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**Gerhard Lazu:** Exactly. And if it can be distributed, that means that we can run multiple instances of our app, was it not for the next point, which is an S3 object store for all the media assets, instead of local disk. Right now when we restore from backups, that's actually what takes the most time, because we have... |
**Jerod Santo:** Putting all of our assets into S3 would be like "Welcome to the 2000's, guys." |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I would be, right? \[laughter\] This is exactly right, yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[55:47\] "You've now left the '90s..." Maybe I should explain why we're using local storage. Some of it is actually just technical debt. This was a decision I made when building the platform back in 2015, around how we handle uploads. Not image uploads, but mp3 uploads... Which is one of the major thi... |
So because of that reason, and because I was new to Elixir and I didn't know exactly the best way to do it in the cloud, I just said "Let's keep it simple. We're just gonna upload the files to the local disk." We had a big VPS with a big disk on it, and were like "Don't complicate things." So that's what we did. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, must use it. |
**Jerod Santo:** And know full well -- I mean, even back then I had done client work where I would put their assets on S3. It was just because this mp3 thing and the ID3, we ran FFmpeg against it, and like "How do you that in the cloud?" etc. So that was the initial decision-making, and we've been kind of bumping up ag... |
So as part of this "Well, let's put our assets on S3" thing, I'm like "Let's replace Arc when we're doing this, because I don't want to retro-fit Arc." It does support S3 uploads, but the way it goes about shelling out for the post-processing stuff, it's kind of wonky, and I don't totally trust it... So I would want to... |
So it's kind of like that, where it's slightly a bigger job than reconfiguring Arc just to push to S3, and doing one upload and being done with it. But it's definitely time... It's past time, so I'm with you. I think we'll do it. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. This just basically highlights the importance of discussion these improvements constantly. So stuff that keeps coming up, not once, but two years in a row - it's the stuff that really needs to change. Unless you do this constantly, you don't realize exactly wha... |
I think in this case, this S3 and the database, which is not managed, have the potential of unlocking so many things for us. Simplifying everything... |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, the app becomes effectively stateless, right? |
**Gerhard Lazu:** It does. How amazing is that...? |
**Jerod Santo:** And then you're basically in the cloud world, where you can just do whatever you want, and life is good. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's exactly it. |
**Jerod Santo:** And then face all new problems you didn't know existed. \[laughs\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** True. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Does this Arc thing also impact the chaptering stuff we've talked about in the past, Jerod? Wasn't that also part of it? |
**Jerod Santo:** \[59:58\] There is an angle into that... So for the listeners, the chaptering -- so the mp3 spec... Actually, it's the ID3 version 2 spec, which is part of the way mp3's work - it's all about the headers - supports chaptering. ID3 v1 does not. ID3 v1 is very simple. It's like a fixed frame kind of a th... |
Unfortunately, there's not an ID3v2 Elixir library, and the way that we do our ID3 tags right now, by way of Arc, is with FFmpeg. So we shell out FFmpeg, and we tell FFmpeg what to do to the mp3 file, and it does all the ID3 magic, and then we take it from there. |
So the idea was - well, if we could not depend on FFmpeg, first of all, that simplifies our deploys, because we don't have a dependency that's like a Linux binary, although that's a small thing. But we'd be able to also do chaptering, so we'd get some features, as well as simplify the setup. And that is only partially ... |
So the fact that it doesn't exist in FFmpeg, which - if you've ever seen, it's one of the most feature-full tools in the world. I mean, FFmpeg is an amazing piece of software, that does so many things... But it doesn't support mp3 chaptering. So it's kind of a slightly related, but different initiative that I've also n... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm just wondering if we had to bite the Arc tail off, or whatever that might seem like, to also get a win, along with that... And the win we've wanted for years essentially was being able to bake in some sort of chaptering maker into the CMS backend, so that we can display those on page, as you sai... |
**Jerod Santo:** Totally. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And for obvious reasons, that Jerod has mentioned, that's why we haven't done it. It's not because we don't want to, it's because we haven't technically been able to. So if this made us bite that off, then it could provide some team motivation... Like, we get this feature too, and we get this statel... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. And one way I thought that we could tackle that, which doesn't work with our current setup, is we could -- I mean, we render the mp3's or we mix down the mp3's locally on our machines, then we upload them to the site... We could pre-process the chapters locally. We could add the chapters locally ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[01:03:35.15\] As I was listening to you talking about this, one of the things that it reminded me of is the segments in YouTube video files, which sometimes I really like, because I can skip to specific topics really easily... So rather than having fixed beginning, middle and end, you can have topic... |
**Jerod Santo:** That's the feature right there. You use it however you wanna use it. The obvious way is like "Well, there's three segments. I'll put three chapters in." But if you were in charge of doing your own episode details and you could put the chapters in the way you would want to - yeah, you could make it real... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I would love that. |
**Jerod Santo:** And for clients that support it, it is a spectacular feature. Now, a lot of the popular podcast apps don't care. Spotify is not gonna use it. Apple Podcasts historically has not used it. So they basically don't exist. But the indie devs tend to put those kind of features in... Like the Overcasts, the C... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah, I love that. The other thing that I would really like is when I write blog posts, I could just drag and drop files as I do in GitHub, and just get them automatically uploaded to S3... Because right now, I have to manually upload them... |
**Jerod Santo:** You and me both. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** ...and then referencing them is so clunky. |
**Jerod Santo:** I would love that feature. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You're exposing our ad-hocness. Come on now. \[laughter\] We literally open up Transmit, or whatever you use to manage S3 buckets... |
**Jerod Santo:** And we upload them. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** ...and we drag and drop them, and then we Copy URL... But first you have to make it readable by the world - don't forget that part - and then put the link into your blog post. |
**Jerod Santo:** No, you can globally configure that on the bucket, so that all files are readable... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yes, we do have that. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Really? I didn't know about that. |
**Jerod Santo:** But it still sucks... \[laughs\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It does suck. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** But one thing which I do for these episodes, for the Ship It ones - I take a screenshot... By the way, I took very good screenshots of all three of us... And I put them in the show notes. |
**Jerod Santo:** I saw that. You're the first one to do that... So again, you're pushing the envelope of Changelog podcasts, and you're probably pushing us towards features that I would normally just completely put off over and over again. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** See what happens when people come together and talk about what could improve? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** Well said. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So what I propose now is that we go and improve those things, and come back in ten episodes. How does that sound? |
**Jerod Santo:** Sounds good. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Kaizen! |
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