The Business of Laravel

Matt Stauffer:
All right, welcome back to the Business of Laravel podcast where I talk to business leaders who are working in and within Laravel. My guest today is Brannick Wieix, CEO of Diagonal. Brannick, would you introduce yourself and also tell us who are you and what's your business?

Branick Weix:
Awesome. Thanks for having me on, Matt. Nice to meet everyone. My name's Brannick. I'm the CEO of Diagonal and we're building what we call personalized software for small businesses in America. You can kind of think of traditional service-based industries, things like lawn service providers, yoga studios, plumbers, HVAC, et cetera. I also previously started a company called Aryeo, which we can spend a few minutes talking about if you want, Yeah. Let's see. That was kind of your classic startup story from

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, let's do that.

Branick Weix:
college dorm room with your friends, learning how to code and then growing that business and learning how to grow a business and get one started. And then we ultimately sold that business in 2023 to Zillow, which was quite the journey though.

Matt Stauffer:
NBD, you know.

Branick Weix:
It was quite fun.

Matt Stauffer:
I can imagine.

Branick Weix:
So lots of learnings on that. And that's where I first met or get introduced to just Laravel as a whole was in college actually. And kind of picking it up from that side, which I could spend a few minutes diving into if you want, but yeah, where do you want to go?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, for sure. I think that going through your backstory would be really interesting because that's not always where we start, but I do think that Diagonal is new, right? And I want us to talk about Diagonal, but part of the reason why you're on a Business Laravel podcast is what you've done. And then that also kind of informs what you're doing. So yeah, if you wouldn't mind sharing just like, I mean, if as much of the backstory of areas you're interested in sharing, especially as it relates to kind of using Laravel in it.

Branick Weix:
Yeah, for sure. And you know, it was interesting because the last business we built on Laravel, I would say kind of accidentally and then starting this business now, we kind of had more of the choice of like, okay, what do we want to build in? And we chose Laravel again for the new business Diagonal as well. So, but winding the clock back, you know, I started out studying computer science in college and I always, I wanted to study computer science because I always wanted to make things and like, I like to build things.

But I was like taking all these classes and they were interesting, like learning the theory of things, but I never really felt like I was building stuff, you know? And there was one guy on campus that everyone would go to. If you had an idea or something, you go ask him, but he was like the go-to person, like, how to build an app or something. And I asked him, was like, hey, I've taken some CS classes. I got this idea for this software I want to build for, you know, photography companies. Do you have any recommendations for me? And he's like, go learn PHP. He's like, no one else is going to tell you this, but go learn PHP and...

Matt Stauffer:
Wow.

Branick Weix:
Andy said, go check out Codecourse. And I go on the Codecourse website, which, you know, thank you, Alex, if he's listening here. And the thing that resonated with me right away was all the tutorials were focused around building like real world applications for businesses, right? It wasn't like I was taking another computer science course or something. And like, I pretty quickly fell in love with that. I joined the Laravel Boston group. I went to my first Laracon that summer and like, it felt like for the first time, okay, like.

Matt Stauffer:
Nice.

Branick Weix:
I still had no idea really what I was doing on the day to day. Like it took me a good probably couple years to like learn the basics of web dev, but like it felt like I could piece things together for how to build something. Like even our first version of that, that software that was almost a decade ago now, like it was breaking all the time. I didn't know the difference between a local database and a production database. Uh, one of the co, I could, this is kind of a fun story. One of the core features of that first version was, people could upload pictures and then we'd resize them in different formats. They could send them off to other people.

And we couldn't for the life of us get that to work. It was like pictures were coming. We'd have hundreds of pictures that are like 50 megabytes each and it would just crash the servers. So I eventually I would just, I'd set up a text message that go to my phone when the user uploaded pictures. I would SSH into the server. I would compress all the files on the server and then I would re-link to that. And then I would trigger the email to go off to the customer so they could go download. And I did that for months as we tried to figure out how to make that work. Which yeah, it's kind of a fun one to look back at.

Matt Stauffer:
Love that. Oh my god.

Branick Weix:
Yeah, learning how to do things.

Matt Stauffer:
That's like the whoever it was that shipped without having the ability to pay. They're like, look, let's just get this in people's hands and start taking their money for it. But that's brilliant.

Branick Weix:
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So that was fun to me. We had a good time building that. Then beginning of this year, I started working on this new company called Diagonal. Very early days. We're a few months into it. We've got our first kind of wave of engineers on board. So we've got about eight engineers now. Pretty much all people more or less from the Laravel ecosystem, which honestly was probably a big part of the decision of, what tech staff do we want to use here across the board? And for me, one of the benefits of going to Laravel is you get kind of these like pre vetted people in the industry that

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Branick Weix:
they're coming in with like a certain set of standards that are like, all right, there's just a way to do some of these things. Like I don't want to waste resources and time, like rebuilding off. They're like, cron jobs or like all this stuff. Like I just kind of want to start with the batteries included thing, which I think has been the right decision so far. We did make the jump in the last business we're using Vue. This one now we're using React on the front end and inertia JS. We just love that stack. So it's been a very pleasant for us so far.

Matt Stauffer:
So you're a very tech focused CEO. What was your role at Aryeo?

Branick Weix:
CEO, I was not the CTO though. So Brendan Quinlan was. I, know, early days that was just almost hacking together, building stuff. I would say I'm the, I always strive to be the worst engineer on the team. Like that's the goal. And I think I am, so that's good.

Matt Stauffer:
That's the way to do it. Love that.

Branick Weix:
And like, it also is like, I think a helpful, like I'll kind of come check in on things. And like, if it's too confusing for me, like usually it's a good litmus, but maybe we need to simplify it or something or figure out a different way to do it.

Matt Stauffer:
Love that, yep.

Branick Weix:
But I'm usually, I was probably just the oriented around, I want to get something to the customer's hands, right? Like I code so I can build product for them. And like, that's kind of the, the, the mental model for me of like, all right, we need to ship this thing. And then I learned to program to do that. So that's kind how I think about it on the day to day.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. So you just recently went through a round of hiring. I mean, you mentioned, you know, kind of your first wave of engineers. What do you think is like a common misconception or maybe just what do people not know about how to hire well? Because I think people are struggling with hiring engineers. Right? And like you seem pretty happy with what you know, what you got. Yeah.

Branick Weix:
Yeah, I've never struggled with hiring engineers. And it's so odd to me of that, in part because we kind of have the right level of focus, right? We're not just hiring any full-stack developer. I think that's just too broad. For me, the focus of someone that knows Laravel, or even the full-stack roles, that is a perfect litmus of getting the pool to something reasonable. And for us, the numbers, I just tweeted the other week some of our numbers from this hiring round. It's usually about 100 applications to one.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah.

Branick Weix:
for like every hire or so and I kind of went through the numbers. That's been pretty consistent over the last decade for us. But let's see here on that, that process of whole, we always use Larajobs. Like that's usually been our consistently like the highest quality people, which has been great. And the other thing I tell a lot of startups, even outside of Laravel and whatnot is go look at your packages that you use in your company and then go look at the maintainers and the people that contribute to those packages. And those are the people you should outreach to. And everyone's like, oh, like, why did I never think about that?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Branick Weix:
It's like, yeah, if someone's spending their nights and weekends doing this for fun, that is a great person to have on the team. They're like, you're going to pay me to do more of this? Yeah, and it's great. It's fun. And you get people that enjoy the work. That's probably my biggest filter. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, and they're super knowledgeable because they're in the guts of it. Yeah, that's very cool.

Branick Weix:
And that's probably our biggest hiring litmus, people that actually enjoy the work, that you get the value from it, which it's fun when you get a team of people like that.

Matt Stauffer:
Hmm. Yeah. Yeah, that's very cool. It's funny because one of the questions I normally ask is what's the most exciting thing you've dealt with this year technically? And I'm like, your entire company is the most exciting technical thing. How much do you want to share about Diagonal? You're gonna keep things under the wraps or you want to share a little today?

Branick Weix:
Yeah, I mean, it's not intentionally secret. know, we're just early stages. So like, you know, I'm always a failure. Like the proof's in the pudding is like, want to get a product out to customers and share more there. Like a lot of the thesis around what we're building came from this feeling that most businesses in America and just even running our last company, there was a certain like turning point, I think in the company, once we started serving thousands of businesses in that certain number, like the job and like my job all of a sudden became no longer just kind of like setting the roadmap and like the future direction.

Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.

Branick Weix:
It also became mad managing this massive wave of current customers and like all of these feature requests and things, which I'm sure probably every engineer listening at a company today resonates with like, oh, you know what? Like the sales team just needs one more feature to get this customer over the line. Right. And there's just one more, right. It's always just one more.

Matt Stauffer:
Yep. And then we'll finally be able to... Yeah. Yeah.

Branick Weix:
And like we literally had a feature request board at our last company with over 3000 feature requests on it, which sounds like, I mean, it was a lot. It was more than any full-time person could handle even reviewing those kinds of things.

Matt Stauffer:
Oh my gosh. Yeah.

Branick Weix:
And where it kind of led me and like, especially over the last year, like reflecting on everything and what did I want to work on next? Led me to this realization that most software is built for this concept of an average customer and that there really is no such thing as an average customer. Like that's an entirely fictitious concept that we've just kind of invented and you're constantly making trade-offs, right? And you think you look at your software, then the majority of like tickets and stuff that goes out the door is usually just like configuration related. It's like, you know, we got this customer that wants to send a customer review email.

Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

Branick Weix:
Every Tuesday, this one wants to send it once a month, this one only wants to send it to new customers, and the engineers work with PMs and the designer to come up with an interface for all these configuration settings. Then you got one customer with something custom over here that wants this, and it's like, all this noise. And then all of a sudden you're you're just trapped. You're like, we got to get rid of this tech debt, right? And that ultimately led us to what we want to build with Diagonal, which is a piece of software that is designed from the ground up around configuration, where every single piece of the software from the front end to the back end to the business logic is highly configurable and runs in a very dynamic way.

There's still a lot of unknowns with it. We're kind of proving it out, but like we don't want to like have to write controllers. I don't want to have anyone have to write like actual code there. It's like our approach has been to define kind of our own abstract kind of config, if you will, and every business gets their own config. And then we're building the engine today that kind of runs those configs. So instead of us writing controllers by hand, routes by hands, you can define configs very quickly. You can manipulate them. Businesses can have different ones and then you can run that for all of your customers. Kind of like a Nova-esque setup, I'd say, on that meta level, but try to take that all the way through for an entire application. It's been technically hard. It's been fun, though, finding people that are excited about it. If you're listening and you're interested in that kind of work, give me a follow and whatnot. But yeah, it's been fun getting the early things together for that.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
And that's cool, because one of the things that is curious to me is the future of no code and low code given AI and also given a lot of unsuccessful attempts for people to launch projects using low code and no code when it turns out they're like, they're good for a demo, but they don't often kind of work for real life. And one of the reasons I think that is is because they work for the one use case that they're for and they don't use work for a lot of other scenarios. And so a low code or no code scenario where you're building an app just for you,

Branick Weix:
Mm-hmm

Matt Stauffer:
makes more sense. And it's interesting because you guys aren't a no code or low code platform, but in some ways it's very similar because you're allowing people to customize something that's just for them. And then you've also got engineers on the back end ensuring that the whole thing is working smoothly. So it's sort of like the benefits of both, right? Like they're building their thing their way, but you've got real engineers actually ensuring that their thing their way is going to be a viable set of configuration options.

Branick Weix:
Exactly. And there's still a lot of unknowns on like how you pull that off and like some customers are more or less technical than others. So, you know, some people it's going to be more kind of like an agency like relationship and like bringing that. like, I think it's actually been proven out. You look at like the large ERPs out there and whatnot, like they've been building and shipping relatively custom software for like larger organizations for a while. I think now with AI and these other things, you can kind of see that move down market. I was thinking like Shopify is a great example of bringing the power of customization and e-commerce to a whole lot of businesses and a relatively flexible system without needing to know how to code and all those other things. So we'll see where it takes us, but it's been a fun early journey so far at least.

Matt Stauffer:
I love that. so I want to go back to kind of where you're coming from a little bit because you are young. You have built and sold a SaaS to a major player that everybody knows about. mean, you could say, Hey, I was just on a podcast with my buddy who had sold pod, you know, sold software to Zillow and people are going to understand that's a big deal. And that's not often the case for a lot of us. And so you kind of made it there pretty young. One of the things that I often ask in this podcast, but I know people are going to be curious about this one is how do I become the next Branick, right? Like I'm up and coming and I'm just trying to learn how to code. How do I do what he did? So I often ask about advice or books or articles and stuff like that. I do want to go there, but I just want to lead with, if someone asks you that question, how do I see my life go in the trajectory that yours has? What would you tell them to start with?

Branick Weix:
Um, it's a good question. It's something I can always myself. I knew I like, oh, I wanted to build a company one day, right? That was kind of always the pipe dream. And then like these things, they just like, you know, they just kind of happen upon themselves. Like everyone's like, oh, when did you have like the light bulb moment? You know, I'm a firm believer. There's no such thing as light bulb moment. Um, I don't think that exists. I think it's just fictitious. If you ever hear like a founder saying, oh, you know, I was on a walk and I had this light bulb. No, I don't think it exists. Like it is an accumulation of hundreds and thousands of small decisions every single day that eventually kind of get you there. Right.

Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.

Branick Weix:
And like that's usually my biggest advice. Like I do meet with a lot of students and people working on starting their own companies and things. like, usually the first thing is if you haven't got started on this, get started. Like you don't need to, you know, like the metaphor I like to use is the train is leaving the station and like you just kind of paint the picture of where the train's going and people are going to jump on along the way. Maybe you don't know how to code, right? Like I talked to a lot of students that don't know how to code. Thankfully now there are a lot of, you know, the AI tools making it more accessible so you can use some of those tools out there. But there's a lot of ways to prove things out in the business too in advance.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Branick Weix:
And I tell people, you're interested in market, maybe you don't know how to code or build a product, just call the business owners and say, hey, I'll run your website for you. I'll run your, your Facebook ads for you. Like that's literally what I did before we got started. I ran Facebook ads for like 10 different companies just to learn about their business. And then it was like, now I can automate this. And I got a relationship I can build with. So I like that approach of figuring out novel ways to work with your customers that, you know, if you're not quite there yet, or maybe you got a job or some other commitments that you can't get around. I think that's good.

Matt Stauffer:
Nice.

Branick Weix:
And then I've got a good friend that I think puts it nicely. It's like when you're starting a company, you're either a builder or a seller. And I think first ask yourself, which one are you? Which camp are you in? And then know that you're never going to do enough of the other thing. You will just never come close to it. And like your entire job every day is compensating for that fact that you were never going to do enough of that other thing. And like the pendulum will never swing. Ideally, you find a co-founder that like balances it right. You got one of each. That's great. Or just know in the back of your head, like even if you think you're doing it, like you're just never going to do enough of the other thing.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Branick Weix:
And so like that was one of my insights from this last business of like, wish I started sales sooner because it's tempting and it's fun just to keep building and building and building. But yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
I mean, I love that insight and I especially think it's true in the Laravel community. We have a community absolutely chock full of builders and there's not a lot of people who understand sales. And I'm not saying they don't exist, in the end, it's a community of engineers. And unlike a lot of communities of engineers, we've got an entrepreneurial spirit and a set of tooling that allows you to build your app solo or with a very small team in a way that you can't elsewhere. But that just further exposes the fact that it's still just engineers building it and who are like, yeah, I have a completely functioning app that is super stable, really well thought out, built it in six months and I don't know how to get anybody to know about it. So yeah.

Branick Weix:
Yeah. Yeah. It feels awkward, but just like, you know, maybe it's hard picking up the phone, but even just DMing people and getting out there, like always a fan. I wish I saw more projects that they're charging more money. I think we have this like, I just, there's not a project charging appropriate amount of in the Laravel community. Um, you know, maybe that's a hot take, but I really wish everyone charged a bit more, especially for like the business licenses of things. Like when I go through the bills every month of things of like what we pay for and the value we get from it. Typically.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Branick Weix:
Like if it's a good piece of software stack, like even I remember I've told the wearable team like, hey, we do not pay enough for Forge. Like, you know, now they've got Cloud, which I'm excited to try with Diagonal. But like some of these tools, like boy, they give you so much value and don't be afraid just to, you can always lower prices. It's much easier to lower them. So start with some high price points and see where it goes.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay. So that's all really good. want to keep kind of digging into the how does someone become the next Branick. So are there any books, specifically written books? I mean, is that how you learn?

Branick Weix:
I do like to read a lot. I don't listen to any podcasts. So it's interesting. I will read the transcript of podcasts though. So I will pull the transcript and then read it. So I really just like reading mostly.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, reading guy.

Branick Weix:
For this new business, I've been reading a lot of old papers, which has been kind of fun. It's like old research papers from like the sixties and seventies, which has been very fun for me of like, you know, I think it's interesting. They did a lot of research on just like how people interact with computers early on.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay.

Branick Weix:
And like there was so many constraints because you didn't have beautiful 4K displays. You didn't have any like large memory or anything. So it forced you really think about the root of the problem. So I've had fun reading that stuff. You know, there's always like some basic startup books out there, like your Zero to One by Peter Thiel. That's like a good one. You got your Paul Graham essays to read. But like, you know, the other other place that you can jump in for content, like I'm in a ton of Facebook groups with potential customers. There's all these like small business owner Facebook groups out there. And whatever you're kind of exploring. I don't know where the community is for different things, right? For us, it was these Facebook groups, but there's different ones. I love getting those and just reading through the comments and what people are posting, what their problems are. It's a good way to learn about it. Hey, I kind of oscillate on the reading and listening. Sometimes it's good just to make things too, just be more on the producing side of stuff versus the consuming side.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Okay. So you mentioned a lot of things that have to do with how you become the entrepreneurial CEO type. Do you do much people management? And if so, what has the process of becoming growing as a manager of people kind of look like for you?

Branick Weix:
Yeah, especially the last business, you by the time we sold, we probably had about 50 people on the team or so. And I started it when I was 19 or 20. So I was usually the youngest person. I remember our first like company retreat, like I couldn't rent the car because I was too young. It was like, oh, this is interesting. For me, like I really resonate with people and I try to like paint that picture of where is the train going? And then, you know, my job is just to help.

Matt Stauffer:
Yep.

Branick Weix:
the train get there and help everyone kind of do their different pieces of the job really. And go around and like, one of the biggest blockers for everyone. Can I kind of get out of the way and do that? So I try to be pretty hands off. Some things I'm pretty hands on though. There's no doubt about that. But I do find like the type of people that get excited by doing like the hard thing, like the challenge itself, like I usually really resonate with those people and they go super far too at the company. I'd say like, you know, some of our best hires over the years were always people that like, like one of our best sales reps ever. He started on customer support.

Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.

Branick Weix:
And we could just tell immediately, like he was just going above and beyond with the customers and doing it such a way. was like, oh my gosh, we've got to move them over sales. And he just took off and it was one of the best sales reps then. Even like, you know, like, like at Diagonal, current head of engineering, Owen, he started with us. He came in as like a full stack engineer on the Ayreo team pretty early on. And Owen has such a wonderful perspective of like keeping in the customers in mind always. And I, you know, I think I always notice that I'm like, all right, I gotta just keep giving Owen more of like that.

Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.

Branick Weix:
you know, keep taking out more. And now he's running the engineering team at Diagonal, which has been great. So, you know, in terms of my people management, I like to find interesting people. I like to see what interests them and then hopefully I can give them more of that and hopefully take away the things that aren't interesting and hopefully that. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay. Well, it makes a ton of sense. Okay. I, I know that this is, hold on. I have a guess of where this might go, but you recently had a tweet that kind of went a little bit of viral and I won't specifically mention the tweet, but I have a question and I'm curious whether it lines up with this tweet or not. One of the things I'd like to ask is what is one piece of advice you have for other people who are doing their business using Laravel? So other business owners, founders, whatever, who are using Laravel and you know,

Branick Weix:
Okay, yeah, yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
We'll talk about the spicy tweet if that's not it. So I shouldn't even mention that. like if you if someone just said, hey, you know what? I'm I'm running a business. I'm using Laravel too you know, what have you found about the specifics of running a business using Laravel that you think more people should be knowing or should stop doing or whatever?

Branick Weix:
I think sticking to the standards as best as you can is great. Like that is the intentional benefit of it, like to do it in an opinionated way. And I actually think there's this whole other benefit that's now coming true, with all the AI models where if you are doing things in this data way, it's much easier for the models to keep doing it in the stairways. Cause they've seen it already a whole lot of different ways. And yes, there are like a lot of AI tooling around, you know, JavaScript and so many things, but there's so many different ways to do things in those things that it's like becomes just chaotic.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Branick Weix:
Like I look at some of my friends' code base and like, this is just chaos. I don't know how you guys keep track of all this. So like stick to the extent that you can, like all the built-in stuff, like that has never served us wrong at all. I mean, some things we change up. Like we usually got to like, we use like the internaut key modules package. We use domains in most of our projects. Like we do like having a little bit breaking things up there, but sticking with that. And that I think just not being afraid to be like unopiniated, like, we're building with Laravel. Like that is actually part of the company. Like that is the intent here. I mean like.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Branick Weix:
Like for us, it's not just like the tech decision, but it's the, as I talked about earlier, the people hiring decision to like actually embracing and running with that. Like go to Laracon, sponsor it, get a booth, do things with the community. you know, come meet you, do things like this, like just lean into it. I think versus, you know, you know, we're just building software with, with this thing and like, yeah, kind of it is what it is. Right. But lean into it and it becomes a big advantage, I think pretty quick.

Matt Stauffer:
That's great. And you mentioned earlier that when you were hiring, you tried to hire people who are you trying to the benefit of hiring people who know Laravel and who are kind of adopted that way of thinking. Have you all tried hiring people from outside the Laravel world and try to kind of like teach them on the fly? Or you're like, No, we kind of want you to know when you come in.

Branick Weix:
Um, yeah, we have tried to teach honestly, we've never done a good job or had to, I guess of like training, like more junior entry level roles into senior people. And like, I would like that to happen at Diagonal. Like I never really did that with last company was more like, we always lean to pretty senior people, honestly. Um, and we, kind of had the benefit that we were able to get senior people, um, which was nice. Um, but like, you know, I think as long as you weigh things out in a very clear way, like we do have one engineer that came on that's more front end focusing came from PHP world. Um, just not.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Branick Weix:
not Laravel, so he was able to pick up Laravel quite easily and learn that stuff. And like, I don't know, it's more about just how you think, right? And I think, ya know, bringing it back to versus then like separately how you implement the code usually. So I do think it's quite possible for people to pick it up and like Inertia, like that's kind of a unique thing for within our little community, like learning how does that interact with React and what not. It kind of takes a second to figure that out once you get going, but then once you do, it's, you know, it makes a lot of sense, I think. So I don't have too much advice on that in particular thoughts.

Matt Stauffer:
Well, you mentioned that you'd be curious to hire juniors, but you haven't before. I'm gonna totally put you on the spot.

Branick Weix:
Yeah, put me on the spot.

Matt Stauffer:
If I had to give you 10 juniors right now, what are the things that you would look for in a junior that make you most interested in bringing them onto the team?

Branick Weix:
well, it was interesting even on like this, this last round of hiring, right? It was the first time I hired kind of the age of AI and we ended up with so many applications that answer our questions perfectly. And I was like, what do I do with this? Normally I'd read the questions first and that was my filter. That was my first filter to like, who do we want a phone screen? Unbelievable. It was all just AI answers for a lot of these. Right. So we said, okay, let's add a new step into the interview process. I don't want to call it like an IQ test. It was more like a thinking test, I guess. where I literally took questions from the SAT, from the LSAT.

Matt Stauffer:
Hmm. Yeah.

Branick Weix:
From logic puzzles and we put it together into like a 20 to 30 minute little test and it's a monitored test so you can't access any other tools and it locks your browser up and we gave it to people and the thing that we're looking for is like okay how do you approach problems and can you do it in a somewhat abstract way like or like the are you aware of like the process of thinking I guess and like how do you lay those things out like that is one thing that we look for and I think that'll be even more important because it's less of like you know how to technically implement this specific detail like

Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.

Branick Weix:
You can learn that eventually, like, are you going to know to reach for the right kinds of things that help you get to that point? Um, that's one thing, uh, one interview question, I guess I'm to give it away now. Um, but, uh, uh, you know, Owen always asks this, which I think is a brilliant question. He says, Hey, you just merged something into production and the app starts crashing like 500 errors everywhere. What do you do? Right. And the answer that most people give is like, Oh, you know, I'm going to pull up the logs here and like this thing or that thing. And like, they start diving into like the engineering technical bit.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Branick Weix:
And the answer we're usually looking for is, our customers are hurting right now. We're going to make sure we revert that first. We'll figure it out later. Let's roll it back.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, roll it back. Yep.

Branick Weix:
Let's roll it back. And that's probably, I'd say sub 10 % of people say that. It's pretty rare answers. So we try to figure out ways to look at where does your mind jump to in its default state.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah. That's really good. Yeah. I, um, I've been telling people for a long time. I have never hired in the age of AI. Uh, we have brought people on in this time period, but it's all, all bitten for referrals. We never did like a full and like you, we usually get somewhere between 300, 500 applicants per per job posting. And we usually can get probably three or four good people out of that. So even if we're just hiring one, we hire one and then we just hang onto the other's information for the next time we need another person.

And I'm very nervous about what that's gonna do for my hiring process. So hearing it, I'm like, yeah, that's exactly what it's gonna do,

Branick Weix:
Yeah, you gotta change it a little bit, which you know, it's good and bad. Yeah, the rest of it kind of goes normal then once you filter through.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. So this is also, I think, the first Business of Laravel podcast I've done since AI has the level of really prominence in the industry that it does right now. So I got to ask you, if somebody came along in either of the extremes, the extremes being just an AI maximalist who says, AI is going to write all of our code in the future. My job is purely just to prompt AI and correct some of their stuff or an absolute minimalist who says I refuse to use any AI I think it's melting our brains you know first of all which of the two would you prefer and second all would you give either of them a corrective if you had them or do you think those are all valid ways to think about it?

Branick Weix:
I think you definitely have to be using it to some extent. I think going forward, we will not, if we have someone in an interview that is like, oh, I won't touch it, we're just done. Yeah. So I'll be pretty blank on that one, I think, or point blank there. I think I'm personally probably at least two times more effective with everything on the day-to-day, like in terms of like raw output of like the programming side. Now it's interesting because more of my day is spent thinking and planning and like even with pen and paper and then going into stuff, which I like, like I like that stuff.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Branick Weix:
I don't like writing if statements by hand and like doing things like that's not why I was put on this earth. And like, maybe some people love that. Great. But like, that's not what I want to do. I don't want to do like all these random little conditionals or remember the format for this thing. Now I want to like design products and ship products, right? Like even on the, last, you know, in the last two months, so we, we were using a bunch of different tools, but AI is now the second largest independent contributor to our code base of like entirely AI drafted PRs, like full stack all the way through.

Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.

Branick Weix:
So I can run down some of those tools if it's interesting. We've had a ton of success with Devin, which I think early on some people tried Devin. I think it's devin.ai, might be the website. Some people, they kind of lose results on that. what we found is as long as you take the time of setting it up and giving it the context, we've had really excellent results. And this means true across all the models. I think a lot of people just go plug it into a Laravel project and go, do this for me. Like, oh, I didn't do it great.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Branick Weix:
We haven't shipped a product production so far. We've got over 600 tests and I think like almost 3000 assertions in the code base today. Like the level of like coverage we have for that is so that we can have the AI just run and build out features and give us confidence on things. So for like for Devin, like we spent a couple of weeks, I ended up going through setting up context files for it. Like here's the rule files for the backend, for the front end. Here's our standards. Like we've got this Laravel pint, there's rector, there's all these linking things out there. Take them first, those things, the not AI things. I say take them to them

Matt Stauffer:
Wow.

Branick Weix:
extreme that you can take them. And like, you don't want people thinking about like the style, the name functions or any of that. Like that should all be automated ideally. And you get errors when that stuff is like dial those levers up and then go through and just document your rules. So like I'd say about 60 or 70 % of our team is using cursor and another engineers are using PHP storm and clock code with it. Um, and we've got different kinds of subfolders for all of our rules. So we've got backend rules, front end rules, database rules. We've got package rules too, for like packages that we use heavily.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay.

Branick Weix:
And like, can even in cursor, can link to specific packages. So it gets injected with context as you're doing work. And then like, for me, the most mind boggling thing has been like the workflow. I'd say for about half of the things I work on now, I will first go to linear or GR or whatever you're using. We use linear. I'll write up the ticket and then I will tag Devin to work on it. Devin will draft a full PR for me and then I'll pull down that PR. I'll review it. I'll show you usually review and get up first, give comments and feedback, and then I'll pull it in if I need to change things. But a good amount of time, I can just do it all in GitHub. It's actually been interesting with people that are the maximalists versus the kind of the new AI. The maximalists I usually find were the engineering managers whose job before was just like writing tickets all day. And they're like, wow, I finished writing the ticket and I got something to review. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's like so much better.

Matt Stauffer:
Sure. Yeah, I still write in tickets. Yeah.

Branick Weix:
Like, I really liked it. was like, damn, I just usually just writing tickets. Like, can I get a result right away? That's great. Versus, you know, it does take a little bit of the flow state. I will acknowledge that. Like it is a little hard to have, it's a different kind of programming experience versus kind of being in the state for things. Usually I'll take out a feature and I'll try to build like the first version of it or like the reproducible block. And then I'll have AI come in and kind of automate it. Once you put those guardrails in place, it's really good then running with it and kind of repetitive tasks on top of things.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, okay. And I mean, everyone's gonna come to their own conclusion when it comes to AI, but I do think that one of the things that's interesting to me is like, if people are worried about their jobs, thinking about who is going to succeed the best, if AI does take off the way a lot of people think, who is gonna have the hardest time? And I've been saying for a long time that if AI does become such a deeply important part of the programming community, as most folks seem to be thinking it's going to at this point, the biggest hit will be against the juniors.

And the people with most likelihood to be totally fine are engineering managers, senior technical leads, and stuff like that.

Branick Weix:
Yes. Yeah, it's tough. It'll be interesting to see as kind of people go through the early, like the learning phase. So still think it's important to like learn the fundamentals. And like, I remember like I first picked up Laravel, I was doing Blade templates and then I added in jQuery, then I LiveWire and then Inertia. And now it's like, I feel like I've done that progression. It's probably hard for like new devs to do that progression. I'm a big fan of not learning React or anything like advanced at first. Like I think you should just do classic server side apps and just learn how to get comfortable with the mental model of it.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, totally.

Branick Weix:
because you just learn some these little details like, this is why this exists versus all this complexity out there. But yeah, I don't think AI is necessarily coming for everyone's jobs. I think it'll enable people to do a whole lot more. I do think that there is a very fair concern of companies hiring less for certain sizes of companies. And like, this is probably one of the, I remember when we first hiring our first couple of engineers in the last business, went from one person to two to three.

Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.

Branick Weix:
And in my head, thought, you know, we're going to be one times productive or maybe two times productive. We're going to be three times. Right. I was like, yeah. Like, yeah. Yeah. Right.

Matt Stauffer:
Oh, you sweet summer child. Yeah.

Branick Weix:
And I was like, wait, what's happening here? And not only are we not going up, but it's like getting less productive. Like what? And like, think that is going to be an interesting thing to see with AI because there's this like management overhead. I'm just like inherent of people talking to one another that like as team sizes grow, it's hard to come around that. And if you could do more with less people, I think companies will kind of optimize around these groupings of people that can do more, but maybe you'll have more pods of people doing stuff.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, interesting. Are you guys hiring right now? You mentioned kind of like people if they're interested kind of kind of follow you. What's that looking like?

Branick Weix:
We do have, so on our website, godiagonal.com, we do have a careers page up there, we have a wild card roll, so I do monitor that, that's kind of our pool of people that like, maybe we don't have an open roll right now, we just finished this wave of folks on board. I expect we're gonna ramp up again now in the fall, and we're also going to Laracon, it'll be fun to meet people. So we do kind like, what you imagine, like ideally we have the kind of short list of people that we stay in touch with that are interested in working with us, or I just like meeting interesting, smart people doing things, so, yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Okay. So I'm nearing my wrap up. got two questions, but before I ask my last two questions, is there anything you wanted to talk about as you were thinking about this that we didn't get a chance to cover today?

Branick Weix:
You know, I definitely on the AI side of things, I encourage everyone and maybe I think, you know, we've talked about working a little putting videos out of how we're using this stuff. Like it truly has been a game changer and then day for us. And I think the important thing to keep in mind, just like you bring on a new employee to your team, it's going to take a little bit to like, got to give that person context for how you do things. So like, if you invest in it, like we have Docker, we run everything through Docker so that the AI can spin up the same environment exactly as we have and have all that stuff in there and then stick with the Laravel standards. You get a whole lot of benefits. Like it really has blown my mind.

We even got rid of Zoom at the company and we switched all to Google just so we could have all of our contacts there. Every meeting with customers is now recorded. We got notes we can go across it. Even this interview, I just asked Chat gpt to prep some questions for me, which was helpful, which was kind of fun. So I wish I would see some more folks, I think, in the Laravel world, just dive in and do some of that stuff. I think we're getting there on some of that stuff, which is nice. Let's see. Yeah, I think that's most of it. Yeah, very excited for Laracon.

Excited to see where things go. I haven't tried cloud yet, so we're looking forward to hopefully trying cloud.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, you're like cloud. Well, I wanted to ask what you want to plug. But I think one of the things is I know that you guys are doing some things at Laracon. So you could tell like what's Diagonal's presence at Laracon go look like.

Branick Weix:
Yeah, we're doing a little happy hour with the mostly technical guys the night before the conference. So that should be fun. There's a little RSVP going around. I think unfortunately there's a waiting list for that, but hopefully we'll see a whole lot of folks there. All right, awesome. Excited to see you there. So that'll be a good time. then I usually like just to keep a low key presence. So we're just going to be milling around the conference. We got the company started just a few months ago really. So we don't have a formal booth or anything there, but we'll be walking around in t-shirts. So I'm hoping people can come say hello.

Matt Stauffer:
Also, this will be part of your team's first time meeting each other, right? Yeah, so that's cool. I love that.

Branick Weix:
It is, yes, we're flying the whole team in. I'm really excited for that. We've got people all over the world. We've someone in Canada, Belgium, Ecuador, Brazil, and then the US. So all over the place. It'll be really fun to meet everyone.

Matt Stauffer:
That's great. I love that. Other than that, is there anything else you want to plug?

Branick Weix:
I don't think so, so I appreciate you having me on here, Matt.

Matt Stauffer:
Of course, I got one more for you. If you were to make, and it's so funny talking to people who've sold businesses before, because the answer's always a little different, but if you were to be handed $100 million tax-free today, what would you do tomorrow?

Branick Weix:
I'd be doing the same thing. I'd be doing this right now. And I honestly like, yeah, like, it was interesting. You we sold the business. I stayed in Zillow for a handful of months. And then I kind of went on a sabbatical. I was like burned out. I was like, all right, I'm going to take a break and just kind of do fun stuff. Right. And like, he kind of sit there and like, what do you want to do? And like, it's so interesting because I think like, you know, like he got all these hobbies, you know, go vacation and stuff. Like the thing I kind of came to at the end of the sabbatical was hobbies are hobbies because they are the hobby. They're what you do not in your main time. And vacations are vacations because it is a break from things. I very much enjoyed the time. I got an old car that I worked on. I love doing that. If I had another break, I'd love to go do another car project and whatnot.

But I also just get a lot of joy from learning and working with people and building things. And where I came to at the end of it was, boy, starting a company and doing that again checks a lot of those boxes for me. It's such an exciting time right now. Oh, I'm amped.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah. I love that, man. I mean, I could I could see it in your energy. You are definitely very excited about this. So, well, I'm excited to learn more about it as you go. I mean, you and I have spoke a little bit of our on our own about the project that we haven't even talked about here. And I just know that you're doing a lot of innovative things there. And I am very curious to see kind of where you where you land, because I feel like you're doing a lot of research that's going to play out for everybody in terms of when you're like, hey, here's what we figured out.

And you mentioned you're reading all these papers and stuff, but also just how you're trying to build an application is very unique. So I'm really excited to see where that goes for you.

Branick Weix:
I'm excited to get a demo out soon for people to play with.

Matt Stauffer:
I love it.

Branick Weix:
So it will be quite interesting. Thanks for having me on. It's been great chatting Matt.

Matt Stauffer:
Thank you for having for hanging out and for the rest of you. We will see you all next time!