Hit F5 on the Dome | talkingshop.dev

[00:00:00]

[00:01:16] David: What is going on?

[00:01:20] Kalen Jordan: How's your week going so far? Kicking butt and taking names,

[00:01:26] David: Yeah, baby. Doing stuff, making progress. Good times.

[00:01:33] Kalen Jordan: Knocking those items off the old to-do list.

[00:01:36] David: That's like one big item I've been working on lately. Trying to

[00:01:40] Kalen Jordan: Oh yeah.

[00:01:41] David: numbers flowing.

[00:01:44] Kalen Jordan: A mega item. The NetSuite thing. The NetSuite, yeah. Nice.

[00:01:51] David: It's getting there.

[00:01:52] Kalen Jordan: Yeah. Did you end up taking a crack at the AI stuff

[00:01:56] David: Not yet. I haven't

[00:01:57] Kalen Jordan: to,

[00:01:58] David: I'm

[00:01:59] Kalen Jordan: oh, okay.

[00:02:00] David: trying to get some, proof of concept numbers to match with some big old SQL queries

[00:02:06] Kalen Jordan: Oh, nice.

[00:02:08] David: and the numbers. They are a matching.

[00:02:14] Kalen Jordan: Gotta get the numbers to match up.

[00:02:16] David: The numbers.

[00:02:17] Kalen Jordan: Oh dude, I'm, I'm

[00:02:20] David: How's your

[00:02:20] Kalen Jordan: low on, uh, it's pretty good, I'm running low on juice right now. I gotta get the juices moving. I'm like ready to,

[00:02:28] David: kind of juice you prefer?

[00:02:33] Kalen Jordan: I'm running, I'm like running on fumes.

[00:02:37] David: Busy week or what?

[00:02:39] Kalen Jordan: I've been, been working, been busy. . Just like I was, working on some stuff and then I, I was like, okay, I gotta get ready for the pod. And then I was like, all right, should I work up until like the last minute?

[00:02:51] Kalen Jordan: I was like, nah. I was like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna be distracted. If I try to do that, I'm not gonna get it done anyways. So then I like laid down for a couple minutes and I don't know if that was a good idea or not, but

[00:03:05] David: always

[00:03:05] Kalen Jordan: yeah,

[00:03:06] David: like four to eight hours to wake up when I take a nap.

[00:03:10] Kalen Jordan: sometimes I can do a nice, like, I was doing it more often, but sometimes I could, I could just lay down for a hot minute and then get like reset, get a little refresh, hit a quick F five on the dome. But,

[00:03:30] Kalen Jordan: but it didn't quite happen that way this time.

[00:03:34] David: maybe

[00:03:34] Kalen Jordan: So.

[00:03:35] David: the age is getting to you or the children. I think it's a little bit of both for me.

[00:03:40] Kalen Jordan: I know, man. I know, dude. I'm getting old. Getting old, and then there's going to be a hailstorm tonight, so I gotta, move the cars into the garage. I have a whole situation on my hands to move my desk and stuff to, yeah.

[00:03:57] David: gr my garage is not suitable for storming cars. we have to do that mad scramble sometimes too. It's actually storming here right now. You might hear some thunder,

[00:04:10] Kalen Jordan: Oh, is it

[00:04:11] David: yeah, we always have to like clean up the cardboard boxes and random projects in the middle of the floor to get our cars in.

[00:04:20] Kalen Jordan: Right. Do you have a good, like notification system for like storms? Like do you get an app notification or, um, I.

[00:04:30] David: people that just kind of lets other people tell them that things are happening with the

[00:04:34] Kalen Jordan: Right,

[00:04:35] David: really,

[00:04:36] Kalen Jordan: right.

[00:04:36] David: like to

[00:04:37] Kalen Jordan: Just in general in life, right?

[00:04:39] David: Yeah.

[00:04:42] Kalen Jordan: Yeah. I, that's normally what happens, like my wife told me this time, but like, when, if it hails, like I, I have to get the both of the cars in the garage like quickly. , and so I need like a more foolproof method,

[00:04:56] David: Hmm.

[00:04:57] Kalen Jordan: Because we've been lucky enough, we haven't had any hail destroy our cars yet, but, you know, it's, it, it,

[00:05:03] David: have, like my cars have aged enough that I really don't care

[00:05:06] Kalen Jordan: yeah. See, that's,

[00:05:08] David: if they have some Ds.

[00:05:09] Kalen Jordan: that's the way to live life

[00:05:13] David: I just

[00:05:13] Kalen Jordan: having.

[00:05:14] David: until it dies.

[00:05:16] Kalen Jordan: Ride it into the ground. But having said that, like you wouldn't, I mean, if the windshield got cracked, I mean, we had some hail recently, windshields were cracked in. Like,

[00:05:25] David: I guess

[00:05:25] Kalen Jordan: that's gonna, that'll put a cramp in your, in your daily commute,

[00:05:31] David: I say that, but I like, at some point, one of my cars is going to die, probably the older one, I really want to get a rivian. And if I have a rivian, I will baby that thing for sure

[00:05:45] Kalen Jordan: Yeah. Then you'll be stressing.

[00:05:46] David: for at least six months. And back to not caring.

[00:05:53] Kalen Jordan: Nice. I am a little uptight about the cars. That's, that's the problem with having a, like a newer car is I get real uptight man,

[00:06:01] David: Yeah,

[00:06:01] Kalen Jordan: which isn't, isn't.

[00:06:03] David: going? No. Then you

[00:06:04] Kalen Jordan: Oh man, I can, I wish I had one of those bad boys. Well, when it first came out I was like, really? I was like, I need to get one of those. , when I got the Tesla, I was the, the model YI was pretty excited about it.

[00:06:17] Kalen Jordan: And then within a matter of time I went from feeling like it was cool to feeling like it was like, like the well doesn't help that. Like first, all the conservatives hated my Tesla. And so I got, used to that and now the other side hates it. So I basically, I went from feeling like I had a cool car to feeling like I had the stupidest, most hated car in existence.

[00:06:42] Kalen Jordan: So now I'm kinda like, you know, if you're excited about a car, like wait six months and you, you know, you'll hate it type of thing.

[00:06:48] David: Yeah,

[00:06:50] David: I could understand not wanting to get it all dented up if it's newer and all that jazz. I.

[00:06:55] Kalen Jordan: Yeah. Yeah. It's,

[00:06:57] David: I

[00:06:57] Kalen Jordan: it's an issue.

[00:06:58] David: the, the model Y. It's pretty like, usually that's what I get when I have to rent a car out in

[00:07:03] Kalen Jordan: Oh, nice,

[00:07:03] David: I get one of those and they're, definitely fun to drive.

[00:07:07] Kalen Jordan: nice.

[00:07:07] David: own a cyber truck.

[00:07:09] David: Someone at my kids' school has one and they call it the trash can truck

[00:07:13] Kalen Jordan: Yeah, that's what they call it over here too. My son's into it. My daughters, they all make fun, you know, they all call it a trash can truck. Me and my son, he, my son, he's on the, we're on the same team, you know? Um,

[00:07:29] David: truck.

[00:07:30] Kalen Jordan: yeah. Yeah. We support each other, um, in the household.

[00:07:36] David: That's,

[00:07:37] Kalen Jordan: Yeah. Yeah. Balance out the, the fun, Feng Shu.

[00:07:43] David: Dude,

[00:07:43] Kalen Jordan: Um.

[00:07:44] David: I don't know if like you wanted to build up to this or not, but I'm really interested by your. Your app that you showed recently on Twitter that, like that block builder thing. So there's a thing like admin blocks. I, I feel like I was tangentially aware of them, but then you just kind of like, did it, what is that?

[00:08:07] Kalen Jordan: We can't talk about this. I have a whole buildup planned out. We're gonna, we're gonna crescendo.

[00:08:12] David: Register

[00:08:13] Kalen Jordan: whole, I have a whole series, and then we're gonna crescendo at minute 33 into this,

[00:08:20] David: Perfect.

[00:08:21] Kalen Jordan: so basically the admin block. Oh, so I have a, I have , this B2B project I've been working on, where the agency

[00:08:29] Kalen Jordan: is putting together like an accelerator type of a thing. \ basically wanna like retool, like kind of productize some of the stuff we've built and then try to use it for other, clients and kinda like, um, you know, for, yeah, so, which was like music to my ears because like I love to try to, make things a little more productized versus like, when you're on a typical, you know, crazy client deadline, you're just rushing, rushing, rushing and stuff.

[00:08:58] Kalen Jordan: So, as part of that, because like one of the issues is that like with the way, , we have customers assigned to companies with different roles and things like that, there's a couple different, like fields and ta like for example, there's a tag that, . Is required. And I can't even remember off.

[00:09:21] Kalen Jordan: I think it's because you can't query customers on company as well as other filters. So I had to add a tag to the customer in addition to the company association. So like, if, if somebody, so if somebody wants to go and, and move a customer from one company to another, there's like multiple steps they have to do.

[00:09:41] Kalen Jordan: They have to change the company, they gotta change the tag. And then there's similar issues with like, meta fields too. Like there's a whole bunch of meta fields on the company, meta fields on products, variance on stuff. And basically they're talking about, hey, like, let's kind of make it a little more user friendly.

[00:09:59] Kalen Jordan: , so then, so that's where I started working on the blocks and I was like, you know, typical developer fashion where it's like, instead of pass me to catch up, it's like, let me build a, you know, let me build a contraption to, so I built like a little, , drag and drop builder, to generate the, uh, admin blocks, so that, we could, make little arbitrary, like little admin blocks and basically plug in like, like different meta fields, , into the block.

[00:10:28] Kalen Jordan: Like, there's like a company approval status and there's like terms, which I know these things are all native, but for various reasons we're not using the native, stat, uh, you know, fields for like.

[00:10:40] David: Yeah.

[00:10:40] Kalen Jordan: terms and like, things like that. But there's all these, so we're basically, there's all these fields and so then the app basically lets you create little blocks where you can display the fields and, and then you can let 'em make an edit, to a field and then like hook that into some custom functionality to do like other stuff.

[00:10:59] Kalen Jordan: If there's additional thing, like if like a tag needs to be changed at the same time that, you know, a company's changed, you can kind of do that all together to kind of

[00:11:08] David: Gotcha.

[00:11:09] Kalen Jordan: make it more user friendly.

[00:11:11] David: guess the one thing I didn't like, one of the main things I didn't know is for these admin app blocks, you can like edit, you can edit data within them and save within like a

[00:11:24] Kalen Jordan: Yeah.

[00:11:25] David: or a

[00:11:25] Kalen Jordan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's a little react joby, so there's like form, you're limited to what, , react components you can use to the, um, you know, it's like checkout extensions or customer account extensions. It's a similar thing, but there's like a set of components you can use, but there's some form controls and then you can like post to the, um, Shopify API, from within there.

[00:11:49] Kalen Jordan: So yeah, you can do edit functionality and, and other stuff like that.

[00:11:53] David: a mix of different, meta fields for, so you're in the company edit area in Shopify,

[00:12:00] Kalen Jordan: Yeah.

[00:12:01] David: based on that company, you can have an app block that displays underneath it lets you edit things about the company or meta fields from other things like

[00:12:14] Kalen Jordan: Right.

[00:12:14] David: and products.

[00:12:16] Kalen Jordan: Right. And then,

[00:12:18] David: sweet.

[00:12:19] Kalen Jordan: and thanks. And then, you'll be able to do it on any page that supports blocks. So, products, variance. , because, you know, products typically end up with tons of meta fields. I mean, you might know a thing or two about this, but, you know, you end up with a, this, this whole, mess of, meta fields.

[00:12:37] Kalen Jordan: And, and of course it's, it's hard to organize them. You know, you can pin them, you can reorder them, but you kind of inevitably end up with this like, disgusting list of.

[00:12:48] David: You can only pin 20. You

[00:12:51] Kalen Jordan: Yeah.

[00:12:51] David: very carefully.

[00:12:53] Kalen Jordan: Like I, I spend a lot of time going like, all right, let me pin this one. You know, and then you're testing something and it's not pinned, and you're like, I gotta pin that.

[00:13:01] Kalen Jordan: I don't want to click seven times. You know? Then you pin it.

[00:13:04] David: from this list?

[00:13:06] Kalen Jordan: Yeah. Yeah. And then a month later you're like, why is that pinned? That doesn't make any sense to be pinned. You know? It's like a

[00:13:15] David: with this things aside.

[00:13:18] Kalen Jordan: yeah. It's like, it's nasty JSO field and like that shouldn't be pinned, but it's like, I'm not gonna change it now.

[00:13:24] Kalen Jordan: yeah, dude. So know.

[00:13:26] David: step is that you also made a thing that makes those things

[00:13:30] Kalen Jordan: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So it's like a little, yeah.

[00:13:36] David: the block maker Joby, so you go in and you select like, okay, I want this to be a meta field that goes in here and it should show up based on this certain context. Like if it's a company or something like that.

[00:13:49] Kalen Jordan: Yeah, so like, the homepage has like, build your company block and you click into that or build your product block or your variant block. And then once you're in the builder for a specific, , type of a block, then you can add in different things. You can add in, like the way these react components works is like you have block stacks, inline stacks, sections, you know, they're like flex layouts basically.

[00:14:14] Kalen Jordan: So you, you, you know, so that's how you can add like little layouts and then you can add in text fields, title fields, badges, images, , and then you can populate them with like static text or pull from meta fields or pull from native fields. And then you can just build like little layouts.

[00:14:31] David: that's cool.

[00:14:32] Kalen Jordan: So.

[00:14:33] David: knows it needs to send. Its like updated value to and all of that.

[00:14:40] Kalen Jordan: Yeah. Yeah. So I have to, build all that stuff out, like the edit functionality. It needs to know like what GraphQL it's gonna post, um, to, to the different objects and stuff like that. So,

[00:14:55] David: Yeah, that seems

[00:14:56] Kalen Jordan: thanks, dude.

[00:14:57] David: like have not seen something like that. Like there, there aren't apps that use app blocks really? That I've seen

[00:15:04] Kalen Jordan: Yeah. I think it's a, it's right. Yeah. I mean, it's like, I think they're like kind of a newer integration piece and, , surface area and I'm starting to see apps use 'em. So I want to, had been wanting to mess around with him and got a little retweet from Gil. That was exciting. Um. But yeah, wanna eventually figure out some kind of a public app,

[00:15:28] David: Yeah.

[00:15:29] Kalen Jordan: you know, it's like you keep putting things out there, you get a little traction and then, you know, you try to see if you can actually get some stuff moving, uh, with them.

[00:15:36] Kalen Jordan: So hopefully, hopefully something will, but it,

[00:15:39] David: new, like, definitely interesting, like differentiating thing.

[00:15:43] Kalen Jordan: yeah, hope. Yeah, I guess so, man. Hopefully,

[00:15:46] David: can you put that block any, like, does it have to go at the very bottom, under the meta fields or can you like, put

[00:15:51] Kalen Jordan: I.

[00:15:51] David: on the side or something thing.

[00:15:52] Kalen Jordan: It does. Yeah. There's just one slot where they go where you can add 'em. Yeah. Which is at the bottom. And then, this is kind of weird. I haven't quite figured this out yet, but like it, so the other thing it does is it, it limits the height or like, it gives you, like if the height of the content in there is, bigger than like a certain amount, which is roughly like a square, like it doesn't want you to have a bunch of content there, then it puts like a yellow.

[00:16:19] Kalen Jordan: Border that says like, this is too long and you have to click to expand it. So then I realized like you probably what you need to do is add, allow people to add multiple different blocks, but then there isn't like a concept of like instances of blocks. So I think that like if I want to allow somebody to have, let's say two different blocks, like let's say on a product page, like the first one is gonna have certain meta fields and the other one's gonna have certain other ones, then I think I need to create two separate extensions and duplicate all the code.

[00:16:54] Kalen Jordan: Because extensions can't share code between each other. Um, and then let people define like, okay, define your product block number one, and define your product block number two, and then you can, add 'em in type of a thing. that'll be fun to figure out.

[00:17:11] David: the extension contains everything it needs to know about how it should look based on the, the configuration from your, like, layout builder.

[00:17:22] Kalen Jordan: , yeah. Well, so the, so the layout builder, saves like JSON to a shop meta field, and then the extension pulls that JSON in from the shop meta field and then uses it to render the thing. Yeah.

[00:17:38] David: That's cool.

[00:17:39] Kalen Jordan: which I should probably change those.

[00:17:40] David: extension.

[00:17:42] Kalen Jordan: Yeah, yeah. So I should probably change those to like app owned meta fields or something like that instead of a shop meta field at some point.

[00:17:50] Kalen Jordan: yeah, dude, you got, you got any, uh, any use cases in mind?

[00:17:56] David: I'm like, honestly, thinking about it right

[00:17:59] Kalen Jordan: Nice.

[00:17:59] David: now, like what could,

[00:18:03] Kalen Jordan: Nice,

[00:18:04] David: That's gonna be one of those things that's like head and now I'm going to looking for ways

[00:18:10] Kalen Jordan: nice,

[00:18:11] David: it.

[00:18:12] Kalen Jordan: nice. All right. Well, so, so far this is, the best feedback I've gotten from you so far in an app, so that's probably, a good sign.

[00:18:21] David: Heck

[00:18:22] Kalen Jordan: Um,

[00:18:23] David: Maybe I

[00:18:23] Kalen Jordan: yeah.

[00:18:24] David: positive feedback.

[00:18:26] Kalen Jordan: No, no, no, no, no. I mean, it's like, it's the nature of the thing. It's like, certain things are just less, you know, like interesting, right?

[00:18:34] Kalen Jordan: It's like, Hey, I can do a NetSuite integration. It's like, okay, great. All right. I don't need that. I already have one. I hate it, but it's there. I'm not gonna change it. You know, like, and then that's the thing is you want to kind of stumble upon the right thing. That's like a little, you know,

[00:18:47] David: Be cool to do like

[00:18:49] Kalen Jordan: I.

[00:18:49] David: if there was a hackathon thing at the dev additions to like encourage everyone to make more app blocks because they're cool.

[00:18:59] Kalen Jordan: Yeah.

[00:18:59] David: Or

[00:19:00] Kalen Jordan: All right. I gotta, I, I, I gotta rant a little bit about this hackathon thing. So the, um,

[00:19:04] David: hear it.

[00:19:05] Kalen Jordan: the liquid dude, uh, I should call him the liquid guy. Is it Ben? Ben something? The pm I think he's the, he, he posted, yeah, he posted. He's like, let's have a hackathon at editions, , for doing stuff on liquid. And I'm like,

[00:19:20] Kalen Jordan: why have a hackathon specific only to liquid? Like, why not just have a hackathon? You know what I mean? Like, I don't know. Uh,

[00:19:32] David: the, the fun

[00:19:34] Kalen Jordan: yeah, I know. It's like, I, dude, what's up with that man? We gotta, we gotta open it up, man. So it's so arbitrary. It's a Shopify dev event, you know what I mean? It's like.

[00:19:45] David: the, uh, who's the PM for apps? We need them to start a hackathon

[00:19:50] Kalen Jordan: Yeah, we need them to, it'd be funny if the PMs were like beefing with each other about stuff like that.

[00:19:58] David: whose hackathon is bigger.

[00:20:01] Kalen Jordan: Shopify people are so chill though. I can't even, like, imagine, I can't even imagine them like, arguing with you. Plus they probably have policies to never argue in public, but

[00:20:12] David: in the office.

[00:20:13] Kalen Jordan: Yeah. But I can't even imagine them like, arguing with each other. But that'd be kind of hilarious. I,

[00:20:21] David: I am glad they all seem nice because I'm a little worried they wouldn't let us into the country anymore,

[00:20:26] Kalen Jordan: I know, I know. That'd be,

[00:20:29] David: but we're gonna make

[00:20:30] Kalen Jordan: that'd be rough. Yeah, dude. Yep. I'm gonna be there. I gotta get my Airbnb.

[00:20:34] David: I only have one more thing to check off.

[00:20:37] Kalen Jordan: Yeah. I.

[00:20:38] David: It's gotta find my hotel situation, which we'll

[00:20:41] Kalen Jordan: Oh, okay.

[00:20:42] David: until the last minute anyway.

[00:20:43] Kalen Jordan: Nice. do A little hotel tonight while you're,

[00:20:48] David: That's

[00:20:48] Kalen Jordan: while you're flying in. Nice man.

[00:20:52] David: I don't know if that improves rates or not and honestly I probably won't do that. That's a little, that makes me a little too nervous.

[00:21:00] Kalen Jordan: Yeah. I don't know, man. I thought it did. I think hotel tonight probably does sometimes, but I don't think it always does. I think a lot of times it's just the regular, yeah. Yeah. It's like for finding last minute hotels, but I don't even know if you really

[00:21:18] David: uh, when I was a kid and we drove all the way to Florida from St. Louis, Missouri. So it was like a 14 hour drive

[00:21:24] Kalen Jordan: Yeah.

[00:21:25] David: and I guess my dad thought we were just gonna drive around and find a hotel. But it was

[00:21:29] Kalen Jordan: Yeah.

[00:21:31] David: it was to like, wherever they did all of the, spring break stuff and it was

[00:21:36] Kalen Jordan: Yeah.

[00:21:37] David: break, so there

[00:21:38] Kalen Jordan: Yeah.

[00:21:38] David: nowhere.

[00:21:39] David: We were driving around until like 3:00 AM.

[00:21:44] Kalen Jordan: That's hilarious because I'm that dad.

[00:21:49] Kalen Jordan: I've done that, like same type of thing, and like my wife is the planner. It, it, it drives her crazy. I'm like, we'll figure it out. We're gonna tell, you know, and then like things have gone bad like that for us before.

[00:22:06] David: Because then you're driving around trying to find a place and you need someone else to figure it out 'cause you're driving. So

[00:22:12] Kalen Jordan: Right, right, right. That's the other thing. I figure I'll just, you know, I'll just kind of do it, you know, while I'm driving and then like, my wife starts looking it up on her phone and then she's just like deep researching on her phone for like two hours. And I'm like, are are we gonna like, talk or anything?

[00:22:28] Kalen Jordan: Like, you know, you're just staring at your phone. It's like, yeah, it's kind of, yeah. That's so funny. Gotta get locked in. , dude, so, okay. I was looking at the, Shopify platform, fees because I had remembered hearing. That like you can get charged for things outside of payment processing.

[00:22:55] Kalen Jordan: And I was like telling this client like, Hey, by the way, you might just wanna look into this just 'cause we're in, we import a lot of orders, you know like a lot of high price to orders that they're processing.

[00:23:09] David: directly somewhere else.

[00:23:11] Kalen Jordan: Yeah, they're placed in their ERP and thing through sales reps and things like that. And I was like, I swear I've heard that they somehow charge you for these, but I searched it, couldn't find it, posted about this one dude replied back.

[00:23:24] Kalen Jordan: He's like, yeah, they charge you a platform fee, which is like zero point 18% or something like that on, on all order volume. And I was like, ha, I found it. But like, but it works out in such a way that the platform fee gets deducted from whatever your, Shopify Plus fee is like, whatever the 2000 a month or the 2,500 a month, it gets deducted from that.

[00:23:49] Kalen Jordan: So you don't pay anything extra unless you go over the platform fee and then you start paying extra.

[00:23:56] David: Oh.

[00:23:57] Kalen Jordan: But then it turns out, which I haven't seen this matrix, somebody else told me, they, there's a whole matrix of which orders you get charged for and which orders you don't get charged for. And the orders, the only one you don't get charged for is if you import an order and it gets marked as paid automatically, like, which is my exact use case that I was worried about.

[00:24:23] David: yeah. That

[00:24:25] Kalen Jordan: but if you.

[00:24:26] David: use case. We just

[00:24:27] Kalen Jordan: Okay.

[00:24:27] David: and imported

[00:24:29] Kalen Jordan: Yeah.

[00:24:29] David: of orders and I was like, can you tell me if I'm gonna get charged more or not?

[00:24:34] Kalen Jordan: Yeah. So like if you mark an order paid manually, then you're gonna, get charged for that. And I think the,

[00:24:42] David: you might've fulfilled it manually in the backend, but if it's already paid, then

[00:24:47] Kalen Jordan: right. Or like, you know, maybe it was a phone order or, or something. I don't know. A po a check. What were those checks called? Money order. Maybe it's a money order or something. And I guess the idea is if you're using Shopify to mark the order as paid and handle it, handle the order, then you know, you're using a platform type of thing.

[00:25:08] Kalen Jordan: I'm Still a little bit worried because one person said the order has to be marked as paid, like when it's imported, and now I'm worried. What if you mark it as paid after it's imported, like via the API? Is that handled differently? And I'm a little worried about that because it's not like I can look this up anywhere and know exactly what the rules are, you know?

[00:25:33] Kalen Jordan: Or maybe the AP AP maybe the way I did the API call, I did it in such a way that we're gonna get charged for it or something. I don't know.

[00:25:42] David: long has this been going? Has it over been over a month?

[00:25:46] Kalen Jordan: I mean, well, I mean, yeah, it's been probably a few months now, but I don't know when they're gonna see their bill or, you know, I, I like, you know, I have no idea.

[00:25:54] David: like in the monthly, I mean,

[00:25:56] Kalen Jordan: did they give you a breakdown of in the bill? Did they, they break that all down.

[00:26:02] David: I think so. Yeah. I

[00:26:03] Kalen Jordan: Okay.

[00:26:04] David: like a monthly platform fee that I have to pay. , maybe at some point they do like a, now it's because it's higher during like higher transaction months, so,

[00:26:16] Kalen Jordan: Really interesting.

[00:26:19] David: So I

[00:26:20] Kalen Jordan: That's interesting.

[00:26:21] David: known it

[00:26:22] Kalen Jordan: Yeah. So, but when you look at your bill, do you see usage based stuff going into your platform fee?

[00:26:31] David: It's not broken out like that

[00:26:33] Kalen Jordan: It's not broken up

[00:26:34] David: but I know like during the holiday, our Shopify bill is higher.

[00:26:39] Kalen Jordan: and the platform fee specifically, or they don't, they don't even break that out.

[00:26:43] David: I'll have to go check.

[00:26:45] Kalen Jordan: Look it up, dude. Look it up. You might, you might be getting charged. You might be getting charged.

[00:26:51] David: She, uh, we imported like all the way back to 2015. I

[00:26:58] Kalen Jordan: Oh, right, right, right, right. You're gonna get charged $5 million.

[00:27:04] David: Yeah.

[00:27:05] Kalen Jordan: You gonna push your whole company out of business because of the import you did.

[00:27:10] David: At least the data isn't, is in there.

[00:27:14] Kalen Jordan: That's messed up, dude. Nice, nice. what Have you been up to, man? I know you mentioned the NetSuite, stuff.

[00:27:22] David: NetSuite stuff. Been doing AB testing, , talking to the, uh, creative team about figuring out how to make our more luxurious, which is very, , what's the word for like, not well-defined.

[00:27:39] Kalen Jordan: Yeah. Ambiguous.

[00:27:41] David: Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know, but I feel like we'll get somewhere and it'll be pretty sweet.

[00:27:47] Kalen Jordan: Yeah, that's,

[00:27:48] David: something.

[00:27:49] Kalen Jordan: that's kind of a funny, that's kind of an interesting question actually. Like how do you make a site more luxurious?

[00:27:54] David: Yeah. Feel luxurious. Who knows?

[00:27:59] Kalen Jordan: Maybe some gold-plated buttons, put, put some, make some like that

[00:28:04] David: wants to put like confetti and like snow flying around and stuff, so maybe that'll do it.

[00:28:10] Kalen Jordan: Is everyone you.

[00:28:16] David: Thankfully, it's like not the creative team who actually help us figure out these things.

[00:28:21] Kalen Jordan: He been trying, you've been trying to pitch them on confetti for like five years. Like every time you're in a meeting and they talk about this, you like find a way to bring it up in like a different way. And then, and then they're like, David, is this your confetti idea again? And you're like, yeah, they're.

[00:28:40] David: we launched our new feature and there's all these settings and there's this checkbox down here for confetti. If you ever want that to be what happens?

[00:28:50] Kalen Jordan: He like mentioned like random, like Buzzfeed articles. He like bring them in on a clipboard. I just, I just saw this post with 12 reasons why you should add confetti to

[00:29:03] David: add confetti to

[00:29:04] Kalen Jordan: make

[00:29:05] David: website, your luxury eCommerce website.

[00:29:10] Kalen Jordan: That's so funny. Uh, that, oh, I have a question for you. Do you get asked questions like you have to repeat the same thing again and, and like you would want to have like a knowledge base. Like with an an, like, somebody asks, oh, how do I do this in Shopify for a X, Y, Z case?

[00:29:34] Kalen Jordan: And then instead of answering it manually, like it would be good to have like a knowledge base where you could point people to,

[00:29:43] David: That would be interesting. The thing is, we already have a knowledge base. We have to point people to it.

[00:29:49] Kalen Jordan: right.

[00:29:49] David: But you're, you're saying like an immediate like, , auto response to a question someone has

[00:29:55] Kalen Jordan: Maybe not even auto response.

[00:29:57] David: something?

[00:29:58] Kalen Jordan: Well, no, I mean just like, like, 'cause I was having this issue with, with a client where they're asking, you know, how do I change this thing and I'm repeating the same thing. And I was like, man, I kind of wish I could create like a little knowledge base and then just send them a link.

[00:30:15] Kalen Jordan: To how to do X, Y, and Z. But like,

[00:30:18] David: Yeah.

[00:30:19] Kalen Jordan: you know, typically \ if you're doing client work like within an agency, that doesn't really tend to happen. You know, you just kind of manually answer questions. Yeah. But I feel like there needs to be a better.

[00:30:33] David: I saw something interesting from the, the Reggio discount app

[00:30:38] Kalen Jordan: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:30:40] David: The way that he did SOPs for like his support team

[00:30:43] Kalen Jordan: Mm-hmm.

[00:30:44] David: record a video where he talked over doing the thing

[00:30:48] Kalen Jordan: Mm-hmm.

[00:30:49] David: Generated like a nice wiki article from that.

[00:30:54] Kalen Jordan: Oh, that's cool.

[00:30:55] David: help.

[00:30:56] Kalen Jordan: That's a good idea.

[00:30:57] David: just like send them that link. But yeah, I mean, that, that presupposes that you have a knowledge base somewhere. I definitely see the value in there being knowledge bases for how, like in our, in ours we have, we're using Atlassian Confluence and we have like a Shopify how tos section for things

[00:31:15] Kalen Jordan: Okay.

[00:31:16] David: people always forget.

[00:31:18] Kalen Jordan: Okay. Okay. Because we have Confluence too. And actually I had forgotten about that until just now because it's, we, I don't know, we don't tend to use it that much with these, it's, it's kinda like we put together a bunch of documentation for the project handoff and it's like, I'm pretty sure nobody ever like, looks at it.

[00:31:37] David: yeah,

[00:31:38] Kalen Jordan: But, I don't know, like. Do you guys like, do you use that? Like do you keep it up to date and then have it set up in such a way that you can send like an easy link to like spec a specific thing versus like, here's a big old document with 19 things on it, and then nobody reads it.

[00:31:57] David: yeah. And we used to, when I was in the agency world, we used to make confluence, , I forget what they're called, but like workspaces. So for each, client would get one, and

[00:32:07] Kalen Jordan: Mm-hmm.

[00:32:08] David: try. And, I mean, the, the problem with that kind of knowledge base is it's never as up to date as you wish it was,

[00:32:15] Kalen Jordan: Right.

[00:32:16] David: , like , ours, Quiana could be a lot better, but it is still something where like we go back to things from 2018 and we can see that like, oh, like it helps,

[00:32:27] Kalen Jordan: Nice.

[00:32:28] David: little stuff that's there, decisions or whatever, it, it's always fun. Like with this data project I found, I searched the Wiki and I found, a page called Data Dictionary and I got really excited,

[00:32:41] Kalen Jordan: Mm.

[00:32:41] David: when I got to it, it was completely empty.

[00:32:43] David: So I was like, dang, I'll be the one making this then.

[00:32:50] Kalen Jordan: You are like, we have a data dictionary. That's awesome.

[00:32:53] David: Yeah,

[00:32:56] Kalen Jordan: We had the idea for a data dictionary.

[00:32:58] David: that's right. said to someone else that we should have one. And that's how far we got.

[00:33:05] Kalen Jordan: Yeah. They fired up the doc and then they went to lunch. And then be funny. If you looked at the history on it, you're like, oh, I created this.

[00:33:16] David: Yeah, definitely happened before.

[00:33:21] Kalen Jordan: Nice. All right. Well, I need to start using, our confluence then. Because I mean, 'cause I don't mind updating it. Like when I get asked the question in the first place, I'll just put it in there, respond with the link, and then boom, ,

[00:33:33] David: Yeah.

[00:33:33] Kalen Jordan: then, you know, uh,

[00:33:35] David: the other hard thing with those is like, you have to make sure that whoever you're sending a link to actually has access to Confluence,

[00:33:42] Kalen Jordan: right, right,

[00:33:43] David: then

[00:33:44] Kalen Jordan: right,

[00:33:44] David: it weird. And you,

[00:33:45] Kalen Jordan: right.

[00:33:46] David: could send them the PDF that's generated from the doc 'cause it would still be helpful for you to have it.

[00:33:51] Kalen Jordan: Right.

[00:33:52] David: yeah, I don't

[00:33:53] Kalen Jordan: Yeah. That's why like, I feel like a nice lightweight tool that, like, for example, if you shared the deep link with someone, they could always view it, no matter, without logging in, without anything. To me, that's how it should work. If somebody has the link, then they can see it, you know?

[00:34:13] Kalen Jordan: I mean, whereas just Confluence is just, every time I have to go in there, a, it's a navigational

[00:34:21] David: tedious.

[00:34:22] Kalen Jordan: wreck. Yeah. But

[00:34:24] David: there's a good platform that lets you do a video recording of just doing the thing and then it makes a doc that is always

[00:34:32] Kalen Jordan: yeah.

[00:34:32] David: you should get some Perma Link or something like that.

[00:34:35] Kalen Jordan: Yeah, that's, that would be kind of cool,

[00:34:38] David: if you send that link to someone, like I, I found that when you record a video doing something, people think you put a lot more work into it than you

[00:34:45] Kalen Jordan: right? Right,

[00:34:48] David: but for you, like it just took you five minutes to go do

[00:34:51] Kalen Jordan: right.

[00:34:51] David: you it off. Yeah.

[00:34:54] Kalen Jordan: I did a couple of those with Loom where it generates an ai, description of it, and it's kind of like they were like decent, but like not quite good enough to where I might just rather write it myself, but I'm sure those things have gotten, have been getting better all the time.

[00:35:11] Kalen Jordan: And I'm sure there's something out there that creates the document in just the right way and which would be perfect.

[00:35:19] David: There is probably one that, like it was pre-trained or whatever on making a, a knowledge base type thing

[00:35:28] Kalen Jordan: Right,

[00:35:28] David: as its output.

[00:35:30] Kalen Jordan: right. This is gonna go in the SaaS hall of shame. You know, how SaaS companies , will pressure you to sign a contract, right? Well, there's this one, I'm working with this client. This is affiliate tracking software, which these affiliate tracking softwares are outta control, man.

[00:35:49] Kalen Jordan: I mean, they're high on their own supply. They're just, it's a weird space

[00:35:55] David: attributions.

[00:35:57] Kalen Jordan: , and so they do a 48 hour trial period and then, there's no option for a monthly contract that an annual contract is the minimum that you could do after a 48 hour free trial.

[00:36:15] David: What is it doing?

[00:36:17] Kalen Jordan: It's like influencer management stuff. It's called Grin and they do like, um, yeah, which apparently, you know, it's like a pretty, you know, I mean, everybody seems to love it and I, I mean, I guess it does, magic does wonders with getting influencers to do stuff. But it's like, I'm trying to figure out this integration and it's like, , I mean, I don't mind having a relatively, I mean, it makes seven days feel like a luxury at this point.

[00:36:44] Kalen Jordan: I mean, that feels like that'd be a luxury website if I could.

[00:36:48] David: to like integrate it and see if it

[00:36:51] Kalen Jordan: Yeah. And it's like I, and, and it's like they're describing how to do the thing, uh, that we need to do to integrate with our other click tracking. And I'm like, okay, well, like, let me pop into the account and double check where things are and test out the thing that, you know, the way you're describing it and we'll be good.

[00:37:09] Kalen Jordan: You know? And it's like, okay, well, if you want, we can start the 48 hour trial. And I'm just like, holy crap, you know?

[00:37:16] David: Yeah, I always need to get in and just like, let me poke around and figure out if this

[00:37:21] Kalen Jordan: Yeah.

[00:37:21] David: going to, work, because otherwise it's just like I'm talking to salespeople and then I'm in a one year contract.

[00:37:29] Kalen Jordan: Insane, dude.

[00:37:30] David: with GR when we were on Salesforce and then like, we actually just never ended up using it.

[00:37:37] David: It was kind of annoying to me because it was hard. It was

[00:37:40] Kalen Jordan: Oh, really?

[00:37:40] David: on Salesforce, it was like kind of annoying. I don't remember exactly why. But they have like, , gifting and stuff like that, right? Like you, you want to gift

[00:37:48] Kalen Jordan: Yes.

[00:37:49] David: certain influencers and then

[00:37:51] Kalen Jordan: Yeah.

[00:37:51] David: give their reviews and, and all that kind of stuff.

[00:37:54] Kalen Jordan: Yep.

[00:37:55] David: there's another one called Shop My that we've been using recently. That's pretty good. And, , integration was like, they're still on the custom app. Side of things. Like they don't have their own thing published in the app store,

[00:38:10] Kalen Jordan: Mm-hmm.

[00:38:11] David: The way that they integrates pretty good

[00:38:13] Kalen Jordan: Mm-hmm.

[00:38:14] David: like, they have templates for a flow that you can set up to reclassify orders that come in from shop buy and stuff like that.

[00:38:25] Kalen Jordan: Mm-hmm.

[00:38:26] David: It's been pretty painless. I don't know if like they're

[00:38:28] Kalen Jordan: Nice.

[00:38:29] David: something with Grin or what, but it sounds like a similar thing.

[00:38:32] Kalen Jordan: I'm gonna have to shoot that over. 'cause they met, they're like, yeah, we've looked at a bunch of the software and they're like, if you know of one that you like, let us know. And I was like, I don't know it, I don't know any of this stuff. That's a good one.

[00:38:43] Kalen Jordan: I'll, I'll have to shoot that over.

[00:38:44] David: cool. I,

[00:38:47] Kalen Jordan: Nice. Yeah, apparently Grin does like payouts and 10 90 nines as well and all sorts of stuff, which

[00:38:55] David: uh,

[00:38:56] Kalen Jordan: seems

[00:38:57] David: more of the whole. Influencer

[00:39:01] Kalen Jordan: Yeah, apparently they handle a lot. Which I was like, yeah, I could see how that would be useful.

[00:39:06] David: Yeah. And

[00:39:07] Kalen Jordan: Um, yeah.

[00:39:08] David: I

[00:39:08] Kalen Jordan: Oh yeah. And that's the other thing too.

[00:39:10] Kalen Jordan: It's

[00:39:10] David: that was a marketing team special. So

[00:39:13] Kalen Jordan: okay. Marketing seems special.

[00:39:18] David: sometimes I just get emails and it's like, Hey, we need to do this thing, and I just gotta figure it out, you know?

[00:39:26] Kalen Jordan: Yeah, get in there and get her done.

[00:39:30] David: That's right.

[00:39:31] Kalen Jordan: I saw this tweet. It was talking about developers are basically high paid farmers and, , the combine harvester has been invented with ai. And they're all gonna be out of a job soon, is this VC guy, you know.

[00:39:47] David: the combine? A harvester, bro.

[00:39:49] Kalen Jordan: Yeah , but it got me thinking, it got me thinking about when is it exactly that technology, like, takes the jobs away versus transforming the job type thing. And in the case of the individual, I don't know how much combine harvesters cost, but I, I think they were expensive. Right? So the, I think that basically the farmers couldn't afford the combine harvesters.

[00:40:19] Kalen Jordan: So then the big companies that could afford the combine harvesters, it took all the farming, right. But. What about if you look at when the personal computer came out and then what about accountants? Okay. You, they, I'm sure they thought like, oh, nobody's gonna need an accountant anymore, but he has their own computer.

[00:40:37] Kalen Jordan: But there's tons of, there's tons of accountants because the accountants can afford the accounting software and then we just pay them because, they make it easier, you know, whatever. , so I was thinking, or also,

[00:40:49] David: before there were spreadsheets, , there were like complete floors of buildings filled with people who were just doing calculations.

[00:40:56] Kalen Jordan: Right, right.

[00:40:57] David: like those, so accounting just became something different where like. I don't know. Maybe the manager from the floor of the accounting firm that had all the people at the desks is like accountants are now, I don't know.

[00:41:11] Kalen Jordan: See, I don't know if it was the manager who became the accountant or the individual counters that became the accountants. Because like if you look at the number of farmers that's gone down. But if you look at the number of accountants, I'm pretty sure even if you go back and compare to the whole building full of manual counters, I think that number's increased a lot.

[00:41:29] Kalen Jordan: I think the manual counters, I.

[00:41:31] David: were able to do that versus like, it just being available to large companies,

[00:41:35] Kalen Jordan: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Like I think if the technology is so expensive that it can only be afforded by a large company, then it kills most jobs. But if the technology can be afforded by the individuals, then it empowers the individuals. Like the type of person that can sit and count numbers, pen and paper for eight hours a day is probably the same type of person that can be a computer accountant.

[00:41:59] Kalen Jordan: You know, like it's different, but it takes a level of concentration, I mean to do that. Or like, for example, when the smartphone came out, you might have thought all the photographers were gonna be out of a job, but there's like, and I am kind of making these numbers up, and I'm pretty sure there's like more photographers now, like,

[00:42:20] David: sure.

[00:42:21] Kalen Jordan: like, like there's.

[00:42:23] David: a photographer 'cause they have a phone,

[00:42:24] Kalen Jordan: But like even professional photographers, there's a ton of them. Like now everybody gets family photos every year and everybody gets like super fancy wedding photos, and then there's videographers and on top of photographers and there's like pro, there's this whole pro sumer category of cameras.

[00:42:41] Kalen Jordan: You know? So, because they, the individuals can afford the expensive cameras, you know, and then like, people don't want the quality of a regular, like all of a sudden the quality of a regular phone camera isn't that interesting? You're gonna go ahead and pay for the quality of a $5,000 lens,

[00:42:59] Kalen Jordan: and, and, and so that's what everybody does,

[00:43:01] David: a couple transitions that happened in the camera thing because like there, there used to be professional photography that you would get at like Sears and they'd have all the big cameras set up,

[00:43:11] Kalen Jordan: right?

[00:43:11] David: so that's where you would do your professional pictures. Otherwise, everyone just had like a, a disposable or whatever.

[00:43:18] David: But with,

[00:43:19] Kalen Jordan: Right.

[00:43:20] David: the cost of. Cameras going down and the size of them going down enough that has a camera in their pocket. There's this next phase like, okay, so Sears professional cameras went away. But then because it's cheap enough, people who are interested in photography or more people who are interested in photography get into it and they make themselves available for like those weekend photo shoots.

[00:43:43] David: So

[00:43:43] Kalen Jordan: Right, right,

[00:43:45] David: that you actually do get more of them.

[00:43:47] Kalen Jordan: right, and I think the same thing's happening with ai. It's like there's more people who are able to get into coding, , with ai and then people who are already coders are able to do more with ai. And I think it's just gonna make, I think it's just gonna. Grow the, the category.

[00:44:04] Kalen Jordan: And also it made me realize like I'm kind of grateful the way that AI is playing out where it is affordable to the individuals, because that didn't necessarily have to be the case. I mean, like, if the companies that are spending billions of dollars just sold this technology for a hundred thousand dollars a pop to big players like it could have gone that way, you know, but it, it's gone.

[00:44:28] Kalen Jordan: the foundational model costs are becoming \ commodities, and then people are building apps on top of those. It's kind of awesome that it worked out that way. Because I think if it didn't then yeah, we would've been screwed.

[00:44:40] Kalen Jordan: Like if it, if it cost a hundred grand to use these things, which that's not even that crazy that it would cost that much because it cost way more than that to create these models.

[00:44:51] David: It also costs, like, it actually does cost a lot to run them, but they're, I don't know, it's open ai, like running at a, loss, or are they making money? I have no idea.

[00:44:59] Kalen Jordan: I, I don't know what their margins are, but they're definitely like, I think it's easy to hate on them. but it's like they made a choice at some point to make it affordable to, to individuals, you know?

[00:45:12] David: it definitely made it into a race. Like more of a race for sure.

[00:45:15] Kalen Jordan: Yeah. Because before that, like Google had all of this technology and they weren't putting it out there to the individual. They were using it in search, they were like, and then all of sudden open OpenAI comes out and then like, I don't know, a couple weeks later, Google launches their stuff. Like, oh yeah, we have this too.

[00:45:35] Kalen Jordan: And like, and I think people like invested.

[00:45:37] David: the transformer architecture and then OpenAI used that. And then I guess Google was like, oh shit, was our thing. we gotta go, we gotta go. Put that into production.

[00:45:48] Kalen Jordan: Wow. Okay, that makes sense. But yeah, it like sort of kicked off this race in a certain direction and maybe it was inevitable for that to happen. I don't know, for the technology to be like consumer level. , I don't know if it was inevitable for that to happen or not, but the fact that it is, is I think what is making it so that it's not gonna kill the jobs, it's gonna empower the jobs.

[00:46:13] Kalen Jordan: I think it might be as simple as that as to when, like, I'm trying to think of examples like as to when does technology kill jobs versus like, explode the job category. And I think it's as simple as if the individuals can afford it or not.

[00:46:28] David: Hmm.

[00:46:28] Kalen Jordan: And I'm, I I, I'm trying to think of like a counter example.

[00:46:32] David: yeah, , what is a new technology that was not affordable that ended up killing jobs?

[00:46:41] Kalen Jordan: Maybe like manufacturing automation, like big ass manufacturing robots. Probably kill the, the individual manufacturing jobs. I,

[00:46:52] David: but it, it's always like a transformation. It's never, like, if you liked building cars before robots existed, you could probably still keep building cars with the help of a robot, but you adjust where it is that your work is.

[00:47:10] Kalen Jordan: right,

[00:47:12] David: I don't know if that makes sense, but like you, you still think about the same things, like you still wanna make a car, it's just the way that you make it changes a bit.

[00:47:19] Kalen Jordan: right.

[00:47:20] David: I don't know.

[00:47:21] Kalen Jordan: Yeah.

[00:47:21] David: What I'm trying to say is that jobs probably don't get destroyed. It's more like what a job is, changes a bit. And it also probably happens slowly enough that usually you can adapt and like, I feel like a lot of people are already adapting to this new way of programming it just makes them faster.

[00:47:44] David: Like I, I feel like we get things done faster and it's the same things that we're doing though.

[00:47:49] Kalen Jordan: Yeah. I feel like on the whole, that happens, but there definitely is like a difference between the farmer and the photographer. There's sort of a qualitative difference in like, the number of jobs, the degree to which that quote job was killed. I'm trying to kind of, figure out what, and, and at the end of the day it's like there's kind of no, it's, there's kind of no point like trying to figure this stuff out.

[00:48:16] Kalen Jordan: Like it's gonna go the way it's gonna go.

[00:48:18] David: repeat itself. It could go differently.

[00:48:20] Kalen Jordan: Yeah. , but I, that tweet just bugged the shit outta me. And then, I was like, I'm gonna figure out how to tell this guy he's wrong.

[00:48:31] Kalen Jordan: But it did get me thinking about , why is it not like the farmer thing? And I think it does have a lot to do with the cost of the technology.

[00:48:39] David: Yeah, you might be right there. I mean I kind of smile or just like maybe roll my eyes every time I see like, oh yeah, this thing, just one shot at this video game programming is dead, but there's no programmer that's like sad, like all the programmers are using it. So

[00:48:57] Kalen Jordan: Right,

[00:48:57] David: have more stuff now, like more cool

[00:48:59] Kalen Jordan: right,

[00:49:00] David: that's an interesting impact. Like

[00:49:02] Kalen Jordan: right.

[00:49:03] David: those things didn't exist before this thing, and it was because it was too. Time consuming to do this stuff and like now it's not. So it's weird. It seems like it does cheapen skill a bit, but, no second order effects yet. It's just like more people are making cool stuff,

[00:49:22] Kalen Jordan: Yeah. Yeah. I think that's how it's gonna play out. ,

[00:49:27] David: which is great. I hate experiencing bad software. I'm excited to like, for these things to continue to refine and I get to experience more good software

[00:49:37] Kalen Jordan: yeah, yeah.

[00:49:39] David: in general. Like, why does my TV software suck so bad?

[00:49:44] Kalen Jordan: Right,

[00:49:44] David: let

[00:49:45] Kalen Jordan: right,

[00:49:45] David: let an AI rewrite all of this.

[00:49:47] Kalen Jordan: right. Speaking of cool software, dude, uh, so, you know, Shopify ql, , the reporting query language.

[00:49:56] David: Yeah.

[00:49:57] Kalen Jordan: So I was looking at something, 'cause somebody was asking about trying to pull some, data out of the Shopify APIs. Yeah. Pull, pull those. They say pull out the numbers and we're gonna break your legs.

[00:50:10] Kalen Jordan: Um, if you can't pull those numbers out, we're going to send you a message. We wanna see CLV stat,

[00:50:21] David: A what?

[00:50:26] Kalen Jordan: we wanna see

[00:50:28] David: Give me your A OV before I break your neck.

[00:50:36] Kalen Jordan: one. Yeah. So, but then, so then I looked at the, uh, API docs and, and, uh, and they're sun setting. The Shopify ql, API. Which makes, I mean, and I think that was announced a long time ago. I mean, I remember seeing in the docs, but it just didn't bother me that much until recently. which doesn't make any sense to me because for one thing, okay, Shopify QL used to be plus only, right?

[00:51:01] Kalen Jordan: I distinctly remember.

[00:51:03] David: was a new thing. Like I, I just now started seeing it in my reporting area in Shopify.

[00:51:08] Kalen Jordan: Right, because what happened is Shopify QL used to be an app that was plus only, and they took that and they brought it into the reporting so that now everybody has access to it and it's like integrated more nicely into the reports. So I mean, they've taken this thing that was plus only and they've brought it to everyone, which I mean the costs around Shopify QL have to be all the data indexing, that they have to do.

[00:51:38] Kalen Jordan: And if anything I'd imagine that's why it was plus only for a while. Now it isn't. And so, I mean, they obviously want Inc to have increased usage of it. In the API docs, when it says this is sunset, if you want to, , pull data out, you know, see the orders, at query endpoint.

[00:51:57] Kalen Jordan: In other words, if you wanna query order reporting data, you gotta slurp all the orders out and do the reporting yourself.

[00:52:04] David: she y'all?

[00:52:05] Kalen Jordan: So it's not like they're saving on API bandwidth, I mean, because if anybody wants to do anything, they're gonna be blowing the orders endpoint up to get data out, you know? So, like, I don't Under

[00:52:21] David: that's a separately optimized endpoint than a, like, have you tried using the QL in the admin? It's pretty limited to like what you can do.

[00:52:31] Kalen Jordan: a li Yeah, a little bit. I've used, a little bit and it has like specific columns you can pull and like

[00:52:37] David: yeah, like I, I mean, maybe I just ran into a weird edge case, but I was trying to query like orders that had a particular discount code used.

[00:52:46] Kalen Jordan: Mm-hmm.

[00:52:46] David: you can do that in the order list, but you can't do it in Shopify QL

[00:52:52] Kalen Jordan: Mm-hmm.

[00:52:53] David: area. So I, I imagine they made some decisions, on what's available there based on like making sure it doesn't overwhelm systems

[00:53:04] Kalen Jordan: Right, right, right,

[00:53:05] David: of indexes or something.

[00:53:07] Kalen Jordan: right. But I'm just saying like, whatever functionality already exists and the API already exists that just pass through a query and everything has to be indexed already. So passing through query is in much trouble. , I even posted a question of the forms, 'cause I'm like, what's the rationale behind removing this?

[00:53:25] Kalen Jordan: Like, just doesn't make any sense to be, you know, so.

[00:53:30] David: anything?

[00:53:31] Kalen Jordan: No, I haven't, I haven't gotten any answers. The forums, man, I, for the re forum's, responsiveness has been a little hit and miss lately, man. Little, little hit and miss. Yeah, it's not new. Liam's not on top of every answer anymore like he used to be.

[00:53:49] Kalen Jordan: I mean,

[00:53:50] David: Liam.

[00:53:51] Kalen Jordan: I think Liam was running around the offices just making sure people answered questions.

[00:53:57] David: I bet now he's like real busy with. The, uh, Shopify Developer Conference.

[00:54:03] Kalen Jordan: Uh, yeah, it probably is, probably is. I mean, he got it off the ground. I don't know if it was him, like was, I think it was his thing, but I mean, he got the sucker off the ground. I'm sure that that took, internal like coordination and stuff like that. So

[00:54:17] David: definitely.

[00:54:18] Kalen Jordan: really the hard, and then getting it bootstrapped where people were using it.

[00:54:21] Kalen Jordan: So that was like the hard part that he did that, which was like the important thing. Um but yeah. So maybe it was just a stupid question.

[00:54:30] David: out this app, , speaking of reporting, it's called Better Reports, Shopify, better Reports, something

[00:54:37] Kalen Jordan: Yeah.

[00:54:38] David: And it's pretty interesting. It takes a while to like pull all of your data and index it, and then they give you some interesting, different views into all of your data.

[00:54:48] Kalen Jordan: Right, right.

[00:54:50] David: but it doesn't do like. We use the retail 4, 5, 4 calendar. Have you ever heard of that?

[00:54:57] Kalen Jordan: Uh, no.

[00:54:58] David: It's, every month is exactly four weeks. And then our fiscal start of the year is in February.

[00:55:07] Kalen Jordan: Mm-hmm.

[00:55:07] David: each period is only four weeks. there are, 12 periods in a week, un or 12 periods in a year, you have an extra week in a year. And this, so like, there's all these like 53 weeks, weeks start on Monday. , and March 1st might not actually be the second period of the year because. You're still in the last week of the previous month because February only has 28 days. Like we like, okay. So there's all this weird stuff

[00:55:39] Kalen Jordan: Right.

[00:55:40] David: and, , we have to like build that into our reporting. And that's the thing that Better reports, seem like couldn't handle, but like I'll, I'll give them that. Otherwise, it's, it's pretty interesting. And they have like a seven day free trial.

[00:55:54] Kalen Jordan: Right.

[00:55:54] David: is looking for some reporting for one of your clients, that might be interesting shot.

[00:56:00] Kalen Jordan: Oh, nice. Nice. Check that out. The Better Reporting app doesn't quite support that Crazy calendar.

[00:56:08] David: No, but it's got a bunch of, uh, like out of the box reports that are pretty cool

[00:56:12] Kalen Jordan: Mm-hmm.

[00:56:13] David: would, I decided to pay for it for a month. 'cause I, I'm still not ready to like, decide if it's we won't be able to use.

[00:56:21] Kalen Jordan: Nice.

[00:56:21] David: it, it depends on your, Shopify tier, , for how much you pay them.

[00:56:27] David: So like, on plus. And so we pay them the most. But if you're on like a starter plan, it's pretty cheap.

[00:56:34] Kalen Jordan: Right. Nice. Could you describe that calendar thing to me? Again?

[00:56:38] David: I, I think , the place that this thing came from is like, comparing your sales month over month is hard because every month has a different number of

[00:56:46] Kalen Jordan: Oh, right, right.

[00:56:48] David: And so you define a month as being exactly four weeks. because of that, , the calendar month does not always match up the fiscal period month.

[00:57:01] David: So

[00:57:01] Kalen Jordan: Oh, okay.

[00:57:02] David: year would still have like years have 12 months and this setup years still have 12 periods, but each period start and end might be like, instead of being March 1st, it would be like March 2nd. So there's

[00:57:15] Kalen Jordan: Mm-hmm.

[00:57:15] David: stuff there.

[00:57:16] Kalen Jordan: That's weird.

[00:57:17] David: Another level of weirdness is we decided that our weeks start on Monday. So there's, . Two things that we have to layer on top of all of the orders based on the transaction date, uh, in

[00:57:28] Kalen Jordan: Wow.

[00:57:29] David: these buckets.

[00:57:32] Kalen Jordan: That's insane.

[00:57:33] David: And uh, last year was a leap year. And so instead of having 52 weeks, it actually had 53.

[00:57:42] Kalen Jordan: Okay,

[00:57:43] David: still battling that monster.

[00:57:45] Kalen Jordan: dude. Wait,

[00:57:48] David: It still comes

[00:57:48] Kalen Jordan: so,

[00:57:49] David: someone's like, my report doesn't match their report

[00:57:52] Kalen Jordan: oh my God.

[00:57:53] David: extra week.

[00:57:55] Kalen Jordan: Right, so do you have an existing system somewhere that generates reports on this? On this crazy ass time table.

[00:58:04] David: there's helper tables in BigQuery that you have to join on

[00:58:08] Kalen Jordan: Oh, wow.

[00:58:08] David: uh. and it just has like every day, of the year back to like 2015 or something and different classifications

[00:58:16] Kalen Jordan: Right,

[00:58:17] David: What each day is.

[00:58:19] Kalen Jordan: right.

[00:58:20] David: on based on the transaction date to get your periods and all that stuff.

[00:58:24] Kalen Jordan: Did this, this sounds like the type of thing you'd see in like a computer science class, be like, write the following report and you'd be like, no one is ever gonna use this.

[00:58:37] David: weird financial requirements

[00:58:40] Kalen Jordan: Yeah.

[00:58:40] David: they require you.

[00:58:44] Kalen Jordan: Yeah. By the way, did you major in what? Computer science or

[00:58:48] David: I

[00:58:48] Kalen Jordan: what did you

[00:58:48] David: Uh, I

[00:58:49] Kalen Jordan: Oh, nice.

[00:58:50] David: though, and then

[00:58:51] Kalen Jordan: Oh really?

[00:58:53] David: I was

[00:58:53] Kalen Jordan: I.

[00:58:53] David: Not a great job in college as you do as a first year student. I. was like, you know,

[00:59:00] Kalen Jordan: It's disappointing, David.

[00:59:01] David: feel like I would do better computer science. And I I made it through.

[00:59:06] Kalen Jordan: I just completely visualized you like a chemistry person, just like

[00:59:11] David: Yeah.

[00:59:11] Kalen Jordan: a chill lab guy, like in the lab doing, doing stuff

[00:59:18] David: That was the boring part to me too. How, which is how I knew. 'cause I was like, okay, this experiment is cool, but now I have to write everything down in this notebook that's so boring.

[00:59:27] Kalen Jordan: right.

[00:59:28] David: like, do something else now. But it was pretty cool doing like, , calculations of, how much energy would be expended in a bomb calorimeter, if you like, mix these two things together.

[00:59:40] David: It was weird.

[00:59:42] Kalen Jordan: Calculating moles and shit.

[00:59:45] David: I'm happy to, uh, be talking to computers instead now.

[00:59:49] Kalen Jordan: Nice. Chemistry was tough for me, that that might have been one of the hardest subjects for me. And I never did like O Chem or anything like that.

[00:59:58] David: Yeah. Yeah, that's hard.

[01:00:02] Kalen Jordan: yeah. Nice.

[01:00:04] David: table is, is so cool though. I still think it's cool.

[01:00:07] Kalen Jordan: Really. That's cool.

[01:00:09] David: they make like a, a period, like a real periodic table where it's got a little bit of each element. And sometimes you can find those in a museum, but they make little, like, smaller size ones.

[01:00:18] David: I have to find one and acquire it,

[01:00:21] Kalen Jordan: Right?

[01:00:22] David: get a

[01:00:23] Kalen Jordan: Did

[01:00:23] David: in my office.

[01:00:25] Kalen Jordan: Have you ever seen any of this, these people talking about aliens and like, the chemical that was, discovered, um,

[01:00:34] David: No,

[01:00:34] Kalen Jordan: God, I'm doing such a bit.

[01:00:37] David: because I feel like Twitter's algorithm got changed and I just see a bunch of different stuff now, but I'm okay with seeing the alien stuff to be honest.

[01:00:46] Kalen Jordan: okay, this guy Bob Lazar. You ever hear about this guy?

[01:00:50] David: Yep.

[01:00:51] Kalen Jordan: You did the area 51 guy.

[01:00:56] David: oh, okay. No, I was thinking of someone else.

[01:00:58] Kalen Jordan: Oh, okay. Um,

[01:01:00] David: know who that is.

[01:01:01] Kalen Jordan: He came out, I don't know, dude, like 20, 30 years ago saying that, they were hiding aliens in the area 51 or Area 54. I don't know. He has a four hour episode on Joe Rogan about it. But anyways, one of the things that he talked about was this new element called Element one 15, and.

[01:01:20] Kalen Jordan: I guess he'd mentioned this initially like 30 years ago at the, and then at the time he mentioned all this, people thought he was crazy, whatever. He stuck to his story for years, and then at some point the EE element one 15 was like officially recognized or whatever, like,

[01:01:37] David: I see it.

[01:01:38] Kalen Jordan: yeah. Yeah. I was just curious if you had like seen that since you mentioned the, the periodic table,

[01:01:47] David: I have to read about this thing. What did, did he say like the aliens brought it or something

[01:01:51] Kalen Jordan: something like that. Yeah, something like that. It was, yeah, it was discovered by them or it was key component and 'cause he was back engineering like his story was that they found like the, the spacecraft crashed and his job was to back engineer all this stuff. So he.

[01:02:09] David: interesting.

[01:02:09] Kalen Jordan: Went in there and was, and there was a whole team of different, and it was all compartmentalized, different engineers and working on different things.

[01:02:17] Kalen Jordan: And so he's like, yeah, he's like, I went into the, to the actual spacecraft. He's like, there's no seams anywhere in the spacecraft. Like in the way it was engineered. There was no seams. Like it was all one like thing. And that like, it just, it it's crazy. It's, nutty. , yeah, we're, we're on a

[01:02:38] David: you think the aliens came from another planet or they're from underwater?

[01:02:43] Kalen Jordan: dude. The underwater thing is nuts. When I first heard that recently, I had never considered that. And, and, um,

[01:02:52] David: either.

[01:02:53] Kalen Jordan: and now that's all I imagine is just underground civilizations of aliens, dude off the coast of Mexico. Like that's.

[01:03:03] David: from down deep.

[01:03:05] Kalen Jordan: Yeah, dude, that's so crazy. It's so crazy to think about that. ,

[01:03:13] David: weird though. Like why would it be such a secretive thing?

[01:03:16] Kalen Jordan: Yeah, it, the whole thing makes no sense. I mean obviously they're wanting to keep it somewhat secretive or else they would just, you know, walk up to the White House or something like that. , and then the, our military, I could see how they would wanna keep things secret.

[01:03:32] Kalen Jordan: You know, they discover a spacecraft, they're like, we can't talk about this.

[01:03:36] David: That's why I always feel like it's, uh , like their military craft or something. I don't know.

[01:03:41] Kalen Jordan: yeah.

[01:03:42] David: to talk about it.

[01:03:44] Kalen Jordan: Yeah.

[01:03:44] David: But it would be cool for someone to come and like, give us some new technology. Like, I want some cool anti grab boots or something. That'd be pretty sweet. teach us about gravity.

[01:03:56] Kalen Jordan: Show title, some cool anti grab boots. Oh, nice dude. Um,

[01:04:05] David: see the thing about, the open space underneath the pyramids,

[01:04:10] Kalen Jordan: oh no.

[01:04:12] David: our aliens. 'cause like there's always weird alien stuff about the, like the Egyptian, , figures that you always see in the hieroglyphs. Like

[01:04:21] Kalen Jordan: Right,

[01:04:21] David: talks about those being aliens.

[01:04:23] Kalen Jordan: right, right.

[01:04:23] David: they're saying there's this big open space underneath the pyramids.

[01:04:26] David: So maybe that's where we find the anti-graft boots.

[01:04:30] Kalen Jordan: Right, right. Somebody needs to go check that out, dude. Send me a pair of those boots.

[01:04:37] David: down there, send me the blueprints.

[01:04:43] Kalen Jordan: Yeah. , all right, quick couple quick hits. Gotta mention Shopify did a an MCP model context, something,

[01:04:52] David: yeah.

[01:04:52] Kalen Jordan: , that you plug into.

[01:04:54] David: is, but I wanna go look at it.

[01:04:56] Kalen Jordan: I tried installing it in Cursor. I think it's, it basically, it lets your, a AI agent look up, GraphQL docs directly to Shopify so that it does better GraphQL queries and stuff.

[01:05:08] David: Yeah.

[01:05:08] Kalen Jordan: tried and,

[01:05:09] David: as

[01:05:10] Kalen Jordan: yeah,

[01:05:10] David: know about it, but

[01:05:11] Kalen Jordan: yeah,

[01:05:12] David: want to go look at it and understand

[01:05:14] Kalen Jordan: yeah. I.

[01:05:15] David: does this actually help in ai? I don't get it.

[01:05:17] Kalen Jordan: I don't get it either. It like, it's like it's an NPM command is like what you configure in cursor. And I'm like, you know, I don't even know what that does. But yeah, I tried installing it and I don't know if it worked because it didn't like give a confirmation and my graphic QL queries didn't really look any better.

[01:05:36] Kalen Jordan: Actually. I'm pretty sure it didn't because I think, I think when it does work, it says, okay, calling MCP tool whenever it's making a call out, so I must have screwed something up.

[01:05:50] David: like the video preview.

[01:05:51] Kalen Jordan: Yeah.

[01:05:52] David: You'll

[01:05:52] Kalen Jordan: But that's a, that's awesome.

[01:05:54] David: it out, I want to know like, okay. Like, okay. It makes things way better. is it doing that?

[01:06:00] Kalen Jordan: Yeah, I mean it has to, I gotta get that sucker working, , which is cool that they got that going. And, uh, oh, and I just saw a tweet, uh, Aaron from, uh, from Shop Pad. My old boss at, uh, shop Pad Mesa. They're working on an MCP that he po he posted a little screenshot of, , like he, you're in Claude, and you say, send me reports from Shopify for January, 2024.

[01:06:29] Kalen Jordan: And it, it hits there at MCP and generates, A PDF and emails it to, or something like that.

[01:06:35] David: That's

[01:06:35] Kalen Jordan: which is kind of cool. And I don't know how these mcbs work, but I'm, I'm guessing that you can charge for them because if you can charge for them, then like you can build, that'd be awesome because then like, then you can build some cool stuff out like that.

[01:06:53] Kalen Jordan: And.

[01:06:54] David: MCP on top of Shopify that you have defined, like

[01:06:58] Kalen Jordan: I think that's what he's doing. Yeah. I think that's what he's doing. Yeah. So that'd be cool. I kind of feel like,

[01:07:08] David: like flow, flow work in general is one of the things that's gonna be really interestingly changed by ai.

[01:07:18] Kalen Jordan: yeah. Yeah. Like I, I feel like if you're building a developer tool now, the interface has to be through, the AI agent, and which then I, you gotta do an MCP, because if you build a developer tool and it's like a website I gotta go to and click around and do stuff, I just feel like it's gotta be tied into your.

[01:07:43] Kalen Jordan: Yeah. Yeah, I think that's,

[01:07:45] David: from, VS. Code or whatever in

[01:07:47] Kalen Jordan: yeah, I think that's the move. And then last thing, I haven't checked this out yet, but there's a Shopify app dev. So if you're doing Shopify app dev on an app, there's a new option where it runs, in local host versus what it currently does is it use a CloudFlare tunnel has some CloudFlare Magic, which is great, but it's, I guess, I guess the local host is, is faster because it's not having to do the tunnel.

[01:08:18] Kalen Jordan: Which is cool. So I, I haven't checked that out yet, but I gotta check that out.

[01:08:22] David: Yeah. I always thought that tunneling was weird. I mean, it, it worked, but I.

[01:08:26] Kalen Jordan: Yeah.

[01:08:27] David: oh, that's a great improvement.

[01:08:29] Kalen Jordan: I always thought it was this completely necessary black magic that just worked. So I was like always very like happy about it. And then now it's like, we don't need it. And I'm like, good. Good riddance to that garbage. Yeah.

[01:08:44] David: Never liked it anyway.

[01:08:47] Kalen Jordan: Always hated that.

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