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**Brian Ketelsen:** I love the [operator pattern](https://www.slideshare.net/Jakobkaralus/the-kubernetes-operator-pattern-containerconf-nov-2017)... That's very much sort of a turning operations into a building block, having Kubernetes as kind of the standard interface to facilitate it. That's really exciting, and I wa... |
You know, I have my problems with... Kubernetes is too complex, Kubernetes is yadda-yadda-yadda, and some of these can be solved with higher level abstractions, and one of the projects that I would love to do that I just can't find a -- it just doesn't make sense to make it is the Dokku of Kubernetes, that kind of sits... |
The problem is Kubernetes is already very extensible, but it gets very complicated very fast, and there's still a lot of stuff that you need to kind of set up and configure with Kubernetes out of the box. |
\[19:55\] The way things are moving, Kubernetes is probably just gonna add more stuff to try and solve those problems, but it's just gonna make things more complicated. That's usually what happens with software like this; it happened to OpenStack, it happened to Docker, it's happening to Kubernetes... It's really unfor... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, I think outside interest, and I think everybody kind of has their own vision of the future and direction, and they're all trying to slide in the building blocks that they need for that vision, and then we end up in situations where there's so many options... The kind of analysis paralysis, or... |
I'm a big Kubernetes lover, but I also think that Kubernetes is amazing for Kubernetes' related problems. I think there's nothing wrong if your infrastructure is not complex in that way... There's nothing wrong with running a couple of containers in Docker, and things like that, and a load balancer in front it, and pro... |
**Jeff Lindsay:** Totally, yeah. |
**Erik St. Martin:** ...why support all of that? |
**Jeff Lindsay:** Definitely. Most of the time when I try and get people's vision of the future, it's not really that much further out from the existing scope that they're working in. They might want certain different ways of doing things at a lower-level, because they're fans of [Systemd](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... |
Actually, Kubernetes isn't super interesting to me anymore. In the same way that I kind of quickly moved on from Docker, it's like "Okay, I know how to do stuff with this. It's a solved problem." That happened really quickly with Docker, and then it was just really painful to sit through years of the industry kind of c... |
So one of my early Docker containers was a BusyBox container with [OPKG](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opkg), which was a package manager for routers, I think. |
And then I discovered Alpine, and I'm like "This has everything... With a couple of caveats, but this is great." Now luckily everybody's using Alpine as their base image, because it's actually -- like, you're shipping containers around all the time, why are you sending these huge images? |
\[24:05\] And I'm also really pleased to see stuff like webhooks... They're everywhere. It took ten years, but... When I was working on webhooks, I was building a lot of prototypes, adapters to give you webhooks for various things... Kind of as demos to show people like "Oh, this is what you can do and how easy it is t... |
And one of the things that seemed to make a lot of sense for webhooks is, well, you wanna write little scripts, little handler scripts, and it's gotta be easy; I just wanna be able to wire something up and be done. So I basically imagine the pitch was a paste bin, but the code you that you put in it actually runs. This... |
And there were a lot of those kind of hosted code type of things back then, and they were all positioned to build apps with... It was like, "No, their benefit..." -- a lot of ones, like AppJet, and I can't remember, I used to have a list of these... That let you just write code and hit Save. And there's a bunch now, li... |
Then AWS comes along, and they do [Lambda](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWS_Lambda), and they make it specifically for event handling... A lot for their internal events, but then also webhooks, and it can do HTTP, and the funny thing is -- and then everybody wants to build apps with it, which was kind of hilarious. Bu... |
Most workflow automation stuff is just you're kind of defining this big state machine, you do in this kind of like DSL type of thing, and it's kind of painful. I just imagined being able to write some JavaScript where you get to a function, and it doesn't even have async/await, or maybe it does, but you get to a functi... |
This finally became possible with some of the stuff that was done as first kernel extensions, and is now integrated into Docker. You can actually persist a process, pause a process, serialize it to disk - any process - and unserialize it, and it will start running exactly where it was. So with a little bit of infrastru... |
\[28:24\] That's kind of what durable functions give you... So it's validating on one hand, and a little -- but I wanna talk more about Go. This is GoTime. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Well, that's perfect. When did you start Go? Who introduced you to Go? Was it something that you stumbled across and found on your own? |
**Jeff Lindsay:** I used to watch a lot of tech talks, Google tech talks, and [Rob Pike](https://twitter.com/rob_pike) gave a [talk in 2007](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB05UFqOtFA) in which he talked about Newsqueak. Newsqueak was -- I feel like it's not as well known as it should be, but Newsqueak was very much a... |
And then of course, the fact that Go had this philosophy... It kind of came from why people did stuff at Bell Labs, which was very much kind of like that UNIX philosophy, building simple systems... There was sort of a design -- what's the word...? |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Ethos? |
**Jeff Lindsay:** There's a certain amount of discernment... There is a clear ethos, and in it sort of this like "You know we're actually going to be thoughtful about things, and try and build --" I mean, the way I describe it is very generative primitives, right? The people that wanna do a set library for Go - it's li... |
What I wanna see are less libraries, and one of the ways that I think that's possible... How can I try and describe this...? So when I was working on webhooks, there was this kind of metaphor, this story of "You talk to an API. The API doesn't really have a way to talk to you. You talk to it using HTTP, and then whatev... |
And that was kind of a realization -- it's kind of a two-way conversation. The weird thing is that almost all programming, the way you think about it, like every library is a collection of functions and objects with methods that you call, and that's kind of the main paradigm of reusable software - exposing collections ... |
\[32:07\] Basically, the analogy is having kind of a one-sided conversation with somebody. You're talking to somebody, and pretty much all they're doing is acknowledging you, maybe looking confused, like "That's returning an error...", or if you ask a question, they answer it, but they aren't a real participant in the ... |
Interfaces are magical. It's like one of the coolest tools in software abstractions ever created, and we don't use them enough in Go as it is, but we can actually -- imagine if we actually really used them to do two-way conversations. That's kind of what I've been working on, how I've been running software for the past... |
This pattern, the way I'm thinking about this actually came from Track, that Python piece of software that nobody really knows how it works except for Track developers, and as a person who's building a startup around it, I had to know how it worked. And they developed this over time... This really kind of elegant kind ... |
For example, if you wanted to make it so that code is checked in, it will close the issues that are mentioned in it, that could be implemented in the issue tracking system instead of being hardcoded with the versioning system. It just has a hook. When code is checked in, have a look at what's in it, and then another sy... |
Then those extension points can be exposed to the user to do custom -- you could expose them as hooks, like shell hooks, like shell scripts, or you could expose them over some custom plugin protocol, expose a JavaScript interpreter and you call functions in there, so now your users can script stuff in your application.... |
\[36:01\] So this turned out to be an incredibly powerful, simple idea like webhooks, and I've been trying to find a way for the past three, four years to do that in Go in a Go idiomatic way that also has some of these other properties of building component-oriented software, and I actually finally have a library that ... |
So it's a really simple library. I just put it up in an example app and all this... So I guess this is the official announcement of it - it's called com, it's kind of a stupid name... [GliderLabs Com](https://github.com/gliderlabs/com). It lets you build component-oriented software in Go using this kind of interface-ba... |
It's really abstract though, it's hard to describe, and visually it's a lot easier, but if you go to the project you can look at the examples, and stuff. I built a wiki in it the other night, and the wiki is like 200 lines of code, because it's using a lot of reusable stuff. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** I saw a com a couple of weeks ago... Probably when you first pushed it up, I'm not sure. I have a habit of cruising through GitHub late night, looking at interesting Go projects... And I didn't quite understand it until you put the wiki example up, and now it's much easier to understand. So maybe it... |
**Jeff Lindsay:** Yeah, that was the challenge... Normally, Go libraries - it's like "Oh, just go look at the Go docs" and that was like the worst way to approach it, especially because now you really only use one method... It's basically a one-function system, and everything else kind of happens magically with the ref... |
So there's this separate library that's called Standard Com, that has stuff that I do al the time. It actually sounds like, "Oh, why would you need a component for that?" Like, there's a daemon manager that will run services, so that if you have anything that needs to serve something, this will run it after some initia... |
From that I built sessions and authentication... Authentication using [Goth](https://github.com/markbates/goth), that actually has like 40 providers, or something like that. So you log in with GitHub or whatever, and all of the -- usually, when you use Goth, you have to set up the handlers... They have some helper stuf... |
These are all kind of more experimental stuff, but then I built a console component that basically wraps up the authentication. You have a page where it says login, authenticates with whatever provider is configured, it takes you to this kind of like very adminy-looking thing with a top menu, where you can configure wh... |
\[40:25\] So it's a really amazing way to write -- it feels like we never had composable software before. It's such a different way of building -- I mean, not different, it just feels so good working with this system. It's taken years to kind of get right and reproduce in Go, but I think I've finally done it. |
So now the idea is I'm gonna build a bunch of stuff with it, because that was the whole point - by having reusable components, I can easily throw together systems and ideas and projects. One of the things that I wanna do with this is rebuild command.io kind of from the ground up, based on the existing codebase... And a... |
So I'm gonna try and build every component from the ground up, building a command.io system... Which by the way sort of functions as a service, but it's commands over SSH it in itself is kind of funny. I don't know if anybody's seen command.io... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** I looked at it but didn't really get the use case for it. It seemed like there was the ability to run remote commands, but no persistence or no file storage... I was confused. Help me out. |
**Jeff Lindsay:** Yeah, so a lot of kind of function as a service is usually designed around HTTP, so you're writing web handlers and you can kind of shell out and do whatever if you have containers. Usually, these things aren't made to work for -- you know, let's say you have a script. A lot of people's automation in ... |
They are stateless in that you don't have -- but you can pull from Git, you can kind of do anything you want from the command line. However, one of the things that I've been working on for a while is a way to expose your current directory to it. That will open up the possibility of writing tools that actually interact ... |
Again, it's kind of like the speed to get somebody working on your project, have all the right tools and stuff like that - you can actually put all those in the cloud, and then they kind of run a command... And it's working on your file system, but the code is executing somewhere else. So it's run consistently, and any... |
\[44:25\] So function as a service, focusing on command line... That's really what it is. And yeah, it's a great tool. So I was gonna rebuild that using this component; it's using an older version of it, and isn't as componentized as it could be, but this is a way that people can kind of see "Oh, here's how you'd build... |
A common one that we have besides HTTP is SSH. We have a really great SSH library for Go, people don't know... [GliderLabs SSH](https://github.com/gliderlabs/ssh). It wraps the existing crypto SSH library and gives you an interface that looks a lot like the HTTP interface for servers. So it becomes really easy to build... |
[Brad Fitzpatrick](https://twitter.com/bradfitz) said he thought that it was dope, so I think that's good. He said it's refreshing to see good API design... I was like, "Well, I'm just copying HTTP, so..." |
**Erik St. Martin:** \[laughs\] I wanna say I've messed with the SSH library... It's been a while. It's so hard to remember where you pick up the libraries from; you find something cool and you're like "Oh, this is awesome", and then you remember who wrote it later. |
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