This past week at Carfax has been one of great excitement! I'm working together every day with our platform engineers to design and implement a company-wide GraphQL API. At first we are only starting with a small entity of data, Reviews. While small, it does come with a lot of challenges: Reviews are connected with so many other entities of data making the modeling problem a bit complicated.
There are currently two kinds of reviews and they vary slightly in structure
depending on type. And while they have a lot of overlapping qualities regarding
relationships with other data (the Consumer that made the review, or Vehicle
that's associated with it), there are other relationships that only exist on one
type. The challenge is coming up with a model that not only makes the most sense
but is easy to use.
This problem has been solved a couple of other times during Carfax's history and we have the opportunity to make it a little better. Hopefully we can succeed in that effort and have it delivered on time 3 weeks from now.
Caleb showed me some Adult Swim content: "This House has People In It" and other titles. I'm not going to go in depth about what that is here but instead focus on the takeaway.
At first I thought it was just weird and interesting but after seeing parts of a 1.5 hour video explanation / theory, I became totally infatuated with this genre.
What I really enjoy is how things in this purely fictional world have artifacts that exist in the real world.
It's an incredibly relevant concept to the sitcom that Caleb and I are secretly podcasting about. We had already been talking about what is real and what is fake and this definitely inspired us to feel more comfortable with making bolder decisions about what the scope of our "show" and what its setting is.
I can't stress enough how non-serious our current efforts are because of our tremendous lack of experience, but I will say at least for now that we are going to devote two sessions a week to this podcast (instead of one) for the summer.
A quick Sizable update. Brad made us shirts! They basically look just like the cover of our first album.
We have our first two sessions at the mixer in 2 weeks so we're preparing hard for that. I still need to contribute chords and structure to a song that is going on this album. I always put these duties off because I never feel like my creative energies are there.
The time pressure will make it happen for me. I think it will all work out.
Got an interview tomorrow with filmmaker and friend Matt Schacht. I'm excited to see how that will go.
I also interviewed game composer Duane Decker. I've always been a big huge fan of his Rise Of Nations soundtrack and it was interesting learning how he got there and how he writes music. I'll upload it soon.
I don't really know what to do with my interviews at this point. Despite what I said here, I think I'll keep developing for PAPIO a bit and making it even easier for me to push content there. It's still a mildly interesting app to me even if Google will eventually make it irrelevant. This app is still the best place I have to post this stuff so I'm going to continue putting it there until a better choice is more obvious.