E3: Observalyze Update

06/24/2024, duration: 13:50

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Welcome to Debugging Dan, where I share weekly my journey, balancing life, a full-time job, and side projects. I'm Dan, your host. Let's dive in.

Today's topic will be about how I just finished up ObserverLize and preparing to release this podcast for the first time. So recording this and the broadcasting of this, there will be some time in between. But before I get into that, today are the European elections here in the Netherlands, where I'm from, which is a topic which is at the moment very political importance because there are some electional things happening in the Netherlands.

So we had an election last year, November, a local selection or election and a very right party was elected and they were having trouble forming a cabinet. I guess that's what it's called in the Netherlands. And the cabinet that they eventually formed was kind of against Europe and they need a lot of things from Europe. And that's why these European elections are important to either, if you're not right, not liberal, but more social to give a counter voice to the election of the right parties. Or if you're right to give your voice again to the right parties, so they can perhaps influence Europe for the whole, I think it's four years, but the elections in Europe, so that's currently important.

Currently, I'm writing, I'm in a car commuting to work, so I have to work, so I will probably vote after work cause the voting location is open until line. So I'll be voting today and the topic for today I'd like to talk about is finishing up ObserverLize and starting on the podcast.

So I finished up ObserverLize a week ago, I believe. And, um, it's online and in my task planning, I said, finishing up ObserverLize, creating the podcast to be able to use that as a marketing thing also, but also to get it out. This podcast is not only about marketing, but it's about getting myself known. And also I'd like to interact with people who are doing similar things as I am. So that's next on my to-do list.

After that is the marketing for ObserverLize and this episode will probably be part of that since I'm talking about ObserverLize in here. So it might be the first or a second episode. I need to look at the planning. Maybe it may even be the first. Besides from the interaction, but yeah, I finished it up.

The demo is working. I'm not that happy yet with the user interface that I created for the SDK. It's still a bit simple and a bit boring. So, after I do the podcast and the marketing on my task list, I said, returning back to ObserverLize and fixing bugs and fixing some things that turned out to be annoying. Either from feedback from users, if there are any, or, some stuff that I encountered myself together with competing some talks, tasks that I wasn't able to finish for the MVP and will finish later.

What I think I will do is, well, I will also give a deadline. So I give myself the maximum of a week to go through that list. So I need to prioritize it for the most important things because else I might run into the situation that I will eventually take another month to finish up these additional tasks while I also like to be working on other things. So I just came up with that and I think that's smart. It also, again, gives me a kind of a deadline, which helped in completing ObserverLize. So yeah.

And so I've completed ObserverLize; it's online, but it's just as online as it was before because before it was only about event tracking and statistics and analytics for your SaaS app. And now the gamification part kind of replaced that, even though the analytics is still in there.

What I also plan to do is to record a video of me adding ObserverLize to Data Store, one of my other projects just to show that as an introduction and to highlight how easy it is basically to add ObserverLize to an existing project. And it's already in there, so for the video, I might just temporarily remove it and I just disable it. So that's it for now.

So I kind of completed the ObserverLize, but it didn't really change anything because there's not a lot of users flocking to it. Nobody knows it's there. Same as it was before, which is kind of what always happens when I release something; I have a problem giving it proper marketing and making it known.

That it's out there and I say marketing, but I don't mean it in the bad sense that the people have a lot of people have about marketing. I don't go into the tricks. I just want to announce it, make it available, and help people help make their products better. It's not really about all those marketing tactics and tricks because I try to keep it as close to how I am as possible.

And that's really not a slick marketing talk about things, but I'd like to have my projects speak for themselves. And I'm learning that that's pretty difficult because to have people recognize that it is something that could help them, they need to have seen it, they need to have interacted with it. So you need a way to get them there and hopefully then it will speak for itself and will help people and will also help me by making it, by learning from people and making it better.

So for the podcast, I had to do a couple of things, I haven't done a podcast before, so I need to learn about editing, improving audio and improving audio, especially because I'm recording this in the car. So there's background noise that hopefully I will be able to remove that with some additional filters.

I am currently, I need to do two, or I want to do two different options. I need to, I want to learn how to do it in Audacity, which is an open source audio editor, which I'm also going to need just to add it to the audio a bit. For example, the intro and the outro need to be added and I might really mess up during the recording. So I want to remove that, but the goal is to do all the recordings in one take and not have any editing done. That's the goal.

But since I have never done a podcast before, I'm not really sure whether that's really feasible. So we need to check the final product for doing that. And then to try using Audacity and also using, I believe it's called Adult Audio and Answer, which is just an API you send your file to and then get it back. And then I'm going to compare it to which one's better and just use that probably which one's better.

I also learned how to use the Open AI Whisper project to generate transcripts for the podcast. So I can also include those. I've installed an open-source podcast solution. I forgot the name, but it's a PHP project. It's Castor Pot, I believe. And, um, I've installed that so that I'm able to publish from there. I could have also gone for a commercial thing like Transistor, for example, but I'd like to keep things in control and also low budget.

So I'm pretty familiar with technical stuff, so I know how to install a software package and maintain it. So I figured I'd just do it myself. I already have the server and this won't cost me any additional money and I might decide to change that later. So what I figured is that I'd serve the feed and then, or at least the RSS feed. And I serve that from my own server and then I can always later on decide if I can redirect that to a different file.

For example, if I decide to move to Transistor, I could just update the RSS feed URL in my, on my, on my own domain. Instead of having to update to your podcast feeds, cause I don't know if that will go over properly or that I then need to create a new podcast because I'm choosing the RSS feed URL. So I've decided to do this, which means that I control where the file lives and what the contents is.

So that's what I've done. And kind of what I didn't do was really about the content of the podcast. The technical stuff I've been working with, I've been working on a project that I have that allows me to generate a static site and a blog from Notion pages. So I've been, it's not an official product, but I've used that for the static pages on the other projects that I have.

And I figured, Hey, I can also use that for the debuggingdan.com website, which is true. And the configuration for that was living in a JSON file. So every time I added a page needed to, to add a site, I needed to update the JSON file manually. And for me, that was a good excuse to decide, Hey, I'm going to put this in my SaaS boilerplate and already create a user account to log in around that.

Because that calls from, it's basically a part of the SaaS template radius or the boilerplate. So I created a web configuration element around that and for that, I don't need to change things manually because what I want to do for the podcast, I want to have, for example, the debuggingdan.com slash zero zero one. I want to have that redirected to any blog page specifically for that podcast where you can read the transcripts and also a summary.

And then for the future, what I'd also like to build this automation for that. So when I upload an MP3 file somewhere that it's good, that the audio gets improved automatically, if the transcripts are generated, that the summary is generated automatically. So I'd like to automate this as much as possible.

And one of the reasons that I'd like to build automations and also it takes me less time. Like if everything is, is, is generated already and ready to go, to go back to what I just said, I've been mostly working on the technical parts. I'm always, almost done with the updates to the blog site thingy that allows me to manage the website easier. I'm always done with that.

Yeah, I'm, I'm silent because I just realized that I need to reorder something because pages are not recognized if the blog is at the root URL and that's nowhere related to this podcast. It's just an internal thingy, but I just realized that so you can ignore that part.

And once that's done and I'm getting, now I'm getting motivated for that. I'd like to write out the introduction that I have, or I w I'd like to have a static basic introduction that explains this is the debugging Dan podcast. And we're talking about life and technology, and we did not only debugging software, but also debugging life.

I need to figure out what to say. And also I want to create an outro that thanks that says, thanks for listening, check out one of my products, check me out on Twitter, YouTube, et cetera. And then that's most of it. I'm not really good in user design, but for the podcast, I need a thumbnail for the podcast itself and for every episode.

And, well, I've generated a cool image with a D and some bugs on it. So that's what I'm going to use for both the podcast and the thumbnails for every episode. I'll keep there, there's a logo somewhere, and then I'll just do a static or a plain color background and some text on it with the title of the podcast or the title of the episode.

At some point, I think I'm going to evolve the thumbnails into something better. I am now learning, I just like to get started instead of getting hung up on details like that. So that's what I'm doing. So probably the thumbnail for this podcast episode is pretty, you know, pretty bland, but I hope that that won't scare off people.

It's not really the correct word, but I hope that it won't scare off people and just allows them to still listen because I hope that the content that I create is fun for people to listen to and helpful and people learn from it for my journey. And that's what I hope.

So to conclude, ObserverLize is done working on the podcast and after that, I'm going to work on marketing for ObserverLize and that entails sharing on social media, creating the Data Store, integration, video of ObserverLize, sharing on Reddit, on Twitter, and more stuff that I need to figure out.

So that's what I'm going to do in the coming weeks. Thanks for tuning in to Debugging Dan. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a review. Stay curious and see you next week.