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#02: Swap Stories

Mappin' Around with Scott and Ryan·podcast_episode·1h 37m·analyzed·Aug 19, 2018
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.028

TL;DR

Pinball Map launches Patreon and OPDB; Danny B shares nostalgic venue stories and St. Louis pinball history.

Summary

Mappin' Around with Scott and Ryan (#02) covers the Pinball Map's operational updates—Patreon launch, merchandise, and the new Open Pinball Database (OPDB)—alongside a long interview segment with Danny B about pinball locations and personal stories from his youth in St. Louis. The episode also includes technical deep-dive into performance optimization of the Pinball Map's Rails application.

Key Claims

  • Pinball Map launched a Patreon in the first 24 hours with 10 supporters

    high confidence · Ryan, in mid-episode update: 'in the first 24 hours of the Patreon, we got 10 supporters'

  • Open Pinball Database (OPDB) went live as a collaboration between Pinball Map, Andreas (Pintips.net/Match Play Events), and others

    high confidence · Scott: 'we put together a site called, or a database called, OPDB, Open Pinball Database, that lists all the machines. We supplied them with all the seed data because we've been maintaining a database of machine names for 10 years'

  • Pinball Map supplies Match Play Events tournament software with live machine data via API integration

    high confidence · Scott explaining integration: 'you just click a tab that says Pinball Map on Match Play Events and it says, looks like you're at Ground Control because it knows where you are physically... And then it says, well, here's the 20 machines at Ground Control'

  • IPDB (Internet Pinball Database) does not offer an API and shows no interest in collaboration

    high confidence · Scott: 'There is a website that's been around for a long, long time, called IPDB that we link to. Every one of our machines links to IPDB, the Internet Pinball Database... However, they don't have an API. They don't seem interested in collaborating with others.'

  • Pinball Map application runs on 512MB RAM and one processor using Heroku's cheapest tier

    high confidence · Scott: 'we use Heroku, but we use the cheapest possible pay tier that there is... we get 512 megs of RAM and one processor'

  • Pinball Map application regularly runs 200-300MB over its RAM limit, forcing heavy reliance on disk swap

    high confidence · Scott: 'What I found is that on average our application was running two to three hundred megs over our RAM limit. So we were in swap most of the time. Very slow.'

  • Google is implementing new pricing and policies for map API requests, affecting sites like Pinball Map

    high confidence · Scott: 'Google has decided to clamp those down and start charging more for those... And we're also, it's not only more requests but it's different types of requests than we were getting before'

Notable Quotes

  • “We have two, two entries in the database for that [Pirates of the Caribbean]. It's, it's pretty confusing to manage.”

    Scott @ early discussion — Highlights data integrity challenges in managing multiple entries for the same machine due to regionless expansion

  • “What's wrong with us? We're delightful. We are.”

    Scott and Ryan (dialogue) @ IPDB discussion — Humorous aside reflecting frustration with IPDB's lack of collaboration

  • “I like the solitude, man. I think that's what I like most about pinball in general... I really love to just concentrate man. I like to just be in you know find that that zone that Zen you know.”

    Danny B @ venue discussion — Reveals preference for quiet, focused pinball environments over crowded social venues

  • “I'm just the best in the city. Probably are. You got more GCs than me. I gotta have the most GCs. But I'm better than all those guys.”

    Danny B @ competitive banter — Self-assured competitive statement about Danny B's local pinball skill level

  • “I think you can sort of follow like the gentrification of a city through the pinball map.”

    Danny B @ late episode discussion — Observation about how pinball machine locations correlate with urban gentrification patterns

  • “When it's in memory that well, I guess picture that memory. No. It's maybe green and black.”

    Scott @ technical segment — Illustrates Scott's informal, conversational technical explanation style

Entities

Pinball MapproductScottpersonRyanpersonDanny BpersonAndreaspersonOpen Pinball Database (OPDB)productMatch Play EventsproductInternet Pinball Database (IPDB)product

Signals

  • ?

    product_launch: Open Pinball Database (OPDB) officially launched with API functionality enabling third-party integrations like Match Play Events

    high · Scott: 'we put together a site called, or a database called, OPDB... Now that the database is live now, we're both editors of it.'

  • ?

    product_launch: Pinball Map launched Patreon campaign with 10 supporters in first 24 hours to offset rising infrastructure costs

    high · Ryan: 'in the first 24 hours of the Patreon, we got 10 supporters, which is amazing. We're really excited about that.'

  • ?

    business_signal: Operating costs rising due to Google API pricing changes, global user growth, and increased server load from regionless expansion

    high · Scott: 'As more people use the site, more requests are made to Google APIs and Google has decided to clamp those down and start charging more'

  • ?

    technology_signal: Pinball Map experienced performance crisis running on 512MB RAM; application regularly exceeded limits by 200-300MB, requiring heavy disk swap

    high · Scott: 'on average our application was running two to three hundred megs over our RAM limit. So we were in swap most of the time. Very slow.'

  • $

    market_signal: Pinball machine locations correlate with urban gentrification patterns; can be used as demographic proxy for city development

    medium · Danny B: 'I think you can sort of follow like the gentrification of a city through the pinball map'

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.292

0:00
This episode of Mappin' Around with Scott and Ryan is brought to you by Shrek Vault Edition. Step back into the kingdom of Far Far Away and experience once more the joys of Donkey Mini Pinball, Donkey Multiball, and the Donkey Targets. And now, on with the show. Hi Ryan. Hi Scott. How are you? Great. How are you? How have you been? I've been better. You know, I've been better. Yeah, you've been sick. Yeah, I had a cold. Me too. A lot of that going around. Yeah, I'm getting better. A lot of that going around. My daughter had a daycare illness. Oh yeah. Horse mouth and hoof? Just kidding. Horse mouth and hoof? Yeah. She had horse mouth and hoof. And I got a cold. So you and I have both been sick. But you know what? You know who doesn't care about you or me being sick? The users of the pinball map. Yeah. They might care, but they're not going to stop using the website, so... No. They might be annoyed if we're sniffing into the mic. No. They'll get over it. Sorry about that.
1:30
Alright, well before we get too deep into it, I want to, uh... I want to give thanks to... to Molly Ghost for our theme song, This episode and last episode also and maybe even future episodes. I think that was like a song from one of their later demos, late career demos. Pretty hard to find. So I just feel pretty honored. Thank you to Molly Ghost for hooking us up. Yeah, T Ghost. Mm-hmm, T Ghost. So in this intro section, we have a few exciting things to announce, which you could tell by my voice. You could tell it's exciting because I went, exciting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And first things first, we just launched a Patreon. And this is a way for people to donate money to the site to help it run because costs are rising right now. And it's hard to afford the site, I guess is an easy way to put it. And the we did have like for the last year, we've had a donate button on the site. And that I think We are now at the end of our segment. We hope you enjoyed it and would like to see more of our videos. Please subscribe to our channel and hit the bell icon to get notified of our latest videos. Thanks for watching! We'll see you next time. Bye! Scott Danesi, Data East, Tim Kitzrow, Laser Los, Loser Kid Pinball Podcast, Mirco Playfields.

  • Pinball Map went 'regionless' which increased API requests due to geocoding from geographic location searches

    high confidence · Scott: 'now with Regionless they're searching in geographical areas which is called geocoding so they could look up Salem, Oregon and that is a request that costs money'

    • Molly Ghost
    person
    Drew Marshallperson
    Isle of Elsieperson
    John Chadperson
    Ground Controlvenue
    Billy Ray'svenue
    82 Clubvenue
    Google APIsproduct
    Herokuproduct
    Ruby on Railsproduct
    Shrek Vault Editiongame
    ?

    venue_signal: Discussion of legacy pinball venues (Billy Ray's in Oregon, St. Louis locations from 1980s) reflecting changes in pinball geography over decades

    medium · Danny B describing Billy Ray's as optimal quiet venue; reminiscing about 7-Eleven, Happy Joe's Pizza, Marlboro Lanes in St. Louis route

  • ?

    community_signal: Pinball community tooling ecosystem maturing: OPDB unifies machine IDs across platforms, enabling deeper API integrations between Pinball Map, Match Play Events, and future partners

    high · Scott: 'It's a unique identifier that everybody can key in on... there's gonna be a lot of cool stuff with it'

  • ?

    operational_signal: 82 Club maintains full-time tech staff for pinball machines; represents premium venue operational standard

    medium · Danny B: 'Always a tech on the floor, which is pretty unique for a place. You just... tell Danny or whoever... our master of Tekken will always come in'

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Pinball Map operators expressing urgency around cost sustainability; transition from donation model to Patreon signals growing financial pressure

    high · Scott: 'costs are rising right now. And it's hard to afford the site... operating costs out of donations... dried up, hence the Patreon'

  • ?

    manufacturing_signal: Stern Pinball's Shrek Vault Edition used as episode sponsor/advertisement

    low · Episode opening: 'This episode of Mappin' Around with Scott and Ryan is brought to you by Shrek Vault Edition'

    • 3:38
    You know, operating costs out of donations, and that's awesome. Yes. But you know, after the initial wave of generous users, it kind of dried up, hence the Patreon. And the rising costs like, in a nutshell, and we'll get into this a little more in the episode, I think as we go regionless and because of that we start getting people from all over the world, the volume of requests goes up. And we'll talk about the performance here in a little bit. So there's just more people using the site. And then the other big thing, which maybe we'll get into next episode. I love planning these things out in real time. Next episode, sounds good. Next episode, we'll talk about Google and their kind of changing policy with how they Offer their map services which we're relying on pretty heavily. As more people use the site, more requests are made to Google APIs and Google has decided to clamp those down and start charging more for those. We get charged more. And we're also, it's not only more requests but it's different types of requests than we were getting before because before users weren't geocoding. They weren't making geocoding requests because users would only look up like a machine using the autocomplete. They'd look up Pirates of the Caribbean or they'd look up an existing location like ground control and now with Regionless they're searching in geographical areas which is called geocoding so they could look up Salem, Oregon and that is a request that costs money because Google's Like where's Salem? Here's a, here's a latitude longitude based on that user's input. And that is, so that's like a new type of request that people are making now. And they're also looking at Pirates of the Caribbean now too, instead of just, uh, Pirates of the Caribbean. Yeah. Yeah. We have two, two entries in the database for that. It's, it's pretty confusing to manage. It gets more confusing. Yeah, so yeah the patreon which we've just launched as of this recording we're basically launching it tomorrow so we but when this comes out it'll it'll be properly launched and maybe someone will have donated to it by then because they'll know about it and but it's patreon.com slash pinball map
    6:25
    Hey everybody, this is Ryan. I'm skateboarding to work right now and this is a few days after we recorded this podcast. We've since launched the Patreon.
    6:39
    And as one of the benefits, we said we'd give shoutouts to everybody who has supported us. And in the first 24 hours of the Patreon, we got 10 supporters, which is amazing. We're really excited about that. And we thank all you guys and gals for your support. It's really cool.
    7:00
    Thank you, first names only here, thank you Robert, thank you Jonas, thank you Jetflip, thank you Pindigo, thank you Justin, thanks T, letter T, thank you Matthew, thank you
    7:21
    Thank you Jay, thank you Andreas, and thank you Tom. You guys are awesome, all of you. And back to our regular podcast. And two more since then, thank you Steven, our Wisconsin admin, and thank you Robert from Portland. Have you used Patreon before Ryan? No, I haven't. I have not either. I'll admit, it's like kind of a new thing for me. It feels a little weird, but also feels a little classy. That's how I got aっていう on Spotify so people can tune in and watch and also as a trans forever fan. I got a huge specific caption for my podcast about Ksee's Kid Pen no more. It's got his World War 4R and also about but sort of, you know, the pandemic right just There's a Patreon for it. Isle of Elsie is a comic. And people of this podcast might know him for his pinball zine with John Chad. It's a good one. Yeah. What's it called? Oh, Drop Target. I was like, we should say the name. Yeah. So I had looked and one thing that I actually read a blog post by him about his how he uses Patreon. I thought it was interesting. And so he gives himself a monthly budget of say 20 bucks. And he shifts stuff around from month to month and he's like, well, you know, I've been giving, so say he's giving $2 or $5 to a bunch of different things, say it's $5 to four different things. And he's hit his limit at 20 bucks. But then one of those that he's a patron of, he just hasn't read or whatever it is, listened to in a while. And there's a new thing he really likes, and so he just kind of drops his support of one and shifts it over to another one. So he always has that 20 bucks that he's budgeted to give out to other artists. I got a personal goal to get two dollars out of Alec Longstrat. Like that's, that seems, that seems doable. Um, I mean that guy's like kind of notoriously organized too, right? Yeah, I mean just from reading his blog he's fantastically organized. Yeah, he's like people's productivity coaches and things like that, so this doesn't surprise me. Anyway, that's interesting. Yeah, yeah, maybe I'll give him two bucks too. I mean, Isle of Elsie seems cool, like a cool comic for kids, but my kid's only seven months, so she's not ready for it yet, but I was definitely planning to read her that once she gets a little older. Next up, next item, t-shirts. These designs, we have two different designs. One is on black, one is on dark blue, navy, and the black one is the same design we had last time, a very cool graphic made by Drew Marshall. Um, and, but this time we flipped it around and that is, that graphic's on the back. And on the front is our like kind of header graphic, that little, not even close to dot matrix looking graphic, but it's kind of supposed to be, uh, that says pinball map and it's on the front and like the baby blue color. Oh. Mm-hmm. And it looks really good. So when you're playing a machine. Yeah. You could be right. Okay. Yeah, someone could walk by and be like, holy crap, that's a sweet shirt and that looks like a neat site that I want to visit. And the other shirt is also a design by Drew Marshall. This is a very, very fantastic design he made 10 years ago or so. Both of these he made 10 years ago, but this was one he busted out that says Portland Pinball Map on it. It's taking us back to our roots when we were originally just the Portland Pinball Map. It's the really humongously awesome graphic he made that the weekly paper, the Willamette Week, ended up using it as their cover because they liked it so much. It's really, really cool. So this is kind of our throwback tee and this graphic's on the front. Yeah, this one's great because you have to rewind the clock 10 years to when we were We were in our 20s and we were hungry to build that portfolio and really make our mark. This is Drew at his most stringent. They're both great logos, of course, but this one is what he wants to show somebody to get a job. It's great. He told me he's never made anything this complex since. And we had to simplify it a little bit for to put it on a t-shirt because there's so many teensy little details and so many colors on it. And this is a screen printed shirt and you can't screen print like 18 colors. So we had to kind of clean it up a little bit in our own way, but it still looks really, really good. I think it's what to like eight colors or 10 colors right now. It's a lot of colors. It's a really cool screen print. Both these shirts are $20. That includes Shipping so they're basically like $16 shirts when you think about it. I'll say I have one of the original shirts that we ran and I won't wear it Because it feels you know, it'd be like Who's a musician? The first two that jumped to my head were Aerosmith and Moby
    13:19
    I thought I thought Mick Jagger Okay, it'd be like if Mick Jagger was walking down the street with a Rolling Stone shirt on it just wouldn't look right I'm gonna wear that shirt. I'm gonna wear it. I'm gonna wear it too. So yeah, you can get those on our site at pinballmap.com/.store. Last piece of news. This is kind of a big news item that will, or a long news item. It'll take a while to say it, talk about it, but we'll do the condensed version. There is a website that's been around for a long, long time, I don't know how long, called IPDB that we link to. Every one of our machines links to IPDB, the Internet Pinball Database. It has a lot of cool information about machines. However, they don't have an API. They don't seem interested in collaborating with others. I know we haven't maybe explained too well why APIs are cool in this podcast, so people might not understand. But here's an example of why one's cool. First off, we with Andreas, the creator of Pintips.net and Match Play Events, a tournament software that a lot of people use, and some other people, we put together a site called, or a database called, OPDB, Open Pinball Database, that lists all the machines. We supplied them with all the seed data because we've been maintaining a database of machine names for 10 years and we got like 1400 machine names on it. Those are only machines that have been out on location. So we fed that to Andreas for the seed data for OPDB. Now that the database is live now, we're both editors of it. We add new machines to it. Scott and I are editors. I mean, I know I am. I am, but Ryan's the one who edits. Okay. And so here's what's cool about it. And this is, it's easiest just to give a real life example. So Match Play Events, it's a tournament software. Say you're having a tournament at Ground Control. You're there at Ground Control, you have your computer open, you go to Match Play. Now first thing you gotta do for your tournament is add 20 machines to your tournament. I don't wanna do that. Yeah, me either. But I have a solution to that. And the solution is you just click a tab that says Pinball Map on Match Play Events and it says, looks like you're at Ground Control because it knows where you are physically. And then if you are, you say, yes I am. And then it says, well, here's the 20 machines at Ground Control. You want to add them all? And that list of 20 machines is taken straight from Pinball Map using our API. And so it's going to save people a lot of time. And you know, the part where OPDB comes in is like it's, I don't know how to describe this really, it's like it's matching the IDs of the machines on our site and the IDs of the machines on OPDB. They're the same IDs. They all, they both... It's a unique identifier that everybody can key in on. Yeah, okay. And so yeah, there's gonna be a lot of cool stuff with it. I think like, I don't know who else is going to be using it, but possibly. I don't know. I don't want to say just in case they don't. We're all gonna use it. Everybody's gonna use it. Okay. Yeah, we're all gonna use it. And you know, you're we're gonna be happy at last. I'm finally, finally happy. Yeah. Now that OPDB is here. Yeah, so it's a really it's a nice slick site. It doesn't have as much information as IPDB, but that's okay. It like, you know, go to IPDB for your rule sets and or whatever else they have in there. Photos, really cool photos on there. Yeah, but it's a great site. Yep, I know. I look at all the time, but they don't want anything to do with other sites. What's wrong with us? We're delightful. We are. Oh well. Oh well. Music Now it's time to dip in with Danny B. Music So Danny, last time we left off you were humming Pinball Wizard over and over. We're just over and over. And now we're at the Garden Juice Bar downtown LA. Ding-a-ding-a-ding-a-ding-a-ding. Shig-a-ding-a-ding-a-ding-a-ding. Ding-a-ding-a-ding-a-ding-a-ding. I was wondering, what type of... When you're playing out on location, what's your, like, ideal place? What do you look for? What do you think's cool? You know what was the best place? Billy Ray, Orland, Oregon. In the daytime though. And then that was the complete opposite at night. There'd be some
    18:38
    fucking big drunk loud douche. Probably John Ray. Just kidding. Didn't he work there? Yeah, he worked there for years. Yeah, it was upstairs. It was away. There was no like... We're live on the There's like a little trace of music up there, but it was like right in the window, you get a nice breeze. Yeah, big ol' that huge window. It was a big Victorian house. Yeah, the bar downstairs and the upstairs was just pinball. Yeah, I think it's still there, isn't it? Yeah, I think so. $20 cover. What do you like about that place? I like the solitude, man. I think that's what I like most about pinball in general. Been thinking about that a lot lately.
    19:19
    There may be like one other dude up there, but... I really love to just concentrate man. I like to just be in you know find that that zone that Zen you know. I don't sound like a hippie but I mean that's the only way. There goes my sunglasses. Yeah I like that too. You know I like to I don't like to go out to bars just to like drink. Right. But now there's an activity there. It's fun. Yeah. Get to play with some friends or on your own, you know, and just get into a game for an hour or so. I mean, you can get some solitude with like headphones and that, but it's not the same. I like hearing the game and I just really liked it up there. It was kind of a little hot in the summer, but it was all right. Yeah. I like my father's place a lot. Just the dingy, like old school, you know, games are all fucked up, you know, like some I don't know, just play a little float or Batman just because that's the way it is that day. Might kick out two balls, fuck it, play them. Yeah, that was a 24 hour restaurant, right? Yeah. Wasn't it? No, I don't think it was 24 hours, was it? Maybe it was, yeah. I feel like I went in there pretty late and got some pancakes. Yeah, maybe you're right. It was a 24 hour restaurant. But maybe the bar side closed because they have to? Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, yeah. Yeah man, I really love that place and I used to love like the bowling alleys and shit. I'm getting pretty nostalgic for that stuff lately. Yeah, I used to play Interstate Lanes a lot. No one there. I was on Interstate, different side of town. Oh yeah, yeah, that place was sweet. I was on Vancouver, you had? Or wait, no. No, I was on Interstate. Isn't that a street? That's right, yeah. Yeah, they had Jurassic Park and Flintstones. Right. We got Flintstones at our work. Oh, do you? Yeah. I love that game. Yeah, go for that. Yeah, I love that game. Go for the strike. Strike. Danny B's work, 82 in downtown Los Angeles. Club. Come see him DJ at Wednesdays at 6 to 9, right? 6 to 10? See you, Chin-Gol. That's right, 6 to 9. Ah, 6 to 10. Sometimes 10-30. Sometimes 7. Yeah, man, that's my ideal place to play. I don't know. I love them darker spots and I don't know. I'm not really into like, I mean honestly a place like 82 would be the last place I'd want to play. You know, or like, not that they, I love the games and the lineup's really good and you keep the game, you know, they keep the game, they're working solid, man. There's always a tech on the floor. Yeah, that's a cool thing. Always a tech on the floor, which is pretty unique for a place. You just, seeing things break, you just tell Danny or whoever, soft blankets. And then our master of Tekken will always come in in the day, you know, and fix any catastrophic... Malfunction. Malfunctions. And uh... Well, that place is for some people. Might not be like your ideal place, but it's fucking crowded. Like people are always like, oh, you got all the GCs because you work here. But honestly, man, like anybody who hangs out there and plays pinball plays the games way more than I do. And if I do, I'm not a fan of the old-school, like, if it is maybe a league night and there's nobody around and I'll get a game in or two, there's somebody tapping on my shoulder constantly. You know what I mean? I'm not like GC in games. It works. It takes some time. I might stay out afterwards and play one, but that's honestly not true. I'm just the best in the city. Probably are. You got more GCs than me. I gotta have the most GCs. But I'm better than all those guys. I mean, I'm not trying to sound like Egotistical, but I've just been at it a long time. Tim Kitzrow bought me a pueden. Johnny New Monica, Johnny New Monica Mohikea. Alright, what else? You got any cool pinball stories, maybe from your, when you were a kid, hustling? God, I really have so many, man. I just, I've been thinking a lot lately about, there used to be this one strip in St. Louis, I was thinking back, it was actually Route 66. Man, I was watching the Chippewa Road. That's kind of like pretty close to my house. I could cruise my bike over there in like 10 minutes, you know, or take some back routes on the skateboard.
    23:56
    This was so rad, man. You had like 7-Eleven. And so what we would do was we would like, we were young, man, like 12, 13, and these kids, this kid Boomer and Jason Schumer, they were brothers, man. I'm a fan of the kids. And Boomer was like twice as big as Jason. Boomer Schumer? Yeah. I think it was Peter Lee, Boomer Schumer. Wow. Those kids were... Man they were some hard kids man To say the least they were super smart you know and just super just kind of raised themselves up man Their ma worked real hard to raise them, and just blue-collar kids, man. She was like a bartender down in the city, you know. Man, tough kids, the Schuwers, man. So, uh, Rad, she was always a worker, so we kinda, we could just like smoke cigarettes, weed around the house, drink, like, do whatever. Actually, she didn't like, Cindy didn't like us to drink. But, uh, so then we'd get blazed and go walk down the street, man, and there was 7-Eleven that had Black Knight 2000, and then a couple other games, and they had Castlevania, and then like, we had Fire for a little while, and uh, so that's how I remember the peak, We'd sneak in the back and take a couple of tokes or we'd do like inhalants. God, that's funny to think about, man. We'd have a little like toilet paper roll and he would like stick it in some tooling, which was like he found out in rehab that tooling is the property of glue that gets you high. This was Jason, man. That guy had like mercury around the crib and stuff. Peter Korn, The Enterprise and Young Men. Just a wild dude and he would stick it in the toolie and then put it in like a paper towel roller and then we'd just like huff it down, catch a ringer and play Black Knight. Then walk down to the next spot which was Happy Joe's Pizza, which is still there, they still got a little pinball. Nice. And then down the street from that was, maybe in between was Marlboro Lanes, which was a redneck bowling alley, man. Marlboro Lanes? Yeah. I remember just, I don't know, some good times walking up and down them corners. And I do remember, I remember one time we were up in 7-Eleven and doing them inlets and we were like, I was ripping them the black knife. I guess there was like a new guy working and we were like three or four of us in there. And Jason went around and he took like five magazines. There's like a magazine rack where the video games were. And then he went around and he took like, he filled like his whole belt underneath his jacket and his shirt with like cartons of cigarettes. Wow. He gave me a carton of Alpine Light 100s.
    27:00
    And then like a couple, like a week later, they're so nasty I could barely smoke them. So I just kind of stashed them in my house. And like a week later I got pneumonia.
    27:12
    And I was like quarantined. Maybe I got the mumps or the measles or some shit. That's old school or whatever, the chicken pox.
    27:21
    And all I had was the fucking Alpine Light 100s, man. I smoked like a carton of them in like a week. That's all I could do was smoke ciggies and nobody would talk to nobody. I'd go on my route and smoke ciggies. How old are you? I think 12, 13. Nah, probably 12. I would have been smoking them at 13. Marlboro's only. Cool. So back then were you like, were you seeking out pinball or was it just like a fun thing to play? We did, yeah. We definitely, not to sound like all, all, but like yeah man, pinball was cool. Like that was what we did. We loved to like get blazed and go play pinball. Yeah. I guess not much has changed, man. Yeah. Yeah, I was playing it around that time too. Yeah. Giovanni's Pizza, Caribbean Cruise. Yeah, that was popular. Uh huh. And especially like, you know, you take acid and we'd be at the skate park and there'd be that like, uh... You had a skate park back then? Mark, back then? Yeah, man, we had a, um, yeah, we had a, there was Webster Groves, it's right in my neighborhood, man, like three blocks from my house, and uh, there was this guy who opened up a skate shop, one of the first ones, and it was more like a surf shop. I want to say it was one of the first ones, but I think Glenn had his shop open way before that, but everybody gives Kyle credit. Maybe it was Kyle, but I don't know, man, he went to like California or Florida or some shit and saw these surf shops and decided that he would open one up in St. Louis. I mean everybody thought that was crazy and he sold like jams and like clam diggers, pants and then started selling skateboards and then like skateboarding became so popular that all of a sudden the guy was like you know making a fucking fat bank you know. Yeah. So he opened up a little skate park man and he was rad. It was open for like four or five years. Indoor or outdoor? It might even still be there honestly. There might even still be ramps and like the outdoor, it was outdoor on the ice rink. There was an ice rink during the, they had like a warming house. Man, how old am I? Like 90? You're like 67? Yeah. And they had the warming house in there. So we'd go and... Different times. Man, I remember being on Acid and playing that... I remember I was playing Earthshaker. It might have just come out too. I was ripping it. And Kyle, or one of the guys, I like to think it was Kyle, it might not have been. That's pretty late. He would have been like closing down the skate park. Maybe it was, man. He's like, you know, you guys have got to close up, man, but if you can keep getting free games, you can keep playing. And then he turned off all the lights. Yeah. Shit, maybe he was conditioning us. So you just kept playing the whole night? He wasn't. He was a good guy. So, well, yeah, it was like, I was on acid, though, so I was like, the lights were so crazy. And I just remember like, I was like, holy shit. I was in the middle of ripping and the game was all going crazy and there was like some spots on the wall right next to where the game was and I swear to God I thought they were all spiders and I was like holy shit and I like jumped away from them and I like looked back and I was like wait are those spiders and then they were dots again and then they were like it was just like looked like that and I was like oh now they're spiders. Danny just pointed to all the dirt on the wall and the place we're eating at. Yeah. And then he's like, no, those aren't... God, they're spiders! And then I drain, drain, drain. Did he... was he concerned that you were yelling about spiders? He was. But they all knew that we did acid shit. Alright. It's kind of a little safe spot, potentially, for some people. I mean, he was grooming us, after all. He was grooming you. Just turn out the lights a little bit, and... It's just Snacky Quarters. You don't want to play without pants.
    31:10
    Sorry. That's taking it too far. A little too far. I took it too far. Well, the St. Louis pinball map actually has a lot of machines on it. Man, it's getting... I mean, I think you can sort of follow like the gentrification of a city through the pinball map. This would be a good experiment, you know? I mean, look at Portland. That would be interesting. Yeah. I'm just trying not to talk like this anymore, but it's things that Caucasian people with money like, with indispensable money. Even though St. Louis is still poor, man, for the most part. You think you know somebody with money, but they ain't got no damn money. Just wait until you see Crazy Rich Asians. Comes out tomorrow, wait, today. You don't go to a party on a barge. I'm going to say the same thing as you do, though. They did that in Singapore in the movie? They're in Singapore the whole movie? Yeah, in Singapore. Have you been there? No. Never been to Singapore. I've never been there either. If only I was a crazy rich Caucasian. Someday. I'm not. When that Portlandia gets bought out by HBO. Get the replays. What's it called? The residuals. Residuals? Please, in the meantime, send me one dollar. Yeah, paypal, one dollar to dannybelrose at gmail dot com. Please, paypal, dannybelrose, gmail dot com. Keeping pinball real since Lake of the Ozarks, man, in the 80s, man. We just added to the pinball map yesterday the world's oldest penny arcade in Rhode Island. Road Island. Whoa. It's called Silver Lake Arcade? No, not Silver Lake. Super Lake? That's amazing, man. Lake Arcade. Alright, we gotta end this, because we just don't have that much time. I got, I mean, I got this parky thing, but was that a good story? Yeah, that was a great story. And this is the world. Map Tech, Map Tech, Map Tech. So Ryan, something happened a few weeks ago. I'm not comfortable sharing what it is. I thought it was an aha moment in my life, a catalyst, if you will, that made me do what some people in the tech industry describe as a spike. And this particular spike was a performance spike. I looked at the map and I thought, we can do better. We're always in such a sprint to get all these features out there, fixing bugs, yada yada yada. Performance, general maintenance sometimes falls to the wayside. Yeah. Would you mind, would you indulge me to talk about that for a few moments? I will. Have at it. Oh, thank you. I think we've mentioned before our app runs on Heroku, which is a service that makes it easy to deploy and manage web applications. They're secretly, well not secretly, they're a wrapper on AWS, Amazon Web Services. In our efforts to keep costs as low as possible, we use Heroku, but we use the cheapest possible pay tier that there is. And what that means, and I'll put these in computer terms that we all know and love, we get 512 megs of RAM and one processor. And that's what we get. And that's what the pinball map runs on. That's what services the website, the apps, the whole shaboos. Shaboos? Shaboos I think? Shabazz? The whole shabazz. So as you've heard before, Pinball Map's a Rails application, and Rails application's not exactly famous for being slim. They're huge. The beauty of Rails is that it handles a lot of the work for you, and what you do is kind of glue concepts together. And when the concepts don't match up like they would for everyone else, you write custom But the Penalty of having this out of the box Magic is that it's it's kind of bloated it makes it hard to run in 512 Megs of RAM! What happens when you're out of your ram? You drop to disk and it's a thing called swap. So what's that? What's the problem there? Well you picture a hard drive, picture it now in your head. I'll wait. It's probably like a rectangle. And here's a little disc part that's maybe spinning around in circles. So that spinning motion is the disc running around in circles trying to find all the little individual pieces of what you're asking it to do and make them happen together. When it's in memory that well, I guess picture that memory. No. It's maybe green and black. You can get as much of the application as you can into memory. When I opened the, what is it, the hood? To look and see how fast things were going. I guess that's a weird way to see how fast things are going to open the hood. What I found is that on average our application was running two to three hundred megs over our RAM limit. So we were in swap most of the time. Very slow. Not good. So clearly a problem that we need to solve. So I did what every single computer programmer on earth does, just started typing words into Google, right? That's a secret here. Over time you don't have to type as many words, but you always have to type words. So I'm Googling, you know, Heroku memory, yada yada yada, to get us out of swap and get us more performing. And here is what I did. Here is a bulleted list. I don't want to use up the whole podcast. If any of this is interesting to anybody, please write us at our email address, which is... pinballmap at fastmail.com Is Fastmail in Germany? No, I got away for the Germany one. Actually, I think they're in like Italy or Australia or something, but I don't know. Okay. They're offshore. So anyway, here's what we did. I started with upgrading Ruby from 2.3.4 to 2.5.1. Doesn't sound like much, right? But after the upgrade we dropped about 100 megs of footprint. Wow. Not bad. Yeah, that's okay. Observe the logs. It's kind of satisfying sometimes to watch the logs zip by, but it's difficult to read. And as I'm watching I'm like, huh, why is this difficult to read? Why are they so long? And then it occurred to me, oh, we have a number of N plus 1 errors here. Well, errors. What's that? Well, I'm glad you asked. So we have a single database and think about when you load the website. You load the website, you do a search for a zone. Let's just say a zone. You say you're in Portland, you search for downtown. Behind the scenes what was happening is it'll do a search for all the machines in Portland, Then it'll do a search for the region for each of those machines, which is Portland, over and over again. It'll do a search for the names of all the machines in downtown in Portland, over and over again. So if there's a fishtails in four places, it's going to do four searches. And we only get, I think, 20 concurrent database connections. That number might be way high. I'm sorry. But in total, all told, all total. In toto, that's what I usually say. In toto, there were a lot of, it was not rare for a pretty common use case to spawn off say like 200 database queries just to load a webpage. And each individual query is pretty quick, like we're talking milliseconds, but it's doing 200 of them. And as other people are making requests too, it has to share between everybody. So it would be like, okay, I'll do 50 of yours, now I'm going to do 20 of yours, now 30 of yours. And it's just the context switching is slow. That's M plus one, is when you're doing more queries than you need to, but it's taking a lot of queries and turning them into one big query. So I went across the site and I tried to find every instance where we were doing too many queries, zipped them up into one or two bigger queries. That was a big one. Another big one, and this one, geez, I hope this is interesting to somebody else. It was like horrifying to me, but other people might not care. With databases, there's regular maintenance that you do. There's this thing called vacuuming and there's this thing called analyzing. As you add and delete machines to the database, there are records that are left behind in the database. And I think it's like the concept where, you know, when you think you've deleted or how about this, you wipe your hard drive and you sell it to some schmuck and he is able to like revive your, your credit info from it. It's never actually deleted, you know? Yeah. Is that a thing still? I think that's a thing. Yeah, I think it's a thing. Okay, so when you delete stuff on the site, the records are actually left behind and there's There's a process called vacuuming, which you do to a database which cleans up those records. And if you don't clean them up, it's as if your table was just bigger and bigger and bigger. So even if we have... how many locations do we have? 5,400 or something. Okay, so if you deleted, say, 300 of those, it would be like we had 5,800. And the more data you have, the harder it is to go through. So that's what vacuuming is. Analyzing is a concept that says as we build queries to satisfy requests, we need to know about how many records are in each table so we know how to interface with the tables. Like if I know the table has like a bazillion records, I'm going to treat it differently than if it has 10. So it's like indexing kind of? Yeah, kind of. I mean, it's able to know which index to use based on how big the table is or how to use the indexes in some ways. Like, there's different types of queries that it'll try to do based on the size of tables. So, here's where I get horrified. Our database hadn't been analyzed or vacuumed in like five, six years. I mean, to the point where it thought that there were like ten locations. I mean, that's just, that's not good. I'm stuck on that. Yeah, like I don't know, like maybe when I first set it up, I was playing around just by hand to see what the database could do. Oh, I hear you. And I typed it. Yeah. But I thought that Heroku was doing this automatically. Turns out not so much because we're not paying them whatever money for whatever tier of service. So, a long story. I vacuum and analyze the whole thing and I set up a process to do it automatically. Oh, cool. Did you have to massage it too? I did. I vacuumed, I analyzed, and then I played some soft music and gave a 30 minute chair massage to the database. The final thing I did, and this is the thing that took us under and officially ended my spike, which I'm not proud of, but here we are. I lowered the number of threads that would attempt to run from five to four. So a thread is like, for a process it'll try to do X number of things at a time. And we can have a whole podcast episode about Ruby threads and how people will just punt on the whole language because of the way they work. Maybe next year. Maybe, okay, next year. Dropping it from five to four is the thing that finally took us down. So below our limit. So now we're hovering around 80% memory usage. I unfortunately do not have the log capabilities at our price level to accurately give before and after performance indicators, but my ANIC data says that our slowest operations are probably about twice as fast as they used to be. And those are pretty common things like loading the app or looking up a location. Yeah, I noticed the app was faster to load. Well, that's kind of where I was hoping maybe this podcast becomes a conversation is if anyone's listening to this and they've noticed any speed difference, even if you've noticed no speed difference, let us know because I don't know. I mean, people complained about it, but I don't know if they noticed that it's faster. Yeah, yeah, because we just did that kind of silently and until now, of course. But yeah, I mean, I don't know if I, I think I would have noticed even if I didn't know what you were doing, just because like the app does take a while to load that initial data and now it seems like at least twice as fast. Oh, really? Okay. I think so. Well, that's good to hear. Let us know, listener, if you think it's faster too. The next thing I want to do after, you know, some features is revisit our serialization. And serialization is when you use our API, you're basically asking for enormous chunks of text to come across to you.
    45:59
    The process of grabbing data from a database and turning it into enormous chunks of text It's a good thing that we're all working on something that can be slow and is currently slow on our system. So I think if I can play around with that, there's Netflix built a library that I think we might be able to use that should speed that up and I think then you will truly notice a major speed difference. Thanks for your time. That's what I've been up to. Maybe we could tie this back into AWS and how would this all, would this change at all if we moved from Heroku to AWS? So I think the things that I did are, aside from lowering the number of threads that we run, are universally like best practice. You upgrade your libraries, you fix your M plus one issues, you do your database maintenance. But, you know, like I said, all that work and we're still 80% total memory usage and we had to lower our actual throughput capacity just to stay in memory. I think moving to AWS lets us take all these gains and it becomes cheaper for us to say, Well, instead of going from five threads to four, maybe we have three parallel processes running that are automatically load balanced and we leave the threads on each one at five. Yeah, that'd be fantastic. Yeah, because I mean, in some ways, we've like cut off an arm to crawl through a hole, right? Yeah. That was a good analogy. Yeah, that was good. It made me think. So I don't want to, I don't want to have to do that. But you know, I also can't spend 60 bucks a month on bandwidth and all that stuff. Right. Yeah. That's where you come in listener. Pause. Okay. All right. Yeah. Anyway, I like that stuff. And that's what I've been up to. Cool. Well, one little follow up then is on Heroku, there's these little tools that you could install like Memcashier and if we were on AWS, would we just kind of like be on our own or are there little cool little tools like that to use there too? Great question I think the answer is going to be a little bit of both Like Heroku is a great service and I love Heroku and Heroku is always should be everyone go thing for prototyping and you know just playing around because it cuts out the whole DevOps thing entirely You just kind of push to this thing and it just sort of works And they give you all kinds of great plugins and tools that Tim Kitzrow Laser Loser Kid Pinball Podcast Mirco Playfields
    49:09
    I'm going to be out of the box, but like email, we're going to have to send that off to some email server.
    49:26
    Okay, let's chat for a minute about stats. In the last episode we talked for 20 minutes about 7 stats. We're going to flip it around and do like 20 stats in three minutes. Oh, okay. That's not like you were going to say 40 minutes. Yeah. I mean, that's a lie. Of course, we're not actually doing 20 stats and who knows how long it'll take. But okay. Beginning, like we're at 5,558 locations on the map right now, 17,457 machines. We've grown since the last episode. I don't even, I'm not even going to look up how many we had last episode. If I was more organized, I would, and then we'd just compare them. But believe me, believe me, it's more, right? Yeah. Or just re-listen to the last episode. Yeah. We have machines added to locations. There's been 1,138 machines added to locations, which is actually a little bit lower than last month where we were at like 1,200 or something, but it's still very, very high. It's because no Japan. Right. Yeah. Japan is done. Our Japan admin has been submitting a few other spots nearby in Singapore, which is kind of cool, but only a couple spots there. And this is, I think, an interesting data point. Machines removed. Usually, there's definitely more machines added than removed, but machines removed, there's 669 removed, which I feel is pretty low this month. Which, yeah, definitely, it indicates that we've just been adding lots of machines and, like I said before, it's sad when machines are removed, unless they're getting swapped for a really sweet one, but that just shows like some good growth right there. Locations suggested, these are ones that have been submitted to us, we had 191 locations submitted to us, almost 200. That keeps us busy and we've been adding, I don't know, all of them. I'll say all of them. All of them were added. And locations confirmed 424. I see we should have been organized and know like, because that's what we talked about last time. We're like, maybe. Yeah, I'm not going to be comfortable until that is at parity with number of locations on the map. Wow. Each. Yeah, that is true. That's a good point. Because we don't want that brings me to a small aside right here. Let's go. I'm not disparaging that, like these are really nice cool people that are using the map and having fun with it, submitting locations. Some of them are gas stations in Italy, which are called Total Erg. It's one word, Total E-R-G. Wait, that's like the name of the gas station? That's the name of the gas station, Total Erg. Yeah. Sounds like something from Starcraft or something like that.
    52:46
    Um, but you know, he, you know, this guy's probably having an awesome vacation. He went to France apparently, according to his submissions and Italy. And, uh, you know, these locate these gas stations, the machine comments that he submits with them are just like, this machine sucks and is in terrible shape. There's no actual address for the gas station. It's just like a crossroads on some street in the hills of Italy. And I'm like, is anybody going to visit this place again and update this location on the map? Or is this kind of like a one and done thing? And this data is going to get stale. That's like the cynic in me when I see these. I say leave them. Yeah, I think I think that particular stale is charming. Yeah, and it is cool to get these little like random places in Europe too. I like that. Uh, comment, all right, no, scores, we had 141 scores submitted, which, uh, that's way more than last time. I think we had like 60 last month. Oh, really? Yeah. Well, still kind of just tells me that our users aren't very good at pinball. Yeah, I guess they're just not putting up, they're not getting any score on their machines. Right. They're getting zeros and so there's nothing to enter. Then once in a while they get a score. Right. Comments, 910 comments left about machines. Danny B and I mentioned last month when we were talking about the Simpsons garage door breaking and I mentioned that that's a common one. So I looked it up to see how many Simpsons on location right now have a broken garage If you're lost on the треть special editionốt , think about the I think that over 10% of on-location Simpsons pinball parties have a broken door. Yeah, I think that's probably safe to say. Huh. Yeah, I don't know. Somebody, some, one of those like aftermarket pinball sites, Pinball Life or something should make a new garage door or something like that, one that works. With mirror blades on it. Mirror blade garage door. A couple other fun stats we have is I wanted to see how many locations have the word lounge in it. Uh-huh. Just because I thought of that. And 131 locations have lounge in their name. Nice. Yeah, pretty good. After that I looked up how many users, how many user names have the string pin, P-I-N with pin pinball so pinhead whatever there's uh even i'm not saying people aren't creative if a lot of them have pin in their names but it's a pinball themed website so i kind of expected there to be a lot of people with pin in their names and there are uh there's 214 users have pin in their names in some form yeah that's mainly the other the only other stat i had which we don't need to go I'm going to go into just how much like code and crap we've changed this month, but we thought maybe that was too much detail. It's a lot of, a lot of code. Yeah, but we did close, well, 24 issues. We're, this is like, these are all stats for July, I should say. And now I know we're in August now, but it's just easier and cleaner to look from month to month. So we closed 24 issues. The issues are kind of like tickets that we write to ourselves for the site, bug, like feature updates, bug reports, stuff like that. Closed 24 and we pushed a lot of code. And I didn't do a ton this month. I feel like I, I, I, you know, I do like the front end development for the site, the design, and I, there wasn't a ton for me to do. I'm going to be doing a lot of little tweaks here and there and I focus more on doing the design work for the React Native app. I think August is going to be a huge month for both of us. Yeah, maybe so. Yeah, especially for you because you started out super strong with your performance refactor, your performance, what do you call it, strike? Spike. Performance spike. Like you're spiking a ball, kind of? I don't know. Yeah, dancing around. Yeah, moving on to the next section now. Those are the stats. I mentioned React Native. This is something we've mentioned last time. We haven't talked about it much this month. But here we go. We're rewriting the app from scratch using React Native, which we described last time. It's coming along very, very nicely. I think people are going to be happy with this new version. I mean, we talked a few moments ago about the startup time for the AT&T And so without further ado, we bring you Scott interviewing Beth. Take it away. Who are you? My name is Beth Poore. Okay, I thought there'd be some follow up to that question, but clearly what else do you follow that up with? Hello Beth. Please describe your relationship with the sport of pinball. Sport of Pinball. So pinball and I don't go back too many years. I don't think I'd ever played pinball per se before being with my fiance Dennis. We'd been together a couple years before we'd ever actually played together. He played a lot as a kid and was apparently really good. And years later when we were in, I think, Bend for the weekend, we played some games and it was really fun. And we... that's when he got really back into playing a lot and I started playing a lot myself. Where did he play when he was really good as a kid? I believe the 7-Eleven at... or Plaid Pantry in Corvallis on Monroe Street. Okay, alright. So it was in Oregon, young, really... okay. Yeah. I'm gonna do some research on that after. Like, probably college age and... Oh, okay. And he lived with a guy one summer that you guys know, John Sherard. Yeah. And he had a whitewater in the basement and that was, I guess he played that thing all summer when he lived with him. So you have a dotted line from yourself to John Sherard also? Yes, exactly. Okay. And I met him briefly once at a picnic. I've also played that whitewater machine. Oh nice. As has Ryan. Okay. Sorry. Dennis plays, you play. Yeah, and then Dennis's job brought him up to Seattle for a few years and that's when we both kind of went nuts with playing a lot of pinball while we were separated. He joined a league in Seattle and played every Monday night and I started going out by myself to events in Portland and I joined Bells and Chimes and started playing with a lot of the ladies around town and just meeting a lot of people and whenever I'd go up to Seattle We would meet up with people in Seattle and play at Shorty's. We'd do the monthly on Sundays at Shorty's. We did that for a long time and it was really great. Now that he's back, we have a machine at home and we still just play all the time. What machine is that? We have a Fishtails. Oh, I knew that. You helped me find that and we're so happy that you did. We love it. Yeah, that was a pretty good deal on Fishtails, I think. I mean, I don't think we'd ever find one for any less. Yeah, okay, okay. When you were playing around town when Dennis was away, where would you play? Well, I live out in kind of deep southwest, so I would go to this dive bar called The Dugout where people would look at me funny for being there by myself. And I would just chill out and have a beer and play some pinball, or I'd go to C-Bar a lot when I came into town. What's the lineup like at the dugout? Right now, they have Junkyard. I was gonna guess Corvette or Harley Davidson or something like that. They did have Harley Davidson for a while. When I was going there so much in the beginning, they had a CSI. In my past life, I was a scientist. I worked at a virology lab and I'm really into I'm a fan of the CSI, I was at the dugout, it was my jam. CSI, that's a classy move for a dive bar. It's a surprising move, I guess. Really? I think so. I don't know if an operator had that machine, but unless the owner of the bar is like... It's Melody. Oh, okay. For a while they would have two machines, and those were the good old days, but there's just one, and there's been one for several years now. I gotcha. Okay. What is your relationship to the pinball map? The pinball map is really special to me in a lot of ways. I can't recall exactly when I started using the pinball map, but probably, I guess it's been five or six years ago now. So now I went back to school to get a post-baccalaureate in computer science and I'd been using and really enjoying the pinball map for probably a couple years at this point. And in my web development class we had to go and learn how to, or basically provide instructions for how to use any API of our choosing and make a website about it. So I chose the pinball map API. This is getting really specific into code already. This is good. This is what we want. So I chose the Pinball Map API just because, well, simply it's kind of easy to get into, to use, and it provides a lot of data that I found exciting to myself personally because I obviously am running into pinball. I was a pinball user, so I used the pinball map API for my web development project in school. I had already been an avid user at that point, but I guess from then on I've just always been really into the pinball map as well as the actual inner workings of it, like the application and the API and everything. What language were you using to interact with the pinball map back then? I don't remember. Was that Python? I was just using JavaScript to make an API request. Got it. Yeah. Okay, I don't know. I feel weird asking this, but I'm going to ask anyway. You say simple, and this is the second time I've heard that today. And it's a compliment. I take it as a compliment. Yeah. I mean it as a compliment. Why do you think simple? I have some theories on that, but I don't even know. I guess the very first thing is just that you don't have to have an API key to access anything, so you can just get right in and get to going. Because I was between using the IFPA API or the Pinball Map API when I was choosing an API to work with, and the IFPA API you have to request a key. And I mean I think it only took like a day or two for them to get back to me but by the time they got back to me with the key I'd already been playing around with data from the pinball map and this. The API key thing is good but also worries me a little bit. It's a little sketchy because I think it opens it up to a lot of abuse, you know what I mean? Oh certainly. Like scrapers or any of that stuff. When I first started using the map, part of what blew my mind, but I found really cool, was that there wasn't even, like, back in the day, you didn't even have a user account, so just anyone was able to add and remove machines from locations, and I thought that was just so cool and really indicative that the pinball community in general is, you know, trustworthy, and yeah, and just like, it just felt like this app represented, like, I think a lot of things are good in the world. And I know now that we do have to have user names and logins, but I think that's just for the very minority amount of the population that things like that are necessary. And you also get beneficial things with having profiles. So like with the app and the website now, we're able to track user statistics. So you do get benefit by benefits by having a required login if you want to make changes to the map. Yeah, a secret reason we have most endpoints don't need a key is backwards compatibility with the old apps. Like some people have really, really old smartphones and they won't upgrade and they have versions of the software that they can't upgrade anymore. Astro Axier Guys Ryan and I talked about it last time. You are the catalyst for the paradigm change of application development in the pinball map universe. Tell us a little bit about React Native and why we care so much about it. Sure. I hope to not disappoint with this React Native transition. So the web app is a Ruby on Rails application and currently the phone apps are separate Android and iOS applications. None of these technologies I personally have any experience in really. I had offered that when it came time to do the revamp of the phone apps that I'd be willing to learn one of the stacks, and try to take charge on one of them. Which is not easy. It's not easy, and I don't have any experience. I was hoping that if it all came down to it I'm excited that I might get to do the iOS just because I was like, well, I have an iPhone. That seems interesting. But in my current day job, I work with React to make web applications. And using React Native is porting all of the React work that I am already knowledgeable, have experience in. And just plugging that into creating phone applications. And I believe you talked about in the last episode about how React Native, you can compile down to both Android and iOS code, or not code, but applications from a single React Native codebase. Which is magic to me. Like I have no idea how that works, but... Honestly it's magic to me too and I'm nervous. Yeah, like they take... We're hoping for the best right now. If they take some piece of JavaScript and they turn it into Java code and Objective C or like Swift or something and then that's compiled separately, that's, I don't know. I guess we, I don't know. That's what I was going to say. I hope it all works at the end of the day. It should. I mean, huge companies are using React Native to make their apps and I'm sure we'll figure it out. Right now it's pretty smooth sailing because we're just using JavaScript to write basically what would be a standard React application. I've never actually made a React Native app so we're going to see what roadblocks we come up into when it comes time to try to actually get these into the app stores and make them run as their own independent apps. It's part of the rich history of technology selection based on your day job and trying to improve your skills on something that you get paid to do by building it for the pinball map community. I think it's a good choice though, personally, it makes a ton of sense. Can we expect a clone of the current apps when these new ones roll out? Is it just going to look the same or is it going to act differently? What are you going to be doing in the future? There's going to be a lot of similar functionality, but we're also going to have some enhancements to especially like the profile streams and search is going to be, if all goes well, search is going to be dramatically improved, like searching for locations especially. Do I have to pick a region anymore when it loads up? No, but I'm still trying to understand all of how this actually works. Gotcha. Because I think part of the hope here is a screen that everybody sees when it starts and you start searching and it finds stuff regardless of what region you're in. Regionless, basically. Sure, but it's going to load up with where you're currently at, right? Well, yeah, I guess, sure. Sure, but if I'm in Portland and I type in a map address for Seattle, it'll show me Seattle stuff, right? Yeah. I don't have to switch over to the Seattle region to pull it up? Correct. Okay, there you go. Yeah. Big feature request from many angry travelers is having to switch between regions is confusing. They were angry? Well, some were angrier than others. People are very polite, but some people, I mean, they know what they want. How about that? Sure. I personally never found it that up-putting to change my region, and I, to be honest, I've never really considered why I even need to do that. Yeah, I think it's the people who travel, and I think for, I think the apps are a little slow right now because they preload all the data for a region. Off the record, CONNECT is running a massive sale at the mezzanine range of passionately- slopescast, doorMaeknis and onretShow.com. I just wanted to say a lot of good progress has been made and there's still a lot of progress that needs to be made. But we're zooming along and Ryan has been doing a great job doing all the styling. I terrible at styling things so it really nice to have someone who has an eye for that and a passion for getting it right The styling is CSS right Essentially Essentially you use Flexbox which is a way of using CSS for React Native and you can use most CSS stylings for React Native but you have things that are specific to phones to consider at nopen deuces 4 you don't have on clicking as there is no
    73:31
    Clicking them out. You have可是 What's the biggest challenge for you guys to be like out of date or all over the place? It's all changing really quickly and getting just getting all the pieces of the infrastructure for the app in place has been challenging at times because we'll want to upgrade certain packages to get like a current new feature but then other dependencies are then out of date so this is definitely a changing ecosystem that has changed a lot.
    74:24
    How do you feel about talking into a cell phone in a park in busy downtown Portland with people next to you having a conversation and a small houseless camp? That's all fine. It's less uncomfortable to talk into a phone than I thought it'd be. Oh, okay. I mean it's just a phone. Alright, any parting thoughts that we need to consider? Just that I love the pinball map and anything that I can do to help keep it going, I'm into. What a great attitude that we could all adopt. Thanks, Beth. See ya. Wow, what a great interview. Beth's really easy to talk to. And easy to listen to, too. Yeah, that actually we Beth and I had lunch at me Mero mole which is right across the street from ground control we were gonna do the interview there but there was loud street noise like the train so we thought we were gonna do the interview in ground control and get like cool ambient pinball noises but it was free play day which is like a blessing and a curse because I'm not gonna spend five dollars to go to go sit in there not play So, what we ended up doing is walking to that weird park by Powell's and that's, anyway, a little behind the scenes there of how that interview worked. Something Beth and I wanted to get into, but both of us forgot to get into it. We talked about her writing the API to interact with the website in college. But we didn't get what happened next, which is Beth started contributing to the pinball map in general, like the open source Rails application. And because of that, Beth and I got to talking and there was an opening at my work and I said, you know, hey, you can program clearly. Like, why don't you come work? And so she applied and, you know, best a great programmer was a slam dunk. And there she goes. But we wanted to bring that up because all of our applications are open source. Like, there's nothing that we do that isn't available to read through right now. So if anybody is interested in contributing or even learning more about it, I think all of us are pretty approachable, happy to walk you through and explain any weirdness that you see there. So don't hesitate to look and contribute. Yeah, and we have the list of issues on the GitHub page that shows things we'd like to work on. We're here to help, you can call 6 Sort Volkswagen and schedule a free 15 minute private talk about action or misbehavior, the free 15 minute private talk talking about a popular tech con, make use of other August 11th events, pay less and less, email us. He's a god send in a way. She's really cool. From high above. Maybe that's a little dramatic, god send. . That's fine. Let's give it to Bob. She's a blessing in disguise, I'd say. Wait. . But if you're nervous about jumping into something like this, you don't have a ton of experience, that's fine. You wouldn't be the first one to approach us under those terms. We're happy to help people figure it out because we want to make it into something So you're actually helping us by letting us help you contribute. Does that make sense? Helping us by helping? Yeah, just for you. Okay. Just for you. And you know, some of the site, it's not all Rails. It's CSS and HTML too, so you don't even need to know Rails if you, if there's front end stuff you wanted to do, like you You really hate that blue color in one spot? You could attempt to submit a change and we'll review that and see what new color you propose. Right. Or you want to do the whole thing over in Ember or Angular or some weird thing like that. That's fine as long as you do it. Yeah, as long as you actually do it. All right, so now here's a new segment. It's called Let's Discuss About This Now. Let's discuss about this now. All right, Scott, let's discuss about this now. We're going to discuss, in this segment we discuss a provocative issue that peaks our minds and our brains. In this episode, the question is, what is a public machine? We're a map of publicly playable pinball machines. It's not always super straightforward what's public and what's not public. And so I think it's kind of worth some discussion here. And I'll start out by just dropping some examples to pique your interest here. Alright, so a cafe. A cafe is a public place. Anyone can go into it and order some food and then play their machine. Can I stop you right there? Yeah. I'm sorry. Are you going to challenge that? I'm already, yeah, I'm already peaked. Okay, great. Your cafe example. Okay. Anybody can walk in and you say, order some food and play. What if I just want to walk in and play pinball? What is Pinball? Do you sell it in a hotel? If you had to order something before, kind of like at a cafe, at a coffee shop, you have to like order a coffee before using their Wi-Fi or something. I don't know. I'd say that's still definitely safely in the public realm right there. Okay. Yeah. But you're right. That is like, it challenges you a bit because you have to have money. You have to have probably shirt and shoes on. Yeah, I mean there's some social social constructs maybe and maybe some people are more willing to enforce them than others like a place that I would sometimes play is glowing greens in downtown Portland and that is a glow-in-the-dark miniature golf course that has a pinball machine at the check-in area hmm and every time you go down there they're like hey are you here to play pirate themed miniature golf and the answer is no hmm I'm not here to play pirate themed miniature golf. I'm just here to play your pinball machine. And they always just say, oh, okay, sure. But I imagine some people, you know, they might not want you taking up their space. Yeah, and some places, obviously, you need to pay some sort of entrance fee too. There's not, not ever, not all places are as nice as Glowing Greens and have their machine outside of the entrance. An example of that is, the easiest example I could think of is Disneyland. Disneyland has a machine and you gotta pay an entrance fee to get into the park. What do they have? They have Indiana Jones. Oh, this is the one that's all gussied up, right? Yeah, it has the cool custom wood legs on it. It's actually removed right now, but someone, it just breaks immediately, like day one, it's totally broken. And then it just sits there broken for a couple months and then it gets taken out, fixed, put back a couple weeks later. These days people don't even remove it from the map because it just happens so frequently that it gets taken in and out and they just leave a comment when it's broken. That's interesting and I don't want to dwell on it because I'm sure you have other examples but you're giving an example of a place that once you're in you can play the pinball machine But clearly there's a high barrier to getting in. Yeah. Um, but there seems to be some kind of correlation between a very hard to get to public pinball machine and damage to that pinball machine. Like, what's up with that? Are these people like kicking it or, or what? I don't know. I, I, I kind of think that it's just like when they fix it up, they maybe don't make it immaculate. They just kind of like managed to just barely fix the flipper or something and then it gets put back and yeah maybe it does get beat up it sees a lot of I'm sure it sees a lot of action and it's you know it's an older machine it's Indiana Jones the pinball adventure so it's the older one yeah and I don't know it's seen some stuff another similar example to The Disney Land in spirit is a location that was submitted to the San Diego map a couple months ago, which was an escape room. And that's, this escape room had a machine, I think, in their lobby or something. But you need to be a paying customer to play it, because you can't just walk into their escape room. Like they're telling you that? Yeah, I think we, yeah, we asked, we verified. And the San Diego admin did not want to add this place because he's like, well, that doesn't seem public to me. Yeah. But I said, but I was like, it's like kind of the same as Disneyland, though. What's the difference? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Good point. And that's and it's before you actually enter. So it's like the glowing greens thing. Yeah. But I feel like these escape rooms are kind of yeah, it is it is just like that. But they're very simple. They're just like a at least the one we went to in Portland that one time. I mean, it's just like, it's like somebody's apartment basically. It's like a weird office complex. Right, yeah. And so the opening, and they probably keep the place locked. Oh yeah, that's another thing about escape rooms. They do, they're not just like open 9 to 5. They only open when people schedule. Oh. Yeah. Hmm. And, you know, I'm going to throw out a bunch of other similar examples here. .
    85:50
    Not five minutes ago did I just say that I didn't want to pay to get into ground control. Yeah, is ground control not public? Should we take it off the map?
    86:00
    Uh, it's just, yeah, there's a, there's just a range to public and some of these are, I guess, even further along in the range, there are pinball league clubhouses. You got to join the league And then you can play. That's definitely more public than a private residence where you need to like be invited by bill or you need to be bill. But you know that it has open enrollment, open membership to a league and then you have access to the clubhouse. I mean that's not something we list on the site but it is kind of public. Man, so this gets really philosophical. Like it's public if you give your time and energy into joining the league. If we're not going to consider that public, then I mean, you could argue I gave my time and energy to get the money to get into Disneyland to play broken Indiana Jones. Yeah. Like, conceptually, there's no difference. Yeah, there isn't. I mean, I, I, and this is something I'm torn about. I'm like, we do get clubhouses submitted sometimes and I'm sitting there, I'm like, oh, I kind of want to add it, but it doesn't feel super public, but I'm, I'm on the fence. I don't know. I mean, I think the practical answer here is that as long as people tag these things as such and leave like good comments about how, you know, you gotta be in CFF to get in this room or like it Today's topic I don't think I've ever been in a dirty magazine store. I mean, by the time I was old enough, I just didn't really have the interest. Right. Well, search the map. I mean, now's your chance. You could have an excuse. Yeah, that's a good point. I don't think I will, but it's a good point. It's another reason to go. Yeah. And here's an example, public, that I think is very, very interesting. This is the first of its kind on Pinball Map. I mean, we have had hotels, of course. There's lots of hotels on there, which that's another one where do you have to be staying there to play the machine? Maybe, maybe not. You might be able to sneak in and play it. But the place is an Airbnb. It's outside of Atlanta. It's on the map as Don's Airbnb. It's basically a guy that just opened up his home collection by making his place an Airbnb. So wait, you can't go and play it? You have to stay at this guy's house? Yeah. And then you get to play? Yeah, you gotta book a room. Is it good? Yeah. What's he got? He's got a ton of machines. He's, uh, and he does, he did, I asked him about this, um, he said he- Well, you're in contact with Don. Yeah. Well, I was interested, because, uh, he's asked, he's had a few requests, uh, one of which was, Please remove my phone number from the site because people are calling and wanting to play there. Nice. I mean, that sucks, but also nice. Yeah, and my answer was you could remove it yourself. It's a field that you can edit.
    89:40
    But yeah, he's got Caribbean Cruise. He's got the cocktail game Caribbean Cruise, which is one of the games I was at. It was at Giovanni's Pizza in Montecito where I grew up and I played that Microsoft Word 97- advancing Microsoft Word 97- I'm not giving verdicts here, but do you have to pay to use the machines on site? Are these free play machines? I don't know. Okay, because I feel like a common thread for everything except the clubhouse has been that you have to pay to use the machines. Yeah, yeah. So, I'm kind of thinking you could group that together and say a public machine is This is a machine that you pay somebody to use as a service. And if that criteria is met, then it's public and anything surrounding it, like whether you have to pay to get in or whether you have to buy a muffin, is just like trimmings. And anything that's on free play is probably not public. But you know, that all falls apart the minute that some guy has a bar and has like a Indy Thanks for watching.
    91:43
    Yeah, and uh, yeah, that was just some person's like liquor store and they put the machine on free play. That's public as heck. I noticed we're saying public machines. Aren't we supposed to say on location or something like that? Oh yeah, location machines. Yeah, we know what we're talking about. We do. I didn't know if maybe there was a nuance to location versus public that we needed to mine here, but probably not. Yeah, probably not. I guess for this discussion too, we're specifically like trying to talk about whether things are publicly accessible or not. And you can't say that as easily with like, is it is it a locationally accessible machine? Yeah, just isn't the right word. Well, maybe the listener can write in with their thoughts, and we can find the best ones and share it if anything new comes up. Yeah, yeah, let's hear, we want to hear from you, listener. Yeah, give us your nuance. Yeah, discuss about this with us via email. Last segment we have today in episode two of Mapping Around with Scott and Ryan is tips and tactics. This is just a quick segment where, you know, we often see people make the same mistakes or do the same thing incorrectly on the site or they just don't know about something. And so this This is a quick tip for all y'all. You can edit a location's information. And what does that mean? And what are the restrictions? Here you go. Like location information, you got a location name, ground control. You have their address, whatever. And their phone number, their location type, they're a bar slash arcade. The You can, on the app and the website, there's a little edit location button. And some of those fields, you can change the phone number, you can change the location type, you can change the operator. The operator has to be, the one you choose has to be one that's already in our system though. And if they're not in our system, just contact us and we'll add them. We don't allow you guys to directly add operators. No offense. And I think it's... Yeah, no offense. Just helps manage the data a little better. You can add the website for the place too. And this, you know, it just helps like we have so many locations on site 5500 and not, I think it just helps kind of make the data a little more robust. You get to know more about the place, like what type it is. And if you want to see the hours, you click on the website or you want to, you could call them or something like that. It's just nice to have this in there and it's helpful if you guys want to help I'm going to go ahead and just add that stuff in there. And the one that I'm particular, I would love, this is like the ultimate goal of mine for pinball map is for every single one of the locations to have a location type assigned to it. Um, because otherwise, if you want to look up like arcades in Portland, there might be an arcade that's not tagged as an arcade and there you just, so the results just aren't as valuable. If we have every single location tagged with a location type, then it would just, it would really help the data and like the usability of the site. I think it would make it a lot, it would improve it a bit. And you won't accidentally wander into a dirty magazine store looking for Spider-Man. Uh, all right, that's it. So add location types in there. Well Ryan, it's 1010 on a Sunday night and I'm going to be woken up in just about 8 hours so it's time for me to go to bed. I hear that, where I'm going to wake up my baby in 10 minutes and do a little night feeding. Wow, good for you. Yeah, it helps her sleep through the night. I'm going to help myself as not as good a dad as you.
    96:14
    For the feedings, that was, Renee did that for the most part. Well, Azita will do the feedings. I'll wake Hannah up, hand her over, and then pick up
    96:30
    Hannah after that and do a quick change and then put her back in her crib. Hey, that's still pretty good. That's pretty solid parenting. Yeah, no, that's good. That's, that's, uh, it's like Azita's the race car driver, and you're the pit crew. Yeah, changing those wheels. Yeah, that's helpful. All right, well, um, I had fun doing this. Let's do another podcast in about a month. That sounds great. And in the meantime, a quick recap. We got a Patreon, we got t-shirts. Hit those up if you want shirts or to help support the site so we can make it faster and awesomer. Thanks for your help everybody. Yeah. Bye. Thanks for updating the map. Bye.