Elio Struyf - Front Matter CMS, Demo Time

Speaker A: Uh, but yeah, as a presenter you don't like that because you can be the best coder, but if you're live on stage, you're stressy, you're not in your chair and all of a sudden you cannot type anymore. That's also one of those things that I started thinking about, okay, what can I do to make my life easier?

Speaker B: Hello, welcome to devtool. This is a podcast about developer tools and the people who make them. I'm Andrew and this is my co host Jess.

Speaker C: Hey everyone. Uh, we're really excited to have Elio on with us. Um, you've got a long and storied background and sort of like devtool space, so it's really exciting to chat with you. Um, before we dig into our topics though, would you like to tell our listeners a little bit more about yourself?

Speaker A: Yeah, sure. Thank you for having me. Um, I'm Edio, I'm living in uh, Antwerp near or in Belgium. Near Antwerp. Uh, for the people that know Belgium, it's or on the northern part. Um, I'm a cycling fanatic. Um, so that's my hobby. That's what I do most of the time, trying to do more uh, this year even. And I love ah, to build tools for myself but also share these tools with others because uh, over time I saw that the tools that I need and use are also tools that others uh, require it as well. Um, so that's how I got into the open source world, uh, to start, yeah, start building my own things. And besides that, I'm a Microsoft MVP and GitHub Star and Google Developer Expert

Speaker B: decorated with many titles. Uh, so you've been a machine lately. Uh, I've been looking at your GitHub, uh, and you just like project after project. But before we get to there, like uh, what was your journey into development into the space you are right now?

Speaker A: Oh, um, I go way back to 2008, um, and even before that, uh, when I went to uh, university, that's where I got introduced into uh, programming and I actually didn't know anything about uh, development. Uh, so I had to learn C, C, C, uh, that's where it all started. I hated those things because I, yeah, I needed to have a compiler to do things and I, I'm a very visual learner so I didn't see things happening. Um, so I went over to PHP and that's where I started to create my own cms, uh, system. Um, and that's where I actually got introduced to learning and having a joy in programming and yeah, that's where it all started. And now I went over to. Yeah, people, uh, are going to, uh. Yeah, think that it's a curse word. And for some, yeah, it is. It's SharePoint. Uh, that's where my development career started because I went to a big company that was using uh, SharePoint and started to do development around that. Um, yeah, and over time, um, things became more and More Interesting around JavaScript development node, uh, came up. Um, and that's where, yeah, the real thing began on um, the development and open source things.

Speaker C: Nice, nice. So let's dig into some of your projects. So, um, the first one I think that'd be fun to call out is Front Matter cms, um, which I think is like a really, really interesting project. Uh, also, like, didn't this crop up kind of in a time that was like a little bit hard for you? So you'd had like a cycling accident in 2021. Was that around the time that frontman CMS, you started working on that?

Speaker A: Um, I think Front Matter CMS or back then, it was just front matter. Um, it was, um, it all started in 2019. Oh, look around that time frame. Cool. Um, uh, because I started blogging in 2010. Um, and blogging back then was WordPress. Um, and I've been to various hosts and one of those things that happened quite often was a broken database. Uh, so I had the script that checked every day. Is something broken? If it's broken, auto fix it. And then if there was a real problem, yeah, come back to me. Uh, alert me with an email and then I can do the manual fixes. Um, and yeah, back in 2019, I think that was the time when a lot of people were going over to static site generators. And that's also what I started doing. I was building my own static site generator and then I saw you go. And I was like, will I keep on working on my own? Or will I just port, uh, over to uh, Hugo? Because everything was already there and that's what I eventually did. Uh, so I didn't invest too much time in my own anymore. Um, maybe it's still somewhere around. Um, but yeah, I haven't looked back at it. Went, uh, over to Hugo, uh, from the moment you go static, um, really nice. You have all your markdown files. Uh, first thing that happened was the migration from WordPress over to Markdown. Um, I've written a lot of scripts for that. Um, I think I even wrote a blog post back then about it. Uh, but it wasn't. Yeah, it was A very bumpy road. And that was also for me, the moment that I realized that I didn't want to be locked in anymore. Um, locked in into an environment. Um, yeah, my data is somewhere in the database. Maybe I still own the data, but still it's, it's. Yeah, it's, it's very hard to get it out in the right structure that I wanted it to be. And that's where it. Yeah, the idea then came on. Um, I need to have something now that I have all the markdown files to make it easier for me to manage the front matter section of a static site generator on the markdown. So you add at the top you have the YAML or the Tamil zone where you do actually the metadata of document. And yeah, if you use text or categories, you don't want to invent new categories or new texts every time that you create a file. So that's where it first started. It was just some front matter creator or manager that knew everything about your project and that was it. And then in 2021, um, I was working on my own startup, um, and I got a bike accident and I wasn't allowed to work anymore. Uh, so from insurance reasons, uh, they said like, yeah, Elio, sorry, um, you cannot do it anymore. Um, so I was only allowed to um, sit for 20 minutes a day back then, uh, or be in bed or walk around. So I still have my walking pads, uh, right next to me, uh, that I use quite often. Um, so I walk while working. Um, but as I wasn't allowed to work and not do anything that potentially could earn money in the future, um, I started thinking on what can I start doing. And I had front matter being there and that was a perfect moment for me to start working on, um, yeah, a CMS like interface, like a dashboard where I can see all my content, uh, automatically creating blog posts and so on and so on. So uh, that's actually a point in my life where I had the time to stop everything, to think about it and then work on something that I thought, yeah, this could be some very fun project and eventually a lot of people started using it. Um, and still as of today it's still a product that is there, um, not 100% working on it anymore, uh, because of reasons, uh, uh, that I can uh, go into later on. Um, but yeah, one of those things that is, or my mindset was then was I'm not going to lock anyone in. So you come with your own static site generator, the one that you want to use. You create Your own markdown files and you are free to use it or go whenever you want. Um, so it's there, uh, it's your data, it's your content. The only thing that the CMS is doing is putting a UI layer around managing your content.

Speaker B: I find it funny. You couldn't work and you had to do something where uh, you couldn't earn any money and you chose open source to do that. That's just like I find that, that to be a little funny. Uh, but going more into Front Matter, uh, there is something that makes it pretty unique about it. There's a bunch of CMSs out there that do things. But the way that you integrate into VS code I think is pretty novel. Can you walk us through that and like some of the benefits of it?

Speaker A: Yeah, so yeah, as I might as I'm a developer, I uh, love Visual Studio code. Uh, I'm a day one user of the first beta that came out. Um, yeah, that was also the first editor where I was like oh damn, you can fully extend it to your own needs. Uh, so there's like the extension APIs and that allowed me to further dive into all of that because I already started doing extension development, uh, straight from the beginning of Visual Studio code. Um, but, and I already knew what was possible. So the moment that I stepped in into the Front Matter CMS side, I was like, okay, now I'm actually creating a website. So I became to see that Front Matter is like a website with a backend and a front end and the front end being everything that you can do, uh, and view from content wise perspective and images and so on. And then the backend as I call it, is the extension layer, um, that is going to interact with either your file system or with Visual Studio code. Um, and this is something that I really like. Very uh, powerful system and actually also a very stable system. There's never been a time that I actually had to do or remove something from Front Matter or any of the extensions that I already built. Uh, that is being broken by Visual Studio code. So that's also a very nice experience.

Speaker C: I like this. Um, you sort of have this theme of like using VS code as sort of like a product front end almost. Uh, so another project that you've worked on is called Demo Time. And so it's like being able to sort of like script a demo directly in VS code. Uh, I'd love to hear a little bit more about like how that came about. And also you're talking about like you knew, you know, kind of like the possibilities of what you can do in VS code. Uh, demo time does more stuff than I thought you could do. Like, uh, you know, automating, like script terminal commands. I didn't know you could do that. That's, that's pretty cool.

Speaker A: Yeah. So demo time is a total different product. Um, I've been speaking at conferences since 2011, I think, and in the beginning it's always, uh, yeah, stressy when you jump on stage and doing a technical talk. Um, and over time you're getting the hang of it and it's so common or it's. So it doesn't stress me out anymore. Um, so that's also the point where I still like to do, uh, live coding demos or live technical things because it still gives me a kick, still, uh, gives me some excitement. I need to prepare things. Um, and I also love seeing people talk on stage and doing their live coding demos. Um, sometimes things fail and most of the time things fail. And that's also the point where you learn a lot of things on, um, how is a presenter going to solve these things? But yeah, as a presenter, you don't like that because you, you can, you can be the best coder, but if you're live on stage, you're stressy, you're not in your chair, and all of a sudden you cannot type anymore. Um, and that's also one of those things that I started thinking about, okay, what can I do to make my life easier? And then a lot of developers and a lot of speakers started doing snippets. Uh, so we have snippets somewhere in a repository or visual studio code. And then the moment we are going to head on stage, we know that we need to do this keystroke and then we have this snippet and then we do this keystroke and then this snippet, um, works eventually. So that's how I got started as well. Um, but then the more you do these kind of things and sometimes you go just to one conference or to one event, but if you do this talk a couple of times, you also need to create a script on what is your starting point, what is your end point? And if you want to do this again, how do you break things down? Uh, so going back to the starting point and that's where it, uh, came all together to me, uh, where somebody came up to me, uh, also on an event. And uh, he said like, hey, have you ever tried, um, codetour? It's a Visual Studio code extension. Um, which, yeah, before the AI era, it was a really good extension because you could ask, or you could create a tour, ah, throughout your repository and then somebody new that comes in into your repository gets a tour around your code. Like this is what uh, is a starting point. This is how it does this and this and that. Very nice experience. I liked it. Um, and that person said like, hey, this is something that we can use or you can use in order to get rid of your snippets and create your live coding speaking experience. I was like, okay, uh, let me take a look. And came home, started to take a look at it, did some parts, what I wanted to do. But it's very focused on that first experience and that experience on um, getting to know the repository. A lot of clicking around. And this is something that I don't want to do on stage. I don't want to click around. I want to just use a clicker and say, hey, next, next, next, do this. And that's where I started to think, okay, what if I create an extension that is something like a presentation? Uh, but it can have a presentation experience and a coding experience and they can go fluently in flow into each other. Um, so, and that became eventually uh, a scripting experience for demo time. So it's a YAML or JSON experience where I can just say, start with a markdown file which is a slide, and then go over to creating a file, a blank file. Or it can be a file with content in it, adding, uh, content in it, highlighting code, building it, running it. All of that can just be done by scripting. And all the things that you can do, uh, within Visual Studio code can actually be scripted. And there are also a couple of parts where demo time provides you a couple of actions that automate things a lot faster so that you can say, hey, create me a file, um, behind the scenes that are like six steps, uh, now with just one action that is going to create it.

Speaker B: So, so it seems like that experience of creating those demos could be like kind of intense. Like you're literally scripting VS code. So like what does it look like to create a demo in demo time?

Speaker A: Um, that's an experience on um, yeah, first it was just JSON. Uh, so you opened the JSON file and you started scripting. There's a schema, so you follow the schema. Now it's a configuration editor that you can use. You can still use uh, the JSON file or the YAML file. Um, but basically you first start with like how you start every presentation. What are you going to show Is it first going to show a, uh, slide, then you're going to add a new action, um, or a new. Nowadays, uh, it's all uh, in a new terminology. So in the latest version we change the terminology, uh, from demos and demo and demo step and so on over to a more theoretical, um, experience. Like we have a play, we have an actual. We have a scene, and we have steps in the scene. So, um, you first set a scene, which is what are you going to do? So my scene is going to be like showing a presentation. So that's my scene. And in order to show that presentation, I need to have a step which is going to open a slide. Open the slide is a markdown file. So that's the step that you're going to add.

Speaker C: That's it.

Speaker A: If your next scene is going to be showing code, then it's going, you create that scene. The next step or the step inside that scene will then be an open a file. So first step is open a file. Um, then the next step is to add code to that file and so on. And it just clicking around basically. Or you can also start from code that you already have. Uh, so if you already have code and you just want to use it for highlighting code, you select code and you say, hey, uh, create me an action or a step that is going to highlight this code in demo time. And then everything is then, uh, in your JSON file or your YAML file and in your panel you will see the whole step history. And then you can start either by clicking it or you go into presentation mode. And then you can use your clicker or the next key on your keyboard in order to go through your presentation. And the nice thing there is the moment you're done, you restart it. You remove all the things that you had done. Uh, like for instance, um, you don't commit it, but you discard it and you start again, uh, the next time. So when I go to a conference, um, and they ask me, hey, do you have a presentation? I can just pick up whatever presentation I have and I can start by just entering, uh, the presentation mode and clicking around. Maybe I need to update, uh, the slide. Because, uh, the slide deck is probably, or the slide theme is probably for that specific event. But I can also use another team that demotime already provides without any branding of that particular, uh, conference. Ah, so it's a very easy way. Uh, the starting point is a little bit steep maybe, and that's still something I'm trying to work around to make that less steep. Um, but you need to start thinking differently on what you did before and how you're going to do it now, uh, with demo time. But the moment you get started, um, yeah, the people that already used it, um, yeah, the advice has been so positive um, that yeah,

Speaker C: yeah, it seems like pretty powerful. There's this like, there's always this awkward point in talks where you're like going through your slides and then you have to switch over to like giving a demo. I uh, uh. So he's like let me like find my editor window and like run this or whatever. And it's like kind of cool that it's pretty seamless of like the slides are just like a tab in VS code and then you know, you go to the next slide which is your demo and it just like using the scripting can like run the demo or whatever. So it's like that same experience through slides which I think is, it's pretty neat.

Speaker A: There are still people that want to use PowerPoint or keynotes and there's like for Keynote there's no add in um, experience. But for PowerPoint there's an extension or an add in Experience. So there's actually also a demo time, uh, add in uh, that you can couple to your Visual Studio code Experience. So the moment you open Visual, uh, the moment you open PowerPoint you can just do your presentation and then the moment you want to go to your demo it's automatically going to flip to Visual Studio code, start your demo, you do your demo there and then you can go back automatically to uh, PowerPoint as well. That way you don't have to context switch. Um, it's automatically done for you so you don't have to think about where is the screen again.

Speaker C: So that's really slick. That's awesome. Yeah, it looks like it just like has. There's so many features of just like browsing through the docs. Um, I'm curious like uh. So I noticed you have an MCP server. I'm curious like ah, how you know with this tools and other tools like how you're trying to think about integrating like LLM, um usage with these tools. It's like um, I don't really know exactly other than like setting up the structure of your talk, like how you would really use AI for this. But I'm curious like how you've seen it shape out.

Speaker A: Yeah. And that's still something I'm working on.

Speaker C: Um.

Speaker A: Yeah, MCP was like the first way to go because the moment MCP servers became hot I was like okay, let Me see what I can do. Hook up the documentation against an MCP server and then have a search experience in order to maybe automate things or ask uh, the MCP server how you can implement it. It works. Um, is it used very often? Not sure. Um, there's also the LLM, uh text file, uh, that is being added to the documentation. So um, like if you use context 7, uh, the MCP server from context 7 it also knows uh demo time. So you can uh, automatically create uh, demos from that uh, or with that MCP server. But one thing that I'm currently looking at, a um, friend of mine, uh, he has a git uh, uh, commit workflow uh where he says like when I, he does a lot of workshops um, for Microsoft. Um, so it's a little bit bigger than just a one hour talk. Uh, but he has like a flow that he goes into like um, start a project and then I need to create this file, commit this file with a specific description and then do this, create a commit to that, create a commit and everything is yeah, documented with these commit uh messages. And he has created a, an agent that can read these commit messages and then automatically create a uh, demo out of it or a presentation out of it. And that's also where I'm thinking okay, this could become like a sort of product for demo time that you use during the creation of your presentation. Okay, now I'm doing this commit it but you use for instance demo time, um, add new file, uh, demo time highlights uh line 70 demo time, do this demo time to that and everything will be just a commit history. So at the end you, you publish it. But uh, demo time can then go over everything and then see, okay, these are the steps that you're actually doing. Okay, this is the whole presentation that I'm going to create for you. Um, so that's one way that I'm currently thinking about how to automate things with demo time. Um, another thing is, yeah, um, LLMs and AI is becoming, becoming so powerful. Ah, the moment you give it good documentation and a couple of samples it can also create um, amazing stuff for you. So it's two ways that I'm currently thinking about what's the right way. Uh, time will decide on that.

Speaker B: Yeah, doing it via git commit messages seems uh, pretty clever. Uh, uh, that's an interface that everybody already knows. Uh, pretty well. We've touched on uh, monetization a little bit, uh, and earning money for your work. But how have you been thinking about that with demo time and some of These side projects.

Speaker A: Mhm. That's um, yeah, good one and a hard one. Um, and maybe also another thing that I can highlight about demo time is the learning perspective uh, behind it. But uh, let's first go uh, to the monetization. Um, yeah, open source, it's a very difficult one. Um, so um, open source in my perspective it's still a nice thing. Uh, you're contributing to the world, everyone can use it for free but eventually it's not giving me any money back, uh, or not something that I can live out of. Uh, so I earn a small bit of money. Uh, most of the money just goes for the services I run behind it. Um, so it's a break even process. So that's nice. Um, but I don't want to count the time ah, that I already spent um, on it uh because that's something that cannot be paid anymore because it's so much. But eventually it's also my hobby so and yeah hobbies cost money so my hobby cost a lot of time.

Speaker C: Um,

Speaker A: that said yeah, monetization around demo time is something I still taking a look at. Uh, one of those things is the demo creation. Um, is this something that we can productize? Might be. Um, another thing that I just built in is uh analytics around your presentation that is now part of a premium feature and the premium feature is linked to your GitHub sponsorship. So if you sponsor then you can ah, just sign in into Visual Studio code like uh, with any extension can look into the uh, authentication experience of Visual Studio code. Uh I can just say hey sign um in to GitHub. They sign into GitHub and then I can see if they are sponsor. If they are sponsoring then they get the analytics experience as well. Um, it's useful for dry runs and the actual presentation on what worked, what didn't work, how long um, were you on one specific slide? Um like for instance if you're doing a talk for 30 minutes and you have it all thought out of but all of a sudden you were talking about one specific topic, 10 minutes on this thing and maybe you had it planned for only five minutes. What did go wrong and then you can go back uh, and take a look at it. So that's one of those things that I'm thinking about. Is this going to add up? I'm not sure. Um, sometimes I hope that there's a big company that put their name on it like Demo. Ah, time has been used by Microsoft, GitHub, um OpenAI already on their conferences there is support but yeah the support is like very small, um, compared to what they used it for. So I still see, yeah, a broken demo on a big conference like that is like, um, yeah, people are starting to laugh at your product. So if you're doing a product demo, um, at that point you don't want to have your demos broken. Ah, they need to work. Um, so yeah, that's that.

Speaker B: Um,

Speaker A: there were a couple of other people that were giving me feedback on things that were missing, uh, or that they wanted to do, uh, in during a presentation like polls and um, analytics, uh, around how many people are in my session and, and so on and so on. And that's where I started. Think about, let me create another product, uh, which is called Engage Time, um, and put it next to Demo Time. Um, it integrates fully. It also integrates with PowerPoint. That's nothing to do with Demo Time by itself, uh, but it gives you a whole speaker and event experience. But, uh, that experience is actually being created for earning a bit of money in order to fully develop or keep on developing Demo Time and Engage Time. Um, so that's also where I am right now. Uh, Engage Time is there. Uh, it's still in a beta phase. I wanted to launch it early, uh, January. Um, but right now I'm also thinking about what is happening with AI these days and SaaS, products being killed and so on. I'm still looking into the licensing model. Probably, um, going to go for like a license, uh, business, uh. Oh, forgot the name. M. A license that is like the code is there. You can just read the code, you can use it, but only for testing purposes. And then after four years it becomes open source, or at least that version becomes open source. Um, so that there's like a trust relationship between people that are going to use it that they can see. Okay, we are not doing anything wrong with the data. Uh, but there's like a cloud offering that you can start using. So yeah, that's, that's one of those things that I'm currently looking at. Um, hopefully it starts, um, making some money. Um, so. But yeah, it's a trial and error on that site.

Speaker C: Yeah, I wish you luck with that. I know we've had so many conversations with people trying to figure out like monetization of their tools making, um, open source sustainable. It's like an evergreen problem and it seems to only be getting harder, especially with like the advent of AI. Um, it's like some ways it's really exciting because people can do more and like there's more opportunity for People to realize their dreams. But like, also, you know, bad behavior is like, also easier, like wholesale copying people's projects or, you know, whatever else. So I don't know. I'm hopeful that, like, there's some good things that come out of this space and that people, some people like yourself, like, are able to sort of find a way to make it sustainable.

Speaker A: But, yeah, that's. Yeah, that's another topic that we can, uh, touch. But yeah, I've wrote, yeah, I've written a blog post about it a couple of weeks ago. I think about, uh, the speed is so fast these days and we don't think anymore. We just do. Uh, and that's a big problem. Um, there's actually the moment that I started to think about it. I was in a car ride for two hours and at the end, um, I was using cloth, uh, just talking against it. Um, I'm using it a lot to brainstorm. And at the end it asked me like, yeah, do you have a solution for this kind of problem? I was like, m. What could be a solution? And that's like, yeah, what we are not doing anymore is we are not having our moral compass anymore. Uh, there, like before, we were going to plant and we are going to check the market. Oh, it's already there. Maybe I don't need to do it anymore. It's like the same thing that I did with my static site generator. I was building it because I liked it and it took. Yeah, it was just fun to build. But then at, at I was at the point where I said, okay, either I create a product out of it or I look what's on the market. And then I saw, okay, there's Hugo. Um, it's so much better already. Okay. I stopped doing it because it's going to take way much time. Um, um, so I'm, I'm just going to take, uh, you go. And this is what we are not doing anymore. We, we are not checking around anymore. I've, I've seen a couple of, uh, social media posts already around. I created this, uh, because it didn't fit or the other products didn't fit in my workflow. And then the first criteria was it's free. That's not a criteria for your workflow. It's like, this is bullshit. This, this, this is just copying, uh, other people's work. And if we are keeping, keep on doing that, nobody's going to win from it. So my solution, or the solution that I came up back then was, uh, creating sort of moral compass, um, AI Agent, uh, that I now use for my IDs as well. Uh, so it starts as an interview. It asks me, what do you want to create? And, and then it says like, okay, um, now I know what you're trying to do. And it's going to do a market analysis around what is available on open source, what is available on, uh, SaaS products and so on. And then it gives an overview of, yeah, your product is doing this, but there are these products. Maybe you should think about these products. Uh, and then I already know. Okay, this is not something I'm going to go into.

Speaker C: Well, I wouldn't get too philosophical here, but uh, I don't know that the markets are very, uh, they're, they're not very moral at times.

Speaker A: I know, I know. And yeah, in an ideal world, I would hope that uh, platforms like, like, I'm not going to call any name here, but uh, like let's say the vibe coding platforms, it would be ideal that they start with this kind of an interview, uh, that they just say, hey, what you want? Do you want to create? Oh, this. Hmm. Mhm. But did you already know that this and this and this exist, and then come up with a reason why you don't want to use these products but create a new one? Um, and if there are valuable points in it, yeah, sure. Like, uh, one of those things that I saw was, um, it's all local, um, because I don't want to use a cloud service. Valid point. Uh, so there's trust and security reasons. Ah, around it. Very good point. But there's like these Vibe coding platforms. Uh, last week they sent me an email, like, yeah, start cloning, uh, the product that you saw. Um, why it was around Reddit. Start building your own Reddit clone. It's like, no, this is not something we should be doing. It's like somebody put a lot of effort in it. Um, why should you start cloning it? Like, nobody gains from it anymore.

Speaker B: Yeah, it does definitely feel pretty icky where it's like somebody spent so much time like looking into like the details of this, like getting the flows right. Like making a good product and now like to recreate those products is just like so dead simple. It's, it's ridiculous. Uh, it even extends to like packages. Like we, we use package managers and packages because we want to go, okay, somebody else did something like complicated and I want to like use that work and not have to do it myself. But in the age of AI, it's like, oh, well, why not just put a similar Thing generated into my project and then I control the whole thing. Like, the line has kind of blurred a lot because work, work is worthless now. It's like, it's such a weird mind exercise where work went from this like, very expensive thing to like costless. And like, it just like completely upended everything.

Speaker A: Yeah. And the license of AI, or at least like, for instance, uh, Kitab Copilot or Cloth, uh, starts with $20. It's less than, than the service that you need to pay for using it. So it's like, yeah, it makes you think. Not sure what the right way to go is there. But yeah, um, having having that thought to yourself, like, I'm just copying. This is not right. Do I want to have people just copying my work and doing the same thing all over? I wouldn't feel happy with that.

Speaker C: I think. I think there's also this illusion that, you know, it's kind of like what Andrew said. It feels like the work is getting cheaper, but I think it's like, uh, it's almost a mirage a little bit because the maintenance work doesn't really go away and like, the sort of mental toll of owning things doesn't get simpler. Well, before we move on to our next topic, uh, you made a statement earlier about like, that, you know, demo time isn't just for speakers, it's for learners. I'd love to hear a little bit more about, uh, that. Like, what did you mean by that?

Speaker A: So whenever you go to a session on an event or you're doing a training course or whatsoever, um, most of the time what you get from the speaker is a slides, um, and if you're lucky, you also get the repository with the code. But what you don't have is the actual flow of that speaker. Um, how did they start? What was their mindset on? Um, speaking about this and then going that and then this, uh, doing that particular demo and so on. And this is where demo time shines, uh, where I can just give a repository, uh, with the whole script in it, and then if I give it to any of my attendees, they can just clone the repository, open it in Visual Studio code and click on start. And they can go step by step through the whole same process that I was doing. Code is going to be added, code, uh, is going to be highlighted and so on. I can also add some notes there so there can be a markdown file being added. The moment you click on something, it opens a markdown file and says here, I want to talk about this particular thing. These lines are very Important because. And so on. Uh, but what this gives to an attendee or somebody that was in your workshop, they can do it at their own pace. They can learn at their own pace. They can read it. They don't need to write anything down anymore in your session. Uh, so that's also what I'm telling you during my sessions is everyone that wants to take screenshots, uh, take pictures or write things down, feel free to do so, but know that you got everything from my session in a repository. You can clone it and you can do whatever you want with it. And, yeah, it's. It's like you're watching a video and you can pause it and then write it down and then play it again and so on. But now you're actually having all the sources. Um, so this is what, to me makes demo time shine. Um, and, yeah, it's a very valuable aspect out of it. Cool.

Speaker C: Yeah, that's, uh. Yeah, that's awesome. I mean, I definitely have had times where I've, like, following a demo and they did something and I was like, oh, I missed, you know, what they did. And it would be cool to, like, be able to, like, actually replay the whole demo, not just in the recording, but actually see what is running. Um, cool. Well, with that, this is a good transition point to talk about another project. You had this project called Ghostwriter Agents. Uh, and it plays into the theme of what we were talking about earlier, of, like, how much responsibility we give off to AI. Um, yeah, just tell us a little bit about this project, um, and how you use it.

Speaker A: Yeah, so, uh, Ghostwriter Agents is not something that I invented. Um, I borrowed the id, not even cloned, um, was a project, uh, that was being shown off to the, uh, Google developer experts a couple of, uh, months ago, uh, where they had created a tool that hooked into Gemini. Um, but as I was not a Gemini user, I was a copilot user. Um, I had to recreate it, um, in, like, markdown files to be able to have, like, agents. Um, so I started thinking about, okay, what if I can have a better experience for writing my blog post? Typically, what I do is I have my brain dump, uh, that I have somewhere in, yeah, markdown file in front matter. And the moment I have time, I start writing it. Um, so I say, okay, here needs to be a screenshot, here needs to be a code snippet, and so on and so on, so on. Um, but nowadays, uh, or what I wanted to get to was, what if AI can actually interview me around a specific topic um, and that way

Speaker B: it

Speaker A: broadens the, the knowledge around that topic because AI is interviewing you. So it's going to ask you a couple of questions like, hey, have you thought about this? And how do you do this and how do you do that? Um, and yeah, eventually it became Margaon Files for an interview. A writer, a voice creator. Um, there's also a brainstormer, um, and you have the moral compass right now. Also part of, uh, the Ghostwriter project, um, back then started, as I said, like agent Files that can be installed for Clouds Copilot, um, and any agent, uh, these days, or any AI tool these days that support agent, uh, files. Um, and then eventually it became also a Visual Studio code extension. And the reason why was that I wanted to have an integration within Front Matter as well. Uh, but still it's a separate product, uh, or a separate extension. Um, but it all starts within Front Matter where you can just say, hey, I want to have an interview around this topic. And then it's going to say, okay, uh, this topic, what do you want to tell about this topic? Um, how long do you want to have it? Um, and so on. And depending on the first questions it asks you, um, it starts asking you more questions, um, or less. Um, so if I say it should be a very short blog post, it's probably going to ask you around five to 10 questions around that particular topic. But if you want to really do a deep dive. Yeah, I've been in cases where it asked me 50 questions.

Speaker B: Um,

Speaker A: and the nice thing about having it all in Visual Studio code is that you can link, uh, your images and so on. At the end you get a transcript, and from that transcript you go over to the writer agent, and then you say to the writer agent, um, this is my voice file. Uh, it gets automatically generated. Uh, or you can automatically generate it based out of your previous, uh, markdown files or the content that you already have written. You select it and then you say, okay, I want to write this particular blog post. And then it creates it, and then you have a draft. Um, this is my starting point nowadays on, um, starting to write this. Uh, so first my interview, then the writer creates the document out of my transcript with my voice, and then I adapt it to my needs so I never publish it automatically. But the difference here is, or at least what I see is you've seen a lot of blog posts these days or articles that are just AI generated, um, that you say, I want to write about a particular feature, and it starts writing about that feature. Can the article Be good. Yeah, for sure. It uh, can be a really good article or there can be some hallucination in it. Uh, but in this case it's, it's an interview, it's your voice, it's your answers. You gave all the details and AI is just going to use these details of your transcripts to create the article. So it's. The whole thing is you. The only thing that was generated out of AI is the article and that's it. That's a structure and so on. But still it are your words. And then if you adapt it even more, uh, by yourself, um, um, yeah, you can completely make it yours.

Speaker B: Yeah, I find it fun. You took like some coding, uh, like LLM techniques and applied it to writing. Like you kind of with some uh, of your agents. There's like the adversarial uh, aspect to it where it's like kind of like trying to be this bouncing board off of the holes in your logic. And then like the whole workflow itself kind of feels like plan mode where like you spend a lot of time in a plan and like conversing with the AI. And then the output is much better because it has all of this context of what you wanted it to be before it actually went and did the generation.

Speaker A: Yeah. And it's also a very nice way to start writing again. Um, because you're not doing it by yourself anymore. Somebody's actually asking you questions. Yeah, this is what I was, ah, also intrigued about when I first saw it at Google. Uh, um, it's like, yeah, this is a really nice concept of using AI in order to retrieve more information out of you without actually having thought about it, uh, around. I'm just going to write about this particular feature and then AI is going to ask you, hey, but now that you're using this feature, have you thought about this? No, I didn't. That's actually a really good question. Then you start going into that particular thing and yeah, depending on how your blog posts or your review or whatsoever needs to be written. Yeah, you can go in depth or not, or you can just say no, stop here. This is for another blog post.

Speaker C: I think this like plays into the thing that you said earlier. It's like, um, you know, a lot of people are using AIs to like or LLMs to think less. Right. They're just like, oh, just like do more things for me. Um, and you know there are people liberally using the slop cannons to put a blog post and or other content that is like, not that it's necessarily unoriginal per se. Like I've seen some slot content that was like good and helpful, but like, it's interesting that you know, that's. That bar is not useful really because it's like there's this contract, this relationship that we have, you know, as a reader to a writer and a writer to a reader. Like how we respect each other's times and you know, the. I don't know, there's, there's something here. And you know, I like the idea of like, I'm going to use a tool to refine my thinking and to challenge me and to push me to make the content better and to you know, do something maybe like compress the timeline of like how long it takes me to put something out because I'm like have these other avenues to push on it. But not like, oh, I'm just gonna like generate this article. Um, because I think that there is like that subtle balance there and it's um, I don't know, it's something I've been thinking a lot with my own writing. Cause I wanna write more and I struggle with it a lot. I struggle with the activation, energy and feeling like, oh, this story I'm trying to tell is not very comprehensive and it's so tempting. Just be like, hey, LLM fix this for me. I mean, but that's like, you know, that's also not good because that doesn't help improve my practice of writing. Right. That doesn't help me as a writer. Um, so yeah, it's an interesting project.

Speaker A: Yeah, definitely give it a try. At least for me it helps. Um, now the only thing that you need to do is come up with a topic and then let the AI do the thing for you. Not let AI do the thing for you, let AI do the interview for you and then you can see what comes out of it. Um, if it's nothing, yeah, you can just throw away the transcript or use it at a later point again and say, hey, use this transcript. Uh, but do the new interview out of it. Um, at least you get something. And you can also use it as a brainstorming. Uh, like, is it something? Yeah, let's see.

Speaker C: Cool. So as we're getting close to wrapping up here, we always like to ask um, our guest like a future facing question. And I know that you're working on a new project called Voice Snippets and we've chatted a little bit, ah, about um, how you're using voice more uh, like in your day to day now that uh, we have these like agents. Um, yeah, I would love to hear like where you think this space is heading, how you're sort of approaching it and how it's like changing your workflow.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think I need to start two years ago, uh, when GitHub, uh, released like GitHub copilot voice. Um, I believe it was two years ago or something, uh, where they announced it on stage and they were like, yeah, now you can use your voice in order to um, tell Copilot what to do for you. I saw the extensibility perspective out of it. So that's a, uh, really good point. Uh, for people that are, yeah, don't use their keyboard or cannot use their keyboard, but now can start using their voice in order to create applications. Uh, but then I think it was somewhere December last year, uh, when somebody said like, hey, I'm using Whisper. Um, and um, yeah, he showed me his workflow on how he used his voice in order to do all sorts of things. And as we are currently more and more prompting AI, it makes so much more sense to use your voice. Um, and one tool that I'm using daily nowadays is uh, handy, um, it's ah, handy computer, I think the website. Um, so it does local transcription of your voice. Um, so I hold the keyboard shortcuts, it starts listening to me. The moment I stop, um, I remove my. Or, yeah, I stop pressing it, it's going to transcribe what I said. And it, I started using it I think at the end of December, beginning of January and it became so convenient. Same thing with Ghostwriter. And uh, Ghostwriter asked me a question and I can just uh, talk against Ghostwriter. Hey, this is what I want to do and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then it's transcribed. It uh, press Enter and that's press Enter. That was the moment that it stuck me. Like, what if I take this one and a, uh, step further. What, uh, if I can command my device to do anything that I want and this is how voice snippets what's going to be created. Like it does text expansion, it can do shortcuts, it can do simple workflows. Uh, like I can say, uh, um, open demo time. And what it does for me, it triggers Raycast. It uh, searches for uh, Visual Studio code. It opens Visual Studio code extension in Raycast and then it looks, uh, for demo time and it presses Enter and demo time opens in Visual Studio code so I can start coding and then I can say, um, start development. And it opens my terminal and it runs NPM uh, run dev. Um, so when it starts development, so all of that thing, all of these things are just commands that you can then define. Um, and I can actually start, um, working automatically with it by just using my voice. And funny fact is, today I received my new keyboard. Um, so I still need to program it. Uh, but then I have one keyboard or one key press for my voice for the dictation, uh, for handy, and then another key that I'm going to use for, uh, voice snippets. So that way I don't need to use my whole keyboard anymore. So let's see how that one goes. Um, but I think voice becomes so important, um, because it's so much faster to talk than to type. Um, and as we are using more and more AI and more and more prompting. Yeah, this is so convenient. Um, but it takes a couple of days in order to get it out of your fingers and into your M microphone. So I think this is where we are heading, that we are going to talk more and more to our computers.

Speaker B: Yeah, I was looking through that handy website. It looks like a nice little tool. I like that. They are, they're like, oh, we made this as simple as possible so you can fork it. And then the examples of people making foot pedals, uh, for handy seem very funny.

Speaker A: Yeah, correct, correct. And actually I wanted to do the same thing until I then came up with voice snippets. And then I was like, yeah, now I need to have two buttons. So I started looking for a device. Uh, so I came up with, or I found this one last week.

Speaker B: I have to come up with a, uh, function for the third button.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's true. And there's also a handle around it that I can turn around. Not sure what I'm going to use that one for, but

Speaker B: how hard the AI tries. Maybe. Um, well, that wraps it up for our questions this week. Thanks for coming on and talking about all the projects that you've worked on, on and are working on. It's a lot. Uh, and they all look very high quality. So thanks, uh, for putting those out there.

Speaker A: Thank you very much for having me and, uh, see you next time.

Speaker C: Yeah, we really appreciate you having on having you on. And I also really appreciate your thoughtful approach to this changing world. I mean, I think some of the tools that you're putting out there are incredible and you know, just leading with things like Moral Agent or just trying to make people thoughtful about how they're using these new tools I think is helpful. We needed all the positive voices in the space that we can get. So, uh, thanks for your efforts.

Speaker A: Thank you.