Web Gardening with Travis Fantina! 🪴
Chatting about technology, life, and all the fun complexities that go along with it.
Hi everybody - in my latest podcast episode, I chat with developer and indie hacker extraordinaire Travis Fantina. Travis has been building cool technical projects for fun…well before that was considered cool! 🪴
In this chat, he and I cover his journey into tech, why technology has gotten so complicated, the greatness of third places like libraries, his latest side project Postalbox, and a whole lot more!
Watch the entire, fun-filled chat below:
Besides YouTube, you can catch this episode on Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, and more by going here.
Importance of Third Places
In between our discussions on technical topics, we talked a bit (starting at 46:05) about third places. If you are unfamiliar with this term, the third place:
…refers to the social surroundings that are separate from the two usual social environments of home ("first place") and the workplace ("second place"). Examples of third places include churches, cafes, bars, clubs, libraries, gyms, bookstores, hackerspaces, stoops, parks, theaters, among others…
Much has been written over the years around how our phones have taken the place of third places in many people’s lives. Physical, real-world social interaction has been replaced with taps and clicks on the screen. This has partly led to a decline in third places - both in people using them and in places that are available for people to use. Both of which is unfortunate. For a deeper look at this decline, this article does a good summarizing the challenges.
Till Next Time
One of Travis’s latest projects is Postalbox:
You write a message in your browser and specify a recipient and their physical address. A physical mail with your message printed out gets sent to the recipient. It’s a great and fun example of our analog and digital worlds colliding, so do check it out.
Before I wrap things up, for those of you keeping score on how long I’ve known my podcast guests, yes - Travis is someone who I’ve now known close to two decades. He and I crossed paths first in 2006 on…dare I say it…a third place known as the forums 😂
Cheers,
Kirupa 🐙