[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":496},["ShallowReactive",2],{"footer-primary":3,"footer-secondary":93,"footer-description":119,"tv-i-made-this":121,"tv-i-made-this-seasons":131,"tv-i-made-this-episodes":141,"sales-reps":245},{"items":4},[5,29,49,69],{"id":6,"title":7,"url":8,"page":8,"children":9},"522e608a-77b0-4333-820d-d4f44be2ade1","Solutions",null,[10,15,20,25],{"id":11,"title":12,"url":8,"page":13},"fcafe85a-a798-4710-9e7a-776fe413aae5","Headless CMS",{"permalink":14},"/solutions/headless-cms",{"id":16,"title":17,"url":8,"page":18},"79972923-93cf-4777-9e32-5c9b0315fc10","Backend-as-a-Service",{"permalink":19},"/solutions/backend-as-a-service",{"id":21,"title":22,"url":8,"page":23},"0fa8d0c1-7b64-4f6f-939d-d7fdb99fc407","Product Information",{"permalink":24},"/solutions/product-information-management",{"id":26,"title":27,"url":28,"page":8},"63946d54-6052-4780-8ff4-91f5a9931dcc","100+ Things to Build","https://directus.io/blog/100-tools-apps-and-platforms-you-can-build-with-directus",{"id":30,"title":31,"url":8,"page":8,"children":32},"8ab4f9b1-f3e2-44d6-919b-011d91fe072f","Resources",[33,37,41,45],{"id":34,"title":35,"url":36,"page":8},"f951fb84-8777-4b84-9e91-996fe9d25483","Documentation","https://docs.directus.io",{"id":38,"title":39,"url":40,"page":8},"366febc7-a538-4c08-a326-e6204957f1e3","Guides","https://docs.directus.io/guides/",{"id":42,"title":43,"url":44,"page":8},"aeb9128e-1c5f-417f-863c-2449416433cd","Community","https://directus.chat",{"id":46,"title":47,"url":48,"page":8},"da1c2ed8-0a77-49b0-a903-49c56cb07de5","Release Notes","https://github.com/directus/directus/releases",{"id":50,"title":51,"url":8,"page":8,"children":52},"d61fae8c-7502-494a-822f-19ecff3d0256","Support",[53,57,61,65],{"id":54,"title":55,"url":56,"page":8},"8c43c781-7ebd-475f-a931-747e293c0a88","Issue Tracker","https://github.com/directus/directus/issues",{"id":58,"title":59,"url":60,"page":8},"d77bb78e-cf7b-4e01-932a-514414ba49d3","Feature Requests","https://github.com/directus/directus/discussions?discussions_q=is:open+sort:top",{"id":62,"title":63,"url":64,"page":8},"4346be2b-2c53-476e-b53b-becacec626a6","Community Chat","https://discord.com/channels/725371605378924594/741317677397704757",{"id":66,"title":67,"url":68,"page":8},"26c115d2-49f7-4edc-935e-d37d427fb89d","Cloud Dashboard","https://directus.cloud",{"id":70,"title":71,"url":8,"page":8,"children":72},"49141403-4f20-44ac-8453-25ace1265812","Organization",[73,78,84,88],{"id":74,"title":75,"url":76,"page":77},"1f36ea92-8a5e-47c8-914c-9822a8b9538a","About","/about",{"permalink":76},{"id":79,"title":80,"url":81,"page":82},"b84bf525-5471-4b14-a93c-225f6c386005","Careers","#",{"permalink":83},"/careers",{"id":85,"title":86,"url":87,"page":8},"86aabc3a-433d-434b-9efa-ad1d34be0a34","Brand Assets","https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1lBOTba4RaA5ikqOn8Ewo4RYzD0XcymG9?usp=sharing",{"id":89,"title":90,"url":8,"page":91},"8d2fa1e3-198e-4405-81e1-2ceb858bc237","Contact",{"permalink":92},"/contact",{"items":94},[95,101,107,113],{"id":96,"title":97,"url":8,"page":98,"children":100},"8a1b7bfa-429d-4ffc-a650-2a5fdcf356da","Cloud Policies",{"permalink":99},"/cloud-policies",[],{"id":102,"title":103,"url":81,"page":104,"children":106},"bea848ef-828f-4306-8017-6b00ec5d4a0c","License",{"permalink":105},"/bsl",[],{"id":108,"title":109,"url":81,"page":110,"children":112},"4e914f47-4bee-42b7-b445-3119ee4196ef","Terms",{"permalink":111},"/terms",[],{"id":114,"title":115,"url":81,"page":116,"children":118},"ea69eda6-d317-4981-8421-fcabb1826bfd","Privacy",{"permalink":117},"/privacy",[],{"description":120},"\u003Cp>A composable backend to build your Headless CMS, BaaS, and more. \u003C/p>",{"id":122,"title":123,"logo":124,"cover":125,"tile":126,"announcement_text":8,"description":127,"slug":128,"one_liner":129,"card_text":8,"status":130,"sort":8},"95b9e28b-c72e-473c-a99c-41f83f4a62ff","I Made This","ddac52a0-d363-4393-b918-cba141fdd128","75b998fa-4d3a-4507-a523-3f4cbf0ac883","1e087400-d8fc-417d-a7c2-50283beb9996","In 'I Made This,' dive into engaging conversations with developers who use Directus, as they showcase their unique projects and share their creative work. 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He and his team are building some innovative applications in the sports betting space.","cc9c59d3-9503-4366-8dab-d03e7e481e8e",23,[149],{"name":150,"url":151},"TDSoft","https://www.tdsoft.com/",[153,156,159],{"name":154,"url":155},"Dariusz Tarczyński","https://www.linkedin.com/in/dariusztarczynski/",{"name":157,"url":158},"John Daniels","https://directus.io/team/john-daniels",{"name":160,"url":161},"Pedro Pizarro","https://directus.io/team/pedro-pizarro","2023-03-01","Building a Sports Betting Platform with TDSOFT","\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Alright. Thanks, everyone. We have Darius here from TD Soft. Darius, thanks so much for your time today. Why don't you tell the audience a little bit about yourself and a little bit about TD Soft?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Hey, hey guys. Thanks for having me here. My name is Darius and I run a company in Central Europe and Poland called TDSoft. We built innovative software products for the customers, but also for ourselves. One of the projects we can discuss today is the one that we did for ourselves, which is the better signals.com.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. So why don't you, why don't you give a little bit of background into Better Signals? And, also, in the same time, why don't you let us know, as you were starting to build these products, what led you to Directus? What kind of features in Directus kind of made you choose that? And then go into what BetterSignals is in your experience kind of building that out.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. So actually starting from the, the Directus as I think this one came first in the company. Actually, we we started to look at this, product, back then it was in PHP, I think. I believe it was a couple of years back. Mhmm.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>So it was on our radar. You know, the migration to JavaScript based, you know, engine, was definitely the thing that allowed us to move move forward with it. In addition, some of the developers, actually, it was, you know, It started from a couple of points at the same time. Well, first was obviously me, but then I was looking for a technologies that would allow me to start up projects quicker, you know, go to business logic as quickly as possible. You know, we want to be innovative, deliver innovative solutions, and there is no time to waste.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>The, well, also, some of our developers started noticing directives from, articles, related to Jamstack. So it's kind of polar motive in here. Directors fits in quite nicely, and we were able to leverage, the features of directors in the better signals, project. It allowed us to cut the development time quite a lot. I I I was surprised how quickly we were able to deliver that.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Not only this, but we were able to deliver it in a way that was, very, very scalable. So, I mean, we just started a couple months ago. The traffic is still growing, but we're ready for 100 100 times more traffic. And we are not afraid of the costs, as how we set this up. Directors allowed us to really speed up the process.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Maybe, I can tell you a little bit about how we structured the project of Better Signals with Directus. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: I'd love to learn more a little bit more about Better Signals, and that use case, you know, what you use direct us for. Exactly. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Okay. So just, and make the photo for better signals. We have a lot experience in the sports industry and the sports betting industry and in the talent industry. We work with sports betting companies, also affiliate companies, therefore, you know, natural idea of better signals, and, the idea of better signals, started. Better signals with, a new take on how we, provide sports tips, because we leverage the new media a lot.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>I mean, the deep directors is the content hub that, you know, we push content through, not only on the front end, but also we leverage the, and the flows to and the automations, to automatically publish posts on different media platforms, like Instagram, Twitter, Instagram, and so forth. So, the, the, the whole concept is about delivering quality tips to people in a new ways that are more, you know, attainable with modern market, modern user basis. Got it.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. Yeah. And you and you mentioned the front end, you know, gathering content from the front end and the back end as well. What did you integrate with Directus? Because some people do use Directus as their actual interface for customers to come on to whether they're building an app or whatnot.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>But most people use, a different software for the front end. So what did you use to integrate Directus with for the front end, and how was that interaction between Directus and the front end? Was it easy? Was it easy to set up and easy to update? Give us a little bit of information about that.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. Yes. So in line with, with ReactOS, we we used, a RemX technology that we were really looking at right now because, RemX has this approach of edge computing that, that we really need here. That allows us also to reduce the potential cost of the, you know, upkeep of the project. So we we manage the API of the Lexus.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>We use the JavaScript SDK with with Remix, which means that we use it mostly for the back end, but also, you know, we have professional tipsters that provide the content to to our platform, to CMS they get. So there is a kind of customer who is using the the platform, which is our, content providers. So so it's, at the end of the day, Directus is a content hub, a content pipeline that runs everything from the backend. Got it. Got it.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: And I heard that, you know, while you were building this out, you get a little bit of help or assistance, at least in the project from, from one of our own employees, Roger. Is that how did you find him and, how did that discussion go and what'd you learn here?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: It's actually quite funny because, I I didn't knew that, he works for you guys. Thank you for that. But, you know, he was the author of the, the, The, the repository, the starter repository that uses, dynamics, and direct card same time. And, had a couple of, issues, regarding the setup. You know, I'm also tinkering with this software a little bit on myself because I have to have the knowledge of how to build stuff quickly.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>And so I have reached out to Kim, over Discord channel, and he replied to me quite quickly. Oh, amazing. Only only later, I found out he actually works for it guys.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Did he work for us at the time? Or was that I\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: don't I don't think he worked for us at the time. I think He should. I think we saw how awesome this yeah. He's been putting out stuff around Dorekas for quite a while, and I think we we snagged him because his stuff is so it helps people, including himself, build tools quickly. He I think he's released and we can put this in the description, by the way, of the video.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>I think he's released several games that he said he built in 20 or 30 minutes. You know? So they're pretty simple games, but they're kinda fun to play around with. So, for those of you out there who do build things and kinda use Directus, maybe we'll snag you one day. But yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>So I've I've I've followed along with you, Darius, because obviously we've had discussions before this and you and I have built up a little bit of a working relationship. What other additional product projects do you kind of have in mind to use Directus with or, or, you know, do you see Directus accelerating future projects in general for you guys?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yes. Definitely. Actually, we are in the middle of building another project, like, this is the project made for the customer. So as a service industry this time, but also sports related. We are building, a really innovative content pipeline, that allow that will allow us to provide, high quality content for multiple websites from one back end only, and actually really, really cuts the costs of, you know, proprietary content, you know, the editorial, before it's getting lost all over the world.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>And Directus allows us to actually deliver that within the times, times, and the costs, that was that was not before. Basically, also, what's really interesting about how we can, build stuff with directors is that we can prototype a lot because the cost of prototype is very, very small. With that, can provide the model and structure to the customer, suggest how we will do this feed get the gather the feedback on the live, product from him, and actually modify things, ease without leveraging, you know, tons of documentation, beforehand or multiple hours, long calls. Just, just to try to agree on something that we can't build yet. This time with directors, we can actually first build, a quick prototype showcase to the customer, you know, see his feedback, which is really helpful.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Yeah. That's awesome. You know, throughout this conversation, obviously, we've, we've talked a lot about how amazing Directus is and and everything we can do. But I'm thinking, like, you know, in the future, obviously, we don't do everything today. So what are, are there some features or, you know, capabilities that you'd like to see out of direct us maybe in future versions or, you something you'd like to see us build within the platform?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Obviously it's also custom, extensible to, to any, to some degree, but, what would you like to see coming in the future as as we progress?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. Obviously, we we could come up with a Snyder list. I say now with every product. And I actually got, before this call, I got feedback from developers. Maybe the, this podcast doesn't have enough space to, to, to talk about very, very deep technical details.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>There's a couple of points, that, maybe I'll tell you. My story where I seem to get stopped, in one or two, things that would be really, really amazing to have solved. First thing is, If I would want to create a product, with custom front end using JavaScript SDK with single sign on, I have to implement that by myself, the single sign on, and then find a way to authenticate the user. So, single sign on way to authenticate instead of only login password for, you know, SDK JavaScript SDK would be something that, I would devote for. Got it.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Okay. That that wasn't on the list from my developers. So,\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Is that already on on GitHub as as a request?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yes. And there's some discussion pending because it's not that easy.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. We'll start to upload it now then. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: We'll we'll link it as well so everyone can upload it for you.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: There you go. Well, yeah. So if you want to create a very, very quick, application that allows you to quickly single sign login, do something, you know, showcase your work and log out, you know, that kind of simple stuff that might be a base of future SaaS product, you know, MVP. This is a little bit harder. We have to register properly and have login in the password or create SSO to something else, for example, you know, create accounts somewhere else to have single sign on capabilities and then only use the API.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>So that's one thing. There is a couple things in the, CMS, but I have to say that, the speed of, development in Directus is really encouraging. I mean, we are seeing a lot, a lot of post merged. So for example, I don't feel like I have to push forward and ask for more because I know that there is a lot of stuff happening right now. So, I can be patient enough, in this way for a couple of things to to be resolved, but on the general perspective, you know, the, the benefits, drastically outweigh the issues.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>I mean, as I mentioned to you, we can build a model very, very quickly, have an API ready, instantly create a quick front type of front end prototype, and also give the CMS to the customer within days. Awesome.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, we'll definitely take that, that feedback to the team as well. See how fast we can get that implemented for you. I know it's difficult though. I've been following that one for a bit.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. No expectations. So I I I I I I I'm sorry. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Well, hopefully our developers are watching and encouraged. We are moving towards you know, we do put a lot of releases out there, a lot of pools or PRs that are done quickly, and we're kinda moving towards this continual release motion where we're just continually releasing new features, bug fixes, extensions, whatever that may be. I think part of your last answer kind of, answered some an additional question I was gonna have, some advice for other users, which also, you know, it's easy to develop. And is is there any sort of other hints that you would give users who are looking to either start using Directus or are using Directus and building a similar application? Any, you know, one or two really good tips that you've learned either the hard or easy way that you would give to other users?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Mhmm. Yeah, for sure. I mean, first of all, try to leverage the, the cloud version, the free cloud version that you have. It's it's good enough. You you can you can start with that.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>You don't have to, you know, try to host things by yourself from the day 1. Secondly, we had an, ability to work in a team of, 5 developers, on better signals.com. That we noticed that it's really good to give them some space to actually track things out and see their platform capabilities before they're not jumping into work, because there are some trial cuts they they could take. So actually in, in terms of the recommendation, just, you know, explore the platform by yourself, you know, see the breadth of this before you go dive into some, you know, specifics. That that's something that I can, I can really, advise here?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>And yes, leverage the pre cloud version. It it has enough capabilities.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: So Darius, before the call, you were mentioning, really cool flow that you built inside of Directus. I'd love to to see that if we can show that off.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Let me just show my screen for you, and then cool. And the cool thing about Slows is that in this product, they allow us to really streamline their process of content delivered to different platforms.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>We use additional automation software to to continue deliver the, the content. But as you can see, it allows us to, show the the processes in a very pleased way. For example, when we when someone from the editors, editorial team creates a new signal, then we get notified. So we can, for example, quality test that and approve this, without having to check the platform every time. We can also, for example, publish every scheduled signal.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>So, you know, scheduling is also part of this, flow.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: I also appreciate how it's in dark mode. I myself am a dark mode person, so\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: I'm a fan\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: of it. I love the contrast.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Love the icons too.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: You know, it's all about developer experience, right? We invest a lot in developer experience, further experience. So as you can, I can show that you guys, the, the really cool thing is that I show you the one that will be more complex? Yeah. So I could it's really clear.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>I mean, even there is a a blog that says hack away, tag or something. It's too clear as we are doing something here for Yeah. Everyone who is not part of the project yet, it's very, very easy to actually understand what's happening there. So the the concept of flows and the visual presentation of flows in this platform is, really, probably best in class.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Okay. Wow. We're gonna we're gonna sniff that and and quote that in the future as well. Yeah. So I do know in the flows, you are running, running one with JavaScript in line.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>That's a new feature. What's your experience been? Was it hard to learn flows? We're putting out more documentation around that all the time. I think we recently announced or released a flows cookbook.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>So what's your experience been building Flows? Because this is a feature that as Pedro and I talk to other prospects and users, they really start to understand the power of it. You know, obviously, visually, it's easy, but building it out once you learned it, is it extremely easy to build new flows?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yes. So it it needs a minute or 2 to, you know, get accustomed with us, and fully understand their power. So I I don't have much advice here except that maybe, just look at the documentation. I know that documentation is still being built for that. I don't think if I have anything, you know, interesting to say.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: No, it's good. It's it's, it's great to get a look at it.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. And, also I can show you our log screen, you know. Oh, yeah. Nice. One of one of the things that are really cool about Directus is, you know, the theming option and being able to, also showcase to the customer the c CMS that he ordered that has his own brand and colors and style.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Mhmm.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. I think that's that's what really surprises me. It's just people, you know, don't take advantage as much as they could with the the theming. You know, we're we're building out a theming option where it just makes it even easier to change colors and whatnot. But even putting your logo up there, the whole the whole platform itself is white labelable, so that's awesome to see that you've done that.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. So brand, consistency and brand awareness is from the 1st day in the Battery Signals comp projects. So it was in a conscious decision to ensure that everything we do is, you know, following the the brand guidelines here, and it looks really nice. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>I can also show you while you're on the call. I could also show you that we have just created quite simple, you know, data model that allows us to, basically deliver content tips, but not only. For example, creating, you know, a static page. It's just that, that simple model here.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: I like that. I like\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: that WYSIWYG editor with a 1,000\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. And there are these are our tips as you can see. And those are being managed by, by professional, content providers, you know, sports enthusiasts, people who have a lot of knowledge in sports who deliver those insights to us. And then we streamline those into our various media platforms. Got it.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Awesome. And then this this is where, you know, people put in these tips and whatnot, and then the flows kind of, you know, work it through your process. Correct?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Exactly. And then they end up here. Got it.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Alright. Perfect. Well, since I've been following along and we've been interacting again for a little while, I'm excited to hear what the plan is for, you know, the next 6 to 12 months, maybe even further out if you wanna discuss it. But what are some things that you guys at TD Soft are planning to build and release?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah, sometimes are huge, obviously. In our company, we bought at least 20% of our income into r and d, which means internal product development because we have to level on ourselves, you know, on our own issues before we actually propose to customers on solution. We have full, planning for the whole next year for the better signals dotcom. We are just launching. I I think it'll be it might be even live once the podcast is live, though, or gamify.com platform, which is a business gamification platform for our companies.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>We use that on ourselves, and our whole team is working together towards achieving their own personal goals, personal development, and, watching their position on either boats and also buying some stuff from the, company store. I hope that other people will find it best in those. So, maybe I can suggest, interested visitor store visit our website once in a while to see the news as we always have something news in our pipeline.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. I know that I'm Pedro and I are a little competitive amongst each other as well as with other employees here. So we will definitely be checking that out because any way that we can officially brag over the other person, I think we're, we're, we're all for that. So\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. The most important thing about, you know, gamification is to be over that other person. It is.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: It's helped you competition is great for work.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we know I can show you our library. It's small, but, you know, we treat self development seriously here, which means that it's not only about tech, but also about personal development and also, you know, Healthy lifestyle, all the things that come together to actually productive life and fulfilling life and not only man, just work. And I hope the same for others.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>That's why we published this stuff.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. I think that's where, you know, you guys developing, putting 20% of your time to in in revenue towards research and development. I think that's kind of the model that a lot of technology companies use. And, for example, I mean, Google itself has developed so many products just from the free time or the time that they develop or they designate towards developing new fun projects, whether it be a side project, somebody just wanted to mess around with, or actual time that they just wanted to try and build something, that's that's where new and great platforms come about. So I think that's a a great amount of time and a great, option that your employees have.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Awesome. Cool. Well, I think that's that's it from for our questions. Well, thank you, Darius, so much for your time. And, you know, we'll we'll obviously be following along with TDSoft.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Please let everyone know how they can contact you to perhaps contract out some work or build something with,\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: obviously you can spell my name in Google search, right? Yeah. There you go. Easy. You know, I hope there'll be some link in the description or something.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Yeah. We can do that. Yeah. And then I will also, you know, advertise or maybe comment under the, you know, social media appearances. So there will be a way to find me.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Absolutely.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: We'll list all your information here in the description and, and be on the lookout for future projects. But again, thank you for being a part of this. And, Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. It was a pleasure, guys. Thanks for having me here and, let's continue building stuff.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. Absolutely. Thanks so much. And\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: scene.\u003C/p>","Alright. Thanks, everyone. We have Darius here from TD Soft. Darius, thanks so much for your time today. Why don't you tell the audience a little bit about yourself and a little bit about TD Soft? Hey, hey guys. Thanks for having me here. My name is Darius and I run a company in Central Europe and Poland called TDSoft. We built innovative software products for the customers, but also for ourselves. One of the projects we can discuss today is the one that we did for ourselves, which is the better signals.com. Yeah. So why don't you, why don't you give a little bit of background into Better Signals? And, also, in the same time, why don't you let us know, as you were starting to build these products, what led you to Directus? What kind of features in Directus kind of made you choose that? And then go into what BetterSignals is in your experience kind of building that out. Yeah. So actually starting from the, the Directus as I think this one came first in the company. Actually, we we started to look at this, product, back then it was in PHP, I think. I believe it was a couple of years back. Mhmm. So it was on our radar. You know, the migration to JavaScript based, you know, engine, was definitely the thing that allowed us to move move forward with it. In addition, some of the developers, actually, it was, you know, It started from a couple of points at the same time. Well, first was obviously me, but then I was looking for a technologies that would allow me to start up projects quicker, you know, go to business logic as quickly as possible. You know, we want to be innovative, deliver innovative solutions, and there is no time to waste. The, well, also, some of our developers started noticing directives from, articles, related to Jamstack. So it's kind of polar motive in here. Directors fits in quite nicely, and we were able to leverage, the features of directors in the better signals, project. It allowed us to cut the development time quite a lot. I I I was surprised how quickly we were able to deliver that. Not only this, but we were able to deliver it in a way that was, very, very scalable. So, I mean, we just started a couple months ago. The traffic is still growing, but we're ready for 100 100 times more traffic. And we are not afraid of the costs, as how we set this up. Directors allowed us to really speed up the process. Maybe, I can tell you a little bit about how we structured the project of Better Signals with Directus. Yeah. I'd love to learn more a little bit more about Better Signals, and that use case, you know, what you use direct us for. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. So just, and make the photo for better signals. We have a lot experience in the sports industry and the sports betting industry and in the talent industry. We work with sports betting companies, also affiliate companies, therefore, you know, natural idea of better signals, and, the idea of better signals, started. Better signals with, a new take on how we, provide sports tips, because we leverage the new media a lot. I mean, the deep directors is the content hub that, you know, we push content through, not only on the front end, but also we leverage the, and the flows to and the automations, to automatically publish posts on different media platforms, like Instagram, Twitter, Instagram, and so forth. So, the, the, the whole concept is about delivering quality tips to people in a new ways that are more, you know, attainable with modern market, modern user basis. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. And you and you mentioned the front end, you know, gathering content from the front end and the back end as well. What did you integrate with Directus? Because some people do use Directus as their actual interface for customers to come on to whether they're building an app or whatnot. But most people use, a different software for the front end. So what did you use to integrate Directus with for the front end, and how was that interaction between Directus and the front end? Was it easy? Was it easy to set up and easy to update? Give us a little bit of information about that. Yeah. Yes. So in line with, with ReactOS, we we used, a RemX technology that we were really looking at right now because, RemX has this approach of edge computing that, that we really need here. That allows us also to reduce the potential cost of the, you know, upkeep of the project. So we we manage the API of the Lexus. We use the JavaScript SDK with with Remix, which means that we use it mostly for the back end, but also, you know, we have professional tipsters that provide the content to to our platform, to CMS they get. So there is a kind of customer who is using the the platform, which is our, content providers. So so it's, at the end of the day, Directus is a content hub, a content pipeline that runs everything from the backend. Got it. Got it. And I heard that, you know, while you were building this out, you get a little bit of help or assistance, at least in the project from, from one of our own employees, Roger. Is that how did you find him and, how did that discussion go and what'd you learn here? It's actually quite funny because, I I didn't knew that, he works for you guys. Thank you for that. But, you know, he was the author of the, the, The, the repository, the starter repository that uses, dynamics, and direct card same time. And, had a couple of, issues, regarding the setup. You know, I'm also tinkering with this software a little bit on myself because I have to have the knowledge of how to build stuff quickly. And so I have reached out to Kim, over Discord channel, and he replied to me quite quickly. Oh, amazing. Only only later, I found out he actually works for it guys. Did he work for us at the time? Or was that I don't I don't think he worked for us at the time. I think He should. I think we saw how awesome this yeah. He's been putting out stuff around Dorekas for quite a while, and I think we we snagged him because his stuff is so it helps people, including himself, build tools quickly. He I think he's released and we can put this in the description, by the way, of the video. I think he's released several games that he said he built in 20 or 30 minutes. You know? So they're pretty simple games, but they're kinda fun to play around with. So, for those of you out there who do build things and kinda use Directus, maybe we'll snag you one day. But yeah. So I've I've I've followed along with you, Darius, because obviously we've had discussions before this and you and I have built up a little bit of a working relationship. What other additional product projects do you kind of have in mind to use Directus with or, or, you know, do you see Directus accelerating future projects in general for you guys? Yes. Definitely. Actually, we are in the middle of building another project, like, this is the project made for the customer. So as a service industry this time, but also sports related. We are building, a really innovative content pipeline, that allow that will allow us to provide, high quality content for multiple websites from one back end only, and actually really, really cuts the costs of, you know, proprietary content, you know, the editorial, before it's getting lost all over the world. And Directus allows us to actually deliver that within the times, times, and the costs, that was that was not before. Basically, also, what's really interesting about how we can, build stuff with directors is that we can prototype a lot because the cost of prototype is very, very small. With that, can provide the model and structure to the customer, suggest how we will do this feed get the gather the feedback on the live, product from him, and actually modify things, ease without leveraging, you know, tons of documentation, beforehand or multiple hours, long calls. Just, just to try to agree on something that we can't build yet. This time with directors, we can actually first build, a quick prototype showcase to the customer, you know, see his feedback, which is really helpful. Yeah. That's awesome. You know, throughout this conversation, obviously, we've, we've talked a lot about how amazing Directus is and and everything we can do. But I'm thinking, like, you know, in the future, obviously, we don't do everything today. So what are, are there some features or, you know, capabilities that you'd like to see out of direct us maybe in future versions or, you something you'd like to see us build within the platform? Obviously it's also custom, extensible to, to any, to some degree, but, what would you like to see coming in the future as as we progress? Yeah. Obviously, we we could come up with a Snyder list. I say now with every product. And I actually got, before this call, I got feedback from developers. Maybe the, this podcast doesn't have enough space to, to, to talk about very, very deep technical details. There's a couple of points, that, maybe I'll tell you. My story where I seem to get stopped, in one or two, things that would be really, really amazing to have solved. First thing is, If I would want to create a product, with custom front end using JavaScript SDK with single sign on, I have to implement that by myself, the single sign on, and then find a way to authenticate the user. So, single sign on way to authenticate instead of only login password for, you know, SDK JavaScript SDK would be something that, I would devote for. Got it. Okay. That that wasn't on the list from my developers. So, Is that already on on GitHub as as a request? Yes. And there's some discussion pending because it's not that easy. Yeah. Yeah. We'll start to upload it now then. Yeah. We'll we'll link it as well so everyone can upload it for you. There you go. Well, yeah. So if you want to create a very, very quick, application that allows you to quickly single sign login, do something, you know, showcase your work and log out, you know, that kind of simple stuff that might be a base of future SaaS product, you know, MVP. This is a little bit harder. We have to register properly and have login in the password or create SSO to something else, for example, you know, create accounts somewhere else to have single sign on capabilities and then only use the API. So that's one thing. There is a couple things in the, CMS, but I have to say that, the speed of, development in Directus is really encouraging. I mean, we are seeing a lot, a lot of post merged. So for example, I don't feel like I have to push forward and ask for more because I know that there is a lot of stuff happening right now. So, I can be patient enough, in this way for a couple of things to to be resolved, but on the general perspective, you know, the, the benefits, drastically outweigh the issues. I mean, as I mentioned to you, we can build a model very, very quickly, have an API ready, instantly create a quick front type of front end prototype, and also give the CMS to the customer within days. Awesome. Yeah. Well, we'll definitely take that, that feedback to the team as well. See how fast we can get that implemented for you. I know it's difficult though. I've been following that one for a bit. Yeah. No expectations. So I I I I I I I'm sorry. Yeah. Well, hopefully our developers are watching and encouraged. We are moving towards you know, we do put a lot of releases out there, a lot of pools or PRs that are done quickly, and we're kinda moving towards this continual release motion where we're just continually releasing new features, bug fixes, extensions, whatever that may be. I think part of your last answer kind of, answered some an additional question I was gonna have, some advice for other users, which also, you know, it's easy to develop. And is is there any sort of other hints that you would give users who are looking to either start using Directus or are using Directus and building a similar application? Any, you know, one or two really good tips that you've learned either the hard or easy way that you would give to other users? Mhmm. Yeah, for sure. I mean, first of all, try to leverage the, the cloud version, the free cloud version that you have. It's it's good enough. You you can you can start with that. You don't have to, you know, try to host things by yourself from the day 1. Secondly, we had an, ability to work in a team of, 5 developers, on better signals.com. That we noticed that it's really good to give them some space to actually track things out and see their platform capabilities before they're not jumping into work, because there are some trial cuts they they could take. So actually in, in terms of the recommendation, just, you know, explore the platform by yourself, you know, see the breadth of this before you go dive into some, you know, specifics. That that's something that I can, I can really, advise here? And yes, leverage the pre cloud version. It it has enough capabilities. So Darius, before the call, you were mentioning, really cool flow that you built inside of Directus. I'd love to to see that if we can show that off. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Let me just show my screen for you, and then cool. And the cool thing about Slows is that in this product, they allow us to really streamline their process of content delivered to different platforms. We use additional automation software to to continue deliver the, the content. But as you can see, it allows us to, show the the processes in a very pleased way. For example, when we when someone from the editors, editorial team creates a new signal, then we get notified. So we can, for example, quality test that and approve this, without having to check the platform every time. We can also, for example, publish every scheduled signal. So, you know, scheduling is also part of this, flow. I also appreciate how it's in dark mode. I myself am a dark mode person, so I'm a fan of it. I love the contrast. Love the icons too. You know, it's all about developer experience, right? We invest a lot in developer experience, further experience. So as you can, I can show that you guys, the, the really cool thing is that I show you the one that will be more complex? Yeah. So I could it's really clear. I mean, even there is a a blog that says hack away, tag or something. It's too clear as we are doing something here for Yeah. Everyone who is not part of the project yet, it's very, very easy to actually understand what's happening there. So the the concept of flows and the visual presentation of flows in this platform is, really, probably best in class. Okay. Wow. We're gonna we're gonna sniff that and and quote that in the future as well. Yeah. So I do know in the flows, you are running, running one with JavaScript in line. That's a new feature. What's your experience been? Was it hard to learn flows? We're putting out more documentation around that all the time. I think we recently announced or released a flows cookbook. So what's your experience been building Flows? Because this is a feature that as Pedro and I talk to other prospects and users, they really start to understand the power of it. You know, obviously, visually, it's easy, but building it out once you learned it, is it extremely easy to build new flows? Yes. So it it needs a minute or 2 to, you know, get accustomed with us, and fully understand their power. So I I don't have much advice here except that maybe, just look at the documentation. I know that documentation is still being built for that. I don't think if I have anything, you know, interesting to say. No, it's good. It's it's, it's great to get a look at it. Yeah. And, also I can show you our log screen, you know. Oh, yeah. Nice. One of one of the things that are really cool about Directus is, you know, the theming option and being able to, also showcase to the customer the c CMS that he ordered that has his own brand and colors and style. Mhmm. Yeah. I think that's that's what really surprises me. It's just people, you know, don't take advantage as much as they could with the the theming. You know, we're we're building out a theming option where it just makes it even easier to change colors and whatnot. But even putting your logo up there, the whole the whole platform itself is white labelable, so that's awesome to see that you've done that. Yeah. Yeah. So brand, consistency and brand awareness is from the 1st day in the Battery Signals comp projects. So it was in a conscious decision to ensure that everything we do is, you know, following the the brand guidelines here, and it looks really nice. Yeah. I can also show you while you're on the call. I could also show you that we have just created quite simple, you know, data model that allows us to, basically deliver content tips, but not only. For example, creating, you know, a static page. It's just that, that simple model here. I like that. I like that WYSIWYG editor with a 1,000 Yeah. And there are these are our tips as you can see. And those are being managed by, by professional, content providers, you know, sports enthusiasts, people who have a lot of knowledge in sports who deliver those insights to us. And then we streamline those into our various media platforms. Got it. Awesome. And then this this is where, you know, people put in these tips and whatnot, and then the flows kind of, you know, work it through your process. Correct? Exactly. And then they end up here. Got it. Alright. Perfect. Well, since I've been following along and we've been interacting again for a little while, I'm excited to hear what the plan is for, you know, the next 6 to 12 months, maybe even further out if you wanna discuss it. But what are some things that you guys at TD Soft are planning to build and release? Yeah, sometimes are huge, obviously. In our company, we bought at least 20% of our income into r and d, which means internal product development because we have to level on ourselves, you know, on our own issues before we actually propose to customers on solution. We have full, planning for the whole next year for the better signals dotcom. We are just launching. I I think it'll be it might be even live once the podcast is live, though, or gamify.com platform, which is a business gamification platform for our companies. We use that on ourselves, and our whole team is working together towards achieving their own personal goals, personal development, and, watching their position on either boats and also buying some stuff from the, company store. I hope that other people will find it best in those. So, maybe I can suggest, interested visitor store visit our website once in a while to see the news as we always have something news in our pipeline. Yeah. I know that I'm Pedro and I are a little competitive amongst each other as well as with other employees here. So we will definitely be checking that out because any way that we can officially brag over the other person, I think we're, we're, we're all for that. So Yeah. Yeah. The most important thing about, you know, gamification is to be over that other person. It is. It's helped you competition is great for work. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we know I can show you our library. It's small, but, you know, we treat self development seriously here, which means that it's not only about tech, but also about personal development and also, you know, Healthy lifestyle, all the things that come together to actually productive life and fulfilling life and not only man, just work. And I hope the same for others. That's why we published this stuff. Yeah. I think that's where, you know, you guys developing, putting 20% of your time to in in revenue towards research and development. I think that's kind of the model that a lot of technology companies use. And, for example, I mean, Google itself has developed so many products just from the free time or the time that they develop or they designate towards developing new fun projects, whether it be a side project, somebody just wanted to mess around with, or actual time that they just wanted to try and build something, that's that's where new and great platforms come about. So I think that's a a great amount of time and a great, option that your employees have. Awesome. Cool. Well, I think that's that's it from for our questions. Well, thank you, Darius, so much for your time. And, you know, we'll we'll obviously be following along with TDSoft. Please let everyone know how they can contact you to perhaps contract out some work or build something with, obviously you can spell my name in Google search, right? Yeah. There you go. Easy. You know, I hope there'll be some link in the description or something. Yeah. We can do that. Yeah. And then I will also, you know, advertise or maybe comment under the, you know, social media appearances. So there will be a way to find me. Absolutely. We'll list all your information here in the description and, and be on the lookout for future projects. But again, thank you for being a part of this. And, Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was a pleasure, guys. Thanks for having me here and, let's continue building stuff. Yeah. Absolutely. Thanks so much. And scene.",[167,168,169],"8ba660da-46db-410e-8adc-dcb604affefb","9e1fb4c6-fec0-4a39-b543-44a1632545bb","14b84c3f-a4ca-400f-a814-9957cd465620",[],{"id":133,"number":134,"show":122,"year":135,"episodes":172},[137,138,139,140],{"id":138,"slug":174,"vimeo_id":175,"description":176,"tile":177,"length":178,"resources":8,"people":179,"episode_number":185,"published":186,"title":187,"video_transcript_html":188,"video_transcript_text":189,"content":8,"seo":8,"status":130,"episode_people":190,"recommendations":194,"season":195},"platform-to-monetize-communities","894102457","In this episode of I Made This, Pedro and John chat with Bryant to learn why he chose Directus and walk-through how he built a community monetization platform.","51ab7dd2-9eef-487f-84e3-b4469285d530",43,[180,183,184],{"name":181,"url":182},"Bryant Gillespie","https://directus.io/team/bryant-gillespie",{"name":157,"url":158},{"name":160,"url":161},2,"2023-03-17","Building a Platform to Monetize Communities","\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Hello, everyone. Welcome to this episode of I Made This. My name is Pedro.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: And I'm John. Thanks for joining us today. We also have Bryant here. Bryant, why don't you give us a brief introduction into who you are?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely, guys. Thanks for having me. My name is Bryant Gillespie. I am a jack of all trades, I guess you could say.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>I do a ton of different things. I've got a design background. Been in the sign and print industry for probably too many years at this point. I would say, like, 15, 16 years. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>I've worked in kinda all facets of that industry. Like, I previously ran and helped manage a sign and print shop for probably 5, 6 years. We grew that business, and I burnt myself out and was looking for the next thing. And then I got hooked up with a software company that made software for the sign and print industry. So it was a great fit there, but, yeah, I've got a ton of experience in just a little bit of everything from business management to design, marketing, even a little bit of sales at my former company there for a while.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>And I've also got this development streak that I'm on at this point. I'm not a professional developer by any means, so let me preface everything that we talk about here. With that, Last 2 or 3 years, I've picked up JavaScript development. Mostly, like, working at a software company, I always wondered, k. How hard is it to do what we're talking about on the product side of things?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>How challenging is it to build this certain feature? And, yeah, I've got a nasty habit of scratching my own itch that sometimes gets me bogged down into crazy projects like the one we're gonna talk about today.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Awesome. And through that software development streak and kinda learning software development, is that how you found Directus, or what was your first touch with Directus?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Yeah. I can't remember exactly how I came across Directus. I know hey. Like, the background story there is I used to be really heavy into Airtable, and I think it's a really great tool, great platform, great company. But I had a client that we built a really nice Airtable base.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>And over the course of 2 or 3 years, this thing just kept getting more and more complex as any project does. And so when we first started, it was just simply, hey. Let's keep track of our orders. And then we started bolting on things like, hey. We wanna be able to send an online proof to our clients and let them approve the artwork for this order, and then, hey.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Let's let them pay for the order. And then it graduated into a full blown website where a the client could come on sight unseen and place their own order for decorated apparel. We as we kept iterating on that, things got more and more complex, and there were more moving pieces. And we rapidly started hitting the limits of Airtable, not just, like, what it was built to do. There's some API rate limits there that kind of affect how you call their API and what you can actually do with it.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>But there's also, I think we were on one of the we weren't on the enterprise plan, and the enterprise plan at the time was probably, like, 3 dollars 1,000 a month, which is kind of out of reach for yeah. We did. Definitely chump change. Yeah. So it's kinda out of reach for a small company that has 15, 20 employees.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>So that's a lot of money for them to spend on a platform where they were at maybe several $100 a month with all their employees on there and all the platforms and things that we had built around AirDance. That makes sense.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. I think you're on a similar journey, or I guess I'm on a similar journey to you. And if for anyone who's out there watching, Brian's face probably does look familiar because Brian also does videos for Directus. And so as I've come along on this Directus journey and as Pedro and I have started doing some videos, I also have an entrepreneurial spirit inside me. I've started several companies on the side and kind of have ideas that are floating around inside of my head too.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>And so I've been on this similar sounding journey to you of exploring these other platforms out there. A lot of these platforms are great for what they do, and they all have their limitations as any software does. But, you know, the more I've been creating these videos for Directus and working for Directus and seeing what it can do, one of the nice things as I'm building out these platforms and some of them actually make their way to actual companies, whether they're small or medium sized, some of them fizzle out. One of the great things that I've kinda come to discover about Directus is there there is no limitation, especially if you're starting off in self hosted. You're not gonna hit that $3,000 a month mark right right away.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>And so it it's so great for a beginner developer begin I have some experience in web development and websites and things like that. But as you're starting to explore, you're not gonna hit any wall in regards to pricing. You can kind of build it out and get a full fledged platform without having to worry about, oh, I can't get the full traffic tested. I can't gonna have to pay $500 a month starting off. I think that's kind of a similar journey that I've come to uncover and have more creative ideas flowing as I've been creating these videos for Directus.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>So it sounds very similar to kind of the journey that you are ahead of. You've been making these videos longer than we have, but sounds like a very similar journey.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Kind of\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: creating you found Directus. You started using it. You started creating videos for it. More ideas come to light. Does that kinda sound right?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Yeah. A 100%. And so like I was saying, we were hitting the limits of Airtable, and then it was like, well, what's the next jump? Like, where do we go from here? Hey.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>This could be a stand alone app that we could have somebody program or develop the back end. And at that stage of the journey, I wasn't comfortable enough to say, hey. This is something I could take on myself. So I started looking at, okay. Are we gonna have a developer or an agency or somebody, like, build this into a full blown app?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Because we're running out of runway here on this no code tool like Airtable. And and I'm not knocking those tools at all, but, you know, like you mentioned, there's certain limitations that you run into that you you don't know at the outset. You don't know that you're gonna run into those things or we probably had I known where we were gonna end up with the tool, it probably would not have started where we did with Airtable. Yeah. But Fortunate\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: enough that you grew at that pace. Right? Like, people underestimate their abilities and they grow a company or grow a software or an organization much faster than anticipated. So that's a good thing.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely. So we were looking for the next thing and I don't know if it was through Product Hunt or Hacker News or some other group that I like, a random Discord or Slack group or something that I'm a part of. I had stumbled onto the Directus website and I saw I think it it was really close to when version 9 launched, I think. And I was, like, like, what is it?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>This open data platform. And I saw the screenshots, and I was, like, hey. This kinda looks similar to the other tools that I'm used to, but it looks way more powerful because they're talking about a full SQL database that I own and immediate generated APIs and all the things that I could do through the UI, through the no code app that I'm used to doing in other platforms and more. So Directus did not work out for that particular client. We kind of made a few changes that extended the runway on their existing platform, but I kinda took up the mantle, and I was like, hey.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>This is I could use this for all my other things, like my own personal projects and get a leg up because now this is actually going to scale. This thing is, like, I'm driving the Ferrari on day 1 instead of effectively driving the Pinto for a little bit and then trying to figure out, hey. Do we slap a turbo on this or get some new wheels or what do we do with it?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. As someone who owns a Ford Fiesta vehicle, I feel I feel slighted that, you know, my car\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: is great.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: It's a great car, but I would take a Ferrari over it. Yeah. And so I think that's a that's a good lead in because a lot of people you know, I I come I came into Directus just thinking you were somebody who created videos, but you've created a whole platform on top of Directus. So why don't you give us a look into the most recent project that you built on Directus because I think it's really cool. I think it kind of ties into a lot of what Pedro and I have heard on calls with prospects and customers as well.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>So why don't you give us a little insight into the most recent project that you have?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Give me a second here, guys, and I'll share my screen. BetterSignShop kinda started when I left my previous company.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>I was the head of customer success there. I managed a team of customer success managers that would implement and train people on how to use our software that was designed for sign and print. So I've got this this bug, shop manager, being the 2nd in command for 5 years and experiencing every facet of the business through that, and then working on the tech side as a software provider, I probably worked with 350, 400 shops directly over the course of 7 years at my previous company. It was one of those things. It's like, hey.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>I'm it's time for me to move on to the next thing, and I immediately jumped into consulting with sign and print shops. Just that was the background that I had. That's where I've got the most leverage. Why not explore that? So that morphed into a lot of random projects.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Like, the best thing to come out of it was probably this platform that I'm gonna show you guys. But we started a podcast, we started a mastermind group where we meet once a month, we bring in like an outside expert that talks about a specific topic. Maybe that is online marketing for sign and print shops or how to hire sales reps because it's traditionally not a it's a it's a small business type of industry. There are some very large printers and very large sign companies in the world, but traditionally it's it's a small mom and pop type industry. Most shops have fewer than 20 employees.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>So we had all these resources that we're putting together, and we said, hey. Let's build a platform to contain all those. So we had just a bunch of random stuff that we were building, and we were like, hey. How do we connect all the dots? Right?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Like, we were doing interviews with industry experts. We had 100 of we had a 150 members inside a private Facebook group. We've got some calculators on, hey, should I buy that piece of equipment, or should we keep outsourcing this service? So we had all these things, and the challenge was, like, what do we do with it? Like, how do we bring it all together?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>And that's when we decided to create this platform, My Better Sign Shop, to bring it all together.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: I like that you chose a color scheme that fits with Directus, the purples and pinks and\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. So how I got into this industry was as a graphic designer. So everything I do, I've got that designer OCD type of thing going on where I always hate working on my own stuff because it's so hard for me to pick something. And when we started this, I was like, like, I'm just gonna go wild with this.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Like, we gotta go over the top. So my kids, my 3 daughters are into pink and purple, and I said, let's leverage that, and we'll just own those colors. Hey. If you see pink and purple in this space, like hot pink, that's gonna be us. I like it.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. Why don't you why don't you give us a quick walk through kind of how you built it out in Directus and then maybe even an insight into what did you build the front end? What did you build the actual website with? You know, what what technology Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely. So I the thing about Directus, it was so nice building out the data model. And I've you know, I since I graduated from Airtable, like, I I was kinda used to already, like, how do I map out this data relationally? How do I make sure that I'm not duplicating data that that I could just link using a relationship?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>So the first piece that we started with was probably like the LMS, our learning management system, because we kind of had this course called Profitable Sign Pricing that I was working on prior to this platform, and we just kind of rolled it into the platform. Platform. So inside Directus, I'm not sure if you guys can see this, I could probably zoom in just a little bit. We started, that was the piece that we started with first. So and maybe while we're See\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: your nice custom icons as well.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Yeah. Again, that's the design OCD part where everything has to be nightly nicely organized. Yeah. The system, we did all module based because, like I said, it was originally just a bunch of stuff that we had built. And we were like, hey.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Let's give people one simple way to access it. So I'll just throw some of these out. And then we have our so we've got our library here, where the library has some resources that are, like, downloads for you guys. Hey. What questions should we be asking to qualify customers?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>So building this out, it was a really super simple indirectus. If I hop into, like, our library data model here, this is just a folder where we put all of our other collections. So we've got our resources, which are just kind of one time offerings, and then we have our courses. So the data structure here, we have a course that sits at the top level. Then each course has several modules, and each module has lessons.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>So if we open up the course, we can see we've got, hey, is this a free course? What's the status of this? Is it published? Is it draft? What's the title of the course?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>What are we gonna use for the slug, which is the URL that we're gonna access that at? The description, we've got a featured image. Then we have the modules for that course. That is a one to many relationship that links to the modules. And inside the modules very similar, title, status, what's the course that this module belongs to, what's the description of the module, and the lessons for that module.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>So the meat and potatoes is probably in the actual lessons. So we've got the module it belongs to, stylus, title, slug, description. And then we have some interesting things like content, which is the WYSIWYG editor in Directus, which is super nice. Other platforms that I've used, Airtable specifically, like, it does not have a WYSIWYG editor. So doing long form content there does not it's just not helpful.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>We've got a video input. So this is just a string. On the front end, we've got, a function that will clean this up. So you can paste Vimeo, you could do YouTube, you could do Loom videos. Whatever that is, it'll clean that up and generate, like, an embed code.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>We also have, like, a form schema here. So some of the courses that we are going to do, we've got let's actually just flip over to one of the lessons maybe here.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: So you're saying a school or a university could build an entire learning platform modernized indirect us. So, you know, that's kind of what you've built here in one one module of your platform.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Absolutely. Yeah. A 100%. Yeah. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: We actually have a university.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Yeah. Could be yeah. School, university, anything, really.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: We actually have a an LMS use case for one of our one of the clients that I work with. I don't know if I'm allowed to say their name or not, so I just won't I'll avoid that. But they've built essentially in a very similar schema with the modules, the courses linked. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Yeah. And eventually, I think we'll add, like, some completion percentages and some niceties onto this. But, yeah, you can see here, this is one of our lessons here. And I on the front end, we've also got, like, this profitable sign pricing course has it's almost like a calculator, like a worksheet type of offering. It's not like a quiz per se.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Let me just, show it to you guys, and I'll go back to the side by side here. So this is the front end of the application. We've got our main navigation over here, and it's divided into the different modules that we have. This my shop is a new one that has not released yet. So I'm giving you guys the local flavor here that's got the latest updates also so I don't break anything.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>And then we have, like, a community module, some other things. But if we enroll in our course here. Okay. Alright. So this is what the initial view looks like.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>You can expand these modules over here. But I'm going to show you the same calculating your shop rate lesson. It looks like I've got the wrong video here, but I'll just go ahead and hide this menu so we can go full screen. So the format here, we've got a nice video that they'll follow along with. We've got a short description.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>And then this particular one is all about calculating their shop rate. So in custom sign and print you're building a custom order every single time. Your unit of work there is your time. So how much should you charge for your time? Big question for everybody.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>So here, basically, we give them the ability to go in and enter in their monthly expenses, how many days a week they're working, how many team members they've got, how often those team members are working, and\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: I don't work 7 hours\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: a day. And what target profit they want and then it will spit out what their hourly cost is to operate. We got 2 guys working 6 hours a day. We wanna make a 100,000 or 30,000 in profit at the end of it. Shows us their hourly cost, so this is what that what it costs to keep the lights on, and then what they have to charge per hour or per day to actually make those profit numbers.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>So those are the things that we're putting together inside this platform, and it's all dedicated to helping sign and print shop owners grow and improve their business.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: That's awesome.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: That that's sweet. And I noticed that the front end takes a lot of visual cues from the back end. Is that intentional? And what technology do you use for the for the front end of the site?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad you picked up on that because Yeah. Yeah. I like, when we started down the road of modules, I was that's a kind of a design challenge.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>It really is. And Directus has done such a great job with it of, like, how do I show hierarchy? How do I make sure that people know where everything is at? And I kinda took cues from that. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>We used intercom a lot at my previous employer. They've got, like, a similar, hey. Our modules are on the left hand side kind of set up. And I thought that was a great design pattern. But, yeah, a lot of this has been taken cues directly from the back end inside Directus.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>That's awesome.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. We've even seen people, because of the way Directus is designed on the back end, using the back end as if it is an internal tool for a business, like, using the back end as an actual front end as well. It's just like this is the tool that we log into as employees.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: And that's it's easily doable. Like, you can log in and you can white label this. And if you wanted to be a little more stingy about it, you could even turn off the documentation where, like, it didn't have any, like, references to direct us at all. But Right. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: From And then using roles and permissions to just hide everything that wouldn't be relevant to that user or that group of users.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Absolutely. Yeah. And that that was, like, an option that I considered. That would've dramatically cut the time to get something launched, but I like, being design oriented,\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: I Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: That OCD kicked in. Okay. We're gonna build a custom front end on this.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: That looks great.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: So And I think that's one of the I think that's one of the beautiful things about Directus is if for any reason in the future you decided to move away from Directus, if your front end was also the back end, you're kinda stuck there. But with your front end being built separately, you can pull that SQL database because as you mentioned, it's just your it's your SQL database. You could pull that information out. All the tables are there. Directus had injected nothing into it, and you could move to another back end.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>So I I think that some people find the benefit. We we do think Directus can fit long term, but it is nice to sometimes separate those front end things out because if for any reason you needed the SQL database for somewhere else, you could put it somewhere else as well.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, this is my actual SQL database here. Right? Everything Directus is namespace there. Again, like you said, that's this is just the kind of metadata that enables Directus to do its thing.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>So, yeah, we've got books. We've got all the lessons. Like, they're all there. Directus, none of this is intertwined with the Directus system data, which it which is very nice. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>I like that aspect of it. I don't see moving this from Directus because, like, the speed at which I can put something together is that's the craziest part of this whole thing for me. I'm not being a professional developer, I'm, like, self taught developer. I've mostly played, like, the get it done guy role, is what I like to call it. Every company that I've been in or even on my own stuff, I'm the guy that if I don't know or I if I don't have somebody that'll do it for me or if, you know, there's a problem, like, I'll figure it out however I need to.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>And that's what led me into development in the first place. But Directus gives me that tool, like, you know, almost almost too easy for me to go down a rabbit hole and build something.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Did you say go down a rabbit hole on purpose?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: I didn't. No. But that's the bunny puns could come easily, though. So, you know, this new module that we've been working on is basically like a knowledge base of Oh, awesome. SOPs and standard procedures.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Yeah. Like I mentioned, a lot of these small shops are they don't have things like this in place. So we're gonna give them a template for this. K. Here's your employee handbook.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Go in and customize the pieces that you need, but we'll get you 80% of the way there. And using Directus, like, building something like this out, is super on the back end, I probably spent the most of the time here to build this feature of like cards and collections. So if I open up one of these cards, here's what the back end of this card looks like. Probably the most time spent was just trying to map out how I wanted the data to look. So here we've got collections that hold the cards, collections could be nested into each other, so coming up with that schema, like on paper was probably the hardest part about it, but as far as actually getting an API that I can use on the front end it probably took me 10, 15 minutes to put together these 2 collections inside Directus and actually start building something on the front end, which is huge.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: This is really cool.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: If I would have done something previously, I don't have the back end knowledge or skill set. So I would have either been mutts trying to learn that and put that together and maybe something like Laravel or Rails or something that gives you a leg up or been paying somebody 1,000 of dollars a week probably to build something like this. And just like the speed and flexibility that Directus gives me. K, if I've got an idea and my girls are off shopping for the weekend, which is exactly how this feature came about, You know, it's it's easy enough for to build something that's gonna deliver value in in a weekend. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: So so people just need to take more trips away from their family and you could do more projects.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Is that\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: what you're saying?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: I'm not saying that at all. No. If you get a if you get a random weekend where and you have 3 kids and your wife takes them shopping, use that for project time. 100%. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>So seeing\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: this seeing this knowledge base really gets my gears turning on a lot of different ideas that you could start implementing. And I'm not gonna impose any of those on you, but I'm sure you have a lot of ideas and future plans around this project. Could you maybe Oh, yeah. Fail some of those or other things you plan to add on to the this project with Directus?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Yeah. I I mean, even yeah. Like, we've got onboarding checklists that are\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Oh, wow.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Like a thing that we're putting into this. So one of the big things in any business really, is how do you onboard new employees? And this is specifically generic enough that it doesn't have to be used for onboarding. But, you know, since we're focused on the team aspect, that's the primary use case here. But, you know, we're working on this onboarding checklist structure where, hey, Whenever we hire somebody, we want them to be able to go in and have just a, hey.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Here's how your next 6 weeks or your first 6 weeks are gonna go with the company. And not only does that improve morale, but, you know, it it's easy. It improves retention as well. Like, if you start a new company and you've got the 1st 6 weeks laid out for you, here's everything you need to do to be successful in this new role, that's gonna skyrocket retention. So we've got this set up where you can assign the specific user to a task within the checklist in case, like, a manager needs to be assigned to a certain task instead of the new employee.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>You could set up due dates, all of that, And then you just run the checklist, and we'll have a couple dashboards in here. This is still very much a work in progress, but that's, that's probably the newest thing. We've got tons of different ideas of what we're gonna implement in the future, but, you know, that's kinda what we're working on at the moment.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. I can see this specific feature being really useful for a lot of smaller startups or companies who just don't have the time to build this. Do you have any plans to list the setup or at least some sort of instructions in the upcoming marketplace. You could be able to to list this up there for other companies to be able to use this as well. Have you thought about that?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. I'm totally open to it. I need to learn more about the plans there and how we could make that work.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Or you could just send people use the your platform too.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Yeah. No. I for me, I don't see this I don't wanna get this thing outside of sign and print. So this is probably gonna be, like, a really niche thing, but, totally, what we built here, it's like, there would be nothing stopping you from taking this and either generalizing it to any company or, for me, I mean, like, you could take this and and focus on your if you had a specific intersection, and that's kind of my philosophy of where I bring value anyway is at the intersection of sign and print and tech, automation, integration. Hey.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Bringing those 2 together is like a space that that I have, bring the most value. So if you're out there and you're listening to this and that's that describes you, you got a passion on the tech side, you've got some industry knowledge, you could take something like Directus and build a tool that will help bring in recurring revenue for you or, honestly, if I were to focus on this full time, it could probably be a full time business that that we could grow and scale. But, yeah, I've got a few other priorities, and I quite like the lifestyle aspect of\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: it at this point. That's a perfect segue because I was gonna ask you guys as we kinda start to wrap this up, advice for those people who are building platforms or similar platforms. You obviously have access to the Directus team directly as you kind of work with us week by week. But did you research things on GitHub, or did you reach out to people on Discord? Or did was it kind of just playing around?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>What advice would you give to those, either new or relatively well versed in direct us? What did you run into that you would advise people to sidestep or hop over if we use a budget plan?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Yeah. I've always been, like, action oriented, and I don't know if that's sometimes that's a fault. A lot of times, I think that's a strength because and I know, like you said, you were getting into development, John. There's a lot of, like, courses out there on here's how to become a full stack developer, here's how to become a Vue JS developer, and it's just module after module after module after module. And I've tried those, and I discovered that it didn't work for me because it it's either a project that we're building that I don't care about or it's just too abstract in the moment.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>The it's like, I don't know when I'm gonna use this. That's the same reason that I couldn't give you if you gave me a calculus test right now, I couldn't tell you the first answer on any of it because I haven't used any of that stuff in so long even though I learned it. So the first thing that I would say is, hey. If you got a decent idea or one that you think could be a good side project or a business side. Get into Directus.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>It's simple enough to build out your data model. I've even got if you're looking for a starter on the front end, where is this thing? So our platform is built on Nuxt, which is based on Vue. Js, but if you need a good starter that already has the plumbing connected with Directus, we've got a starter that you can use as well. So you can pull this down, it's just Brian Gillespie slash nuxt3 dashdirectus dash starter on GitHub.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>It's getting a little popular, I think. Not that 55 stars is anything compared to the 18 or 20,000 at Directus, but this is a good starting point. Like, just set up a couple collections inside Directus, start building something. And then as you run into challenges, the direct to stocks will be your best friend. Shout out to Aaron on that side of things.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>I've seen a lot of great improvements on the documentation recently. I really love this cookbook section, like some of these things, how to do a content hierarchy. This was kind of one of the things that probably tripped me up when I first started with Directus, some of these more specific things, which I'm sure that's a challenge for you guys as well because Directus us can could do so many different things.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Like, how do we tell people how to set these things up? And then the community has been great as well. Even even before I was doing the videos on YouTube for DirectUs, if I would run into any gotchas, k, I I don't know how to do this. I think Brain Slug was one of the guys that reached out and helped me before he was working with the team as well. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Like, initially, I was trying to set this up and, like, tenancy is a big question that came up as well, and it was one of the things that I had trouble navigating of, like, how do I set up not just, like, an account inside here, but each account has many different users. So, how do I manage all of that inside Directus? I know Directus will do it, but how do I figure it out? And the guys in the community, guys and gals, I should say, were very helpful in that regard of just hopping into the discord, which I like a lot more so than, like, a support forum or some of those other it's nice just to hop in and just kinda post a question and see who's already had experience doing this thing.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. Shout out to BrainSlug as well. I'll second that. I think his name is the one I see the most in Discord, and I believe he was on vacation a couple months ago, and it got a little quiet in Discord. I'm like, we need brain slug back.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>So shout out to him.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. And there's quite a few names that I see popping up time and time again. So one of the other kinda nice things that I really like about Directus here is the insights module, where I've just been able to set up, like, a quick dashboard that shows me our accounts. So this was back in October.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>That was when we initially launched, and I could see how many accounts are being created each day, the total number of accounts. So we've got a free plan, and we've got a pay plan. I could see how many people have published their shop listing within our community, what our recommended book numbers come from, and this is all community driven stuff. Hey. This is one of my favorite vendors to work with, or this is a book that I recommend reading.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>But Direct has made this really easy, whereas, again, like, if I wanted to do this, I would either be exporting the data from Directus and doing a pivot table and some charts inside Google Sheets, which would be a\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: blast. Pivot tables.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Or I would have to build I would have to build the same functionality somewhere into my own app, which would be kind of a pain to do. So Directus makes this super simple for me. And this has this has been helpful to share with the other guys that are working on the podcast and this platform with me just to give them motivation. K. We signed up 3 accounts today, and we've done very little promotion on this thing at all.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>So\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Have you played around with flows at all? I know for me, flows can get pretty technical pretty fast. Yes.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Yes. So we do have several flows going on. One of the cooler features that I really like about the, like, the community module that we have, in addition to like the list view of here's all the member shops that we have where you can browse what their capabilities are. Hey, if I are you UL certified? Which means, hey, can you do electrical work?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Or do you have a wide format printer? One of the really nice things here is this map view. Sign and print is locally, it's mostly a regional, local type market. You're not gonna, with the exception of really large signage, if you want a banner or something simple, you're probably going to be dealing with a local person. So this is another thing that I stole from Directus.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>You guys were using Mapbox on the admin side for geolocation. Previously I'd used Google Maps and I found Mapbox to be a lot easier, but I wouldn't have known about that had it not been through Directus. But being able to, like, filter these based on a map, tremendously helpful. Okay, I'm located in West Virginia, who around me has a bucket truck that can go do an install, so here's a couple different options that I can find. So it's all about collaboration.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>But on the Directus side, when somebody edits their listing, and it looks like I've managed to break something there, when they edit their listing they add their address information. So on the flow side of things we've got a Flow set up that will send that address to Mapbox and pick up their latitude and longitude geocode data anytime that listing is updated. So if they go in and change the address, that will store their location correctly. See I've got so many different modules I can't even find them. Directory.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>You need\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: a little map icon. You're all iconized, you just need a little\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: map. Yeah. That's what I need. Yeah, so the geolocation data here, it will automatically generate this for us. So that was been a that was a huge, like, one up for using flows, so I didn't have to, like, custom code any of that or do it manually.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Some of the other flows that we've got on our Mastermind calls, We've got, let's open that up. So we've got these thumbnail images that show when you go through and browse through these previous calls. That is a flow that is set up whenever the recording is posted for that previous call it will go out to Vimeo and capture the thumbnail image so we could show it here. And I've also got just a nice little anytime a new user account is added, it will ping us inside Slack. So let me see if I can open this up for you guys just to give you a taste.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Yeah. So we've got an inbox inside Slack that whenever a new user and a new account is created, that happens through flows as well.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Very cool. I assume you used a little bit of just toying around till it worked, which is what I do. I just kind of change one thing until it works. Probably a little bit of the dots. Is that kinda how you figured some of those out?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Yeah. So my new method for flows is basically taking it step by step. Like, I will create the initial flow or, like, the trigger setup, and then I will trigger that flow to make sure to see what data I've got coming out of it, and then I will just kind of march step by step after that. That kinda makes it easier for me to stay focused instead of building, like, 30 steps at once and then trying to figure out why I'm not getting what I want at the end of it. I've also my wife makes fun of me.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>I've got sausage fingers. So a lot of my trouble with flows is usually just just because of typos that I'm not paying attention to.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. I think the I think I was working on a flow on one thing that I'm kind of toying around with here yesterday or the day before. I think I had about 70 iterations where I was just changing 1 step by step like you kinda do, but also why isn't this working? Okay. Let's change this one thing.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Oh, let's change this let's change it to another thing. That's my method of figuring out how it works. Because you you kinda mentioned just starting Yeah. I yeah. I think you get\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: you learn how to\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: do it.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Yeah. I yeah. I think you get you learn how to learn at that point. That's probably the biggest skill is, like, you could go through and you could certainly read all the docs or watch all of the YouTube videos that you guys have done or the ones that I have done. But until, like, you actually need that knowledge, like, you may forget some of that.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>So, like, I really prefer, like, an action oriented approach where you just dive in and try to figure it out, and then there's plenty of resources available when you get stuck.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. Correct me if I'm wrong, Pedro. I think even as sometimes when we're filming these from the field episodes that are also on our YouTube, I think sometimes people ask questions and on those phone calls where sometimes those questions are asked, our engineer, Jonathan, will answer them. And so when we have to kind of go back and reanswer them on from the field, we kinda have to play around with it until we figure out how to answer the question. Is it the same for you, Pedro, or is it just me who's, we'll figure it out?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: No. Absolutely. I mean, that there's a little bit of decoding there and going back and reviewing things as they're asked on calls and from the community trying to clarify those things. So definitely feel the pain there.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Yeah. There's some of that for me as well where, like, I'm trying to distill a feature into a video. So I've I've got to for me, like, the nuts and bolts of it. Like, you've gotta get into it and do it yourself to actually be able to translate it. So I've it's certainly the it has to be the same way for developers using Directus as well.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>One of the strengths here is obviously this is no code app that anybody can use, not just, like, the technical members of the team, but, you know, I've got my guys on the podcast. They've got access to this. So if they wanna go in and upload a resource or they wanna upload set up a new meeting for the mastermind calls, they can. And it's simple enough for them to do that.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Alright. Awesome. Well, Brian, we thank you very much for being a part of the I made this podcast or video series, whatever you wanna call it. And thank you for giving us a deeper look into better sign shop and everything you're doing there and all the work you've done within Directus. I guess maybe to to leave this off, what, the last question would be maybe what would you like to see from Directus that you haven't seen yet?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Or is there a feature that you've just been dying to see come to Directus?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: That's a loaded question there. You're getting you're getting me into trouble, Pedro. No. Yeah. I've been consistently impressed with everything that Directus has done.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>And I had this conversation with Wrike, I think, on one of the calls that I was looking for some guidance on. Hey. How do I do this one feature? But I was talking to Wrike, and I was like, man, you're doing the right abstractions. There's that balance that you've gotta strike of, like, hey, flexibility and and just, like, not taking not putting too much magic into it.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>I as far as what I would like to see, I think Flows could probably use a little more work on the developer experience side, like, making it easier to figure out what's gonna come out the other end of it. It. That that would be a tremendous help as I get more into flows. What else? I and I I think I saw this on maybe one of the roadmap pages, like an Airtable like spreadsheet view layout where I could edit a lot of data at once would be very helpful.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>I think there is probably what, like real time, like websockets maybe in the future. I don't know that we have a ton of application for that. Maybe in the future, there'll be, like, a BetterSign Shop chat module where these guys could talk to each other through the app.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. Create your own little discord.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm excited to to play around with that, certainly. I a lot of times now, I feel like a kid with just, like, a a nice set of Legos. Like, I've got the $100 set of LEGOs, not like the cheap $10 set.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Like, Directus gives you that nice LEGO set that's got all the pieces where you just build whatever you want out of it.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Well, again, I'll thank you for your time as well. I will second that flows. All of that you the things that you mentioned, I think, are in the works.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>But as someone who has already said in this video that flows can get pretty technical pretty quickly, I will second that. We need some one one click easier options for us nontechnical people, but I do agree that it's very powerful in a good and dangerous way for someone like me who can break things. But thank you again for your time, and thanks to everyone who's been watching this. We'll see you on the next one. And if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us either on YouTube, Discord, via our website.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Follow along and subscribe. Also, go and follow Bryant on his social media accounts as well. We'll put those in the link and description. Thanks again for your time and we'll see you on the next one.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Yeah. Thank you, guys. It's been a pleasure.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: And scene.\u003C/p>","Hello, everyone. Welcome to this episode of I Made This. My name is Pedro. And I'm John. Thanks for joining us today. We also have Bryant here. Bryant, why don't you give us a brief introduction into who you are? Yeah. Absolutely, guys. Thanks for having me. My name is Bryant Gillespie. I am a jack of all trades, I guess you could say. I do a ton of different things. I've got a design background. Been in the sign and print industry for probably too many years at this point. I would say, like, 15, 16 years. Yeah. I've worked in kinda all facets of that industry. Like, I previously ran and helped manage a sign and print shop for probably 5, 6 years. We grew that business, and I burnt myself out and was looking for the next thing. And then I got hooked up with a software company that made software for the sign and print industry. So it was a great fit there, but, yeah, I've got a ton of experience in just a little bit of everything from business management to design, marketing, even a little bit of sales at my former company there for a while. And I've also got this development streak that I'm on at this point. I'm not a professional developer by any means, so let me preface everything that we talk about here. With that, Last 2 or 3 years, I've picked up JavaScript development. Mostly, like, working at a software company, I always wondered, k. How hard is it to do what we're talking about on the product side of things? How challenging is it to build this certain feature? And, yeah, I've got a nasty habit of scratching my own itch that sometimes gets me bogged down into crazy projects like the one we're gonna talk about today. Awesome. And through that software development streak and kinda learning software development, is that how you found Directus, or what was your first touch with Directus? Yeah. I can't remember exactly how I came across Directus. I know hey. Like, the background story there is I used to be really heavy into Airtable, and I think it's a really great tool, great platform, great company. But I had a client that we built a really nice Airtable base. And over the course of 2 or 3 years, this thing just kept getting more and more complex as any project does. And so when we first started, it was just simply, hey. Let's keep track of our orders. And then we started bolting on things like, hey. We wanna be able to send an online proof to our clients and let them approve the artwork for this order, and then, hey. Let's let them pay for the order. And then it graduated into a full blown website where a the client could come on sight unseen and place their own order for decorated apparel. We as we kept iterating on that, things got more and more complex, and there were more moving pieces. And we rapidly started hitting the limits of Airtable, not just, like, what it was built to do. There's some API rate limits there that kind of affect how you call their API and what you can actually do with it. But there's also, I think we were on one of the we weren't on the enterprise plan, and the enterprise plan at the time was probably, like, 3 dollars 1,000 a month, which is kind of out of reach for yeah. We did. Definitely chump change. Yeah. So it's kinda out of reach for a small company that has 15, 20 employees. So that's a lot of money for them to spend on a platform where they were at maybe several $100 a month with all their employees on there and all the platforms and things that we had built around AirDance. That makes sense. Yeah. I think you're on a similar journey, or I guess I'm on a similar journey to you. And if for anyone who's out there watching, Brian's face probably does look familiar because Brian also does videos for Directus. And so as I've come along on this Directus journey and as Pedro and I have started doing some videos, I also have an entrepreneurial spirit inside me. I've started several companies on the side and kind of have ideas that are floating around inside of my head too. And so I've been on this similar sounding journey to you of exploring these other platforms out there. A lot of these platforms are great for what they do, and they all have their limitations as any software does. But, you know, the more I've been creating these videos for Directus and working for Directus and seeing what it can do, one of the nice things as I'm building out these platforms and some of them actually make their way to actual companies, whether they're small or medium sized, some of them fizzle out. One of the great things that I've kinda come to discover about Directus is there there is no limitation, especially if you're starting off in self hosted. You're not gonna hit that $3,000 a month mark right right away. And so it it's so great for a beginner developer begin I have some experience in web development and websites and things like that. But as you're starting to explore, you're not gonna hit any wall in regards to pricing. You can kind of build it out and get a full fledged platform without having to worry about, oh, I can't get the full traffic tested. I can't gonna have to pay $500 a month starting off. I think that's kind of a similar journey that I've come to uncover and have more creative ideas flowing as I've been creating these videos for Directus. So it sounds very similar to kind of the journey that you are ahead of. You've been making these videos longer than we have, but sounds like a very similar journey. Kind of creating you found Directus. You started using it. You started creating videos for it. More ideas come to light. Does that kinda sound right? Yeah. A 100%. And so like I was saying, we were hitting the limits of Airtable, and then it was like, well, what's the next jump? Like, where do we go from here? Hey. This could be a stand alone app that we could have somebody program or develop the back end. And at that stage of the journey, I wasn't comfortable enough to say, hey. This is something I could take on myself. So I started looking at, okay. Are we gonna have a developer or an agency or somebody, like, build this into a full blown app? Because we're running out of runway here on this no code tool like Airtable. And and I'm not knocking those tools at all, but, you know, like you mentioned, there's certain limitations that you run into that you you don't know at the outset. You don't know that you're gonna run into those things or we probably had I known where we were gonna end up with the tool, it probably would not have started where we did with Airtable. Yeah. But Fortunate enough that you grew at that pace. Right? Like, people underestimate their abilities and they grow a company or grow a software or an organization much faster than anticipated. So that's a good thing. Yeah. Absolutely. So we were looking for the next thing and I don't know if it was through Product Hunt or Hacker News or some other group that I like, a random Discord or Slack group or something that I'm a part of. I had stumbled onto the Directus website and I saw I think it it was really close to when version 9 launched, I think. And I was, like, like, what is it? This open data platform. And I saw the screenshots, and I was, like, hey. This kinda looks similar to the other tools that I'm used to, but it looks way more powerful because they're talking about a full SQL database that I own and immediate generated APIs and all the things that I could do through the UI, through the no code app that I'm used to doing in other platforms and more. So Directus did not work out for that particular client. We kind of made a few changes that extended the runway on their existing platform, but I kinda took up the mantle, and I was like, hey. This is I could use this for all my other things, like my own personal projects and get a leg up because now this is actually going to scale. This thing is, like, I'm driving the Ferrari on day 1 instead of effectively driving the Pinto for a little bit and then trying to figure out, hey. Do we slap a turbo on this or get some new wheels or what do we do with it? Yeah. As someone who owns a Ford Fiesta vehicle, I feel I feel slighted that, you know, my car is great. It's a great car, but I would take a Ferrari over it. Yeah. And so I think that's a that's a good lead in because a lot of people you know, I I come I came into Directus just thinking you were somebody who created videos, but you've created a whole platform on top of Directus. So why don't you give us a look into the most recent project that you built on Directus because I think it's really cool. I think it kind of ties into a lot of what Pedro and I have heard on calls with prospects and customers as well. So why don't you give us a little insight into the most recent project that you have? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Give me a second here, guys, and I'll share my screen. BetterSignShop kinda started when I left my previous company. I was the head of customer success there. I managed a team of customer success managers that would implement and train people on how to use our software that was designed for sign and print. So I've got this this bug, shop manager, being the 2nd in command for 5 years and experiencing every facet of the business through that, and then working on the tech side as a software provider, I probably worked with 350, 400 shops directly over the course of 7 years at my previous company. It was one of those things. It's like, hey. I'm it's time for me to move on to the next thing, and I immediately jumped into consulting with sign and print shops. Just that was the background that I had. That's where I've got the most leverage. Why not explore that? So that morphed into a lot of random projects. Like, the best thing to come out of it was probably this platform that I'm gonna show you guys. But we started a podcast, we started a mastermind group where we meet once a month, we bring in like an outside expert that talks about a specific topic. Maybe that is online marketing for sign and print shops or how to hire sales reps because it's traditionally not a it's a it's a small business type of industry. There are some very large printers and very large sign companies in the world, but traditionally it's it's a small mom and pop type industry. Most shops have fewer than 20 employees. So we had all these resources that we're putting together, and we said, hey. Let's build a platform to contain all those. So we had just a bunch of random stuff that we were building, and we were like, hey. How do we connect all the dots? Right? Like, we were doing interviews with industry experts. We had 100 of we had a 150 members inside a private Facebook group. We've got some calculators on, hey, should I buy that piece of equipment, or should we keep outsourcing this service? So we had all these things, and the challenge was, like, what do we do with it? Like, how do we bring it all together? And that's when we decided to create this platform, My Better Sign Shop, to bring it all together. I like that you chose a color scheme that fits with Directus, the purples and pinks and Yeah. Yeah. So how I got into this industry was as a graphic designer. So everything I do, I've got that designer OCD type of thing going on where I always hate working on my own stuff because it's so hard for me to pick something. And when we started this, I was like, like, I'm just gonna go wild with this. Like, we gotta go over the top. So my kids, my 3 daughters are into pink and purple, and I said, let's leverage that, and we'll just own those colors. Hey. If you see pink and purple in this space, like hot pink, that's gonna be us. I like it. Yeah. Why don't you why don't you give us a quick walk through kind of how you built it out in Directus and then maybe even an insight into what did you build the front end? What did you build the actual website with? You know, what what technology Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So I the thing about Directus, it was so nice building out the data model. And I've you know, I since I graduated from Airtable, like, I I was kinda used to already, like, how do I map out this data relationally? How do I make sure that I'm not duplicating data that that I could just link using a relationship? So the first piece that we started with was probably like the LMS, our learning management system, because we kind of had this course called Profitable Sign Pricing that I was working on prior to this platform, and we just kind of rolled it into the platform. Platform. So inside Directus, I'm not sure if you guys can see this, I could probably zoom in just a little bit. We started, that was the piece that we started with first. So and maybe while we're See your nice custom icons as well. Yeah. Again, that's the design OCD part where everything has to be nightly nicely organized. Yeah. The system, we did all module based because, like I said, it was originally just a bunch of stuff that we had built. And we were like, hey. Let's give people one simple way to access it. So I'll just throw some of these out. And then we have our so we've got our library here, where the library has some resources that are, like, downloads for you guys. Hey. What questions should we be asking to qualify customers? So building this out, it was a really super simple indirectus. If I hop into, like, our library data model here, this is just a folder where we put all of our other collections. So we've got our resources, which are just kind of one time offerings, and then we have our courses. So the data structure here, we have a course that sits at the top level. Then each course has several modules, and each module has lessons. So if we open up the course, we can see we've got, hey, is this a free course? What's the status of this? Is it published? Is it draft? What's the title of the course? What are we gonna use for the slug, which is the URL that we're gonna access that at? The description, we've got a featured image. Then we have the modules for that course. That is a one to many relationship that links to the modules. And inside the modules very similar, title, status, what's the course that this module belongs to, what's the description of the module, and the lessons for that module. So the meat and potatoes is probably in the actual lessons. So we've got the module it belongs to, stylus, title, slug, description. And then we have some interesting things like content, which is the WYSIWYG editor in Directus, which is super nice. Other platforms that I've used, Airtable specifically, like, it does not have a WYSIWYG editor. So doing long form content there does not it's just not helpful. We've got a video input. So this is just a string. On the front end, we've got, a function that will clean this up. So you can paste Vimeo, you could do YouTube, you could do Loom videos. Whatever that is, it'll clean that up and generate, like, an embed code. We also have, like, a form schema here. So some of the courses that we are going to do, we've got let's actually just flip over to one of the lessons maybe here. So you're saying a school or a university could build an entire learning platform modernized indirect us. So, you know, that's kind of what you've built here in one one module of your platform. Absolutely. Yeah. A 100%. Yeah. Yeah. We actually have a university. Yeah. Could be yeah. School, university, anything, really. We actually have a an LMS use case for one of our one of the clients that I work with. I don't know if I'm allowed to say their name or not, so I just won't I'll avoid that. But they've built essentially in a very similar schema with the modules, the courses linked. Yeah. Yeah. And eventually, I think we'll add, like, some completion percentages and some niceties onto this. But, yeah, you can see here, this is one of our lessons here. And I on the front end, we've also got, like, this profitable sign pricing course has it's almost like a calculator, like a worksheet type of offering. It's not like a quiz per se. Let me just, show it to you guys, and I'll go back to the side by side here. So this is the front end of the application. We've got our main navigation over here, and it's divided into the different modules that we have. This my shop is a new one that has not released yet. So I'm giving you guys the local flavor here that's got the latest updates also so I don't break anything. And then we have, like, a community module, some other things. But if we enroll in our course here. Okay. Alright. So this is what the initial view looks like. You can expand these modules over here. But I'm going to show you the same calculating your shop rate lesson. It looks like I've got the wrong video here, but I'll just go ahead and hide this menu so we can go full screen. So the format here, we've got a nice video that they'll follow along with. We've got a short description. And then this particular one is all about calculating their shop rate. So in custom sign and print you're building a custom order every single time. Your unit of work there is your time. So how much should you charge for your time? Big question for everybody. So here, basically, we give them the ability to go in and enter in their monthly expenses, how many days a week they're working, how many team members they've got, how often those team members are working, and I don't work 7 hours a day. And what target profit they want and then it will spit out what their hourly cost is to operate. We got 2 guys working 6 hours a day. We wanna make a 100,000 or 30,000 in profit at the end of it. Shows us their hourly cost, so this is what that what it costs to keep the lights on, and then what they have to charge per hour or per day to actually make those profit numbers. So those are the things that we're putting together inside this platform, and it's all dedicated to helping sign and print shop owners grow and improve their business. That's awesome. That that's sweet. And I noticed that the front end takes a lot of visual cues from the back end. Is that intentional? And what technology do you use for the for the front end of the site? Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad you picked up on that because Yeah. Yeah. I like, when we started down the road of modules, I was that's a kind of a design challenge. It really is. And Directus has done such a great job with it of, like, how do I show hierarchy? How do I make sure that people know where everything is at? And I kinda took cues from that. Yeah. We used intercom a lot at my previous employer. They've got, like, a similar, hey. Our modules are on the left hand side kind of set up. And I thought that was a great design pattern. But, yeah, a lot of this has been taken cues directly from the back end inside Directus. That's awesome. Yeah. We've even seen people, because of the way Directus is designed on the back end, using the back end as if it is an internal tool for a business, like, using the back end as an actual front end as well. It's just like this is the tool that we log into as employees. And that's it's easily doable. Like, you can log in and you can white label this. And if you wanted to be a little more stingy about it, you could even turn off the documentation where, like, it didn't have any, like, references to direct us at all. But Right. Yeah. From And then using roles and permissions to just hide everything that wouldn't be relevant to that user or that group of users. Absolutely. Yeah. And that that was, like, an option that I considered. That would've dramatically cut the time to get something launched, but I like, being design oriented, I Yeah. That OCD kicked in. Okay. We're gonna build a custom front end on this. That looks great. So And I think that's one of the I think that's one of the beautiful things about Directus is if for any reason in the future you decided to move away from Directus, if your front end was also the back end, you're kinda stuck there. But with your front end being built separately, you can pull that SQL database because as you mentioned, it's just your it's your SQL database. You could pull that information out. All the tables are there. Directus had injected nothing into it, and you could move to another back end. So I I think that some people find the benefit. We we do think Directus can fit long term, but it is nice to sometimes separate those front end things out because if for any reason you needed the SQL database for somewhere else, you could put it somewhere else as well. Yeah. I mean, this is my actual SQL database here. Right? Everything Directus is namespace there. Again, like you said, that's this is just the kind of metadata that enables Directus to do its thing. So, yeah, we've got books. We've got all the lessons. Like, they're all there. Directus, none of this is intertwined with the Directus system data, which it which is very nice. Yeah. I like that aspect of it. I don't see moving this from Directus because, like, the speed at which I can put something together is that's the craziest part of this whole thing for me. I'm not being a professional developer, I'm, like, self taught developer. I've mostly played, like, the get it done guy role, is what I like to call it. Every company that I've been in or even on my own stuff, I'm the guy that if I don't know or I if I don't have somebody that'll do it for me or if, you know, there's a problem, like, I'll figure it out however I need to. And that's what led me into development in the first place. But Directus gives me that tool, like, you know, almost almost too easy for me to go down a rabbit hole and build something. Did you say go down a rabbit hole on purpose? I didn't. No. But that's the bunny puns could come easily, though. So, you know, this new module that we've been working on is basically like a knowledge base of Oh, awesome. SOPs and standard procedures. Yeah. Like I mentioned, a lot of these small shops are they don't have things like this in place. So we're gonna give them a template for this. K. Here's your employee handbook. Go in and customize the pieces that you need, but we'll get you 80% of the way there. And using Directus, like, building something like this out, is super on the back end, I probably spent the most of the time here to build this feature of like cards and collections. So if I open up one of these cards, here's what the back end of this card looks like. Probably the most time spent was just trying to map out how I wanted the data to look. So here we've got collections that hold the cards, collections could be nested into each other, so coming up with that schema, like on paper was probably the hardest part about it, but as far as actually getting an API that I can use on the front end it probably took me 10, 15 minutes to put together these 2 collections inside Directus and actually start building something on the front end, which is huge. This is really cool. If I would have done something previously, I don't have the back end knowledge or skill set. So I would have either been mutts trying to learn that and put that together and maybe something like Laravel or Rails or something that gives you a leg up or been paying somebody 1,000 of dollars a week probably to build something like this. And just like the speed and flexibility that Directus gives me. K, if I've got an idea and my girls are off shopping for the weekend, which is exactly how this feature came about, You know, it's it's easy enough for to build something that's gonna deliver value in in a weekend. Yeah. So so people just need to take more trips away from their family and you could do more projects. Is that what you're saying? I'm not saying that at all. No. If you get a if you get a random weekend where and you have 3 kids and your wife takes them shopping, use that for project time. 100%. Yeah. So seeing this seeing this knowledge base really gets my gears turning on a lot of different ideas that you could start implementing. And I'm not gonna impose any of those on you, but I'm sure you have a lot of ideas and future plans around this project. Could you maybe Oh, yeah. Fail some of those or other things you plan to add on to the this project with Directus? Yeah. I I mean, even yeah. Like, we've got onboarding checklists that are Oh, wow. Like a thing that we're putting into this. So one of the big things in any business really, is how do you onboard new employees? And this is specifically generic enough that it doesn't have to be used for onboarding. But, you know, since we're focused on the team aspect, that's the primary use case here. But, you know, we're working on this onboarding checklist structure where, hey, Whenever we hire somebody, we want them to be able to go in and have just a, hey. Here's how your next 6 weeks or your first 6 weeks are gonna go with the company. And not only does that improve morale, but, you know, it it's easy. It improves retention as well. Like, if you start a new company and you've got the 1st 6 weeks laid out for you, here's everything you need to do to be successful in this new role, that's gonna skyrocket retention. So we've got this set up where you can assign the specific user to a task within the checklist in case, like, a manager needs to be assigned to a certain task instead of the new employee. You could set up due dates, all of that, And then you just run the checklist, and we'll have a couple dashboards in here. This is still very much a work in progress, but that's, that's probably the newest thing. We've got tons of different ideas of what we're gonna implement in the future, but, you know, that's kinda what we're working on at the moment. Yeah. I can see this specific feature being really useful for a lot of smaller startups or companies who just don't have the time to build this. Do you have any plans to list the setup or at least some sort of instructions in the upcoming marketplace. You could be able to to list this up there for other companies to be able to use this as well. Have you thought about that? Yeah. Yeah. I'm totally open to it. I need to learn more about the plans there and how we could make that work. Or you could just send people use the your platform too. Yeah. No. I for me, I don't see this I don't wanna get this thing outside of sign and print. So this is probably gonna be, like, a really niche thing, but, totally, what we built here, it's like, there would be nothing stopping you from taking this and either generalizing it to any company or, for me, I mean, like, you could take this and and focus on your if you had a specific intersection, and that's kind of my philosophy of where I bring value anyway is at the intersection of sign and print and tech, automation, integration. Hey. Bringing those 2 together is like a space that that I have, bring the most value. So if you're out there and you're listening to this and that's that describes you, you got a passion on the tech side, you've got some industry knowledge, you could take something like Directus and build a tool that will help bring in recurring revenue for you or, honestly, if I were to focus on this full time, it could probably be a full time business that that we could grow and scale. But, yeah, I've got a few other priorities, and I quite like the lifestyle aspect of it at this point. That's a perfect segue because I was gonna ask you guys as we kinda start to wrap this up, advice for those people who are building platforms or similar platforms. You obviously have access to the Directus team directly as you kind of work with us week by week. But did you research things on GitHub, or did you reach out to people on Discord? Or did was it kind of just playing around? What advice would you give to those, either new or relatively well versed in direct us? What did you run into that you would advise people to sidestep or hop over if we use a budget plan? Yeah. I've always been, like, action oriented, and I don't know if that's sometimes that's a fault. A lot of times, I think that's a strength because and I know, like you said, you were getting into development, John. There's a lot of, like, courses out there on here's how to become a full stack developer, here's how to become a Vue JS developer, and it's just module after module after module after module. And I've tried those, and I discovered that it didn't work for me because it it's either a project that we're building that I don't care about or it's just too abstract in the moment. The it's like, I don't know when I'm gonna use this. That's the same reason that I couldn't give you if you gave me a calculus test right now, I couldn't tell you the first answer on any of it because I haven't used any of that stuff in so long even though I learned it. So the first thing that I would say is, hey. If you got a decent idea or one that you think could be a good side project or a business side. Get into Directus. It's simple enough to build out your data model. I've even got if you're looking for a starter on the front end, where is this thing? So our platform is built on Nuxt, which is based on Vue. Js, but if you need a good starter that already has the plumbing connected with Directus, we've got a starter that you can use as well. So you can pull this down, it's just Brian Gillespie slash nuxt3 dashdirectus dash starter on GitHub. It's getting a little popular, I think. Not that 55 stars is anything compared to the 18 or 20,000 at Directus, but this is a good starting point. Like, just set up a couple collections inside Directus, start building something. And then as you run into challenges, the direct to stocks will be your best friend. Shout out to Aaron on that side of things. I've seen a lot of great improvements on the documentation recently. I really love this cookbook section, like some of these things, how to do a content hierarchy. This was kind of one of the things that probably tripped me up when I first started with Directus, some of these more specific things, which I'm sure that's a challenge for you guys as well because Directus us can could do so many different things. Yeah. Like, how do we tell people how to set these things up? And then the community has been great as well. Even even before I was doing the videos on YouTube for DirectUs, if I would run into any gotchas, k, I I don't know how to do this. I think Brain Slug was one of the guys that reached out and helped me before he was working with the team as well. Yeah. Like, initially, I was trying to set this up and, like, tenancy is a big question that came up as well, and it was one of the things that I had trouble navigating of, like, how do I set up not just, like, an account inside here, but each account has many different users. So, how do I manage all of that inside Directus? I know Directus will do it, but how do I figure it out? And the guys in the community, guys and gals, I should say, were very helpful in that regard of just hopping into the discord, which I like a lot more so than, like, a support forum or some of those other it's nice just to hop in and just kinda post a question and see who's already had experience doing this thing. Yeah. Shout out to BrainSlug as well. I'll second that. I think his name is the one I see the most in Discord, and I believe he was on vacation a couple months ago, and it got a little quiet in Discord. I'm like, we need brain slug back. So shout out to him. Yeah. Yeah. And there's quite a few names that I see popping up time and time again. So one of the other kinda nice things that I really like about Directus here is the insights module, where I've just been able to set up, like, a quick dashboard that shows me our accounts. So this was back in October. That was when we initially launched, and I could see how many accounts are being created each day, the total number of accounts. So we've got a free plan, and we've got a pay plan. I could see how many people have published their shop listing within our community, what our recommended book numbers come from, and this is all community driven stuff. Hey. This is one of my favorite vendors to work with, or this is a book that I recommend reading. But Direct has made this really easy, whereas, again, like, if I wanted to do this, I would either be exporting the data from Directus and doing a pivot table and some charts inside Google Sheets, which would be a blast. Pivot tables. Or I would have to build I would have to build the same functionality somewhere into my own app, which would be kind of a pain to do. So Directus makes this super simple for me. And this has this has been helpful to share with the other guys that are working on the podcast and this platform with me just to give them motivation. K. We signed up 3 accounts today, and we've done very little promotion on this thing at all. So Have you played around with flows at all? I know for me, flows can get pretty technical pretty fast. Yes. Yes. So we do have several flows going on. One of the cooler features that I really like about the, like, the community module that we have, in addition to like the list view of here's all the member shops that we have where you can browse what their capabilities are. Hey, if I are you UL certified? Which means, hey, can you do electrical work? Or do you have a wide format printer? One of the really nice things here is this map view. Sign and print is locally, it's mostly a regional, local type market. You're not gonna, with the exception of really large signage, if you want a banner or something simple, you're probably going to be dealing with a local person. So this is another thing that I stole from Directus. You guys were using Mapbox on the admin side for geolocation. Previously I'd used Google Maps and I found Mapbox to be a lot easier, but I wouldn't have known about that had it not been through Directus. But being able to, like, filter these based on a map, tremendously helpful. Okay, I'm located in West Virginia, who around me has a bucket truck that can go do an install, so here's a couple different options that I can find. So it's all about collaboration. But on the Directus side, when somebody edits their listing, and it looks like I've managed to break something there, when they edit their listing they add their address information. So on the flow side of things we've got a Flow set up that will send that address to Mapbox and pick up their latitude and longitude geocode data anytime that listing is updated. So if they go in and change the address, that will store their location correctly. See I've got so many different modules I can't even find them. Directory. You need a little map icon. You're all iconized, you just need a little map. Yeah. That's what I need. Yeah, so the geolocation data here, it will automatically generate this for us. So that was been a that was a huge, like, one up for using flows, so I didn't have to, like, custom code any of that or do it manually. Some of the other flows that we've got on our Mastermind calls, We've got, let's open that up. So we've got these thumbnail images that show when you go through and browse through these previous calls. That is a flow that is set up whenever the recording is posted for that previous call it will go out to Vimeo and capture the thumbnail image so we could show it here. And I've also got just a nice little anytime a new user account is added, it will ping us inside Slack. So let me see if I can open this up for you guys just to give you a taste. Yeah. So we've got an inbox inside Slack that whenever a new user and a new account is created, that happens through flows as well. Very cool. I assume you used a little bit of just toying around till it worked, which is what I do. I just kind of change one thing until it works. Probably a little bit of the dots. Is that kinda how you figured some of those out? Yeah. So my new method for flows is basically taking it step by step. Like, I will create the initial flow or, like, the trigger setup, and then I will trigger that flow to make sure to see what data I've got coming out of it, and then I will just kind of march step by step after that. That kinda makes it easier for me to stay focused instead of building, like, 30 steps at once and then trying to figure out why I'm not getting what I want at the end of it. I've also my wife makes fun of me. I've got sausage fingers. So a lot of my trouble with flows is usually just just because of typos that I'm not paying attention to. Yeah. I think the I think I was working on a flow on one thing that I'm kind of toying around with here yesterday or the day before. I think I had about 70 iterations where I was just changing 1 step by step like you kinda do, but also why isn't this working? Okay. Let's change this one thing. Oh, let's change this let's change it to another thing. That's my method of figuring out how it works. Because you you kinda mentioned just starting Yeah. I yeah. I think you get you learn how to do it. Yeah. I yeah. I think you get you learn how to learn at that point. That's probably the biggest skill is, like, you could go through and you could certainly read all the docs or watch all of the YouTube videos that you guys have done or the ones that I have done. But until, like, you actually need that knowledge, like, you may forget some of that. So, like, I really prefer, like, an action oriented approach where you just dive in and try to figure it out, and then there's plenty of resources available when you get stuck. Yeah. Correct me if I'm wrong, Pedro. I think even as sometimes when we're filming these from the field episodes that are also on our YouTube, I think sometimes people ask questions and on those phone calls where sometimes those questions are asked, our engineer, Jonathan, will answer them. And so when we have to kind of go back and reanswer them on from the field, we kinda have to play around with it until we figure out how to answer the question. Is it the same for you, Pedro, or is it just me who's, we'll figure it out? No. Absolutely. I mean, that there's a little bit of decoding there and going back and reviewing things as they're asked on calls and from the community trying to clarify those things. So definitely feel the pain there. Yeah. There's some of that for me as well where, like, I'm trying to distill a feature into a video. So I've I've got to for me, like, the nuts and bolts of it. Like, you've gotta get into it and do it yourself to actually be able to translate it. So I've it's certainly the it has to be the same way for developers using Directus as well. One of the strengths here is obviously this is no code app that anybody can use, not just, like, the technical members of the team, but, you know, I've got my guys on the podcast. They've got access to this. So if they wanna go in and upload a resource or they wanna upload set up a new meeting for the mastermind calls, they can. And it's simple enough for them to do that. Alright. Awesome. Well, Brian, we thank you very much for being a part of the I made this podcast or video series, whatever you wanna call it. And thank you for giving us a deeper look into better sign shop and everything you're doing there and all the work you've done within Directus. I guess maybe to to leave this off, what, the last question would be maybe what would you like to see from Directus that you haven't seen yet? Or is there a feature that you've just been dying to see come to Directus? That's a loaded question there. You're getting you're getting me into trouble, Pedro. No. Yeah. I've been consistently impressed with everything that Directus has done. And I had this conversation with Wrike, I think, on one of the calls that I was looking for some guidance on. Hey. How do I do this one feature? But I was talking to Wrike, and I was like, man, you're doing the right abstractions. There's that balance that you've gotta strike of, like, hey, flexibility and and just, like, not taking not putting too much magic into it. I as far as what I would like to see, I think Flows could probably use a little more work on the developer experience side, like, making it easier to figure out what's gonna come out the other end of it. It. That that would be a tremendous help as I get more into flows. What else? I and I I think I saw this on maybe one of the roadmap pages, like an Airtable like spreadsheet view layout where I could edit a lot of data at once would be very helpful. I think there is probably what, like real time, like websockets maybe in the future. I don't know that we have a ton of application for that. Maybe in the future, there'll be, like, a BetterSign Shop chat module where these guys could talk to each other through the app. Yeah. Create your own little discord. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm excited to to play around with that, certainly. I a lot of times now, I feel like a kid with just, like, a a nice set of Legos. Like, I've got the $100 set of LEGOs, not like the cheap $10 set. Like, Directus gives you that nice LEGO set that's got all the pieces where you just build whatever you want out of it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, again, I'll thank you for your time as well. I will second that flows. All of that you the things that you mentioned, I think, are in the works. But as someone who has already said in this video that flows can get pretty technical pretty quickly, I will second that. We need some one one click easier options for us nontechnical people, but I do agree that it's very powerful in a good and dangerous way for someone like me who can break things. But thank you again for your time, and thanks to everyone who's been watching this. We'll see you on the next one. And if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us either on YouTube, Discord, via our website. Follow along and subscribe. Also, go and follow Bryant on his social media accounts as well. We'll put those in the link and description. Thanks again for your time and we'll see you on the next one. Yeah. Thank you, guys. It's been a pleasure. And scene.",[191,192,193],"963ba582-ba10-4576-9b97-a18be8678315","1505448d-c07d-481e-93b9-3695461ce338","02810029-b6f5-4803-a85f-cd995d04d139",[],{"id":133,"number":134,"show":122,"year":135,"episodes":196},[137,138,139,140],{"id":139,"slug":198,"vimeo_id":199,"description":200,"tile":201,"length":202,"resources":203,"people":207,"episode_number":209,"published":210,"title":211,"video_transcript_html":212,"video_transcript_text":213,"content":8,"seo":8,"status":130,"episode_people":214,"recommendations":216,"season":217},"talent-recruitment-platform","894101800","In this episode of I Made This, Erwin and Uwe walk Bryant through one of their recent Directus projects - a engineering job listing and talent recruitment site for their client - Rockstar Recruiting.\n","17109185-a938-45b3-a552-a167c18a56fc",49,[204],{"name":205,"url":206},"Heinrichs & Heinrichs","https://heinrichsundheinrichs.de/",[208],{"name":181,"url":182},3,"2023-06-01","Building a Talent Platform with H&H","\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Hi, guys. Brian here for Directus. Welcome back to another episode of I Made This. Today, I've got very special guests with me, my friends from Germany, Heinrichs and Heinrichs. I've got Erwin and Yueh.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Guys, welcome to I Made This. I this is gonna be probably one of my favorite episodes. How are you guys?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Thank you so much for us. We are fine. Thank you.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Excellent. Excellent. I I I would just preface this to the audience and say that these guys build amazing things with Directus and Nuxt and all kinds of other technologies, and I'm really excited to showcase this project that they are going to demonstrate for us. But before we dive into that, guys, give me the story of Heinrichs and Heinrichs and yourselves as well. Yes.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Sure.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Our story is, I think, not not a normal story for front end developer, but a very normal story for designers. So we both did study communication design, and that's a very graphic design related course. Yeah. You can compare it with graphic design, to be honest. And and we did do during our studies a lot with with user interface designs and things like that, and we did love design all the time.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>And we tried to, bring new ideas for the web to life. And at the beginning, we just were the dinos, and so we had freaking ideas, but, had had the opportunity to realize it. And, yeah. So so we thought about, at at first, we we started with, cooperating with programmers, and they had to bring it to life. And after after a a bit of time, it gets more and more frustrated because we hear heard things like, no.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>It's not possible in this way. So we learn about our by ourself, and that's the reason why we are designers and front end developers right now.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: That's great. So, hey, you guys were working with programmers before, and they just like, they would take your designs and say, hey. This is not gonna work out. And you're like, no. It is.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>It would Yeah. It should be. If we have to do it ourselves, we'll get it done. Yeah. Right.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>I love that. I I I love it. So when did you guys start your agency?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: We we don't have a agency right now. So we're both working as freelancers, but\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Oh, okay.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: We are collaborating the Okay. Of the time. So all all the projects we're doing together. And, we started for, for two and a half years ago, I think. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>With full time just doing our stuff, it's, like, two and a half years.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: So, like, how many in that 2 years, like, how many projects have you guys done?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: We did a lot of projects, to be honest. So, for the most of the time, we're working as, like, ghost designers or ghost front end developers because we, signed a lot of NDAs and worked for global players and, did very niche things where we, design unique, user interfaces, and then we, more more, started to do things for for our own clients. So not just participating in in a team, and I think for our own projects, we did in the last two and a half year. Didn't count it, to be honest. And so there must be more than 20.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: That's awesome. That's awesome. And I like, before the the show, I was browsing around on your website, and I love the the interactions that you guys have programmed into it. Thank you so much. It's like do you do you get to like, do clients come to you specifically for that style of, like, hey.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>We want something very interactive, or is that just like you guys flexing your own creative muscles for your own site?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. It's a bit flexing, to be honest, because at the moment, we're just, we just get, our clients not because of our huge, our huge, digital performance. And the digital performance, it's more like, we don't we don't have any we don't have an Instagram account. We, we barely happen on LinkedIn. We I think our website is currently, not, so the robots 16 blocks right now Google and things like that.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: So it\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: barely happen out there in the in the world wide web, but we're trying to to, yeah, to to reach out more and more. And we also have a plan doing a block and things like that to get more so that we can show more the Heinrichs and Heinrichs approach and not be, we're just ghost designers, and you can place us into a team, and then we will figure something out.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. Yeah. I I mean, I I love it. Like, I think your approach is awesome. And, talk to me about, like, the the tooling that you guys are using.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Like, first and foremost, like, what are you what are you designing it? Like, how are you how do you come up with this stuff? Does it like, does everything start in, like, a sketchpad, or you, like, go straight to Figma? Like, talk to me through that.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. It depends, to be honest. So sometimes we we, go the the very classic way and start with a mood board and think about so if if it's a if it's a topic where we have to deep dive, then we have to then we start googling a lot. So which are which which what does our client do? So what what does he want how does he want to present himself in the in the Internet or with this idea of his, of his brand?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>And then we start, for example, with the mood board, and then we go straight into Figma or Adobe XD and start there, with some ideas. They can roughly be just some UI components, more more like a rough scratch, not not just so we don't do a pixel perfect design at the beginning. It's more of the direction process where we, where we try to generate look and feel and, to to bring a brand to life. Yeah. And after that, then we go for Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>For a more precise approach. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Alright. Cool. Cool. What are what's your your tech stack that you guys are using for, like, most of your clients?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Our tech stack is for us. So Nuxt 3 is one of our most used front end frameworks. Yeah. We we also did some things with pew 3, but when it comes to a website for our clients, then Next 3 is our way to go. And for the back end\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: the go to.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Use\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: I love Nuxtree.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. We we we do also. And for the back end, now our main way to go is directors. So we all we so whenever there is a a chance to place directive, then we're going to use it. I yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Yeah. We\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: would. And, of course, that's why we're here. But but yeah. Yeah. Like, what did you guys like, what tools did you use for back ends before Directus?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Or Like our well, let me preface that. Like, are most of the sites that you're doing, like, very content heavy? Or, like, are you doing, like, apps for clients as well? Or We did both.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: So we we started with\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Okay.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: So when when we when we talk about the the typical client who just needs a website, then we came from, WordPress. So, like, almost everybody who started with just the front end things, and there there we started in the in the very early stages. We just, bought the theme, And then we customized it, changed the colors, had to look out, had to look of which which plugins could we install and things like that. And after that, we started doing our own themes, then we just back introduced Elementor, things like that. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>But yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Competitive. Yes.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Everybody everybody knows WordPress. Yeah. And we don't like PHP, to be honest.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: It's a it's a solid platform. Yeah. It is. I'm right there with you. Like, WordPress is, it's a solid platform.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>I I my experience has been much the same, though. So I'll I'll echo exactly what you guys said.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. It become becomes very difficult when you start installing plug ins and another plugin, and then you have to to update it, and then you have to figure out if it's still compatible with the new WordPress version and things like that. And then your whole page keeps breaking. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: That's that's great when you log in and see there's, like, 75 update notifications for the plugins. Right? You know it's gonna be a good day. It's so true. So I do did you guys jump directly from WordPress into Directus, or was there, like, a\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: No. No. No.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: We some other tool that you try.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. We we did a lot of traditional CMS systems. So we also worked with Joomla. I don't know if this says to anyone out there. We also used KontaO, and that's a very small traditional CMS system.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Then we also used, for ecommerce systems, the WooCommerce plugin. That is WordPress as well, but we also did something with Magento. And, yeah, we we we tried a lot, to be honest. And then there comes the point where we heard about, the headless CMS system at first, and then we also tried things like the Tamek. We also tried, Strapi Strapi and\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Yeah. Pimcore.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Pimcore, and yeah. And then Of course. Also.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Gosh. So I know you guys have been through, like, dozens of different tools.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. We tried everything,\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: to be honest. How did you guys originally come across Directus, or how did you find Directus?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: I was more or less a Google search.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Yes. I'm\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: sorry. So we we just Googled, what is the best headless team f you could use, and then you get, yeah, then you get directors, you get, you get\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Story block, I think, is\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Story block contentful, things like that. And Yeah. That that we we did try every day.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Marketing guys are definitely gonna love that. And and\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: we also love the the open source approach.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. That's awesome.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Because, where we we did, we didn't have much experience with headless CMS systems, so, the open source approach was was the best one for us to to give it a a try. So we started out with a Strapi, I think, and then tried directors. And directors, us had much more flexibility in building these relations between between the data we we want.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. I would say, we, as a designer, directors was usable, was very, very was was was was very easy to use in comparison with Strapi. Because in Strapi, you had to the server has time to reload if you fetch anything in the data object, things like that. So it was more or less in the in the daily task. Directus was way easier to use.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: You change something. You have a real time API, and, this combined with the with the hot module reload, and Nuxt 3 was perfectly efficient workflow for us.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. So I like, my one of my other questions to you guys, obviously, you've got clients that are using Directus. We kinda internally, we consider it like a a Swiss army knife.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Like, you could use it for an app back end. You can use it for a headless CMS. There's, like, too many different use cases. So I'm curious, like, how do you guys present Directus to your clients when you're, either, like, in, like, the initial stages of the project or, yeah, later when you're actually, like, building the CMS and and, you know, showing it to them?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. It depends. Sometimes, we we have, clients who does have a a little bit of technical expertise. And when we drop, when we just, make some backward dropping like Hetto CMS, they are, yeah, go for it. We love Hetto CMS.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>But but and sometimes we have clients who came or who does have WordPress sites at the moment, for example, and they are like, Yeah. Okay. It could be faster, but, I think it's already fast. And then you have to deep dive into what what are the, what what are the the opportunities while using a headless CMS and why it's so much better than using a WordPress, for example, in this scenario where you have to, maybe in our example, what we're going to show, that we have, that we have 2 fraud end sites and one director's back end. This is so much more practicable than than a WordPress back end.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>And and then sometimes where where we do a back end for for a web application, for example, then, there's no other possibility than using Swiss Army knife, as you said, as directors, for example.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: I see.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Or you even could use it for the digitalization of portfolio. That's also things we've done with, product information management systems. But, as we deep dive in in directors, we learned that this also could be totally possible doing with directors, and that's also a thing.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. Like, the spoken like a true, champion, I guess. Like, that is he like, you guys are very good. Very good. I also love Let's get into it.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Alright. Like, are you guys ready to dive in? Oh, go ahead. I'm sorry, Yue. Sorry.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>I also love the the the\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: the the fact that we can, like, outsource the the content task to the to the to a specific person or to a specific team and say, go for it.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: That's true.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Fill it out, play with it, create some content, and we can focus on building, the front end or the actual use case for the date, the the other ones are creating.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. That's so true.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. So you can hey. Like, being able to, like, decouple the content and the the front end the business logic. Useful in that scenario.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. That's true.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Great. Cool. So do you guys wanna dive in and and show this project? I can remember, like, seeing it when we had a a quick call before we scheduled the episode, and I was blown away. And I I think the audience is too.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>But\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. Sure. I'm going to share my screen.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Okay. Alright. So while we're sorting out the details there, Yueh, why don't you kind of give me the backstory of the project?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: So the backstory was, we had so it it all started, I think, 7 or 8 years ago. I was still a student, when I got the connection to, to Rockstar Recruiting who just, who just, raised their who who just build their company, and, they asked me back then for a logo. And that's still the logo we can see over here. And we did a a small so I I did a small brand design back then. And now after, yeah, 7 years later, they reached out back and said, maybe you could help us, doing a new homepage, a new website, and that's what we did.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>And, yeah, that's what you can see here right now. That's awesome.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: So 8 years ago, you did the website or the logo for them, and then they like, 8 years later, they're like, hey. This guy is awesome. Let's come back and get the website done.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. It's yeah. That's how it happens.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: So they are a so they're, basically, a recruiting firm for developers and engineering talent. Is that that's what I gather from the website.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. That's that's exactly what they are. So they are a recruiting agency who, are looking for developers and data engineers and things like that. And, the first thing we did here was, we asked them, how do the users of your website reach to your website right now? And they said, yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>The most of them are not, some some Google search hits. They are more like they go to a lot of showcases and things like that, and they're and they're Mhmm. From there, they go to the website. So we thought about when do most of the people who go to this website already know who Rockstar is? Why don't we start with a huge call to action where you can reach out to the to the point, what you're going to do right here?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>So if you're if you're a company and want to hire a tech talent or, if you're a candidate, meaning a developer or a data engineer or something like that, you could also go right to the to the candidate page. So we just made the animation where you can switch to left and right for, the for the candidates and also for the companies.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Nice. Yeah. Nice. And I I love the, like, the black and white aesthetic and and just yeah. It, like, it it feels very much, like, you're specifically targeting developers in it.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Are those, are those keyboard shortcuts that I see down there as well?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. The the these are keyboard shortcuts inspired by the terminal, meaning you have, for example, here, you can see the control and h button, then you will get the would get to home or you could press control and e to go to the imprint and, for the events or the recruiter or everything like that. And you could can hit it and go straightly to the recruiter page, for example, like I did here. Or, you also could, if you're not, technical, more, more a company, for example, who want who's who's searching for technical developers, then you also could, can also just press the button. So the idea is to have a a user experience for both, for the developers or the tech experience people, but also it should be, able to navigate if you don't have much experience with with the terminal in this scenario.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Yeah. And to keep it here, we we used a lot of, look and feel, you know, from from from the one point zero time. So, like, these ASCII borders, and this typing animations and everything. It's feels like like like a bit a long time ago.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. That's so true. And, when we beautiful.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: How long did you guys spend in, like, the design phase for this?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: I think the design\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: phase Just curious.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: In in 8 days, something like that.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: I think the the whole phase with with finding the right idea and deciding which one to go, it went about, like, a month.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. When you go for the whole process with with thinking about the boot and yeah. Then it did take something like a month. But the the the the designing process where we just made the UI components where the idea was set, then, I think we we wait. We went forward pretty, pretty fast.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Yeah. And and here we have things like, for example, the ASCII border. In the screen design process, it was pretty simple, and we thought about, yeah, the this this would be something like you would do it in the web 1.0 version. And, we didn't think one second about how it could be used, in a responsive scenario because in the one point zero world, there was no responsive. So we had we had problems that that we never thought about because when you when you want to, make this ASCII border responsive, it gets, it it gets it was quite complicated, to be honest.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>So we made the SVG grid.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. I bet. So yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: We we just started with just using some CSS and changing the content. Then we learned, okay. It's not possible. Then we used the Busia then we tried to boost JavaScript. Also pretty hard, and then we came to the SVG grid.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: It there you go. Yeah. That's you guys definitely made it challenging on yourself. Like, the end result, it it looks great.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. But yeah. The these these are some small things which you didn't think when you're designing that that you never would think about.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Yeah, it could can could be a problem doing a border like this. So\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Yeah. These are the things, which which, which which come back with a comment, like, this is not possible.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. That's so true. And I can totally understand that.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. I can totally understand that\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: the the this would be something which can come at yeah. Possible. Yeah. But we made it possible with with a lot of effort, but, yeah, it's it's there. And, yeah, we also did hear the Odenowski animations.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. Those are great. Can you guys or does your client, Rockstar, mind if you show us around, like, the the direct us instance that's powering this?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: No. Not at all. We asked before, and it's not a problem at all. So we can deep dive into the directest. So and as we told before, they have 2 front end pages.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>So they have 2 websites, And Groxo, the one we just saw, and text executive can also show that. That that's the same thing for, for executive roles in the development process. And, this is\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Okay. Gotcha.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. The the this is right now, that's not an own firm. It's just by Rockstar Recruiting right now. They will change that, I think. But for the moment, they share a lot of global components.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>For example, the people. There are a lot of people who are working for Rockstar right now and also for the executive, That's the point where directors made so much sense because we could, do some global components and some components for Rockstar or for TechSec in this scenario.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Yeah. Like, the locations, the blog post, people, and so on.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. The blog post, for example, goes for both. People goes for both. And also the locations because they, decided not to translate their content. They decided to, just show the different different locations with different content.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>So you can choose between Berlin and Zurich, and there you have different people for, for the team, and you have have some some more Berlin related infos and things like that. So if you we go for the whole Got it. Here you here you can choose Cool. Between Berlin and Zurich, for example. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Nice. So this is using the Directus translations feature, but not necessarily for translations. It looks like it's all in English.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: That's true. All is all is in English, but they, we just use the translation feature as a location feature, and it works pretty good.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. That's great. So it looks like I see over in the, like, the nav bar, you've got your globals, and then you've got, like, your different stacks of rock star versus tech executive. And, like, how like, your what do your clients think of of this? Like, was this, like, an iterative process when you built, like, the back end of Directus with them, or you just said, like, hey.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>We've gone through and mapped all this, and then just, like, hey. Go take a look and tell us what you thought.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. That's that's one of the coolest thing in that. Coolest things in directors because we we do draft with, how we want to organize our data or how we want to be more specific when we have a UI component like, this one at the beginning, how we want to, to make it possible to change these these words which are typed over here. And then there are things which just make sense. For example, here, you can add the text for it, and then it will just, be changed in the in the front end.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>And it's, you can extend it with other, with other developer variants, how we called it, or you can erase one just with the tech feature.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: But Gotcha.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. And and\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: And you guys have it looks like every bit is dynamic on here. Like, the\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. Almost.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: That's so true.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Almost. Yeah. Yeah. That's great.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: And and yeah. Because we we, as designers, we love to give the users a good experience on the front end. So on the website, when they are entering it, we we love a good user experience when they know how to navigate, when they know how to scroll, when they know where all the, most important informations are. But, with Directus, we had the opportunity to also make a good user experience for the back end, and that's the thing we really love because, we have the possibility to say, okay. We can we can, make almost every all yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Almost, everything dynamic, and then they have the possibility to change some things. But, in this scenario, it's almost not not only almost, it's impossible to break the design, because, all all things are as limitless as they they will always look good. It doesn't matter how much they enter here. And that these are the things when you for example, when our clients had Elementor in WordPress or things like that, they they just started entering a headline, which was, I don't know, 100 and 20 words or something like that. And the whole design breaks, and everything looks awkward.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>And, yeah, with directors, we have\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: I've I've been there a bunch of times.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. And we have the possibility to limit everything that's that's almost impossible to break the design. And that's a huge thing we love about.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: What are, like, 2 or 3 of your, like, your favorite pieces that you guys have implemented for this?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: I think the the contact form for tech executive was quite a quite a thing.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. That's true. This one's one of our most loved features. It's a contact form for the tech executive page on, tech executive. And there you have the differentiation.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>So how do you want to start? You can choose between I'm a candidate or I represent a company. And if you choose 1, then you get, to the to the type to to the form wizard where you can enter your name and, your last name, then your email, and, your phone number. Okay.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: It checks it's a real phone number. Okay.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: And, all this is completely dynamic, and has has is completely editable. So you have the question groups. You can see over here with data, then the professional track record, technical skills, additional informations, and you can see all these things for the candidate form here. So you have the personal data, and there you have the questions we just go through. So first name and, last name, email, phone, things like that.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>And you always have the possibility to create a new question, and there you can choose between a question type. So we have a question with answers or a question with input or a question with answer autofill. So if you go for the answer, for example, I will show the the front.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. This this looks really amazing. I I can't imagine how many hours you guys have spent just on this one component.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. It was quite hard. But I I think it's very cool because now it's it's a pretty fast wizard for very complex and for a very complex, for a very complex topic because entering all data in from a CV, for example, the technical knowledge in this scenario is a question with answers autofill in short over here. And this is a component where we made, a question with answer autofill. The question is, what's your technical knowledge?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Then enter your program image you're familiar with and write your experience from 1 to 6. And then you get all the autofill words. These are the, most used programming languages. And then you have the rating enabled, and you get, you can enter a a thumb a hint for each star. So it's a Novitz beginner intermediate advanced professional.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Wow. This is And when\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: mind blowing, guys.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: And when you, for example, add JavaScript, you can choose, you're a beginner or a new leads. And this this all comes from directors. And you have the possibility, for example, to do this with technical knowledge, but you could also use this component for, for languages. So are you a fluent speaker of, English, Spanish, or whatever? And then you also could rate it, and you could also, change the the the, the states here with intermediate bonds and things like that.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>And you could also, also, fill in all the autofills, like we did here. This is\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Wow.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Pretty cool thing where we first used the edit draw value because when we when we we we got we were provided the list with, I don't know how many there. I think something like 250 programming languages. That's And then and then we yeah. That's that's that's true. And then we want to add it.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>And the first thing we tried was, like, okay. Yavas, and then we did some commas, but it didn't work because when you enter a comma that makes sense, then it just enters the this, this, this tag. But placing all 250 tags with with just copy paste them, it would be a lot of work. And then we just found out, ah, you you have the possibility to edit the to edit the raw value. And then we just, take all of them, export it as a JSON, and place copy paste it in here, and voila.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>There they are. Yeah. That's pretty cool that that you also want.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Is that something that you teach your clients as well? Like, the edit raw value? Do your clients use that? Or just kind of you guys\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: For for this specific use, we didn't have to because it's more like a initial fill. Because after after reporting all the 250 tags, the the only things which can happen in the future is that there will be 1 or 2 more, and you just have to enter them in here. So you you you will never have the the the possibility the use case again where you have to import 250, auto fill words because yeah. Which programming language? I don't know.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>They they just added, I think, OpenAI or something like that, which is pretty new. But, it's not like there are 3 or 4 program languages a month.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Right. Right. What's, I'm I'm curious. Like, what do the relationships look like just for, like, this one, like, question and answer, like, form component?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Which in the data mode?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Uh-huh. Yeah. We we have the question groups with the name, description, and questions. Here, I see many to many relation question. And Look\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: for the questions. Okay.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: We have the question. No. No. That's the group Where are we? Here the quest.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Ah, yeah. Okay. So it's it's a credit it's a huge it's a huge question, data model. But it's it's still very easy to use because we made we would did work a lot of conditions in this scenario. So this is what I oops.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>This is what I thought, would which I have shown here. When you go for a new question, we have so many conditions that the first thing you would see is the question type. And after filling that, you will get the, question, question description, author words, and then you have also the condition for, do you want a rating for the answers? And if you enable that, you also, could, can change the, the rating description.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: So So it's very much yeah. It's a it's a lot of information, but, like, with the conditional fields inside Directus, you don't overwhelm the end user at all. It's very clean. Yeah. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>I love it, man. Thank you. What like, are there any other, like, favorite little features that you guys have have built into this thing?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. I think one of the the things we already have shown was, the the thing was the developer variants over here. And, one thing we also done is additional pages, And this is where we didn't use, right now, the many to any relation where you just can, place some components in. But, they had the idea that they want for SEO landing pages for for, different keywords which which they are going to pay for for the, Google Ads. And, that that's when we introduce the the component additional pages, and this is, just the ID in the next, and they can add it over here.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>So they have the page name contracting, for example, then they got a huge where they can implement everything. They also have a script field because they are, they have a good technical expertise. So and they ask for it and we just let them do that. But, yeah. Normally normally, this would be a much too too much for a customer with no technical expertise.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Right. Yeah. And Yeah. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. It's really easy to blow up the site with those script tags. That's so true.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: But in this scenario, it works, and they have the possibility to enter a page name, and then they are live, the pages. So they you can reach them by entering the slash. And if you want to, if you want to, if you want to place them in the menu, you also have the possibility to go into the menu field, and there you can add the menu and also have the possibility to add the letter for the quick access, for example.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: So the menu we showed. I mean,\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: like, you guys have literally thought of everything with this.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. It it was very fun because, we we we it was the first time we we we recognized, how many possibilities there are with, not just making it dynamic, and also to make something like conditions and to limit things and to give, things like soft quotas in the in the blog posts for the descriptions, for example. And, yeah, these are a lot of things which which just made so much fun. That's the reason because why we, yeah, why we try to to And not everything dynamic.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: And also have the the whole control over the the the map. This was also pretty pretty impressive where each page had the type description in which field, which the the the client can use if if he if he wants to. And this Mhmm. Was was pretty neat and pretty pretty, pretty good because he he has the the whole control over over the SEO thing and, over his Google Ads campaigns. This was also, like, a game changer for us.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. That's true. The metadata field was Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: And it looks like that is using the the translations feature as well.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. That's true.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: So you can have different metadata for the different locations.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Nice. And we also make\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: And, is it, like, are both of these sites are built on Nuxt on the front end?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. Both both are Nuxt front end pages.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Gotcha. And,\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: hey, like, like, obviously, like, you guys are you you mentioned you had a lot of you experience, but, you know, what were your like, as you were building this, like, what would you say are, like, your favorite bits or or, like, why why would you reach for Nuxt versus just, like, regular Vue or, you know, one of the other I think there's several other frameworks on Vue as well.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: I think Nuxt works best for us because it we test the different render modes, for for example, the hybrid rendering and the the SSG thing, and and the new, we we use I think it was the first time we were using, like, the server side rendering because before we to. We also we we we just did a project with aesthetic Yeah. Just aesthetic aesthetic size, aesthetic stack.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: That that was two times, but, yeah, we we also did the the the Nuxt generate and, reached out their static sites. But, yeah, the server side rendering thing is way too cool, to be honest.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: For me, I like the the file based routing because in in in the classical view environment, it's, it's it's it's it's in the ass to to configure the route and to say the these are the children of this route and and to register all the components. And if you want to start a a website with Nuxt, you just hit the CLI, go for it, and, directly start, developing for I think it's it's the perfect way to go. It it it and it keeps the boundaries for for for for get for making progress very low.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Love it. Love it. What, it'll, like, did you guys have any trouble integrating Directus with Nuxt?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Not at all. We we did we did see, there there was a example online already, I think, with with the block and next, thing, and that's that's something we set up, and then we just get from there. We we are we had everything we we needed, to be honest. So it was very easy.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Yes. The beginning I saw, I think it was your guitar repo, Brian, the the one with the nice director's actually\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: True. True. It was his.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: We built a little wrapper around because, we had to to implement the, our localized functionality. So we had a little wrapper around and around the wrapper, where we check, okay, which local is present and which local should be used. So,\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. Great, guys. So I I do wanna be respectful of your time. I know we're I think we've gone a little over what we had planned, but this is, it's so interesting to me to, like, see how you guys have constructed this and put it all together. You know, let's talk about, like, the the future.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Like, what's, what's the future look like for you guys? I know that's pretty vague, but, like, what are you working on? Like, what do you wanna where do you wanna go with this? Like, what else do you wanna do? One\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: thing we we are going to do for the page we just have shown, I think quite funny because I've seen you you just released, I don't know, 2 weeks ago or something like that, a video with, ChetchyPT and directors. And Yeah. That's the thing we we, did also in the same time, to be honest. And we That's great. We we love it because the idea is to you still have a a a long journey while filling out the whole form for a candidate for, because you have to do, you have to enter your name, your email, your telephone number, and also some some text, like, what are experiences in your technical industries and things like that.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>And our idea is to, just drop down your CV, and then we will pass all the data set it to chat gpt, and chat gpt will sort all the data into the fields we have in our form. Just, we'll prefill the whole form, and in the best case scenario, you just have to press next next next next and send.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Wow. That would be amazing. That would be a great dude. Like, we're calling that new series the direct to top line, but that would be that would be a great episode as well. True.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Oh, and what about the the future for you guys? Like, do you have a a bunch more projects in the works aside from this one? Or\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. We we we do have some daily tasks, but, for us as as a Calabrio, we, our next step would be to we we're the moment refactoring our own home page. So our Heinrichs on Heinrichs.ke. And, we we just set up a directors for this site also, and we're trying to to, reach out to the world with more, with more public relation. So we we're just looking forward to, to, release a blog and to do some things on LinkedIn to have the possibility to get more cool projects like Rockstar, for example, and not just to be in our daily task and as a ghost designer and ghost developer.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Yes. And also, the website is getting a new a new look and feel, a new, a new design update, a new technical update. We're moving to moving into next 3.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: So at the moment, Fuse. Right?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Yes. And we're also doing trying trying a new thing with directors, where we, we are rendering blocks. And maybe we can show\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: many to any\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: where we where we are where we're trying to like like a home page. The home page contains different blocks. And in the front end, we will have, like like a like a render skeleton where Mhmm. The the API call determines which component gets rendered. So we have, like, like, a front end block and a back end block, which will be which can be used, like, in in in in many ways or for many projects.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. The the main idea is to have,\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Like like reusable components over and over and over. Like like like a like a like an own component framework.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Small library where we just make, can make some, front of UI components and directors and reuse in our Nuxt framework, to to, yeah, to just get things passed down If you have the reusable components\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: that you\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: use all the time I've\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: got some to share with you guys on that front then. Yeah. Yeah. I I I've got a project that is in the works, teasing the audience a little bit, but I'll share it with you guys for sure. I think it'll be helpful for you on that side.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. We can.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. Guys, so if anybody wants to learn more about you guys and, like, look at some of the projects that you've done or or even work with you guys, like, how how's the best way to go about contacting you?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: You? Reach us our our, to our website. So it's it's a very complicated URL. Many for the English speakers because it's Heinrichs. De, but, we just bought a new, URL, Heinrichs.cool.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>And then you cool.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Very good. That's a little easier.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: That's very easy. There you can reach us via email every time.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 2: Yes. I think when this episode will go live, and the new date will also be live. This is this is not me calling you out.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Don't put yourself on a timeline. We're gonna I think we're gonna turn this one around pretty quickly. So, yeah, I I I I look forward to seeing the the new site. I could tell you all the the guys on our team played around with your existing site for, like, 20 minutes, and they were like, oh, this is so cool. So I can't wait to see what the new one looks like.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Guys, been a pleasure. I I really appreciate you joining us, and I I can't thank you enough. And I I look forward to seeing, like, the next project that you guys come out with.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Thank you so much for having us.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Alright, guys. Thank you. Thanks.\u003C/p>","Hi, guys. Brian here for Directus. Welcome back to another episode of I Made This. Today, I've got very special guests with me, my friends from Germany, Heinrichs and Heinrichs. I've got Erwin and Yueh. Guys, welcome to I Made This. I this is gonna be probably one of my favorite episodes. How are you guys? Thank you so much for us. We are fine. Thank you. Excellent. Excellent. I I I would just preface this to the audience and say that these guys build amazing things with Directus and Nuxt and all kinds of other technologies, and I'm really excited to showcase this project that they are going to demonstrate for us. But before we dive into that, guys, give me the story of Heinrichs and Heinrichs and yourselves as well. Yes. Sure. Our story is, I think, not not a normal story for front end developer, but a very normal story for designers. So we both did study communication design, and that's a very graphic design related course. Yeah. You can compare it with graphic design, to be honest. And and we did do during our studies a lot with with user interface designs and things like that, and we did love design all the time. And we tried to, bring new ideas for the web to life. And at the beginning, we just were the dinos, and so we had freaking ideas, but, had had the opportunity to realize it. And, yeah. So so we thought about, at at first, we we started with, cooperating with programmers, and they had to bring it to life. And after after a a bit of time, it gets more and more frustrated because we hear heard things like, no. It's not possible in this way. So we learn about our by ourself, and that's the reason why we are designers and front end developers right now. That's great. So, hey, you guys were working with programmers before, and they just like, they would take your designs and say, hey. This is not gonna work out. And you're like, no. It is. It would Yeah. It should be. If we have to do it ourselves, we'll get it done. Yeah. Right. I love that. I I I love it. So when did you guys start your agency? We we don't have a agency right now. So we're both working as freelancers, but Oh, okay. We are collaborating the Okay. Of the time. So all all the projects we're doing together. And, we started for, for two and a half years ago, I think. Yeah. With full time just doing our stuff, it's, like, two and a half years. So, like, how many in that 2 years, like, how many projects have you guys done? We did a lot of projects, to be honest. So, for the most of the time, we're working as, like, ghost designers or ghost front end developers because we, signed a lot of NDAs and worked for global players and, did very niche things where we, design unique, user interfaces, and then we, more more, started to do things for for our own clients. So not just participating in in a team, and I think for our own projects, we did in the last two and a half year. Didn't count it, to be honest. And so there must be more than 20. That's awesome. That's awesome. And I like, before the the show, I was browsing around on your website, and I love the the interactions that you guys have programmed into it. Thank you so much. It's like do you do you get to like, do clients come to you specifically for that style of, like, hey. We want something very interactive, or is that just like you guys flexing your own creative muscles for your own site? Yeah. It's a bit flexing, to be honest, because at the moment, we're just, we just get, our clients not because of our huge, our huge, digital performance. And the digital performance, it's more like, we don't we don't have any we don't have an Instagram account. We, we barely happen on LinkedIn. We I think our website is currently, not, so the robots 16 blocks right now Google and things like that. So it barely happen out there in the in the world wide web, but we're trying to to, yeah, to to reach out more and more. And we also have a plan doing a block and things like that to get more so that we can show more the Heinrichs and Heinrichs approach and not be, we're just ghost designers, and you can place us into a team, and then we will figure something out. Yeah. Yeah. I I mean, I I love it. Like, I think your approach is awesome. And, talk to me about, like, the the tooling that you guys are using. Like, first and foremost, like, what are you what are you designing it? Like, how are you how do you come up with this stuff? Does it like, does everything start in, like, a sketchpad, or you, like, go straight to Figma? Like, talk to me through that. Yeah. It depends, to be honest. So sometimes we we, go the the very classic way and start with a mood board and think about so if if it's a if it's a topic where we have to deep dive, then we have to then we start googling a lot. So which are which which what does our client do? So what what does he want how does he want to present himself in the in the Internet or with this idea of his, of his brand? And then we start, for example, with the mood board, and then we go straight into Figma or Adobe XD and start there, with some ideas. They can roughly be just some UI components, more more like a rough scratch, not not just so we don't do a pixel perfect design at the beginning. It's more of the direction process where we, where we try to generate look and feel and, to to bring a brand to life. Yeah. And after that, then we go for Yeah. For a more precise approach. Yeah. Alright. Cool. Cool. What are what's your your tech stack that you guys are using for, like, most of your clients? Our tech stack is for us. So Nuxt 3 is one of our most used front end frameworks. Yeah. We we also did some things with pew 3, but when it comes to a website for our clients, then Next 3 is our way to go. And for the back end the go to. Use I love Nuxtree. Yeah. We we we do also. And for the back end, now our main way to go is directors. So we all we so whenever there is a a chance to place directive, then we're going to use it. I yeah. Yeah. We would. And, of course, that's why we're here. But but yeah. Yeah. Like, what did you guys like, what tools did you use for back ends before Directus? Or Like our well, let me preface that. Like, are most of the sites that you're doing, like, very content heavy? Or, like, are you doing, like, apps for clients as well? Or We did both. So we we started with Okay. So when when we when we talk about the the typical client who just needs a website, then we came from, WordPress. So, like, almost everybody who started with just the front end things, and there there we started in the in the very early stages. We just, bought the theme, And then we customized it, changed the colors, had to look out, had to look of which which plugins could we install and things like that. And after that, we started doing our own themes, then we just back introduced Elementor, things like that. Yeah. But yeah. Competitive. Yes. Everybody everybody knows WordPress. Yeah. And we don't like PHP, to be honest. It's a it's a solid platform. Yeah. It is. I'm right there with you. Like, WordPress is, it's a solid platform. I I my experience has been much the same, though. So I'll I'll echo exactly what you guys said. Yeah. It become becomes very difficult when you start installing plug ins and another plugin, and then you have to to update it, and then you have to figure out if it's still compatible with the new WordPress version and things like that. And then your whole page keeps breaking. Yeah. That's that's great when you log in and see there's, like, 75 update notifications for the plugins. Right? You know it's gonna be a good day. It's so true. So I do did you guys jump directly from WordPress into Directus, or was there, like, a No. No. No. We some other tool that you try. Yeah. We we did a lot of traditional CMS systems. So we also worked with Joomla. I don't know if this says to anyone out there. We also used KontaO, and that's a very small traditional CMS system. Then we also used, for ecommerce systems, the WooCommerce plugin. That is WordPress as well, but we also did something with Magento. And, yeah, we we we tried a lot, to be honest. And then there comes the point where we heard about, the headless CMS system at first, and then we also tried things like the Tamek. We also tried, Strapi Strapi and Yeah. Pimcore. Pimcore, and yeah. And then Of course. Also. Gosh. So I know you guys have been through, like, dozens of different tools. Yeah. We tried everything, to be honest. How did you guys originally come across Directus, or how did you find Directus? I was more or less a Google search. Yes. I'm sorry. So we we just Googled, what is the best headless team f you could use, and then you get, yeah, then you get directors, you get, you get Story block, I think, is Story block contentful, things like that. And Yeah. That that we we did try every day. Marketing guys are definitely gonna love that. And and we also love the the open source approach. Yeah. That's awesome. Because, where we we did, we didn't have much experience with headless CMS systems, so, the open source approach was was the best one for us to to give it a a try. So we started out with a Strapi, I think, and then tried directors. And directors, us had much more flexibility in building these relations between between the data we we want. Yeah. I would say, we, as a designer, directors was usable, was very, very was was was was very easy to use in comparison with Strapi. Because in Strapi, you had to the server has time to reload if you fetch anything in the data object, things like that. So it was more or less in the in the daily task. Directus was way easier to use. You change something. You have a real time API, and, this combined with the with the hot module reload, and Nuxt 3 was perfectly efficient workflow for us. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. So I like, my one of my other questions to you guys, obviously, you've got clients that are using Directus. We kinda internally, we consider it like a a Swiss army knife. Like, you could use it for an app back end. You can use it for a headless CMS. There's, like, too many different use cases. So I'm curious, like, how do you guys present Directus to your clients when you're, either, like, in, like, the initial stages of the project or, yeah, later when you're actually, like, building the CMS and and, you know, showing it to them? Yeah. It depends. Sometimes, we we have, clients who does have a a little bit of technical expertise. And when we drop, when we just, make some backward dropping like Hetto CMS, they are, yeah, go for it. We love Hetto CMS. But but and sometimes we have clients who came or who does have WordPress sites at the moment, for example, and they are like, Yeah. Okay. It could be faster, but, I think it's already fast. And then you have to deep dive into what what are the, what what are the the opportunities while using a headless CMS and why it's so much better than using a WordPress, for example, in this scenario where you have to, maybe in our example, what we're going to show, that we have, that we have 2 fraud end sites and one director's back end. This is so much more practicable than than a WordPress back end. And and then sometimes where where we do a back end for for a web application, for example, then, there's no other possibility than using Swiss Army knife, as you said, as directors, for example. I see. Or you even could use it for the digitalization of portfolio. That's also things we've done with, product information management systems. But, as we deep dive in in directors, we learned that this also could be totally possible doing with directors, and that's also a thing. Yeah. Like, the spoken like a true, champion, I guess. Like, that is he like, you guys are very good. Very good. I also love Let's get into it. Alright. Like, are you guys ready to dive in? Oh, go ahead. I'm sorry, Yue. Sorry. I also love the the the the the fact that we can, like, outsource the the content task to the to the to a specific person or to a specific team and say, go for it. That's true. Fill it out, play with it, create some content, and we can focus on building, the front end or the actual use case for the date, the the other ones are creating. Yeah. That's so true. Yeah. So you can hey. Like, being able to, like, decouple the content and the the front end the business logic. Useful in that scenario. Yeah. That's true. Great. Cool. So do you guys wanna dive in and and show this project? I can remember, like, seeing it when we had a a quick call before we scheduled the episode, and I was blown away. And I I think the audience is too. But Yeah. Sure. I'm going to share my screen. Okay. Alright. So while we're sorting out the details there, Yueh, why don't you kind of give me the backstory of the project? So the backstory was, we had so it it all started, I think, 7 or 8 years ago. I was still a student, when I got the connection to, to Rockstar Recruiting who just, who just, raised their who who just build their company, and, they asked me back then for a logo. And that's still the logo we can see over here. And we did a a small so I I did a small brand design back then. And now after, yeah, 7 years later, they reached out back and said, maybe you could help us, doing a new homepage, a new website, and that's what we did. And, yeah, that's what you can see here right now. That's awesome. So 8 years ago, you did the website or the logo for them, and then they like, 8 years later, they're like, hey. This guy is awesome. Let's come back and get the website done. Yeah. It's yeah. That's how it happens. So they are a so they're, basically, a recruiting firm for developers and engineering talent. Is that that's what I gather from the website. Yeah. That's that's exactly what they are. So they are a recruiting agency who, are looking for developers and data engineers and things like that. And, the first thing we did here was, we asked them, how do the users of your website reach to your website right now? And they said, yeah. The most of them are not, some some Google search hits. They are more like they go to a lot of showcases and things like that, and they're and they're Mhmm. From there, they go to the website. So we thought about when do most of the people who go to this website already know who Rockstar is? Why don't we start with a huge call to action where you can reach out to the to the point, what you're going to do right here? So if you're if you're a company and want to hire a tech talent or, if you're a candidate, meaning a developer or a data engineer or something like that, you could also go right to the to the candidate page. So we just made the animation where you can switch to left and right for, the for the candidates and also for the companies. Nice. Yeah. Nice. And I I love the, like, the black and white aesthetic and and just yeah. It, like, it it feels very much, like, you're specifically targeting developers in it. Are those, are those keyboard shortcuts that I see down there as well? Yeah. The the these are keyboard shortcuts inspired by the terminal, meaning you have, for example, here, you can see the control and h button, then you will get the would get to home or you could press control and e to go to the imprint and, for the events or the recruiter or everything like that. And you could can hit it and go straightly to the recruiter page, for example, like I did here. Or, you also could, if you're not, technical, more, more a company, for example, who want who's who's searching for technical developers, then you also could, can also just press the button. So the idea is to have a a user experience for both, for the developers or the tech experience people, but also it should be, able to navigate if you don't have much experience with with the terminal in this scenario. Yeah. And to keep it here, we we used a lot of, look and feel, you know, from from from the one point zero time. So, like, these ASCII borders, and this typing animations and everything. It's feels like like like a bit a long time ago. Yeah. That's so true. And, when we beautiful. How long did you guys spend in, like, the design phase for this? I think the design phase Just curious. In in 8 days, something like that. I think the the whole phase with with finding the right idea and deciding which one to go, it went about, like, a month. Yeah. When you go for the whole process with with thinking about the boot and yeah. Then it did take something like a month. But the the the the designing process where we just made the UI components where the idea was set, then, I think we we wait. We went forward pretty, pretty fast. Yeah. And and here we have things like, for example, the ASCII border. In the screen design process, it was pretty simple, and we thought about, yeah, the this this would be something like you would do it in the web 1.0 version. And, we didn't think one second about how it could be used, in a responsive scenario because in the one point zero world, there was no responsive. So we had we had problems that that we never thought about because when you when you want to, make this ASCII border responsive, it gets, it it gets it was quite complicated, to be honest. So we made the SVG grid. Yeah. I bet. So yeah. We we just started with just using some CSS and changing the content. Then we learned, okay. It's not possible. Then we used the Busia then we tried to boost JavaScript. Also pretty hard, and then we came to the SVG grid. It there you go. Yeah. That's you guys definitely made it challenging on yourself. Like, the end result, it it looks great. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. But yeah. The these these are some small things which you didn't think when you're designing that that you never would think about. Yeah, it could can could be a problem doing a border like this. So Yeah. These are the things, which which, which which come back with a comment, like, this is not possible. Yeah. That's so true. And I can totally understand that. Yeah. I can totally understand that the the this would be something which can come at yeah. Possible. Yeah. But we made it possible with with a lot of effort, but, yeah, it's it's there. And, yeah, we also did hear the Odenowski animations. Yeah. Those are great. Can you guys or does your client, Rockstar, mind if you show us around, like, the the direct us instance that's powering this? No. Not at all. We asked before, and it's not a problem at all. So we can deep dive into the directest. So and as we told before, they have 2 front end pages. So they have 2 websites, And Groxo, the one we just saw, and text executive can also show that. That that's the same thing for, for executive roles in the development process. And, this is Okay. Gotcha. Yeah. The the this is right now, that's not an own firm. It's just by Rockstar Recruiting right now. They will change that, I think. But for the moment, they share a lot of global components. For example, the people. There are a lot of people who are working for Rockstar right now and also for the executive, That's the point where directors made so much sense because we could, do some global components and some components for Rockstar or for TechSec in this scenario. Yeah. Like, the locations, the blog post, people, and so on. Yeah. The blog post, for example, goes for both. People goes for both. And also the locations because they, decided not to translate their content. They decided to, just show the different different locations with different content. So you can choose between Berlin and Zurich, and there you have different people for, for the team, and you have have some some more Berlin related infos and things like that. So if you we go for the whole Got it. Here you here you can choose Cool. Between Berlin and Zurich, for example. Yeah. Nice. So this is using the Directus translations feature, but not necessarily for translations. It looks like it's all in English. That's true. All is all is in English, but they, we just use the translation feature as a location feature, and it works pretty good. Yeah. That's great. So it looks like I see over in the, like, the nav bar, you've got your globals, and then you've got, like, your different stacks of rock star versus tech executive. And, like, how like, your what do your clients think of of this? Like, was this, like, an iterative process when you built, like, the back end of Directus with them, or you just said, like, hey. We've gone through and mapped all this, and then just, like, hey. Go take a look and tell us what you thought. Yeah. That's that's one of the coolest thing in that. Coolest things in directors because we we do draft with, how we want to organize our data or how we want to be more specific when we have a UI component like, this one at the beginning, how we want to, to make it possible to change these these words which are typed over here. And then there are things which just make sense. For example, here, you can add the text for it, and then it will just, be changed in the in the front end. And it's, you can extend it with other, with other developer variants, how we called it, or you can erase one just with the tech feature. But Gotcha. Yeah. And and And you guys have it looks like every bit is dynamic on here. Like, the Yeah. Almost. That's so true. Almost. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. And and yeah. Because we we, as designers, we love to give the users a good experience on the front end. So on the website, when they are entering it, we we love a good user experience when they know how to navigate, when they know how to scroll, when they know where all the, most important informations are. But, with Directus, we had the opportunity to also make a good user experience for the back end, and that's the thing we really love because, we have the possibility to say, okay. We can we can, make almost every all yeah. Almost, everything dynamic, and then they have the possibility to change some things. But, in this scenario, it's almost not not only almost, it's impossible to break the design, because, all all things are as limitless as they they will always look good. It doesn't matter how much they enter here. And that these are the things when you for example, when our clients had Elementor in WordPress or things like that, they they just started entering a headline, which was, I don't know, 100 and 20 words or something like that. And the whole design breaks, and everything looks awkward. And, yeah, with directors, we have I've I've been there a bunch of times. Yeah. And we have the possibility to limit everything that's that's almost impossible to break the design. And that's a huge thing we love about. What are, like, 2 or 3 of your, like, your favorite pieces that you guys have implemented for this? I think the the contact form for tech executive was quite a quite a thing. Yeah. That's true. This one's one of our most loved features. It's a contact form for the tech executive page on, tech executive. And there you have the differentiation. So how do you want to start? You can choose between I'm a candidate or I represent a company. And if you choose 1, then you get, to the to the type to to the form wizard where you can enter your name and, your last name, then your email, and, your phone number. Okay. It checks it's a real phone number. Okay. And, all this is completely dynamic, and has has is completely editable. So you have the question groups. You can see over here with data, then the professional track record, technical skills, additional informations, and you can see all these things for the candidate form here. So you have the personal data, and there you have the questions we just go through. So first name and, last name, email, phone, things like that. And you always have the possibility to create a new question, and there you can choose between a question type. So we have a question with answers or a question with input or a question with answer autofill. So if you go for the answer, for example, I will show the the front. Yeah. This this looks really amazing. I I can't imagine how many hours you guys have spent just on this one component. Yeah. It was quite hard. But I I think it's very cool because now it's it's a pretty fast wizard for very complex and for a very complex, for a very complex topic because entering all data in from a CV, for example, the technical knowledge in this scenario is a question with answers autofill in short over here. And this is a component where we made, a question with answer autofill. The question is, what's your technical knowledge? Then enter your program image you're familiar with and write your experience from 1 to 6. And then you get all the autofill words. These are the, most used programming languages. And then you have the rating enabled, and you get, you can enter a a thumb a hint for each star. So it's a Novitz beginner intermediate advanced professional. Wow. This is And when mind blowing, guys. And when you, for example, add JavaScript, you can choose, you're a beginner or a new leads. And this this all comes from directors. And you have the possibility, for example, to do this with technical knowledge, but you could also use this component for, for languages. So are you a fluent speaker of, English, Spanish, or whatever? And then you also could rate it, and you could also, change the the the, the states here with intermediate bonds and things like that. And you could also, also, fill in all the autofills, like we did here. This is Wow. Pretty cool thing where we first used the edit draw value because when we when we we we got we were provided the list with, I don't know how many there. I think something like 250 programming languages. That's And then and then we yeah. That's that's that's true. And then we want to add it. And the first thing we tried was, like, okay. Yavas, and then we did some commas, but it didn't work because when you enter a comma that makes sense, then it just enters the this, this, this tag. But placing all 250 tags with with just copy paste them, it would be a lot of work. And then we just found out, ah, you you have the possibility to edit the to edit the raw value. And then we just, take all of them, export it as a JSON, and place copy paste it in here, and voila. There they are. Yeah. That's pretty cool that that you also want. Is that something that you teach your clients as well? Like, the edit raw value? Do your clients use that? Or just kind of you guys For for this specific use, we didn't have to because it's more like a initial fill. Because after after reporting all the 250 tags, the the only things which can happen in the future is that there will be 1 or 2 more, and you just have to enter them in here. So you you you will never have the the the possibility the use case again where you have to import 250, auto fill words because yeah. Which programming language? I don't know. They they just added, I think, OpenAI or something like that, which is pretty new. But, it's not like there are 3 or 4 program languages a month. Right. Right. What's, I'm I'm curious. Like, what do the relationships look like just for, like, this one, like, question and answer, like, form component? Which in the data mode? Uh-huh. Yeah. We we have the question groups with the name, description, and questions. Here, I see many to many relation question. And Look for the questions. Okay. We have the question. No. No. That's the group Where are we? Here the quest. Ah, yeah. Okay. So it's it's a credit it's a huge it's a huge question, data model. But it's it's still very easy to use because we made we would did work a lot of conditions in this scenario. So this is what I oops. This is what I thought, would which I have shown here. When you go for a new question, we have so many conditions that the first thing you would see is the question type. And after filling that, you will get the, question, question description, author words, and then you have also the condition for, do you want a rating for the answers? And if you enable that, you also, could, can change the, the rating description. So So it's very much yeah. It's a it's a lot of information, but, like, with the conditional fields inside Directus, you don't overwhelm the end user at all. It's very clean. Yeah. Yeah. I love it, man. Thank you. What like, are there any other, like, favorite little features that you guys have have built into this thing? Yeah. I think one of the the things we already have shown was, the the thing was the developer variants over here. And, one thing we also done is additional pages, And this is where we didn't use, right now, the many to any relation where you just can, place some components in. But, they had the idea that they want for SEO landing pages for for, different keywords which which they are going to pay for for the, Google Ads. And, that that's when we introduce the the component additional pages, and this is, just the ID in the next, and they can add it over here. So they have the page name contracting, for example, then they got a huge where they can implement everything. They also have a script field because they are, they have a good technical expertise. So and they ask for it and we just let them do that. But, yeah. Normally normally, this would be a much too too much for a customer with no technical expertise. Right. Yeah. And Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's really easy to blow up the site with those script tags. That's so true. But in this scenario, it works, and they have the possibility to enter a page name, and then they are live, the pages. So they you can reach them by entering the slash. And if you want to, if you want to, if you want to place them in the menu, you also have the possibility to go into the menu field, and there you can add the menu and also have the possibility to add the letter for the quick access, for example. So the menu we showed. I mean, like, you guys have literally thought of everything with this. Yeah. It it was very fun because, we we we it was the first time we we we recognized, how many possibilities there are with, not just making it dynamic, and also to make something like conditions and to limit things and to give, things like soft quotas in the in the blog posts for the descriptions, for example. And, yeah, these are a lot of things which which just made so much fun. That's the reason because why we, yeah, why we try to to And not everything dynamic. And also have the the whole control over the the the map. This was also pretty pretty impressive where each page had the type description in which field, which the the the client can use if if he if he wants to. And this Mhmm. Was was pretty neat and pretty pretty, pretty good because he he has the the whole control over over the SEO thing and, over his Google Ads campaigns. This was also, like, a game changer for us. Yeah. That's true. The metadata field was Yeah. And it looks like that is using the the translations feature as well. Yeah. That's true. So you can have different metadata for the different locations. Nice. And we also make And, is it, like, are both of these sites are built on Nuxt on the front end? Yeah. Both both are Nuxt front end pages. Gotcha. And, hey, like, like, obviously, like, you guys are you you mentioned you had a lot of you experience, but, you know, what were your like, as you were building this, like, what would you say are, like, your favorite bits or or, like, why why would you reach for Nuxt versus just, like, regular Vue or, you know, one of the other I think there's several other frameworks on Vue as well. I think Nuxt works best for us because it we test the different render modes, for for example, the hybrid rendering and the the SSG thing, and and the new, we we use I think it was the first time we were using, like, the server side rendering because before we to. We also we we we just did a project with aesthetic Yeah. Just aesthetic aesthetic size, aesthetic stack. That that was two times, but, yeah, we we also did the the the Nuxt generate and, reached out their static sites. But, yeah, the server side rendering thing is way too cool, to be honest. For me, I like the the file based routing because in in in the classical view environment, it's, it's it's it's it's in the ass to to configure the route and to say the these are the children of this route and and to register all the components. And if you want to start a a website with Nuxt, you just hit the CLI, go for it, and, directly start, developing for I think it's it's the perfect way to go. It it it and it keeps the boundaries for for for for get for making progress very low. Love it. Love it. What, it'll, like, did you guys have any trouble integrating Directus with Nuxt? Not at all. We we did we did see, there there was a example online already, I think, with with the block and next, thing, and that's that's something we set up, and then we just get from there. We we are we had everything we we needed, to be honest. So it was very easy. Yes. The beginning I saw, I think it was your guitar repo, Brian, the the one with the nice director's actually True. True. It was his. We built a little wrapper around because, we had to to implement the, our localized functionality. So we had a little wrapper around and around the wrapper, where we check, okay, which local is present and which local should be used. So, Yeah. Great, guys. So I I do wanna be respectful of your time. I know we're I think we've gone a little over what we had planned, but this is, it's so interesting to me to, like, see how you guys have constructed this and put it all together. You know, let's talk about, like, the the future. Like, what's, what's the future look like for you guys? I know that's pretty vague, but, like, what are you working on? Like, what do you wanna where do you wanna go with this? Like, what else do you wanna do? One thing we we are going to do for the page we just have shown, I think quite funny because I've seen you you just released, I don't know, 2 weeks ago or something like that, a video with, ChetchyPT and directors. And Yeah. That's the thing we we, did also in the same time, to be honest. And we That's great. We we love it because the idea is to you still have a a a long journey while filling out the whole form for a candidate for, because you have to do, you have to enter your name, your email, your telephone number, and also some some text, like, what are experiences in your technical industries and things like that. And our idea is to, just drop down your CV, and then we will pass all the data set it to chat gpt, and chat gpt will sort all the data into the fields we have in our form. Just, we'll prefill the whole form, and in the best case scenario, you just have to press next next next next and send. Wow. That would be amazing. That would be a great dude. Like, we're calling that new series the direct to top line, but that would be that would be a great episode as well. True. Oh, and what about the the future for you guys? Like, do you have a a bunch more projects in the works aside from this one? Or Yeah. We we we do have some daily tasks, but, for us as as a Calabrio, we, our next step would be to we we're the moment refactoring our own home page. So our Heinrichs on Heinrichs.ke. And, we we just set up a directors for this site also, and we're trying to to, reach out to the world with more, with more public relation. So we we're just looking forward to, to, release a blog and to do some things on LinkedIn to have the possibility to get more cool projects like Rockstar, for example, and not just to be in our daily task and as a ghost designer and ghost developer. Yes. And also, the website is getting a new a new look and feel, a new, a new design update, a new technical update. We're moving to moving into next 3. So at the moment, Fuse. Right? Yes. And we're also doing trying trying a new thing with directors, where we, we are rendering blocks. And maybe we can show many to any where we where we are where we're trying to like like a home page. The home page contains different blocks. And in the front end, we will have, like like a like a render skeleton where Mhmm. The the API call determines which component gets rendered. So we have, like, like, a front end block and a back end block, which will be which can be used, like, in in in in many ways or for many projects. Yeah. The the main idea is to have, Like like reusable components over and over and over. Like like like a like a like an own component framework. Small library where we just make, can make some, front of UI components and directors and reuse in our Nuxt framework, to to, yeah, to just get things passed down If you have the reusable components that you use all the time I've got some to share with you guys on that front then. Yeah. Yeah. I I I've got a project that is in the works, teasing the audience a little bit, but I'll share it with you guys for sure. I think it'll be helpful for you on that side. Yeah. We can. Yeah. Guys, so if anybody wants to learn more about you guys and, like, look at some of the projects that you've done or or even work with you guys, like, how how's the best way to go about contacting you? You? Reach us our our, to our website. So it's it's a very complicated URL. Many for the English speakers because it's Heinrichs. De, but, we just bought a new, URL, Heinrichs.cool. And then you cool. Very good. That's a little easier. That's very easy. There you can reach us via email every time. Yes. I think when this episode will go live, and the new date will also be live. This is this is not me calling you out. Don't put yourself on a timeline. We're gonna I think we're gonna turn this one around pretty quickly. So, yeah, I I I I look forward to seeing the the new site. I could tell you all the the guys on our team played around with your existing site for, like, 20 minutes, and they were like, oh, this is so cool. So I can't wait to see what the new one looks like. Guys, been a pleasure. I I really appreciate you joining us, and I I can't thank you enough. And I I look forward to seeing, like, the next project that you guys come out with. Thank you so much for having us. Alright, guys. Thank you. Thanks.",[215],"162e7b09-df83-4b34-ae4b-a88eddb69e52",[],{"id":133,"number":134,"show":122,"year":135,"episodes":218},[137,138,139,140],{"id":140,"slug":220,"vimeo_id":221,"description":222,"tile":223,"length":224,"resources":225,"people":229,"episode_number":234,"published":235,"title":236,"video_transcript_html":237,"video_transcript_text":238,"content":8,"seo":8,"status":130,"episode_people":239,"recommendations":242,"season":243},"boutique-web-agency","901507988","In this episode of I Made This, Bryant is joined by Miguel Stevens, the creative force behind Studio Monty, a Belgium-based agency specializing in lifestyle and bespoke websites. Miguel shares his journey from a childhood fascination with computers to founding his studio. ","1a6f3e0d-558f-445d-bc0d-f97bb36270aa",47,[226],{"name":227,"url":228},"Studio Monty","https://www.studiomonty.be/",[230,231],{"name":181,"url":182},{"name":232,"url":233},"Miguel Stevens","https://www.linkedin.com/in/miguelstevensbe/",4,"2024-01-23","Building a Boutique Web Agency with Studio Monty","\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Hi, guys. Welcome back to another episode of I Made This. I'm your host, Brian Gillespie, developer advocate here at Directus, and I have got my extra special guest with me today, mister Miguel Stevens from Studio Monti. Miguel, happy to have you, man.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Hi. Thanks for having me. Glad\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: to Yeah. Yeah. So, hey. Like, you and I have talked inside our directus community a couple times through Discord or, I I think, even on several, like, GitHub issues probably. But, you know, for those who don't know you, maybe, give us a little intro or, you know, what's the backstory?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Sure. So my studio is called Studio Monty. We're a Belgium based web company. We do lifestyle websites, boutique kind of websites, so not not a big technical prod products, but more like the the well and refined designed projects. And we always offer CMS, of course, which is direct us.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: So we don't necessarily have to dive in, directly to direct us. Super glad that you're using that. But, you know, tell me a a little more about the agency. Like, how did you get started? What what led you to that?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>You know? If we back up even further, like, how did you how did you get into development?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Okay. Cool. Good question. I think for me, the case, like many people, has been like a a child passion. When I was 8 years old, my dad bought me a a Pentium 386 or what was this called?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>I don't even remember it.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: And I was I'm not sure.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: The 386. Old computer with with floppy disks.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Okay.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. And the\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: I'm trying to think of, like, what the what the the megahertz they were running back in the day. I think the first computer I had was, like, maybe, like, 96 megahertz or something\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: like that. Right? The people remember. No, like a diskette disk. How do you call it in English?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>It's 3.14 megabytes or something.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. There you go.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: And the floppies were even less than that. But I started experimenting with Microsoft FrontPage, which, like, Dreamweaver is really old, but FrontPage, that's a whole other level. So I think I just roll I I started making small websites with cheat codes for roller coaster tycoon, things like that. Hey. There you go.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>So then my my whole journey has been development. I worked in some big development companies in Ghent, and I worked in some boutique agencies, but it's always been about about design and development. Yeah. So I I I love both. I'm a 100% developer.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>I it has to be beautiful. Right?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: I guess it. Yeah. So and you guys mentioned that you focus on boutique websites. Could you, you know, like, expand that a little bit? Like, specifically, like, what does the average project look like for you guys?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Sure. I think with boutique, I mean, those are mostly websites with less than 10 pages. Design is very important. They wanna have something unique about them. So we we don't do it's not like WordPress templates, where you can clear a seed template.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>We always work with a designer. We we do custom designs, and custom development. It's it's very much focused on the specific needs of each client. And yeah. And then it's in the lifestyle sector, so, it's fun companies, interior design, architecture, things like that.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Yeah. Very local as well.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. So, hey, smaller businesses, clients who are very concerned with image and design and, looking professional.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. Is\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: that a fair summarization?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. Very fair.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: What does your what does your process look like on those projects? Like, on the front end, like, how how you mentioned it's local, but how how do most of these clients find you?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. For us, it's been a case of. Right? So, I think we started only 1 year ago, and all projects we've had have been through local Netflix. You make a website for someone you know.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Before you know it, their uncle wants a website, and then you really get started and and your network grows. I do try to there's a we're based in Ghent, Belgium, and there's a good community of, of, people that are, yeah, entrepreneurs. What's the word in English?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. Yeah. You got it. You nailed it. What?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. So there's a lot of events, that we that I tried to go to to meet people, to talk about how we can help people. So it's been word-of-mouth. That's the English Cool.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: You're primarily. Excellent. Yeah. Talk to me about your process. Like, yeah, being a, like, you're doing smaller projects that are, let's say, not, like, super data intensive.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>If like, what's your like, what's the time span from, like, conception or or, like, the idea phase to, like, launching a project? Talk me talk me through your process because I'm super curious on that. Like, what those type of projects actually like, what the flow looks like.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Okay. Good question. I've been refining this because I feel process is really important to make something replicable and scalable. So what's important for for me is I always start with a very intense strategy session. And so it's, like, 1 to 2 hours where we sit down with the client and really listen, like, what what are your challenges?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Where do you wanna go with your business? Who do you wanna be in 5 years' time? It it can be very personal because each business has, like, these typical problems. They want more revenue. They want the right type of client.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>They want they want their website to provide more information, better customer service for their clients. So we really drill down the goals for each website, and only then do we start going to wireframing to to design and development.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Gotcha. Now in that strategy call, is that, like, after you've already quoted them and and they sent them a proposal?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Or Oh, yeah. Right. I forgot that part. So I think it starts with a sales conversation. You you call on the phone mostly, or you go face to face and you just listen.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Can we help you? I think it's important. The big money topic. There's a lot of interesting videos about this, but a lot of people I read about, a lot of starting people are afraid to discuss money. They all wanna talk about money upfront, but I think it's important that you know what's in what's their budget, what can we do to help them, and, how can we make it work?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>So it's I think it's this first sales call is is very important.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. That's that's always the toughest, like, conversation. Right?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Right. Like, how come I've got\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: a I've I've got a number in my head. You've got a number. Right. Yeah. Like, how do we talk about like, how do you how do you address that with clients?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Like, you said you you don't shy away from it.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: I think during those first 15 minutes, it has to be clear what the budget is. So if it's not clear from them, tell you, you can just ask upfront, like, what budget do you have in mind? And if that range is acceptable for the type of websites, then we can then we can go for that. For example, startups, I wouldn't work with a fresh startup because they don't need a custom built website. Startups can use Wix or Squarespace, which is mostly enough to help them.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>So it it would be it wouldn't be good customer service of me to try to sell them a website because they don't need custom websites in their first month. Yeah. So I try to be very honest. I'm not the type of person who just takes on a client to get the money and then, no. I can't help them.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>If I can send them to Squarespace, then we'll happily do that. Yeah. Yeah. It's honesty and transparency. Right?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. Yeah. I love that. That's super critical. You know?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Mhmm. And even being like, you said you started the agency about a year ago. I can imagine, like, in the early days, it's a little harder to do that. Right? Where like, hey.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>We need a couple of projects through the door, but, still, if it's not a right fit, you you turn them away anyway. That's that's, that's pretty cool.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. At the beginning, you have to take on a lot of projects, obviously, because you just started and there's no, no real cash flow, but yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. Well, cool. So you have the strategy session. You guys get into, like, their company goals and, like, aspirations and things like that. And then how do how do things progress from there?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Sure. Once we know after the strategy session, I make a content model, which is like a sitemap, but for each page, I also include elements. This happens after research. So we look at competitors. You look at the industry.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>What does the industry expect from websites of that sector, and and, what does the competition do? What do they do good? What don't they do good? And then we discuss some styles. There's there's more meetings.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>And then it's onto the design phase. For bigger projects, we do a style guide first. If there's a copywriter to be involved, you're a copywriter, obviously, and that's onto design. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Gotcha. Like, do you have any, like, philosophy? Like, what's your design philosophy? Yeah. I I I think for me, when I used to do projects, like, doing competitor research is is absolutely critical.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Right? You gotta know what the landscape is, but how do you how do you not let that inform your own design? You know what I mean? Like, you you don't wanna just, like, copy competitors or you don't want to on the surface, you may not know whether that is actually working well for the competitor or not. Right?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>So, hey. Like, what is your philosophy on design, and, like, how do you navigate, just hey. Like, hey. Here's what everybody else is doing. Here's what we think is gonna actually work well for you as a to your clients.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Mhmm. I think it's it's important obviously to look at the top ten. Right? We we we don't compare with businesses that are on page 20 on Google. And I think it's important if you're looking at, like, what's the content going to be to only focus on the content.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>It's like you just said, we try to if we see, like, interesting piece of content, I I copy paste the text and put it in Figma in, like, a sort of prototype. We don't screenshot designs because, like you say, if you start screenshotting designs from other companies, your design will be influenced by that. So I think it's important in the in the first phases where the content is being decided, that you just focus on what's what's being written, what's being told. I also saw an interesting video by The Future, and they they make this comparison like, a website has to answer questions. So we always start with that in mind.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>I write the quote and I'll accept it, and they say, a website is like a conversation. Right? You come to my website. It's like you come into my house, and you you have questions for me. Like, will this product help me feel more whatever.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>I don't know. So the the order of your website, the content has to answer all people's questions. This is something we I try to keep in mind when building the content model.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. I I love to hear you say that because everybody says that you should be content first, but, like, what I see a lot of times is, like, there's a whole board of inspiration of, like, hey. We like this site. We like this site. We like this site.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>And then you're working backwards of, like, hey. Let's let's incorporate this theme and, hey. Like, take some ideas from this. And what I'm hearing you say is that you guys you you don't take screenshots of other websites. You might, like, snip some content, but it is very much, like, content driven.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>There's no like, when you're in the design process, there's no, like, outside influences from other websites. Is that right?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. Maybe a bit. I I mean, I have a designer who I work with, and she, she loves designing, so she's not content first. I'm a big fan of content first, but I think it depends. It's it's one of the biggest chicken or egg problems in the web design industry for me is do you do the content first and then have your designer build around the content?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Or do you have the designer design first and then put the content in the available space that the designer chose. It's we we've been trying both, ways of working, and there's no winner yet. I get you.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. I I I think it's just just like the messy middle\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: of, like, hey. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Like, where things come together.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: I don't know if there's an answer to if someone has an answer to the the big chicken or egg design versus content first question. Please let me know.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Okay. Cool. And sales great. So I like, going through the design phase, like, obviously, hey. Like, are you who does the development?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Like, the actual like, are you doing a lot\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: of the actual code at\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: this point or got somebody else on the team? Like, what does that look like?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. I it depends if it's, if it's really busy and I'm like doing a lot of intakes and strategy, then I outsource the development. I'm working with someone who is really capable. I had to look, for a long time before I found him, but I have someone who helps me out. And sometimes I do projects myself.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>It's good to to stay in the flow. Right? So Nxt is evolving very quickly. Direct is evolving really quickly, and I I wanna, be up to date with everything. So I I still like to to, develop as well.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>To if it's still\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: like to jump in. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: I I think that's, like, a common case for a lot of us. Right? You get into it. Like, you you love building stuff, and then, like, inevitably, you've gotta take on more of the business stuff, and that gets in the way of of, like, the fun stuff of actually building and creating. And it's very much the same way for me where, like, I I love to build and create, and, like, the other stuff kinda I I I enjoy that as well, but it kinda gets in the way.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Right?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: I I think it's you never wanna have, like, 0 or 100 to to one side. I think it's always I always love developing. Maybe it's the same for you. Yeah. When there's time, it's it's great to just put on your headphones and be in the flow for a whole afternoon, writing code.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>It's amazing. It's still fun.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. But excellent. Well, what what is the average timeline? So, like, we we've talked about the process. Like, it start to finish, like, how quickly are you you know, how long does it take for the average project to Mhmm.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Start to launch?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: I think in theory, it would take, like, 1 month. But in practice, it's always 2, 3, 4 month. It's because I think there's something we're struggling with. It's very hard to to really I mean, it's only 1 year since we started, but it's very difficult for me right now to know exactly how long something will take. Sure.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Depending on on how how fast does the design go, what types of content. So sometimes the client wants to write a copy himself, which is mostly something that will take long because nobody likes writing copy unless you're a copyright. Make your friends. I noticed that clients seems to seem to, like, not want to do it, so they they keep on, delaying it, and then it never happens. So it's it's a combination of waiting for assets.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>There's, like, a photographer involved, which is something for the types of websites. In the CGM Monti builds, we I wanna work with good photography. And minimal design is really important. So then you have a photographer who has to, be involved in the process. So there's a lot of variables, right, that can stretch or tend the timeline, but you you don't know in advance.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. They like, on the photography side, do you require your clients to to work with a professional photographer? Or\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Well, this is something I started doing now since the last client. Yeah. I guess It's secured in the in the in the offer as well. I used to add, like, an an add on, like, photography optional, but there people are paying a lot of websites a lot of money for a website, and they're like, I don't need good pictures. So now it's just included in the price, and it's, yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Oh, that's smart. Yeah. I I always hate to see a well designed website and then, like, the same stock photos that you've seen on 35 other websites. It just ruins it ruins everything.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: The stock photos are the worst. I think the dark iPhone picture by the owner is even better than the stock.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. At least it's real.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Yeah. Or it feels real. I I'm sure that's a real person in the stock photo, but, you know, some of those stock photos, I I don't know, like, how people make those poses. Like, I think you never see that stuff in real life. Right?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Well, I think it's it's your eye sees it directly. I mean, your stock photo, you can see it from very far, and it it gives the site a sort of fake feeling. It's it doesn't feel right when you see stock photos.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: So, like, shifting into, like, the tools that you're using to build the sites, like, what does your preferred, like, stack look like? You know? Right? What tools are you using on the front end, on the back end, that sort of stuff?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: So it's, for us, it's Nuxtree on the front end and then Directus, on the back end. Yeah. Gotcha. We're running it on Docker containers for our production servers as well as, local local hosting. It's also on Docker.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Nice. Yeah. You're definitely one of my preferred stacks. But, like, what what led you to those 2 pieces? Like, you know, were you using those a year ago when you started?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Or yeah. I know you mentioned front page that you were using way back in the day to build stuff. Like, walk walk me through the progression because that's that's super interesting for me because I I remember front page. I remember Dreamweaver. Right.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>I even I'm I'm not sure I I'm not sure if Angel Fire or, like, GeoCities were ever popular outside the US, but it was like a it was like a free website builder where you could get on and have all the animated GIFs and, like, all the all the crazy counters and all that stuff back in the day. But that's that's how I got my start in the industry as well. It was back in the day using those tools to kinda scratch stuff together.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: I think that you said this rings a bell, but I I never heard of for this Angelfire. Angelfire.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: It was yeah. It's basically like a a free website builder host. Like, you could you could throw, like, crazy backgrounds and stuff on there and write your text. But the rest of it, you know, back in those days, it was all just whatever HTML you could throw together yourself.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. Marquee elements and stuff like that.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: So, I started my development. I mean, my first company I worked with was Laravel. So it was PHP. I loved Laravel. It's it was easy to use for me.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>It was a a dream come true after writing spaghetti code in PHP. But the older I got, and I started working with Vue, and I started loving JavaScript a lot. For me, it feels much cleaner, the syntax and PHP. I'm stirring some feathers here. I know.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>It's a big discussion. PHP lovers are everywhere and the JavaScript lovers. But for me, it's always been JavaScript. So when I started this company 1 year ago, I promised no PHP. So, my first thought was, okay.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>I need a I need a JavaScript back end. So I started looking into headless CMS systems. Strapi Strapi. I don't know how you pronounce it. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Was the first one I tried, but I I found it difficult to work with. I don't know. It was it didn't feel right. So I tried a few others. I tried story block.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>I tried content folks for a while, and then someone on Reddit mentioned Directus. Mhmm. I think version 10 was just released. When was it released? Do you know version 10?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Version 10 or version 9. Version 10 was that's Yeah. Version 10 was not so long ago. Version 9 was, like, a big change. Version version 8 was on PHP.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Oh, really?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Version 9 version 9 was, like, the switch to to node to, like, the JavaScript side of things. And that was a a crazy big shift. That was about the same time that I actually found directives myself.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Okay. That's\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: when when version 9 was released,\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: which was You weren't there in the BHP era.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: I I was not. No. I I wasn't even aware of the tool, which is Okay. Which is wild.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. And that's why I think it's someone on Reddit brought me to Directus, and I I tried it out, set it up. The documentation is great, and I just got it working. And then I just built my first website.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. Nice. So I like, what were you said, like, the other tools didn't feel right, and that that definitely feels like a like a designer thing of a it doesn't feel right. But were there a like, any, like, issues that you encountered that were you were like, hey. This is this is not working for me?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Like, can you even remember any of those tools? Like, what were the the red flags, like, if you can remember any?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. I think for me, now that I think about it, the biggest thing was since I mean, headless CMS systems can be used for, like, internal tools, for softwares. But for our studio, it's always going to be a CMS system. So my thought was if a client I remember with Strapi, I thought, if a client has to work on this, it's gonna be complicated. And for with directors, it just felt very calm.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>I could see my even less tech savvy clients work in this system. So for me, it was mostly a choice of, okay, which system are people my clients going to be able to work in without having to call me too much with questions. It it Not having to do a 12 hour CMS training.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: It is very much from, like, the client perspective. Yeah. I I can remember that personally, like, seeing it like, I I went through a bunch of those as well. And, like, the seeing the white space and just I you mentioned calmness or the the calm, of, like, hey. This is really well designed, and it's open source, which is great.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: But I can remember looking at it and like, hey. Like, okay. Yeah. This feels right. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>I think it\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: was a gut feeling. It's like a first impression. Right? You always set up doc. You open the tool and it's okay.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>This feels good. And I think what I also remember is the image handling direct is is is perfect. For CMS systems, there are always gonna be images, and the I think the file library and all the systems around it are built really, really solidly. So, yeah, that's a big plus\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: as well. What does, like, the average project look like for you inside Directus for for a client? You know, like, maybe through, like, the data model. You know? Or maybe just talk me through some of those, and and I think you've got a few things to show us.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>But, maybe just so you could, like, talk me through how the projects look inside Directus before we jump into that.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Okay. Cool. I think the last three projects were mostly similar. So we have pages. We have a page builder using the, many to any builder system.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>And then we have just like projects, testimonials, the team page. So it's mostly, managing data. We're not too heavy on flows at the moment. There's a few flows for, like, building, which we'll get into in a in a few minutes. But, yeah, it's mostly page builder.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>That's the biggest, chunk. And we use blocks. So every page, you can just, compose yourself with blocks. Clients don't really use that too much. It's mostly for myself.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>A block is reusable. It's a nice, neat piece of code, which can even be reused in in other projects. So yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: How do you, like, how do you present, like, the CMS and, like, direct us to your clients, like, through that phase? Is that, like, a discussion that you have, like, at the very beginning of a project? Is it like, hey. Oh, we got your website. You're gonna be able to edit all the content through this CMS.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Yeah. Are you, like, talking me through how you present that solution to the client?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Sounds good. In my last, few offers, I included, screenshots or a video of directors. And the good thing is that clients mostly come from WordPress. So when they see directors, they're like, this is impossible. They almost can't believe how easy it is.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Crazy. The the reactions are just amazing. The last two clients were really like, this is so easy. Essentially what they said. I sat next to them for the CMS training.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>We put in some data together and just they came from WordPress. They were like, this is really easy. So it feels really good to have clients, have this this sort of really good experience.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Now are are most of them coming from, like, the the drag and drop page builders where they've gotta go in and manage, like, all the padding and spacing and colors and all of that? Okay.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. Or from WordPress installations that are like a plug in hell, and everything's a plug in, and there there have to be and people don't like that. I think directors, you can also you can protect your clients. Like, you give them roles, and they only they can only edit what they're assigned to do. I know you can do that in WordPress as well, but WordPress feels like very, very much.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>And clients, they mostly don't have a lot of time. They maybe want to add a new testimonial. They had just want to log in, click testimonial, add new, and be done with it.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: So Yeah. They they don't wanna, yeah, geek out on the the software or the tools like like we do. They just wanna get\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: them out.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: They've got other stuff to do.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. They don't care what tool it is. It just has to be easy enough.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. Cool. Well, do you wanna maybe share your screen and and show us, you know, like I would love to share with the audience, like, what the the typical, like, front end project looks like for you, And then, you know, maybe show us around the the back end if you're if you're able to.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. Sure. Let me just share my screen real quick. K. Cool.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>So this is a project we finished, 2 months ago. It's a website for a company that does funding. Yeah. We like white space. We like beautiful fonts.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>These pages are so this is Nextree. This is a statically generated website. So Okay. It's on it's built on Netlify. So it's not SSR.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>It's SS SSG.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: What's what is the what's the the display font there? Like, all the headings.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: The this font?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. I I I really like that font. Have a look.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: I should know that. Ah, silica. It's silica. Right. Silca.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>It's nice having font.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. Yeah. It looks great. I and, like, I've got another project that I'm working on personally that, I I've been eyeing fonts, and, like, that process is always, like, such a nightmare of, like, going through and trying to suss out just the perfect font for a project. This one looks great.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Right.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Might have to worry about.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Beautiful fonts are mostly really expensive, which is fair.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: True. True.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: And this is actually just a page built and page builder. They have cases, which are like, yeah, project cases. And what I love about this, it feels really snappy. I mean, this is Nuxt. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>It's pre rendered, so that's the speed is the speed is amazing. Speed score is also really good. There's a form in here which will, be sent to directors as well. Nice. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>And it's a dynamic form if you if you go to a case and you wanna be then your case will be prefilled here. This all will be sent to directors. Yeah. That's cool. What's\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: a great great looking site.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. Thanks.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Very clean.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: What are you, what are you using for, like, the the transitions and the animations? Is it, are you, like I'm just custom coded CSS, or is it, like, a different library?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: It's a wrapper component. It's called scroll transition dot view. I made it together with someone else, I think. We used it in a previous project. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>And it just, yeah, it shifted into, into view.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: As yeah. It's it's very tasteful. I think for me, that's one of the other things that I always struggle with on some websites is, like, everything is animated. There's, like, a crazy amount of motion, and it it just distracts from the the story in some cases. But this is this looks really well done.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: I think it it has to be subtle. What I would like now is for, like, working on some images that, like, slide in from the right. Some some tiny animations, but I don't want it to be much more than this.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. It looks great.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: So for the for the back end, as you see the models we have, this is heavily based on the agency OS, by the way, which I think which you wrote most part of it.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. Most of it is mine.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: So thank you for this. Yeah. No. Great.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: How No. Happy to you know, that project was like a labor of love because it it it took me a long time to figure out how to manage, like, the page blocks. And I was like, okay. Like, once you see it and and you've got a a reference, it's much easier to understand. But when I first came to Directus, I knew this functionality was available.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>It just like, there weren't any good references reference points to to use. So I I'm happy that it's been helpful for you. 100%.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Oh, it yeah. It is. I don't know if I would have managed without. I think it's also it's a plus point because there's a lot of back end systems, but you guys took the time to write out a full front end to showcase how it can be used. So that's I'm very grateful for it.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>It's, it's amazing. You probably see it's heavily based on agency OS. Right? Yeah. There's a page.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>You have the blocks. You can move them.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. It looks very familiar.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. This marquee, this text, that's the one you see here. So it's it's very easy for the client to work in. What's interesting about this project and, something I told you about is the the the flows, that we built. Because it's statically generated, you can use, like, a Netlify hook that each time you save a change you made, Netlify will start building.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>But the problem you get when 3 or 4 people are changing content is you get a queue of 20, 30 builds, the day. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Or the client changes a couple of different pages. Right? And they They go through it.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: They they press save. They change something else, and it's it's triggering bills the whole time. Yep. And on NettoFi. So what, I contacted I wrote down his username, Arud Arud on Arud.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Yeah. Arud. Do you know him?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. Yeah. He, he won several of the or I think he won at least one of our hackathons.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Okay.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Nice. Yeah. Yeah. He started\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: to on on Discord.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. Very helpful member of the community. 100%.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: So he started the idea of, these 3 flows you see in green, and then I finished it. There was one issue, and we worked on it together, reached out a bit. So what this does is every time a change is pushed, we set a flag, like change pushed through, and we set a time stamp.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Mhmm.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: And what these three flows together do is they only trigger a build every 5 minutes. So you could And and only when there's changes. Right. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Oh, that's cool.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: For example, this one, every 5 minutes, it will look inside the general settings and check if the variable has changes if it's set to true, and that will trigger this other flow.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Okay.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: And this other flow will trigger an Sify build and update the current build time and update the settings. So it's,\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: I gotcha.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. And then there's one more, the publish queue on save. This one just watches, if you save anything.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Okay. Yeah. So it's watching the content collections.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. All of them.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. Gotcha.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: And then it checks if it's older than 5 minutes, and then it triggers a flow. Or if it's not, it updates that we have some changes. It looks easy now, but we had some work with this.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. Yeah. I can imagine. Hey. Like, hey.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Trying to figure out, like, how to structure the flow and and actually building it, I'm sure. Like, how long did it take you to actually nail it nail the the flow, like, these 3 separate flows?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. Is it well, Arutz did most of it. It was almost great. He had some issues that were remaining. I think we fixed it with, I'm not sure.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>I don't remember really because I was also a a FlowDB. I I hadn't used Flows before. So for me, it was a a very thorough introduction into flows.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: I yeah. Yeah. Well, now you're an expert. So it was awesome.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Mostly with a with a bit of help from Discord.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. Hey. The community members are amazing. Yeah, that that was how I learned most when I first started with Directus, as well.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: I've had I don't know if the other have the CMS systems out there, have this community, but the Discord is amazing. It's for me, it's a it's a big plus. I mean, probably everyone has good community, but the the the director's Discord is really amazing. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. You you you gotta get this one updated too. I see you're on 10 dot 6 dot 3. You can get it updated to to 10 dot 7 so you can, use the theming. And I think Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>I think 10 dot 8 went actually last night as well.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Oh, really?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Which has, like, some preset themes that are available. But Okay.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Nice. Yeah. I saw the video you guys did on the what was enabled to week with with all the everyday video?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Leap week.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Leap week. Yeah. Very nice. I think, like, content versioning is also under 10.7. Right?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: It's yeah. That's on 10.7 as well. Yeah. It could be I I'd say for your clients, maybe not, super helpful. I I doubt they have, like, a ton of different versions of content, but for, larger sites where you need to to manage changes, definitely helpful.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Mhmm. Yeah. And the team, and I need to try it. It's a coincidence, but the director's team is matches this website really good.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love the purple. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Maybe that's Yeah. Maybe that's what, issue what drew my eye to it or or what I, yes, subconsciously I was like, hey. This looks amazing. That purple plays into it for sure.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. There's, there's one more website I wanted to show. This is\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. Yeah. Definitely.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: This is a website for an interior, high end design store, in our city, and they they loved, directors. They used to work with WordPress, and they were very excited when I showed them the finished CMS and how easy it was to change things. But this is also a project very heavy on good photography. And Directus was great in this one because I managed to use the the block system and and the for, like, for example, if we have a a blog and there's a Mhmm. This is in Dutch.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>I don't, suppose you can read it. But the we are using the blog builder. I think I I I read it here. If you go to the to the block, and then you have a block. And we're using the blocks as well to, really write the content.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. Yeah. So what do you do? A client can embed, like, rich rich content, like videos and and things like that.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Video is not yet. Sorry. But images, we can this is a a text block. They could add a a gallery block in which they can combine images. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>So it's Nice.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. It's cool. Like, especially because it's very photo heavy. And they do I learned\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: a lot from from directors for this project, especially like the blocks. Sorry.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Oh, I was gonna say, do they is it a furniture business? Is that what it is?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: They do high end furniture. Like, the Eames chair is something they sell, like, the classical higher end brands.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: I gotcha.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. So they they you just have they have a big collection as well. For example, is a brand. And in this one, they can also write text, and then you can add these images themselves. And inside directors, they can choose.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>I want this image to be a size small, medium, or large, and the grid will using a series as grid, we'll place them like this. So it was a fun project. Learned a lot about directors, about the the the m to a system. Yeah. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: It looks really nice. Yeah. And I like that you're giving clients a little little control over presentation, but, you know, like, not enough to break the design.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. And so I think that's the problem with with WordPress sometimes is there's a lot of things the client can do wrong, and and I think people like it. You can just change only what they want to change. Right?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. Like, honestly, like, I the clients that I worked with in the past, like WordPress and and stuff like Squarespace, it gives them it it's distracting. Right? Because what I really need them to do or needed them to do was go in and add content and photos, and what they ended up doing was, like, tweaking the spacing. Like, you know, like, hey.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>This doesn't look right. Or Yeah. Yeah. They spend 3 hours tweaking the design on the website, and they and they skip over the content. Right?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. I know what you mean. I know exactly what you mean. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. Well, I I appreciate the tour. It looks amazing. You know? What's what is the the future?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>It's something I I like to ask everybody. I I before we we started recording, you said you gave a a talk on chat GPT and stuff, but, that would could be an interesting little thread. But what what are your future plans for your agency? You know, what what kind of projects are you guys working on now or or getting ready to launch soon? Like, what's in the cards for you?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. I think that I have some exciting I have 2 projects coming up, and they both need multi language. It's something which I'm very afraid to start doing because I don't know how I'm gonna do it. I was hoping you would have done it in the agency OS.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: That's the next version. Right?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: I'll wait for you to finish that.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Oh, so I think, with directors, I I took on some small projects. I blocked one really big project because I was afraid because I don't know yet how to do it. So for me, the future really is to get these bigger projects up and running in directives, see if I can use multi language, together with Nuxt and the block builder system. I know it's possible in directives. I just have to find out how to do it.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. I I think it's a matter of just, like, getting into it. It's it's it's one that I'm keen to explore as well. So I like, as you get into it, definitely hit me up. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>The like, the translation interface, super easy to use inside Directus. Like, the the pieces that I'm not a 100% on, and maybe somebody watching this can, like, school us both. It would it's just, like, how to how the best way to architect that on the front end and and, like, connect it. And I think there's for Nux, there's the, there's a module, I think, that that would potentially play into it. I haven't messed with it, though.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>The\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: You mean the i18n module or yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. I haven't messed with it yet.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: I think it's it's fairly I've used it with a static website. So where the the the translation strings are just adjacent file, it works perfectly. It even hooks into the transition state so that when you change language, you have a fade out that changes.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Oh, nice.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. I think, well, the question will be, like, how do we like, if you do a request to to direct us for a page, do you give back all translations and you filter them out on the front end? Or when the user changes language, do you refresh the request to direct us? I think that would be\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: the way. Yeah. That's probably how I would do it. Yeah. I I have to connect you with, the the guys at Heinrichs and Heinrichs.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>They were one of the the previous episodes.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: On email.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. They've got yeah. They've they've got a project that, they're I I I don't think it was actually, like, 2 different languages, but they were using the translation inside Directus to to manage that side of it. Uh-huh. It was like 2 locations.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Like, they wanted to have 2 versions of the site, but it was all it was all still in English, but they were still using the the translations interface for\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: it. I remember. I think they used the translations interface to show these two locations. Right? Yep.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>I remember you did a video with them as well. Very interesting guys. Both of them.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. So or what's the the future date like for the agency? Or, like, you know, what are your your goals for, you know, I guess, like, a little longer term? You know, a year, 2 years, 3 years, 5 years?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: What what's the\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: future on that side?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. In the coming year, I wanna be, like, become really good in just next time directors. I mean, some new projects require me to do look something up like this multi language thing. This is something that I don't it's hard to estimate. Client asks how much it's gonna cost me more to have multi language, but I don't know.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>So I'm gonna be happy once I I've built a few very complex, integrations between Nuxt and Directus so that I can quickly and correctly estimate future projects and just get them up and running much quicker. And then there's also I have a whole second company I'm starting called Waiyo. It's a it's a we're gonna build sort of a SaaS platform to connect patients with medical professionals. So I want to start exploring multitenancy and directives as well, which is also a big topic.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. I I look forward to seeing more about that project, Miguel.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Well I'll\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: be happy to share all my findings with the community. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. Yeah. That's one thing that I love about everybody that works with Directus. Yeah. They're is so helpful and and just willing to share.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>I I think, you know, ultimately, that that's what, like, an open source product, like, yeah, that's one of the ways that, we can compete with a as a smaller team with with, like, larger products, you know, some of the the SaaS based headless CMS and and other products. But just our community, amazing community and and full of supportive people like yourself and Arud. We'll make sure we'll get him a a shout out again in this thing. Do that. Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: I feel like I wonder if, like I think, like, head headless CMS feels like the future to me. Just it's so obvious to decouple the front and the back end. It's it's just like your your data platform and you can do anything you want with it. So I look forward to pretty seeing more of that evolve, in the in the near future.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: And one last parting question before we go. Is there is there anything, you would like to see from us at at Directus, you know, in terms of, it could be features inside the system or, you know, otherwise, you know, something inside the community or documentation or guides or anything like that.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: There's one thing I'm looking forward to, but I saw some threads on GitHub already. It's, what's the correct name? Like, if you upload an image that you can, like, select a part of the image that's the most important.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Oh, the focus. Yeah. Focal points. That's Yeah. Focal points.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Focal that's amazing because a lot of clients upload a picture, and, obviously, your website is responsive. And he's like, oh, but my partner's faces out of the picture is like, okay, but it just scales. So it would be amazing to really have the client control what support for them in the picture. But I think Rick was busy with it. I haven't checked, but I'm looking really forward to that one and my clients as well.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Yeah.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. Yeah. That that's a big one. Yeah. I love that feature in some of the other CMSs I've seen and that, I'm not exactly sure how the implementation of that will work, but one I'm very excited for as well.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Yeah. Me too.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Well, well, perfect. Miguel, thanks again, man. I I really enjoyed this conversation looking at the the projects that you've built with Directus and Nuxt. Amazing work, my friend.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Thank you very much. Thanks. And thanks for having me. It was great talking to you.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Speaker 0: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. We'll have to do this again sometime.\u003C/p>","Hi, guys. Welcome back to another episode of I Made This. I'm your host, Brian Gillespie, developer advocate here at Directus, and I have got my extra special guest with me today, mister Miguel Stevens from Studio Monti. Miguel, happy to have you, man. Hi. Thanks for having me. Glad to Yeah. Yeah. So, hey. Like, you and I have talked inside our directus community a couple times through Discord or, I I think, even on several, like, GitHub issues probably. But, you know, for those who don't know you, maybe, give us a little intro or, you know, what's the backstory? Sure. So my studio is called Studio Monty. We're a Belgium based web company. We do lifestyle websites, boutique kind of websites, so not not a big technical prod products, but more like the the well and refined designed projects. And we always offer CMS, of course, which is direct us. So we don't necessarily have to dive in, directly to direct us. Super glad that you're using that. But, you know, tell me a a little more about the agency. Like, how did you get started? What what led you to that? You know? If we back up even further, like, how did you how did you get into development? Okay. Cool. Good question. I think for me, the case, like many people, has been like a a child passion. When I was 8 years old, my dad bought me a a Pentium 386 or what was this called? I don't even remember it. And I was I'm not sure. The 386. Old computer with with floppy disks. Okay. Yeah. And the I'm trying to think of, like, what the what the the megahertz they were running back in the day. I think the first computer I had was, like, maybe, like, 96 megahertz or something like that. Right? The people remember. No, like a diskette disk. How do you call it in English? It's 3.14 megabytes or something. Yeah. There you go. And the floppies were even less than that. But I started experimenting with Microsoft FrontPage, which, like, Dreamweaver is really old, but FrontPage, that's a whole other level. So I think I just roll I I started making small websites with cheat codes for roller coaster tycoon, things like that. Hey. There you go. So then my my whole journey has been development. I worked in some big development companies in Ghent, and I worked in some boutique agencies, but it's always been about about design and development. Yeah. So I I I love both. I'm a 100% developer. I it has to be beautiful. Right? I guess it. Yeah. So and you guys mentioned that you focus on boutique websites. Could you, you know, like, expand that a little bit? Like, specifically, like, what does the average project look like for you guys? Sure. I think with boutique, I mean, those are mostly websites with less than 10 pages. Design is very important. They wanna have something unique about them. So we we don't do it's not like WordPress templates, where you can clear a seed template. We always work with a designer. We we do custom designs, and custom development. It's it's very much focused on the specific needs of each client. And yeah. And then it's in the lifestyle sector, so, it's fun companies, interior design, architecture, things like that. Yeah. Very local as well. Yeah. So, hey, smaller businesses, clients who are very concerned with image and design and, looking professional. Yeah. Is that a fair summarization? Yeah. Very fair. What does your what does your process look like on those projects? Like, on the front end, like, how how you mentioned it's local, but how how do most of these clients find you? Yeah. For us, it's been a case of. Right? So, I think we started only 1 year ago, and all projects we've had have been through local Netflix. You make a website for someone you know. Before you know it, their uncle wants a website, and then you really get started and and your network grows. I do try to there's a we're based in Ghent, Belgium, and there's a good community of, of, people that are, yeah, entrepreneurs. What's the word in English? Yeah. Yeah. You got it. You nailed it. What? Yeah. So there's a lot of events, that we that I tried to go to to meet people, to talk about how we can help people. So it's been word-of-mouth. That's the English Cool. You're primarily. Excellent. Yeah. Talk to me about your process. Like, yeah, being a, like, you're doing smaller projects that are, let's say, not, like, super data intensive. If like, what's your like, what's the time span from, like, conception or or, like, the idea phase to, like, launching a project? Talk me talk me through your process because I'm super curious on that. Like, what those type of projects actually like, what the flow looks like. Okay. Good question. I've been refining this because I feel process is really important to make something replicable and scalable. So what's important for for me is I always start with a very intense strategy session. And so it's, like, 1 to 2 hours where we sit down with the client and really listen, like, what what are your challenges? Where do you wanna go with your business? Who do you wanna be in 5 years' time? It it can be very personal because each business has, like, these typical problems. They want more revenue. They want the right type of client. They want they want their website to provide more information, better customer service for their clients. So we really drill down the goals for each website, and only then do we start going to wireframing to to design and development. Gotcha. Now in that strategy call, is that, like, after you've already quoted them and and they sent them a proposal? Or Oh, yeah. Right. I forgot that part. So I think it starts with a sales conversation. You you call on the phone mostly, or you go face to face and you just listen. Can we help you? I think it's important. The big money topic. There's a lot of interesting videos about this, but a lot of people I read about, a lot of starting people are afraid to discuss money. They all wanna talk about money upfront, but I think it's important that you know what's in what's their budget, what can we do to help them, and, how can we make it work? So it's I think it's this first sales call is is very important. Yeah. That's that's always the toughest, like, conversation. Right? Right. Like, how come I've got a I've I've got a number in my head. You've got a number. Right. Yeah. Like, how do we talk about like, how do you how do you address that with clients? Like, you said you you don't shy away from it. I think during those first 15 minutes, it has to be clear what the budget is. So if it's not clear from them, tell you, you can just ask upfront, like, what budget do you have in mind? And if that range is acceptable for the type of websites, then we can then we can go for that. For example, startups, I wouldn't work with a fresh startup because they don't need a custom built website. Startups can use Wix or Squarespace, which is mostly enough to help them. So it it would be it wouldn't be good customer service of me to try to sell them a website because they don't need custom websites in their first month. Yeah. So I try to be very honest. I'm not the type of person who just takes on a client to get the money and then, no. I can't help them. If I can send them to Squarespace, then we'll happily do that. Yeah. Yeah. It's honesty and transparency. Right? Yeah. Yeah. I love that. That's super critical. You know? Mhmm. And even being like, you said you started the agency about a year ago. I can imagine, like, in the early days, it's a little harder to do that. Right? Where like, hey. We need a couple of projects through the door, but, still, if it's not a right fit, you you turn them away anyway. That's that's, that's pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. At the beginning, you have to take on a lot of projects, obviously, because you just started and there's no, no real cash flow, but yeah. Yeah. Well, cool. So you have the strategy session. You guys get into, like, their company goals and, like, aspirations and things like that. And then how do how do things progress from there? Sure. Once we know after the strategy session, I make a content model, which is like a sitemap, but for each page, I also include elements. This happens after research. So we look at competitors. You look at the industry. What does the industry expect from websites of that sector, and and, what does the competition do? What do they do good? What don't they do good? And then we discuss some styles. There's there's more meetings. And then it's onto the design phase. For bigger projects, we do a style guide first. If there's a copywriter to be involved, you're a copywriter, obviously, and that's onto design. Yeah. Gotcha. Like, do you have any, like, philosophy? Like, what's your design philosophy? Yeah. I I I think for me, when I used to do projects, like, doing competitor research is is absolutely critical. Right? You gotta know what the landscape is, but how do you how do you not let that inform your own design? You know what I mean? Like, you you don't wanna just, like, copy competitors or you don't want to on the surface, you may not know whether that is actually working well for the competitor or not. Right? So, hey. Like, what is your philosophy on design, and, like, how do you navigate, just hey. Like, hey. Here's what everybody else is doing. Here's what we think is gonna actually work well for you as a to your clients. Mhmm. I think it's it's important obviously to look at the top ten. Right? We we we don't compare with businesses that are on page 20 on Google. And I think it's important if you're looking at, like, what's the content going to be to only focus on the content. It's like you just said, we try to if we see, like, interesting piece of content, I I copy paste the text and put it in Figma in, like, a sort of prototype. We don't screenshot designs because, like you say, if you start screenshotting designs from other companies, your design will be influenced by that. So I think it's important in the in the first phases where the content is being decided, that you just focus on what's what's being written, what's being told. I also saw an interesting video by The Future, and they they make this comparison like, a website has to answer questions. So we always start with that in mind. I write the quote and I'll accept it, and they say, a website is like a conversation. Right? You come to my website. It's like you come into my house, and you you have questions for me. Like, will this product help me feel more whatever. I don't know. So the the order of your website, the content has to answer all people's questions. This is something we I try to keep in mind when building the content model. Yeah. I I love to hear you say that because everybody says that you should be content first, but, like, what I see a lot of times is, like, there's a whole board of inspiration of, like, hey. We like this site. We like this site. We like this site. And then you're working backwards of, like, hey. Let's let's incorporate this theme and, hey. Like, take some ideas from this. And what I'm hearing you say is that you guys you you don't take screenshots of other websites. You might, like, snip some content, but it is very much, like, content driven. There's no like, when you're in the design process, there's no, like, outside influences from other websites. Is that right? Yeah. Maybe a bit. I I mean, I have a designer who I work with, and she, she loves designing, so she's not content first. I'm a big fan of content first, but I think it depends. It's it's one of the biggest chicken or egg problems in the web design industry for me is do you do the content first and then have your designer build around the content? Or do you have the designer design first and then put the content in the available space that the designer chose. It's we we've been trying both, ways of working, and there's no winner yet. I get you. Yeah. I I I think it's just just like the messy middle of, like, hey. Yeah. Like, where things come together. I don't know if there's an answer to if someone has an answer to the the big chicken or egg design versus content first question. Please let me know. Okay. Cool. And sales great. So I like, going through the design phase, like, obviously, hey. Like, are you who does the development? Like, the actual like, are you doing a lot of the actual code at this point or got somebody else on the team? Like, what does that look like? Yeah. I it depends if it's, if it's really busy and I'm like doing a lot of intakes and strategy, then I outsource the development. I'm working with someone who is really capable. I had to look, for a long time before I found him, but I have someone who helps me out. And sometimes I do projects myself. It's good to to stay in the flow. Right? So Nxt is evolving very quickly. Direct is evolving really quickly, and I I wanna, be up to date with everything. So I I still like to to, develop as well. To if it's still like to jump in. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I think that's, like, a common case for a lot of us. Right? You get into it. Like, you you love building stuff, and then, like, inevitably, you've gotta take on more of the business stuff, and that gets in the way of of, like, the fun stuff of actually building and creating. And it's very much the same way for me where, like, I I love to build and create, and, like, the other stuff kinda I I I enjoy that as well, but it kinda gets in the way. Right? I I think it's you never wanna have, like, 0 or 100 to to one side. I think it's always I always love developing. Maybe it's the same for you. Yeah. When there's time, it's it's great to just put on your headphones and be in the flow for a whole afternoon, writing code. It's amazing. It's still fun. Yeah. But excellent. Well, what what is the average timeline? So, like, we we've talked about the process. Like, it start to finish, like, how quickly are you you know, how long does it take for the average project to Mhmm. Start to launch? I think in theory, it would take, like, 1 month. But in practice, it's always 2, 3, 4 month. It's because I think there's something we're struggling with. It's very hard to to really I mean, it's only 1 year since we started, but it's very difficult for me right now to know exactly how long something will take. Sure. Depending on on how how fast does the design go, what types of content. So sometimes the client wants to write a copy himself, which is mostly something that will take long because nobody likes writing copy unless you're a copyright. Make your friends. I noticed that clients seems to seem to, like, not want to do it, so they they keep on, delaying it, and then it never happens. So it's it's a combination of waiting for assets. There's, like, a photographer involved, which is something for the types of websites. In the CGM Monti builds, we I wanna work with good photography. And minimal design is really important. So then you have a photographer who has to, be involved in the process. So there's a lot of variables, right, that can stretch or tend the timeline, but you you don't know in advance. Yeah. They like, on the photography side, do you require your clients to to work with a professional photographer? Or Well, this is something I started doing now since the last client. Yeah. I guess It's secured in the in the in the offer as well. I used to add, like, an an add on, like, photography optional, but there people are paying a lot of websites a lot of money for a website, and they're like, I don't need good pictures. So now it's just included in the price, and it's, yeah. Oh, that's smart. Yeah. I I always hate to see a well designed website and then, like, the same stock photos that you've seen on 35 other websites. It just ruins it ruins everything. The stock photos are the worst. I think the dark iPhone picture by the owner is even better than the stock. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. At least it's real. Yeah. Or it feels real. I I'm sure that's a real person in the stock photo, but, you know, some of those stock photos, I I don't know, like, how people make those poses. Like, I think you never see that stuff in real life. Right? Well, I think it's it's your eye sees it directly. I mean, your stock photo, you can see it from very far, and it it gives the site a sort of fake feeling. It's it doesn't feel right when you see stock photos. Yeah. Yeah. So, like, shifting into, like, the tools that you're using to build the sites, like, what does your preferred, like, stack look like? You know? Right? What tools are you using on the front end, on the back end, that sort of stuff? So it's, for us, it's Nuxtree on the front end and then Directus, on the back end. Yeah. Gotcha. We're running it on Docker containers for our production servers as well as, local local hosting. It's also on Docker. Nice. Yeah. You're definitely one of my preferred stacks. But, like, what what led you to those 2 pieces? Like, you know, were you using those a year ago when you started? Or yeah. I know you mentioned front page that you were using way back in the day to build stuff. Like, walk walk me through the progression because that's that's super interesting for me because I I remember front page. I remember Dreamweaver. Right. I even I'm I'm not sure I I'm not sure if Angel Fire or, like, GeoCities were ever popular outside the US, but it was like a it was like a free website builder where you could get on and have all the animated GIFs and, like, all the all the crazy counters and all that stuff back in the day. But that's that's how I got my start in the industry as well. It was back in the day using those tools to kinda scratch stuff together. I think that you said this rings a bell, but I I never heard of for this Angelfire. Angelfire. It was yeah. It's basically like a a free website builder host. Like, you could you could throw, like, crazy backgrounds and stuff on there and write your text. But the rest of it, you know, back in those days, it was all just whatever HTML you could throw together yourself. Yeah. Marquee elements and stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So, I started my development. I mean, my first company I worked with was Laravel. So it was PHP. I loved Laravel. It's it was easy to use for me. It was a a dream come true after writing spaghetti code in PHP. But the older I got, and I started working with Vue, and I started loving JavaScript a lot. For me, it feels much cleaner, the syntax and PHP. I'm stirring some feathers here. I know. It's a big discussion. PHP lovers are everywhere and the JavaScript lovers. But for me, it's always been JavaScript. So when I started this company 1 year ago, I promised no PHP. So, my first thought was, okay. I need a I need a JavaScript back end. So I started looking into headless CMS systems. Strapi Strapi. I don't know how you pronounce it. Yeah. Was the first one I tried, but I I found it difficult to work with. I don't know. It was it didn't feel right. So I tried a few others. I tried story block. I tried content folks for a while, and then someone on Reddit mentioned Directus. Mhmm. I think version 10 was just released. When was it released? Do you know version 10? Version 10 or version 9. Version 10 was that's Yeah. Version 10 was not so long ago. Version 9 was, like, a big change. Version version 8 was on PHP. Oh, really? Version 9 version 9 was, like, the switch to to node to, like, the JavaScript side of things. And that was a a crazy big shift. That was about the same time that I actually found directives myself. Okay. That's when when version 9 was released, which was You weren't there in the BHP era. I I was not. No. I I wasn't even aware of the tool, which is Okay. Which is wild. Yeah. And that's why I think it's someone on Reddit brought me to Directus, and I I tried it out, set it up. The documentation is great, and I just got it working. And then I just built my first website. Yeah. Nice. So I like, what were you said, like, the other tools didn't feel right, and that that definitely feels like a like a designer thing of a it doesn't feel right. But were there a like, any, like, issues that you encountered that were you were like, hey. This is this is not working for me? Like, can you even remember any of those tools? Like, what were the the red flags, like, if you can remember any? Yeah. I think for me, now that I think about it, the biggest thing was since I mean, headless CMS systems can be used for, like, internal tools, for softwares. But for our studio, it's always going to be a CMS system. So my thought was if a client I remember with Strapi, I thought, if a client has to work on this, it's gonna be complicated. And for with directors, it just felt very calm. I could see my even less tech savvy clients work in this system. So for me, it was mostly a choice of, okay, which system are people my clients going to be able to work in without having to call me too much with questions. It it Not having to do a 12 hour CMS training. It is very much from, like, the client perspective. Yeah. I I can remember that personally, like, seeing it like, I I went through a bunch of those as well. And, like, the seeing the white space and just I you mentioned calmness or the the calm, of, like, hey. This is really well designed, and it's open source, which is great. Yeah. But I can remember looking at it and like, hey. Like, okay. Yeah. This feels right. Yeah. I think it was a gut feeling. It's like a first impression. Right? You always set up doc. You open the tool and it's okay. This feels good. And I think what I also remember is the image handling direct is is is perfect. For CMS systems, there are always gonna be images, and the I think the file library and all the systems around it are built really, really solidly. So, yeah, that's a big plus as well. What does, like, the average project look like for you inside Directus for for a client? You know, like, maybe through, like, the data model. You know? Or maybe just talk me through some of those, and and I think you've got a few things to show us. But, maybe just so you could, like, talk me through how the projects look inside Directus before we jump into that. Okay. Cool. I think the last three projects were mostly similar. So we have pages. We have a page builder using the, many to any builder system. And then we have just like projects, testimonials, the team page. So it's mostly, managing data. We're not too heavy on flows at the moment. There's a few flows for, like, building, which we'll get into in a in a few minutes. But, yeah, it's mostly page builder. That's the biggest, chunk. And we use blocks. So every page, you can just, compose yourself with blocks. Clients don't really use that too much. It's mostly for myself. A block is reusable. It's a nice, neat piece of code, which can even be reused in in other projects. So yeah. How do you, like, how do you present, like, the CMS and, like, direct us to your clients, like, through that phase? Is that, like, a discussion that you have, like, at the very beginning of a project? Is it like, hey. Oh, we got your website. You're gonna be able to edit all the content through this CMS. Yeah. Are you, like, talking me through how you present that solution to the client? Sounds good. In my last, few offers, I included, screenshots or a video of directors. And the good thing is that clients mostly come from WordPress. So when they see directors, they're like, this is impossible. They almost can't believe how easy it is. Crazy. The the reactions are just amazing. The last two clients were really like, this is so easy. Essentially what they said. I sat next to them for the CMS training. We put in some data together and just they came from WordPress. They were like, this is really easy. So it feels really good to have clients, have this this sort of really good experience. Now are are most of them coming from, like, the the drag and drop page builders where they've gotta go in and manage, like, all the padding and spacing and colors and all of that? Okay. Yeah. Or from WordPress installations that are like a plug in hell, and everything's a plug in, and there there have to be and people don't like that. I think directors, you can also you can protect your clients. Like, you give them roles, and they only they can only edit what they're assigned to do. I know you can do that in WordPress as well, but WordPress feels like very, very much. And clients, they mostly don't have a lot of time. They maybe want to add a new testimonial. They had just want to log in, click testimonial, add new, and be done with it. So Yeah. They they don't wanna, yeah, geek out on the the software or the tools like like we do. They just wanna get them out. They've got other stuff to do. Yeah. They don't care what tool it is. It just has to be easy enough. Yeah. Cool. Well, do you wanna maybe share your screen and and show us, you know, like I would love to share with the audience, like, what the the typical, like, front end project looks like for you, And then, you know, maybe show us around the the back end if you're if you're able to. Yeah. Sure. Let me just share my screen real quick. K. Cool. So this is a project we finished, 2 months ago. It's a website for a company that does funding. Yeah. We like white space. We like beautiful fonts. These pages are so this is Nextree. This is a statically generated website. So Okay. It's on it's built on Netlify. So it's not SSR. It's SS SSG. What's what is the what's the the display font there? Like, all the headings. The this font? Yeah. I I I really like that font. Have a look. I should know that. Ah, silica. It's silica. Right. Silca. It's nice having font. Yeah. Yeah. It looks great. I and, like, I've got another project that I'm working on personally that, I I've been eyeing fonts, and, like, that process is always, like, such a nightmare of, like, going through and trying to suss out just the perfect font for a project. This one looks great. Right. Might have to worry about. Beautiful fonts are mostly really expensive, which is fair. True. True. And this is actually just a page built and page builder. They have cases, which are like, yeah, project cases. And what I love about this, it feels really snappy. I mean, this is Nuxt. Yeah. It's pre rendered, so that's the speed is the speed is amazing. Speed score is also really good. There's a form in here which will, be sent to directors as well. Nice. Yeah. And it's a dynamic form if you if you go to a case and you wanna be then your case will be prefilled here. This all will be sent to directors. Yeah. That's cool. What's a great great looking site. Yeah. Thanks. Very clean. Yeah. What are you, what are you using for, like, the the transitions and the animations? Is it, are you, like I'm just custom coded CSS, or is it, like, a different library? It's a wrapper component. It's called scroll transition dot view. I made it together with someone else, I think. We used it in a previous project. Yeah. And it just, yeah, it shifted into, into view. As yeah. It's it's very tasteful. I think for me, that's one of the other things that I always struggle with on some websites is, like, everything is animated. There's, like, a crazy amount of motion, and it it just distracts from the the story in some cases. But this is this looks really well done. I think it it has to be subtle. What I would like now is for, like, working on some images that, like, slide in from the right. Some some tiny animations, but I don't want it to be much more than this. Yeah. It looks great. So for the for the back end, as you see the models we have, this is heavily based on the agency OS, by the way, which I think which you wrote most part of it. Yeah. Most of it is mine. So thank you for this. Yeah. No. Great. How No. Happy to you know, that project was like a labor of love because it it it took me a long time to figure out how to manage, like, the page blocks. And I was like, okay. Like, once you see it and and you've got a a reference, it's much easier to understand. But when I first came to Directus, I knew this functionality was available. It just like, there weren't any good references reference points to to use. So I I'm happy that it's been helpful for you. 100%. Oh, it yeah. It is. I don't know if I would have managed without. I think it's also it's a plus point because there's a lot of back end systems, but you guys took the time to write out a full front end to showcase how it can be used. So that's I'm very grateful for it. It's, it's amazing. You probably see it's heavily based on agency OS. Right? Yeah. There's a page. You have the blocks. You can move them. Yeah. It looks very familiar. Yeah. This marquee, this text, that's the one you see here. So it's it's very easy for the client to work in. What's interesting about this project and, something I told you about is the the the flows, that we built. Because it's statically generated, you can use, like, a Netlify hook that each time you save a change you made, Netlify will start building. But the problem you get when 3 or 4 people are changing content is you get a queue of 20, 30 builds, the day. Yeah. Or the client changes a couple of different pages. Right? And they They go through it. They they press save. They change something else, and it's it's triggering bills the whole time. Yep. And on NettoFi. So what, I contacted I wrote down his username, Arud Arud on Arud. Yeah. Arud. Do you know him? Yeah. Yeah. He, he won several of the or I think he won at least one of our hackathons. Okay. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. He started to on on Discord. Yeah. Very helpful member of the community. 100%. So he started the idea of, these 3 flows you see in green, and then I finished it. There was one issue, and we worked on it together, reached out a bit. So what this does is every time a change is pushed, we set a flag, like change pushed through, and we set a time stamp. Mhmm. And what these three flows together do is they only trigger a build every 5 minutes. So you could And and only when there's changes. Right. Yeah. Oh, that's cool. For example, this one, every 5 minutes, it will look inside the general settings and check if the variable has changes if it's set to true, and that will trigger this other flow. Okay. And this other flow will trigger an Sify build and update the current build time and update the settings. So it's, I gotcha. Yeah. And then there's one more, the publish queue on save. This one just watches, if you save anything. Okay. Yeah. So it's watching the content collections. Yeah. All of them. Yeah. Gotcha. And then it checks if it's older than 5 minutes, and then it triggers a flow. Or if it's not, it updates that we have some changes. It looks easy now, but we had some work with this. Yeah. Yeah. I can imagine. Hey. Like, hey. Trying to figure out, like, how to structure the flow and and actually building it, I'm sure. Like, how long did it take you to actually nail it nail the the flow, like, these 3 separate flows? Yeah. Is it well, Arutz did most of it. It was almost great. He had some issues that were remaining. I think we fixed it with, I'm not sure. I don't remember really because I was also a a FlowDB. I I hadn't used Flows before. So for me, it was a a very thorough introduction into flows. I yeah. Yeah. Well, now you're an expert. So it was awesome. Mostly with a with a bit of help from Discord. Yeah. Hey. The community members are amazing. Yeah, that that was how I learned most when I first started with Directus, as well. I've had I don't know if the other have the CMS systems out there, have this community, but the Discord is amazing. It's for me, it's a it's a big plus. I mean, probably everyone has good community, but the the the director's Discord is really amazing. Yeah. Yeah. You you you gotta get this one updated too. I see you're on 10 dot 6 dot 3. You can get it updated to to 10 dot 7 so you can, use the theming. And I think Yeah. I think 10 dot 8 went actually last night as well. Oh, really? Which has, like, some preset themes that are available. But Okay. Nice. Yeah. I saw the video you guys did on the what was enabled to week with with all the everyday video? Leap week. Leap week. Yeah. Very nice. I think, like, content versioning is also under 10.7. Right? It's yeah. That's on 10.7 as well. Yeah. It could be I I'd say for your clients, maybe not, super helpful. I I doubt they have, like, a ton of different versions of content, but for, larger sites where you need to to manage changes, definitely helpful. Mhmm. Yeah. And the team, and I need to try it. It's a coincidence, but the director's team is matches this website really good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love the purple. Yeah. Maybe that's Yeah. Maybe that's what, issue what drew my eye to it or or what I, yes, subconsciously I was like, hey. This looks amazing. That purple plays into it for sure. Yeah. There's, there's one more website I wanted to show. This is Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. This is a website for an interior, high end design store, in our city, and they they loved, directors. They used to work with WordPress, and they were very excited when I showed them the finished CMS and how easy it was to change things. But this is also a project very heavy on good photography. And Directus was great in this one because I managed to use the the block system and and the for, like, for example, if we have a a blog and there's a Mhmm. This is in Dutch. I don't, suppose you can read it. But the we are using the blog builder. I think I I I read it here. If you go to the to the block, and then you have a block. And we're using the blocks as well to, really write the content. Yeah. Yeah. So what do you do? A client can embed, like, rich rich content, like videos and and things like that. Video is not yet. Sorry. But images, we can this is a a text block. They could add a a gallery block in which they can combine images. Yeah. So it's Nice. Yeah. It's cool. Like, especially because it's very photo heavy. And they do I learned a lot from from directors for this project, especially like the blocks. Sorry. Oh, I was gonna say, do they is it a furniture business? Is that what it is? They do high end furniture. Like, the Eames chair is something they sell, like, the classical higher end brands. I gotcha. Yeah. So they they you just have they have a big collection as well. For example, is a brand. And in this one, they can also write text, and then you can add these images themselves. And inside directors, they can choose. I want this image to be a size small, medium, or large, and the grid will using a series as grid, we'll place them like this. So it was a fun project. Learned a lot about directors, about the the the m to a system. Yeah. Yeah. It looks really nice. Yeah. And I like that you're giving clients a little little control over presentation, but, you know, like, not enough to break the design. Yeah. Yeah. And so I think that's the problem with with WordPress sometimes is there's a lot of things the client can do wrong, and and I think people like it. You can just change only what they want to change. Right? Yeah. Like, honestly, like, I the clients that I worked with in the past, like WordPress and and stuff like Squarespace, it gives them it it's distracting. Right? Because what I really need them to do or needed them to do was go in and add content and photos, and what they ended up doing was, like, tweaking the spacing. Like, you know, like, hey. This doesn't look right. Or Yeah. Yeah. They spend 3 hours tweaking the design on the website, and they and they skip over the content. Right? Yeah. I know what you mean. I know exactly what you mean. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I I appreciate the tour. It looks amazing. You know? What's what is the the future? It's something I I like to ask everybody. I I before we we started recording, you said you gave a a talk on chat GPT and stuff, but, that would could be an interesting little thread. But what what are your future plans for your agency? You know, what what kind of projects are you guys working on now or or getting ready to launch soon? Like, what's in the cards for you? Yeah. I think that I have some exciting I have 2 projects coming up, and they both need multi language. It's something which I'm very afraid to start doing because I don't know how I'm gonna do it. I was hoping you would have done it in the agency OS. That's the next version. Right? I'll wait for you to finish that. Yeah. Oh, so I think, with directors, I I took on some small projects. I blocked one really big project because I was afraid because I don't know yet how to do it. So for me, the future really is to get these bigger projects up and running in directives, see if I can use multi language, together with Nuxt and the block builder system. I know it's possible in directives. I just have to find out how to do it. Yeah. I I think it's a matter of just, like, getting into it. It's it's it's one that I'm keen to explore as well. So I like, as you get into it, definitely hit me up. Yeah. The like, the translation interface, super easy to use inside Directus. Like, the the pieces that I'm not a 100% on, and maybe somebody watching this can, like, school us both. It would it's just, like, how to how the best way to architect that on the front end and and, like, connect it. And I think there's for Nux, there's the, there's a module, I think, that that would potentially play into it. I haven't messed with it, though. The You mean the i18n module or yeah. Yeah. I haven't messed with it yet. I think it's it's fairly I've used it with a static website. So where the the the translation strings are just adjacent file, it works perfectly. It even hooks into the transition state so that when you change language, you have a fade out that changes. Oh, nice. Yeah. I think, well, the question will be, like, how do we like, if you do a request to to direct us for a page, do you give back all translations and you filter them out on the front end? Or when the user changes language, do you refresh the request to direct us? I think that would be the way. Yeah. That's probably how I would do it. Yeah. I I have to connect you with, the the guys at Heinrichs and Heinrichs. They were one of the the previous episodes. On email. Yeah. They've got yeah. They've they've got a project that, they're I I I don't think it was actually, like, 2 different languages, but they were using the translation inside Directus to to manage that side of it. Uh-huh. It was like 2 locations. Like, they wanted to have 2 versions of the site, but it was all it was all still in English, but they were still using the the translations interface for it. I remember. I think they used the translations interface to show these two locations. Right? Yep. I remember you did a video with them as well. Very interesting guys. Both of them. Yeah. So or what's the the future date like for the agency? Or, like, you know, what are your your goals for, you know, I guess, like, a little longer term? You know, a year, 2 years, 3 years, 5 years? What what's the future on that side? Yeah. In the coming year, I wanna be, like, become really good in just next time directors. I mean, some new projects require me to do look something up like this multi language thing. This is something that I don't it's hard to estimate. Client asks how much it's gonna cost me more to have multi language, but I don't know. So I'm gonna be happy once I I've built a few very complex, integrations between Nuxt and Directus so that I can quickly and correctly estimate future projects and just get them up and running much quicker. And then there's also I have a whole second company I'm starting called Waiyo. It's a it's a we're gonna build sort of a SaaS platform to connect patients with medical professionals. So I want to start exploring multitenancy and directives as well, which is also a big topic. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. I I look forward to seeing more about that project, Miguel. Yeah. Well I'll be happy to share all my findings with the community. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's one thing that I love about everybody that works with Directus. Yeah. They're is so helpful and and just willing to share. I I think, you know, ultimately, that that's what, like, an open source product, like, yeah, that's one of the ways that, we can compete with a as a smaller team with with, like, larger products, you know, some of the the SaaS based headless CMS and and other products. But just our community, amazing community and and full of supportive people like yourself and Arud. We'll make sure we'll get him a a shout out again in this thing. Do that. Yeah. I feel like I wonder if, like I think, like, head headless CMS feels like the future to me. Just it's so obvious to decouple the front and the back end. It's it's just like your your data platform and you can do anything you want with it. So I look forward to pretty seeing more of that evolve, in the in the near future. And one last parting question before we go. Is there is there anything, you would like to see from us at at Directus, you know, in terms of, it could be features inside the system or, you know, otherwise, you know, something inside the community or documentation or guides or anything like that. There's one thing I'm looking forward to, but I saw some threads on GitHub already. It's, what's the correct name? Like, if you upload an image that you can, like, select a part of the image that's the most important. Oh, the focus. Yeah. Focal points. That's Yeah. Focal points. Yeah. Focal that's amazing because a lot of clients upload a picture, and, obviously, your website is responsive. And he's like, oh, but my partner's faces out of the picture is like, okay, but it just scales. So it would be amazing to really have the client control what support for them in the picture. But I think Rick was busy with it. I haven't checked, but I'm looking really forward to that one and my clients as well. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That that's a big one. Yeah. I love that feature in some of the other CMSs I've seen and that, I'm not exactly sure how the implementation of that will work, but one I'm very excited for as well. Yeah. Me too. Well, well, perfect. Miguel, thanks again, man. I I really enjoyed this conversation looking at the the projects that you've built with Directus and Nuxt. Amazing work, my friend. Thank you very much. Thanks. And thanks for having me. It was great talking to you. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. 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