh but he was talking to me cuz he's been making content for a little while and uh we've talked back and forth so he's given me tips and stuff like that and I know for him like like he

burns out from doing it because he's constantly trying to make content and post it and stuff and like he's a he's a software developer so he gets like Concepts around Automation and things like that like he's like he can figure this stuff out so he he'll do like scheduling and stuff like that but I think to still stay on top of it it's like takes time so now that I've been doing it for a while too and I have brand go I said hey man like I think like I think I can help you here like he's been he's been helpful to me in the past like he's helped me he G me tips on my newsletter on my styles of posting and stuff um and he's told me too like hey I'm not telling you this because I think it's factually the best way

or something but it's more like these are things that work for me like you can try them you should try them and see if they work for you so anyway um I told him about brand ghost I said hey I got this i got this thing and I I think it'll help I want you to try it and like I'll uh I'll kind kind of like just extend the trial for you because I really think that like this is going to do it for you and one of the parts of the conversation too as we were talking about like monetizing content so uh he was saying like he's trying to look for some other ways to help monetize because like it takes a lot of a lot of people don't realize this for for most content creators that aren't like uh Justin Welsh kind of

thing um you know it's not everyone's like making Bank off content they're just putting in a lot of work and and hoping that they can kind of get there someday or to some to some level of uh success with it sorry the highway is extremely crappy right now just cuz the the rain uh anyway so he's talking about ways to monetize his audience more effectively um so what I didn't want to do is be like hey like you should use this and by the way like the paid tier is going to cost you another $100 a month because he's already talking about how he wants to to monetize more effectively so I just wanted to make sure I could extend the the Gratitude like kind of say like hey like you help me like let me let me help you with this because I think

it will I know I know how he makes content because we've talked about it before and I think it's very much aligned so um so yeah I got him got him to check it out he was like oh I'm kind of busy but like I'll check it out next week and then a few minutes later and like I can see the events in Telemetry I know when people register and stuff so I knew he did but he sent me a message and he was like hey he's like I couldn't resist but he's like I'm checking it out right now um and I think immediate it was really cool cuz immediately he got the idea which is good we don't expect that everyone will we kind of validated my thought process of like I know how he makes content I know this will be helpful so

that was pretty cool and uh so he's like okay I really get it you can tell he's excited about it oh man I forgot to get gas and I'm on the highway and it's flashing so hopefully we make hopefully we don't die that's what happens when I start rambling me uh what else so then he had a bunch of feedback like I think most of it was like either trivial like we fixed most of it yesterday and the other parts were like things we've talked about which is cool um again getting the feedback is not something like oh we feel bad about it like there's going to be bugs there's going to be things we can improve we know that and we will fix and we will improve things so not it's not like a personal offense or anything like that but it's very validating

to hear the feedback and someone being like hey like it would be really nice if you could do this feature and it's like it's something we've already built and we just have turned off uh like things like that where we're like okay like you know we we're on the right track so that was a really positive experience and uh yeah so like we did a bit of a not quite a bug bash but like a we were just kind of focused on his uh on his requests yesterday like last night working through them now we unfortunately we we introduced a bug overnight which is really embarrassing so fixed up a bunch of stuff did a couple of Vis quests but then like broke something that was very very simple um and just kind of goes back to the conversation I was having on this Blog

the other week where I was saying like we uh we need to do better at putting like the tests in place now so we've been able to get by kind of just like iterating quick and like swapping out components in the UI experimenting on the back end but like backend now is getting every time I'm adding features now I'm testing them and I think we're we're approaching that on the fr end I know there's been historically a lot more experimenting there for us but we got to do better and now the entire highway is stopped and blocked and I don't have gas so I'm not excited about this let's see what's happening there's a you probably saw there's an ambulance that drove past me and then on Google Maps I see that there's three police officers ahead so I don't know what's up hopefully not

an accident but it's pretty common here um I find this particular Highway that I'm on it doesn't drain very well so when it rains there's pockets of the highway that like there's just a particular spot when I was driving to my old gym if it was raining I could I could guarantee like I would bet money on it every single time if I could that there would be an accident at this one spot guaranteed without a doubt every single time and it's because the water pools on parts of the highway and people don't see it and it's right near the wall so on the far left lane so people are going fast and every single time takes them out it's fascinating like that no one would fix that or address it after so many accidents but I think we might be in the clear now

I'm just really focused on like do I have to hop off the highway to get gas or what but we'll see um making me a little nervous so at Brand ghost I think we're probably in the front end we're probably got to start thinking about how we're going to be testing things now cuz I think it's uh I think it's about time I might jump off the highway here to to get gas let's see I just it' be so embarrassing to be like I don't I've never run out of gas in a car in my life and I don't want to start right now so let's see you won't notice it because I will trim it on YouTube I don't edit my videos for this channel but I just trim out the Dead Space if I have to get gas or when I had to

drop off stuff to my wife the other day Cu uh I don't think I'm at Vlog level where I'm going to carry around my camera and fil myself pumping gas we're not there yet if this channel reaches 100,000 subscribers then sure I'll fil myself getting gas I you want to do want to upgrade this car I'm really into modified cars and this one is not modified at all except for the wrap so it's a it's like a gunmetal gray car and uh it's currently wrapped like white with gold flakes because I think I've said this on the channel before this is a car I bought from my wife she doesn't like to drive it but uh she got to pick the brand and the color and I got to pick the model so I picked a fun model but it was hard to find like

in the color so I said hey we'll pick any color and we'll just wrap the car like it's fine now I'm looking for a gas station here let's see Chevron to the right sh okay we're good we're good we're not going to get stranded live to see another day oh yeah there it is a glorious shell okay if you give me one sec I'm going to well you won't care this will be edited out starting now let's go we're fueled up into the rain I have no idea where I am so we'll figure it out together but yeah this uh this weekend definitely going to be pumping out videos uh I got to probably get through I want to try to aim for like at least two sections recorded for our next course because I have to catch up from not filming this week I

I'm in a bit of a a a rut or a dry spell for YouTube videos I'm not feeling good about that I feel like I don't have a good topic that I want to dive into more so that's kind of bothering me um the last couple I did the failing the Google interview one that did pretty well at least like on for my channel and it surprised ing because that kind of content usually doesn't and uh on my channel and then I did one that was about being too old to code that one did okay um I was kind of hoping I'd have a another hit like the the Google interview one but not so much it was nice though that I could kind of uh I had a couple people from LinkedIn and Twitter featured in there so it's nice to kind of have

engage with them and uh nice uh I should just mention this because it's cool the uh one of the shoutouts I did in that video was for Dan who is code wrinkles on YouTube and uh so he he messaged me actually and said like by the way like I actually think I have a lot more to say about this if you're interested and jokingly he was like so I'm kind of volunteering myself for a podcast episode and I was like holy crap yeah why didn't I think about asking Dan to come on the podcast so um we're going to meet tomorrow tomorrow morning for me it's tomorrow evening for him and we're going to we're going to record together so I'm excited I've talked about Dan before I'm not like like Dan takes I think a couple breaks from social media periodically um but I

like Dan a lot um you know Dan did me a solid when my channel was significantly smaller I've talked about that um I think he's great to engage with on social media like he's like he's got his opinions and he's also not like a jerk so that means you can have really good conversations with people like that which is awesome so you know you like I'm sure there's things I disagree with uh with Dan on and I actually feel like I could talk to him about those things and we could have like a good conversation and not be like no screw you man um but most of like I feel like most of the stuff when we're talking online I think we agree on most things so like that's pretty cool too um but again I I think it's I think it's important that you're

not just like in an echo chamber uh you learn a lot of cool things from people with different perspectives so anyway I'm going to meet Dan tomorrow I'm excited for that talk um so that might go up in probably not this week coming up but the the week after I'm probably going to do probably going to do two podcast episodes to release this week coming up and hopefully I get to two YouTube videos cuz I want to make sure that I can put all of my time for Content creation into the uh the course that I'm doing with Ryan so so that'll be good but yeah just got to got to get on it now I learned from doing the previous course with Ryan that the content for it feels a little slower just because I have to put slides together and like that I

don't like making slides so well we'll see um there's a couple sections in the previous course where slides didn't make sense like they didn't feel right to me so I didn't do them but try I think for most of them especially if we're listing things out it's probably helpful for students to see it but that takes that just takes time so it's not like okay I know what I want to talk about let me go record it it's like I know what I want to go talk about let me go organize it visually uh it's it's almost like double the work so I I learned that last time so I'll pay attention to it more this time but uh we'll see I might uh I might spend like all of Saturday just like getting the um slides and stuff together and then all of Sunday

recording uh or I might split it up so that say I can do uh a section of slides record so it's fresh and then maybe do another section of slides wake up record and kind of get through a third section that way but anyway it's going to be good I'm excited for this one um and we got more coming we signed for a bunch of them so be good stuff but otherwise uh the brand G stuff is like obviously it's top of mine for me but it's nice because I have I have support right it's not it's not brand ghost isn't me which is nice my cold is I think like 99% gone so but brand ghost isn't just me which makes it nice like while I was at CrossFit like I'm driving so I'm not going to message them back but while I was

at CrossFit I could see that they were fixing some of the bugs that happened from overnight um even even Muhammad has responded um I got man this is so interesting there's someone on on LinkedIn I just saw this message again this person on LinkedIn was like hey like just kind of going through my uh was like reflecting on my career and stuff and wanted to catch up with people that I thought were like impactful and like wanted to catch up and I was like this name's not familiar and then I looked at their profile and I'm like I've never worked with this person in my life ever um and they just messaged me again and they're like hey just wanted to like make sure you saw my message and I'm like I can't tell if this is like someone's account got comp rised or something

but they've only worked in the US and I haven't worked in the US and they're all at different companies and I don't know their name so they might I don't know who they think I am but and ain't me pal or maybe it is and I'm just stupid which is entirely possible you know but brand ghost wise I'm trying to think like I chatted about this before there's Fe features that I want to go build and there are features that like we probably need to focus on so I did get done the post scheduling like if you wanted to go post from Brand ghost is a one-off thing we support that we just don't have it in the user interface but like I can call Web apis to do it which is nice um I had a bit of a I should talk about this

I had a bit of a shitty situation with uh with zapier there's a Mustang beside me trying to like match my driving people with mustangs I don't understand I'm sorry if you drive a Mustang but they're not good cars um what was I saying oh zapier yeah man okay so I was using like as I was building brand ghost and before I built goes I use zapier a lot and zapier is an absolute pile of trash and when I started using zapier it was okay and I actually had some good uh support requests and stuff like when things weren't working I felt like I was being supported especially as a paid customer and I have open support tickets from like January with zapier and I want to expl explain my my problem with zapi from their absolutely terrible customer service which is actually embarrassing like

if I if I were in charge of tech support and customer service at zapier I would I would not feel good about the state of things based on my interactions there I've literally had people in tech support like that I don't know their levels but um someone who seemed to be like taking over a case like it was like escalated and they were they literally said in their message like we're so sorry that you've been having a bad experience and like I'm here to go kind of like change the direction of this and then they shared with me in the email a bunch of information and screenshots for the wrong user so they had sent me over a bunch of someone else's like personal zapier stuff in a screenshot and I responded and I was like look I know that you're try trying to go

make this better but you literally just did a really big oopsie like not okay um not only are you just wasting my time still but like now you you've act you've like violated someone's privacy like it's ridiculous anyway the technical reason why I'm infuriated with zapier is that zapier does not seem to understand that when they make web requests when they make web requests if there's an error they will retry it and it's not every error but there are categories of errors that they will retry and you might say well Nick that might make sense maybe zapier wants that and you're right they do want that because they actually have a feature that you can turn on that allows you to control the behavior to retry but by default that feature is off and I don't have it turned on for anything at all and

I have had many instances many instances that when zapier goes to make a web request to some social platform or even to say the platform called buffer when zapier goes to communicate with buffer for videos in particular this is a common one buffer sends an error response back to zapier saying like hey like we're still waiting it's not that it's failed they're saying hey we're still waiting for it to finish processing so like here's a a response that's not a 200 and zapier goes oh it failed I'll try again and it does it three times now I post to like roughly every day like 8 to 12 social media platforms and you might imagine that if I'm triple posting a video to 12 platforms then that's not a good time for me in fact it is significantly worse than automating it and like the benefit

I get from automating it's significantly worse than that positive experience so I have sent them logs I have I've literally gotten people from buffer to give me web logs about how their API is being hit and it's evidenced in those logs that zapier is calling buffer three times I run brand ghost now and I can see on my server that they're making additional web requests and I don't have any feature turned on to retry things now last night's issue was even worse it wasn't retrying things the entire zap which is what you call like a workflow in zapier that that zap triggers every day at 9:00 a.m. okay at 5:116 p.m. out of nowhere it just decided to go run again just decided to go run again and it posted a short form video that already got posted this morning it posted it to every

platform once again and the problem now is that like I know zapier support is so terrible that I will never get the support I need on it like it's it's always going to be something I need to assume is broken which is terrible um cuz I'm paying for this service so we uh we really need to get Tik Tok approved and I think once Tik Tok is approved I can turn off zapier for forever um I I never want to give zap or another scent because they're so awful I think zapier tried to go too wide on too many things just to say that they have all these platforms and the whole thing sucks so cool zapier you can do 100 you can do a th000 you could do a million platforms but who cares if you can't even trust that the thing is going

to work in the most simple case like I can't I can't understand this so yeah and it made it even worse because when I was talking with the support people I was like I'm literally telling you that you need to go look in your logs that must exist somewhere that when you see a failed web request to go check why it's retrying like maybe the and very likely the tech support people aren't looking at code like I don't expect that but like how like how are you not communicating with this with an engineering team over what it's October now so like over this is the 10th month at least it's not been addressed it's just it's uh it's unreal like especially knowing that they have an optional feature for it right you have an optional feature I don't have it turned on you literally wrote

code to go design this optional feature around this that means your engineering teams understand the failure modes and they have logic in there to go interpret the failure mode and say should we retry should we take some other action the engineers know it so go tell them what's happening I don't have that feature turned on it should not retry it's insane but anyway I can't wait to never pay zapier again so I'm motivated that way because even if no one ever wants to pay for brand ghost I'm going to be saving money from zapier and they can eat it man cuz can't stand them and I'm home and I'm hungry but that's it for today um maybe we'll get another video in over the weekend I don't know not if I'm driving with my wife she probably doesn't want to be on the camera but

thanks for hanging out listen to me rant don't use zapier it sucks and I'll see you next time