Eating Our Own Dog Food With BrandGhost

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all right I'm uh leaving a little early today um and just like I suspected I parked at the edge and someone parked beside me and when you park at the edge you can like kind of park into some extra space where there's just some um I don't know like not what what am I trying to say like filled lines like hatched lines you can kind to park over them and it just frees up more space uh on your on your other side cuz no one else can park in that spot so when you get an end spot you can park over the edge and give yourself some more door room someone parked I knew this was going to happen someone parked beside me and just completely disregarded the fact that there's lines on the ground and parked basically up against my door so I still

couldn't open my door and had to like shimmy in even though I purposefully gave myself room I took a picture of it and they're parked completely over the lines it's just like they didn't look and decided to park as close as I could to my car without hitting it maybe they did hit it I don't know I might as well have uh no I'm leaving early because I was in at the office this whole week instead of just uh 2 days as plan because uh travel to the office but the person I was planning to meet with was actually sick today so uh didn't really work out so it's actually one of the worst days for me to to drive to the office just like for my schedule because Thursdays for me are basically meetings from start to end and nothing wrong with that I

kind of plan to have like heavy oneon-one days sorry about 101's in the last video and um it's a heavy 101 day for me but we had uh I mentioned in the last video I had to move some one-on ones which I don't like doing for office travel we also had another meeting that was scheduled today so I had a bunch of stuff that's kind of unplanned for today that kind of disrupted the schedule again totally fine this is just how life is I'm not complaining about it but the one meeting that was in place got moved to Monday so now there's a gaping hole in my calendar which again not complaining just explaining the situation just means I can do other work during that time totally fine and then because the one person uh was out today I also had an hourong meeting scheduled

with them so if they're out sick basically I had all this time free up and it's not effective for me to be at the office for this so I'm just going to drive home uh on Thursdays I have a a late meeting as well so I'm kind of doing what I what I preach like have the flexibility in your schedule I'm going to be on later tonight doesn't matter that I'm driving like you know air quotes like during work hours I worked until whatever it was like 8:30 last night like it's fine I'm not not going to feel bad about it but it is more effective for me to get home and just work from there uh kind of like I had planned for I had planned distractions for today uh if I can call it that right again not trying trying to be clear

I'm not complaining about uh you know having people come to the office and moving things around totally fine um but I had planned for those types of distractions now that they are removed I don't want to have unplanned distractions kind of uh take up more time so um heading back from the office mostly just cheesed that someone tried to disrupt the parking situation man what a what a pain in the butt I just I don't know like I want to have I want to trust that people try to do their best job when they're parking but it's really hard for me to believe sometimes it's really difficult for me to believe that sometimes but anyway um I figured do a little bit of talking about brand ghost um from like a development perspective what we got going on I know I talked about this some

the other day and I was talking about um like Azure um Azure storage so I got to invest some time into that I'm going to Y I'm sorry don't mean to do it um so I got to spend some time coding up the stuff for your blob storage um which I think is going to be cool um part of me is not excited for it the other part is like I haven't actually used these services on Azure like it's going to be new I'm going to learn that's okay um so that's cool definitely um like I'll give you an example of why I think this is going to be valuable um even just from uh like an internal like usage so one one thing and I promise this is going to be more technical than it sounds on the Sur but for what's going on

here someone was in the far left lane which is two turning Lanes to get onto the highway and then they decided they were and they were at the front they decided they're going to just forget that and they moved over two lanes so everyone was honing at them amazing um so the scenario I want to talk about is uh for brand ghost all all of the social media that we're going to be doing is going to be dog fotedar with the concept of dog fooding cuz I realized this and I think I've talked about this before in other forums other videos uh maybe on live streams or something but the the term or the phrase dog fooding or to eat your own dog food I didn't realize doesn't really translate well like or convey the same meaning properly to to other cultures and I learned

this because we have at Microsoft we have a like a dog food test ring and I had employees from Mexico that after a while we're like by the way what's what what's dog food why do we call it dog food and I was like oh crap I never thought that like you just might not know that from like a uh I don't know it's like not a phrase or something that would come up and even it doesn't have to be because they're from Mexico but it was just interesting that two people from Mexico were like we just don't know what that means um so if you're not familiar with what dog fooding means or eating your own dog food it means that you're using your own product or service and there's a lot of benefits to that because you can you can be your own

customer like if you're feeling like it's painful you're going to want to make changes for it right people are already hitting the brakes um so for our social media posting on brand ghost all of the social media content is done through brand ghost Mo like and when I talk about my own personal social media Dev leader like 99% of it is done through brand ghost there's only a handful of things that are ad hoc you know that I post up you know maybe I'm taking a especially for like packed publishing posts and stuff like that um I might take a one-off picture and post and kind of thing oh man this highway is jacked up I hate I hate commuting so there's rare situations like that um where I'll I'll go make a post so with our stuff on brand ghost brand ghost we're dog

fooding all of it uh we have our topic streams hooked up to go posting and this situation happened where um we set up these um these topic streams to post and we wanted to have them be image like an image post across different social media platforms and for me I I'm pretty sure I set these up in code so and I think I did I I don't know because there was a bug and that's why I think that I did it manually versus like through the app anyway oh you know what no I'm I'm that's total bull crap um there was a bug but it's like it's end user error which is even more reason for this entire conversation okay let me let me get it back on track here uh so right now when you want to make an image Post in brand ghost

you need to be able to provide the URL to the image not so bad so you just need an image hosted somewhere that's public and you give that URL to Brand ghost and it will post it everyone's happy yay so the bug um or the the user error and the thing that we can improve is that one of the other people on the team uh set up the topic stream and I'm thankful for them actually I'm not blaming them by the way uh they set up the topic stream they put the links to all of the CU we you can host stuff in Google Drive and get a public link so he put all the stuff in a Google drive with public links great cool and then uh I was going to be responsible for writing the text for the post so he set all

those up and I just had to go write text Sweet right that's this is good stuff and then I remember I only did a couple of them cuz I just wanted to prove that things were going to post and look good and I figured I turn off like out of nine of them I would turn off seven and I would make two that I'm like I got to do these properly we'll see how they look and then I got busy and then I remember like oh yeah I got to go back and check these and they just they just didn't post and I was like well what the heck's going on here so I went back and checked and I was like okay like I'm just going to I wasn't paying attention just going to clear out all the history for this thing let it

run again and we'll be good and I just had it run and noticed uh this morning that the links that were provided from Google Drive they are no one's fault they're a link to basically view the picture inside of Google Drive like it gives you a little viewer for it it's not a link to download it and it's so easy to mess this up unless you know so I saw it I was like oh crap like that's why these aren't posting okay so I have to go in and then change the format of the URL to be a Google Drive download link which is entirely different I can just use the same ID to the resource so great that's all working now I should see these things posting everyone's happy but the point that I want to make here is that uh users shouldn't have

to deal with this kind of crap um so good thing we're dog fooding it and living through this experience and I truly think that the the Azure blob storage stuff is going to make this so much better because you just won't ever have to deal with that so if you want to give it a URL like I'm even thinking that in the future we might not even allow you to post from a URL just because it's Error prone what happens if that site go down the only reason that might be valuable is if you have like a different picture that you're putting at the same URL but that seems kind of like specific I don't even know if that's a real use case maybe it's not so bad to get on the highway over here I don't know why it was so backed up to

get on there's a hugee line of traffic but there's no traffic on the highway okay so back to the Azure blob storage stuff the reason why that's so valuable is that you just get to upload the image as one might expect and um then internally in our system we can deal with IDs for things we can get URLs to download we can get the btes like we have full control and for all of the social media apis that do just leverage URLs we can at least say don't you worry about it we got the URL for it it's an Azure blob storage awesome so overall I think it's going to make that experience so much better um not only just from like a usability perspective just like upload your picture or your video whatever um but it makes it really hard to screw up you

don't have to worry about having a URL someone pulled out into the fast lane and they're going like under the speed limit in front of me we don't do that um so yeah I'm excited to do some of the Azure blob storage stuff just cuz like I think it's going to be kind of transformative for our platform so I'm happy for that um I had uh one of the other developers checking out Tik Tok this morning we had a funny bug like we we need to go submit to Tik Tok to get approval but uh when we were testing it uh we were we were just setting the expiration in our for for Access tokens in our server just like kind of whatever and we knew that there was a bug between our front end and back end for for Tik Tok and we kind

of just like we're putting it off and then we we forgot so the issue is that when you go to authenticate it all works with Tik Tok but we were telling our back end that the tokens were already expired so then you'd go to do anything with Tik Tok and it was like no doesn't work so kind of crappy um but I I just had him look into that and basically we were setting the the wrong offset uh for expiration time so that's fixed which is good news um so he'll have to go do the approval videos and stuff for Tik Tok which is a pain in the butt um I hope the approval process for the individual permissions is very much like the app I really hope uh because if it's anything just like how meta treated their approval process it's going to be

awful because meta wasn't even following the instructions so anyway we'll get that out of the way I should I got to Ping him when I get home to ask about the Google quota uh limit for YouTube because that's also problematic um and I should make a note for myself I got to make my um some of my content is still not on brand ghost some of it so just for transparency like if you see my short form videos go up my short form videos are still posted through the Legacy system and I need to get them on to Brand ghost it's a bad spot to park a vehicle man on the highway and uh I suspect what might happen is we ask for a increase from Google they might be waiting to see their like the API being used cuz they might say well why

do you want to increase the quota you're not even using it it's because we don't want to offer it to the public if if basically no one can use it in parallel we can't have people competing with each other for it so I might on board myself to it and then just get that out of the way so I might do that so I should driving I can't make a note for myself it's kind of difficult so I'm saying it out loud so I remember so I got to do that um I'm interested in how our brand G social media post will go for we have this uh idea and kind of sharing my social media Secrets it's not really a secret but um we want to try doing like kind of like shout out posts and what I mean by that is like referencing

some other big creators and some of their philosophies and and just sharing thoughts about that so we'll have pictures of them we'll share some posts that they have in the pictures we'll have like our own thoughts about it and and tag them and hopefully if they engage then we get some visibility so we have a whole topic stream dedicated to basically trying to get engagement out of big creators now when I say big creators um I don't just mean like Alex Heros or Gary ve um because those creators are so big that they don't even have to engage on their platforms they kind of have their content creation the way that all of us want to have it which is just post stuff and forget it they can do that and they can get tons of Impressions the rest of us have to stay commenting

on stuff we don't have a choice you don't get the Impressions so unless you're like a celebrity you don't get impressions unless you're commenting on things so I think that'll be a good experiment for us um so I'm excited for that there was something else for bran ghost that I wanted to oh oh we have um our content onboarding I think I talked about the content onboarding before but let me explain it again the idea and again I want to share some of the technical parts to this like why it's challenging cuz you might not care about anything I'm saying but if it's a little bit more programy then maybe it's more interesting but um one of the things I have talked about this from our metrics is that we look at people onboarding they drop off right away and that's because once your you're

made an account like the next step is like is just work right you have to go add your social media accounts you have to go create a topic stream you might be saying like what the hell is a topic stream so like it's just there's a barrier there and we're well aware of it we actually before we started onboarding people we actually reduced an even bigger barrier which is that all of the posts that you make are temp are technically templated so you can customize all of these different uh macros that you can use in your post so there's all of this backend infrastructure um there's all of this backend infrastructure that supports like writing macros and and templating and doing search and replace kind of stuff but we were like there's literally no way anyone's going to figure this out and it we only

did it because I started coding it because that's how I was using this kind of stuff before for myself so we'll bring it back as like a power user feature but we said for the average person the they'll never get started so we're very interested in streamlining the onboarding and uh the way that we want to do that is connect to your social media feeds um what so you you'll pick an account basically so by going through that it's actually the first step that you have to do on our platform anyway is connect to social media account so we kind of force you through the first step like hey like where's your content that you want to import if you want to import any oh it's on LinkedIn oh it's on Twitter okay cool connect that and then we'll go pull some posts and then

we will show you how we can make a topic stream of those posts and if you're happy with it we'll just add it so there's a a Twist to that this is where we're going to start incorporating some of the AI so I suspect and I don't know this for a fact but I suspect with some of the AI pieces here um if it hasn't got enough of your content to do uh like to kind of rewrite in your voice if it doesn't have enough then we might fall into to like a a trap where we take your posts and we say hey we'll we'll try to you know give you variations of these posts uh that are improved with AI for example it just might not be enough of your tone your voice your writing style that it makes sense to do that effectively

we'll have to see because the last thing we want to do is take some of your your posts that you're proud of and then we go to to rewrite them to give you some extra variations just for more content right and then all of a sudden your new post is like rocket emoji in the vast realm of digital markeing the landscape is dramatically changing uh let's delve into oh my goodness I sneezed I hope that wasn't the most defining thing you've ever heard I'm sorry I don't even know how to mute this if I have to sneeze so you got to be ready all the time um yeah so we don't we don't want to rewrite stuff and just make it total garbage for people that's not like I don't want brand ghost to become a platform where people are like AI generating content and

just like blasting it out like I I don't want to be associated with that so when we start using AI Tools in our platform I want to make sure that we're doing it in a way that's supplementary gets you started and not in a a way that's like we're just going to use chat GPT and write the most garbage post for you like I'm not not okay with that and it's because as a content creator there are people I see that will literally do two things they'll make a post that's just completely AI generated and it's so obvious that you're kind of like dude please take this down like I'm getting secondhand embarrassment that's one thing and then the second is the comments the comments are so much worse um people are leaving AI generated comments and I'm not going to call out I don't

even want to call them a competitor they got a ton of people using their product but I can tell they're using their product because the replies that are being left are just absolute trash if you have a oneclick button to generate an a an AI response like AI comment and people are just like I don't want to spend time on social media let me do this um you end up with garbage it's absolutely trash and I think I personally think there's a way to make this better but when you're just blindly posting AI comments man it's it's so obvious and and part of me struggles because like as a Creator when people leave comments you're supposed to reply to them it helps with your engagement and Impressions but when someone leaves a blatant AI comment on my post I'm like I just want to I

just want to delete it like I want it gone cuz it's like it feels gross so anyway we'll see how that goes but we want to make sure that when we're onboarding people we can give them some variation to the content they already have so we'll see we'll have to see if it if it starts feeling really bad and it's just not enough context then we'll move away from it but that's a really big feature for us that I'm looking forward to so I think I have to finish up one more API uh I think I talked about it yesterday very very briefly I just didn't have time yesterday uh I actually started it this morning uh sometime after CrossFit and before coming to work but uh I hit a bit of a snag which is funny because I was very confident I can make

it backwards compatible like no sweat and I made the the call site to it so if you were to call the API you can have flexibility in how you want to call it so that part's backwards compatible but I realized I need to change the response and I can't I can't just add to the response I have to change the response so I was like oh man like I can't just push this up like if it was basically done it's a simple change but I'm like now I can't just push this up I should have checked if I needed to make a whole new API first um so I talked to the other engineer and he said like doesn't matter to him he's like can be the same or different uh he's like I'm not in a rush so if you need to make two

or whatever and take more time like go do it and uh now I'm thinking cuz I change the code from like the API call site to going to the database and everything like through the the unit of work and all that um that's all been updated but what I might do is keep all of that the how it's been updated and just make a second web API that way I can handle the response the way I need to but anyway that should be quick work so I think like tonight there's going to be a handful of things I can crank out right away and just have more progress so I'm happy about that I do have to turn on this feature that I'm calling like post splitting and I don't know I ramble too much in the car so I don't know if I've talked

about this one but man there's more and more cyber trucks look at this stupid looking thing okay um with platforms like Twitter and threads and blue sky um you have these really short um post lengths right like Twitter used to be 140 characters now it's 280 um but if you have a a Twitter premium account you can get uh the apis now allow for long posts so sweet but if you want to go post that same thing to threads or blue sky probably m it on I don't know what the limmit is I'm M it on you basically have to design content to be short form for that so the way that people get around this is they just make threads like they manually go you know you're you got your first paragraph you're going to put it that then into one tweet you're going

to reply to it with the next one so people make threads this way which is fine and the idea behind post splitting is that if you are over the limit what I'm trying to do is find natural spots to break up your post and make sure that they fit within the limit so I'm going to try to enable that I have the code written I've written some tests for it it's It's tricky because I think there's going to be some scenario still where it's going to feel weird and that's because it doesn't have context for what it's actually trying to split just looking for it's a it's definitely a naive approach for how to do it um so for example it might split between a bulleted list or like a numbered list I haven't written code that will necessarily guarantee that it doesn't it does

a pretty good job but I think it'll mess up on some stuff like that and someone who's having their content fed into that might go man I don't I just don't want my content to look like that so I just feel like I have a couple of more edge cases to cover with it but uh we're going to turn that on for David he will be I guess I shouldn't have said his name I don't know if that matters you don't get a last name David Davidson uh we'll turn it on for the D Man and uh we'll see it with his content cuz uh he had asked about a particular type of content and I said like it's doable I said I have code for it cuz the alternative is that you have to go you know take long form text posts and and

rewrite them to be short which we can use AI for that to help but it would be even better if you don't even have to do that if you just post it and it does the right thing so I got to do that so I don't know that's like five or six things I think right the the Azure blob storage is definitely the the big daddy so we'll get that sorted out but probably do a bunch of that tonight to be honest I'm not going to finish the blob storage tonight there's just not enough time and that reminds me I got to get on a call with Ryan Murphy to finish up our course cuz we're right there it's cool so might have to be a next week thing where we schedule some time and get on the recording together it's going to be fun

so I'm almost home here almost home traffic patterns are a little different when uh you're not leaving at the normal time although I don't know why this light's taking so long I shouldn't the other thing this will be my Pivot away from software engineering stuff is my uh my TT goes in for an oil change tomorrow and uh I should probably spend some time I got I got to fill up the I got to check the air in the tires I got to make sure the battery's charged got to do a handful of things so I should do that uh right after work so maybe that will derail some of the development time tonight but I got to do that cuz I got to drive it tomorrow if it's not drivable I got a different problem so I'll do that but that should mean that

car I mean yeah it'll be drivable which is good because I I didn't want to drive it when the oil change wasn't done and for context I can't change my own oil in the the setup I have um I should be transparent I've never changed my own oil but if I needed to I can't I can't do it in my driveway I have to like do it on the street because my driveway slanted I don't have space to do it so uh otherwise it would be cool to just be able to jack up the car and and get it all done but cannot do it so got to find a shop that can and closest shop is like 25 minutes away at least that I trust so they take care of our uh of our BMW and I I really enjoy like their level of

customer service so so that's cool the I asked the Mercedes dealership for for this car the one time I was in getting the oil change for this I said by the way like I have a I have a higher end TT it's uh it's a ttrs it's not like it's the base model or anything it's not an R8 but I said if I have that like would you guys change the wheel for that here and he was like no okay worth asking but you could tell they're just like know we have zero interest in your whatever garbage car you have that's not uh a Mercedes like we want nothing to do with it I'm like I get it it's a dealership but I was hopeful so I am home backing in I got to bring my garbage in but I think that's it folks thanks

for hanging out on the drive and I will see you next time