All Play w/ Ryan Hefner Podcast Por Ryan Hefner arte de portada

All Play w/ Ryan Hefner

All Play w/ Ryan Hefner

De: Ryan Hefner
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Follow along as I, Ryan Hefner, build products and tools, while sharing the learnings and challenges along the way.© 2024 - 2025 Ryan Hefner Economía Gestión y Liderazgo Liderazgo
Episodios
  • 037 — No Waves
    Jul 2 2025

    Or, you can watch the video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/iU2PMrYUNIQ

    After attempting and failing to get an episode out the last couple of weeks, I am happy to say that I finally recorded one, and I am getting it out early this week.

    A lot of stuff has happened over the last 2.5 weeks, so here’s a quick run down, along with links:

    Optimizations were made to the https://www.opengraphs.com renderer, that is currently powering the open graph image generation for both https://www.allplay.fm and https://www.ryanhefner.com

    While integrating OpenGraphs into the All Play site, I noticed the audio players were no longer playing anymore, so after a bit of back-and-forth with Transistor (https://www.transistor.fm), I decided to rip out the custom waveform generation stuff I was doing and just play the mp3 directly in an `audio` tag. Hence, No Waves. I do plan on getting back to a solution for adding the waveforms back, but for the sake of getting things working, and working on other stuff, this quick hack will have to do. Probably a lesson in there about focusing on the right things, and how not everything has to be bespoke and custom built.

    Along that front, the whole No Waves thing got me thinking about Justin Jackson’s (https://justinjackson.ca) analogy about finding the right wave, and how I feel the same way trying to find the right product and revenue generator as I did back in the day when I started surfing. Heading out on the crap days to get more comfortable with my board and doing a lot of paddling to get into shitty waves, but all that time in the water and paddling made it easier for me to catch waves when I would eventually get out on the good days and was presented with good waves.

    Speaking of Justin Jackson, I was able to snag some time with him last Thursday for an impromptu Jam Sessions episode. I was feeling a little off in this one, but have a watch and let me know what you think: https://www.youtube.com/live/2_nuzJa3AJ0?si=JYB2WWNhlMphWu14

    On the OpenGraphs front, I have been busy making a few optimizations to the render, but mostly focusing on the marketing site and building some tools, and browser extensions (!) to launch before the full offering is available. And, a side note, the current state of browser extension development somehow feels even more fragmented and disjointed than ever, but I’ll save my thoughts and issues there for another episode.

    The goal this week is to get the browser extension submitted to at least one of the stores/directories this week, along with updates to the OpenGraphs marketing site to support it/them. And, get one—maybe two!—tools deployed to the site as well. My thinking is that if I can start to bake in some early tools that are nice and people like to use, hopefully that will keep people coming back, subscribing to the newsletter, and aware as new stuff keeps rolling out to the site, leading up to the full-on service becoming available. I’ll keep you posted on how that goes as things progress.

    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

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    13 m
  • 036 — Pedal to the Metal
    Jun 15 2025

    Watch the video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/rLRNnlzIOQM

    I connected with Vercel this past week to discuss how I could both optimize and try to control the costs that https://www.starterpacks.net was accumulating. I did walk away with some techniques that I will try on the next site I launch on Vercel where I need to try to maintain a consistent bill. Most notably:

    • Fluid Compute is good and does reduce function use/chaos
    • Controlling the cache key to maintain the cache between deploys (when possible)
    • Play with Cache-Control headers to see if it's possible to increase the number of cached edge request hits, and ultimately skip the function rendering for each cached page


    So, some good pointers to keep in mind for the next site that takes off on Vercel.

    On the client front, it was a busy week, but I was able to play around with writing my own Cache Handler to support the Render deploy of the frontend. I played around with various approaches trying to write a Cache Handler backed by a Redis instance, but ultimately had to back out of that approach since I wasn’t able to fully grasp the life cycle flow for when a cache handler is initialized and abandoned, resulting in either too many Redis connections remaining open and overloading the instance, or clients cleaning themselves up too early and causing errors when get/set methods were called. Instead, I ended up writing a Cache Handler that is using a LRU cache, and it seems to be enough to smooth out the instance, serve things fast, but without all the complexity of the Redis stuff. I might circle back to a Redis-based solution down the road, but the LRU approach seems to be working for now.

    After a long week of client work and troubleshooting, I wanted to make progress on something new that I have been putting off for a while, so I sat down on Friday on got the first instance of the open graph images renderer setup and deployed for https://www.opengraphs.com. OpenGraphs is essentially a re-write/re-imagination of a previous service that I wrote and was using to generate open graph images for my projects, but I have some plans to both optimize and expand that previous services vision, and hopefully customers, which I will be focusing on as I continue to build out the admin portions of the app.

    Along with getting the OpenGraphs renderer deployed, I was able to publish an update to the library that I use to handle the open graph data in my NextJS sites. You can check it out here: https://github.com/ryanhefner/next-meta

    And, don’t think that I have forgot about https://www.skylounge.social. After getting Starter Packs stabilized and no longer sucking money out of my wallet, and getting the OpenGraphs renderer setup and deployed, I should have the headspace available to wrap up a few of the remaining features on Skylounge and start inviting some early people to host sessions on the site and see how well it either does, or does not, work 🤞 More on that to come...

    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

    Más Menos
    13 m
  • 035 — $800 Gorilla in the Room
    Jun 7 2025

    Unfortunately I missed my milestone of getting an early release of https://www.skylounge.social deployed during Release Day. But, it wasn’t for a lack of trying. It’s kind of hard to run when it feels like you have a knife in your stomach and you don’t know how to stop the bleeding.

    I dig into what attempts I made to optimize the NextJS App for https://www.starterpacks.net to utilize fewer resources on Vercel (spoiler alert, unsuccessfully), what the usage and costs were, and what I ultimately did to try to stabilize the costs until I can start to get the site earning more than it costs to host.

    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

    Más Menos
    10 m
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