Solspace Podcast

We continue the conversation with Zack Bloom of Cloudflare. In this episode Zack and I talk at length about one of my favorite Cloudflare features, free and easy SSL certificates. We discuss how this system works and why it’s so much easier these days for web developers to run their client’s sites behind HTTPS. Zazk and I talk a bit about the history of security on the web and we discuss how Cloudflare’s SSL offerings caused a spike in the number of sites moving to HTTPS. I ask Zack about whether there is a private Cloudflare available to defense departments…

One of the lynchpins of Web Reliability is fast load times. For more than a decade Cloudflare has been central to low latency, high availability best practices among web developers. And now Cloudflare is on the Solspace podcast. This is the first of a series of four podcast episodes where Zack Bloom, Head of Developer Marketing at Cloudflare and I go through, in detail, the many tools and capabilities of Cloudflare. Recently I have fallen behind Cloudflare. I knew I needed to get caught up when I had my clients from ProPublica on the podcast and they explained how thoroughly…

Part two of my interview with ecologist Sarah Spaulding discusses how our work reaches regular people. Through diatoms.org, Sarah (and by extension, Solspace) not only supplies resources to scientists around the globe, but also provides valuable information to primary, middle, and high school kids looking to pursue future careers in science. Having easy access to this information ensures a future of budding scientists and entrepreneurs who both understand how to find the information they need on the internet and use that information to solve the world’s problems. Being cognizant and aware of this kind of audience is essential to web…

This is the second half of my interview with Mike Tigas and Frank Sharpe. We continue our conversation about how ProPublica uses CloudFlare’s Workers KV system to serve most of the propublica.org website from the Edge. ‘From the Edge’ means from servers located as close to the end user as possible, thanks to a distributed network of data centers. We talk about how ProPublica has systems for baking pages. To bake a page means to push the HTML for a given url up into CloudFlare KV so that it is ready to be accessed by visitors to the site. Workers…

Remember when launching a new website meant flipping a switch and holding your breath? Yeah, that’s still the norm and it’s still terrifying. But the good people over at ProPublica have developed a solution to that problem. Mike Tigas and Frank Sharpe from ProPublica agreed to talk with me on the Solspace podcast to answer all of my dumb questions. You’ll love the way they have built their modern tech stack. It can handle massive global traffic without breaking a sweat. It can launch portions of a new website while leaving other sections untouched. It can respond quickly and easily…

Sarah Spaulding is an ecologist with the USGS as well as an INSTAAR fellow. And more importantly, she’s someone who follows her gut—and nature’s gut, for that matter. Her work centers around the study of diatoms, algae that produce 50% of the air we breathe. In this episode, Sarah and I discuss the importance of paying attention to the small things, whether that be the presence of diatoms in the environment or the instinct that something just isn’t quite right. Though the world values productivity, we often forget that in order to be productive we also have to be creative.…

Procrastination is pretty much the touchstone in this pandemic moment. Small business owners have been putting off for years the necessary and important work of getting their businesses online. Online revenue streams are at the root of what I talk about in my Web Reliability book. Allowing customers to smoothly find their way to your products and services online is the key. Too many business owners have procrastinated about this important work. They’ve allowed too much friction to build up between their customers and themselves. With business owner procrastination as the main theme in this solocast, I talk about which…

In part two of the interview with marketing and communications director for Songwriters Hall of Fame, April Anderson, we discuss one of the biggest questions of all time—How do you know when it’s right? Whether you’re talking about friendship or dating or website development, finding the right fit is integral to making your life and business work. Often, the right fit means finding a middle way—a mix of process and creativity. Procedures can allow clients to feel confident in your abilities, while openness to creativity allows clients to feel heard and assured that you can meet their unique needs. Sometimes…

Brandon has been a friend and web development colleague for many years. At times like these it’s good to have relationships that you can draw on for support, perspective and insight. In this podcast Brandon and I talk about the current state of the Craft economy as well as our predictions for where things are headed in the next few months. We talk about the different ways that we web developers can help our local businesses during the downturn. We also talk about how Craft could be used to spin up websites quickly and when that might be appropriate. We…

On this podcast episode my old friend Eric Miller and I talk about building. We’re in the middle of a global pandemic with this Covid-19 virus crisis. We don’t yet know if work is going to totally freeze up or if it’s going to blow up. What we do know is that we are stressed. If the economy does really freeze up, we will have some time on our hands. You have time to either sit on the couch and watch Netflix or you have time to get going on that old project you had always meant to finish and…

Jason said it best on the podcast, his first major business crisis was the dot com bubble. Then it was 911, then The Great Recession, etc etc. We’ve been through crises like the current COVID-19 pandemic before and we know a few things are essential right now. In this podcast episode I interview Eva Passalacqua, long time member of the Solspace team, Jason Siffring, owner of the Chicago web development firm Surprise Highway, and Matt Weinberg, Co-founder at Happy Cog out of New York City. In the first days of the COVID-19 crisis, when I started to see how the…

You should really have a look at April Anderson’s YouTube channel: Art As Air. There you will find clips from her documentary on Icelandic horses as well as clips from her other documentary work. And here’s the Amazon Prime Video link so that you can watch the full Tails of Iceland film. In this episode April and I talk about some of her thoughts on what it takes to be a web developer serving clients well. April and I landed on an answer that I often find to be true in the first order: conversation is key. We talk about…

This is the first episode of the rebooted Solspace podcast. From this point forward I hope to bring information of value to our two primary customers, the two types of people responsible for a reliable website: marketing directors and the web developers who serve them. In this episode I talk with Scott Hutcheson (http://www.thestrategicweb.com). This is the first of a two part conversation with Scott. This is a bit of a meta-episode in the sense that it tries to lay the groundwork for future podcast interviews. Scott and I talk about the importance of conversation in web development. Though it…

As you care for your clients day to day you often perform the same services again and again. They are scalable and sellable, but you just don’t know it because you have your nose down too close to the action. Pull back a little bit and have another look. These services you already perform can be productized. Once you turn them into a product, they can be marketed and sold as products. Your customers can sign up to pay for these productized services on a recurring model. This frees you up and stabilizes your income. And it’s all built on…

Half a year ago I found myself having dinner with Pete Sena, founder of Digital Surgeons, a 40+ person digital agency on the East Coast. I was struck by the easy confidence Pete had in his and his team’s ability to generate new work to keep their pipeline filled. This is an area in which I, and most of my work colleagues, don’t have the same confidence. As confident and capable as we are as web designers and developers, most of us don’t know how to market ourselves. When we hit a down cycle, we rarely have practiced and well…

Carl Crawley of Made by Hippo and I talk in depth about shaping your company around you and your team. In this podcast we talk about how to say no to work that does not suit you; how to say yes to the right types of clients and generally how to avoid self-imposed misery.

You all know Ryan Irelan, VP of Technology at Happy Cog. You all know that he thinks nice, clear, coherent, wise thoughts about technology as well as business matters. Listen to us discuss some of the finer points of the importance of location in business, performance for high traffic clients, mobile development and unforced errors.

So my cousin and good friend Kevin Keener runs a very successful plumbing contracting company in Oklahoma. I have long wanted to talk with people in the building trades about how they bid projects, get work, keep things on track and manage their companies. I have always thought there were many similarities in building websites and building buildings. So Kevin and I talk about all of this. The building trades are so much more evolved, in a business sense, than web development. We think we’re so original and smart and innovative and need learn nothing from those long established crafts…

Kenny Meyers (kennymeyers.com) is a good friend of mine. He’s someone who thinks very clear, salient and opinionated thoughts about software development, the internet, working, companies, being human and such things. On this podcast he and I speak about his work at Adobe, Facebook and his opinions on the state of the ExpressionEngine community as well as what it means to be a happy developer.

Kyle Cotter of Cotter Interactive and I talk about business in this podcast. Since he’s so new to the business of owning a web design and development firm I ask him how he’s getting started, how he’s growing his client list, how he’s getting new business, where’s he’s getting help, and more. You will be surprised at how together and self-possesed this gentleman is. And I think, like me, you will learn a thing or two.