Meeting Title: Google Calendar Meeting (not synced) Date: 2025-10-16 Meeting participants: Amber Lin, Robert Tseng, Surfield Thomas, Jr., Awaish Kumar
WEBVTT
1 00:00:33.780 ⇒ 00:00:34.810 Amber Lin: Hello.
2 00:00:35.050 ⇒ 00:00:35.970 Robert Tseng: Hello.
3 00:00:36.260 ⇒ 00:00:38.299 Amber Lin: Wow, I saw the chat, I was…
4 00:00:39.750 ⇒ 00:00:41.569 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: Keep going, Amber.
5 00:00:42.650 ⇒ 00:00:46.179 Amber Lin: No, keep going, you guys discuss this, just, so that we have a meeting room.
6 00:00:46.730 ⇒ 00:00:48.900 Amber Lin: Cool!
7 00:00:48.900 ⇒ 00:00:50.430 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: Robert, do you want to go first?
8 00:00:51.360 ⇒ 00:01:07.899 Robert Tseng: There’s no way they’re meeting that. Like, yeah, this is… yeah, I… I’m sorry, I should have jumped on a call with them earlier. This was… I mean, it’s not gonna be on us, like, obviously, but, like, it’s just… this is not looking… this is not looking good at all, so…
9 00:01:07.900 ⇒ 00:01:14.870 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: Yeah, and I… I feel like I’m crazy, right? Like… like, the blow-up on Tuesday was way out of pocket.
10 00:01:15.070 ⇒ 00:01:19.300 Robert Tseng: Even though he had extra days, it’s still not done, and then, like…
11 00:01:19.860 ⇒ 00:01:25.420 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: We’re getting to, like, hallucination levels of insanity if we think this isn’t gonna be done in…
12 00:01:25.700 ⇒ 00:01:27.560 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: Like, 16 days.
13 00:01:27.780 ⇒ 00:01:33.040 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: Yeah. Right? Like, just what are we even… like, in the realm of, like, reality, what are we talking about here?
14 00:01:33.260 ⇒ 00:01:36.750 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: Right, like, just what is actually going on?
15 00:01:36.930 ⇒ 00:01:39.190 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: So it’s like, yeah, I’m just… woo!
16 00:01:42.290 ⇒ 00:01:43.510 Robert Tseng: Okay, so, I mean.
17 00:01:45.600 ⇒ 00:01:57.730 Robert Tseng: I’m just thinking, well, I mean, our… this… we’re… our… our engagement with them is up by end of this month as well. So, I mean, if this is just, like, irreconcilable, we just send our… I mean, I think…
18 00:02:00.410 ⇒ 00:02:18.049 Robert Tseng: I… I think… I think… I don’t actually want to work with these remote guys, like, I… I kind of want to step out, like, I… I don’t know. So, I kind of want to just collect on what… on the… on the… on the two months of, advisory, and then we can… we can just… we can move on. That’s what I want to do. But,
19 00:02:18.050 ⇒ 00:02:24.050 Robert Tseng: Yeah, I mean, I, I guess I’m… Wha-how… I’m just like…
20 00:02:25.220 ⇒ 00:02:29.860 Robert Tseng: I don’t think this is salvageable, I really don’t think so. So, I think it’s more about…
21 00:02:30.100 ⇒ 00:02:40.709 Robert Tseng: be able to give Eden as much information as they can about, like, how they… how they should handle things. Yeah, this is not going to be ready by November 1st.
22 00:02:40.710 ⇒ 00:02:42.920 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: There’s no fucking… there’s no shot in hell!
23 00:02:43.190 ⇒ 00:02:43.650 Robert Tseng: Yeah.
24 00:02:43.650 ⇒ 00:02:44.590 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: It’s all crazy.
25 00:02:48.650 ⇒ 00:02:52.010 Robert Tseng: Yeah, the fact that we haven’t seen a single, like.
26 00:02:52.210 ⇒ 00:02:58.780 Robert Tseng: live order go through the system. Like, this is, like… I don’t… I don’t believe this will happen in two weeks. The…
27 00:02:58.780 ⇒ 00:02:59.780 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: No way, no shot.
28 00:03:00.920 ⇒ 00:03:04.150 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: Yeah, so I guess my question to you is, like.
29 00:03:05.610 ⇒ 00:03:09.299 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: I think we have an ELT meeting on Monday.
30 00:03:09.620 ⇒ 00:03:10.210 Robert Tseng: Yeah.
31 00:03:10.210 ⇒ 00:03:17.379 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: Right? Let’s figure out the time for that and all that stuff, so, like, I could be there. Sure. I wanted to give them a write-up, but, like.
32 00:03:17.610 ⇒ 00:03:19.729 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: What is my write-up consisting of?
33 00:03:19.850 ⇒ 00:03:21.110 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: Is it, like…
34 00:03:21.400 ⇒ 00:03:35.900 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: my thoughts of, like, when this thing is actually gonna get done, is it, I guess, all of this encompassing, like, what I think, once he delivers them, whatever he delivers them, how much extra work they’re gonna need to do, right? Like…
35 00:03:35.930 ⇒ 00:03:44.040 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: Because, again, the thing’s not complete. Again, he said… he rewrote it for Tuesday, and then rewrote it again for Thursday, so just like…
36 00:03:44.200 ⇒ 00:03:49.260 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: Like, again, like, we… I’m literally fighting against Claude… I mean, Cursor.
37 00:03:49.340 ⇒ 00:04:06.659 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: Right? He’s, like, pinging me, could you read this code? And, like, the code just keeps changing, so it’s just, like, wasted men, whereas because, like, he has a different thought, there’s some new… because, again, like, he’s like, there’s this new, cool JSON schema, and I’m using this, and I was like, JSON’s been around for fucking ever, why don’t you use JSON?
38 00:04:06.660 ⇒ 00:04:08.759 Robert Tseng: Yeah, just use JSON, yeah.
39 00:04:08.760 ⇒ 00:04:17.729 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: Yeah, so it’s like, it’s like, again, like, I’ve worked with the type, he’s an engineer’s engineer who wants to engineer, but, like, at the end of the day, right, like, you have to sell a product.
40 00:04:17.910 ⇒ 00:04:21.110 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: Right? Like, you don’t need all of this fancy shit, right?
41 00:04:21.110 ⇒ 00:04:21.570 Robert Tseng: Yeah.
42 00:04:21.579 ⇒ 00:04:31.579 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: just get it to work, and again, I think they’re gonna have a hard time getting him to get it to work, because again, he wants it to work, like, this specific mystical way, and like…
43 00:04:31.819 ⇒ 00:04:34.329 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: Like, there’s just a lot… like, there’s a lot of…
44 00:04:35.229 ⇒ 00:04:39.309 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: unnecessary fluff. It’s just a bunch of… really pretty…
45 00:04:40.159 ⇒ 00:04:51.409 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: like, stuff, and again, it’s like, we’re fighting against Cursor here, because Cursor’s just writing whatever, and it’s just more and more and more, but, like, it’s missing the substance, which is, like, can we submit an order on a thing?
46 00:04:51.519 ⇒ 00:05:04.059 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: And that answer keeps being no, right? Like, no one cares that it’s using Zod, no one cares that it’s doing all of these new, really, really cool, interesting things that, again, no one’s battle-tested, and people have been using APIs.
47 00:05:04.219 ⇒ 00:05:09.569 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: forever, right? We just wanted, which is like…
48 00:05:09.729 ⇒ 00:05:15.839 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: the… I guess, if we want to talk about a feature mapping to Basque, right, BASC does one thing pretty well, submits orders.
49 00:05:16.420 ⇒ 00:05:17.190 Robert Tseng: Yeah.
50 00:05:18.690 ⇒ 00:05:28.869 Robert Tseng: I mean, the fact that he’s basically trying to say, we’re gonna match Basque and do a little more, like, that’s… that’s not the acceptance criteria.
51 00:05:28.870 ⇒ 00:05:30.099 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: That’s like the base case.
52 00:05:30.430 ⇒ 00:05:30.860 Robert Tseng: Yeah.
53 00:05:32.230 ⇒ 00:05:36.270 Robert Tseng: Yeah. Okay, so, yeah, I mean, kind of just… kind of…
54 00:05:36.650 ⇒ 00:05:40.429 Robert Tseng: rallying around that. So I think there’s two… there’s two things that we need to do.
55 00:05:40.430 ⇒ 00:05:58.570 Robert Tseng: One is kind of sharing what we think he’s actually going to be able to deliver by November 1st, and then the limitations of what we’ve seen so far. I mean, like, we can only share, like, off of what we’ve seen. Nothing about his roadmap, nothing about potential, I don’t care about any of his empty promises. What we have today, that’s what we’re going to report out on.
56 00:05:59.140 ⇒ 00:06:10.700 Robert Tseng: And then it’s like the… then the other part is, like, how long we actually think it would take in order for it to be ready to use, on… and defining what those acceptance criteria are.
57 00:06:10.700 ⇒ 00:06:26.490 Robert Tseng: I do feel like he’s very much just, like, spinning his wheels, like, asking everybody, what do you think? Like, is this helpful or not? It seems like, I mean, they don’t really have a PM that’s really managing their project either, and so that’s Eden’s fault for not really being able to
58 00:06:26.490 ⇒ 00:06:49.809 Robert Tseng: maybe they have, but it’s not… it’s not clearly… there’s no one in the weeds, like, really having, like, managing this team. So, we kind of have to produce that… that perspective as well. If we were PMing, kind of, like, the project, what would… what would we have to… like, what would the actual timeline be, and whatever? So, and that’s not something I expect, kind of, this… this crew to do. I… I could do…
59 00:06:49.810 ⇒ 00:07:02.589 Robert Tseng: I can kind of work on that, piece. I mean, obviously with your input, but maybe that’s how we divide and conquer this. So, Surf will kind of… maybe you kind of, provide the… this is what is actually, like.
60 00:07:02.820 ⇒ 00:07:15.239 Robert Tseng: was actually what we have today. This is what you’re actually gonna get… you’re getting from November 1st, and all the limitations, things that we need to look out for, and, like, why this is a hairy thing to really rely on.
61 00:07:15.490 ⇒ 00:07:19.240 Robert Tseng: And then I can help put together the PM plan.
62 00:07:19.740 ⇒ 00:07:32.960 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: Got it. I can get that to you, because I’m a little bit busy, on Saturday. I would love you to read it real quick, and then give me your thoughts as we go, because I want to make sure it’s in a way that, like, it helps you and helps me talk to ETL the right way.
63 00:07:33.140 ⇒ 00:07:42.189 Robert Tseng: Yeah, and if we need to kick it past, Monday, like, I think that would be fine. Like, I don’t really think this is, like… I don’t know who set that deadline, so…
64 00:07:42.400 ⇒ 00:07:43.380 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: Sweet, yeah.
65 00:07:44.350 ⇒ 00:07:51.089 Robert Tseng: Yeah, I just want to make sure that when we send it to them, it’s clear. I don’t want to go back and forth on this anymore.
66 00:07:51.480 ⇒ 00:08:03.300 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: Yep, cool. Yeah, again, I think this is one of those things where it is like, our roadmap originally was we wanted to help them get across. I think we tell them where it is right now, and we’re like.
67 00:08:03.620 ⇒ 00:08:10.639 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: in a sense, like, good luck, November 1st. Not really saying that, but, like, and then that terminates the contract, because, like.
68 00:08:10.810 ⇒ 00:08:23.960 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: the rest of the work, Amber and Awish, right? Like… like, again, the process we set up to do is really, really good, but it’s a process for, like, checking something that’s there, and this is just not there.
69 00:08:24.150 ⇒ 00:08:29.759 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: Right? So, like, to do the rest of that work is kind of in and of itself, a disservice, right? Because, like…
70 00:08:30.080 ⇒ 00:08:43.670 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: there’s no way they’re gonna be able to do any of that, like, switch the database out, all that stuff, because he can only promise what he’s built, and when I say built, I’m using air quotes, right? Because, like, if he’s gonna deliver it on November 1st.
71 00:08:43.820 ⇒ 00:08:57.920 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: Right? There’s no way for him to switch out database topologies, all of that sort of stuff. So then that would be more of, like, well, Eden would have to then hire on a team to take his code to re-architect it, which would be like, well, then why don’t you just build it yourself? Like, what…
72 00:08:58.420 ⇒ 00:09:01.319 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: What do you get from using his codebase from that perspective?
73 00:09:02.360 ⇒ 00:09:06.509 Awaish Kumar: Well, like, we don’t know, like, what… like, if you suggest that…
74 00:09:06.620 ⇒ 00:09:14.880 Awaish Kumar: the product doesn’t meet the acceptance criteria, like, the ADM team can push them to, like, work more on it, and…
75 00:09:15.030 ⇒ 00:09:17.530 Awaish Kumar: And meet the acceptance criteria.
76 00:09:19.770 ⇒ 00:09:20.560 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: I mean…
77 00:09:20.820 ⇒ 00:09:27.479 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: Yeah? I can, again, I can write up what I think is how it should be built, right? Will he get…
78 00:09:27.630 ⇒ 00:09:30.170 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: Is current state built for November 1st? No.
79 00:09:30.350 ⇒ 00:09:37.380 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: Would he get the state that I would tell them to build to for November 1st? Absolutely not. He wouldn’t get that built for this year.
80 00:09:37.630 ⇒ 00:09:41.020 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: Right, that’d be, like, pushing it into, like, March of next year.
81 00:09:41.730 ⇒ 00:09:55.120 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: Right? Like, again, if he listens and does it that way, so they would have to be, like, Eden takes it on, and then builds it to a new spec, and then the question now becomes, how much of this is actually useful if you’re just gonna build it into a new spec anyway?
82 00:09:55.580 ⇒ 00:10:14.460 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: Because then you’d be taking the code to rewrite a bunch of the core pieces to work a different way, so then how much benefit do you actually get from inheriting his topologies? Which is like, again, I want to use this new way of writing JSON when you could probably hire engineers to do it faster than just normal JSON.
83 00:10:18.740 ⇒ 00:10:36.789 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: Right, because everyone knows JSON, not everybody knows this new and improved version of JSON that. Yeah. Right? Like, that’s so wild. That’s why when you said it, I was like, I don’t know, but I’ve been only working in the industry for, I don’t know, 16 years. JSON’s JSON.
84 00:10:38.260 ⇒ 00:10:41.010 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: That’s… Alright, cool.
85 00:10:41.080 ⇒ 00:10:42.579 Awaish Kumar: I’ll get my thoughts down.
86 00:10:44.230 ⇒ 00:10:47.349 Robert Tseng: Okay, cool. Yeah, I mean…
87 00:10:48.600 ⇒ 00:11:01.819 Robert Tseng: Yeah, I’m kind of… I’m kind of speechless, honestly. I think I’m… I’m also kind of meeting now, so… I guess, I think… I think we know what we’re gonna do. But, yeah, thanks, thanks for… thanks for… I mean, we’ve spent the past hour and a half with them, so…
88 00:11:01.820 ⇒ 00:11:02.380 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: What do you do.
89 00:11:02.380 ⇒ 00:11:03.000 Robert Tseng: Appreciate it.
90 00:11:04.180 ⇒ 00:11:05.480 Robert Tseng: Okay, thanks everyone.
91 00:11:05.480 ⇒ 00:11:06.220 Amber Lin: Thanks.
92 00:11:06.220 ⇒ 00:11:06.850 Awaish Kumar: Bye.
93 00:11:07.060 ⇒ 00:11:07.810 Surfield Thomas, Jr.: I make…