S1E25 - Season 1 Finale

Gil Roberts: 0:10

Welcome to the podio solutions podcast. Season one episode 25 or our first season finale. I'm Gil Roberts, and with me today is our lead developer here, Alex Shul, our principal consultant, Jared Duker. Good afternoon. As well as a what for more of our team members, John, Adam, Emily and Caleb, and we'll, we'll go around the room and introduce you guys here shortly. This podcast is about the design and development on the Citrix podio platform. You can find that at Podio, p o d I o.com. We use this podcast to discuss your own experiences with podio as well as other interesting topics from the podio developer community. If you are a podio designer or developer working at an agency, small business or enterprise, you should immediately hit that subscribe button. If you have already, thank you so much for your support. Lastly, before we dive into today's discussion, if you have a topic, issue, solution, problem, or anything else you'd like us to discuss, we want to know about it. Hit us up on our Facebook, linkedin, and Twitter, or send an email or podio message to podcast@brickbridgeconsulting.com. Today's topic is an open discussion here with the brick bridge team. Uh, we're going to talk a little bit about Podio, the platform, a Sassafras, uh, what everybody is working on here at brick bridge, as well as some of the, uh, interesting things that we have coming up in the future. Uh, we wanted to first say thank you to everybody that's listened to our podcast, especially our day one people. It's listened to all, uh, now 25 episodes. We didn't think it would go this far, uh, to be honest. So thank you so much. We do get messages quite often, so please keep sending those along with your podio gaps as we always suggest. Uh, what we'll do today as an open discussion, but we'll first kind of go around some topics about what we're working on, uh, for the, uh, the Sassafras tool kit, which we've talked about before on the podcast. Uh, so first let me introduce John here. Uh, John Gries has been with us since last May. Last May? Yes, I guess so. It's been almost a year and a half. Wow. And when you started with us, you originally started doing what podio build-outs? Yeah Podio build outs for a few clients. One of those clients eventually ended up being an early adapter for the Sassafras Platform. Oh yeah. You were on our, our vilcap client project. So now, recently we've moved you from more from the podio builds over onto the Sassafras team. Uh, Kinda give a quick rundown of what kind of, what you do on Sassafras and how that, how that affects your job here. Um, so a lot of my day is a figuring out some of Alex's technical wizardry, trying to add to it and apply it to different potential situations. Um, right now a lot of what I've been doing is working with Adam on wiring up his front end, work with Alex's back end work and bringing some of it to life. Yeah. It was a journey to be able to get John to actually be able to create functions inside of our lambda, the AWS lambda product on Sassafras. And Alex, what was some of the, the milestones that we've kinda hit over the last six months since we started the podcast to allow John--

Alex Shul: 3:18

We've gone through a few variations and, um, part of the problem with making sure that we can continue supporting our existing clients while advanced the SaaSsafras platform. And John's seen a lot of that. He has been able to deal with a lot of our version control, which is maturing, um, as the API and the UI become public. So, um, right now he's, um, very deeply involved in validating the, uh, recent work I've done on the security of this SaaSsafras function container, which is very important going forward. That's something that Emily and Melissa, who's not here today will be working on. Um, but that's how, that's the core framework that we're using to deliver microservices that are consumed by Adam's new awesome UI.

Gil Roberts: 4:00

So let's go to you, Adam. Uh, you've just recently joined us, uh, beginning of summer, is that right? Yeah. Uh, two, three months, almost two and a half months. Yeah, I was right there in mid, mid into may, I believe. Now you've been heavily focused on, uh, creating the Sassafras UI. Tell a little bit about that. Uh, went, uh, kind of like what it was when you started here and then kind of where, how far we've progressed, uh, just in the short period of time. Um, it was, it had some, it was kind of ugly[ laughter] Seems to me it was a bunch of drawings on a white board. Um, some stuff filled out, uh, uh, with, uh, with angular, um, angular, angular version six or whatever the current version of angular is. And you want to just say real fast what angular is. There might be a couple people who aren't familiar with it. Angular is a front end framework, uh, created and maintained by Google, um, that, uh, is pretty opinionated about how you create your front end architecture. Um, it has a big learning curve, but it's pretty powerful. And so you go on with it. But you, you worked at a, another company before us, correct? Uh, what, and you were working on ecommerce? Resource management software for universities. Okay. Wow. I was way off. Nobody's heard of, it's very niche. That's where I was thinking we said web checkout. That's where I was trying to draw them together. Okay. And uh, now you, you have a special designation. You're the first person we've hired that has development experience in their background. A lot of these, these are y'alls first development jobs, uh, here at brick bridge. So, uh, we needed some, umph, for our UI as you, as you said, our, it was in, I can't say it was in horrible state cause it was just stateless. Yeah, Adam's done a good job of giving a vision...

Alex Shul: 5:58

...to the UI that we've been talking for a long time. And I started connecting things together to where I was dealing with things like authentication and politically ran out of my, you know, beyond my design ability. So it's been great to have Adam, um, really connecting everything to a vision that is technically capable of delivering the experience that Jarett has had in mind for a while. So very thrilled about what you've done.

Jarett Duker: 6:22

I'm just asking, what was that like walking in? So there's two years of, of background services, backend services that Alex has worked on a wide range of potential applications and then trying to build structure around that. I mean, what, what was that like, especially day one when you walked in and said, okay, we needed to do all of these things? Yeah, it was overwhelming at first and lots of like, like whiteboard drawings that I had tried to wrap my head around. And then like now I see them as, it's just completely obvious. So hopefully I have a little bit of this, still have a little bit of that, uh, new person to the table, so that I can create the UI for people that are new to coming into SaaSsafras. I'm absolutely thrilled that my, my crazy ramblings begin to make sense.

Gil Roberts: 7:04

Once you've drawn conclusions, and I mean, outside people have no idea, but we can indoctrinate you apparently. Um, last question for you and we'll, we'll move on. I think something that's very interesting is that you are just starting to learn podio. So you've been building out this tool set and we're, we're gonna get your hands dirty, uh, tomorrow, uh, later throughout the week to really get you in. Now you've used podio in the sense that, you know, we have all of our software in there to clock in and out and all that kind of stuff, but to actually like build something. Definitely I'm gonna learn. Do you think it's been a little bit of an advantage kind of sitting on the outside because you've got to like, maybe it's more difficult I'm sure, but it kind of an advantage in the sense that I have to make this usable without actually seeing the underlying product to your UI design. You have to like simplify.

Adam Wilson: 7:52

An advantage and disadvantage both, uh, to, yeah, to come up with the UI that makes sense to me as someone more new to this universe. Yeah.

Alex Shul: 8:00

I have to say that your UI feels like it makes sense from the, from the beginning without understanding of the details of podio or just with the cleaner UI. So I think there's something to be said about that. It was easy for me to bring in the clutter that was already in my head. Yeah. You kind of came with that Tabula Rasa and you and you kind of made sure that only the necessary thread.

Jarett Duker: 8:21

The only real challenge we had was in terminology. There's a lot of buzz words that we as podio users are used to: workspace, organization, and you know, getting you to understand that, let's say it was probably the only real disadvantage to that, but...

Alex Shul: 8:32

And still no one but me knows what an environment is.

Gil Roberts: 8:38

Plenty of arguments over that. We are introducing new terminology in the Podio Development Community and that's been a challenge also. That's true. Yeah. We're actually putting a kind of a dictionary together. I think that might help. You know, our idea, just like we talked about on the, we'll call it glossary, uh, our idea on the very first podcast and last week's podcast, which is, uh, podio based products. And since that's not a kind of official terminology out there, we've started to put a glossary together and we put our work working on this, including two hour plus meetings arguing on the exact definition of an instance. That's true. So, you know, enjoy people, we didn't just toss this together. Right, right. Hopefully it's well thought through. We'd like to actually, uh, at some point once it's posted at the SaaSsafrass website, uh, Sassafras, s a a s s a f r a s.com. A little bit of a mouthful. Uh, we're working on that. Somebody has the regular domain, much the Alex's, uh, maybe if all of our listeners jumping in on that weekend, uh, get that together. We'll talk about that at another time. Now, what's a, we've got an interesting dichotomy that's going to come up here, which is Emily, you're probably one of our newest people here.

Emily Wantland: 9:46

Yeah. Beginning of June.

Gil Roberts: 9:48

Yeah. So, and then you, you joined us through U of L's internship program. Yeah. And then we'll be extending that looks like into fall, maybe even into the spring as we go forward. So we started you out on Podio build, we saw early on you had a knack for the, the c sharp and we, we kind of shoveled you over to writing lambda functions. Now you write lambda but you do it on behalf of clients.

Emily Wantland: 10:11

Yes. Yes.

Gil Roberts: 10:12

So talk about what you do and how that's how that's been for you.

Emily Wantland: 10:16

Yeah, it was a, it was a little overwhelming at first. As Adam mentioned, a lot at once, but John did a really job on with the, uh, Vilcap client and just, you know, figuring out kind of Alex's glossary too, in working with the API to write those. But once you get going, it's not hard.

Gil Roberts: 10:33

It's, uh, yeah. You just got onto the containers service that we're going to be putting out. Maybe talk a little bit about your first impression of that.

Emily Wantland: 10:42

Yeah, everything's going well. I'm kind of in the seat of potential users trying to write their own custom lambdas. It's far easier than you think, um, once you really have a good grasp on, I guess the API and how to connect that with, you know, the Sassafras packages, it all really comes together pretty easily.

Gil Roberts: 11:01

We've talked, uh, with, uh, Bill actually and, uh, Andrew, a couple of interviews we did this season talked about how it was relatively approachable API from podio standpoint. Do you see that same approachability in the, in Sassafras and the container system of Alex? So, Yep,

Emily Wantland: 11:18

I do. I think the way it's set up is very user friendly. You know, I don't have a huge grasp of C#. I'm, you know, I am a student, but it was very easy to jump in with just pretty simple concepts.

Gil Roberts: 11:29

For people that are new to C# development that are listening or people that are curious to maybe take the plunge just from your student experience. Maybe talk a talk a second about that. Just in C# in general.

Emily Wantland: 11:40

Yeah. Um, I think it's a great language. Um, I mean for my program that's pretty much the one thing that they focus on. Um, but I think it's a great language to start out with, especially in a business background.

Alex Shul: 11:54

Yeah. C#. And it's interesting because, um, it's a language that has type safety obviously, which is different than a lot of developers start off in Java script script. Um, a very loose language that doesn't have type safety. But one of the benefits of using a type safe language for us in this context is that we will be able to, um, generate a lot of classes that are helper classes and people who are developing, um, SaaSsafras solutions. But, um, at the same time, the custom code, um, interface that, um, Emily is going to be working on, uh, supports a developer who has a Podio application and they just want to add a manual, um, web hook as well. So those things are, um, really made easier, um, by having, um, the type safety that's C# provides. Um, and um, we hope to be able to show some of those capabilities, uh, before the end of the year.

Gil Roberts: 12:50

That's fantastic. Uh, wrapping up with you, Emily, I know, um, that you've just been with us about eight weeks and we kind of tossed her to the deep end at week two. Right? We're like build a few little podio things. Okay. Let's see if you can do lambda. How, how much experience did you have with C# before you started and I asked this question to help our listeners kind of gauge how much they may need to get into C# to be able to, to write, uh, functions in lambda on Sassafras.

Emily Wantland: 13:16

I think when I got here, I really only had about three or four months experience working with C#, pretty much classes, loops, kind of got into polymorphism. But I really just have that beginner's experience of it so...

Alex Shul: 13:29

Yeah, and you can be productive with that using lambda,s you don't really have to understand a lot of the details of using a Web API project or um, the different kind of framework. So you're able to use some of the most common features and.net core and you're able to call the APIs to get work done. So a lot of the things you really need to know or just the core program logic and branching, which is what you're referring to.

Gil Roberts: 13:52

Fantastic. Now we go from one of our newest members to one of our, I guess, oldest members. Right. When did Caleb here, when did you, how long has it been buddy? It's been, I guess I've been here now. Uh, I think I came on as an intern in November of 2017 I believe. Wow you remembered. Wow. Thanks you guys. I guess, what we're coming up on two full years, right? Yeah. So, um, tell a little bit about your experience, Kinda like when you showed up. We were in that little tiny office and where we are today. Just the, the journey that you've seen Brick Bridge go through. Uh, when I first came on, um, I came on as a development intern. Um, I was working on design projects, you know, and mostly doing like front end work and podio doing small builds, um, what have you. Um, at the time it was really kind of this dichotomy between we had mPactPro, which was our one big client. And then we had a lot of little like nonprofits and very small projects, um, that we were going off of. We didn't really have any high profile work

Caleb Hayden: 14:52

that we were doing at the time, but now it's just kind of ballooned as the time has gone on here. Um, we've really expanded into, especially like the Rei field. Um, mPactPro is bigger than better than ever. Um, Vilcap is doing great and, and expanding every month. Um, it's just absolutely grown exponentially and our team size has, and our office size is really shown to reflect that as well.

Gil Roberts: 15:14

I think. Well, when you started, uh, who was here? It was just, um, Dylan, right?

Caleb Hayden: 15:20

It was Dylan, Damon, myself and Ryan.

Gil Roberts: 15:23

Ryan. That's right. Because, and then Damon started I think just the week or two before you, I think. And then Ryan came on like a week after you or something like that and Dylan, which we'll give him a shout out on podcast. He's not with us anymore. Moved to Sunny Miami, Florida down there, soaking up the rays. He was our very first intern of March, 2017. Uh, really helped us with the Alpha project. This is pre Alex,Pre SaaSsafras days. And so a shout out to him, um, was very important in the starting and really the mPactPro project in general.

Alex Shul: 16:00

I want to point out that you've been really making a lot of strides in terms of your development skills while you've been with it, Caleb. What's the, um, part of that you worked on most recently for mPactPro?

Caleb Hayden: 16:09

Um, so yeah, uh, I, I think mPactPro kind of accurately sums up like my development progress a s a whole. U m, when I was starting here, I was just doing design work and I had, the only programming experience that I had in the classroom. Which d id you actually do some manual copies? Oh yeah, I was doing manual copies. Yeah, I w ould, I spent weeks doing manual copies of deployments, reinforcing the need for SaaSsafras. U m, yeah. But, u m, Alex, u m, fortunately moved me on to converting our first Globiflows into lambda functions, which was my first experience with what would turn into the earliest iteration of Sassafras and the tools that we would go on to develop for mPactPro. U m, and now, u m, being the service relationship manager, I h ave an active relationship with mPactPro wherein, u m, t hey're contacting me for, yo u k n ow, new features, new development, u m, s ervice support, u m, t hose kinds of things where I can actively leverage SaaSsafras tools such as deployments, you know, patching that sort of thing. Um, t o service those requests.

Gil Roberts: 17:12

All right. And any of our listeners that may have seen some early versions of SaaSsafras probably met Caleb on that Webinar. He was the Vanna white of our putting out, runing the manual commands while Adam is chefing up our, uh, UI. So, uh, again, you may have run into him so far. I, I would want to give a big shout out to Caleb for being with us, uh, for this long. Um, I know there's some people that have come and gone just naturally as internships do. Um, and you're probably one of the most important parts of our team. Um, so, uh, any of our customer potential customers listening and listeners you'll, you'll run into Caleb at some pointshould you use the SaaSsafras services. Um, I think I'm gonna I'm going to toss in since we've met everybody in the room. I think, well let's do this. There's some people that are not in the room, Brittany, which our podcasts listeners have run into before she does our, our marketing research. She was on a, an episode about areas and industries that may be ripe for a podio based products. Melissa, who is probably our newest members, she just joined a couple of weeks back. She's going to be taking over in design so that John could move more into the Saassafras space. Um, is that, am I missing anybody else? I think Chad and how could I forget? I know he's, he's a, he works remote. Um, so he always... He's in the shadow, if you, again, if you're a listener and a client of brick bridge, he's probably done your design. I guess he's been with us since it was shortly after John. You joined us, right? I think Chad's been about a year. I feel like he came on right after we moved offices. Yeah. So, um, Chad does that. He, he's an intern as well. Uh, he goes to Bellarmine university. They kick them out of the dorms all, every semester. So over the last, uh, we haven't seen him in a few months because he's been working from home, um, he lives far away from our local location. Anybody else? I think that's it. So that's everybody on the team. I'm going to start throwing some questions to the team, um, just to do some general discussion. We'll take that for a few minutes and then we'll wrap up our season here. So, uh, one of the favorite things that everybody wants to talk about, and I just got a message this morning, uh, from a listener, which is podio gaps. They can listen to the episode. Maybe another time we'll probably have, we'll probably have something next season about that. A HIPAA and a financial, uh, compliance update, uh, as far as what we're able to defeat with SaaSsafras. But what, I'm just gonna quick around the room. What is the gap in Podio that you guys have noticed? Um, it's Kinda like an annoyance or hey, wish we could do something about this or something that you've run into in design or for a client that you're like, man, you know, was this could be a little bit better. So I'll start with John just at random here. I do wish that podio had better support for the way relationships

John Gries: 20:18

a lot of if for no other reason than as a client. It can be tricky to plan out how you want your business to run, how you want the information to flow. And if you, if you can only have some value live in one place where that one place should be, because there's no, there's not always a wrong answer, but there's not always a right answer. And I think that just, it comes down to no matter what, even if you're not doing these sort of Sassafras development, I'm getting some, some degree of consulting is to help us to use audio. It's not always really obvious, but especially with working with the Rei clients or you have a lot of different units, you don't really have necessarily a key unit of commerce just actually sitting down and mapping out how you want it to work.

Gil Roberts: 21:01

It can be, it can be a little daunting to people that, especially if they're not used to development, they're just kind of looking for a CRM system. That's usually what hooks a lot of people, um, to just pop that open, you know, sign into the podio account for the first time and they're just presented with this and where do you put a date down? You know? Exactly. Cause you have to exactly put it somewhere. Right. So, yeah, that's pretty tough.

Jarett Duker: 21:21

Do you have any ideas for ways to improve or company? Honestly, I think white boarding or trying to make a flow chart and when you sit down and say, oh this is unnecessary and this is really hard. Yes it is. But it's better to do that when it's purely conceptual as opposed to you have, I have a suggestion.

Alex Shul: 21:40

Yeah, I think that, I'm sorry to interrupt but let me restart.

Jarett Duker: 21:43

Well, uh, just something they potentially could implement, which is moving fields between apps by overriding your external ideas. So you know, this field has a unique id. If we could overwrite the app ID associated to it, you wouldn't have a data integrity issues, you could actually rearrange the databases.

Alex Shul: 22:00

So yeah, I would almost imagine it like you have a, if it's not a solution management tool then it's a, a workspace manageable that lets you change where a specific field is just to other apps. Yeah. Or even if it's just a unique data element. I mean you want me to clean up your data for you. Cause the fields still exist. It's still the same ID.

Jarett Duker: 22:20

I want to use the same field id. I just wanted an app B instead of app A.

Gil Roberts: 22:24

that that would be interesting or maybe a lot of this in here and feel free for anybody else to jump in. What if you could put data in a field and that exact field is displayed in two different apps? Well, you can do that already for the calculations. Well, I'm saying actually one field, you put it in one app and then you can, you know, at the bottom where you're selecting and dragging fields in the Podio, you could have an existing things app and just put it there. So if it's a text field, it's in one app. If you change it, it changes in another,

Alex Shul: 22:52

That's almost the basis of the, of the, um, relationship field with a view that lets you do effectively that. But it doesn't, I think you're talking about UI edition that lets you accomplish the same thing that it already accomplishes in the API, but it doesn't make it easy to do.

Jarett Duker: 23:08

I don't think you would want it to display into places, but you could essentially give a visual reference to a field inside of an app which is a relationship, but it's not. Um, but it allows you to manipulate that UI element from somewhere else. The, the master copy is still needs to live somewhere. It needs to exist in an app, but there's no reason you couldn't put a widget of some sort inside of another app. It's not a relationship field, it's just a direct reference to this field in app c to app A that then you can manipulate. That's an interesting field type ID have. Very interesting. So basically a mass field, you put it in, you give the reference and now it is that field.

Gil Roberts: 23:43

Right. And for all intents and purpsoes, okay. Emily, what's something that you've, I know that you've noticed that might be something...

Emily Wantland: 23:51

Kind of piggybacking off of that, one of the clients uses a dashboard system and they've been pretty much duplicating their data, but sometimes not updating both locations. So like you're talking about it kind of be nice to have it near the master location. Okay. So using that dashboard service to display the numbers, a lot of times it wasn't good data in the first place because they weren't keeping up with both locations. So

Gil Roberts: 24:16

it's a better data, data syncing between apps possibly or something that's a little more easier and approachable. Cause I mean we could, you can defeat that with like globiflow or or SaaSsafras or whatever kind of flow engine. But for somebody that's new popping this out of the box. Okay.

Emily Wantland: 24:31

Right. Cause they were adding their own fields and try and customize themselves that we had already done. So. Excellent.

Jarett Duker: 24:37

Caleb, you might have... you know, I'm sitting here racking my brain, but I'm a support guy. So my gripes are all support base. And the one thing that clients constantly, constantly come to me with is issues regarding, you know, the technical limitations of podio and globiflow. And recently they've been plagued with, you know, uh, response time problems, API problems, um, web hooks, not firing the, it just the overall stability of the platform right now is, I know it's kind of a touchy subject cause it's the platform itself, but um, I think a lot of stress can be alleviated just if the average client knew that we're getting these text messages for maintenance, you know, every other weekend, what is it actually doing, you know, uh, are we going to start seeing a market improvement in these things?

Gil Roberts: 25:27

Yeah. You were here for the, uh, the great podio shutdown for, what was that? January, 2018, something like that where it was down for like three or four days. Yeah. Nothing. Yeah, I remember that. They've done a lot for platform stability over the last calendar year or so now. And it's, we used it, Jared, you and I used it for a long time with like zero problems. But I think the growth of the platform, which is a good thing, has caused a lot of issues. And we had that huge pain point January, 2018, uh, where they had, they just had to do the work, uh, which means taking the platform down for, yeah, it was like two or three days. We've been into migration to AWS. And so there, it's not surprising that moving around a lot of those pieces and parts by leaving some disconnection. So I'm, I'm hopeful that their, their investment in that move will pay off in the long term with improved stability. But you know, it, it's, it's a constant operation to keep a system like that available. Let's notkid ourselves. It's not small. Right. And podio is pretty good size piece of software. There's tons and tons of people. I mean, they, they enter the billions of items or something like that. That's a constant operation to keep it up. Absolutely. Um, Alex, yeah, what's something that, that you see there in podio? Well,

Alex Shul: 26:45

um, I think that a lot of what I see is still the extension of the SaaSsafras, uh, platform and completing, um, some of the key elements that, um, I've had in mind for, um, improving the manageability of podio solutions. And that's still foremost in my mind. Um, but as far as, you know, things that I would like to see podio add, I, I still think one of the most exciting possibilities is opening up, um, new ways of connecting to an API for a stable solution along the lines of generating a graph QL and point. Something I mentioned in one of our podcasts. I really think that that's something that team should consider because people who are building out podio solutions, um, just podio applications for that matter, but especially if they're building out something like a SaaSsafras solution, then the complexity of the service offering, um, they have merits displaying or modifying that data from a different website in a lot of cases. And the world of connectivity for modern applications, which are, you know, web-based first they're distributed, um, and they're evolving. Those kind of, um, really expectations that developers have for modern applications means that supporting them, um, makes it nicer to use your platform. And if they were to add features like a graph QL API for, um, a podio workspace, then I think they would see a lot of, um, very interesting uses by developers. Um, who would really be empowered by the, the flexibility and ease of development that graph QL provides front end development.

Jarett Duker: 28:35

Interesting. Jarett, what's on your wishlist? HIPAA, you know. I have to, I get to complain. No, no, not really. I want to go back to the one. Um, I think I mentioned it back in our very, very first season, which is the ability to filter through related items. You know, I want to generate a filtered list of my database, but as a condition of that filter, I want to look through related items and choose a, say a category option if I'm making sense here. So I want all of my items that, uh, have, you know, all of my people who drive blue cars and then inside of their blue cars, that that's a relationship that I'm filtering on, they are manuals for, I want my manual blue cars. Now that manual characteristic doesn't live on their profile, it lives on their car profile, right? It would be very, very helpful to do that second degree filtering. That second layer there to, to bring in more of the data from that relationship. Just kinda open that pipe up a little bit to look through. Right now there's really no way to get that information whatsoever other than to download your car's database in this analogy and then almost do a visual one-to-one match. Or what I would do is, you know, dump both to excel and then put it in two tables, but still there's no way to run this that I'm aware of anywhere in the system unless you're angry at the database. So that's why we've built a massive reporting database because of this exact problem.

Alex Shul: 29:58

A little bit overkill for something you're talking about, which can be done on an ad hoc basis before you really want to invest in a full time sequel server

Jarett Duker: 30:05

This is the small example because there's a lot of times this would be useful, but almost everyone needs to do this in some way. It's a relational database that you can't pull data through relationships. It's a huge blind spot. Yeah, absolutely. Oh, now I know Adam, you haven't had a whole bunch of time inside of Podio, but do you have any, from your cursory time, is there anything that you, you've seen off of that and you're like, hmm, it could be better to do in a different way? Uh, I mean some of the times when I'm like, Oh man, I wish podio could do this. Then I'm like, one of you guys comes around and is like, Oh yeah, you just ya know. So I, yeah, I guess I don't, I don't feel like I know enough-- Well, we'll let you slide--, to sit at this table. But like I said, we'll let you slide since, um, you just haven't had the mileage inside of it, we kinda shuffled you into the corner and had you start working on the UI immediately because of the need. Let's turn that around a little bit. How about is there something you wish SaaSsafras could did that you thought, oh that would be kind of cool? Um, that it could do just in its functionality? Yeah. Like since you've looked at our services and you thought, man, it would be really cool if Sassafras did x. Hate on Alex a little bit.

Alex Shul: 31:18

I want to tell you he already does it and it's fine.

Jarett Duker: 31:21

Well see that's what happens is like we'll have this discussion and it'd be like from like sitting in the user's perspective for me, it'd be cool if the user can be able to get this, this data, you know, this, this, this and this and know this, this and this, and then it's about this item. And then, you know, a few times I've gone to Alex and yeah, does this like do that? And he's like, Yup. I mean lot of times he'll say yes.

Alex Shul: 31:45

Yeah. Sometimes I forget what.

Adam Wilson: 31:48

Or sometimes you say like, no, but um, you can make a calculation in your head about how hard it was to add that that to the API.

Alex Shul: 31:54

Yeah. And I think that's part of the, the importance of having John work on that, on the services. He's able to use that framework and build the services out in a very consistent manner to support the development of the, the UI supporting that, the experience that we want our user to have. So I've focused heavily on a backend system that supports um, the Sassafras solution and the services and, and the experience was just someone who knew how to use a, uh, console and um, the rest client. But I think, um, absolutely that there are a lot of, um, services that and API improvements that we can invest in that will really drive that user experience forward and continue to leverage everything that's been done to date on SaaSsafras.

Jarett Duker: 32:40

Excellent. Well I think you heard it here first. Sassafras does everything. That's what I took away from that.

Gil Roberts: 32:46

You know something that I have personally and I've built podio systems. I guess I'm probably the longest user cause I started using it December, 2012 is when I encountered, before there were any workflows, it was just fancy form software is what it felt like. It felt good. But it was just one when when they started with a basic workflows and then globiflow flow hit the scene. That's really when it expanded the platform, but something I've always struggled with, which someone falls in line with what Jared you're saying on reporting is being able to aggregate data between apps and then apps in other workspaces. So having that, and I know you can get the super menu and there's some other tools that will give you that spreadsheet view, but I always wished that I could have that same experience inside of the podio software itself and I could because they're the relationships field there. It knows that those items should be put together. You know, just something under that little wrench where I can go, okay, let me see, you know, Bob Smith stuff and he's got a few other apps that his stuff's in. To just see that across the whole view and not have to go to a third party. Not to beat anybody up that has those out there right now, it's just not the same user experience as the podio UI has been.

Jarett Duker: 33:54

Sparks an idea for me, kind of a print complete file option. Yeah. Look through all the relationships and give me all of it. Yup. And it's, it's something that I've always had to struggle with and even if I could just have a taste of that maybe in the tile so I could pull some, make some little reports inside those little tiles that, that aren't just a single app. Like I could make a tile report and it talks about how many leads I have with how, about how many leads have these kinds of objects attached. And like you said, that second layer of data through that relationship field in my tile. Right. It raises an interesting question of something we might want to look into in the future is generating a, um, a browser plug in that essentially gives you a dropdown nested view of your podio environment. Hey, I want this file. It's got these six related items. Open this one. It has these two related items open and actually see the full field. Yeah. I mean I don't see any barriers to that other than time and energy.

Gil Roberts: 34:52

I don't like developing them. Yeah. It's just something that always, cause I always felt like he was missing from like day one that I could go if I have leads and then prospects and then close business that I can make one tile with all those. And I know that you can do some graphing inside of globiflow and it would give you like a dynamic image that'll serve out. But it, when you encounter that, it's, it's, it's something that you've like, it's so good. You feel like it should be there. Right. That should be, everything else is at the same level. It's like why is this gap here? So this literally the number one complaint I get from people in the Rei Industry, Rei people love Podio, but they love to see their KPIs too. And podio just can't do it for them. So that's really interesting, I think that...

Alex Shul: 35:38

...you know, the, those are features that would not be too hard to develop on a just case by case basis of pinpoint development effort to provide a specific KPI. But I think that, you know, I, I tend to, um, try to step back and understand how to tackle a problem like that in a way that is usable, that, um, addresses many problems with just a, an added capability rather than a pinpoint solution. And, um, we'll definitely be continuing to think about that one. That's, that's sparked a lot of thoughts.

Gil Roberts: 36:09

Excellent. Well, we'll go ahead and wrap up today's episode and really wrap up the season. Um, I, again, it's been a pleasure, uh, being able to put this podcast together and just the incredible response that we've gotten, both from people reaching out to us with messages, people reaching out, asking about our products, people just saying thank you for helping them through, uh, uh, stop or block that they've had, uh, and just, and just sparking some conversation, especially around as we like to beat on our drum about podio as a product platform. I think it's, I think that's a great direction. Um, and I think that's it. So, uh, we'll go ahead and sign off for this season. We'll be back in a couple of weeks. We're gonna take a short break. Um, and then we'll start season two. We've got some new content that I think a lot of our listeners are going to like. We're going to really listen to what some of the feedback we've had on more gaps episodes for sure. Um, in the meantime, go ahead and start sending those gaps over to us. We need the content to put on there. We like pulling from the community forms. Again, I got a message this morning saying thank you. We addressed those. We're going to start putting our podcasts links in the community forums, so be on the lookout for us responding to your questions on there as well. Definitely if you have not by now at episode 25 hit that subscribe button. I'm just going to implore you, maybe even shame you if you haven't done it so far, please, please do that and any reviews at any of the platforms, particularly the apple podcast, Google play store is so helpful to us and it helps us drive more content into these episodes. We hope that this season has created a lot of value for you. You can return that favor again by reviews and subscribing. I think that's it for today, Ladies and gentlemen. Again, hit us up on our Facebook, linkedin, Twitter, or send us an email or podio message at podcast@brickbridgeconsulting.com. Thank you so much to all our listeners for a great first season. We'll be back for season two in a couple of weeks.

Speaker 5: 38:06

Outro.