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Friendly Show
Wes Oudshoorn - AppSignal's Stroopwafel Adventures 🇳🇱 Sprinkled with Community Love!
Ever wondered how a simple Dutch treat became a beloved symbol in the Ruby and Rails community? Join us as we chat with Wes Oudshoorn, co-founder of AppSignal, who shares the delightful story of sending stroopwafels to conferences and customers since 2013. From nearly 500 kilograms of sweet goodness shipped this year alone to our serendipitous meeting in Thailand at Bangkok RB, Wes takes us through AppSignal’s journey of blending tech, community, and stroopwafels. We also dive into the core mission of AppSignal—providing developer-friendly application performance monitoring—and the logistical challenges of shipping these treats internationally. Plus, we get a taste of the vibrant Rails World 2024 atmosphere in Toronto and the fun activities at the AppSignal booth, including a Dutch game called schulen.
In this exciting episode, we also explore the latest innovations at AppSignal, such as the introduction of the Check-ins feature for monitoring Chrome jobs and continuous processes. Wes underscores the importance of customer feedback in driving continuous improvements, with a target of enhancing the product by 10% each month. The dynamic conference setting is captured, showcasing how attendees’ ideas and feedback play a pivotal role in shaping the product. We highlight AppSignal's dedication to supporting the Ruby and Rails community through event sponsorships, demonstrating how even small contributions can significantly impact the community's growth and success. Join us for a compelling conversation that intertwines technology, community spirit, and a shared love for stroopwafels.
Hey everyone. This is Adrian with the friendly show live in Toronto for Rails 2024, Rails World, and with me is Wes, one of the co-founders of AppSignal. Hey Wes.
Speaker 2:Hey.
Speaker 1:I'm not going to try to pronounce your, I was just waiting for you to pronounce my last name, but it's fine. I'm not going to do it.
Speaker 2:I'm not going to do it Maybe for the listeners, wes Outshorn, you would say, but I'm not going to let you butcher it Wes.
Speaker 1:Outshorn.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's perfect, that's good enough, right, okay, thanks, cool, because I was already afraid of butchering Stroopwafels Stroopwafel the Dutch way anymore Like a nice stroopwafel, so in Dutch we would say stroopwafel.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. Somebody corrected me on stage when I did it. So you know, when people I think now in the Ruby and Rails community, when people see stroopwafels, they immediately think about AppSignal. Yes, yes, what's that all?
Speaker 2:about. So I think we just started sending them to conferences and customers, I think starting in 2013. It was just a little idea we had to just send something nice from the Netherlands to people and it kind of escalated from there. So I think we've sent tens of thousands now over the world, and this year we really ramped up our sponsorships in the Reels and Ruby community.
Speaker 1:So, especially those who have been to many conferences have gained a few pounds just by eating strobophils. Yeah, yeah, I think Roy tweeted something that you sent close to 500 kilograms this year, which is half a ton. It's a lot of strobophils.
Speaker 2:It's a lot of calories, yeah yeah, yeah. But they're delicious, they're delicious.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Thank you, and I think they're very welcome because, you know, sometimes your energy level goes a little bit down and having one, just you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I met a guy on the first day and he was taking very long bike rides. He was taking 200 mile bike rides and he used them as fuel for his bike rides. That's rides so he would take a few through baffles and just eat them to keep going. But yeah, even for programming they're probably good.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they're probably good, yeah, cool. Well, why don't you tell us a little bit like what does AppSignal do?
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure. So AppSignal is application performance monitoring. So we do everything from error tracking, performance monitoring, server monitoring, uptime, like whatever you need to kind of keep your stack healthy and monitor everything. We try to be very developer-friendly, which is also why we're at a lot of these events nowadays. You know, our interface is pretty simple. Our pricing is very straightforward. So, yeah, we really try to, you know, build a product for the developers and keep it simple.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. Yeah, happy customer here. I love it Perfect, that's nice to hear. Yeah, I just love it. So we met in actually this year it was this year in Thailand, early this year. About February March I was there with the family doing a little bit of vacationing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, same for me. Yeah, I was with my family.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and we met at Bangkok RB. I called, I wrote to the organizers like, hey, I'm in town, how about you know, are you still hosting it? And I could come and say, yeah, do you want to speak? And they said, yeah, that's perfect. And guess who else was there?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was there there and we even had stroopwafels there because, um, in december I think, there was a conference, a ruby conference, but the stroopwafels got stuck in customs. So after two or three months, like one random person there got like hundreds of stroopwafels just for him, so I think they were giving them out. On the. On the meetup yeah, so I I've traveled to to thailand a few times and every time I'm there i'm'm trying to attend the meetup there. It's a very nice community and I gave a few talks and this time I was there as well. So we met there. That was nice, that was awesome.
Speaker 1:That was an awesome community. Yeah, I think there's True Waffles and Customs. They don't get along, because even for Friendly you sent a big box and I had to make a few phone calls to get them and we got them just in time. Yeah they're like contraband now.
Speaker 2:It's very hard to get them across the border but we managed. And even shipping them to Toronto, we shipped. There was some misunderstanding about how many kilos we could ship, so we went over by a few kilos because we didn't include the packaging. They got stuck. They actually got stuck 500 meters from the venue in the community who offered to receive them at their home and we either pick them up or they we brought them to the venue. So in the end we had seventeen hundreds to baffles here here at Real's World in Toronto.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's awesome. That's awesome. And speaking of Stroopwafels in Toronto, you have an amazing booth. Yeah, it's a really cool booth. You're a platinum sponsor again for rails world.
Speaker 2:Yes. So shout out to Amanda, who's been very nice in allowing us to do do stuff with the booth. We sponsored the first rails world in Amsterdam, which is like our hometown, so we took the sponsorship there and that was just so awesome to be there. We brought a game of schulen, which is a Dutch game, so you slide wooden disks. I think it's best if Adrian puts it in the description like the name, because I'm going to explain it and you're not going to understand it. But it's a nice table game where you slide wooden disks into slots. Developers actually get very excited about it and the winners get like a year of Stroopwafels, so 365 waffles sent to their home. So that's been amazing and it's just been very nice seeing everyone come to the booth, play the game and just talk to us about AppSignal.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. Yeah, I did play a little bit and I got to say I got a little bit of competition Like I wanted to win. I asked what the high score was.
Speaker 2:What was your high score?
Speaker 1:I think it's 102 or 103.
Speaker 2:Well, the current high score, I think, was 120. 120.
Speaker 1:You've got some time to practice Next year we'll probably be back as a sponsor. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. I think it's really cool how you position yourself as a Rails company. We are full on Rails and we want to support the community. We want to support these kinds of events which celebrate Rails, and I think it's really awesome and more companies should kind of follow suit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so my co-founders, thijs and Roy. They ran a Ruby consultancy or a Rails consultancy many years ago, so this is kind of how everything got started. When I met them, I was a designer and a front-end developer. I started working with Rails developers in a random project. The thing that I loved is that we could start on something in the morning and we could actually ship it by the afternoon. That was just a totally new experience for me. I was just pairing with Rails developers, just having a nice time. We were very productive. So that's how I fell in love with Rails, the community, the developers and, yeah, tyson Roy has been involved in the Rails community for such a long time, so it's just nice to see everything flourish again and it's really a renaissance seeing all these events pop up.
Speaker 1:Awesome, tell me who does what at AppSignal.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so there's more than just the three founders, right, but Thijs, roy and myself Thijs and Roy have been working together since high school. Thijs is the real technical person, so Roy is the most business-minded person. He's a hustler so he's making deals with conflict. You know he gives everyone a good deal, but he likes arranging all this stuff and my background is product and design, so I do the product management right now. So we have, you know, roy on business, tyson on tech and then myself on product and design Awesome.
Speaker 1:The funny thing is that every time I think, whenever I go and I talk about AppSignal, everybody mentions Roy. Roy sent us Stroopwafels, Roy did this, Roy did that.
Speaker 2:Oh, now you're hitting a pain point. No, no, no it's okay, roy has an amazing Twitter handle. It's just at Roy. He spoke at over 50 conferences, so he's a over 50 conferences, so he's a bit of a face of the company, but it's just the three of us doing it together as a team. But everyone thanks Roy, so keep thanking him, but it's coming from all of us with love.
Speaker 1:Awesome. So if you're ever at Railsworld because you'll probably always be around when you're doing your Rails world Find Wes and find Tice as well and say thank you. That would be nice.
Speaker 2:That would be a first for us. No, no, no. Everyone was so nice this conference. It's been a blast.
Speaker 1:Tell me, have you ever?
Speaker 2:tried to do coding. So, to be honest, I started out as a designer and by that time if you wanted to build a website, you just had to do it yourself, because there wasn't really a separation. So if you called yourself a web designer, you had to build it. There was no other option. And I remember seeing the demo from DHH and I was thinking about getting into programming and I looked at the demo and that seemed amazing and I gave it a try and I felt too stupid as a designer. So I gave up and I became a pretty competent front-end developer. So I stayed in my niche. But sometimes I think back. What if I would have pushed forward for two more hours? Then I would have been one of the very first. I could have gotten one of those nice t-shirts that I use since version zero, point or one point. But yeah, I stuck to my field.
Speaker 1:It's okay. I think I started learning development about three or four times until I really stuck to it, so it's okay. It's all good, I just need three more tries, and then I'll be there. Thanks, you're super welcome because, as you can see, this is a welcoming, very welcoming community.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it feels great to be in the Reels community and I think it's nice for me to be. You know, with Roy and Thijs we really complement each other. If I would have been a developer, I probably wouldn't have been a co-founder, because then I would have just been arguing with Tice all day about tabs and spaces we all have our own field, so I think it's fine.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah, it's a good, cool trifecta Awesome. Do you have any other plans at AppSignal for this year?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're constantly building stuff. So we just released a new feature called Check-ins where you can monitor your Chrome jobs and continuous processes. So that kind of fills a small gap in our product, and otherwise we're just listening to customer feedback and trying to make everything you know 10% better every month and yeah, it's been really nice. Also, here at the conference, people are coming up to you, opening their laptop and showing you stuff that they want improved, awesome so we're just working on making AppSignal better.
Speaker 1:So you got some feedback from customers these few days right, For sure, For sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah. People are like now I've got you. Yeah right, You're not escaping me now, which is perfect.
Speaker 1:Yeah, which reminds me I have to tell you about something, a problem that I have, something, a problem that I have. Okay, cool, well, thanks a lot, wes. Thank you to you and to Tyson, to Roy, for all the support. I felt that with friendly, and I see that support through all of the conferences that I go to and you know I don't want to put this in a different you, you know in a bad perspective, but whatever, for big companies, you know, a small amount of money, it's a small amount that doesn't mean a lot, but for a conference, for a community, that means the world, that means that's the difference from you know doing the event and not doing the event, and for you to be involved so much and you know supporting everyone, that means everything and I think this is how the community goes forward and becomes better.
Speaker 2:That's very nice to hear. When you talk about sponsoring, you can think about the return on investment and like oh, we're sponsoring this much and we're getting that back.
Speaker 2:It's impossible to measure, but the only thing that you can measure is just the replies you get from people, people being thankful. So, worst case, we've done something nice for the community and you never know what it's going to do for you in the future. So yeah, we're very happy to keep sponsoring. So if anyone's out there who needs a sponsorship for their conference or wants to get something done, just ask Roy and then thank Thijs and me.
Speaker 1:That's awesome Cool Wes. Thank you so much for being.
