@mux/ai

The year is 1982 and I'm in third grade and they had a lab with the TRS-80

computer and it was a big clunky thing. It was this programming language called

logo which actually still exists today. It's a derivative of this if you really

get into it. But at the time it was like you had a little what they called a

turtle

and the turtle would draw for you and you'd be like forward 60 right 90 forward

60

right 90 and you'd have a square and then we graph like our name and then when

you draw these pictures and it was fascinating. I was young and it was logo

is actually a wonderful language. It's kind of slept on these days but as a

like a learning language it's really fantastic and the tactile feedback of

telling this little turtle and then watching it do what you tell it to do was

awesome. Like it was one of the like first technical victories over the

computer that I ever had and it really stuck with me. I was like oh I like this

stuff. This is Joel. Joel is a full stack developer who founded egghead.io a

successful video course site for web developers and he also works as a

consultant over at badass.dev. In this conversation we picked Joel's brain on

building efficient video workflows. His preferred tech stack and what he likes

about working at an early stage startup after years of building his own

successful businesses. All right here we go. I've built my own video

infrastructure. It's something I've done in my life that I'm also done with.

Several times I built my own video player for the browser and that's a

miserable slog. I'm in the video business though so it's like oh I want

to do this which brings me like why we're here in this conversation because

no I don't do that anymore because there's somebody out there that can just

do that for me so thank you for that Mux. Can you share more about like maybe

that workload that that you've realized within Mux and how that kind of takes

it off your shoulders and some of the nightmare maybe that you

ran into before with that infrastructure approach. Delivering the actual videos

themselves do people across the globe because there's a lot of underserved

markets and when you're talking about that much bandwidth and you're

trying to do this so you know it used to be that we we do progressive video

which means you have three video files you know like the mp4 format or whatever

and they'd be in certain sizes and based on that that you'd switch videos

and then at some point we wanted to get into adaptive

streaming which means that you have a bunch of tiny pieces of videos that can

be switched to different bit rates. That really helped out that helped with

our global distribution but it's still really really difficult and

there's this wonderful human Christian Pillsbury who now actually works at Mux

and I was like Christian I just like I'm like people every single day I have

people in my inbox that aren't in San Francisco or the west coast of the

U.S. that they're having a miserable experience and how we do this and he's

like well it's you know it's like some sort of caching it's edge.

Reason AWS we have S3 buckets with videos in them and you know like you're

gonna have to learn all this stuff so I have to spend a week of my life

learning

about caching and configuration and configuring AWS and IAMs and how to

like set up my cache and like instead of working on my product I have to

like work on core infrastructure so when we started building our new platform

last year I was like I'm not doing that anymore if I can kind of avoid AWS

for our platform I'm going to do that. The other big thing was the player is

actually a big deal. Can you all use real player if you use that?

I'm fortunate or I always swore my music sounded better with real

player for some reason but yeah I don't wish that upon very many people.

Yeah it's like we went through flash and we went through real player and we

went

through you know WinApp was cool but like whatever like like the way we

have watched video on the internet has evolved a lot over the last

couple of decades but the player experience is is pretty difficult and it

was for a long time over the last 10 years anyway where you'd use a

a proprietary player right? Like building a robust media player that's both

like accessible works out expected and then it's something that you can

you can actually like build and grow. It's a it's a real challenge and

everybody benchmarks you against to what Google has done with YouTube.

Recently and Mux's player in particular has seen like leaps and bounds of

improvement with media Chrome and media Chrome is the underlying framework

that's built on web components and it's an open source project and then Mux

player is basically the commercial version that works if you're a Mux

customer but like media Chrome itself is like the first time I looked at

web components we're like oh I can see why you would actually want to use a

web component every now and then and then it's like also one of the like

three github repositories that I actually subscribe to because I've spent so

much

time building a player I want I've watched the evolution

and watch the team and you know like watch Christian and and huff the other

folks in there just like really like get into the weeds I don't even have to

think about the player anymore and having gone through like the last four

years having built three iterations of of a player

yeah it's a marked life improvement for me quality of life

plus plus. All right so I want to switch gears towards a specific project

that you've been working on as far as I understand this was for a specific

course that another developer creator was working on

and your solution was to try to like basically simplify again like there's

a lot of different moving parts here you have the tools like ingest at your

disposal and mux at your disposal maybe you could just walk through it a

little bit what the scenario was like why this stack I'm going to be in the

right fit for you for this project. So the ingest stuff is pretty new this

year we so we've had egghead IO and it was a

rails app so it's a server full app and over the last year and a half or so I

decided for new projects I didn't want to use the rails

API's it was kind of a mistake we use next JS

I wanted to embrace serverless and everything lives in a mono repo it's

actually skill recordings forward slash products

on github so we use visible source I don't call it open source because

there is no support implied or given so if you want to check it out you can

check it out but like we're not trying to like build an open source product

that people can actually use more more just keeping it open because it makes

things easier part of that was like all right

every product is going to get its own database we use planet scale love

planet scale every product gets its own mux instance

and like all of those like everyone gets its notion

account everyone you know like it's this we we consolidate some things like the

versatile account is all one stack and there's a couple other

aspects where we use shared infrastructure but every one of these products

looks the exact same but gets its own slice of the infrastructure so we are

servicing clients at the end of the day that are the instructors of these

courses and you know just to make it

not as bad so it's not we're not quite too nice yet but like how do we

how do we make it not as bad to where they can actually

self-service and don't need like api tokens and and logins to various

services and all that fun stuff to make it happen

media processing workflows are really a pain in the butt like it is not

super easy to you know like mux makes it pretty easy there's a url you can go

to the web interface and and you can actually upload stuff

but really it's like the best thing you can do is pitch a url so it's like you

need to get that the raw media file someplace and then i also

want that in a backup so if i ever have to rebuild like

something happens to mux and i have to rebuild all our video infrastructure

and use AWS that would make me sad but i need to be able to do that right like

so you have to upload files access those files

and then wait for them to process so send it to to a service provider like

mux well it gets transcoded for for streaming

we want transcripts we want subtitles we want to like send it through open AI

to get weird llm suggestions that that might produce for us

sometimes they're good it's good at like tagging and stuff so like we get all

that done all through that process if you do

not say like here is where this is at is that this is doing this right now

it's 70 complete 80 percent send notification do you like to be

emailed do you want a slack message do you want to be hit up on discord do you

want an sms message managing that asynchronous

workflows where like and i've i've been saying lately like distributed systems

are easy and has an asterisk on it because they're super difficult but

like it's actually now it's now it is actually easy i can just make that

happen i can have an idea oh man wouldn't that be cool if that

also notified us over here done right like it's not uh

like i have to go in and change it or refigure it out i know exactly where to

go in the app what to change how to add that step

air handling is is kind of built into the whole thing and then it just

looks like typescript at the end of the day

speaking of ingest you actually have a new role over there was that

a part of just being super stoked about the product or what was what was really

the motivation behind that right now is a very early company

but even at this early stage they have like a really good product that

fills a gap in my my tech stack that was really difficult and something i've

always wanted i love event-driven architectures

and distributed systems it's not a hat i was able to wear i would have to like

staff up and have expertise and kafka and AWS and

salary or whatever like alternative solutions you might choose

and i wasn't able to do it i was never able to get it to a point where it would

be actually reliable and i could run it and ingest let me do that and i was

like i love this so much it was a kind of a joke

tweet i love this product so much that i'm

considering their open dev rail position and then

fairly hit me up and the twitter dms with the with the old eyeball emojis

and it just kind of escalated from there and you know it's like i wasn't

looking

and i wasn't thinking about it i get to sit down and and think about

education from a different side from you know like an early stage

startup position which is that's building something that's like truly

useful and interesting well it's cool to me and probably the biggest difference

is the code and configuration it's all serverless but it's

in our app so we use next-js and all of this configuration

is in our github it's in our git repository and it's committed

and we we get to own that i get to see how the

sausage is made now and and what they're doing is incredibly complex

and you know like as i described it's like this infrastructure where you need

a team of incredibly smart people to manage that you know like building a

product in early is really quite fascinating and

and uh it's gonna it's an accelerator for me because i can

you know like be in an experience that kind of uh deep technical product

growth that i i just you know i wasn't i wasn't getting in in the businesses

that i operate for one last question for you do you remember

like a moment or you not only realize you were interested in the stuff but you

were like this might be like harder than it looks

no actually i don't i've never found the technology to be

i mean it's it's challenging daunting i don't know what i don't know and you

have to dig in and you don't know the answer but to me that's always been the

most fascinating aspect of it and the maybe even the most joyful

aspect of it is the the just the the puzzle it's like a big

Rubik's cube and having to deal with the human

aspect of technology has always been like way more of a struggle for me like

i've i've i love to sink into impossible technical tasks

and rise superior to the machine and curse it

with my dominance when i'm i'm finished with whatever it is i was trying to do

it really boils down to like that's the joy of it it is hard i'm not saying

that this technical stuff isn't hard but like that's

you know like it's like looking up at Everest and and get into the top like

that's like uh if you lose a couple fingers along the way that's just

part of the cost. Joel where can we find you on the internet?

so i spent a lot of time on x and i i actually play around with tiktok a

little bit i haven't posted a lot you think there's a synthesizer that sits

over my shoulder over here so i make screeching noise and bad

generative arts and put that on tiktok a little bit

and then i i blog on joehooks.com infrequently

and badass.dev is kind of my my current personal project that i

love quite a bit. Sweet well thanks for taking some time to

chat with us yeah my pleasure