Show Hub Show

0:00 Hey everybody, welcome to Office Hours and the Office Hours Tuesday Focus. Hey, tonight we're going to pull back the curtain on one of our newest enabling technologies that we use here on this show for organization. You might have heard of it. It's called Showhub, and it's the brainchild of Craig McFarlane, who's my special guest tonight. And after years of using various separate tools to track the people, tasks, assignments,

0:23 and to-dos of putting a complex show like this together, Showhub has kind of been our Our source now to consolidate all that into one area, and as the name implies, it was created by Craig as kind of that single source of truth that everyone in the back end of the office hours shows can use to coordinate a variety of tasks. And joining the panel tonight is going to be people who use it, along with Craig, who built it.

0:47 Josh Kaufman is with us, as is Vic Hernandez, and obviously Cindy, who is reading for us tonight. Craig is going to join me from Boston in just a second. But as always, this show is driven by your questions. So if you want to get your questions in, here's the QR code. Just shoot that with your phone or type in any web browser, askofficehours.global.

1:11 And that's going to connect you directly with the back end of the show. And we will get your questions in there for the last half of things. So what does Show Hub do exactly? for example for those a lot of things is the answer for those of us on camera it functions kind of a sign-up sheet so everyone knows who's going to host who the show reader is going to be

1:35 who's appearing as panelists it also allows the entire backstage crew from the tech director to the question manager to everybody else who's helping put this show together it helps them all kind of keep track of who's doing what which week and sign up for things it allows us to kind kind of build the show as the show progresses. And if somebody has to dive out because they have a conflict or something like that,

2:00 it lets people step in and take those gigs so that we always know who's going to be here. It has a lot of depth and flexibility. And as a vibe-coded app, it's gone through numerous iterations and revisions as kind of the teams have customized how it works for our various shows. It's very, very useful. I got to compare what it was like to do this show every day one way or another from before we had Show Hub to the fact that it's a lot easier and a lot more directed since then.

2:30 So let me start by just going to Craig and say, hey, how did you come up with this crazy idea? And tell us a little bit about the origin story of Show Hub. you know, by years of pain. You know, I think of like, you know, the Beatles or other folks that just put a lot of time in. And then when they, you know, get discovered or whatever,

2:56 people wonder like, wow, it's a hit. It's not a hit from the beginning. The Show Hub is what it is, orchestrating all the different people, hundreds of people for all of our shows. It's what it is because we had the years of coordinating as an organization, as a community, and we all figured out, all right, we're all volunteers. We're all coordinating on

3:18 this stuff. We need to know who signed up for what and what the rules are about that. And so we put in years of work on those spreadsheets, including all the pain and frustration that comes along with spreadsheets. So as soon as I could whip it up with vibe coding, I probably could have done it actually a lot sooner. But when I started in on it, it was more just, I was exploring a platform

3:42 and within about a week, we had the bones of what you see now. And it was actually, it's really surprised me. I've been in technology for decades and it still surprises me. If nothing else, it doesn't look like a spreadsheet, which I think is its biggest positive. I mean, we're so used to these white gridded arrays of things and they all look kind

4:06 of the same. And this is not like that. As a matter of fact, we should probably, this is a visual tool, so we should probably get to the visual thing. Can you take us on a little tour of some of the interface areas of Showhub and how it kind of works? So Showhub, again, is, It's all about coordinating a whole bunch of people across a whole bunch of different

4:28 shows and episodes. And for shows, we've got a very different group of shows. We've got extra hours and Tuesdays, which are at night and have a very focused subject matter. Wednesdays that are very audio Q&A focused. And then there's the rundown, which is a panel show. So they all have different needs as far as the technologies, the features. And so here's some of the recent episodes.

4:58 If I go into just one of these, you can see there's a clip of the show itself. This is a rundown one. Actually, I'm going to go to one from Tuesday because that's the show we're on and go to last week. And you can see here's the video for it, but there's all sorts of details about the show. You can see a task list there. And I'm in demo mode, by the way. So you can see

5:35 the- I was going to say, I don't remember interviewing any of those people. If I turn off the panel, turn on the crew, you can see. So we have a variable number of roles that people can fill in. And so I can go in as a panelist or as a question manager and sign up for a given show. Or I can assign somebody that and then they confirm.

6:00 So there's this workflow that we have all done as a community for quite a few years now. and that's all baked into this. And so you can see here that this group of people have signed up for these different roles and that's based on their skills, which we track through a skill-based system. So we've got guests and panelists, host, reader, engineer in charge, TD, like all the different skills

6:29 for different roles in a given show. And so- And that gives you a way to see if he's qualified You're qualified to do which role and who's allowed to sign up for them? Am I getting that right? Yeah, exactly. So if I had the host role, I could do what you're doing. Obviously, it would be the reverse. But yeah, and then as soon as you have that skill, then you could sign up as the host

6:55 or TD of that show or episode. And you can also look at your plans. If you look at a calendar, there you go. You can see that I'm actually signed up for Sunday, Sunday morning Q&A. If I wanted to sign up for another one as a panelist, I could just click and see that and sign up. Yeah, one of the things that's incredible about this, too, is because it's skills-based and you have to kind of qualify in the skills,

7:25 If I get the flu Monday night late next week and just have to call in and say, I cannot host tomorrow, I'm sorry. Whoever's got Show Hub up and is making these calls can say, well, who else is qualified to host? And you'll get a list of the people who have that skill set and have been checked out for that skill set.

7:45 So it makes it really easier for people to substitute should that become necessary. Yeah. And if somebody wasn't available for a reader, I've got a certain skill that's me assigned. So I could click here and hopefully it'll come up with a little menu of these are all the people that are qualified to be a reader. And so you can't just walk in and jump in for any job.

8:14 You can't just raise your hand for something that you've never done before, although that would be an interesting show. And so just coordinating all those people is sort of the guts of it. But also, you know, as a community, we're asking lots of questions in a lot of the Q&A shows. Those go off to our Q&A system for live, like we are now.

8:37 And then after the show, we take those and pump them back in here. So we can go into our archive and look at all the whatever, 8,000, 10,000 different questions, vote them up or down, do a search. If I want to look for ATEM questions that I didn't ask, I would see all of those. I can then jump to that episode and watch that segment or combine them.

9:10 A lot of this functionality started here, but we're going to be, once we have the new website launching soon, it'll have some of that features there for the public to do as well. So you can do some of those searches like, yeah, I'm thinking about a Sony lens. Tell me what people have reacted to. That's going to be very, very cool. Cool. Also, for me, as someone in the certified crew kind of area, it's really superb for me because you have links to other things that I need.

9:42 For example, if I need to get into the Mukana interface or if I need to get to someplace else, there are these links that I can go to. Yeah, you're circling the Zoom one. So if I want to get into the Zoom instance for this show on a night, I can just go to Show Hub and it'll take me to the places I need to go.

10:01 Right. And so some of the people may not be on the crew. So this little box here is just for people on the crew. So we can add in all the internal crew specific tools and links. And so if I'm working on other shows, I can come in and see who's going to be on from a panelist and all that. But I wouldn't get all of these links that are part of just for the crew.

10:25 Yeah, it's nice that it's modal. And boy, it takes a lot of the stress off of me. is like I used to have to go to this place to do that function. And if I wanted to check out something else, I had to go to another page. And what has happened here is Craig has consolidated a lot of this stuff into a single interface that makes things much, much, much, much, much more convenient.

10:48 You've obviously done a ton of work on this, Craig. Can you tell us a little bit about what were some of the biggest challenges as you kind of architected this beast? I've been in technology for a while, so I understand that part. The biggest challenge is always the people. The technology, even with AI, now it's even easier. The hard part is, you know, we joke around the technology business that there's no API for people, that

11:16 API being a very structured interface that you know how it all works. We're all humans, we're all different. We all have different expectations. We have different commitments in our lives. And so as a volunteer community, having something that coordinates, we just need to be really clear about, hey, when I sign up, I'm really signing up. Or when I sign you this job,

11:39 I need to know you're going to do that job. And so all of those things need to be in the software and need to be able to show you what's going on. So everybody has the same expectation when they They see someone's name or somebody clicks some box. What does that mean? Yeah, absolutely. It's almost a little psychologically, but when I sign up to host, I know I've done it.

12:02 And the mere act of going in and putting my name there means that I've kind of, now I have to take ownership of that sign up and I have to be there and do it. This affects a lot of people. And we have a couple of members who've been using Showhub for a while. So I want to get some different perspectives here.

12:17 And I'm going to start with Josh Kaufman, who coordinates a lot of this stuff behind the scenes. And Josh, can you tell us a little bit about how you use Showhub and kind of what the fact that it now exists has meant to you and your volunteerism for the show? Yeah. One of the best features of Showhub and any informational organizational system is actually

12:38 the blank spaces. So, you know, just a place to hold a place, you know, a place to hold a position that needs to be filled. And you have vision of it. it, you can view it, and you can see that, hey, there's something that needs to be done, and there's no one that's doing it. So it functions kind of as a checklist. I don't have

13:00 a reader for next show. I'm aware of that every time I look at the column. Is that what I'm hearing? Yeah. And, you know, a checklist or a spreadsheet, you know, they all pretty much function the same. I think the benefit of having custom software that we have is that you can have a custom custom view for each individual person. You can really serve the things that are useful to that

13:23 person. Whereas, you know, what we used before, where we were, we were training for Showhub before, like Craig said, while we were training for Showhub, you know, you have the same interface for everybody. So, you know, there's really no good way to do it. It's full of compromises and everybody has to trip over the same type of interface. Whereas, you know, if we have control

13:44 control over it. You can present things that come to the top. You can provide notifications for people to make things easy. And it just gives us like, technically, you could do all of this by hand. It would just be very, just much more difficult. And so it allows us to plan into the future so much better. You know, we can think about it started off with the

14:04 crew. It was one of the first things that I did for office hours is just create a simple spreadsheet so that, you know, we're doing regular jobs on a regular basis, you know, there should be a place where you could sign up, where there's no collisions and understanding things. And then with Showhub, it's moved to the panel where now we're seeing, you know,

14:24 who's on the panel ahead of time. It affects our questions. You know, people see who's coming onto the panel and they're like, oh, you know, look at that panel. I think here's a question I'd like to throw into that. Or, you know, we're looking forward to it actually working the other direction where you see a question there and you're like, hmm, I want a panel for that discussion

14:42 that started and talk about that topic. And another person that some of you may not know about, but who I have seen almost every week on this show for the last year is Vic Fernandez, who's one of the people in the background that you never see, but who is instrumental to getting this show to happen properly. So, Vic, talk to us a little bit about what Showhub's creation has meant to you.

15:04 Yeah, it's been very helpful. As you mentioned, I've been working, helping the back end for about a year. And two things that I really focus on Show Hub. One is show prep, which is I'm a pre-show coordinator. I want to make sure everyone looks good, sounds good, meet the office hours standards. And I can see who's here. Another thing with that is also many times members of the back team are wearing multiple hats.

15:31 So through Show Hub, I can see that one person might be in two or three different jobs. and that might inform me as to what I might be able to do to help alleviate some of the stress from what they do. Personally, and this has been talked about, is the planning. You know, I can plan out what the days that I usually contribute

15:49 and also if I notice that a day that is usually covered by someone else may not have been signed up for, I can just clear my schedule just in case I may be needed. So I just want to compliment Craig on designing with a purpose. Very well done, Spencer. Yeah, I'm going to go back to Craig in just a second here, but I wanted to make sure

16:09 that I had questions set up. So if you have any questions about what Show Hub does, how it functions, the way that it has really changed the convenience for everybody, all the volunteers and all the many people who make office hours happen the way it is, to get your questions in, there is the QR code as always, or you can simply go to any web browser and type in askofficehours.global,

16:34 And that will get you to exactly the same place that QR code takes you. And then you'll get into the question process. And we can talk to both Craig and we can talk to the panelists about their thoughts about what is going on here. So, Craig, I'm going to come back to you and find out. Now, clearly, this has been an iterative and a growing process.

16:55 What were some of the things, kind of the paths that you went down that didn't work out the way you suspected? And how were you able to kind of solve those issues as you were developing this tool? Yeah, I think it's, gosh, I'm trying to think of all the crazy ideas that we had. It's only been around for, what, six months now?

17:18 So it's not like it's been around for years, but it feels that way. And the nice thing about an iterative design is we're not designing a skyscraper. then we're we have an idea and but we're just focusing on the small you know next steps and so we did focus just on the scheduling and then grow beyond that to all right let's let's

17:44 coordinate the skills better let's give the showrunner or owner more planning skills or or features so they can plan out the editorial calendar and that sort of thing. We also beefed up the training, which was kind of weak at the beginning. And there's still a bunch of sort of in the works things like the checklists and the product database, which are hopefully going to launch within the next few weeks or month.

18:18 And we're just testing those out. but it's really part of the iterative process. I don't hold too tightly on, oh, but here's a design that we have to push down people's throats because it's really, as Vic said, as a product designer or owner, you really have to have empathy for the user and really throw away the software and start over if you need to. But you really have to think about what are they trying

18:46 to do, not how do you get them to use different features. It's also obvious that we have an incredible variety of people who are working on the office hours in our community. We have people who have literally decades in both software development and skill sets that are very technical. But we also have a lot of people who are coming in and fascinated and want to do shows of

19:09 their own, and they don't have a tremendous technical background. So they have to be able to operate these tools and fit into the show possibilities, particularly our volunteers who might come in kind of at a simple, I just want to get on a crew and start building some skills and learn how to help in something like this. So how do you design for the beginner and still keep people who are technically sophisticated engaged with that?

19:40 Craig, do you think about that a lot? Yeah, I mean, that's a great example of the kind of diverse community you have to design for with these sort of things. The good thing is, while we have a lot of deep expertise, deep experts in all sorts of different disciplines, as well as some new folks to the home media production, they're all very patient with each other.

20:05 And they're excited to share their knowledge and learning. So this isn't people looking down on new folks coming in. It's a very welcoming community. So that as a basis helps. But then it's just the standard product things like progressive disclosure and understanding, all right, if they don't need this, give them an easy way of hiding it. And do we show it at the checklists?

20:34 Do we show all the details at first or force them to open it? because it might be too much. Some of that just comes out in the early testing to see, did this make sense to you or did it overwhelm you at first? And that's really where going back and forth with Vic and Cindy and everybody else just to say, how's this come across to you? What

20:57 are you thinking? And you can tell that just by their questions. You bring up actually something really exciting, which is that one of the things that Office Hours has always excelled at is that that it gives people who are not in huge organizations where they can get a hold of the people who can do this kind of work. I just I know that in terms of back end stuff, I was the biggest idiot on the planet when I first joined Office Hours.

21:21 I knew, you know, I had certain technical skills. I knew something about video production. I knew something about audio. But the web stuff that I didn't know could fill gigantic realms of encyclopedias. And just hanging out with the people that I've been able to hang out with in office hours, I've developed at least familiarity with the language of their disciplines. And I think this is another one of those things where it's people like Craig and other people in the panel that you're seeing here now who've all been so generous in sharing their knowledge so that you learn so much.

21:56 Josh, what have been some of the things you've learned through this process of watching ShowHub develop over the course of the last six months? It's really about how I think we've been able to adapt to – I agree with Craig. The people are the hard part. So we're partly a cyborg in that, you know, the part of us that we can control does exactly what we want.

22:26 And then understanding of how to solve problems, there's different ways you could do it. You can do it with tools like Showhub. You can do it by changing the culture. You can do it by changing your procedures to solve problems, right? And it's important to distinguish, you know, when a tool is the answer to a problem. Sometimes the easy thing, like the easy thing to change the code in the software, you know,

22:55 as easy as it is, sometimes that's a tempting thing. It's a bit more controllable than human schedules. Yeah. It creates a bit of a dance, you know, back and forth between the people using the software and what we're requesting, how we're using it, understanding what's available and how we adapt our ability. We start to, I think we start to realize greater capabilities

23:22 because we don't have to do some of the mundane things that software can smooth out for you. So that's one of the best benefits, I think. And Vic, I know that you work with so many of the technical people on the backend crew. Drew, having tools like this, do you see it as something that gets more people involved? We talk about that a lot in church video organizations and things like that.

23:47 Just having the ability for civilians, so to speak, to get their hands on sophisticated higher-end tools, the kind of things that they'll encounter if and when they go into working in these industries, that's kind of a draw in itself. Do you find that kind of thing happening with these tools? Actually, that's me. My professional career was in telecoms. And I understood tech and was comfortable with tech, but never had to work anything at this level. So being able to come in, for example, I work every week with Mickey. I mean, people would pay money to do that.

24:23 And they should and pay thousands of dollars to get access to expertise. So to be able to come in every work as not someone in the video production field, but in terms of what with tech, to be able to work alongside people like JJ and Mickey and Chad, it's an opportunity that more people really should take advantage of. Yeah, I remember how I felt the first time somebody said, Mickey's offline.

24:46 He's working the Olympics this week. And again, man, I found some really sharp people working at the highest level of the the industry just by virtue of this volunteer thing that I stumbled into a long time ago. So it's the way things kind of work around here. I noticed we have a bunch of questions popped up here, so I think it's about that time.

25:07 Cindy, what's our first cue on the Q&A side of things? Here's what we have to start us off tonight. Josh Kaufman, a member of the panel today, is asking, asking how might custom software like Show Hub help guide new crew or panelists to catch up to veterans? So we're talking about that thing. I'm going to start with Craig and then go to Vic

25:29 because they both have comments here. Craig, dive in. Yeah, it's a great question. And while we have an easy way for folks to sign up, whether it's for training as a panelist or TD or any other the positions you can join and sign up for training and go through that a number of times. We're actually working on this new checklist system where, you know, each role has different

25:57 number of things, two or three, four things that they do. But within those, there's a whole bunch of little subtasks like, you know, like Vic does, you know, pre-check coordinating and making sure people, their audio level's good, their camera's good, they're positioned well, lighting. There's a whole checklist in his head that he goes through. And he probably doesn't even have to look at it, but a newbie wouldn't necessarily know

26:23 all that. And so having that right in front of them, go through it and check it, they could catch up much quicker. Same for panelists. us like before they get on do they have a little checklist of here's what you know quit your apps do all these different things so getting some of that expertise knowledge into some of those checklists and and pre-show tasks and whatnot is definitely going to help new folks

26:52 vick you wanted to weigh in on this one well just on checklist i've had this checklist as the first show i worked um yes very helpful now on new panelists uh i know one thing that i even though we have after hours there's always someone that's willing to help you out you want to check your kit but having some a place where there's a checklist that okay you know my uh video should be

27:18 at this resolution and my audio should be at this level to be able to go in by yourself and do as as much as you can before you have your other people check your kit, it's invaluable. It really is invaluable. And Josh, you wanted to weigh in on this one as well. Well, you can kind of build a trail to show people sort of what's available to them.

27:43 And the way that Craig's made the system available, when you're granted permissions, then now all of these things now are available to you. You can click on them and go into it. So I think it's made things easier for having an ability to have seeing the documentation about, here's a thing, how do I sign up for that? And also, if you enable the admin side of things, it helps everybody else.

28:09 Because I know that just with our old system, even if you had a great system, it was kind of tedious and difficult to assign permissions to different people. And so things got, you know, behind, but now just assigning permissions opens up doors. And so it kind of pulls people down through the ladders of, you know, where they go next in order to accomplish something.

28:33 Yeah. And that's, you know, from the beginning, when I got involved in any kind of production, the successful productions are always ones that communicate that run of show. And everybody kind of knows everybody stays together, marching toward a single end. And tools like this are invaluable for making sure that everybody knows kind of where things are developing and the pace at which they're developing and really what's next.

28:56 So incredibly useful in that way. Let's head off to our next question. Here's one from Mark Giuliani in Washington, D.C. How much do you use your own experience to adjust or refine the code produced by AI as you develop Show Hub? Okay, that's clearly a Craig question, Craig. I don't know about the code level. I definitely look at the code because part of being an

29:23 engineer is you need to understand it. So you can't just get in a car without thinking about the engine and saying, oh, how does this all work? Oh, I hear a sound and it's sort of needing to, that need to know how everything's put together. So even though I might have AI do a bunch of the the code, I still need to understand it so I can understand the whole. So I definitely have some of

29:47 that. But I don't, there's a temptation that if you handcraft something, you hold onto it longer than you should. And if there's a feature that's not working or you need to replace it, you should just be very comfortable throwing it out. And if you feel, if you have too much pride over that little piece of code because you did this little clever loop or whatever and that's going to slow

30:10 you down and get in the way so i try not to do too much of that the and what i do in my day job is is we've got software that does this at a super macro level or or a larger level where where we're coordinating across many hundreds of people doing these really large IT projects, moving data centers and whatnot. So some of the learning of how do people work together is definitely coming into play there.

30:45 One other thing that I'll add in, obviously AI made a big difference in enabling this to all come together really quickly. We are seeing AI, especially agents now, coming into different areas. And I'm seeing it at work. I'm seeing it everywhere where you have an agent do a bunch of tasks for you. That's baked into the new task system because we're going to get to the point where, you

31:14 know, like Vic might be welcoming a guest and maybe he's got an agent that goes around and checks things. But he wants to know, did it kick off? off, did it finish, what the results are. So just like coordinating with other people, we're going to have to have systems that if we have automation and agents running around, we need to be able to coordinate with those so that it's not us and them, it's all one cohesive

31:38 team. I was struck by what you said in the first part of your answer about killing things that you liked and getting to the point. As someone who writes a good little bit, I remember hearing one one of my editors saying, you know, you really have to do, you have to learn to kill your babies, that you have to learn to take something that you loved. And even if you loved it and you thought

32:00 you executed this line of script or whatever particularly well, if you stand back from things and you find out it's, it was not the right way to go, you have to learn to give up on the things that you particularly liked and take them out for the, for the, to, to, to get closer to a higher higher level of better writing or whatever.

32:22 And it sounds like you're saying the same thing, that part of your learning process here was even if you put in a feature and you thought people are going to love this, everybody's going to die for this little feature, it may not end up being what the whole thing needs, right? Right, right. And it's a little easier now with AI that if I'm doing it, I might spend minutes, you

32:43 know, working with AI to develop some features. So if I don't like it, it's only a few minutes lost. If I handcrafted something, yeah, if I spent a week building something and it's like, we've got a better way to do it, you know, I'm going to be pretty hesitant and argumentative. I don't know. Yeah, no, I think that sounds very real. Let's go to our next question.

33:08 Coming in from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Josh Kaufman asks, how does feedback from the people using custom software shape its evolution? And how do you distinguish an individual preference from a change that benefits the whole organization? It's a fascinating question. And how do you, let me just spin it into this. When you have a big organization like ours here and you get a lot of feedback on things,

33:33 How do you decide what goes on the punch list and what doesn't? Is there a formal way or is it just a gut feeling, Craig? Yeah, that actually, that was one of those stumble upon things. So as part of the office, you're not familiar with it, folks. The Office Hours community has a big intention about learning. So after every show and whatnot, they're doing RFIs, Room for Improvement.

34:01 And Alex had started that with the organization. And it's part of the way everybody works. And so I had been thinking about that from an iteration perspective and building the app. How do we let people highlight? Because RFI might be, hey, there's a bug. It also might be, hey, this is kind of this weird thing. I'm not sure if it means anything.

34:26 It's more just a comment. Or it might be, oh, this inspired me. Could we do something like X, Y, and Z? And so I want to capture as much of those as possible. In fact, I did a feature that has just that, where right on the nav bar, you can put in feedback, whether it's a bug or comment or an idea, and just put it in, save it, and

34:54 it's out of your head. So you can put it in at any moment. It takes a few seconds and we capture it. And in fact, I've been building this actually into a lot of other apps I've built because it works so well here. And you can see all of these pieces of feedback and then we rank them from priority and work the status and all of that.

35:19 And the nice thing about it is if somebody creates a bug like I just did, then I can see it in my own interface and then go back so I can see, oh, I submitted this bug. Where is it? Being able to see, oh, it's scheduled to be fixed or it was a user error or whatever. Getting that feedback loop, actually looping, helps.

35:46 helps because if I submit a bug and it didn't get in or it didn't get fixed, I don't know, do I ever do that again? But if I know, oh, I pointed something out and then a week later it got resolved, I'm going to point out other things. So. Yeah. Success breeds more success. Vic, you had a question. Well, I just wanted to mention that the RFI culture of office hours is off the

36:10 charts. I mean, I've worked for companies that have been open, but there's like a yearly survey for feedback and what many people don't know is with office hours every single show we review for room for you know check RFI's every single show we review and look for room for improvement and on show hub I have submitted a number of bugs and ideas and I and quick response and oh yeah we might need more info or

36:39 Or is you taking care of done, fixed? It's just, it's so refreshing to be in a community, an environment that welcomes ideas for change and growth. Couldn't agree more. And we do an RFI meeting every show like this one. We'll do one right afterwards. And I can't tell you the number of times people have said something about a performance of mine or something I did or my lighting or something.

37:04 And you just know that it's coming from the best of all possible places. Everybody wants everyone to succeed. So when they bring up something, it's not that they're saying you did this wrong. It's always a, hey, I saw this and I think it can be improved. And boy, the number of people, it's not just one person, too. I mean, in structured organizations who are not this diffuse and diverse, it usually comes from your boss, right?

37:33 They're not allowed to give you notes. Here, everyone gives everyone notes. And I can't tell you the number of times that I'll get a ping from somebody who wasn't on the show, not in the back end or something, just somebody that we all know because we've been around here a long time. We say, hey, I noticed this thing. It looked like your light was pointed the wrong way.

37:52 You might want to check it out. And I looked at it, and sure enough, something got kicked or something. And you just seem like you're constantly in this benign churn of improvement where everybody is helping everybody get better at everything we do. And boy, that's worth its weight in platinum. Josh, you had a thought. Plus one, all of that. It does help to have a culture of feedback and having the proximity of feedback is useful.

38:21 So Craig, building that right into the top of the nav bar means that when you're thinking about feedback, you write it down. And of course, people learn pretty quickly if they give feedback and nothing is done about it. and then they give feedback and nothing is done about it, then you get out of the culture of, oh, well, I might as well not go through the effort

38:41 of recording this or reporting it because there's nothing happening. But in reverse, whenever you see things very quickly moved upon, now you're starting to think about it later. The culture that we have in office hours to do RFI checks, it reminds us like, yeah, think about it because something will be done about it. We can enact the change, based on something and it gets a larger percentage or a larger diversity of

39:11 people giving feedback oftentimes there's a certain type of person that may just always you know speak out but your quieter person often has good has good feedback or you know observations and the you really need that culture in in order to get that valuable tips about their different perspectives. Let's hit the next question. This one comes from Mark Giuliani in Washington, DC.

39:41 Have there been any, oh wow moments during the development of Show Hub? Craig, have you said in your brain, oh wow? You know, there's little bits of delay. I wouldn't say it's a wow moments, but there's little bits of delight when you say, hey, I need this. And in my mind, I have a very structured picture of I need a table with these three or ten columns,

40:09 and I'll give it a very specific instructions. And oftentimes I'll miss something, and then it will fill it in. And it's almost like, you know, yes, boss, I did exactly what you said, but you didn't say anything about this. So I just added it. And a lot of times those extra little bits that it adds are, it's awesome just to see, well, that came from a whole bunch of people writing code out there, building apps that the AI trained on.

40:40 So it knows, oh, you really should have a checkbox on the left side to do this. And so if I forget and it fills it in, it's just one of those delightful things. I think from an oh wow perspective, the feedback that we were just talking about, there's an oh wow. A lot of people, software developers, really would love to have lots of bug reports.

41:05 They tend to only get the ones where somebody is really pissed off because they couldn't get around some navigation or got hung or whatever. And so they hear the worst issues. All the little improvements, they barely hear at all. And so I was really tickled that the community came together and gave literally hundreds and hundreds of feedback items of little menu things or positioning or just the most trivial thing.

41:37 But all of that really helps to make the whole thing that much smoother. Cindy's going to be entirely self-serving next. Go ahead, Cindy. Here's one from me, Cindy Drozda in Erie, Colorado. Will Show Hub be available for use by others on their own shows? Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Craig, what's the status of people getting involved with Show Hub? Yeah, I mean, it was definitely, that's been sort of the culture or discussion with

42:03 Office Hours in general is how do we, you know, we have this daily show we've done for whatever, five, six years now that we produce and getting really good at it. how do we help others? And certainly you can do that from a technical lighting and audio and video perspective and all the other disciplines that go along with it, but also from a tool set. So we built this not just to use with office hours shows, but

42:37 for others. So definitely it could be used and with very little effort. So if there's other shows that could uh take advantage of it uh love to talk and okay you know the nice thing about um office hours is being uh you know not-for-profit 503c or whatever we there's no profit motive on building software that we have to make a whole lot of money off if it could further

43:06 the uh the whole entire community even better absolutely let's go to our next question brody Tony Hefner in New York City asks, what are good entry points for someone interested in volunteering? Does Show Hub offer clear descriptions of the specific training and volunteer opportunities? It's a big question. And so you will hear us on the regular show, particularly on the morning show, but also we occasionally do it on the other shows, talk about the various meetings we have for people who are interested in the various sides of this.

43:39 And everyone's welcome to these. Some of the meetings, the Host and Readers meeting, for example, are for people who have qualified to do those jobs. So we really want to keep that discussion focused on people who understand and work in those areas. But there's plenty of other circumstances for the general volunteers in the office hours system. And we encourage anybody who wants to be a part of this.

44:04 And I'm going to let Vic talk a little about it because he's in the back end and handles this a good little bit. Yeah, I can't encourage you more just to jump in. Don't be afraid. Whatever position you want to try, almost every single time that first training section, you're just going to shadow who's working that position. So you're not going to be called upon to do anything strenuous or that you may not be

44:29 able to handle. You might be given a small task that we're sure that you can handle, but it's just a great opportunity to see what each position does. does and you can reevaluate hey yeah that's something I can do or like for myself when I first tried it I realized I needed better hardware so I went on got a Mac Mini I know it's fine but

44:50 jump in jump in get that get your toes wet and you can see what it's like and evaluate if it's something that you'd like to try yeah I've been really surprised one of the things you know this This show, on its surface, looks like it's very, very sophisticated. And to be honest with you, it is. We've had incredible benefit of six years almost of some incredibly smart and incredibly

45:17 dedicated and incredibly generous people helping us architect everything that you're seeing now. But underneath all that, people come into our system all the time with little to no No technical training, particularly people who have always wanted to do something. Let's say they've always wanted to explore live switching or they've always wanted to explore graphics or something like that. Their real life day to day job offers little to no way to get into those streams.

45:50 And office hours does. If you're interested in some any part of the production arts, any part of the I.T. industry and you want to learn more about it. You can simply come into office hours and you'd be surprised at the level of people who would be happy to kind of walk you through, find a place where you can fit in comfortably and go as far as you would like to.

46:13 It's really one of the magic things about this whole process. I think, Vic, you already chatted, so I think I'm going to the next question, Mark's question. And this is Mark's question. Mark Giuliani from Washington, D.C. Craig, when you started this process, you had a set of objectives to solve. What things outside those objectives were you most surprised by? Ah, your thoughts.

46:41 Literally, the objective I had is, how the heck do we get off of Google Sheets for these signups? Because they're killing us. Josh will agree with that. It was painful. It was painful to watch. It was painful to ask people to do something that was really clunky. And I wish I had done it a year earlier. Actually, I probably would have been doing a lot more code a year earlier, but I certainly

47:08 could have done it six months earlier. As far as the vibe is actually, I didn't really care for the term in the beginning when it was coined because it seemed too woo-woo. But after doing apps like Showhub and others, there is a sort of vibe to it of, all right, I need a feature. And you're thinking a little bit more long-term. You're not caught up in the mechanics, a lot of software engineering.

47:39 You're thinking about data structures and all that. And with vibe coding, you're really a level above that. And it's there to think about, but you're really thinking more long. like where are people's needs? Where could this go? And you're playing around with that. And so a lot of the other things like doing the checklists, doing a product catalog where people can say, here's the gear that I have and share that. A lot of those sort of things are going

48:08 to be fun to explore. Let's go to our next question. This one's from Josh Kaufman in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Craig, could you demo the post-show viewing experience in Showhub, showing how the dashboard and jumping to individual questions help viewers explore a past episode? Yeah, I wasn't even aware that it did this. This is how bad I am and why I needed this show tonight.

48:31 So, Craig, talk us a little bit through this. This is also a repository of wisdom from past to office hours? Yeah. So if I go, hold on a sec, if I cut, if I go to, let me go to a previous show. Let me go, I'll just go to Wednesday. So Wednesday is a show. This one's about loudness that has a whole bunch of things.

49:00 You can watch it. But we also built in, these are all the questions that people ask, whether it was during the show itself or after, but you can do some really cool things now where, actually, I'm not going to, yeah, I will ask this. So if I go here, I can actually click, it'll go to that episode. There you go. And I can pop around and you can also, in the archive, you know,

49:32 if I find something in here about some product or some concept, I can go up to the archives, search for that, and then see all the shows that had that term or whatever, and then go through them as a complete segment. So I guess I should probably go with that. If I do that myself, and say loudness and, whoops. So these are all the questions for that.

50:06 If I then click on one, you'll see, whoops. I didn't mean to do that. I click on the segment, you'll see it. And then I can just keep going through each of these segments. And I'm not used to demoing this. So I built this early on. And it's kind of fun to go through. I got really excited when I built it. And I'm actually really excited to see it go out in the website.

50:47 Because in Show Hub, it's just a few hundred people or whatever behind the scenes. But everyone else in the community, people that watch the show, I'd like them to be able to have this feature as well. So I'm super excited to have it out there. So you can type in terms and then build your own show, essentially, that's all about loudness or all about Sony lenses or whatever it may be.

51:12 And that's actually really interesting when you do that to curate some topic and you just want to see these amazing experts talk about that one question at a time. It's really exciting. Josh, you wanted to weigh in on this? Yeah, it's a really great place to watch the show because you can skip. I think a lot of people, if you miss the show and you go back afterwards, okay, let's see,

51:42 just skip to the different chapter markers. Now, you could do that on YouTube too, but you've seen what Craig was showing. There's some voting available there. It's like, hey, that was a really good answer. That's a way of the community sending signal back to us to where like, oh, you're telling us that this was something that was good. it. Or, you know, the negative is a signal too, that helps us to curate things to where that,

52:07 you know, the positive things float to the top and it's, it's a way of curating things, you know, making like YouTube shorts or promoting it or finding out in the community, the more people that use it, the more benefit that the community gets out of it. You know, people go in and tell you, Hey, you know, it's like good reviews for, for a good product. Each of these questions are

52:27 or answers that, you know, part of the content of office hours, we're advertising, this was good content, you know, and people are giving signals to be able to move things up and to be able to find things. And it just the thing like Craig showed to to be able to create your own playlist, it just really, when Craig showed me the way I demonstrate, I'm like, man, all I see is all I

52:48 see is possibilities, like opportunities of moving forward, it does really kind of get, get out of your way and it allows you to move forward with, you know, the community finding information as opposed to, you know, fighting with the UI. We have one more question. Let's get to it. And this is a question for me, Cindy Drozda in Erie, Colorado. Craig, would you please demo how someone new to office hours can use show hub to

53:13 find the place to get involved? I certainly could if I go to here. So right in when you come to show up, you have a couple of buttons. One is the upcoming shows. And so this will display the upcoming seven shows. You go further out. but if we just look at Friday's show, you can see down below, there's all these trainee questions or

53:46 positions. And so all it takes is going here, scrolling down, you see all the trainees, you can train to be a TD or QM or train with Vic, just sign right up there. And so if I do that, it. Now I'm signed up to be a PSC trainee and someone will reach out and let me know where to show up and the link and all that sort of stuff. And I can just come and it's all about making that

54:17 connection with somebody that's done it a bunch of times. They know you're a newbie and it's okay. It's like, where are you coming from? What's your experience? All right, well, here's how I do this. And your attendance is as simple as being on Zoom, just exactly what you're doing day-to-day to talk to people. There's nothing complicated about this process, right? Right. Yep.

54:37 Yeah. So if you have any kind of Zoom client and you just want to pop into the classes, they're all virtual. They don't cost a penny. And they're taught by people who have done this before for a lot. And you can just, boy, if nothing else, connecting and making connections with the people of Office Hours, it's a heck of a way to learn a lot.

54:57 Oh, look at this. The live crew skills. It's a little bit of a skill tree here where, you know, it's easiest to start at one of these three positions, PSC, RFI, and question manager. You just get to know a certain part of a given show. So jumping into a technical director role would be a little bit problematic because you wouldn't know what you're doing yet.

55:21 So starting off from some of these, you get a well-rounded view, and then you can jump into something deeper and more specific. On the other hand, if you're a technical director who's worked only in a small station or on a religious crew or something like that, and you want to learn how to do the virtual part of that job and migrate into being able to switch on the web and things like that, it might be the ideal thing for somebody who's already involved in that.

55:48 In other words, I guess what I'm saying is that there's room and allowances for everybody, no matter how little or how much you know. If you know a lot, coming in and learning how the office hour system works will do nothing but improve your ability. And, you know, I will say this. I have seen a lot of people show up on a random show and kind of you can see the spark light up in their eyes.

56:15 eyes. And then three months later, they are doing that job for the office hours thing. And four or five months after that, I see them on some of the crews that have spun off from office hours where people are actually working on large commercial projects because they've proven in the field on a system like this that a lot of people know about that they're competent to doing

56:40 something like virtual switching of a program via the web and things like that. So there's an almost, it's an extraordinary opportunity to learn technical skills in the real world without the kind of gatekeepers we used to have in the industry, where if you didn't know somebody at a TV station, good luck in getting your fingers on a Grass Valley switcher. It just didn't happen because nobody, well, almost nobody had those in the real world

57:08 other than the people who are already in the industry. And we've all heard the stories about that. I mean, if you didn't know the right person or had the right union connection or something, you'd never get close to the equipment that you wanted to learn how to operate. That's not how we do things around here. It's been an exciting hour. Thank you all for coming and doing this.

57:29 I want to give Craig the last word. We talked a little bit. We mentioned that people can reach out to you through Discord or whatever. So how should people get in contact with you if they want to learn more about Showhub, Craig? So you can find me, Craig, on Mac Dev on GitHub, but also just come to Office Hours and find me there.

57:53 I'm happy to take you through it. We could use more technical folks on the application itself. It's going to be a community-driven application. So it really just reflects back on office hours as a community. So contributing to it from your area of expertise, whether it's TD or something else, would be appreciated. I'm going to do the same thing in the reverse order of the other two people

58:21 who are kind enough to join us and talk about Show Hub on the panel. I'm going to start this time with Vic. Vic, if people want to learn about your side of things, how do they reach out to you? Come on in. Yeah, and the Discord, the Office Hours Discord, you can just reach out. If you have any questions, reach out to me.

58:37 But I really encourage you to sign up for a training at PSC. And that first show, you just hang out with us. We'll show you what we do. It really, really is easy. But if you have questions, you can hit me up in the Office Hours Discord. And finally, Josh, what's your path for people to reach you? Yeah. Well, until I can get replaced by a robot,

59:02 I'm the human side of what people see when they come in. So if you go to officehours.global slash join, you'll get a human hand. It might be me or it might be someone that looks like me and sounds like me. And yeah, we're really trying to smooth the pathways and get beyond the technology and really just get into producing the shows that we want.

59:25 Okay. Listen, everybody in the back end, And pay special attention to the crew information as it rolls. These people are incredibly dedicated. We wouldn't be anywhere near as smooth and constant as we are without an amazingly talented group of people in the background. So join them. Pay attention. Look at the credit names and then connect with us, officehours.global. And on the Discord, which I'm sure it pings somewhere.

59:53 I can't remember how to get into Discord. But look for Discord. Look for officehours.global. You'll find us. And you can ask questions there. The Flawless Traversal today, this is episode 2,401. And if you had been going around to talk to the people who have been on the panel today and get information from them directly, you would have traveled 8,000 miles. That's 12,000 kilometers, 61 million bananas for scale.

1:00:17 Thank you to the crew and for all of you for spending a little bit of your Tuesday evening with us. We'll be back next week doing the same thing again. Take care. Bye-bye. you you Thank you.