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+**Adam Stacoviak:** We love Hacktoberfest. We've silently participated -- Jerod, you've done some stuff with it just by happenstance, I guess...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I got a T-shirt.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You got a T-shirt?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, yeah...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I personally haven't yet, but each year we're silently in the wings of DigitalOcean, cheering this thing on, because clearly we have a heart for open source. Daniel, you're here, and you've been leading this thing... I think what's interesting is that you were part of the team that started it, so maybe give us the beginnings, the why's. Why is this in place?
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** Yeah, thanks guys. I mean, DigitalOcean has always been focused on developers, and we wanted to build developer communities offline and online. This one actually came about -- we were offline, running around different university hackathons, and around the month of September (going into October) we were like "Well, what can we build into this?" and this is five years ago. We were like, "What if we gave away some T-shirts to folks at those hackathons, and why not around the world gave back to open source?" 50 commits to any GitHub repos, and we'll send them a shirt. Pretty DIY. I think it was all just within a blog post. And we ended up sending 505 shirts in 2014.
+
+Back to your question of why - I mean, it's a pretty simple program that's focused on wanting to give something back to the developer community, and fusing open source with it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And clearly, it's about raising awareness of open source, maybe even taking some of those PR's that are hanging there, or some things that are -- maybe even on-ramps; I know a lot of open source is about finding contributors, and building community, and things like that. So this is just one more thing to put the focus on the need for contribution, and the need to give back to open source... Not just monetarily, because that's not what this is about, but in ways that take the technologies and the projects forward, either through updated documentation, or legit bigger feature development, things like that.
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** Absolutely. Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of open source. And what is a celebration? You have to have involvement, you have to have different members of the community come together to celebrate it. So you're right... One thing I would add to the fact that it was driving contributions - we're also bringing new folks to open source. People that may have never participated around the world. That's been super-surprisingly effective, because I love some of the stories. I'll just kind of throw one in here, for instance... I was talking to Victoria, who's in Frankfurt; she's organizing a bunch of meetups this year for Hacktoberfest. She actually got involved last year when she was learning to code in CSS, JavaScript, now she's a Vue.js developer, and last year Hacktoberfest was her first foray into open source, and now she's organizing the community. Those are things that are just unexpected, and awesomely exciting for me about what this has turned into.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Was it always localized communities the way it is now, or has it always been online, and maybe offline...? Now it seems like you're doing things where you're organizing meetups, and you even have a media kit -- or not media kit, but like a meetup kit, or an event kit, so to speak. Has it always been both sides, where it's either online-formed or offline-formed?
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** The event kit came about three years ago, actually... And since then we've just continued to invest resources into that area, because we continue to see community members coming together offline. So not from the very beginning, but it's really taking off, so we're just trying to support it because we see the community just taking it from -- you know, they're just doing their own thing, and we're just getting out of the way, really just supporting them, doing whatever they need. We already have 35 events actually organized for Hacktoberfest 2018, and it's--
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[07:08\] It's a lot.
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** ...October 1st is just starting.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. So you said first year it was 505 shirts - is that right?
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** Yeah, 505 shirts.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Can you give me the -- I'm sure we'll go deeper into other stats along the way, but I'm just curious, just to tie a bone on this, what the stats are on shirts across the years... Like, year one was 505, year two is 2,000... I don't know, whatever.
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** Yeah, year two was 5,700.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow! I was going for 2,000, thinking it would be a lot, but...
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** I can explain, I can explain. That's where GitHub comes in the picture.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay...
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** Yeah, GitHub really helped us reach a new audience, and that partnership has -- okay, so 2016, 10,000; then 2017 (last year) 31,000.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow...
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** So... Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Progress in the number of T-shirts... And you know, that's our love language, it's T-shirts.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's right.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You give me a T-shirt, I'll love you forever.
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** Apparently, that's -- and you know, we're not changing that. That's the way it's gonna continue to work. And the thing that we're seeing other companies do is actually use that model to get their communities involved. SendGrid has really been a pioneer in that. SendGrid last year - they were shooting for getting 80 contributors during the month of October; they got 625 contributors to SendGrid's specific repos... And it's because they worked swag into the offering. They said "Alright, you're participating in Hacktoberfest - we'll also give you a shirt of ours", and what we're seeing this year is there's already a lot of communities that are ready to go with swag if you participate in the larger Hacktoberfest program, but also as an incentive to contribute to their projects.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What is it about developers and swag and T-shirt? Where does the love come from? Because if you look from the outside, you think "Maybe we can't afford clothing, and we really need these T-shirts", but I don't think that's the case.
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** Yeah, definitely developers do not need -- I think developers don't need more T-shirts; I am wrong every time.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, we don't need anymore, but we do want more... That's the thing.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes.
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** Yeah, I mean... First of all, you guys should be answering this question. My educated guess is that the point of a T-shirt -- if the T-shirts didn't have anything on them, that wouldn't work; what the T-shirts have is a technology, a community, an idea, a lifestyle... Something that allows developers to connect with other developers and have a conversation, and sort of be at a conference and say "I'm proud to be a part of X, Y or Z community through my shirt."
+
+At Hacktoberfest, the added aspect to that is now it's the fifth year... It's kind of cool to have -- it's almost a collector's item at this point.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh... You know, vintage...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I was gonna even say -- that, that it's vintage, a collector's item, but also limited. You can't get 2018's in 2019, or go back and get 2016's... It's like it's a once and done. You're not gonna reprint more. Participate and get, or no.
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** Exactly, yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So as Adam was talking about at the beginning of the show, I kind of accidentally got a Hacktoberfest shirt; I think 2016. It wasn't accidental, I just didn't think that my commits were gonna add up, or something... I did know what Hacktoberfest was and what was going on, but when the shirt came in the mail, it was -- or maybe when the email came; I don't know, I can't remember the logistics, but I was pleasantly surprised, and I still wear it with pride.
+
+Maybe how it works, maybe how it's changed... Has it been exactly 50 commits to any open source repo, and that's how it's always worked? Maybe just some of the details on the actual program... Because I know right now what we're all thinking is "Okay, how do I get one of these stinkin' shirts? I want one."
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** \[10:55\] Yeah, it was 50 commits. That was only the first year. The next year we decided to shift the methodology completely to pull requests. We thought there was more meaning to that in terms of the contribution, and more quality... So the past three years (2015, 2016 and 2017) it's been four pull requests. This is a good time for me to say - we're changing that up this year.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, boy.
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** Yeah, it's important to highlight, because we're celebrating year five, so what do you think it's gonna be?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Five pull requests.
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** You got it, yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I'm right here with you.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Tracking. I like it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So does that mean pull requests opened, pull requests merged? What's the exact requirement?
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** The exact requirement is you have to open up five pull requests. If they're merged, that's fantastic. That's something that is an added layer of complexity that we have not explored yet. We have these conversations internally around "Well, what if we switch it up and do this? This thing would actually make for more quality, but it's got these other issues..." I mean, there's a lot of different things we could do, and I'd love your guys' input on that, too.
+
+Just to keep it simple - open five pull requests and get a shirt. Within the month of October, 1st to 31st, all timezones included... That's been an issue in the past, where folks from these far-off timezones are like "Am I gonna get a chance to complete?" and we're like "We've got you covered", to all the folks in Fiji.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm thinking about also the tech required to track this. Is it simply just some GitHub API stuff and it's fairly simple, or is it a lot more than that to actually track? And the validity, because somebody can eventually game this somehow, and I'm sure someone has or will, and that's on them... But are you concerned about that?
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** Yes and no to your question about the actual tooling behind it. It is just GitHub API wizardry. Pretty simple, but then the magic stuff comes in when we add things like the Invalid tag. The Invalid tag was introduced two years ago to give maintainers the power to see pull requests that are really not good stuff, like "Don't come around here with that. You're clearly wasting my time and you're not giving back in a meaningful way", and that gives maintainers the power to tag things as invalid... So that's obviously something that we count and consider.
+
+We have to -- the whole timezone stuff actually does add a bit of complexity sometimes, but for the most part, yeah, it's just counting five pull requests. And I think you bring up a good question about gaming the system. There's three things that come to mind, that we've done to -- because I think that folks that game this system are gonna continue to try to game the system... But we've learned why some people do it, and we've sort of shifted the program in these three ways.
+
+One, the Invalid tag, which I've just mentioned. Allowing maintainers to mark issues invalid has been pretty powerful. Two, no longer focusing on just a few repos. We used to just promote repositories on the website. Now instead we rotate repos, so that all the attention isn't going to just a few select projects, which are just getting bombarded... Instead, it's really just evening it out and letting everyone have a chance to shine on the Hacktoberfest site.
+
+And the other thing that we're introducing this year, the third thing, is values - Hacktoberfest Values. Those are coming from the community, and those are really guiding principles that we've seen the community lead by. It's not us coming up with it, it's something I continue to see in the feedback and the experiences that we see.
+
+I think that when the community has values and principles guided by that community, I think there's more of a level of accountability around focusing on quality and caring about one another, and celebrating open source in a meaningful way.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I think it's sad, but it also makes total sense that people would actually game a system in order to win or earn a T-shirt, right? Because it goes back to the pride point of like you associate yourself with this thing when you're wearing a T-shirt, and so it says something about you... So you're gaming a system to wear a T-shirt for a thing that you didn't legitimately earn - it just seems like backwards to me, but that's a developer and somebody who likes to poke and prod at the rules of systems... I definitely understand the desire to be like "Hm, what's the minimum I can do to get myself one of these T-shirts?"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[15:26\] And still be valid(ish)... The -ish part, you know?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, exactly.
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** That's why we make the rules really simple, and kind of paste them all -- they're all over the place... They're in the confirmation email, they're on the website... That's really front and center. At the same time, the usual "People don't read the instructions", and "Send us an email and ask us what's going on..." But you know, there's just certain ways that the community operates that you guys have even shared from your personal experiences that we're not gonna change, and we're just gonna have to embrace.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, it's funny that I mentioned that, because quick shout out to beardicus who's a member of the Changelog community Slack, Brian Boucheron, who works for ya'll as a technical writer. He was talking about Hacktoberfest in our Slack recently, and even in there I started asking him specific rules, like "Okay, so if I commit to my own open source repository, but I open a pull request for myself, does that count?" Just trying to figure out where are the edges of this system... And we had a fun time discussing what does or does not count, so I can see where -- as developers, that tendency of being like "Where are the boundaries of this, technically, and how exactly can I poke it in the right way?" It definitely happens unfortunately, and that means you are gonna send a T-shirt to somebody who might not have earned it, so... That's the give and take.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, also if it's simply based on pull requests, there's a lot of pull requests opened and not merged on GitHub, on collective repos that are open source, just by nature.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Sure.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So having the budget alone to cover --
+
+**Jerod Santo:** 30,000 shirts last year...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Was it 30k or 50k?
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** It was 30k last year.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. But you're expecting 50k this year.
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** Exactly.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's real money right there.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's a lot of money. I'm just doing the back of the napkin here... The average shirt costs - if you're getting them in that kind of quantity, it's probably pretty low, plus you probably have relationships with a printer, so maybe $8-$10 plus shipping worldwide... That's still a decent budget, just on T-shirts.
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** Well, you know that when you go on the Hacktoberfest site today, now that we've launched, you can see who we have as our partners in this, and we're really lucky to have amazing partners like GitHub and Twilio this year to actually help chip in to companies that have similar values and a focus on developers and open source... So we're not doing it all alone. That would keep me up all night. But still, everything you're saying is absolutely right, and if you did the napkin -- I didn't wanna let you keep going with the napkin math, because I would have been freaking out over here, because I don't wanna be reminded of how much it costs to ship 50,000 shirts to (last year) 121 countries. How awesome is that?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, my goodness.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, let's do it differently then... Let's say - since you came at it from that angle - if others didn't step up for this good cause that definitely influences open source and provides future careers for some, or on-ramps for many, if you had to go alone at your own dollar... Sure, DigitalOcean - you guys are great, but at some point you probably had to cut your budget off and say "We just can't do it this year because it's just so expensive." Would that have happened?
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** If I didn't secure partners, I think we would have shifted the mechanics of the program to limit the amount of shirts that we can give out and figure out other ways to reward community members.
+
+\[18:58\] Of course, another option that we were considering is having the program be self-funded, and a great program that existed before Hacktoberfest and still powers on is 24 Pull Requests, and that's also a really effective, meaningful program giving back to open source that's community-organized. DigitalOcean, I would say, pushes Hacktoberfest forward, but at this point the community could do it on its own. I think it's interesting looking into how this year goes, what the lessons are gonna be, and going into next year.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, we've actually covered 24 Pull Requests a couple weeks back, in the December timeframe too, and it was a lot of fun talking through that with Andrew Nesbitt... And just the sheer weight of that and its impact. I was gonna ask you about other models similar to that. I can't recall if you came first or they came first, and it's not really a matter of who did, but just how what you learn contributes back to other programs similar to this... Or if there's any communication at all.
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** We honestly haven't had a whole lot of communication; it's more about cross-promotion. I think that's what it's been centered around. Through these two programs, the model is pretty evident, what works.
+
+**Break:** \[20:26\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Daniel, let's talk about who should be involved in this, how to get involved... Of course, the emphasis is on community, and you said even bringing new folks to the open source community... But when it comes to Hacktoberfest, you have a lot of different perspectives or angles that you can come at participation. You can say "I strictly want a T-shirt. How am I gonna earn a T-shirt?" and we talked about that a little bit. You can be a maintainer of an open source repository and you would love those extra commits this month... Maybe you're a business, like you mentioned, SendGrid getting involved with their own T-shirt... So from these different perspectives, give us some information on the best ways to go about participating.
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** Yeah. Let's split it up into five. That's what comes to mind for me. One - beginner. Two - contributor. Three - community organizer. Four - maintainer. Five - business. How does that sound?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Repeat it back to me one more time, because you were ready for that and I wasn't. Beginner...
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** Beginner, contributor, maintainer, community organizer and business.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Adam, can you tell he's thought about these things before?
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** I actually just came up with that list.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** He's on the fly! This is nice.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Wow... You're good at this. Alright, let's go.
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** \[22:52\] I wanted to package it for you guys. So the first thing is beginners. Beginners hear about Hacktoberfest through their friends, and they want a T-shirt. "That sounds exciting. Let's get a T-shirt! Wait, what? We have to do open source? GitHub? Git? What is this stuff?" So beginners actually, while it seems -- I think it can come off as kind of intimidating, but there's so much great content, there's so much community involvement and there's so much past experience within the Hacktoberfest community that beginners actually have a lot of routes they could take to get a foot in the door and participate in Hacktoberfest if (if!) they stay committed throughout the month. Because I do hear stories of folks who are like "I got my first pull request. Oh, no! Suddenly it's October 29th. Ugh... Okay, it's too late. I'm not gonna get it."
+
+That's why I encourage beginners to really stay in it and do the upfront hard work of learning how to get up and running with Git and setup in GitHub and starting to learn how to find opportunities to contribute, and seek out meetups to participate in, and look for friends who are talking about it on Twitter. There's a lot of ways to work your way to getting a shirt, and it's really rewarding is what I've seen, as I told the story of Victoria... Another story that comes to mind is Aditya who was just getting started with open source through Hacktoberfest, and fast-forward is now a maintainer of Homebrew Cask, because that's a project that he was passionate about, and started from contributor to maintainer.
+
+So beginners - go for it. There's a lot of exciting things down the road, and it's worth it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It also helps that I'm a big fan of Cask. I use it all the time.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It also helps. \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I mean, just saying... Now I can appreciate the maintainers of that project even more because of its roots, you know what I mean?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's so cool. Maybe that's not the only thing that got that person there, but it was a beginning, it was a start, it was a place that there was an on-ramp, which is what we look for in open source - those on-ramps, those invitations.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right. Well, while we're on beginners, let me give my pitch to potential beginners who want that T-shirt, okay? We have two repos on the Changelog Organization. One is called Transcripts, and the other is called Show Notes. Neither of them have code in them; they all have markdown files that are open source transcripts and show notes, and they're integrated into our CMS. And as I like to say, we have the fastest Merge button in the West, pretty -- although I guess merging doesn't matter in this case, because the opening of the PR is what matters. That being said, just start going to contribute very quickly.
+
+So if you wanna get involved and you are afraid or intimidated by the coding side of pull requests and contribution into the community, well, find non-code contributions that you can do, which will still get you pull requests. Our repos are easy and awesome, and hey, you get to listen to Changelog shows while you're contributing - how cool is that?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I like the pitch, because you can easily go to pretty much any show on our site and go to the transcript and just for "unintelligible", or just go to the transcript repo and do a Find by, and look for "unintelligible." And then go listen to that show, even to that point in the show... I'm overselling it, sorry... But this is how easy it gets. \[laughter\] That's how easy it gets. Anyways, I won't oversell it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Daniel, now you'll find the real reason why we invited you on - so we could pitch our listeners on helping out on our transcripts. Nah, just kidding.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The thing is that's helped our transcripts so much, because they're very readable and they're very inviting... And it's so nice, because people can actually read the show, versus just listen to it. For those who prefer that method, it's just like - you've helped level up. It's nice.
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** I love it. I mean, you guys are pitching the program that DigitalOcean created five years ago. It's amazing, so thank you for doing that. And I think it's a perfect time to talk about contributors, who are experienced contributors... Because you guys are shouting out beginners, but you guys are okay with non-beginners, right?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, absolutely.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Absolutely.
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** \[27:10\] Cool. Perfect. Contributors - the best thing to do is really go on GitHub and search, and just start to spend time on GitHub throughout October, jumping in and using GitHub search to find issues that are related to things that you're interested in.
+
+One route you can go take is think about the technologies that you're using on a regular basis, or that you've come to love through your experience contributing. That's a really natural first step for you to jump into. If projects aren't coming to mind when that prompt comes up, just go on GitHub and maybe search by the language that you are predominantly using... Or once again, the search functionality is just super-effective, and just looking through a whole lot of different types of contributions that you can make...
+
+I think that what we saw last year is things were getting labeled "hacktoberfest", and contributors were jumping in minutes later. It was really amazing to see. So... Contributors, you might have some competition out there, that's why I recommend jumping in and sort of block some time off and jump in throughout October and I'm sure you'll find something meaningful to contribute back to. And as you guys said yourselves - not only through code, but also through documentation and through testing and other... I mean, you guys just called it out yourselves; you guys weren't necessarily pushing for code, so that's great.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right. No questions there, that sounds all good. Move us on to maintainers now, because that's a different perspective altogether.
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** Yeah, and on the flipside of that, maintainers will benefit from actually labeling their different issues "hacktoberfest", and doing so strategically. At first, when we introduced the recommendation to label your issues "hacktoberfest", that was a really good move, because it sort of allowed contributors to find issues with ease. Now what we're seeing is there's actually a lot of -- you know, last year 240,000 pull requests to 60,000 repos. That's the activity that happened in Hacktoberfest 2017.
+
+So think about 240,000 pull requests... The smart thing to do for maintainers is to add specificity to the labeling strategy for the different issues. Is it a "first timers welcome"? Do you wanna talk about the time investment that it's gonna take, or the difficulty level? Things like that allow the community of contributors to jump in and self-identify and connect with these issues in a way that's actually gonna get things done.
+
+The other thing I would say to maintainers is don't necessarily label everything at the beginning of October. It's October 1st, it's important to already have some issues labeled now, however don't worry about getting everything in there right now. You can spread that out throughout the month too, because different things will pop up at different times. We found that that has worked for maintainers.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So does the -- I might have missed it, you might have said it... Do the issues with the Hacktoberfest label - are those aggregated and listed on the Hacktoberfest website, or is it simply to indicate to people who may wanna contribute that you have some good ones, or are you actually aggregating those and having a discoverable list?
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** Yeah, we have a discoverable list on the website.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Awesome.
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** When you land on the site, everytime you refresh the page you'll get new ones.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So this is before October 1st, so some timing to mention for listeners... We're recording this before, obviously, so currently the site doesn't represent what it will represent on October 1st. I'm assuming the "Coming soon" means this kind of stuff will come when October 1st hits.
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** \[31:10\] Exactly.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Thank you for explaining my ignorance here, Adam... We are looking at a splash page, which by the time this airs, will be a much better or much more informative page with that stuff, so that's why I don't know the answer to that... Even though if you're at the website you probably know that already.
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** Yes, that's absolutely right, guys... \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Insider baseball here, okay...
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** I could have also told you that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** All good, all good.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I like the motivation for maintainers though, because they're always looking for ways to find more help. There's no maintainer out there that is gonna turn away somebody... You know, join the community, but then just help taking on the burden of the project, in any way, shape or form. No one's gonna take that away, so having something like Hacktoberfest for maintainers must just be like "Yes, give people a reason to wanna get involved." Even if it's just for a few weeks...
+
+Let's say you add 100 contributors to a project, and five of them stay and actually become long-time, sustained contributors or community members; or some percentage. It's a win.
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** Yeah, it's a win for maintainers, as long as they don't have their wedding, or their babies coming, or something really important in your life is happening in October that's gonna make a double duty.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Why is no one planning around this? I mean, that's what I'm doing; I'm planning my October on this.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Plan your life out, people. October is taken, okay? It's Hacktoberfest, no life events allowed.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And what about community organizers? What's their role here?
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** Similar to maintainers, community organizers are hungry to build community online, offline, and Hacktoberfest, because of the offline piece, Hacktoberfest has become a time when there is this real demand for coming together and hacking away at open source. Community organizers are leveraging that to bring their local communities together.
+
+For instance Adam, who actually works at DigitalOcean, has been a Hacktoberfest community member before he joined DigitalOcean... He told a couple of days ago that they've got 30 people signed up for the Edmonton, Alberta meetup, and that's more people that showed up to their meetup last year. I don't know how much they pushed their community throughout the year, but that's certainly an indication that something is bringing people together -- I don't even know how to describe it. It's really just a hunger for coming together, and last year 119 meetups were organized around Hacktoberfest, and this year I'm honestly expecting over 200 around the world.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Wow. That's spectacular. One question I have which kind of relates to the maintainers and the community organizers - and Daniel, you may or may not have insights or tips on this, so feel free to say "I'm not sure", but when we have an influx of what you might call "casual contributors", or people who their main motivation is for the T-shirt, or they're just getting started... I don't wanna call them low quality or low value contributions, but let's just call them casual, because I think that's probably what they are... As a maintainer, the real value comes kind of like what Adam said, over time, if you get long-term contributors. So you're introducing, hopefully, a casual contributor to eventually become somebody who's going to contribute repeatedly.
+
+It seems like for maintainers and community organizers - specifically more maintainers, but also organizers - it would be nice to have or to help out somehow with resources, or knowledge on... It sounds ikey to say "turning somebody into a contributor", but you know what I'm saying - taking a casual contributor from Hacktoberfest, that never would have found you, but they've found you on the website because you had the label, and now they're interested... But how do you actually convert them from casual to repeated? Are there tried and true methods?
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** \[35:08\] How do you guys do it?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We be nice, we welcome, we thank... Talk about the thing we did from Kent C. Dodds, Jerod. That's a pretty interesting thing. The contributor sections of readme.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, so we used the All Contributors spec command line tool that Kent C. Dodds came up with, which is a way to basically provide shout-outs or credit to all the contributors towards your project, right there in the readme. So there's a grid in your readme, which has everybody's avatars and a little emoji representing how they contributed. That includes non-code contributions, as well as code contributions.
+
+We use that, and it works very well for smaller projects. I think Kubernetes couldn't do that, because they have seven thousand, or however many thousand people who are contributing, so it wouldn't really scale very well... But that's good for small projects.
+
+You know, we thank people on Twitter, we show that it matters to us... The things that we really seek contribution on are our transcripts and show notes. We also have our Changelog.com website which is open source, and we've had some great contributions there... But we aren't necessarily trying to - I don't know, Adam - build a base of core contributors. I mean, for transcripts we definitely would, but... Yeah, we'll just be nice and give shout-outs, and show people that it helps and that it matters, and that we appreciate it. But beyond that, I don't have hard answers either.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** One place they could go to for more resources however, which is no longer an active show, but a great resource in retrospect and it is a lot of greenfield kind of content is Request for Commits, the show we had with Nadia Eghbal and Mikeal Rogers, who did a show on exploring different perspectives in open source sustainability.
+
+"The human side of code" was one of the taglines for this show, essentially. It went 19 episodes over two seasons... Plenty of content in there for contributor on-ramping, how to fund your open source... All these different things of being a maintainer, essentially, but how to attract and keep and nurture a community of involved people in a project and/or idea. So just to add one more thing to the resource pack would be Request for Commits as a podcast; listen to episode 1 through 19, and that's essentially open source 101.
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** And building on that, Nadia developed -- I believe that she was the one that worked on GitHub's open source guides, which are the phenomenal resources which we link to from the Hacktoberfest site... And I love how you brought up Mikeal Rogers...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It was intentional.
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** If he's listening, hey Mikeal! ...because Mikeal was at DigitalOcean when we started Hacktoberfest.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I bet, I bet!
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, nice...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I remember that, because I first met Mikeal in the time whenever he worked at DigitalOcean. This was when the io.js fork happened, and I was like "How in the world do you do your job at DigitalOcean AND help lead this fracture and then regovernance of Node?" And then obviously he quit DigitalOcean a couple months later, not because of the like or dislike for the work, but just moving on in his career.
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** Yeah, absolutely. And I realize I didn't add one aspect of the community organizer piece, and that's the event kit, which is a tool. So we talked about the tools that allow maintainers to bring folks from these casual contributors to ongoing and consistent core contributors; for the event side of things, we have an event kit that we developed two years ago. That's been a collaboration between my colleague, Samantha C. and GitHub's Joe Nash, who runs their university programs.
+
+The event kit has just been phenomenal at giving folks a template of how to put together an event, and how to make it an awesome event. And what I'm seeing is communities are actually organizing for the second or third year in a row Hacktoberfest events. So that's telling me that something is working.
+
+\[39:11\] Samantha and Joe were really active... This year they're actually gonna be releasing some webinars, and there's gonna be a video on the site (you should see it in the event kit section) that's gonna show you a Q&A with them and them providing an overview of how to put together an event yourself... So also a helpful resource for the community organizer side of things.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Is there a list of community-driven events anywhere that I missed? Or will it appear whenever the 1st hits and then there's some information, more so for like "Hey, I'm in Houston, Texas, and somebody has already started this. You don't have to begin from scratch, you can just join up."
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** Hacktoberfest.com/events. It's gonna be a separate page on the site. Just go to /events and you're gonna see all the events that are happening around the world, and in there you can also submit an event, and that's added to the list.
+
+So that's the place I'm gonna be looking for. You see how I dropped the number 200? Let's connect after October and see how close I was to that prediction... Because a lot of this, it's like "Well, Daniel, shouldn't you know exactly what the results of this are gonna be? Shouldn't this be a data-driven program?" Well, yes, but there's also aspects of this that are really hard to predict.
+
+We're gonna be giving out 50,000 shirts this year, and I'm predicting 200 events around the world. I don't know if that's what's gonna actually happen, so I'm gonna be interested to connect with you guys and see how close we were.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We can do a little minisode in November, Jerod, and just do a Hacktoberfest catch-up of...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It'd be fun, yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...like a little break, or something like that, and do that... That would be cool. I love making predictions, 1) to motivate, but then 2) to just try to predict the future and see how close we were... And as you know, Jerod, we're sometimes close, but Daniel, I have a feeling you might be a little closer -- I also said 50,000; that'd be a great number, and 200 events around that time around the world would be great, too.
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** Yeah. And a big driver of all of this is the last of the five ways into Hacktoberfest, and that's the businesses.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, tell us about that piece there. We're really curious, because you mentioned that had it not been for this, you had defined potentially a change of model if you didn't have other businesses. So do you mean at this level, or do you mean businesses in general being involved?
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** Yeah, it's interesting... You just made me think that both are true, because I think the more businesses we can get involved in Hacktoberfest, the more Hacktoberfest could thrive... Which is a bit counter-intuitive, because it seems like it's just a community-driven program, developers around the world celebrating open source. Well, who is in these businesses? Who is building these software and hardware companies? It is developers, and that's why it's been really great to see companies like SendGrid, or for instance you may have heard of this company that's participating this year, Microsoft, participating in Hacktoberfest... Which is helping us drive more involvement, because they have their communities that they're bringing into the fold. The reason for doing it is a really great reason - they want more contributions to open source, and that's why we do the whole thing. So everyone's missions are aligned here. We're on the same page, and that's what makes it really exciting.
+
+SendGrid - I mentioned them earlier - their statistics... They got 43 pull requests in October 2016, and they got 1,249 in 2017. That's a 2,800% increase. I wanted to quote them and share what they said... They said "It's important to emphasize how completely taken by surprise we all were by this activity. We added some issues, we sized them and tagged them appropriately, and then people just kept completing them. Sometimes the same issue at the same time, and often in ways we couldn't predict, but that were awesome."
+
+So that's where I sort of push for this business side of things, because I really think that any business who has an open source component can benefit from this.
+
+**Break:** \[43:25\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Daniel, we were talking about businesses getting involved, and there's different angles here. You've got SendGrid, which you can quote, obviously; lots of cool stuff happening there. I'm sure you have a close relationship because of this. Lots of small businesses getting involved that are seeing benefits from the impact of Hacktoberfest... And just the sheer inertia of what a T-shirt can do to a developer's motivation... What else have you got? I know you've got Microsoft you mentioned... They threw in their hat -- I'm not sure what the involvement is. Can you walk us through more of the business side of things? Either SendGrid or Microsoft, and what's happening there.
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** The model - I can't say that SendGrid were the first to come up with the model of "Hey, participate in Hacktoberfest and we're gonna have our own Hacktoberfest community (sort of) structure, SendGrid-specific, the repos and the issues there", because a lot of open source projects have done that, and projects that have participated, Exercism, and Rust, and Laravel, and OpenShift by Red Hat, and Jenkins, and Ember... I mean, a lot of those communities were using this model of "Hey, within our contained community we're gonna give back a sticker, some swag, if you participate within this larger Hacktoberfest program." SendGrid is just one of the businesses that jumped on board and has had success, and they're continuing to do that... And that's why I'm sort of pushing, in a way, I'm sort of sharing that story, because I'd love to see other businesses get involved and reach out. It really is a win/win for everyone...
+
+I'm overselling it now, but clearly the overselling, whatever it is, there's -- you know, Microsoft is participating this year with that same model. Microsoft is encouraging open source contributors to participate in their repos, and they're gonna give a shirt... And I think it's Ashley McNamara that's gonna design the shirt. How awesome would that be? I think that's what they're doing.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow.
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** Clearly, the pitching is working, or the program itself is pitching the whole thing for me, really... Yeah, so that's the business piece. I'm not gonna get into the other side of it too much, but I'm just surprised that more companies aren't using Hacktoberfest internally, as a tool to encourage their engineers to have more time to hack on open source. I think maybe that's like the next frontier...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Let me sell it with you too, because what I like about this SendGrid example is that they were surprised... And I think what you will find as we collectively -- and I'm gonna use the words of a recent podcast we were on with Donald Fischer of Tidelift... He said, "We as humanity have decided to build our future on technology, and that technology is largely built on open source." That's the truth, so that means that what we're seeing here applies to a wide majority of businesses - everything from my local grocer, H-E-B, here in Houston, Texas, ginormous, whatever, here in Texas, just like Texas is... They are a technology business; every business is involved in technology, and parts of their businesses are open source - SDKs, easy ways, whatever... But the cool thing about SendGrid is that they were surprised by, and then they found ways to benefit from it, to encourage more, but then also to just widen their community. They use this as marketing, in a lot of ways, successfully...
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** Exactly.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And I think this is just an open door. If your business is at all influenced by open source, this is an opportunity to just, you know, get in the DigitalOcean shadow and do some of this stuff with Hacktoberfest. It's just a loss if you don't plan for this. That's what I would think. And you know, we're gonna do some stuff this year, too. We're still working on some fun ways to do some stuff, but this podcast is just one way that we're gonna get involved, and throw our hat into the ring and do some fun stuff.
+
+\[49:09\] So I'm gonna sell it with you - I think if you're a business that relies on open sources, or built in technology, get involved. Find a way. Is there any previews that you're aware of? I know Ashley is designing the T-shirt for Microsoft... Have you seen it? Do you care to know about it as organizers of this? Is this something that you're like "Let's see the T-shirt. What's it look like?" Do you get involved on those levels? Like, this is an unofficial involvement; it's not like they said "Hey, DigitalOcean, can we participate? They just did it."
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** We have brand guidelines on the Hacktoberfest site that we encourage communities to use. They've actually been really helpful for community organizers who don't want to take the time to create yet another event poster... So we've done the work for you, community organizers. Just find the event kit, and in there you'll find the community guidelines, which will allow you to leverage the Hacktoberfest branding for your communities and projects.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So if you do get involved, you do have to tie in the collective Hacktoberfest branding somehow.
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** Yes.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. I won't get involved then. \[laughter\] I'm just kidding, that's cool. I wasn't thinking that, but that's actually a good thing on your part too, because 1) you're just making sure that where it began, that Hacktoberfest the brand is there, not so much DigitalOcean the brand... I'm assuming that's the case, at least.
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** Yeah, the focus is to continue to bring it back to have a sort of unified front, so that we're all working together on this, so that Hacktoberfest continues to grow. That's really the reason for this - we want folks when they're sharing Hacktoberfest to their friends, they're all talking about the same Hacktoberfest. For us, that's really important on a branding aspect as well.
+
+DigitalOcean really cares about branding; it's something that's baked into the simplicity of our mission. We care a lot of our branding, we care a lot about design, and part of the creating a simple cloud experience for developers is creating a visually simple experience, that's enjoyable as well. So that's one of the things that DigitalOcean has carried over into Hacktoberfest and how we execute the program.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** For those curious, inside this kit is vector files, PDFs for the guidelines, the computer itself, which is the core visual piece, the word Hacktoberfest... So you'll have not only PNG, but also vector-level versions, so if you really wanna take it far and do like a gigantic poster, you can. You've got the full working files, not just web-friendly. It's print-friendly too, which is cool.
+
+Let's talk about - since we're on this kick of branding - how important it is to be visually appealing... Maybe even T-shirt quality. I know Jerod is, because he loves out T-shirts, but we personally, as Changelog, we print our T-shirts on American Apparel Tri-blend T-shirts. We do Tri-Black, they're super comfortable, super comfy, and my relatives who support me in my business and our business and what we do - they would wear it anyways, but because it's super comfy, they're like "Please give me a T-shirt, and one for my friends too", because they're super comfortable... So tell me more about the T-shirts themselves and maybe how important it is to be visually appealing and be on-brand, or just the branding nature of this.
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** Yeah, I talked about the branding side a little bit, and the importance to have a consistent design experience... And as you can see, the Hacktoberfest is something brand new, crafted in our design lab year after year; it's something that everyone internally gets really excited about when the new designs come out. I know my co-pilot and partner in this program for many years now, Lee Riley at GitHub - the excitement also builds even more when I share the designs with the GitHub team. So that's the design side of it.
+
+\[53:10\] As you said, the feel of the shirt - that's super important too, I agree with you. I think that a shirt that feels good is gonna have more mileage than one that's cheap. With Hacktoberfest, we wanna create the first kind of experience.
+
+We actually are using -- are you guys familiar with District tees?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** This year it's something new - we're doing a District VIT, which I think you guys are really gonna enjoy... And we actually had a bunch of samples, and we talked to different companies this year to source the different materials, and this is the one that we're feeling really good about. We've put in the first order, so there's no turning back now.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** How many samples did you get and who wore them?
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** The design team?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** Myself, and how many samples - eight.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Nice. Okay, because I've made mistakes before...  I'd said something more like I need to try that T-shirt on, in like all the sizes too, because gosh, it's terrible when you get a 2X that's not a 2X, or a small that's not a small... And it's like, "Oh, that's a bummer." It feels good, but it doesn't fit.
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** Yeah, that's a constant challenge. The logistics part of Hacktoberfest is really a thankless -- and I'll take this opportunity to thank everyone who's involved in actually getting the shirts to all the community members around the world. It's something that starts in October, we start shipping them out within October, so that folks can celebrate and feel good about completing the challenge in the month that it happens... But at the same time, you see shirts arriving in January, because they're going all over the world.
+
+It takes a lot of effort and a lot of time, and I appreciate all the patience that the community has with the shirts, and I'm proud of the logistical challenge that we've taken on... We're making improvements there too, because we saw a lot of shirts not make it last year to certain countries, like India, for instance, and we're making improvements in that regard, so that we lower the percentage of unfulfilled orders... Because we really care about making this work, and everyone who earns a T-shirt, for them to get one in a timely way.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, something like doing the work, getting a T-shirt, and then not getting it, you're like "Oh, man...!" But at the same time, you have to realize, your business isn't shipping T-shirts. Your business is a simple cloud, and this is something that it seems from this call was a happy accident, to some degree. You did it with intention, but the success of it may have been the happy accident part, and you're not gonna quit, because hey, look at the great things it's doing, and you're pulling in partners and finding different reasons, but... It's a bummer whenever you're in a place in the world where it's harder to send things without fail... I agree, it's tough, and you wanna make sure they get their shirts. Even the telling you.. man if you did October, and you got to November, and you tallied it up and then you didn't get their shirt until March or May of the following year - they're not gonna do it next year, or maybe less likely, because like "Hey, I want my T-shirt at least within a relevant timeframe." How has that changed over the years? Have you always been somewhat in a range of near November(ish) of the following month or so, in terms of shipping?
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** The answer is no, initially... We first started shipping things out at the end of October. We would wait for the program to end, we'd tally up all the results, and then we'd start shipping in November... So there you go, that certainly wasn't desirable in terms of like the quick turnaround. But we changed that, and last year we started shipping out as early as the first week of October. So that was an improvement.
+
+\[57:04\] But as I said, the challenge last year was a lot of shirts, specifically in a few countries, just have a really hard time getting through customs, and they just don't make it... So we're using different tactics, like dropshipment this year, and paying a little bit extra for different fulfillment services, so that the percentage of shirts that don't make it actually decreases. We really care about this... So I'd say that's one of the behind-the-scenes changes that we've made this year.
+
+And once again, repeating the important changes that we've made this year, it's five pull requests and 50k shirts. I mean... Yeah. Talking to you guys is really making me feel like some community support here... \[laughter\] Because it's huge, guys. It's really--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, I was just wondering how big can it possibly get... Because I'm a couple of years down the road on you now, thinking "Well, in 2020 how many shirts are they gonna be shipping out?" Do the rules necessarily have to change because there's just -- there's a point that this scale becomes a bit ridiculous, right? Or do we just keep on scaling...?
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** No, I agree with you. I wouldn't say that the scale is ridiculous, it's more about the focus - it might get lost, and that's concerning for me... And that's why I think it's important to have the conversation with the community, and have you guys involved in that. That would be really useful, so that we can all come together and just hear out the community on what the different ideas are, because I think there's a lot of great suggestions out there for building on what we have built together so far.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. And no suggestion we come up here would be the best, but you know I would just say like find a way to do a tiered system you know I mean.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, I love how the businesses involved can do their own shirts...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, that's nice.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I mean, I wouldn't rely upon that as like the only way that it works, but it seems like that could maybe offset... So it's like, you know, if you do all your PRs to Microsoft repos, then you get a Microsoft shirt. Maybe you don't need the other Hacktoberfest shirt again. As Adam said, our ideas, especially off the top of our head, probably aren't the best ideas... So we're happy to be involved in this conversation as it advances. Undoubtedly, there are lots of ways that you could cut this, and some are better than other.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. At the time, we're also very sympathetic to the shoes you're in and the choice you'll have to make.
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** Yeah, thanks guys. And based on those suggestions you gave, I don't think I'll be asking you guys. \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Live on the air, thank you. Well, the cool thing is that you know that we knew that this was an important thing; for one, it's kept going. We've been tracking it, and as Jerod mentioned, he'd gotten an accidental T-shirt, even though it was on purpose, or he earned it; he didn't expect it...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's right.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...to show how easy it is to get acclimated with open source, get acclimated with Git, GitHub, pull requests, core things that if you wanna be a contributor to open source, there are necessary mechanisms to be familiar with... And we're huge advocates of that; that's what we wanna be. The reason why we have no explicit tag on our podcasts is because we wanna be what we say "future hacker-friendly." If you are driving with your children in your car, or you're a young adult or a young adolescent getting into software, our show is one of the things you use as a lens to look at the world and say "This is how software development is happening, this is where things are going" - we wanna be welcoming to that.
+
+We wanna make sure we support you all in this mission, and that's why we wanted to get on the phone with you and talk through this story, figure out where it came from, what the motivations were behind it, who's involved, what the successes are, and more importantly, the impact and how you can get involved. I think that to me is super important.
+
+\[01:00:59.27\] And like you'd said, lost in the mission -- it's not about the T-shirts; that's the nice-to-have, that's sort of the carrot out there. The important thing is open source, understanding it, what's involved in it, the importance it places in our world, the importance that when you pull out your phone, whether it's an Android or an iPhone, it's full of open source... And there's places to get involved, and we wanna be able to give people the necessary on-ramps to that, and more importantly, support the maintainers and those who are already in the fight... Give them the necessary things to be invited, to be welcomed, to be appreciated. That's, I think, the thing I would wanna take away from this; that's what this is - it's a beacon of saying "Hey, you're welcome here, whoever you are. By the way, we'll give you a T-shirt."
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** Thank you so much for supporting it. That was amazing. I couldn't have said it better myself.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I came up with a new idea... See, now you've challenged me.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Nice.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So the rule change that I would suggest next is if you can get a patch committed to the Linux Kernel during October, then you get a T-shirt. \[laughter\] That would fix your scaling problem, wouldn't it?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That would fix it. It would actually limit it quite a bit. Yes, that's a good one, Jerod.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's right. Don't discount me, Daniel; I've got ideas over here, so let's keep talking...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** He said he's not coming to us for the ideas, Jerod. We've already shot ourselves in the foot.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I'm offended. \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We're the motivators, not the idea makers.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I'm offended.
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** You guys are for sure, and you guys have really been helping carry Hacktoberfest forward with this conversation even more so, so I really appreciate that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Cool. Well, anything in closing, anything happening that we may not have covered? Anything super-secret, any stats, anything else that just was on the table and we didn't get in our list?
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** Hacktoberfest - a month-long celebration of open source. Year five is coming soon. That's the only thing I would say. I think we've covered everything. Just get ready, and hack away.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What's the URL? You never said the URL on this call yet. Is it Hactoberfest.DigitalOcean.com? Or is it do.co/hacktoberfest and then add the year?
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** Hacktoberfest.DigitalOcean.com.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. Well, you heard it here. Don't pull over, just earmark that. We do put that in the show notes, so don't worry about that; if you're a listener, you know that. Go back to the show notes, we'll put the URL in there, and there you go.
+
+Daniel, thank you so much for your time, thank you for you and the rest of the team. Everyone involved in this, if your name wasn't mentioned here and you work at DigitalOcean or at GitHub, or any of the collaborating companies that work so hard to make this happen, huge thank you from us and the community, and just keep doing it; we'll support you how we can. And thank you for the time.
+
+**Daniel Zaltsman:** Thank you, guys.
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+**Jerod Santo:** Alright, we're quite excited for this conversation. Brett, this one is not really an answer to episode \#300 - you may not know, we had Zed Shaw on the show; as always, Zed, a controversial person... He had things to say. Probably the most feedback we've had all year has been on that episode. Some people in the affirmative, some on the negatory... And we had a very well thought out and very nice email from Benjamin Bertrand about that show; we kind of went back and forth with him.
+
+Benjamin - well, he disagreed with some things that Zed had to say, and as always, from our perspective, especially because we're trying to cover so much, like, to cover the open source community and hop in and out of different areas of that community, we don't always have full background knowledge. We can't really rebut things, so we have to kind of take things at face value, and specifically in Python, Adam, I don't know -- actually, I do know about you; we aren't very active in the Python community, or at least haven't been, historically... So we kind of have a bit of an outsider's view on things that go on there.
+
+\[04:14\] Benjamin took issue with a few things that Zed said, and if you all are interested, definitely go back and listen to that; it's definitely an interesting conversation. Benjamin said "Hey, let's get somebody from Python on the show." And we did have a Python show recently, but not specifically talking about sustainability and open source participation, and stuff like this... So he pointed us towards Brett.
+
+Brett, we looked at your blog post, and your lightning talk, and thought, "Okay, this is great." So that's the back-story for how this conversation came together... So I guess we'll just say, Benjamin, thanks so much for your feedback and for your input, and we hope that you enjoy this conversation.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** No pressure.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, we hope you enjoy it - we hope Brett doesn't disappoint. \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Brett, don't disappoint.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** I'm gonna do my best.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Good.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So Brett, let's take right off and say that you recently gave a keynote at PyCon, and you have an accompanying blog post which we will link up in the show notes for everybody who wants to read along... All about setting expectations for open source participation, which is a deep, deep conversation; it's about a half an hour keynote, so we don't pretend to cover everything in it, but we're gonna talk about it... And I think it's probably best, at least from my perspective, to note that back in 2016 you had a hiatus from open source participation, because of burnout. You took some time off on purpose, so that you wouldn't burn out, and that was a little bit of the impetus for this talk... But even before that, let's talk about what all you do in open source, and how long you've been involved, because that helps us understand why burnout might become a thing for you.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Yeah, so I am lucky enough to actually get to do open source both personally and professionally. For my day job, I am the dev lead for the Python extension for Visual Studio Code at Microsoft. That's what I would call corporate open source. Basically, there is a company paying my salary and my teammates' salaries to make sure that this open source project is sustained and gets to continue going forward.
+
+On top of that, for my personal life, I am a core developer for Python. I got my commit rights in April of 2003, so it's been over 15 years now... And that's what I would call community open source, because basically if all the volunteers quit, there would more or less not be a Python development team... Because there's no real sustained corporate backing of the project.
+
+That's basically my open source background. After that, it's just the usual - I submit patches and issues just like anybody else. I'm a little prolific with fixing typos in docs sometimes, so I think I've technically got a merge into over 90 projects at this point. I've also been exposed to a lot of various development processes, but that's more or less my open source bona fides.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very cool. Let's talk about you and open source then, because obviously you have the professional side now, which we always call "living the dream", for different definitions of the dream... People who get to work on open source as their day job is definitely a bit of a new thing, and very cool when it happens, although not always all that it cracked up to be; that being said, what is it about open source that drew you in? Why do you do it? I know some of this goes into the reasons for open source, and some of these thoughts that you have around participating in open source... But I think for everybody it goes back to the why, and I think a lot of the why's are different.
+
+So what brought you to open source and why do you participate, on the community side, not on the professional side?
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Yeah, there's a slight story behind that. Back when I was in undergrad I wrote a program for myself to measure the amount of time I did data entry for my father's business. I was on Windows at the time, and there wasn't a function called Time.Strptime, which I needed to parse dates to get back the time tuple representation. I figured out a way to do it, and I gave it to what's called the Python Cookbook, because it just seemed like something other people; I was just trying to be helpful.
+
+\[08:18\] Subsequently, I had to figure out how to make it work, because -- well, I didn't really have to... Basically, it bothered me that you had to input all the locale information. I figured out how to do it over the subsequent months, and actually, as a graduation gift for my undergrad, the week following I solved it and wrote it all out, and I asked Alex Martelli, the editor of the Python Cookbook, which had published my original recipe, "How do I get this into Python? I think it might help others." He said, "Well, email this mailing list, pythondev, and they'll explain it." I did, and they were very helpful, and just walked me through it on how to get a patch sent in to the mailing list, to get that all merged in, and I did.
+
+This happened to coincide with a year off I was taking between my undergrad and going to grad school, because I have a bachelor's in philosophy, but I wanted to go to grad school in computer science... So I was taking more or less a gap year to build a programming portfolio to prove to grad programs that "Hey, I do know how to program, regardless of what my degree is in." I realized that open source provided that potential opportunity by being able to say "Look, I've contributed to these projects."
+
+I happened to get involved with Python early - it was actually in June of 2002 - and I quickly really latched onto the group and how they function, the people and all that... And I ended up basically spending a good chunk of that year off just participating more and more. I started to write the Python Dev Summaries, which were a bi-weekly/semi-monthly summary of what was going on on the development list, because obviously, email volume, and a lot of people couldn't keep up. That led to me noticing the little issues that needed to be fixed, so I was able to then jump in, learn what was going on - because I had the time - submit patches, get those merged... And I just kept doing it to the point where I said, "Hey, can fix this. I just need someone to merge it", and then Guido just went "Oh... Well, can't you just merge it yourself?" I was like, "No, I don't have commit rights." He was like, "Oh, okay. Someone will give them to you... You just merge them yourself." And magically, I just had commit rights.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Nice,
+
+**Brett Cannon:** So for me it was mostly learning, really, in the end... It was just learning how to code, and get that exposure and all that, and I just grew into more or less sustaining a connection in the community in Python, and my fellow teammates on the dev team, and just the community all up, and just wanting to be around those people.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And you've been involved ever since?
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Yeah... Honestly, the only breaks I've taken were -- really there were no breaks, except for potential vacations, and even then, it's hard not to check your phone... Until I did my volunteer detox, as you alluded to, Jerod, back in 2016.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Did you get into open source to be rich?
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Hah! No.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. I just wanted to check that box real quick, to say no.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** No, no... I got into open source basically, as I said, just because it was a learning experience, and I really liked the people, and it continued to be just about the people for me... So it was definitely never about the money. I honestly never really expected to get any work because of it.
+
+When I got involved with Python and I would tell people, "Oh yeah, this is what I do in my spare time", it was back when they would ask "Is that the language where whitespace matters?"\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** So I pre-date Python's -- I got involved way before Python's popularity reached its current level... So it was never about any job prospects, or money, or anything. It was always just enjoyment.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[11:57\] Yeah. And it continues to swell, and become -- I mean, Python is so popular, I'm sure you know better than I do... But every time I see the stats, like the Stack Overflow survey, or these other surveys and analyses, the popularity of Python, even today, is just exploding at this point, right?
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Yeah... Honestly, it's still a bit mind-boggling. I remember the days back when I looked at Perl CPAN in longingness for wanting that level of library and ecosystem support, and now everyone looks at Python as that place that has all those libraries and ecosystem support. Basically, whenever people ask how popular is Python, I say "I don't know of any language popularity list anymore that doesn't list Python somewhere in the top five", if not potentially number three, depending on how they classify, like, C or C++.
+
+I'm still constantly astounded at just how popular the language is and how much it continues to grow. It really hockey-sticked in about 2005, and it continued to just have astounding growth.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Recent growth - I always attribute it to a lot of the machine learning tools... What would you -- maybe you would have more insight on that, but what would you attribute the growth back in '05? I know Google adopted Python at a certain point and put a lot into it. I think that probably -- I remember when I was in college, the question "Which language would you learn, and why?" back then... This was around '04-'05, and people would say "Python, because Google uses Python." I remember that was a thing that people said to me. So that was my thought, like, maybe Google, but what do you think happened in '05 - or maybe it was just well-known and I don't know - that made it explode back then?
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Just to quickly touch on that Google tie-in - actually, the very first code parts of Google way back in the late '90s were actually all written in Python... So Google itself started off as a Python script, ironically.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay. That's funny.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** So that's kind of how Python ended up inside of Google and continues to be one of their officially-supported languages. I honestly don't know exactly what led to that growth... If I had to wager a guess, it was partially certain large companies such as Facebook being respected for their technical jobs, and their decisions having weight for people who needed some way to make a decision, and going like "Alright, well if Google chose it, then that breaks the tie between Python and whatever language..."
+
+I think the other thing is Python was able to get a really good web framework through Django at just the right time... So right around when Rails came out, I think Django went public about maybe a year after. So right when the whole web framework explosion happened, Python very quickly got positioned with a good framework, and it has continued to have good web frameworks through Django, and Flask, and Bottle, and other ones... And it has allowed it to be in the right place at the right time in terms of that kind of growth.
+
+Now, I would like to think it's also just sustained because it's a well-designed, good language, but obviously I'm extremely biased and the wrong person to ask on that one... But I would hope it's just the tie of that, and then after that, honestly, momentum just does a great job of carrying it forward... Because after that, if you look at the ecosystem, we're well over 100,000 packages on PyPI package index. It's very easy to very quickly get drawn in as well based on support of various wrapping libraries. The data science aspect, as you mentioned, recently etc. etc.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. Unfortunately, if you look back at programming language history, it's rare - and I can't think of one... Like you said, the whole meritocracy ideal that we all strive towards, right? You hope that pure language design and fundamentals - the cream raises to the top, kind of idea... And you find out when you look back at historical programming languages and why they have proliferation, it's almost always circumstances -- I mean, it's a mix, but there's always some sort of circumstance... Whether it's proprietary, or happenstance, or a specific framework or tool that brings them in and out of those rises... So it's always interesting to think why a thing happens, and therefore can we reproduce it.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** \[16:24\] I totally think luck plays into all of it, right?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, exactly.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** It's just right place, right time. I know my personal life - a lot of the good stuff that's happened to me is, once again, just luck, and being in the right place at the right time... And I very much think that's true for Python.
+
+It was around in the '90s, people knew about it, but it didn't really -- it was this kind of thing that people knew about, but it hadn't really taken off... I think just literally people start to latch on -- we had the right frameworks and libraries at the right moments in history for various things to catch on.
+
+It's definitely in handy that it's a general purpose language, so it's not niche in any way, and it's accessible enough for everyone that it can easily be picked up in any corners of the programming world for their needs... And obviously, the teachability definitely helps.
+
+Honestly, we just happened to have the right people find it, that they liked it, to develop the right bits that other people then latched onto, and then it just has a major networking effect, and I think that's led to us being able to sustain this growth as we have.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Although one component to luck that you can't discount here is when - at least depending upon your definition of luck - preparation meets opportunity equals luck.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So you have to have some preparation there. Something just happens -- as you said, the network effect; so there's previous work done in and around the Python community, whether it's the language itself, or the libraries, or maturity, or availability, that prepared it for the luck portion.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Yeah. The way I always view -- when people say "Oh, you've been so successful", usually it's literally the luck of being at the right place, equipped with the right tools, and the willingness to take the right chance. I think we happened to have all that at all the right points.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Let's get back to you for a second... We mentioned the time off in 2016, but let's do a hypothetical for today; so today you have a job where you get to work on Python and be involved in Python, but let's hypothetically say that there was no Microsoft job, or there was no professional reason for you to stay involved. You mentioned you got into it because you were learning, and you were kind of building up a portfolio, but you stayed for the people.
+
+Then you have this break, you have a talk all about people, really, so you're trying to get out there and help us do better as open source people, not necessarily with regards to the code... Would you still be standing here today, would you still be involved on the personal community side, or do you think you would have left if it hadn't been for the professional side?
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Oh, no, I definitely would've. My previous, during grad school and all that - I did use some open source in my Ph.D., but it wasn't really too heavy. My time at Google wasn't open source-driven at all... So most of my time actually has not been professionally in any way, shape or form tied to open source. I should even mention that my dev lead position is less than a year old. I think it's a year maybe this week.
+
+So for most of my professional life, it has not been driven by open source... I honestly would still do it regardless anyway, and I know this because going to PyCon U.S., and select other conferences are highlights of my year, because I get to see friends, and I really get to call people in the community actual friends, who I get to see once a year, very intensely, for a couple days - or up to a week, if it's PyCon U.S. - and really get to hang out and see them, catch up, see how they're doing, and just hang out and have fun with my friends.
+
+\[19:56\] So I would still be doing this regardless, just to be able to go see those friends of mine that I only get to see because I'm lucky enough to have made friends internationally, across this globe, in all corners, and the only way we get together is because we're able to coordinate around this conference, and all come together and attend that. So I would definitely still be involved, regardless of whether my employer had me do open source or not.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So despite all the hardships and all the people problems and the drama, and all the stuff that you have to do with the emails, the hurt feelings that we'll get into some of those details, that your friends and the people involved, even more so than the code or the projects have been the reason why you've stuck around and you would continue to stick around, despite whether or not there were financial ties.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Yeah, completely. Totally. And honestly - I'm sure we'll get into this - the whole reason I've put in the effort into doing the talk, and the blog post, hopefully pushing the way for people to just be able to interact better in open source, is specifically because I care so much about the people involved in it... Because I don't wanna give it up. I wanna make sure that I feel like I want to keep coming back, so I'm doing the best I can to try to make sure that it continues for me personally, and for others as well, so they also are going to have the same benefits I've received.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, having the history you have too assumes you have some wisdom, right? And when you set the expectations, as your title says for the talk, as well as the blog post - when you set expectations, it comes usually from a position of wisdom.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You have a lot to offer.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** I like to think so. There's not a lot of open source projects that have existed for 29 years. Guido started Python in December 1989, released it in February of 1991, which actually predates the public release of Linux by a couple months, because that came out in August of 1991.
+
+The project itself has a very unique history in terms of having just existed for that long, and then I also ended up in this odd position where -- I remember for the longest time I was the youngest member of the team, and has the smallest amount of tenure, and over time I've just ended up becoming one of the people with the longest tenure; not THE longest... Barry Warsaw for instance is still active, and he's been active on the project since 1993 or 1994... But yeah, I've been lucky enough to have found motivation and reason and enjoyment enough to -- yeah, I've stuck around for 15 odd years at this point, with this one project, and open source all up... So I'd like to think that I'm not totally making things up on the fly, and just totally pontificating from a position of no knowledge on all this.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Well, I think you're safe in that regard. Tell us the story of back in 2016; we've referenced it a few times - you did a detox, you were approaching burnout... Tell us exactly what happened, what led up to that, why you did it, did it help... Just unpack that for us.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Basically, up until 2016 I had never really taken any form of a break from volunteering on Python. I had been doing open source from April 2003 till 2016, more or less with no real stop. I never took more than maybe a week, and even then, with the advent of smartphones and all that, you'd stay very connected, and so much open source is done through email... It's very easy to not ignore it and stay connected even when you're on vacation.
+
+In 2016 I had a couple rough interactions with some people. Basically, people just flat out had been rude to me, and in ways that I thought were incorrect for the rudeness... I mean, honestly, I'd say rudeness is just never reasonable, period, but the motivations behind the rudeness I thought were incorrect. It happened about every other week for three months straight, and... I don't think there's any scientific backing of this, but I've heard the phrase it takes ten acts of kindness to undo one negative kindness, and unfortunately, in open source there are plenty of people who are willing to say how you did something wrong, but people don't necessarily say when you do something right. It's very much a push versus pull; people are very much willing to push negativity towards you by saying you did something wrong, but it's almost a pull action having to ask people to compliment you, because otherwise it's proactive versus reactive. People are very proactive about seeing what's not working, versus people having to very consciously be reactive to the fact that "Oh, hey, I've been using this thing all day and not had a single problem. I should thank someone for that."
+
+\[24:19\] So having multiple negative incidents happen consecutively, as close as they did over the three months in 2016 (that summer), my wife was noticing... She was like, "What's wrong?", because I'd be walking down the street, or just waiting for the bus, and get a nasty email or something - my face would just shift; she'd notice the change in my attitude and she'd be like "What's going on?" It's like, "I got a really bad email." She'd be like "You just need to stop checking... Why do you still do this?"
+
+She has luckily come to PyCon with me enough times that friends of mine have become friends of hers... If I go to PyCon without my wife, usually the second question I get after "Hello, Brett" is "Where is Andrea?" So she has subsequently come to understand it, but she very much always has pushed me to moderate my engagement level to make sure that this didn't happen. And basically, at that point, I had never really worried about my moderation.
+
+After three months, I just went like "You know what, I'm just starting to not wanna check my personal email. I don't wanna check my open source email. I honestly am dreading it", because I was waiting for something to happen. And when I realized that, it was like "Alright, this is what burnout is. This is what causes people to just rage-quit a project and stop participation." And I didn't want that to happen. As I said, I have friends, I enjoy my engagement, and I didn't want to just write it off. So I thought "Okay, what do I need to do here?"
+
+I basically decided to take the month of October in 2016 off from volunteering. Now, I was still willing to do paid time, and very much moderate where I did things, such that I could control potential areas where I knew there was potential contention. Certain mailing lists typically can get a little heated in discussion, so I ignored that almost entirely, for instance. I would still check issues, but if anyone was in any way cranky, I just ignored it and just walked away. I was like, "No, I don't need to engage. I'm just gonna keep myself safe from being too upset."
+
+What I ended up doing was I spent the entire month more or less just reflecting on "How did I end up in this position? How did I end up in a place where this project and this community that I basically love was pushing me towards wanting to walk away from it?" I came to the realization that people who were being rude were typically coming from a place where they (I think) had a misunderstanding of what open source is and how it's maintained and how it functions, and what's required to make it function...
+
+Because most people, when you point out that they've been rude, they go "Oh, I'm sorry. I really didn't mean it" or "I'm just having a bad day" or whatever. Very rarely is it systemic and actually a core part of their personality... And I just started to think about "What needs to be said to the people and to the general open source community - and obviously Python in particular, for my case - to help people understand how open source truly functions and how people need to adjust their expectations, attitudes and views such that they don't really ever feel like being rude by accident, more or less, and how do they make sure that they just come from a perspective of "Oh, it's all okay" and not trigger themselves to that potential rudeness level, and just have everyone work together better?" And that's basically what happened.
+
+\[27:43\] Now I do what I call "volunteer detox" once a year, for a month, to reflect, see where things are, to make sure I recharge, give myself a chance to more or less recuperate if any negativity has built up over the year... I also try not to read emails one day every weekend, to make sure I don't have a trigger. So I enjoy at least one day a week without any potential outside negativity that I might have to deal with.
+
+And then my wife tries to also make sure I stick to those said plans, so that I don't cheat and try to sneak an email checking on a Sunday, or something.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What's key there is two words: moderation and expectation. You were wise enough to recognize that you needed to exercise moderation, which I think there's a lot of people who just continue - no fault of their own - just going through, trudging through, without self-moderating or realizing that you can't eat Snickers only and live. You've gotta have real sustenance.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, maybe Snickers, though... \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The commercial would lead you to believe that you can satisfy yourself on Snickers...
+
+**Brett Cannon:** I'm lactose-intolerant, so that ain't gonna work for me... I've gotta find something else.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, okay...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And then the other part is the expectation - there is so much clarity in communication with yourself and other individuals or a community when the expectations are clear. I command you on the self-monitoring, but I'll give you a pat on the back - those are two key components of wisdom, right? Not everybody gets that right away. It's not a given behavior, it's a learned behavior.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Yeah, and unfortunately/fortunately for me, there were multiple cases of burnout in the Python community that I noticed, in 2016. And having seen that kind of cascade all at once, it put it in the forefront of my mind as like "Why is this happening?" And then when I started to notice it happened to myself, I was lucky enough to be able to identify that and go like "Okay, I see where I'm heading here, and that's not where I wanna go. What do I need to do to make this work?" and I realized I just need to take a time-out and more or less meditate on what's going on and what could I do for myself, and potentially for the community, to help prevent this from happening to anyone else going forward.
+
+So, once again, somewhat luck, that this happened when this was happening to other people, so that I was able to see it externally, from others, and then be able to self-reflect and pick up on that fact, and then (thank goodness) be self-aware enough to realize I needed to stop and think about it.
+
+**Break:** \[30:22\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Brett, one of the things that you said that I'd like you to unpack for us, and maybe you can tell us how exactly you got to this goal, is that the overall goal of open source is to attract and retain people to help maintain an open source project, while enjoying the experience. I think the "while enjoying the experience" there is key. I don't think you tacked that on by accident there at the end... This is something that you say; and then you go on to say that we're failing this goal, in certain ways.
+
+First, tell us about the goal - is this something you came up with? Is it something the Python community agrees on, or is this Brett's take? What's with this goal, and then following up to that, why are we as a community failing it?
+
+**Brett Cannon:** It is definitely Brett's take, although people have typically told me they agree with it. Coming from a volunteer-run open source project and having been exposed to it over 15 years, I realize that there's always gonna be somewhat a core set of people who are there to pass along folk knowledge and such, and who might be there continuously, but people come and go.
+
+There are many people who were involved in Python heavily when I started and whose names I still very vividly remember who are no longer active. Then there are obviously new people who have come in and become highly active, but have only been around for like 3-5 year, or even one. And then there's all those people who just kind of float in and out and are constantly still active, but not consistent. But the key thing is there's a flow of people, and if you don't make sure you have a mechanism in place to bring people in, the outflow of people will be at a rate higher than the inflow, and you'll basically end up with no one around to help sustain the project. And if you can't sustain the project, then what are we all kind of rallying around? At that point, we are gonna be a community of nothing.
+
+You can have a community around a dog breed, but you've still gotta have that dog breed, for instance, to actually have that initial connection to make these friendships that you have with these people in that community. And the same with Python - if Python doesn't exist, we're not gonna have a PyCon U.S. where we're all gonna get together and hang out, right? So we have to do something to make sure we have our annual excuse to go hang out, to view it one way.
+
+It's very much about how do you make sure the people who are there want to stick around, because you don't want them burning out and falling off the face of the planet, or at least in terms of the project... Because the longer someone's there, the more knowledge they have, the greater abilities they have to help... But you also need new people, because people will leave; hopefully not burn out, but just...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Churn.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Churn, dedication, personal time. People have kids. My contribution rate has dropped off because I'm no longer a student. I got married. Things happen. People have unfortunately passed away. It just happens, it's just life. So you need a way to have new people come in to help keep the level on numbers of people contributing to a sustainable level for your project.
+
+Then the fun bit is just a very key aspect of when you are volunteering to keep this running, you're not gonna do it if it's not fun, right? Why am I going to spend what small amount of time I have on this planet being a live, breathing human being, doing something that sucks? If it's not enjoyable, I'm not gonna do it. It's very weird to put it in that perspective, but if you stop and think about it - I have an end date. I don't know what it is, but it's there. So every moment I spend doing something, it's there and it's gone, and I'm never getting it back.
+
+\[35:59\] So if working on Python, for instance, ever became a total trial and tribulation and just something that was not fun, I wouldn't do it, because I've got better things to do with my amount of time I have left on this planet, and there are plenty of other things I could do. I could totally be spending time with my wife, I could be having fun with friends, I could be going outside and enjoying the weather while it's still good here in Vancouver. There are lots of things I could be doing instead of working on open source... And if open source does not end up being more enjoyable than those other things, I just won't do it, because I have better things to do.
+
+And even honestly when you get paid for it, if it's not fun, I won't do that job anymore. I will either ask for a transfer to a different team that doesn't work in that community, or in open source, or what have you, or I will flat out quit and find another job. It's not even specific to a community-based open source, although that's where you feel it the most...
+
+For anyone involved, basically, if you make someone's life not enjoyable for doing something, they won't do it. That's why - you're right, I did not tack that on just willy-nilly; it was very specifically, because people forget that they have to make sure that there are people there, both coming in and sticking around, to keep a project running... But you also have to make sure no one comes to regret the time they put in. Because as soon as that happens, that's when people burn out and leave, and then that's where projects die.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We hear it all the time, "When I first got into this, it was fun. I was scratching my own itch, I was experimenting, I was having fun, or I was trying something to see if it would work... And I never expected --" it's kind of the plight of the successful open source developer, right? So many of us had these open source projects, and we do them by ourselves, and that's not very fun either; you can code by yourself for so long, and at a certain point you're like "Well, it'd be more fun if more people were involved in this", so you have that side... So that's why a lot of those things fizzle out and die as well.
+
+But then on the other side of a success, where you have this massive adoption, or lots of times it grows at a pace that's completely unsustainable for a small team of one or two, it's like "This WAS fun, and now it's a job... Because now it's a burden, it's all these other things that it didn't set out to be."
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Yeah, you were basically trained to do a nice thing for the world by saying "I made this thing, I found it useful. Maybe someone else will. Here you go" and you set it free. Maybe you hope some other people come along to help you maintain it, because you are using it, or maybe you're hoping someone will come along to teach you something new... Like, I have a little Rust project I'm doing right now, and I've specifically said, "I'm using this to learn. Please don't send me new feature requests or anything... But hey, if you have a PR to help show me how to do something better, please send those", and I've had that happen. That's been really useful.
+
+But if this suddenly exploded on me, and it's suddenly like I'm getting ten new issues a day or something, and it's just me sustaining it, I'd just probably burn out and walk away if the engagement ever became negative, because it's just not worth it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm in a "not really sure" position, but I kind of feel like that's why we do this show, Jerod. We always say we shed a light - or at least we have in the past; it's not exactly our core mission statement, but we try to focus on the positive sides of things, and I think what that means in one way too is that we focus on the things that are enjoyable about what can sometimes be a hard road... And we are optimistic (or at least try to be optimistic) about the high sides and the fun sides and the enjoyable sides of open source as a whole. Obviously, we still talk about the negative things and we don't shy away from those things, but we - we as you and I, and then Changelog the podcast - are really just trying to share the positive things that are enjoyable, and hopefully give people more and more reasons to keep reaching for the positive things... Because when there's enough negativity, it's easy to be drowned out by that negativity and see nothing positive, even if it's right in your face.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[39:58\] Yeah, I totally agree, and I think as open source has grown up over the last (let's just call it) decade -- I even think I said this to you, Adam, maybe off-air, a while back... It's like, where has some of the fun gone? Let's rediscover some of just the hacks, and the crazy experiments, and the one-off things... Because there's a lot of (capital B) Business going on in open source, and that's part of what we cover as well, because that's very much relevant to our lives - there's a lot of corporate interest, there's a lot of posturing, there's drama... I don't know, sometimes it feels like high school, which is not fun, for many people... And that makes me almost wanna burn out and be like, "Yeah... Where is all the fun stuff?" And it's out there. I just think there's so much other things going on that it's not always apparent; maybe we have to dig a little bit deeper.
+
+But yeah, I agree. I think having these conversations, shining a light on the interesting, the fun, the niche is definitely what we're about. And then also having the hard conversations and helping us all together figure out how we can continue to sustain this thing, which has been a huge boon in my life, and I think we can say, Brett, in your life, and Adam, in yours as well. Many of us have benefitted from open source in one way or the other, whether it's the friendships, whether it's the abilities to build a career, which I've very much been able to, build a career on the shoulders of giants, and give back as possible... So we're trying to keep that going, and Brett, having you on to share your perspective and your opinion on "This is the goal", you call it a laudable goal, or an admirable goal - I agree with you completely - and then there's lots of ways that we're falling short of that... And acknowledging that and then being able to shift or pivot in the start-up world - that's what we do, we pivot... And you know, just change ourselves enough to keep it going. It is so crucial.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Yeah. It's an interesting situation, where open source as this larger entity or community kind of fell into this success situation. Back in the '80s or '90s when everything started, it was much more of a niche, fun side-thing, and then businesses started to wake up and be like "Oh hey, there's free quality code out there. Oh, wow." And then it just grew, and no one stopped to really look at where open source was coming from, to set proper expectations for everyone who was coming into it suddenly from the outside, but then also making sure we had the mechanisms in place to make sure that the system and the situation in the overall open source community was gonna continue to be sustainable... Because it all just kind of happens, and if you don't stop and take a look at where it is, it's not gonna happen.
+
+Nadia Eghbal, who I know you all know, because she had a podcast on the Changelog, her big report that she did I think was a good step in trying to take a step back and really look holistically at open source as a whole, and how it has ended up in the current situation where it is, with both corporate and community-based open source, trying to work together, but it being such a huge machine now, and how do we keep it all going, and within the proper spirit of open source, but also keep it sustainable and everyone basically happy, so that they want to keep this thing going. It's a hard problem.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I had an a-ha moment talking on a recent Founder's Talk with Donald Fisher, who is the CEO of Tidelift... I know this as true, but it wasn't as clear to me as truth until he said it out loud to me, and then obviously the listeners of the show. He said, "As a society, as humanity, we have collectively decided to build our civilization on software, and a lot of that software, if not the majority of it, is open source." When he said that and I thought about it, I was just like, "Wow!"
+
+\[44:07\] We do this - Jerod and I, we're knee-deep in open source every single day, it's just part of what we do, but I had never really considered it like that... And it is paramount that we find ways to do things like you're saying here - a series of kindnesses, enjoying it. And then ways to sustain it simply isn't a money thing; there's a cost, as you say... Everything has a cost in open source, and what is the cost?
+
+I don't know about you, but that was so profound to hear, even though I knew it to be true. When I heard it for the first time like that, it solidified and cemented itself in my brain, like "That's truth!" The next generations are built on today's software, and today's software is open source.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Yeah. If you just stop and think about how pervasive software is, just how much are we willing to hand over to software these days, and then once you realize the scope of that, which is mind-boggling to say the least, because software is in everything... I mean, just making a clothes hanger - how much software there is involved in designing it, testing the weight, the machines that print it, press it, control the shipping of it, getting to the stores, the POS machine... Literally, the steps it takes to have a hunk of plastic turn into a clothes hanger that ends up in your closet - the amount of software is just immeasurable. But then, as soon as you think about that, any point of that system is gonna have a very large component of open source to it. There's very little pure, top to bottom stack, bespoke software anymore... Because it doesn't really make sense when there's that much quality code.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** But once again, if we don't stop to think about what it's going to take to sustain this going forward, we're going to end up in a real bad spot. You can almost make the comparison to the environment. We all know there's an environmental problem, and we've all just gone "Oh, it's there, it's there! It's great! Let's totally use it!" and then it's something like "Okay, but there's a sustainability problem here", and if you don't stop and worry about it and try to deal with it, you end up with either the worries we have of just runaway climate change, or you stop, put on the brakes, look, evaluate and go like "Okay, well if it's just green energy, we can continue to benefit from our environment without hurting it irrevocably."
+
+I think open source is approaching that kind of inflection point of making sure we have to stop and take the time to reflect upon what needs to happen to make sure that this stays sustainable, so we don't end up in a position where suddenly the open source world just says "You know what, forget it. I don't wanna deal with this anymore. It's not fun, it's not enjoyable. I'm gonna stop doing open source work", and then we're back to writing all our software in a bespoke fashion, which is gonna put a huge brake on innovation in the world, because suddenly we're gonna be writing everything from scratch... And that's not -- it might be fun for a little while, but having to rewrite how to search a string or a substring for the bazillionth time is not exactly enjoyable either.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Absolutely. Let's go back to Nadia for a second, because back when we had her on the show, and before she had her own podcast, Request for Commits, which had its own run, she wrote that piece - even before Roads and Bridges - which I still remember to a certain degree is "How I stumbled upon the internet's biggest blind spot", something like that was the title... And before that, we weren't really having much of a conversation as a community about sustainability - speaking specifically of monetary... And even at the beginning of Request for Commits, her and Mikeal's show, and the run of that, at the end of that (episode 20), one of the reason we said that this is ending now is because (that was maybe four years ago) now that's a conversation we're having. Things have changed, and now this is something that we talk about. It's not like we have all the answers, but there are sustainability - I'm specifically speaking of funding - options, and there are people making moves... Adam, you just had Tidelift; they had this million dollars initiative for open source maintainers...
+
+\[48:05\] There's money talk happening. But what we learned through money talk is that it's actually kind of a small part of what makes up an ecosystem of sustainability, and sometimes money causes more problems than it solves... But once you get the funding, that doesn't mean we're suddenly sustainable, right?
+
+Brett, a lot of the stuff that you were talking about and we were talking about here today has nothing to do with money. It just has to do with people, and relationships, and kindness. You said in your talk that we're failing at this goal of making open source something where you're attracting people, you're retaining people, and then you're also keeping it enjoyable... Maybe help us understand why you think - and I'm not in disagreement, but start off with why we're failing at it... You have some steps towards better, or at least you were offering them up, so let's go there.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** The example I use in my talk and the blog post is a tweet that Cory Benfield, who used to be very heavily involved in the networking side of the Python community, said... I'm paraphrasing, but basically he said open source made him a more bitter, short-tempered individual. And I can relate to that. When I was hitting burnout before I took my month off, as I said, my wife noticed. She noticed when I read an off-putting an email from someone, or something, and my attitude changed. And it's a really horrible position to be putting people in, that somehow our interactions are leading to people such as Cory and myself or anyone else to actually have a negative result on their personality... Because that not only impacts them, that impacts everyone around them.
+
+I choose to volunteer and put my time into open source, and that does not mean my wife should somehow be impacted beyond the time I choose to put in. If she's nice enough to go like, "Hey, you know what - why don't you go take some time and put a couple hours in this Saturday into Python?" Okay, fantastic. When I'm done and I clock off, the result of that should not be me in a funk for the rest of the day, or even potentially the weekend, right?
+
+I've lost sleep over problems in the community, and that is not fun, and it should not impact anyone else on this planet in any way, shape or form. So that's where that failure comes from - the fact that we are not stopping and taking a look at ourselves as to why this is happening to people, why are contributors ending up in positions where they're literally having to stop and worry about whether their spouse is going to ask them to stop doing open source because it's made them a worse individual... And that's literally what it can do to people.
+
+Literally, open source can make you a worse person than you were before open source, and it's something people don't really bring up often, but it happens. I will fully admit, when my wife has called me out for being in a mood - and it's not always because I'm hangry - it has sometimes been because of open source... And I'll fully admit publicly that I'm very easily hangry, and my wife's very good at calling me out on that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Can I provide an alternative though here real quick?
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Sure.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I mean, could you also have the same result though by playing weekend softball? Not so much from an injury, but just from a lack of enjoyment; just drama, personality. I know we're talking about open source here, but that can happen pretty much anywhere. It's not like it's just open source problems. I just wanna be very clear about that.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Very true. But the interesting difference with open source is the reachability that you have, right?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** True.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Let's look at Python. Python probably has 10 million users, depending on how you count. There's no real good solid number, but I've calculated it using Go's way of calculating, and that got us to 6-7 million, and rounding out for people who don't call themselves Python programmers, we're probably approaching about ten million.
+
+When I play softball, I have at most probably 20 people if we include subs, between my team and the team we're playing. So at most there are 19 other people who probably could potentially upset me, be rude to me, whatever. On the internet, I have at least ten million people who could make me upset, right?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[52:21\] Yeah... Bigger numbers.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** And if you think about the scalability, even if you scale it down to like -- what percentage of the world population are just rude individuals? Just flat out, consistently rude. 0.1%? I don't know. Do we think one of a thousand people is just consistently rude? At ten million people, that would mean, if I'm doing my math right, that gets us down to 10,000 people who very much could be cranky at me at any point in time, because of something in Python that they didn't like, that I happen to somehow be involved with? This scale number is just massive. So that's why it's a somewhat unique situation.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I see.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's also harder to leave, right?
+
+**Brett Cannon:** And it's much harder to leave, and it's much harder to avoid.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Exactly.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** If you have a bad interaction -- let's say you try to do a return at a department store, and you have that cranky customer service person who's not in a good mood because the person before you was a complete jerk about their return; they're gonna probably be cranky, they might take it out on you a little bit, you'll walk away in a huff, you'll be frustrated... But that's it. That's the only interaction you're gonna have about that. You can get over it real quick, because that whole interaction was really short.
+
+When it's open source, you don't get to control when that happens. It's someone pushing often that crankiness onto you. I get to at least prep for when I go to the return desk; I don't get to prep for the cranky email coming into me, and the chance of a number of people is much larger... So there's a cascade effect of I may only have to deal with one cranky person in a blue moon for a return, but I can get a cranky email any day of the week, and have it build up... And getting that washed away in my mind, that negativity, is hard. It takes a lot.
+
+I will fully admit, I've tweeted when I've had a bad interaction, knowing that people would tweet back at me saying "I'm sorry you're having a rough day. I do appreciate what you do." Because otherwise, I'm just sitting here with my cat at home, and getting no positive reinforcement that what I'm doing is appreciated, or good, or anything. So it's tough, the mishmash of scale and reachability that makes it kind of unique in the world in terms of how we all work together.
+
+**Break:** \[54:53\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So a lot of the problems with the open source community are it's difficult to leave, it's a global community, it's constant, it's very difficult to part ways in small groups, like you can with a softball team... One thing you said earlier on, Brett, that really resonated with me and I think it's worth reiterating, is this idea around how much more kindness it is required to undo unkindness. I think it was kind of a ten to one ratio is what you were saying; ten acts of kindness versus one act of unkindess, and whether or not that's scientific or accurate... I think in principle it's definitely true, and something about us as humans is we really resonate on the negative.
+
+There can be a lot of positive reinforcement - thank you's, appreciations, people saying nice things about our open source work or our projects, and a lot of that stuff doesn't really penetrate our thought life very much. You hear it, but you don't feel it; I'm just speaking a little bit personally, but I think this is something a lot of people say. And then one act of negativity, one rude thing, one buddy calling you stupid, or ripping on your project - it tears you apart, right? So there's this huge imbalance there, and we need to recognize it.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Yeah, and it takes very little to -- especially if you're a caring individual who wants to make people happy. I'm Canadian, it's just part of me to try to keep people happy. So when people say "I'm not happy", I do somewhat take that personally. I've tried not to over the years, to work on that, but... I mean, it is gonna take at least ten cat videos to get over that. \[laughter\] It takes effort; it's not a small number. It's not a one-to-one ratio, as you pointed out, Jerod. Look at the news - it's not like they're showing us one negative thing on the news because they just can; it's because they know your brain latches on to that. That's also why they don't try to show you positives, because it is not going to be a one-to-one ratio. They've gotta show a lot of positive aspects in the world to equate out to the reaction you get with that one negative.
+
+My blog post referenced one study where a psychologist seems to think that if you have arguments with your spouse and it's a five-to-one ratio of positive to negative comments in the argument, chances are you're heading towards divorce.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Wow.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** So even if you go down to five-to-one, that's still a decent number of positive actions that have to occur to undo that one negative. And as I said earlier, positivity in open source and complimenting people is very much a reactive thing. You have to consciously stop and think to do it. It's not like negativity, where it's very proactive; when you hit that bug, you instantly know that you're unhappy and you instantly are triggered by it, versus having to stop and think "Oh yeah, it's really nice."
+
+\[01:00:00.02\] I don't want throwback Fridays any more online, I want thank you Thursdays; something to cause us to stop and reflect upon "You know what, who should I thank this week for doing something nice for me, that I just normally wouldn't stop to think about?"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We did in stand-ups, in retrospectives, after a sprint. Retrospectives don't exactly call for this, it's not part of the agile manifesto, but I was like "We should call out the wins. Who do you wanna thank?", and it would be the person(s) thanking... In the same right, you also don't want too many highlights to the same person, but if they deserved it, they deserved it, right?
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Right. It's very interesting that you point that out, Adam, because if you notice, we've actually had to bake that into our development process now, to make sure that we actually do this, right?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Program it in, yeah.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** We've started doing retrospectives on my team at work as well, and we have "What went well, what didn't, and action items", but the fact that we actually have to put that into our processes to make sure we actually do that as individuals with our co-workers is very telling about how not purposely difficult, but just based on just human nature, how difficult it can be to prompt people to take the time to just say "Thank you", "Good job" or whatever positive reinforcement you wanna give.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** There's two things there. I think there's a good majority of people - I'm not sure why - that tend to thrive in conflict. And it's either perpetual because of just human nature, or culture, or change, or whatever it is, but people just tend to sometimes thrive in conflict. And then, just being able to say thank you to your team is one thing, but I believe that there is a constant tear, especially at teams that are highly connected, motivated together, and all that good stuff to tear them apart.
+
+It's part of the design of the system, to pull you apart, because if I can't get along with Jerod and he can't get along with me, then what we do doesn't work well. So he and I have to recognize that, and other members of our team have to recognize it, same with yours, that there's this force, something is trying to pull you apart and make you unsuccessful... And the daily fight is to fight back against that.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Yeah, and honestly, as soon as something negative happens, the instinct is to minimize that happening in the future, versus putting the huge amount of effort it is to not avoid it, but fix the root cause, and make it so that that doesn't happen again in the future.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Now let's talk about error tracking. Root cause analysis. That's fun stuff. \[laughter\]
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** "Where did this begin? Let's go back to the commit."
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Yeah, you just need history debugging and you're all good.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yes, technical solutions to people problems - they always work very well.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Mm-hm...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Mm-hm... So what can we do? The overall call is to be kind to one another. Does it get more specific than that with you, Brett? Because I believe in my heart of hearts that that's part of the solution, and yet it's difficult to actually act on that kind of advice, because it's so generic as to almost sound cliché, or tepid, or something.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Yeah, and it's been one of the most frustrating bits about the conclusions I reached. When I've given this talk, I've had people come back and say "Well, can you give us a call-to-action?" And it's like, "No... People are just flat out hard. It doesn't work that way." I can't just give you a technical solution of "You know, if you just follow these five rules, suddenly the whole world would be better." If we knew what those five rules were, we would be following them already. It just doesn't exist.
+
+\[01:03:44.01\] The way I try to view it is -- you're right that the general thing is we just literally need to be kind to each other. It literally comes down to just kindness. There is no need, ever, to be rude. Why are people rude? Usually, people are rude either because they're frustrated, or because honestly they're trying to bully someone down to win the argument. It's a power play... So it's really not necessary.
+
+In these technical communities you often hear, "Oh, everything should be based on the technical aspects of the discussion, and nothing else", but these people who come in and are rude are trying to game the system by forcibly trying to talk down other people by being rude enough that they wanna walk away or not participate, or blow their stack or what have you, and just have them lose that argument.
+
+For me, it's trying to be kind while realizing the root cause of why we need to be kind. As I said earlier, open source is all about trying to help keep the project running, bringing new people in, keeping/sustaining them, keeping everyone happy. But the other thing to realize is open source owes no one anything.
+
+Let's say you use Python. I don't owe you anything. I gave you a gift of software that I put my limited time on this planet into to try to make it useful for you; you took it, you used it - fantastic. That is the end of it. I have a legal obligation to let you use that software based on the open source, and that's where it stops. I think people forget that fact. They come and they think I owe them bug fixes, or I owe them new features, or I owe them another release. I owe, I owe, I owe. There's somehow a feeling -- people come to open source as somehow there's an obligation on my part beyond the code that I put out there, with the licensing, that you're allowed to copy and use this, it allows you to keep this license with the software... And there isn't. There is no obligation.
+
+I think if more people will come to open source realizing that there is no obligation, the interactions would be better, because then suddenly you don't come from a position of demand, you come from a position of request. You're not gonna come to me and demand I fix a bug if you realize I have no obligation to help you with that bug. But if you realize I could help you if you requested nicely, because I choose to put my time and effort into helping you, your interaction suddenly shifts, your expectations shift, how you choose to work with someone shifts... And I think that's the key here; the conclusion is be kind to one another, which I know is, as you said, borderline a cliché, but I think the key is understanding how do we try to refrain the position of open source such that we all kind of naturally reach for the kindness result. I think the key there is setting the proper expectation for open source and its participation by remembering no one owes anyone anything. And I know that really ruffles some feathers with some people, because they suddenly think "Well, where's the motivation? How are people gonna help?" People who think in terms of numbers are like "Oh, there's gotta be some ulterior motive or some driver for people to participate in open source", and it's like "You know what? No." Open source is kind of a hippy-dippy thing when you really think about. It's literally people just doing it for the fun of it, and just to be kind to other people, to give out software that they think others might like. They don't need any other motivation.
+
+This is something I think people forget - as long as you don't destroy that motivation, people will just keep doing it regardless. So making sure that we remember that there is no obligation and we just need to be kind to these open source contributors to have them keep doing what they do and giving us this software that we benefit from, we'd go a long way towards helping us with the sustainability problem... Because if we are just nice to each other, this burnout problem goes away. If you just understand that "You know what, the two of you don't owe me another podcast. If you do another episode - awesome. I will happily listen and I will appreciate it... But there's no obligation on your part, just like I have no obligation to fix any more bugs in Python ever in my life. I really don't."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:08:07.04\] So you're telling me there's no more seasons of Office coming?
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Yeah, I'm afraid not... \[laughter\] Unless they decide to do a reboot, and they already did the English reboot of the British version; I don't know where they go from the English version, so...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** My gosh...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** They shouldn't.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** The American versus the British -- yeah, the American version was great compared to the British version; I love them both, but I don't know where you go from the American one.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So you're saying there's boundaries to things, right? That's the point, there's boundaries, clear boundaries that need to be understood, that's the expectations - "Don't get mad at Brett, because his obligation was met. Anything else he does or decides to do, or anybody else decides to do is back to the kindness factor, if you're hopefully enjoying yourself, hopefully not upsetting your wife because your mood is changed or whatever, and everyone just took the step of leading with kindness."
+
+There's something that my wife and I say and we learned, and it's to remember that I have and she has goodwill for me. Sometimes I might say something that's critical, but understanding it comes from a "I have goodwill for you." Now, it requires the "I have goodwill for you" aspect of it, because not everyone in the general public has that; however, if we can somehow inherit that a little bit, the kindness, and leading with that, and having goodwill for somebody... I think you're right.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** I think that obligation bit is really key. Like, how much did you pay for Python? Nothing. So why does the fact that you somehow ended up with this thing I gave you, this gift, somehow make you think that it's okay to berate me because there's a bug, or say it's stupid, or it should be done this way, or what have you, or be in any way really critical, in a negative fashion? There's constructive criticism, and that's fine, but it needs to be constructive.
+
+People just don't stop and think about the fact that all of us in open source are literally giving things away, and that you would not be critical to someone who gave you a nice little gift. You can say "Oh, thank you, but it's not for me." That's fine. I'm totally fine if you don't use Python and you're a Ruby user, for instance, or you're preferring Node - whatever, I'm fine with that. You just don't need to be rude to me about it... And that's it. It's a surprisingly simple concept.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It is a simple concept. Be nice.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Yeah, exactly. Be nice. Understand that the obligation that you seem to think is there really isn't. You paid nothing for open source, there is no expectation on anyone's side, at all. I used to phrase this as not kindnesses, but favors, but I felt it was a little potentially loaded, because when you ask someone for a favor, you sometimes expect it to be paid back... But you can metaphorically think of it as like -- basically, when you come to me with a bug report, you're basically asking me to do you a favor to look at it, triage the issue and potentially fix.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. Go into that, because that's a "if you're in HR" metaphor you've got there.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Yeah. My wife is in HR, so that kind of helps understand where I phrased this... It's understanding that when you engage with people, you need to really remember what you're asking. If you come to me with a bug report, you're literally asking me to do you a favor, and as I've said, spend what little time I have, and take free time away from my wife, and my cat, and my friends, and my family, to help you fix that bug.
+
+Now, if you really stop and think about that, that's a significant ask. You're literally asking me to not do something fun, to fix that bug for you. That goes all the way to pull requests, when you ask me to do a review; it's not necessarily gonna be entertaining for me to do a pull request review, but you've sent me this PR and you're asking me to review it. Now, it's great that you sent it to me and I appreciate it, but you've gotta realize that there's a cost to my end as well, of time and effort to do it.
+
+\[01:11:53.14\] In my talk and blog post I phrase it as when you talk to people, a good way to catch yourself to make sure you're communicating in a good way that shows the kindness that you're requesting of someone is basically realize you're asking a favor of the other person, and then after that, make sure you phrase it in such a way that neither your boss, nor your family would be upset with how you asked. Because I'm gonna assume either you care about your job or you care about what your family thinks of you. Because if you don't stop yourself sometimes, it's very easy to blow your top, which I understand, when you're frustrated, especially when you've hit a bug, and it's like "Oh, I need this to work...! Why is this bug -- ugh, this software is horrible! There's this bug! How the heck has it survived 28 years with this bug!? It's the end of the world... Fix it!" But you've gotta realize you're basically asking me a favor to fix this, because guess what - over my 15 years of being a core developer, and the three years prior to that I was a Python user, I didn't hit this bug, or else I would have fixed it. So it doesn't impact my life, but you're still asking me to help you.
+
+Then also realize that, by the way, I know probably who you work for based on your email address, so do realize you do represent your company when you're making this request... And I remember. I have a good memory. I have a list of companies I have had bad interactions with in my head... So I remember and I do prioritize who I help based on who is being nice to me and who's not.
+
+Then after that, if you just need guidance, is this how you would teach your children to talk to someone? Is this how you would want your spouse to talk to you, your parents, anybody in your family? Is this the example you'd wanna set for them on how you communicate? If it's not, then why are you talking to strangers like that? It's just a way to provide guidance for people if they just need a way to phrase it in their head. Realize you're asking a favor, realize you represent your employer, whether it's directly for work or not, because I'll still know... That company still chose to hire you.
+
+And then really think about what kind of example you wanna set and what your family would think about how you're communicating. If you keep those in mind, I would hope for most people that would cause them to communicate in a very empathetic/sympathetic manner with people in open source, such that we set (once again) these proper expectations that there are no requirements on anyone, there is no obligation, and that we're all just trying to basically do kindnesses for everyone to keep this whole crazy thing we call open source running.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** All well said. Let me throw in something a little bit different into the mix, which has to do with the way that we communicate. I've heard elsewhere that the medium is the message, and I'm not sure if that statement even applies to what I'm trying to say here, but it's resonated in my head... What we have on the internet is basically a text area, and sure, we have emoji, and we have grammar, and we have ways that we go about communicating, but text only, even with the help of emoji, is a very low-fidelity form of communication; there's so much nuance, even just voice inflection, that we have the advantage of here on this show...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I like Brett better today... Well, reading his blog posts, you know? I can hear him... \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, or watch his talk, right? It's a completely different message between reading the blog post and watching the talk, even though the content is pretty much the same. You will get more out of the talk, even though you have to dedicate half an hour of looking at a screen and listening. So it takes more time, but there's so much more transmitted between the speaker and a listener than there is between one person reading and one person writing.
+
+I think the more that we can get our community into meet space, so to speak, or even simulate that, the more real-life relationships we can form, the more conversations that we can have, the more we don't have to remind ourselves that there's a person on the other side of that text area because you're looking at that person in the face and talking to them... It no longer becomes a stranger on the internet who ruined your day because their open source project had a bug in it. It becomes this person I know, Brett, who works on Python, and I'm going to speak to Brett in a different way, after having heard his voice, seeing where he's coming from... These kinds of things.
+
+\[01:16:18.18\] So maybe not necessarily a scalable solution for all open source everywhere, since there's such a huge community, but something we can keep in mind - if all we have is a text area, we can at least think of like "Would I say this out loud to somebody that I was standing in front of?" Because sure, there are conflicts in real life, and you can be rude in a face-to-face conversation, but it's a lot harder and you're way less likely. And if we can't actually have voice and video conversations - although I would advocate for more of those - we at least need to be thinking to ourselves, as we write, "How could this possibly be read, so that it's worse off than the way I'm saying it?" Because so much of our problem is just misreading text, right?
+
+**Brett Cannon:** There's two things I'd actually say to that. One is a simple way to help make people realize - at least when they're talking to you - that there's a person on the other end is to actually use a photo of yourself as your profile photo, like on GitHub... Because that little bubble will be there and you will see the other person's face, and it's a little harder to be rude to that person's bubble when you realize that "Oh, that's an actual human being." It's not the random little set of squares that GitHub assigns by default, or some picture of some actor from your favorite movie, or something. When it's an actual picture of you, it does help hit home that there is a human being on the other side of this issue, for instance.
+
+The other thing I would say is basically nothing in open source needs to happen now. There's nothing that has to happen today, this moment, where you can't stop and take the time to proofread. There's no reason why you even need to do anything today. If you're having a bad day, just don't reply. Just wait until tomorrow; if you have to write yourself a note, do it... But there's absolutely no reason why you have to hit that reply button now. Just take the time to realize that "You know what, I can wait. It's okay, the world's not gonna end if I don't reply to this email thread today, or tomorrow, or honestly, ever." You can reply to that issue later, you can file the bug tomorrow, because guess what, even if it gets fixed today, chances are it's not gonna get to you the next day, because releases just typically don't work that way.
+
+Giving yourself even just an hour, or until after lunch, or just the next day, is not really going to impact anyone's life in any way, shape or form almost in any way measurable, and yet it will still put you in a better headspace to make sure that what you communicate online, through text -- because as you point out, Jerod, with text it's very hard to be expressive. This is why it is so difficult to be a good writer, because it is not easy to express oneself or one's feelings, or whatever.
+
+As you guys said, it's very different to read that blog post than it is to see my talk or hear me right now, because it's very hard to get inflections, any sense of humor through it, and to make sure that there's no miscommunication, versus being able to hear my voice and you can very much pick up when I'm joking and when I'm not... It's just hard. And you know what, if you're gonna have to take the time to be very clear, and not rude, because it's so hard to get this right, then just take the time to get it right... And just wait, and just proofread, and just wait until you're in the right headspace that you're willing to put that time and effort into that response.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You need to bake in a cooling off period. Hot-headed is said for a reason. You just need to chill out... Even if you're right. Chill out.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** \[01:19:52.04\] We've joked about what would happen to online interactions if we restricted everyone to one email response per thread a day... What would that do to mailing lists? The volume would drop significantly, which honestly is not always a bad thing... But it would also cause everyone to have to think a lot more about what they say.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Limit the amount of characters and limit the response. Hm... Twitter.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Yeah, the character one could be a little hard, but at least the one per day... I don't know if anyone will ever try that, but for this exact reason it's been at least an enticing idea of "How do you try to really force people to actually take time to respond?"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It'd be a good exercise for a period, just like you do your detoxes... Do it as often as it makes sense, just to let people know "This is how it could feel if it really got out of hand."
+
+**Brett Cannon:** I actually kind of do this already. What I do in my email is I filter everything in Gmail to a label; I make sure the label is not viewable in the label list, and I only check those once a day. So I see it, I read it, I catch up, I do my response, and then I'm done. And that's it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's also very intentional, too. You're very intentional with how you deal with certain things because of, like you said, your triggers, and/or just your sheer desire to maybe deal with some conflict... The whole ten things you mentioned earlier; you realize it's gonna get you riled up, so maybe you're in the mood to get a little riled up, so you check your labels...
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Exactly. If you have to, you force yourself to only interact once a day. A lot of times something that would have upset you has already been dealt with by the time you see it. The internet is 24/7, and chances are there are gonna be responses 24/7, and something that comes in could quite easily be dealt with later on if you just give it some time.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** How about this - we'll close the show by telling the listeners "If you've listened this far, leave this show by going and spreading kindness in some way, shape or form." Either take a lot of the advice that's been given here, or the different stories being shared, but walk away from this with some sort of resolution to be kind and to give yourself a cooling off period the next time you can't be kind in the moment. And to become more self-aware of certain things, moderate yourself, set expectations for people around you, give yourself some buffer so that you don't get into those zones... Because when you get into those zones, it's pretty easy to let your mouth just go.
+
+So walk away from this show -- I always kind of ebb on this, kind of teetering to this, always being aware of how I'm speaking, or this and that, so I'd like to personally leave with just more awareness on being kind, responding with kindness, and giving myself that cool-off period. Jerod knows it, he's much better at responses than I am sometimes... And I wait for Jerod to respond, because I might not respond so nicely, and Jerod does it; I'm like, "Dude, thank you so much, because your email was so much better than mine would have been", at least in that moment. If I gave myself a day, maybe I can match his kindness, but he's pretty good at it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, thank you.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What do you think, Brett?
+
+**Brett Cannon:** I think it would be awesome. I think it would be great if we all just walked away from this podcast -- if any other message, of just be kind, and if you have to, take time until you are able to be kind.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Great. Brett, thank you so much for your time. It has been so much of a pleasure to have this conversation with you and walk this road with you. Thank you... I don't personally use Python every day; I'm sure there's lots of software I use that uses Python, so thank you for all your hard work... If you haven't gotten a thank you today, you're getting it right now. Thank you for all your hard work over the 15 years you've done what you do. Please keep spreading this message, please keep being the kind person you are; you are appreciated, and when you feel like you're not, come back to this podcast, come back to this moment and listen.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Well, thank you to both of you. I appreciate it, and as I said privately, I am a fan of the podcast and I do appreciate what the two of you do with this podcast and the message you try to get out there, so... Thank you for that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Thank you, we appreciate it.
+
+**Break:** \[01:24:13.27\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Aaaand you are off the Changelog hotseat.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Boom!
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Wasn't that hot though?
+
+**Brett Cannon:** No, not at all.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That was a good show, that was fun.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Good!
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That was fun.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I enjoyed that.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** So long as you're not disappointed, that's all I care about.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I mean, the elongated first break really solidified it for me. \[laughter\] I mean, this show is whatever... This show is whatever...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I learned so much about Keanu Reeves today...
+
+**Brett Cannon:** I know, right?! Geez, the man's history is crazy.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I like him so much more now...
+
+**Brett Cannon:** I know, I have so much more respect for the man, based on his troubled childhood, and he still turned out to be a nice guy... Wow.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I know.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's what happened with me and the driver, I feel like; I can't remember his first name right now, but... From Star Wars... I think it was Michael... Adam! I should know it, geez...
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Oh, Adam Driver.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Adam Driver, yeah.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** He was in the armed forces, in the Marines...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Marines, yeah. He was in combat, and had to leave because of an injury, and it tore him to pieces to do so... And it wasn't until after then he became an actor.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** He gave a TED talk about that, but I had no idea. But your like or dislike for his character in Star Wars may make you like or dislike him, and I wasn't exactly a huge fan of Kylo Ren... And I think even when I was in the theater, when he took off his mask, people laughed, rather than being like "Oh...! This Darth Vader..." And it's not, obviously.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So he is somewhat of a disappointment in that role to some... But that's not my true feelings, because I know he's creative, and that's really where it stems from. You've gotta respect everyone who's creative. But knowing his true personal story made me like his character and who he was playing the character better. It gave me a new appreciation.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Yeah, I also thought he nailed it. I think he really nailed that character. I think the problem was when that happened in the movie, I don't think people had enough back-story on the character to realize that he is just a kid who was just--
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right, he was torn.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** He was torn from his parents, and the world he knew has been twisted and contorted into the meanest thing. And then of course, he has this internal conflict that you don't know about till the end, really, where he has the whole scene with his father... But you don't realize that yeah, he kind of looks like this kid, because he is. He's not Darth Vader, this grizzled, pissed off human being, because he thought his whole world was pulled away from him, and basically killed... So it was just the lack of context, and everyone just kind of living in the moment and not stopping to think that "Oh, there might be more to this story later on", just trying to go with it and "Let's see where it ends up", and then "Oh...! There was a reason..."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, meeting their expectations.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Exactly, yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** See, it's all about them expectations, man.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah... If they would have set proper expectations...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm telling you, the solution to most things is proper expectations.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Exactly.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's true. I think it's true.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** So many more people would have come out happy with The Last Jedi.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:28:24.00\] Yeah. I mean, you can't get upset if your expectations were in alignment with, to some degree, the outcome...
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Or at least aware that the outcome you got was a possibility, and potentially even likely. It's the whole risk, the idea of risk... Like, you know, you lost all your money on Bitcoin over the holiday season? You're the idiot. Those people that are pissed...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Bad expectations.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Like, what do you expect?! The market wants you to put your money in, so they can keep it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So they can keep it... \[laughter\] This is true.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** It's just like movie sequels, right? Everyone comes in with the expectation that it's gonna be just like the previous one. It's like, "Yeah, you know what? It ain't gonna happen. There is no way history is gonna repeat itself that way."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** No...!
+
+**Brett Cannon:** It might be better, it could be worse, but it's gonna be different, regardless. And by the way, even your expectation that it's gonna be the same will make you disappointed, because it's more of the same. It's like the weather - you should go in knowing you're gonna be disappointed.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Regardless if it's good or bad.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** No matter how good it is, you're gonna have a --
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Exactly. The weather might look good now, but you could still complain about something, and human beings being as negative as they are, you're gonna find it, and it's gonna make you cranky.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. Ten good days of weather in a row, and then one bad day ruins the whole thing, you know?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** "What's wrong with the weather?! The weather...!"
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Ten-to-one ratio.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Weren't you just at the beach and enjoying your life, three, four, five days in a row? "Yeah, but today sucks!"
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Yeah, it's like "Oh my god, it's raining!", instead of being like "Oh, it's raining. Oh well, at least I had those five full straight days of gorgeous weather."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotta find the good. Gotta find the good.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. Well, just yesterday -- so we had an amazing weekend last weekend; great weather... I won't even go into details; it was a great weekend, just a regular weekend... And then yesterday sucked, just -- at home. And Rachel and I were both kind of pissed off, just at life, and I was just like "This weekend was awesome." \[laughs\] She was like, "Yeah. Yeah, it really was." I'm like, "Let's just think about that for a little bit" and she's like, "Yeah, good idea... Because I'm thinking about today, and today is not going so well." And that kind of helped; we had to remind ourselves.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, you've gotta take stock of what you're thankful for, that's for sure.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.
+
+**Brett Cannon:** Well, as Adam said earlier, whenever you get in an argument with your spouse, it's always -- just stop and remember there's no ill will, and you do love this person, and there's a reason you've married them and ended up in this point.
+
+Just remember all the positive before this stupid argument over what movie you're gonna watch tonight, and it helps put a lot of it in perspective. If you can remember to do that in the moment is a totally different question, but at least afterwards be able to reflect back and be like "Yeah, that was a stupid argument. I should have never gotten that upset over this. It really was not necessary."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So true... So true, my friend.
diff --git a/A good open source password manager Inconceivable! (Interview)_transcript.txt b/A good open source password manager Inconceivable! (Interview)_transcript.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..fe4d37f31de6bf5e3113018773b664ab0c1d50f7
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@@ -0,0 +1,429 @@
+**Jerod Santo:** Today we're here to talk about a conversation that's near and dear to your heart, Adam, and something that I use, although I'm not quite as excited about password managers as you are... And you always bring up password managers, specifically 1Password, which we're not here to talk about 1Password, but we probably will talk about it in passing; we're here to talk about Buttercup... But do we bring up the conversation of like "Why password managers matter?" I feel like our audience is probably on board with, like, this is important stuff. What do you think, Adam?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think maybe a small recap... Just the fact that through 20 years of effort we've successfully trained everyone to use passwords that are hard for humans to remember, but somehow computers can easily guess them - that's a direct quote from xkcd cartoon that I just recently read... I think it just makes sense to do a one-on-one on why passwords -- just having them, that are secure, and in managers, because hey, they have to be hard enough, right? 24 characters, 16 characters, a mix of digits and special symbols or whatever, but... Maybe just a 101.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay, very good. Well, we have Perry here. Perry, you're obviously all in on passwords being important, since you're working on Buttercup, a password manager... Maybe from your perspective, why are password managers something that is vital for people to understand and to use?
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** Yeah, for sure. Password managers are a bit of a stand-in for memory, I would say. We basically understand the premise behind why you need passwords and why they need to be sufficiently complex, obviously. The more complex they are and the more unique they are, then the lesser chance of somebody guessing them, or basically...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Forcing them...?
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** decrypting whatever protected content is behind them... Forcing them - yeah, of course. So a password is kind of like a stand-in, like a phonebook to remember all these things, in encrypted storage, where you can store these secrets. But the reason why it's so important is that, obviously, every password should probably be different, as well. There are so many security concerns that maybe people don't consider on a day-to-day basis, but having unique passwords across all of your accounts is also one such factor, and having a password manager kind of allows you to deal with that necessity, as well.
+
+Obviously, today, if so many people have in the tens or if not hundreds of accounts online - it's so important to have those passwords stored somewhere where you don't really have to worry about the strength or the uniqueness there.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Maybe to you, Jerod - I'm curious if you use, as Perry mentioned, a different password for every account. Do you do that currently?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yes.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Religiously...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[04:10\] When you said "every account" there, I flinched a little bit, because I had to think, "Okay, EVERY account...?" I used to have a series of passwords that were phrases; they were good passwords, but they were based on a system I came up with... I'm a nerd, so I'm developing my own internal systems in my brain, and generating versions... Sometimes it used to be based on the domain name, blah-blah-blah. That was the bad old days.
+
+I do use Apple's password management inside of macOS. So I'm on iOS, I'm on macOS, they have their keychain and they have their password generators, and I have been using them ever since they came out, which is probably only four or five years, I'm not sure exactly when that all launched... But before then, I used to have levels of passwords - my low-security password, that I'd use on sites I didn't care about very much, then I had my high-security passwords, which I would use on things like email accounts, on things like bank accounts... I probably still have some of those floating around out there, but for the most part I do use a high-security fresh password on every website, and I just use Apple's built-in stuff, which works pretty well, and it completely falls apart when it comes to sharing and teams and those kinds of things, which we'll probably get into... Because that's where things get really complicated, like "How do we share--"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So you're really relying on iCloud then too, in that case...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yup.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And obviously, our trust in Apple.
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** I mean, you have to trust somebody...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Somebody's trusting Apple...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I trust somebody... And on your side, Adam, you're a truster of 1Password, which is a very popular solution for these things...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. And I would say that's only because they've been around a long time; I would even contend they're one of the best... They're not open source, so my reason is simply because they've been around since forever, basically, and they've evolved their service over the years, too.
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** Yeah, they've got great UI, great user experience, the whole thing is very fluid... Definitely someone to contend with in the password manager field. I would definitely say that the drawback for a lot of users that I speak to is definitely their pricing, but other than that, I would say that they're probably one of the biggest and the best to set your targets on, so... Yeah, I think that your trust is well placed if you're working with 1Password.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. We'll obviously earmark this for future conversation - I've stopped using the Dropbox sync just because I hated to have to have Dropbox installed into a new machine to then install passwords; it was always this "Well, I've gotta get into Dropbox" so it's my password there, and it was always some weird rigmarole to get in there, so I ended up actually using their hosted service now, which I agree, their pricing is a little bit -- hey, for security, right? I think you've gotta pay for security. If there's one area you don't skimp, it's security...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Or do you...?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Or, yeah, I guess, do you...? It's a question you can ask here...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] We're gonna find out here.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Either way, the 101 is definitely use secure passwords. More importantly, potentially even - depending upon where you said - make sure you use different passwords for each service... And then not to use the 1Password to rule them all kind of thing, but they, it's a good brand name. You usually have one password to get into your manager that has one key to all your kingdoms, basically. Would you say that's the same way Buttercup works here, Perry?
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** Yeah, for sure. The whole idea of a master password, for lack of a better... One key to the kingdom, basically. One password which you explicitly should not use anywhere else for that exact reason, that it's super-valuable; it should be very personal, it should probably be written down and stored somewhere in case you have a lapse of memory, but... Basically, it should not be shared with anyone or any other service. That is - at a very low level - your encryption key to decrypt your content, no matter where it's stored, whether it's locally or in a cloud service like 1Password is hosting.
+
+\[08:06\] At that point, if you can get around that, then I think that you're already doing very well... Better than the majority of users out there, unfortunately. I think that it's still such an issue communicating why this whole process is necessary for someone to follow. People don't feel like they're a target, but obviously, these sorts of things, these issues that happen with account hijackings and stuff like that happen en masse, and it's never really targeted.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, you don't have to be a target; you can just be one of a group of people who's passwords have leaked through some service that you once used, and if you are not having unique passwords per service and you use that elsewhere, then it's very easy at that point for somebody to just brute-force... Say "I have all these passwords on service A. I'm gonna run them all against service B and see who I can get into." That's something that's happened on the regular nowadays, especially with services used by millions, and in certain cases billions of people, with huge data breaches.
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** Yeah, this gets back to the point of having unique passwords. This cross-pollination of services, using duplicate passwords, is such a huge problem. If you go to the very famous site haveibeenpwned.com, you just drop in an email or a username and then it basically gives you a list of pastebins that your accredited credentials appear on... And I've got numerous pastebins where my credentials have appeared on in the past, and it's quite fun to kind of go through that and have a look, and hopefully you've updated your passwords since then, but... It's such a great example of why this whole process is necessary.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, because in most of those cases too, when they're doing those data grabs or those breaches, they are not only just getting your password, they're also getting other key information, potentially even things like middle name, usually the email address goes with it, so other key information they can then also use to act as you, essentially, go along with that.
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** Exactly.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** If you're using the same password across different services, or having, like in your case, Jerod, what you said before, some sort of high-security that's reused... And I'm not saying you're doing that now, but I did that at one point too, where I had "Oh, this is my high-security password" and I just would reuse it here and there, or at least on high-security services... Meanwhile, you're trusting that they've got their data intact or their security intact, and if they get hacked, then you're essentially open to hacks as well, because... Yeah, it's how it works.
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** Yeah, it's identity theft, basically, and then they can use your identity, which at the base level is usually your email address - then they can use that to attack you further, or pose as you, or do whatever with that... So yeah, it's quite damaging, of course.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Clearly, they're important, right? Password managers and/or high-security passwords are important, but maybe more so in today's world than it was in the early days or beginning days with 1Password, since they're the Goliath around here, is that we're drawing more and more to open source software; not just software overall, but particularly open source software, and in lots of cases around security... So maybe take us back to some origination for you. You've got Goliath in the room; you've started this - from what I can tell - in 2015, so it's not like it was yesterday... It was three years ago. And you know 1Password is out there...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Not to mention LastPass, Apple's iCloud stuff... So there's big players in the market.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** The funny thing was - back in 2014-2015 I had a really atrocious practice with my passwords. I had some four-character passwords on some services which allowed it, so I had a very...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** 1234? \[laughter\]
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** No, a little bit more complicated. It was alphanumeric at least, but still four characters... Pretty bad.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Pretty bad...
+
+3:\[11:50\] And I eventually got talked into using a password manager by somebody much more wise than me. I started using KeePass, because I was cheap and didn't wanna pay for other services, so... I quickly discovered how much I hated the experience of using KeePass, and how broken the interface was, and how lacking the cross-platform support was in terms of like a unified experience, and also the complete lack of syncing... Syncing my credentials between devices was absent there, so that was a problem. And then, obviously, I looked towards the competition and didn't find a whole lot which I love back then.
+
+I felt this immense interest in the whole security aspect and the syncing aspect, and kind of fixing all of these loopholes... Doing all that, and then getting something for free. And of course, it's not free - it's my time - but it's kind of like a work of passion, and then kind of providing that for other people, actually, so they can go and get this application without all the fuss which I was going through to find something. So it's definitely to fill a personal need, Buttercup. It was kind of like my first big footprint in open source, which I wanted to get behind, and it's grown a lot since.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What's impressive to me about it when I came across it - first of all, buttercup.pw. Of course, it's in the show notes for those who wanna check it out while we talk... But the UI looks very nice. The breadth of the work that you all have done... There's a desktop client which is cross-platform, there's the mobile clients, there's the browser extensions... It just seems like there's a lot of work to do, and that has already been done, in order to compete in a place where, like you said, you wanna be synced across your devices, you don't wanna have just access here, or just access there. A huge undertaking. I know you haven't done it alone, but the other thing that impressed me is it seems like it's pretty much a team of two... Maybe you wanna tell us about the team besides yourself, Perry, and then how that's grown over the years.
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** Yeah, sure. My colleague, Sallar - he's been obviously just a fundamental part of the whole process. I couldn't have done this without him and his motivation, his personality. I think that when you find the right people to work with, you'll know that it's key to getting any project off the ground.
+
+We met when I moved to Finland. We both worked in the same ad tech job. Not super-interesting, but pretty technical. We got to know each other, and we got to know that we both enjoyed writing open source software. We spoke about the whole password manager situation, and he agreed, and... Yeah, we pretty much just got off the ground then; we started kind of throwing things around in Node.js and playing with the project there, and kind of fell in love with crypto and kind of building projects around that.
+
+The first project to come out of that was the desktop application, with Electron and React. It was a huge amount of fun to build that. A completely new experience... Back then it was still a little bit broken, a little bit rickety; it wasn't completely solid, it wasn't super-friendly to build in, but it got things done and we were able to very quickly produce a cross-platform application... And yeah, it just spiraled from there. After that, we just became insatiated with that and went on to the mobile app, and then the browser extension.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Let's talk about the core... I think the integration points are interesting. I think talking about how you integrate into the operating systems is so important for these types of applications. One of the reasons why I didn't use 1Password back in the day, Adam, was because the integration into the operating system was just not there. And that's not 1Password's fault, it was really Apple's fault in the case of iOS, where they weren't providing the hooks into the OS in order for that experience to be integrated... So it was always one extra step, it was always fighting with my convenience. And I already had, like I said, this system in my head of doing these passwords, so I was just kind of limping along with a semi-good password system... Because I hated the fact that I would have to leave Safari to go to 1Password to get the thing, and then get back into Safari.
+
+A lot of that has been smoothed over in recent releases... At least on the iOS side, and I'm not very familiar with the Android side. I'd love to talk, maybe down the road in this conversation, about those integrations, Perry, and how you work into macOS and how you work into Windows to make that feel seamless... Because it really needs to be part of the core of what you're doing on your devices.
+
+\[16:17\] Let's talk about how Buttercup works internally. You said you've gotten very much into crypto... I have no idea how these things work. I assume you have some sort of secure vault that you're just encrypting based on this master password, but I wouldn't go any further than that. How do you build Buttercup from the inside out?
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** Essentially, in memory, Buttercup is just basically an object store; it's just storing obviously all your entries in there, all your usernames and passwords, so essentially it's just plain text when it's in memory... Obviously, protected by the operating system at that point, but while it's open, it's mostly plain text. When it's closed, obviously all that is wiped, but what's being written to disk is actually a delta, so a list of history of your vault. So what happens is every time you change a password, every time you move it in the vault, you change a username, or something like that. So if you're updating credentials, this is very important.
+
+The deltas are kept in text format. A huge list of all the previous changes, probably a few thousand entries over some significant amount of time. That's encrypted using AES and CBC modes, so it's just a really basic, but still extremely strong encryption, which I would assume most password managers use, or should be using... At least the big ones do. LastPass and 1Password probably use the same technique.
+
+So we encrypt that, and we also compress it, so we gzip it as well. We try to make the file as small as possible. On top of that, we're obviously running key derivations, so obviously your password isn't directly used to encrypt the content. We go through a process of deriving encryption key from that, and that's where the security really comes in, because obviously if people are trying to attack your vault, they're trying to gain access to it, so usually they're brute-forcing it, or they have some sort of table of most commonly used passwords, things like this... So basically, when they're attempting to break your vault, they're usually trying to brute-force it, and that's where they key derivation comes in; we use 250,000, maybe 300,000 rounds of key derivation iterations before we actually use the resulting key to encrypt the archive. That's basically to prevent ultra-fast brute force attacks.
+
+These are all pretty standard techniques, but what they result in is an industry standard (if not better), very strong technique to store the contents of the vault, in a text format, essentially.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay. So when I enter my master password in order to decrypt my vault and gain access to the password stored in, you're not hashing that; you're going through this derivation process... Is that right?
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** Yes.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Is that when it happens - when I enter it, you go 300,000 times in order to get to what is eventually the hashed password?
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** Exactly. And there's also various other values which are stored with the vault, such as a HMAC, which is authentication... It's basically to ensure that the vault hasn't been tampered with, which is another common crypto technique. So after your password is hashed, we also derive this HMAC, which is just another type of key, and we compare the two, and basically make sure that the vault hasn't been tampered with - there's no modification to the data before that payload is decrypted. There's a number of techniques we use there just to make sure that the vault is clear, not corrupted, not modified... And then, of course, we attempt to decrypt it. If the password is wrong, the decryption will fail, of course, but not after taking a substantial amount of time to derive the key... So obviously, you have to wait x hundred milliseconds for the key to be derived, which should hopefully prevent a huge, large number of attacks per second.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. It's always fascinating to me the desire for slowness. It's like the opposite of all other computation, right? We talk about cryptographic algorithms and which ones work well - most of the time you're going for speed, right? Like, "How can I get this encrypted/decrypted fast enough?" But in these cases, you actually want it to go slow enough that it's computationally expensive to brute-force. That's always interesting...
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** \[20:18\] Yeah, it's a really fine line to walk... It's like, how slow do you make it before it actually gets annoying? And I think that we've skirted that a long time. It's been a huge challenge for us, because if you take your MacBook, for instance - it decrypts and encrypts insanely fast. It's ridiculous. So us using 250k or 300k key derivation rounds is actually quite low; it's recommended to be a bit higher. But the second you take that process and you try to run the same process on a phone, especially an Android phone from maybe 5-10 years ago, it's horribly slow, and the user experience is just not there at all... So you have to be considerate, but you also have to make sure that you don't just drop it down to an unreasonably insecure number... So it's a bit of a challenge.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Not only that, but now you have -- I don't know how this fits into derivation, but you have face ID, or touch ID, or different ID types aside from the password. So you've once authenticated to it, and now you get your face as part of the encryption process, which is a whole different thing; I'm sure that's at the iOS level, which we were talking about, Jerod, the integration level and making that more and more seamless... Which 1Password has done pretty well, on that front at least, with face ID recently; I've just started to use that. How does that key part fit into this derivation process? Is that one more layer you have to add support for, is that on the roadmap? Where are you at with that? How does that fit in?
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** It's actually already done. I mean, not for desktop yet, but we have the face ID and touch ID working on the mobile app. So after you've logged into your vault for the first time using your encrypted password, you can immediately turn on touch or face ID, depending on the device. What that does is it basically stores your master key in an encrypted format, which is managed by the OS; so it's not OS-level things. At that point, iOS or Android is responsible for storing that, to the best of its ability.
+
+So you have to have some level of trust to each step, depending on what you wanna do here, but of course, people obviously store their entire lives on their phones, so I think that it's a reasonable expectation to use something like touch ID or face ID, for convenience, at least.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It makes sense. You definitely have to hand over some trust. As you were talking through all this, I was thinking "Geez, should he be sharing exactly how they do things? Because somebody could reverse-engineer this, and..."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's all open source, bro...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, yeah, of course, I guess so, but you'd have to dig. So you'd have to even be--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Perry, how hard do you have to dig to get at your guys' algorithms for this stuff?
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** If you know what you're looking at, it's right in front of you, really. It's like the front page...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Is that right...?
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** Yeah... And the thing is it's not -- people have raised that point over and over and over for us, like "Oh, open source - isn't that gonna make it more insecure?" and actually kind of the opposite intention we're having, trying to make it more secure. I enjoy crypto. I'm definitely not a professional by any measure; I probably wouldn't say I'm a hobbyist, but somewhere in the middle, basically... And this is where it comes in, is that I can't put all these people's trust in just myself or my colleagues. It has to be a bit bigger than that. And that comes back to the open source discussion - it's for everybody to look at, and for everybody to critique and modify and improve.
+
+Obviously, we were very comfortable with what we first released in terms of being secure, but the intention is to kind of like make it better, and use as little home-grown crypto as possible and use as much as the operating systems we're building on's supply. We're trying just to be very smart with that critical part, because you only get one attempt at building a secure system like this. Maybe some of the big password vendors - such as LastPass, they've had a couple of successful hack attempts... I think that they've obviously still pulled through, but normally those things are incredibly damaging, so we need to make sure that we have our ducks in a row when it comes to the crypto.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** How do you mean you only have one attempt to getting it right?
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** \[24:08\] I've got a bit of a pessimistic view on the whole data breach thing. I think it's extremely damaging brand-wise, especially for someone like us, where we're starting out... The crypto and the security measures there are definitely a primary concern for us, just making sure that's all put together properly.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** In line of that, did you have any concerns with choosing Electron and JavaScript as platforms with regard to this, because of a lot of the transitive dependency problems that we've seen? I'm seeing that at least your Buttercup core is packaged JSON, and your dependencies here are very small, so that's great... Obviously, more dev dependencies that runtime dependencies, but I assume once you get to Buttercup desktop, this list is probably going to balloon. Are your concerns with regards to using third-party packages, or is it more about using the right crypto algorithms and not rolling your own crypto?
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** That's an extremely good question. I think there's definitely a bit of concern on the table with the dependencies. Just today I got a message right before this, that there was another dependency injection farce that appeared on npm, some event stream library, which had had some malicious code injected into the minified source. This happens all the time, and it is quite scary, but from what I've seen, it normally happens due to the fact that whoever is the author of the package has normally done something quite questionable, and normally handed over the ownership of the package to somebody else, or used terrible security practices, or something like that... So at least from what I've seen, it's been normal carelessness.
+
+I have a bit more faith in the larger packages such as React, where it's a very strong community and a review-based progression model there. So I think that for the most part, f we stick to the core UI libraries and don't haphazardly install, you know, time saver dependencies, I think that we'll be mostly okay there... But it is a constant concern, and I would ideally like to reduce the list of dependencies down to something very manageable, something which is just bare bones and just what we need. At some point it'll just become overkill, of course, because... \[laughter\] You know, you can't make it perfect. At some point you have to use somebody else's software - you have to use Electron, you have to use React.
+
+I think that you can get it to a point where it's of little to no concern, but it's the same thing as "Is the computer you're running on secure? Have you installed something which is questionable? Are you on Windows and did your mom or somebody else install some questionable package from the internet the day before?" All of these things are going to increase the chances of your computer being hijacked, your passwords being stolen, your secure information being tampered with.
+
+I think you have to draw the line somewhere, but both the dependency model and everything else is definitely a concern for us. Easy with the core, but with Electron - obviously, it's gonna explode; you need a lot to get off the ground with that these days, so...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, exactly. The reason I thought that - first of all, it was also because of that, I don't know if it's a zero-day, that specific vulnerability that was pointed out with regard to an npm module that was snuck on the npm and propagated down... The difficulty with that - and I agree it's often the case, and in this particular case it was the main maintainer of the package gave contributor access to somebody who then pulled in another dependency which had this issue. These things are very difficult to manage, because you may not even be the maintainer of the project; it can be a maintainer of a dependency of yours, or maybe even a dependency of a dependency that was lazy or that was malicious. So these things are very difficult. That's one of the reasons why I thought of it.
+
+\[28:09\] The other reason is because we've just recently interviewed Brian Bondy, who's the CTO of Brave, and they were maintaining their own fork of Electron. Brave is a web browser built on Electron, and they were maintaining their own fork of Electron, with specific security patches against Chromium that the Electron people weren't as interested or motivated to keep up to date because of the way Electron is supposed to be used; it's not necessarily built to be a browser platform. They had security concerns there, and I was thinking "Well, what about Electron in the context of a password manager?" Certainly password managers now have been exposed to as broad a swathe of potential attacks as a web browser is, but nonetheless, these are most definitely things that you are probably thinking about, since security is so important to you.
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** Absolutely, yeah. Electron is actually probably the worst for us. Obviously, we have the browser extension which is all browser-based, so that's also concerning, but I would say that the desktop is probably the most concerning, because you're right, it's pretty much a full-blown browser when you look at it... So that's a bit tricky for us, but we do bundle everything when we release, which is very important for us, so there's a very small amount of dependencies which are installed when you actually install the application... So what we're actually releasing should stay relatively - well, mostly - untouched before it gets to the end user.
+
+There are a couple of low-level dependencies which actually need to be installed on the host operating system to actually work, because they have OS-level bindings, C-level bindings, stuff like that. However, everything else, such as the UI libraries, all other helpers, the Buttercup core, stuff like these - these are all bundled with the application. These are not modified after you install them, so they don't have a chance to download something else, fetch malicious code... And we have - I would say - quite a strong review process. We check, obviously, the network access, we manage all the requests before each release, so... I mean, this will improve, obviously, when we flesh out a bit more of a larger team, that we can actually use to quality-assure the product we're releasing, but all in all I would say that I feel quite confident that the built product coming out on the desktop is still not changing so much when the user is installing it... So I would say the risk there is much more reduced based upon just the fact that we package everything before we release.
+
+**Break:** \[30:43\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I guess the next layer of security is "Am I installing something that is, in fact, secure?" and then you kind of go back to this idea of reproducible builds, which is essentially the concept of "You build it once, and you give me a binary, and I can confirm that binary relates back to its original source." Then, obviously, once it's running, you have runtime concerns, but where are you at with reproducible builds in that security level?
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** This is something that w obviously care about; it's not just from a security point -- I mean, that's the most important, but obviously, from a stability point, having reproducible builds is very important. Having a whole lot of things which change dynamically on install time is generally not super-nice to debug and play with... So yeah, this is something which is important for us, and Electron has a really great system here.
+
+Obviously, it has a whole lot of bundling support, so you can bundle everything using Webpack or whatever you want beforehand, which we do... So that creates static files, for the most part, which is great, because then they don't change. They're what we run, and what we test, and then what we release, and then ultimately what we sign as well... So that's all well and good. And then, obviously, there are still a couple of low-level OS integrations which need to be installed, file system connections, things that Electron has which patch into the OS to give the look and feel of a native application.
+
+These things we can't avoid, we obviously can't bundle, so unfortunately they need to be installed at install time. But we can kind of obviously restrict the semantic versioning there and be quite strict with the versions that we're installing, so at least if we're locking to a particular version on npm, then that should be the same code that everybody gets. Obviously, again, the trust is moved elsewhere - it's moved to npm, it's moved to the fact that they can run a secure firm there. The buck has to stop somewhere, of course.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Random, somewhat related question... I'm just wondering about Electron, because there is so much pulled in - now that we're talking about dependency management, there's so much there... What was the original reason for Electron? Was it because you know web technologies and you wanna go cross-platform? That's what I assume would be why you selected it, but why not write every line of UI from scratch, right? Why not remove that dependency?
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** Yeah, true. I actually started my development career, my hobbyist interest in development actually with QBasic, and very quickly moved on to things like Pascal and Delphi, and did a lot of raw interface development there... And I can see the value behind it, because it's so easy to get off the ground and build very powerful applications, and it's got native performance, which is something which I really value... It's the whole stinging feeling of using a web-based application when you can kind of tell it's not quite as responsive as you would hope... So that's a crucial point for me.
+
+But at the same time, after all of that, I'm left with the Windows application, which can run on a couple of versions of Windows and nowhere else. And of course, there are other cross-platform systems which allow you to build cross-platform native applications, but I've seen so many of them and they don't really look super-good. We wanted something which looked beautiful, worked really well, and was obviously less work for us, because there's only two of us -- or only two of us working full-time. Obviously, we have a lot of really great contributors, but at that point in time it was important that we could get it done and get it done quickly, and then have a lot of code reuse... And then, most importantly, a UI which is uniform across the operating systems.
+
+We've got three operating systems for the price of one, minus the bugs, of course, and the quirks with the UI... But apart from that, it was super-easy to get off the ground, and Electron was really coming into its prime then, so for us it was an obvious choice. And both of us were React developers, so it just made sense to kind of couple all of that UI work that we were playing with with Electron, so... It worked really well.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So if the Electron team is listening, what could they do to make your job easier from a security front?
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** \[35:57\] I think that having as much eyes on the security aspects in the regular updates... Because obviously, Electron uses Chromium under the hood, and being as up to date with the actual base there, the upstream is so super-important... Because obviously, the funding levels are a little bit different; the effort going into each is a little bit different, obviously... The interest and directions, like you mentioned earlier, are a little bit different, but ideally, security should come first. It's so important in the browser landscape to have something which is secure, and this comes back to the runtime security as well. It's like, "Do I trust Chrome to be secure in terms of runtime attacks, and stuff like that?" Yes, for the most part I would trust it to be quite secure, but it's never going to be perfect... But it's so important that -- there are so many applications now being based upon this platform that it's more important than it's ever been that it's more secure. It's not just a browser anymore, it's the base for a huge swathe of applications, and obviously now password managers... So yeah, we're very interested in the development cycle being kept very tight.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Is there a case where you would ever move away from Electron if they -- or is this just good enough for now, where it gets you to a certain point because you're a smaller team, or...? We'll have more to talk about later, but your pre-funding, or your revenue at this point, or you've got some sort of service ideas or business around this to sustain it in the long-term, but... Is this good enough for now, where you eventually think "We should probably build most of this on our own" after a certain point?
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** Super-good question. That also relates strongly to the mobile application, which is built in React Native. It's very much related to this topic, so... I think that, yeah -- would we build them native if we had the had the resources in mobile? Absolutely, yes. I'm done with React Native. It's a beautiful system to get off the ground, it's a lot of fun to work with in the beginning, but to maintain over the long-term it's been a huge pain in our neck, especially with crypto... And I'll get to that later.
+
+In terms of Electron - Electron has treated those really well, and it's been very enjoyable, but I think that if we had the development resources, I think that we would definitely strongly consider building native, obviously, to reduce security risk... And also to reduce package size, because right now our installer is around 55 MB. It's gigantic for what it does, and obviously that's because you're packaging a whole web browser and Node.js with it, so... If you could get rid of that issue there, you'd end up with a faster, smaller, more secure application... But obviously, that involves a lot more work than we're capable of putting in right now, before we actually get funding and be able to work in this full-time.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** This is probably a crazy idea, and it's probably also a bad idea, but there's so many Electron-based applications running on any given machine on a regular basis... It's almost like you should have a dynamic-linked library that is Electron -- or like a single instance of Chromium, or something, that all these Electron apps would be running against that shared memory... That's probably pretty stupid, right?
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** I think for most applications it probably would be okay, but then the emphasis is on how much security is actually--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, it's worse for security, but it's better for user experience memory...
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** Yeah, and especially with shared memory. The second there's any vulnerability, then you've just opened the doors for an attack factor there. And of course, if you explain that process to people, they're only gonna criticize Electron more than they are already today, so...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah...
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** I think that for the small increase in performance it's probably not worth the bad publicity, I would say.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I was thinking the same thing, Jerod. I was like, "That's not a very smart way to \[unintelligible 00:39:40.24\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You were smart enough not to say it out loud though... \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I was thinking that though, because I was like, "Well, that's the case... If you can remove Node.js and if you can remove Chromium, but if you had a trusted local source..." But then that only makes it more and more niche, right? That's not gonna be everybody.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, right...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[39:57\] Like, not everybody's gonna do that, even if you can.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You'd have to have a full build, and then a linked build.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Like I said, it's probably a bad idea, but I thought I'd throw it out there... Because I was just trying to solve this problem, and it seems so silly that you get this new application, and because of the same reasons that you picked, Perry - they wanted to be cross-platform, they understood web technologies, they wanted these things that were so easy... A lot of people are building Electron apps, and as an end user, I don't care so much about cross-platform, as long as it's in my platform, which is the same for everybody, right? But on my platform I just do not want to have a new Chrome instance for every single app that I'm running, and I all this memory bloat and stuff just seems like overkill, so I'm just trying to come up with ways of solving it...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...for you. \[laughs\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, just for me, but yeah...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I know, I'm just joking, because it makes sense to be selfish in that way. We talk about this in Apple Nerds all the time - certain applications just blowing up the RAM, or blowing up the CPU... And this is why, because you have multiple builds, or whatever... Or just basically waste chillin' there, and... You know, we're particular.
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** Yeah, of course. That's a big concern of ours, as well. I think that both of us are very perfectionist in terms of getting the best out of it we can, and obviously sometimes to our fault of not being able to release things fast enough; we'd like it to be as perfect as possible, and one pain point as such is definitely the UI. We feel like we love the look of it and love how it responds, but in terms of the resource usage, it's a huge pain. That would be something which would be great to get rid of, but at the same time, having this unified deployment and build process and everything means that we can also release fixes and updates much quicker. It's maybe like half a day to get a brand new feature in, all cleaned up and released, instead of spending a couple days on one OS, and then going across to Mac and Linux and doing the same build process, which would be a huge pain.
+
+You really need a team to do that simultaneously, especially in terms of security of releases, and stuff like that... You can't afford to have a long release cycle at this early stage. Electron has kind of helped us with that, but I can see that we might outgrow it at some point, but at the same time I can see Electron improving by leaps and bounds in the not so distant future... So I'm optimistic that it will get smaller and faster and lighter and more secure all the time, but of course, that's just a pipe dream at this point, so...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So if you had your rathers you'd rather, as you just said, rather than move on to native builds for each...
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** Yeah, I definitely prefer the process. Like you said, I'm a web developer, so for me it makes a lot of sense. We kind of started this whole project as like a JavaScript project. It was the JavaScript password manager... Kind of like really embracing the community there, so everything is built with JavaScript, bar the mobile application's crypto stuff, because we actually released the first version of the mobile app with the Crypto Browserify library, so basically the Node.js compiled crypto libraries, which were gigantic... And they were terribly slow on mobile, didn't work very well, crashed on a lot of devices... So we basically rewrote those in native Objective-C and Java, and built a bridge across to the app to use those.
+
+That was a great thing, because the speed increased, and the size of the app went down. But that's also a huge pain to maintain. Every time we find something we wanna add in terms of crypto support, we have to do the JavaScript modifications - a lot of painful testing on the React Native - and then we have to do the native code in Objective-C and Java, and obviously do tests for that as well, so... It's a huge development process when we have to manage those native builds.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Are you actually writing those crypto libraries, or are you importing and statically linking them?
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** Yeah, so we were using the built-in crypto stuff in Objective-C that Apple provides, and the same in Java, that Android provides... And we've just recently actually moved across to Rust; so we've removed all of that, and now the crypto library is built into Rust, and it's the same one which is deployed to both Android and iOS. But that is using Rust's core crypto library, so again, nothing that we've rolled our own; it comes with the base system. We're very confident that we're using the best and the safest there, but now we're back to having one build for multiple devices, so it's a little bit nicer to work with.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[44:21\] And from React Native - let's talk about them a little bit, because you're frustrated with React Native, and it sounds like a lot of that is because of running the JavaScript-based crypto stuff on phones... But it sounds like it's providing you at least the ability to call into that Rust code or the compiled output of the Rust code to do these low-level things in kind of a cross-platform fashion. Tell us about your experience, maybe some of the reasons that you are frustrated with that platform... Without just trashing people. \[laughter\]
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** No... Actually, to be honest, I love React Native. It's been a fantastic experience, and I really feel it's still somewhat unrivaled across the other development environments for mobile. I've worked with Titanium, and a little bit of Ionic, and PhoneGap, and Cordova... I played with all of them, and just the infrastructure was not there. React Native offered a familiar interface, obviously, through React-style building of components, and that really appealed to me, and I gave it a bit of a go and it worked amazingly well immediately, on both platforms... And we just thought "Hey, this would be a great way to start." That felt like a really good idea up until we had to do the crypto stuff. Then we realized our mistake. But at that point we just kind of said "Okay, there's no way around this. At some point, the crypto is very performance and security-heavy, so it needs to be native in most cases", so we just bit the bullet and built that natively.
+
+I think that the biggest pain point for React Native is just the debuggability. Sometimes it gets you into a position where you've got some really gnarly transpiled and minified code running, which you're debugging on a virtual phone on your computer, which is using all of your memory and CPU... It just gets to the point where it's' like "Why am I doing this this way?" It just feels very counter-intuitive, but... Either walk away from it and have a think, and come back to it and then it's okay, or you delete all of the work that you did over the past day and start again, but... We've gotten through with the mobile device and we have something which we're quite proud of, but I think that would be the first thing that we would rebuild in separate native applications, had we the time...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** One small statistic which maybe is an outlier or a red herring, which you can speak to, is Buttercup desktop has 42 contributors - that's the Electron-based app - whereas Buttercup Mobile has just three contributors... Speaking of code contributions, realizing that there are many other contributions besides code, but maybe this shows the difficulty of working with React Native, or maybe just the learning curve. I'm sure two of those three are yourself and Sallar, so just one third-party contributor on that one? Maybe the age of the repo also plays a factor, but has there just been less community focus on that application?
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** It really has. We've tried to stir up focus on it. We've had some bounty source items open on the mobile application, we've had lots of outreach on Twitter trying to get help with it, and... Yeah, very little feedback. Not for lack of trying, but there's just been so little interest. If you look at our users as well, right now, we have 350,000 downloads on the desktop application, which includes some updates of course, but that's probably our biggest number of active users, coming through the desktop application. Then comparatively to the mobile application, maybe we have just a few thousand, compared to that, so... It's a much smaller interest group to start with.
+
+But at the same time, I just think that the reward in developing in React Native is just not there. Everyone I know around me that uses React Native is doing it for work; they're getting paid, their salary comes from their work on React Native... Whereas so many people I know that work with Electron, they're doing it for hobby projects and really enjoying it... And I love it as well.
+
+\[48:10\] I feel like it's just a very different environment, and I think it's such a steep learning curve in terms of actually getting everything to work, getting all the libraries installed, getting the perfect environment, getting Xcode to a point where it doesn't want to update when you open it... Yeah, it's a huge lot of work to get that working, whereas Electron is very much just plug-and-play; you install everything and you run it and you have a working application. So yeah, it's vastly different, and that does show in our contributions. It's much harder for us to get the mobile application to a point where we're as happy with it as the desktop applications.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Jerod mentioned some concerns really about integrations. That's always been a stickler for him in terms of like user experience, and even using a password manager in the first place. What are the gotchas on mobile around the experience in terms of integration? I know with iOS you have the up arrow that lets you choose other services when you're on like a password login page, which -- I'm not sure that's a standard or not, or if it's because I have 1Password installed, but that key icon that lets you then choose or launch something I believe it's just 1Password; I could be wrong, but... Maybe you can walk us through some of the UX concerns you may or may not have around mobile for you.
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** Yeah, that's a good point. If you're talking about the key, I believe it is at some point an iOS-level feature. In iOS 12 they have the new password manager integration, which is really funny for Apple to do, because for them to acknowledge the password manager community as something which needs a direct integration like that is actually really cool.
+
+So yeah, obviously you can integrate with that, and you need to build it into the application, which we haven't done yet, because it requires some low-level native code to do that integration, which is still beyond us at the moment; so that's kind of in-progress, but we haven't released it yet... But that's obviously very helpful, and that bridges a huge gap in terms of usability, because you don't wanna switch applications, like you said earlier; you wanna just have it at your fingertip. This is where 1Password is really pushing things forward here, because to my knowledge, they were the first ones that announced the integration. So yeah, that's definitely where we wanna be, as well.
+
+Those are very tricky, because these are things that React Native will never be able to do, in my opinion. I just don't think it's gonna be a focus for the community to build. It requires a lot of low-level native integration, and testing, and making sure it works... It's not available in every iOS version, so it's gonna be something which you need to write the Swift or Objective-C code to get working, so... That's a bit tricky there, but it's still a very important point for a password manager to be usable in terms of having the connection from the interface that you're currently looking at logging into.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I don't really mind app-switching. I mean, I guess I'm less a Jerod and more an Adam in this case, because I would actually deal with the security over convenience factor... Although I can remember a day when -- I've been a 1Password user for a very long time, so that's my perspective I'm speaking from; not so much keeping to marketing them, but there was a day when that integration wasn't there, and I would app switch from my login screen or the app login screen back to this thing, and copy the password and remember the username, and immediately type in one piece, but then paste the other...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Ugh...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[laughs\] See, that's turning Jerod's stomach, he almost threw up in his mic right there...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] I swallowed it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I mean, I was okay with that, but it sounds like what you just said was that you would have to move away from React Native to get that kind of feature set.
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** Well, no... I mean, we could do the same thing with the crypto, basically... So you basically build the native integration in Objective-C or whatever the codebase is, and then you have to build another bridge to the React Native. So the JavaScript is calling an asynchronous bridge to the native code, and that becomes very fiddly, because testing that is pretty much impossible. It comes down to acceptance testing via the UI, and then maybe unit-testing either side separately, but... It's a huge pain to manage that, and debugging it is very painful, because you can't just write logs on the native code, so I don't expect to see them in your console.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[52:15\] This is why I thought eventually Apple would just buy the Goliath in this space... And maybe this is what's drawn me to it, but I could be wrong... But I've always speculated that Apple would eventually buy 1Password and just be done.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Just be done...
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** Yeah... I mean, of course, it's a huge target, and you're buying so much when you look at these companies - you're buying a huge expanse of users and operating systems and integrations, and I think that it would be quite a smart move... But at the same time, Apple also doesn't shy away from building things themselves and having fully-fleshed products, so it wouldn't surprise me if they went either way with that. It seems like they're already taking quite the route of doing things themselves with password management anyway, so...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I'll say 1Password is a power user tool, and it's for teams, and it's for advanced situations. Apple's iCloud Keychain stuff completely suits me as just a regular user that just wants my stuff -- my password is just there.
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** Yeah, you're right. Apple definitely looks more focused towards the end user, not so much the teamwork side of things.
+
+**Break:** \[53:29\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We're talking about mobile integration, and the main thing that you need on your mobile device, that you also want on your desktop, that you also want (I don't know) on your wristwatch, or wherever else you need passwords, is the same vault. You need that sync. This was one of the main things that I think you started off saying you wanted, Perry, so tell us about the sync story with Buttercup and how it works to get that vault propagating around.
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** Yeah, this was one of the points which actually got me started on Buttercup... Obviously, maybe KeePass wasn't the best decision for me to start with, but it was a great start - it was free, it has a lot of open source applications around it, so that was kind of my starting point, and I noticed that there was no syncing... I mean they have some sort of basic, really hard to set up web server which you can use to kind of sync your accounts, but just not very user-friendly there at all, so... That kind of propelled me into building Buttercup in a way which would be easily synchronized.
+
+Buttercup writes the vault files, like we spoke about earlier; they're just text, basically, so they're really easy to store and send, and very lightweight, while being secure... So I immediately thought, "Okay, where can I put this? Where can I put it where it's accessible everywhere?" And I happen to be running my own cloud server at home, which is called ownCloud, which is a fantastic, free, open source software... But obviously, not everybody does that, so immediately we also built a Dropbox connection as well.
+
+\[55:59\] Pretty much everybody knows Dropbox, it's a household name. It also happens to be free, and the fact that we're encrypting the content before we store it there kind of negates, in our opinion, any risks that might be associated to using a cloud service provider. Not all of them, of course... I mean, again, we're still trusting a vendor, but at the same time storing it on your own computer, storing it in your cloud server... Like, at least Dropbox has a team of professionals behind it, so that was an obvious choice for us.
+
+So we started with those two in terms of syncing the archive, and made it available via a web interface to all of our applications. It's very easy to load it up in each device, decrypt it, run it, save it, write it back to the host there.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So I'm feeling like a failure, Adam... As a Changelogger, I have never heard of ownCloud. How about yourself?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's a first for me, man. I'm with you.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We missed it, so maybe an upcoming episode on ownCloud. That's something you think is pretty cool, Perry?
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** Yeah, it's really cool. It's a PHP-based system. It has a couple derivatives also - NextCloud, which I wanna give a shout-out to... Those guys have been amazing, helping us with integrations. All of it is open source, it's as good, if not better, in my personal opinion, than some services similar to Dropbox, obviously because it's free, but it's also very fast. They have all the clients, mobile applications, and you pay nothing for it.
+
+Of course, you need to be relatively tech-savvy to set it up yourself, but other than that, these services are a lot of fun to work with, and can teach you a lot about cloud storage as a whole. And it just seemed like a natural start for us.
+
+We also added WebDev support, which many online web hosts support -- I'm not sure whether Amazon Drive does anymore, but many of these cloud services support WebDev, which is a great way to integrate with cloud storage, which we also support.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** At the beginning of the show, Adam, you were mentioning that you used 1Password with Dropbox support, and then you upgraded to some sort of paid version because you didn't enjoy the experience with Dropbox specifically... Buttercup, based on Dropbox, or ownCloud, or WebDev, but I'm curious what -- remind me, Adam, what the issue is with Dropbox, with your password sync?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I always had 2FA going on there. I obviously had some sort of crazy long password to get into Dropbox, because hey, it's Dropbox, right? I wouldn't want anybody in that thing, so my password--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You don't want a password to your Dropbox...?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. My password would be in 1Password, so to install it, I would have to read this super-long password from my phone, that did have access to 1Password, so that I can install Dropbox just to sync it... And then, of course, I would get tons of stuff in my Dropbox, so it's like "How do I prioritize what to sync to a brand new machine?"
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I see...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That whole song and dance just got more and more troubling, so I was like "You know what, I love Dropbox sync for most things, except for brand new machine installations", which was -- the first thing you're gonna install is gonna be your password manager, because you're doing lots of stuff.
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** Yeah, there's a lot of friction there, obviously, with logging in... I've done the same thing a couple times - log into the vault on my phone, and needing the password to the storage host that I'm storing it on, so I need my desktop computer and I need to open up the password there so I can kind of type it in my phone... That's kind of unavoidable, unfortunately... Unless, of course, you have a paid hosted account with whatever provider you're using, such as 1Password... But of course, we would like to still circumvent that somehow. We have some plans to release a secure QR code, which you can just scan on your mobile app. Basically, if you've got your computer nearby, you could instantly connect to the same vault and the same source just by scanning with your phone. That would alleviate some of the typing in of multiple passwords, and kind of getting that to your device.
+
+So we have some ways to get past it there, but ultimately, yeah, we'd wanna end up with a lot of people using our eventual hosted service, which would alleviate a lot of these self-storage issues with using providers like Dropbox and other ones.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:00:01.10\] From that perspective it sounds like - I'm assuming this, and I'm hoping you'll answer it, however you feel like it, of course - you're in this for the long haul, and we've had this great conversation about some really thoughtful stuff on how you've built up Buttercup... A lot of thought has gone into various layers of this, tons and tons of hours of your time have gone into this, and it seems like the next step past sync is this service, which could be the next step to some sort of long-term gain for you. What does that look like for you?
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** Yeah, I mean... This is still obviously a hobby for us, at some point, but we've gotten to the point now where we realize that we're extremely serious about what we've built, and the community has been super-supportive and really positive about what we've been providing so far, and a lot of people wanting to get in on it and use it, and we've received a lot of compliments... Already that's kind of fueled our desire to actually make something of this and keep it afloat, and as much as we enjoy leaving our day jobs and coming home and then spending several hours on Buttercup - which we will continue to do, of course, no matter what - I think that it would be great to make this a full-time thing and actually have a team behind it and see where this will go.
+
+We have plans to release a hosted service, hopefully sometime in the first half of next year, where we could host people's vaults online, similar to the other services. However, we're trying to create a really low barrier of entry for people, and we're intending to have a free hosted service for single, personal use vaults. So there won't be any charge to host your vault on the site, due to the fact that they're so super-small. And obviously, that's gonna be great for adoption, in our eyes, if it's not gonna cost anything... But we intend to also have a team-based cost model behind that, which will hopefully drive some sort of company which will support the development of Buttercup in the future, including the open source, of course.
+
+Our intention is to build a company behind it, and have that also support the open source community in whatever way we can... So it's just gonna make the whole project a much stronger entity.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Are you going that route because you think it's the great way to take the business the next step, or is that the preferred route to some sort of sustainable funding? Because there's other ways you can go about sustainability. I'm just curious if that's the route you chose to go because of some sort of grand vision in the future.
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** We've looked at other ways of funding this, and we've had a lot of talks with some great investors around Helsinki as well, and... I don't know, I think that we've chosen it because we would actually like to see it built into a company. It would be nice to have some full-time employees around and actually have some sort of process there.
+
+We've tried things like Open Collective, which has worked exceptionally well, but I just don't think it's going to scale to a level fast enough where we kind of need the growth the way we want it now. I think that getting some funding, getting us off the ground and actually getting some people which are building these things on a daily basis - I think we're gonna see some great growth, and we're gonna get away from all these pain points which we're seeing now, in terms of actually release times, and not being able to devote the full day of work to it. Once those things go away, I think that Buttercup is definitely gonna catch up and be someone to contend with.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Just to harken back to Open Collective - you have, from what I can tell, a $283 estimated today's balance. So you've got an annual budget of $285.
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** Yes.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I can see how that's not gonna scale to employees...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's not gonna do it.
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** \[01:03:42.16\] \[laughs\] Yeah. I mean, we also haven't spent anything on marketing really, so it's kind of hard to say right now where that would go... And people have been really supportive already doing that, but of course, if we want to hire a full-time developer, which would be the first place we'd probably wanna start... I mean, developers aren't cheap anywhere you look, so I think that having some high-level funding behind that is gonna be crucial to getting off the ground. If we had someone working even just full-time on Buttercup, that would be an immense help for us, pushing out new features and getting these low-level integrations in mobile devices, which are slowly needed... So yeah, I think that's the direction we're looking at taking at this point.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Just from an outsider's perspective - I'm not a domain expert on enterprise security, but it seems like having a hosted solution could potentially lend itself well to an enterprise play, wherein you could go on-premise... Because if you think about what an enterprise needs, or what plays well financially at the enterprise level, mission-critical things that are infrastructure and security-focused, where they'll wanna run it on their own networks and potentially pay a premium to have a self-hosted version on their own networks... Yeah, potentially some options there.
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** Yeah, for sure.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Definitely interesting potential future. What kind of service would it provide? What kind of features? Obviously, it's gonna be syncing without the need to have a Dropbox or an ownCloud, but are there team features, are there other things that you're thinking that will be offered, that Buttercup core or Buttercup non-hosted or self-hosted won't do?
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** The sharing thing is something we're gonna have to work on, because the way that we've built the vaults is quite complex... But we feel that the sharing aspect of things is gonna be fantastic for us to actually have as a paid feature, because I think it deserves that, of course. But at the same time, having like an array of vaults where it's just gonna seamlessly synchronize between users, being able to invite people easily, having your family in there, and then having the ability where people can modify the vault at the same time... But it's still, at the end of the day, stored in the one same spot, under the same encryption key, and I think our vault structure right now lends itself to being very easily merged.
+
+We have conflict management built into the core, which is gonna play very well for sharing, and also offline vaults as well. For instance, if you're on a plane or something, and you update a password or add an entry or something like that, then you go online and you want to merge your changes, these are things which need to be thought about, and I think that our structure actually lends itself quite well to that, and to the sharing aspect. And of course, there's also the benefit of encrypted media, such as maybe you have a photograph of your passport in your vault, or your driver's license, or something... These are things which we also need to consider storing securely.
+
+So yeah, there will be many features which we will release, both in the free, public, open source version, and obviously some to enrich the business side of things, but... Yeah, primarily it will be team-based, it will be hierarchical if that's what you choose in terms of your company structure, so different permissions for different vaults, maybe read access, stuff like that. There's a huge amount we could do there, but once we get off the ground and we have the free version released first, then we can look at what we want to do with the teams.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I did see a Notes field in one of your UI screen grabs; is there currently the ability to store additional metadata or non-passwords, maybe SSL certificates or API keys that aren't specifically passwords, and use those in different ways?
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** Not in a user-friendly way. We do support it, but we haven't updated the interface yet. That is currently in the works... But yeah, we have the intention to first store basic things, basic text files like SSH keys, but I think that one of the most request features which we have yet to release is the ability to store media like images and videos and documents... And that's very tricky, because we're trying to manage a very performant encryption process on mobile and different devices, and when you're encrypting media, you need to be obviously very careful how you transfer that around, and how we store that as well on a cloud service - do we bundle everything in one file, or do we split the media based upon what they stored? There's a lot of questions we have to answer there, and we need to choose wisely before we release that, just to make sure that we have the future in mind in terms of performance.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[01:08:07.17\] One thing that's cool is you guys have an open source roadmap repo, with an overview and all sorts of stuff in there, so you're very open with regards to where this is heading... But I'm just curious about, you know, as a side project that you work on at night, after you're done doing your 9-to-5 coding, how do you prioritize, how do you get motivation? What do you decide to work on on a Thursday night, after you've just finished work? Do you have a prioritized list of tasks and you're just working down them? Is it whatever you feel like...? Sometimes a side project is like "What do I feel like working on", right? Because it's about fun anyways. How do you make these decisions?
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** It's been the biggest learning process of this entire procedure really, just kind of figuring out what motivates me. This has been an amazing teacher in that regard, because until you undertake project anywhere near this size, you don't really realize what is a superkill joy for you and what actually kind of really gets you up in the morning... And the crypto thing kind of started it off, but you very quickly realize, "Oh, this isn't so fun. I don't really wanna come home and do this", so you work on something else.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's funny.
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** And I think that Buttercup has been a lot of that, actually. We kind of worked around the edges to start with, around the things that we love, and then at some point you have to build the meat of it to kind of get it going. It's been so much like Sallar and I kind of bouncing things off each other, picking each other up... If we didn't have each other to get through this, without us motivating each other and kind of getting us psyched about what we're building, it would be so much more difficult... But I think it's about who you surround yourself with, and then it's also the feedback loop you give yourself online, as well.
+
+When you're giving this to people and when you're talking about it online, you're setting yourself a realistic feedback loop for enjoyment; you're setting yourself realistic goals, not goals which are too far in the future, and kind of get the small things done, and then kind of take solace in the fact that "Hey, I've got this done. This is amazing." And doing that over and over and over again for days and days and days on end, until you actually have something that you want. It's just "make everything smaller" has been the key for us, and it worked, obviously, because we've gotten three large-scale applications out, and we would not have been able to do that if we set off day one wanting to build three large-scale applications. You have to start super-small and just keep building on the building blocks, and just keep focused, and try not to go off and start something new every day... That's been a huge battle for us.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Focus is key. We learned over the years just how important focus really is. It's pretty easy to be squirrel or shiny object-focused, I guess, which is sort of the anti-focus, but... Geez, being able to focus on one core thing for the day, or one or two primary things... I like to call them "What's my primary mission for today? What can I do today to make it successful?" and try to camp out there. Once I've gotten that done, it's like "Okay, now I can move on to more squirrel-based operations", where it's like "What's the most pressing or shiniest thing that I could do next, now that I've done my primary thing I had to do today to make today successful?"
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** And it also comes down to building something that you want to use, something you want to do. So many people say "Okay, you should probably find a market for what you're actually building if you really want it to be successful", but I'm the complete opposite - forget the market, pick something that you want to do, and then find the market later. Obviously, not really the right way to go about things in terms of business sense, but you're not gonna get it done if you don't really enjoy it. You have to love what you're doing to actually get there... So kind of pick what you're interested in first, and eventually you'll come to the point where you actually build something that you want to actually use.
+
+The day where we woke up and realized that "Hey, I'm actually using Buttercup as what I wanted it originally", probably a year later from when I actually set out doing it, was a woke moment for us. It's quite rewarding to get to that point already. And obviously, we've gone past that and we have bigger goals, but it still comes to the fact that every day I use the application which I started building, and I think that's such a rewarding experience, no matter how big or small that is.
+
+I think that if you can pick something which you want to use and something that you want to do, it's gonna mean success in some level of measure.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:12:15.18\] Let's tee things up for the audience that's listening, because I'm sure that there's at least 20,000 people psyched to hear this show, and hackers chomping at the bit to come and help if they can, so... You've got roadmaps, you've got goals, you've got your own focus so that you can focus yourself. Can you focus others? Maybe. I don't know, we'll see, but... How do you help on-ramp others to come in and help out? Is this a project that you're inviting others to come in and help, or is that primarily around security-related things? How can you invite the community to play a part, to ensure that Buttercup has a next step?
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** Yeah, I think that at least everybody who is at all interested in tech, and stuff like that... I mean, you use computers every day, you probably have hundreds of accounts, and this is something which affects all of us - how easy this process is going to be, of staying secure... And it should be enjoyable, I think, because it's something you do so often that it should be something which you don't think about, or something that you look at and go "Yes, that's how it should be. That's really nice." We want Buttercup to be that. We can all benefit from this process, so yeah, we really appreciate people jumping in and giving us their opinions, and redesigning things and saying "Oh, you could basically remove 3-4 clicks from this whole process." We would love that.
+
+There are so many things that we haven't thought of, and so many people which have had these really strong opinions over their entire time of using a password manager, which they bring to Buttercup, and it just blows our minds; it's just like "This is fantastic!" I think that Buttercup has a really low level where they can just jump in and give us their opinions and actually see them implemented quite quickly. There's probably not a huge amount of places where you can take these to actually have some real effect, but we're willing and waiting to get these great ideas and to move forward with them. I think that Buttercup is in the perfect position now to actually have all these things implemented and tidied up, and add all these cool features which are going to make it a pleasure to use.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I like too how you've got in your issues, at least for Buttercup core, where you've got Effort, Priority, Status and Type in terms of tags. And then obviously for the Effort you've got Low, Medium, High, and same thing for Priority - Low, Medium, High and Status being Available or Unavailable, or if it's Type, then Enhancement... We're only seeing Enhancement for Type, but that's interesting too, that you've made it a little easier to jump in there. A lot of these issues you and Sallar generated, or are they community-generated? What's the makeup of some of these issues and how do you drive people to the right issues and invite them in?
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** Yeah, that's been quite a big learning process for us, as well. Core is probably the oldest repo in Buttercup, so it's probably got the most mature label set out of all of them... And I would say that core has been probably mostly our internal issues - I mean, with a few contributors externally, but I would say that the desktop is the complete opposite; the majority of the issues are from the community, which has been really good... Their opinions, their discussions, their ideas coming from them; very few are actually ours, which is really good.
+
+So obviously, you can see a lot of people are using the desktop applications, saying "This is great, but..." and then making a couple of issues. We get a lot of PRs there. We have localization, working with tens of languages on the desktop, which we still need to integrate into the other ones, so obviously the second that we open up the localization, we have maybe like 5-10 PRs immediately for different languages... That was fantastic.
+
+So yeah, we're trying to basically make it easy for people to find it and get into these, and we've tried a couple times marking like "These are easy to start issues, if you haven't looked at Buttercup before."
+
+\[01:15:56.20\] We're on Spectrum, which is an amazing chat system which allows threaded discussions in a little bit of a faster manner. It's a little bit easier to use than GitHub, and easy to connect with, and the guys over at Spectrum have been giving us a pretty good rundown of how to use this system and kind of giving us a little publicity there... So we have several channels between Twitter, GitHub and Spectrum where we can actually help feed people into the right areas if they wanna help and share ideas...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We're coming close on the time, but I have one last question and a suggestion. We'll start with the question - the question is we haven't asked you about the name. Buttercup - what's Buttercup?
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** In 1987 my favorite movie was released, called The Princess Bride...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, my gosh...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yesssss...
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** Fantastic. I absolutely love the movie. Very, very special place in my heart. I watched it day in, day out, every day, for several years. Just a fantastic piece of film.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You're either a Pirate Roberts fan or a very romantic person... Which are you?
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** No, probably the former... I just think it really spoke to me. Actually, funnily enough, I was actually a huge fan of Cary Elwes at that point... And Mandy Patinkin, obviously. He just really stole that part... And obviously, André the Giant... I mean, the whole cast was just incredible, and the movie was amazingly, and definitely a very warm and happy movie. And because I was so fond, the name kind of came from there. Buttercup was obviously the name of Robin Wright's character. That just kind of really spoke to me, and the name stuck; it was unique, it sticks on the mind. It was kind of used jokingly at the start, but at the same time it just stuck, so yeah, Sallar was very accepting of it, and it just took off. So it started there, and it's got a pretty funny beginning.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, my gosh...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Great answer.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's the most amazing move ever. How André scaled that wall I will still never know...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Very easily...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Alright... So that's a good answer for the name then... So we'll close with a suggestion. You mentioned your distaste for marketing, at least in terms of choosing to code instead, or tackle a new focus or a new feature... One thing I would suggest is to create a list for those to join - or email, or something like that - so they can say "Hey, I'm kind of interested in your future sync platform that you plan to have", because 1) it will help you with marketing it really easily, and then 2) once you do get to it, you've got a nice base of people to say "Hey, we're open for business. Come check us out." Because I'm ready, I wanna add myself to that list, so this is kind of self-serving, but you know, we're on a podcast, so we might as well make it for everybody... But I'd like to add myself to a list that says "Hey, when Buttercup has My Buttercup up and running fully for syncing and hosted, or maybe even future team services, that I can check it out", because that's the key feature that I personally need.
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** Yeah, that's a fantastic idea, and I think that's definitely gonna be an important first step for us. We actually want to have a select group of users alpha-test the platform as well, so I think that that list would also play into that very well... So yeah, fantastic idea. I think that we'll definitely chase that one.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** There you go. Well, Perry, thank you so much for your time today, man. It's been a pleasure talking through this with you. Clearly, you're passionate about it. We also share in your passion for the desire for more secure, more performant applications like this. Thank you so much for sharing your time, and thank you for doing what you do. Thanks for coming on the show.
+
+**Perry Mitchell:** Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure, really.
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+**Jerod Santo:** Nader, you're a developer advocate for Amazon Web Services. I think developer advocate, at least for me, is kind of a new position, or it's a burgeoning position - we're starting to see them pop up all over the place. What does it mean to be a developer advocate for AWS? What's that all entail?
+
+**Nader Dabit:** Yeah, totally a burgeoning position. I'm starting to see -- I don't know if it's just because I'm now a developer advocate that I've noticed that everyone's Twitter profile says developer advocate now... Or if it's always been that way.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yes. Well, it's kind of interesting, because a lot of our engineering friends and colleagues and people that we talk to on the shows - they're all developer advocates now; a lot of them are moving into those positions... It's something that we're definitely noticing, and the question is how many can there possibly be...? Because at a certain point, you've gotta have some developers who aren't advocates.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Not enough, not enough... We need more developer advocates.
+
+**Nader Dabit:** I mean, you're right... So the position, I guess I can talk about for a little bit...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Sure.
+
+**Nader Dabit:** It's basically in my opinion kind of like a new form of marketing. I think traditional marketing has not been, of course, working with how the industry has been moving, because a lot of developers - I guess they can't appeal to the typical developer with the traditional marketing approach... So with the developer advocate - we have to understand how to not only build applications, but we have to understand how developers think, and I think the combination of us being developers as well as being out there, interacting with other developers, we provide a lot of value... Not only being able to talk about what we're working on, but to bring feedback back to the teams that are building the tooling that we're working on.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's kind of like a product manager as it is to the product, is developer advocate as it is to the software that gets created to be the product... That's kind of how I see that. Because you're sort of this middle person where you interface with end users, you have to provide some inroads and on-ramps, you have to give feedback to engineering teams, and even marketing in a lot of cases, or have a lot of relationships. You're sort of this liaison to all these different parts.
+
+**Nader Dabit:** \[04:06\] Yeah, I think that's a good way to look at it... And there's different types of this role I guess you could categorize as well. If you've seen people that are developer evangelists or even solutions architects in some of these bigger companies, they all kind of play a similar role... Similar, but different; with the developer advocate, we work closely with the engineering teams and the product and project managers, whereas the developer evangelists I feel like they kind of work closer with the broader sense of what's being worked on in the company, and maybe closer -- I would say that could typically be more of like a marketing role, but they're also doing a lot of conferences, and stuff.
+
+Then solutions architects would be people that are kind of working closely with customers, but they're also writing documentation and blog posts and bringing feedback back to the teams.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's interesting to see a distinction between advocate, evangelist and architect... Solutions architect, at least.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So what's dev rel then? The other one we hear is dev rel, like developer relations. Is that another name for the same thing, or is that a different thing altogether?
+
+**Nader Dabit:** Yeah, I think it's just another term for kind of -- you could maybe say a comprehensive dev rel is maybe the developer advocates and the developer evangelists... So that's just kind of like what dev rel is--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** An umbrella term.
+
+**Nader Dabit:** Yeah, and then in smaller companies dev rel might just be people that are doing all types of stuff, where they don't really differentiate between the two.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So we also see you as one of the four members of React Native Training. In fact, I saw that, and I saw you're the author of React Native in Action, and doing React Native Radio, and I thought you must be like a contractor with Amazon Web Services, because they seem to be doing a lot of stuff.
+
+AWS is like a full-time job for you, and these are all side-gigs, or how does your career lay out?
+
+**Nader Dabit:** Yeah, so before I started with AWS I was working as one of the founders (I guess I should say) of React Native Training, and we were doing consulting as well as training, but we were working with a lot of Fortune 500 companies and startups, or just companies in general... But Amazon was one of our clients, and we would go on-site and just have workshops with their engineers, showing them how to get up and running with React Native as quickly as possible.
+
+So when I started with AWS, they allowed me to kind of continue my role there as kind of just part of the team, but not really doing any training on-site or anything like that anymore... So I'm kind of more just helping manage the blogs and the content creation and the lead generation there part-time, and then really full-time I'm with AWS. And I'm big into React Native, if you haven't noticed.
+
+I did a podcast, but it's more of like a personal thing. The book, of course, is kind of just a book, so it doesn't really have anything to do with them... And then just being involved in the community in general is something that I do on the side.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So AWS has long been the darling of cloud, the first in many ways, and therefore kind of the de facto STDIN the developer community, and yet in terms of open source and really what I would call developer relations (from my particular vantage point now; this is probably not a globalized view) it seems like Amazon has historically been -- I wouldn't say stand-offish, but just less warm to kind of the indie, open source, small business developers... Is that something that is just a misconception, or do you think that that's perhaps historically true and changing? What's your vantage point on that particular culture.
+
+**Nader Dabit:** \[07:45\] Yeah, it's definitely something I've heard before, and after kind of getting involved at AWS and seeing what's going on and what actually happens, I think the culture at AWS and Amazon in general is different in the sense that you don't see a lot of our developers going on Twitter and talking about "Hey, I just contributed to this project or I've built this project", but in reality, because I think the culture is a little more -- we just do stuff and we try not to go around, you know, I wouldn't say bragging about it, but... The culture is a little different. But in reality, a lot of the people at AWS contribute to open source. For instance, we've contributed to MySQL, Linux, Apache, Hadoop, Apache's Tomcat...
+
+We've contributed back to a lot of the other projects that we've used, and then we've even created our own projects and they're open source as well... Things like Apache MXNet blocks, AWS Amplify, which we'll probably talk about in a little bit... We have a few dozen projects that we've created as well, and then we have a bunch of repos that are kind of like sample projects that are kind of more aimed at showing people how to use our stuff, so they're a little more self-serving; I wouldn't say they're open source in the sense like we're creating something for anyone to use in those projects, but we do have those types of projects as well.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's interesting you say that, because -- I can't remember who coined the phrase or the idea of how to be successful on the internet, but the general advice is do cool things and then tell people about it.
+
+**Nader Dabit:** Exactly! And it works, it's actually true.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's actually true. And the second part is just as important as the first, which is why people who are good at talking about what they do are often more successful on the internet... Because you have to tell people what you're doing, and yet for some of us it's very difficult, it feels boastful, and we are just naturally not going to go out there and tell people. But if you don't do that, nobody knows, and there's not success to be had.
+
+So in certain ways, it sounds like - at least what you're saying there is AWS has been doing open source things but not necessarily telling people about it, so maybe that's why that stigma was attached for a while.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Is that an instructive thing, or is that just something that doesn't happen? Is someone at AWS saying "Hey, we'll do cool stuff, but just don't tell anybody about it."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Nader Dabit:** No, there's none of that, but it's just kind of like... I guess once you start working in the culture, you just kind of go along sometimes what other people are doing... But I guess that's where I'm a little different. You'll see me on Twitter saying "Hey, I've built this. I'm awesome. Come look at it." I'm not as humble as some of the people I work with... But I think maybe the tradeoff is I'm not as smart as those people, so I'm kind of like trying to find a way to compensate for that.
+
+But the point that you've made earlier is pretty interesting. I saw a tweet by David Brunelle - he works with Starbucks - and he basically was talking about what you've just said; his tweet, the general gist of it was something about the most talented and the better engineers that he's known aren't the people that are out there speaking at conferences and writing blog posts and stuff like that, because they're just nose down into their work, whereas a lot of times people see the people that are out there like me, that are out there tweeting and blogging and speaking, like that we're smarter, but in reality a lot of the smarter people that he's worked with were the people that aren't out there.
+
+So if you're not out there doing that, you shouldn't feel bad about it, but also, when you're looking at hiring, try to not take that too much into consideration. Take it into consideration to an extent, but really -- he had an interesting point. And obviously, a lot of people thought it was a thoughtful tweet because he had a lot of interaction and there was a lot of cool discussion there.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's interesting to say that they're busy doing the work, because that's often a good excuse to not be boastful or to be on Twitter, sharing all the different things... If you're just too busy to do the "Hey, I've built this cool thing" because you're just too busy doing work - that's a good problem to have.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[11:54\] It sort of reminds me of us, Adam, because we're very good at telling what we do as we shine a light on other people's stuff; that's always been what we do, and we love doing that... So we're very good at like "Hey, check out this cool thing that this person has done, or this team over here is working on", and yet on our own stuff, especially I think Adam, yourself - for instance, you rebooted Founders Talk recently, and you just kind of put it out there and you went on vacation. You didn't really tell anybody.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I mean, I put out an episode that said "Hey, it's coming back." Isn't that enough? \[laughter\] You're right though, I don't think anybody has it perfectly down, but what am I supposed to do? Should I go from the rooftop, should I do a blog post, do a guest post on somebody else's really popular blog? I guess you could do all those things, it just depends on what your goals are.
+
+I guess I would just be happy if people found it and it was like "Sweet. He's back", and told their friend. That would be happiness for me. Sure, of course, if we got 10,000 new listeners, that'd be great too, but you know... I guess how far do you push the boundary of marketing, over saying what you do?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It is tough, isn't it?
+
+**Nader Dabit:** And sometimes a lot of people that are trying to find a balance there... It's hard to go out there and do that type of stuff if you're an introvert or if you're just not used to it; it just feels weird. And sometimes it feels markety a little bit if you don't have a voice that you kind of are comfortable speaking out with...
+
+For me, it's been really tough to go on Twitter and talk about personal things. I feel like I'm okay with talking about technical things, but when I talk about personal things... Not really like personal things being like "I had a fight with my wife" or something like that, but more like "Hey, I bought this cool thing on Amazon. Look at it." You know, that type of stuff... Whereas I feel like people that are successful as far as generating large amounts of followers and stuff like that - they do a really good job of being personal, but also mixing technical there as well, of course.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. Well, here's a case in point for you, Nader... AWS Amplify - this was not something that I had ever heard of; Adam, had you ever heard of AWS Amplify?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** No.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay. And then, until you came onto our ping repo, which long-time listeners of the show are well aware that we have a repo on GitHub called Ping, where anybody can just come and give us ideas for shows. We used to also take news tips there; we don't do that anymore. You can actually go on Changelog.com/submit and submit your news... But for show ideas, it's Ping, and that's been a place where we found lots of awesome shows.
+
+Not very many people, but some will come on Ping and actually say "Hey, you should have me on the show." But I think that's a hard thing for a lot of people to do. And having said that, you came on Ping and said "Hey, here's an awesome thing - AWS Amplify." You're getting the message out there, I had not heard of it, and you said "Hey, I'd be happy to come on the show and talk about it." I'm just curious if that took some guts from you, if that was a natural thing -- you're like, "Hey, here's a thing I can do...", or if that was a thing where you had to overcome a little bit of a fear of rejection, or that kind of idea.
+
+**Nader Dabit:** You know, I think I've gotten over the fear of rejection after being rejected so many times in my life, for different things... It's kind of like, you just get to the point where if you try enough things, you get enough positive response that the negative response doesn't mean anything anymore, and you just stop taking it personally... Because I used to take really -- if I would send an email to someone and they didn't respond even in time, or something, I would feel like "Oh, what did I say? I said something totally wrong."
+
+And of course, putting myself out there and submitting to that GitHub - of course, it took a few days to respond, so I kind of had a little bit of thought like "Maybe that wasn't the correct way to go about this", or something like that... But I think after a while you kind of get over it and you're just like "Okay, people are good in general, and if you try to be a good person and whatever, then you shouldn't have anything to worry about." I don't know if that makes a lot of sense, but that's kind of my philosophy around that stuff.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I like to say that behind every no is a yes. You're one step closer to the next yes. Because you can only get so many no's, right?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Someone's gotta say yes sometimes...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Somebody's gotta say yes; it's a numbers game, right?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[16:00\] That's right.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I do like how he ended his Ping issue here. He says "And I'm a fan of Changelog." That's a good end cap, I like that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, flattery always helps. \[laughs\]
+
+**Nader Dabit:** So I had submitted this idea to a couple different podcasts, and I think two - we decided to talk about certain things; we're talking about a little bit different of a subject on this podcast... But I did get a response that said -- all he responded with was "No, we're not that type of podcast", and I never understood what that meant, because I was like "What type of podcast are you?" I don't know... But I won't even say who it was, because it's someone I really like, so...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Do they not do interviews? Is it not an interview show? Maybe that's what they meant.
+
+**Nader Dabit:** No, they do, actually... So that's why I--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay. So yeah, who knows... \[laughter\] Well, it took us about a month, but we got back to you.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** One thing I like about the way we approached a conversation like this - just to kind of give some preface here - is like, of course we're gonna talk about AWS Amplify, and mobile development but I think it's kind of interesting to sort of unravel some of the steps of like who you are and some of the roles you play, so we can sort of understand contextually who you are, and your position, and where you come from. Not so much to get your life story, but just to have some context.
+
+**Nader Dabit:** Yeah, I really like it. I feel more comfortable also talking to you now, after going over some of this stuff... And I guess -- do you want me to give you even more context? Just kind of a few more things about how I've gotten to where I am?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Please do.
+
+**Nader Dabit:** So I'm in Portland right now, at the Chain React conference, but I work remotely from Jackson, Mississippi, and I'm actually one of the only developer people on the AWS team that does work remotely... But as a developer advocate, a lot of our work is done on our computer, of course, as a lot of people are these days, but specifically we're writing blogs and we're making videos and we're writing documentation and we're interacting with the developers... So we're not working so closely with the engineering team that we need to be there all the time. I go there like once a month or once every two months.
+
+But to go back even further, I started development at the age of 29, and I kind of was a self-taught developer. I moved to California to get my first dev job, in Los Angeles. I lived out there, worked with a couple of companies that kind of showed me the ropes, and I got my first glimpse of really hard-working engineers that were doing things that I didn't know about, like listening to podcasts and going to conferences and going to meetups - things I really actually never knew about, coming from Mississippi... And then bringing that back to Mississippi, that knowledge and that type of work philosophy back with me.
+
+I've kind of continued there and I've done a few different jobs locally, working with startups. Then when React Native came out, I kind of thought this was an awesome thing and I kind of went full-speed ahead with that... So that's why I'm so involved with different things in React Native and kind of made that my specialty.
+
+AWS Mobile is -- you know, when you think about AWS, you don't really think about front-end development, you think about typically back-end development. So it was interesting when I saw some of the projects that they're working on with AWS Mobile, and the idea that what we're doing is kind of like really interesting to me... Probably people don't really get that at first, because again, when you think of AWS, you think of back-end development. But what we're doing is we're building a lot of tooling to help front-end developers kind of move further up the stack, and to increase their efficiency as far as like what they can do with their existing skill set and take the different things that they can do as developers to the next level without having them to learn a bunch of new things.
+
+So we're basically building tooling and building SDK's that allow front-end developers to interact with managed services, so they can do a bunch of different things with JavaScript, or with iOS or Android native as well.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[20:04\] I'm just gonna hop back to what you said - you were 29... That's a relatively late coming to technology as a career... Was that something that was a barrier for you to overcome, your relatively late arrival into this space, or was that something that was kind of a non-factor for you?
+
+**Nader Dabit:** Yeah, it was interesting, because most of the people that I was learning from were like 10 years younger than me literally, at my first job... But I loved it so much that I didn't really care. I had done a bunch of things, I had some really terrible jobs actually growing up, so when I finally got to something that I was fairly good at -- and I wasn't naturally good at it; it was something I had to work at... But once I found out I can actually get paid to do this stuff that I was doing anyway, like, for free, on the side, in my spare time, it was enough motivation that I could kind of overlook the fact that I was a little older than a lot of the people. And it just made me work maybe a little harder to try to catch up with everyone, and stuff like that.
+
+I wouldn't say it was a barrier... I've seen people older than me get into it and still become successful.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, absolutely. So I'm just curious now, what were some of those terrible jobs you had? Give us a couple of your worst jobs.
+
+**Nader Dabit:** So I was a host at a restaurant, I was a bartender at a restaurant, I was a manager at a restaurant, and I really disliked the restaurant industry at this point... \[laughter\] But I have total respect for the people that actually do good in restaurants, because it's like the hardest job... I know it doesn't sound like the hardest job, but it's kind of like a combination of a lot of hard work, but also the environment that you're in and the hours that you work.
+
+For instance, sometimes I would be at work from like 8 AM until midnight, and it was just craziness, and I didn't get paid very well. I was a real estate agent for a while, I also did importing and exporting for goods from China, apparel goods that were shipped to the United States and sold wholesale. I worked at my parents' family business for a while... Those were kind of the main things I guess you would say...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's interesting that you were in restaurants too, because that is such a tough job... It's inexplicably a tough job, because you may have a full shift, or even work a double that day, and you still have to roll silverware, or take care of condiments... All these extra-curricular stuff that's not part of being a server or a part of being the staff, or front of the house staff, that you have to do extra. It's like, once your job is over, you still have more job to do.
+
+**Nader Dabit:** Yeah, that's exactly right... And a lot of times you're even like washing dishes at night and doing stuff that people that were supposed to come in that day didn't do, and you can't really leave until it's all done, so you just jump in and do it.
+
+**Break:** \[22:51\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Alright, Nader, so you pinged us to talk about AWS Amplify, which is a JavaScript library for front-end and mobile developers who are building cloud-enabled applications. Now, there's a lot to unpack here, because I hadn't heard of it, but that doesn't mean it's not popular and large. The breadth of this project - there's so many pieces to it. Why don't you give us the rundown and then we'll dive into specific features of what all AWS Amplify is providing for people?
+
+**Nader Dabit:** Yes, so it's like a fairly new project. It's an open source project as well, so you can kind of download the code and take a look at it if you like, and contribute back if you'd like... But it's really more for just -- I guess, to kind of talk about what it does... If you're a front-end developer or you're a JavaScript developer or you're a native app developer in general and you wanna work with cloud-enabled services, with AWS or really with any cloud provider, getting connected to those different services and having them interact with each other has been typically not an easy thing to do... So we decided to create AWS Amplify to have like a single library with a consistent API, that allows front-end developers to do different things that they used to do -- they used to be able to do some of this stuff, not all, but actually we've added new features... But to do a lot of this stuff - it was just really complicated, because the different SDK's and different client-side libraries were not consistent; this was more of like a consistent API layer.
+
+There's different things you can do with this library - you can do things like authentication, you can do analytics, you can work with serverless functions, with lambda functions, you can work with GraphQL servers... So that means you can work with any GraphQL server, not just our personal GraphQL server, which we also have a managed GraphQL service called AWS AppSync, so you can interact with that as well. You can do storage with S3, push notifications, a bunch of other stuff as well.
+
+So the bottom line is it's kind of like a way for front-end developers to start interacting with cloud services... And it's really complemented by a CLI. We have this command line interface that you can install to your terminal and spin up these cloud-enabled applications.
+
+Of course, as a front-end developer, AWS to me was kind of a tough thing to wrap my head around; working in the console was brand new to me, and I thought it was pretty complicated at first. With the CLI you can just be in your terminal, in the environment that you're used to being working in, and maybe you could be inside of a React, or a React Native, or Angular, or a Vue app, whatever you're working on, and you can just spin up a new cloud application, and then you automatically have some basic features out of the box that are already spun up in the cloud, like analytics... Then you can add things like authentication, you can add a GraphQL API, you can add storage, you can add push notifications from the CLI, and then that gets pushed up to the AWS cloud or whatever you would call that, the console, to your account, and then you can just interact with that from the command line or from your application.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So there's like an umbrella JavaScript module... npm install AWS Amplify first, and then what you're saying is depending on the specific features that you want - you mentioned authentication, analytics, a GraphQL client - you can mix and match these, you can pull them in as necessary, using the CLI that gets installed... Or is it using npm?
+
+**Nader Dabit:** You install the JavaScript library, and it has all of these different APIs... The AWS Amplify library has an auth class, it has an analytics class, and it has an API class. So you have all of that as part of the library, and then if you wanna actually create that service in your AWS account, from the CLI you can just say "Hey, I wanna add authentication." It will spin up an authentication setup for you, and then you can just connect using the API that's provided by Amplify.
+
+\[28:16\] With Amplify we also have some JavaScript libraries that are implemented with first-class components... So you can either just use the vanilla JavaScript and kind of interact with these from JavaScript directly, using these different classes, or you can use some pre-configured components for Angular, React and React Native. That will kind of generate a bunch of pre-configured UI and functionality, and it'll just help you get started quickly.
+
+So we have this width authenticator higher order component and higher order component will basically add authentication to your app with like a single line of code... But the deal with that is it's giving you a pre-configured set of decisions that are made for you around your UI, and stuff like that. So you end up probably in the production app ripping that out and just writing it from scratch, using just the regular JavaScript.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I see. So it's kind of a nice starter; you can test the water, see how it works, but if you're gonna wanna have your own specific things, then you're gonna wanna use that auth class and build out the flows all yourself.
+
+**Nader Dabit:** Totally, yeah. That's right.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay. So the CLI - that's where I misunderstood; I thought it was pulling in specific of the JavaScript bits, but it's actually allowing you to turn off and turn on specific cloud services on the AWS side, that you'd normally go onto the console and say "Turn this on" or "Sign me up for this." It's triggering those for you.
+
+**Nader Dabit:** Yeah, exactly. It's more of like a flow that works for front-end developers that are used to working with npm and they're using to working from the terminal in general... So instead of having to go and learn the AWS console, you can just spin up these services from your command line.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very cool. And it's front-end and mobile... So talk about the mobile side. You mentioned React Native - is that the only way to get these things into your mobile applications?
+
+**Nader Dabit:** Yeah, so with Amplify we support React Native and web right now. We're continuing to add other different integrations (I guess you'd say). So we've had a lot of people ask for iOS and Android natively as well, so we're looking into that... But yeah, for right now, it's based strictly for JavaScript. You can use this with Ionic or Angular as well... Anything that's just a JavaScript-based application right now.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So while we're talking React Native, and we know that you're a huge advocate for having run the React Native Radio for a few years, undoubtedly you've seen Airbnb's recent Medium post about their big bet on React Native in 2016, and now they're ready to share their experiences and they're basically ready to move on. I think all technologies go through this hype cycle where first it's a brand new thing and people are afraid of it, but excited, but then all of a sudden everybody's adopting it and now we're all using it, and then the posts start to come out of the actual drawbacks, and "This didn't work for that reason", and we start to see the backlash... This is the very first I've seen of React Native being moved away from (especially) such a large internet company.
+
+I'm curious just what your thoughts are on that, if you're aware of that particular post, that situation at Airbnb, and why React Native perhaps didn't fit in that case.
+
+**Nader Dabit:** Yeah, I definitely am interested in that topic actually. I've totally read that blog post, and I have a really good understanding about that whole situation, because Airbnb has been such a great contributor to the React Native ecosystem over the years, and they've had a lot of great people that worked on the Airbnb app that were part of the React Native community, that were really involved with a lot of conferences and stuff like that.
+
+It's interesting -- I would say the issues that they ran into were around bringing in an existing application that was built natively, and integrating React Native. I think if I have read correctly, 85% or so of their app was native, and only a small percentage was React Native to begin with... I think that they brought in React Native, they definitely tried to make it work...
+
+\[32:22\] Some of the issues that they ran into were just issues that had not been solved at the moment with React Native, and I think they just got fed up and tired with trying to get things to play together when they were having all these issues over the years... And they were such early adopters they have probably seen even more issues than if you picked it up today, or maybe even a year from now... You would see less issues over time.
+
+I read a lot about that - maybe there's some culture there with some of their native iOS developers where they gave it a shot and they were just like "You know, we've given it a shot. Let's just not deal with it anymore", because maybe they did see these issues, and as native developers, they didn't have to run into these issues before...
+
+But I think generally, around the same time that they released that blog post, Facebook actually also released a blog post talking about the re-engineering of React Native, and they made three major changes. The first is that threading model. They basically are changing the threading model; instead of each UI update needing to perform on three different threads, it will be possible to call synchronously into JavaScript on any thread for high-priority updates, and it will keep the low priority work off of the main threads, to maintain good responsiveness and good performance.
+
+They're also incorporating async rendering capabilities into React Native, which is gonna basically allow multiple rendering priorities, and it will simplify the asynchronous data handling. There were some issues around that that they were having...
+
+And then also they're changing the way the bridge works. The native bridge is really -- if you're bringing in React Native into a brownfield app, the bridge is a major part of that, because you're writing a lot of code that passes in between native and JavaScript, and you're passing in a lot of data probably from your existing native app into the JavaScript side. They're simplifying it and making it faster... I don't know what that looks like in actual implementation, but that's kind of the messaging that they've given.
+
+I'm really interested to see what's gonna happen after they release this newly-architected version, to see if that really kind of solves some of the problems... And I would say, as someone that works a lot with big companies that are using React Native, with React Native Training, we work with a lot of these companies that are bringing in React Native right now... And this year alone, we've seen like a 300% increase in companies reaching out for training, even now.
+
+Companies like Microsoft, companies like Salesforce, American Express, Visa, even Amazon, have all reached out to us this year, including a bunch of other smaller to medium-sized companies.
+
+When we see big companies like that adopting React Native, I think what you're seeing is yes, there's gonna be situations where it doesn't work, but overall, I think the value proposition with React Native, or something like React Native - maybe it's Flutter as well - is you're still able to ship multiple platforms with somewhat of a similar, single codebase, and you're still able to save money and be efficient. There's always gonna be tradeoffs with anything, and I think the tradeoff with React Native right now is you do have those issues, especially with upgrading (that's kind of a painful process), but also integrating with brownfield existing native apps; there's some issues still there.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[36:03\] What's interesting about that series that they did is they actually did a four-part series, so it wasn't just like "Hey, here's three paragraphs. We're sunsetting it." They actually were pretty responsible about their positioning, because considering Airbnb - great engieering team, a lot of clout in the space, so what they do has a lot of ramifications to other people's outlook on React Native... So they took that responsibly and did a four-part series.
+
+At the same time, some stats from that post was 63% of their engineers would have chosen React again, given the chance, and 74% would consider React Native for a new project. So it wasn't like all bad, it was just like it didn't work for them, in their particular situations.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. A lot of those moving on posts are kind of like hit pieces, where they're just tearing down this thing that they've been using, and Airbnb's post, like you said, Adam, was nothing like that... In fact, very thoughtful, very detailed; as you said, multiple-part series, so much respect to them for actually laying out their experience, and then everybody else can come alongside and say "Okay, am I like them? Is this my experience that I'm gonna have, or am I in a different scenario?" It was very thoughtful.
+
+**Nader Dabit:** Yeah, totally. And for them to write five pages of a blog... As someone that writes a lot, I could say that that guy probably spent at least a week putting that together. It's awesome that they did that; it's actually super-insightful as well.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Absolutely. You know it's long when you have to think about "Do I have the time to read this?" You don't think how long it took him to write it... \[laughs\] It's like "Do I really wanna read five parts...?"
+
+**Break:** \[37:34\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's very cool that AWS Amplify can work with React Native; as you said, it can work with Ionic, you can use it with Angular, you can use it with Vue, React of course. Kind of wherever you are in your front-end app, you can pull it in. Of course, if you can use all those things, I'm sure you can use it with vanilla JavaScript. The question is can you use it with other clouds?
+
+I noticed in the readme that it's built in such a way that that is possible, but it sounds like that's not -- that's vaporware; you guys want that to be a thing, but actually only works with AWS. Is that a good read?
+
+**Nader Dabit:** Yeah, it's basically our priority to make it work as well as possible with AWS, and everything else kind of takes a backseat, because a lot of our customers that are working with all of our services through JavaScript applications are asking us for different features and stuff like that, and we always prioritize whatever the customer actually wants first.
+
+But we also have a completely open GitHub repo, so you can submit issues, and anything that is doable, we're gonna try to prioritize it, and if it makes sense, we're gonna try to implement it. But we have things that work already that are with only AWS; again, our GraphQL client... So if you've ever worked with Apollo or URQL, we have our own version of GraphQL client, that works with not only ours, but GraphCool, or works with Hasura, or if you build your own GraphQL database server, it works well with that.
+
+\[40:14\] Internationalization works well with anything. We have a few different other APIs that already kind of work with any different service provider, and we're continuing to iterate on that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I think that's important, because when I look at these services that you're providing, authentication specifically, I think "Okay, this is a very integral part of my application, a GraphQL client, of course, storage, there you have it..." Certain things are easier to replace - analytics, push notifications - but when I think about like these are core aspects of what I am building, there's a certain twinge of vendor lock in with AWS as the cloud; it wouldn't be like a show stopper necessarily, and the pragmatists would say "Well, you're using AWS, so what's the problem here?" But just the ability to say "Yeah, well, I am using them, but if that relationship goes south, I don't have to completely rewrite everything in order to go to a different back-end vendor."
+
+So I think it's definitely important to provide those options, and I like that you guys are building it in such a way that it's pluggable for those custom back-ends, especially you have the GraphQL one; like you said, it works with pretty much anything at this point... I'm curious if that's something that you all will tackle, or you're hoping that a community comes by, or maybe even you're hoping that Microsoft funds them to write the Azure plug for these things. What are your thoughts on that?
+
+**Nader Dabit:** So it's totally a combination of community and our developers contributing to this project, but I think the contributions from the community -- we have pull requests, of course, but we have a lot of man-power (I guess you'd say) behind this project, implementing the features that people are asking for in the issues. So again, most of the actual work, I would say, is done within the team, but we do have a very healthy number of people submitting pull requests and issues as well, that are part of the community.
+
+And again, I would say that we try to probably prioritize issues that are with customers before we prioritize anything else. So if we have a customer that's having issues maybe working with their S3 bucket or their serverless lambda function, their serverless application, we'll probably tackle that before we'll add a new feature that works with another cloud provider.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Is there like a generic lambda connection here, or functions-as-a-service type of a thing in this? I'm seeing interactions, I'm seeing "Create conversational bots", so I'm assuming it's using those kinds of back-ends, but is there a serverless wrapper inside this toolset?
+
+**Nader Dabit:** Yes, so the API category works really well and really easily with serverless. You pass in the API name, and if you have a path, you could pass that in, and then you can just call GET, POST, PUT, DELETE things like that on that resource.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Talk a little bit about this interactions bit. I'm just going through kind of the feature list here; we've mentioned analytics, authentication, push notifications, interactions -- it says "Create conversational bots powered by deep learning technologies. Can you tell us more about that?
+
+**Nader Dabit:** Yes, that's a really interesting category. We've just added that actually a few weeks ago, and I've just posted a blog actually on TylerMcGinnis.com - he's one of my friends, he's big into the React community - on how to do this.
+
+The idea behind this is a lot of where you're seeing some applications go, or around conversations, and you're seeing things like Alexa, but you're also seeing things within applications where you're able to kind of have these conversations with whatever, you know? And of course, at AWS we have the Lex service, which allows you to create these conversational bots with voice or with text... So what we've done is with Amplify we've implemented a category that just makes it really easy to interact with your service.
+
+\[44:17\] With the AWS Mobile CLI, you can spin up a new bot and then you can interact with it using a couple of different components from the Amplify library. We have a chatbot component which is a pre-configured component that already has all of the UI and the actual code written to handle the back and forth... Or you can use the Interactions category, which gives you direct access. What you would end up doing is you create your bot, you import that interactions category and then you start sending messages to the bot.
+
+The bots, basically -- the way that they work is you have a trigger message that kind of triggers the bot. If you have a bot that wants to, for instance, book you a hotel reservation, you might have a few different triggers, things like "Book a hotel" or "I want to take a trip" or whatever; so you'd have a list of these triggers, and if you can get something from the user that matches closely, then that bot gets triggered.
+
+Then you can do a couple of things with that bot - you can send that trigger through a lambda function and do more complex things, or you can actually just send back a list of utterances that you wanna then say to the user.
+
+Say that the bot of booking a hotel gets triggered - then you maybe have like four different questions that you have the user. So you would say things like "What city? What number of people are gonna be staying in the room?", so on and so forth. Then you capture that data and then you do stuff with it.
+
+What you can do with that data normally would be you have some other application or some other service that you're gonna be hitting with that data, and then you return a response back to the user.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's awesome. That's a very easy way to get chatbots going. I just have a meta question about chatbots, and Adam, maybe I can pull you in on this as well... Remember a couple years ago when everybody was saying chat is the new UI, and chatbots are going to take over your world, and all these things? Specifically Facebook was saying that... It was 2016 -- I don't know if it was two years ago or one year ago, but the round of conferences, it was Facebook... What's Facebook's called? Thumbs Up -- no, what's it called? \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** WhatsApp?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** No, Facebook's developer conference, what's it called?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** F8.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, F8, and then like Build, and then Google I/O, and then WWDC... In that timeframe, chatbots were the rage; everybody was gonna have chat, conversational UIs, "This is the next thing." It's two years later now - or maybe it's only a year, if my memory is not serving me right, but... I'm not trying to knock chatbots here, I'm just thinking bigger picture - it seems like that didn't really take hold. Or do we see that as a thing that's happening?
+
+**Nader Dabit:** You could see this happen in blockchain technology over the last year as well, and then with AI before that... I think what happens is there's a ton of hype around something, and people expect too much of it at an early stage, and what you end up seeing is people pile on to an idea, and then they don't get the expected outcome from the hype, so it kind of falls back to the wayside... But people are slowly actually improving the technologies around these things, and then later on they are fruitful.
+
+I think that's what you saw with artificial intelligence two years ago, and now it's starting to pay dividends. I think you saw that with chatbots, where now you're actually seeing more of that come into play; it's not as big a deal as you would have thought it would be, but it's still starting to play a role with Alexa and different areas that you're seeing.
+
+Blockchain technology - I don't really know where that is, but I think that we're at the beginning of the downturn of the initial hype cycle, and then that's gonna slowly build back up.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[48:04\] Yeah, things kind of quiet down and people are just busy building... And really, it's tools like these and it's services -- a lot of it is tooling to put into us, developer's hands, and allow us to more easily play with these things, and build things, and start with a toy app, or a toy service, and then think "Okay, I can use this here", and start to kind of -- there's a groundswell of actual use cases that happen slowly over time... And by the time it actually happens, I guess it's like we've moved on; we're excited about something else. But the reality of it is it definitely improves things in people's lives.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Maybe a question for this might be how did this happen prior to Amplify? Did you have to cobble together your own ways to interact with or take advantage of the various AWS features? Lex being a brand new thing... You wouldn't wanna go and make your own way, you'd want a framework like Amplify to help you get there. How did people deal with AWS services before on the front-end?
+
+**Nader Dabit:** Yeah, that's a good question, and I think the main answer would be just using the regular AWS JavaScript SDK, which is something that we've already had for a while. So I would kind of take a step back and talk about what we're doing in general, as like a philosophy, all my team and AWS Mobile... The things that we're accomplishing with Amplify could have been accomplished, again, with the regular JavaScript SDK; it would just have been much harder.
+
+I think to use the JavaScript SDK as a front-end developer, you could have probably gotten all this stuff accomplished, but we're building really more of like an ecosystem around tooling not only for connecting, but also for creating these services. When you see things like Firebase, or for us it's AWS AppSync, or these other managed services (like Auth0) that offer an easy way to get up and running with authentication...
+
+What we're really moving towards, in my opinion, as far as like software engineering in general, is especially for front-end developers - you're seeing these front-end developers being able to access more and more complex functionality as a service. So instead of having to spend the time and effort to kind of understand the entire working of an authentication flow on the server and on the client, and build that out and make it secure, you're betting on the fact that all these other people that are out there doing that and spending millions and billions of dollars even bringing a managed service to life that as a front-end developer you can then just subscribe to - I think we're seeing a lot more of that. With AWS Mobile - we're kind of trying to Amplify that... \[laughs\] We're trying to bring that to the forefront with this Amplify library, along with the CLI.
+
+So with an existing skill set of understanding how to work with just APIs in general, you can kind of be a JavaScript developer and build out a full stack application with only your existing JavaScript knowledge. So that means you can not only create authentication and analytics and push notifications, but now we've added this AWS AppSync service, which is a managed GraphQL service which is basically a managed database. So you end up being able to work with a single GraphQL API through the Amplify JavaScript SDK, and have not only all these other service, but -- of course, the database is the integral service that you need for an application; we've added that integral part, and we're gonna be iterating on all this stuff... And I think hopefully people are starting to catch on and see "Hey, as a front-end developer, I don't have to learn how all of this complex functionality works on the back-end... I can just pay for this service."
+
+And again, with the type of services we're talking about, you could categorize them as serverless. And with serverless, the idea is you're basically trading capital expense for variable expense. Instead of paying for something or building something and not using it until you get the users, you're subscribing to something and you don't really pay for it until you get a bunch of users.
+
+\[52:12\] With a startup - or really with a company in general - once you get those users, you're kind of good to go anyway, for the most part... Or at least you can then jump off a cliff if it doesn't work... But you're getting to the point where "Oh, we have users. We can probably afford to pay for this now", and that's when your actual bill comes in.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I think I heard the marker come out there, did you say "Trading capital expense for variable expense"? That was very smooth; I like that. \[laughs\]
+
+**Nader Dabit:** Well, it's actually the only way I can really -- because it's true; you end up building something yourself, and you spend time, and time is money, or you pay a developer to build out this service, and again, that's time, and that's capital. It's a capital expense.
+
+So the way I look at it is "Should I go ahead and pay someone to build this, even though I don't know if it's gonna work or not? Or should I instead just subscribe to this service that does it for me?" And then say it does work out, we can go back and build it later if we'd like, from scratch, or we can continue to kind of use this service and pay for whatever that service costs.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's what I was thinking... This gives the ability for someone to either be a one or two-person team, to put together an idea, they have the capability, they can leverage these services, and let's say whatever it is, it's successful and it proves itself - well then, if they wanted to and they actually did prove their idea and they got product-market fit, and maybe even paying customers, or capital, or investing, or whatever to take them to that next step, they can begin to trade off "Well hey, I don't really need to have this managed GraphQL server, because we would rather do it this way. Let's bring that one in-house." Is that what you're trying to say?
+
+**Nader Dabit:** Yes, exactly. That's the way I look at it, that's the philosophy that I have about all this stuff.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** In a lot of cases, to put it quite bluntly -- sure, these people may build apps and continue to use these services, but in a lot of cases it seems like the AWS infrastructure is putting a big bet on people's applications and their success, because for you to get paid, it needs to have a fairly decent adoption or great usage, and that's when you get paid. So you're actually putting all the capital in the infrastructure and the ability and the plumbing and the accessibility of it, hoping that more people use it so that they can get to the first step faster, and maybe they keep using it, maybe they don't.
+
+**Nader Dabit:** Yeah, exactly. And it allows for more experimentation, it allows for more different trial and error, it allows you to fail faster, and that's kind of what goes on in a startup environment. You don't wanna build out something that costs $100,000 if you're not sure if it's gonna work, but if you know that you're only gonna probably spend a fraction of that paying a front-end developer to implement it and it doesn't work, you're not really -- you haven't lost as must, but you've been able to try that thing and see if it works. So I kind of think it allows not only cost savings, but it allows more innovation and experimentation.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** At the bottom of the page for AWS Mobile I see "Trusted by category-defining applications, huge brand names like Netflix, Tinder, Yelp, Airbnb, Periscope, Etsy" - these are huge names. The last two I'm not that familiar with - Easy Taxi and hike Messenger - but what kind of applications within these organizations are being powered by... Is it Amplify, or is it these services for mobile?
+
+**Nader Dabit:** So I can't really go into exactly what each customer is using, but some of the most popular services that are being--
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Hypothesize, you know...? It's not Netflix, it's CinemaFlix. \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Just guess.
+
+**Nader Dabit:** You know, we have a lot of people -- our platform is growing in adoption quickly. We have a lot of people picking up a lot of these different tools and running with them and actually building and shipping things... That's why we're doubling down and we're continuing to grow the teams around this. We're even hiring (if you're listening) on all of our teams.
+
+So we're doing a lot of things that are being used by companies, and a lot of the tooling that we build at AWS Mobile, a lot of these companies are using.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[56:19\] You're powering a lot of things being used by companies. That's pretty vague. I like it though.
+
+**Nader Dabit:** I mean, I'm sorry... \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Is there anything you could share about some example applications out there that are pretty well-defined, or anything that you can share? Maybe not these ones in particular, but something else.
+
+**Nader Dabit:** Yeah, okay, I can talk about some of the stuff that different companies -- you mentioned Airbnb... Basically, the company runs all of its IT infrastructure on AWS, and they use over 1,300 Amazon EC2 instances, they use Amazon EMR, they use S3.
+
+Then Lyft - Lyft is another big startup, as well as Pinterest... They both are on AWS. Lyft is using a lot of EC2 Spot instances, and Spot instances are basically kind of a lower cost EC2 instance that doesn't stay around -- it's not as consistently there and it can't be depended on to kind of run a normal application, but you can do things like testing, and you get basically a big discount on the instance by using that. Pinterest - so they're using AWS to run their website, they use S3 to ingest and store their data...
+
+But a lot of these companies are using just traditional AWS services. What you're seeing with AWS mobile is we're really providing integration from client-side applications into some of these services, and then with the introduction of our CLI, to spin up a new application. Then with the AWS AppSync, that's kind of like our first main -- or not really our first, but it's one of our first main services that are specifically... Like, I wouldn't say mobile-only, but they're part of our organization.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Where is a good place you send people to to get started? I think you can get started with React, you can get started with web... What's the one you prefer people to go to first?
+
+**Nader Dabit:** I would probably just go to the docs and read just the regular JavaScript implementations, and then if you are a fan of whatever framework, we have sections on those different frameworks.
+
+I have a repo on my personal GitHub - it's dabit3, and repo is awesome-aws-amplify. And if you've ever seen one of these Awesome repos for any other framework, it's pretty much the same thing. We just kind of aggregate all the different links, and stuff like that... And it's open source, of course, since it's on GitHub; you can send a PR if you wanna add something, or if you wanna make a fix on something we already have there.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Alright, awesome. We will link up Awesome-aws-amplify in the...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We like awesome lists... \[laughter\]
+
+**Nader Dabit:** There's also an awesome-aws-appsync if anyone's interested.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's kind of awesome.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You had to go there.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I had to go there, sorry. \[laughter\] I was hoping for more laughter... I'm sure the listeners are like, "Adam, you're lame. Please end the show", and I'll go ahead and do that.
+
+Nader, it was really awesome having you on here. I love the enthusiasm you have.
+
+**Nader Dabit:** Yeah, totally. It was fun to be here, and it was really nice meeting both of you.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Thank you very much.
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+**Jerod Santo:** So Renovate is a project that hit our radar because of Ping, and specifically, we have to give a shoutout to Nicholas Young, whose name and avatar rings a bell, so I think he's probably submitted before... Who told us "You've got to have Rhys Arkins talk about Renovate." Nicholas gave Rhys this compliment, he said "It's the first GitHub app that has changed how I develop software by easing the frustration of managing dependencies for the most part automatically", and he gets bonus points for not saying "automagically", one of my least favorite words. So that's quite a compliment, and we'll get into that.
+
+We're happy to have you here, Rhys. Real quick, we do wanna take a quick moment before I do that and talk about Ping, and some changes that are happening with Ping. For those who don't know, Ping is our open inbox on GitHub (github.com/thechangelog/ping), and for years now we've taken submissions there, Ask Us Anything style posts, questions, feedback, and most importantly I think, show ideas; if you've been listening to the Changelog for a while, a lot of our best shows are because of our community, who submitted the ideas to Ping, this show being one of those.
+
+We love that and we want that to continue happening. However, we've also been taking news and article submissions - projects, articles, blog posts - we love those as well. We no longer want those on Ping however, because we've actually built a version of that into the website where you should submit instead. Adam, do you wanna tell them about that?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think it can be summarized best with the update to the readme, which says "This is no longer the place to share projects, articles and news, because Changelog.com/news/submit is the new URL for that." What you can do when you go there - we'll actually ask you to sign in and create an account, but the important thing is that you can share with us links, articles - whether you wrote it or not - and that gets served into Changelog News, our homepage, and then potentially it can hit Changelog Weekly, which is a highly sought after, beloved newsletter we ship every single week. If you're not subscribed to that, I would suggest you go to Changelog.com and you will see an option to subscribe, so just follow that lead and do that.
+
+Ping is for show ideas, and the evolution now is to share your news through Changelog.com/news/submit.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[03:55\] There you have it. Rhys, let's get to Renovate, let's hear your story and this app that -- at least you've got one happy customer, Nicholas Young, who it's changed his life a little bit. So tell us about Renovate, what it is and the back-story of how it came to be.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Yeah, thanks, and thanks to Nicholas, of course. Renovate is a command line tool that is also being adapted to also be a GitHub app, which is what Nicholas refers to... But primarily, it's a command line tool that is used for automating dependency updates for projects such as JavaScript and Dockerfiles and a few things like that. It automates it using branches and pull requests in your existing project to try to fit in with the workflow you already have.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very straightforward. How about the back-story? Why did it come to be and how did it come to be?
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Renovate is not the first to actually do this. I was using another tool called Doppins for a project of mine; it was a web app, and Doppins was really good, but I broke the app into (you could say) a monorepo with Docker containers, where they each had their own package.json, and that meant that I couldn't keep using the automated pull requests from Doppins, and none of the tools that were available at that point or any apps supported having a package.json dependency file that was outside the root of the project, so I just didn't have it anymore.
+
+A few months later I had a problem which was affecting up to 5% of users - weird errors getting caught in my Sentry reporting, and I probably spent two days trying to figure out what was going on. There was actually another developer one day, and myself a day, and eventually we discovered that it was a really strange bug that had been fixed by Google's Firebase a month earlier, or something... And I just decided "Never again", because that was a really -- I couldn't even tell exactly how it was impacting users; you're getting exceptions thrown, but you don't know for sure what they're seeing or what's failing for them, and two days of developer time as well - it's too much, so I decided to hack together a script.
+
+Basically, it was like a Bash script with Git commands - git branch, git pull, git checkout, git push - combined with just a little bit of JavaScript to make the pull request.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I just wanted to comment on the fact that so many awesome projects begin with "So I decided to hack together a script..." How many times did we hear that?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Lots.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Yeah, this was absolutely one of those cases, like necessity, or whatever. So I worked out how it could be done, but again, it was like another week, another week, so I actually paid a freelancer - I just advertised and found someone who wrote that, and by the time he finished it, I realized that I didn't actually need to use Git, that actually GitHub itself provides a Git API... So somewhat for no real good reason, but I decided to rewrite it then myself using pure API. And there it stood, and it worked. So at that point it was still just a script that I was using, and I was thinking like "Maybe I should open source this." Then I had the idea that I would open source it for SEO (search engine optimization) because I was working in real estate, so I still had it... And I had this thing where whenever I'd open source something, I would pick a name that was relevant to real estate; I already had one product called Lint Condo, which was a lint container for Docker. That one actually got in Docker.com's newsletter and things like that, and I got some links back to my blog.
+
+\[07:59\] Another one I released was called Home Inspector, which was another screenshot regression testing... And for this one then I hit on the name Renovate. It was only when I got the name that I thought "That's a perfect name", and I decided to open source it. I blogged an announcement about it; there'd be a few sites interested in it and I'd get some links back to the site, because it's just a bootstrap real estate site, with no advertising budget. That was basically my first reason to open source it. So it came out of necessity why I wrote it, I open sourced it for search engine optimization, but then people actually discovered it and used it. And kind of like out of obligation or pride, when they would say "This is really cool. I just need this, so can you add that?", I started doing it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** When was that? What year was that?
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** That was about one year ago, around January of 2017.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Before you go further, I'm curious how does the SEO impact the naming? Maybe I'm missing it, what is the reasoning there for that?
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Well, Google still fundamentally works on backlinks; if you're important, people link to you.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** But then Google of course tries to work against gaming of the system. You can't just spam a bunch of links or spam keywords and things like that... But if real, legitimate sites link to you, then that kind of counts, and that's what they use to decide whether you should be high enough or not. Part of it though is they also are smart and they filter out if links seem to be completely irrelevant to what you're doing, such as in my case the real estate side. But if people link to it with an anchor that says like "renovate" or "home inspector" or "condo", then in my theory that should hopefully be good enough to by-pass that a little bit. I didn't really see anything wrong with that, because people are linking because it actually is something useful, and it's always fun to have a naming convention for the things you do.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I love that, yeah.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** That was what sealed it for me; it was like "Okay, I'm gonna release it, and I'm gonna give it the name Renovate, and people are gonna link to my blog, which is hosted on the same domain as my website, and that'll be worth it..." Better than paying some SEO person $1,000 to give me some spam kind of links that don't look spam; I may as well actually do something useful.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So does it actually feed back into your real estate site, too? Is that part of the point?
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Well, it was more just that when I put it on the blog, the blog's saying "Here's what I wrote", because I didn't have any RenovateApp.com or anything then. The point is that people would link to that, which describes it, and of course, then go to GitHub and use it. But apart from that, it really wouldn't have anything to do with -- I actually had a separate blog page on the real estate site called "Our tech" to separate out real estate blogging from open source work.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Here's a big picture question related to all of this, and something that I've thought about sometimes... When we talk about real estate, domains are online real estate, and something that I'm a believer in is owning your own real estate and not putting all your pearls on other people's platforms... Syndicate, right? Like with Changelog.com, we write for our website and we syndicate out to these different media: to Twitter, to Facebook, to even micro.blog now we're syndicating, so RSS. But everything comes back to that one place, and that's really what you're doing when you blog about it on your real estate site - you're linking everything back to there. But one thing that all of us developers don't do is we don't host our own Git repos, we don't host our own documentation, we don't host our own stuff, so ultimately, we're giving the last mile to GitHub because we're hosting our actual things there, where people are linking to and spending their time, to GitHub.
+
+\[12:03\] I think it was Patrick McKenzie back in the day (patio11), who's become kind of internet famous in developer circles/entrepreneurial circles because of all his writing around entrepreneurship and what have you... He made a split-testing Ruby gem years ago, and he refused to put it on GitHub - or maybe it was on GitHub as well, but everything he did was he hosted that... It was open source, Git, all that, but he hosted it on his website, and the reason was the reasons that I'm saying. I'm curious if you guys have had thoughts about that, and if we're all just kind of giving all of our Google juice to GitHub.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** I don't have too much concern with that part, because I think it's partly to do with how closely related your source code is to your main website. Even if you're gonna self-host, you're most likely gonna end up putting it on git.renovateapp.com, or something like that, so it's still technically gonna be like a separate domain.
+
+I think GitHub did a really great job of capturing the open source market all that years ago. Opinions differ about how much they keep doing to retain it, and you can debate for a long time about "Does the community owe GitHub, or does GitHub owe the community?" I mean, they're hosting stuff for free, and they don't put ads and things like that, they don't sell your details, so you're not quite the product.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I don't know about that...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What do you think, Adam?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's a good question, because we link out to lots of open source, and whenever I have a chance to link to somebody's landing page, which is usually their domain, versus the repo, I will more often than not link to their homepage, and then in the details of promoting this new thing or describing what's going on, "Here's also the source on GitHub", because I feel like what you feel, like the hub and spoke model. I feel like people should own their content, and I don't have anything against GitHub and the open source, I just feel like the legitimacy of that --
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Strategically, it's smarter.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I feel like giving it to them first -- because a GitHub readme looks like GitHub, it doesn't look like a branded version of X, and sometimes... Like, Homebrew - you go to Homebrew's website and it's a beautiful-looking site, the documentation is clear; you can easily see that it's on GitHub, you can see all the other things they can advertise. You're removing their ability to better communicate to their community by only linking to the readme, which is essentially a GitHub repo.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** I think that's a good idea. These days, I have RenovateApp.com, which essentially is for the app part, not so much for the open source, as in it's intended for people who don't care too much about the source, they wanna use the app, and I try to filter out all the stuff about how to host it yourself and so on, because that just confuses people if you give them options that aren't actually valid to an end user. So I tend to adjust where I link to depending upon the audience or what they're after.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. I surely wouldn't wanna self-host my Git.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, it's a matter of convenience in that case.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I'm not gonna do that. But GitHub owns that, they do a great job, and like we said, "Do we owe them or they owe us? Are we the product?" I think the open source community is their product, because GitHub is -- I mean, they're giving it away, but at the same time they're getting so much traffic, they're getting so much authority... Think about all the Google juice that's going to them, Rhys, that you're after. Imagine the exact opposite. We've been linking to GitHub for years; not that we're a big source for their juice, but multiply us by 10,000 other media outlets that are linking to GitHub. They're getting a lot of benefit.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[15:52\] Yeah. It's an ecosystem, everybody gets things out, and I agree, it has to do with convenience. I guess my takeaway from this is kind of what you said, Adam... Specifically, have your own homepage; you host your code there on GitHub, all the tools are there, your clones can be off GitHub or what have you, but if you have an open source project and it's not just like a throw-away -- like, I have open source stuff that I just throw up on GitHub and whatever... But if it's actually a thing that's in support of a goal of yours, like is the case with Rhys, with his Renovate and his other tools, where they're trying to provide some benefit back to his business - well, have a homepage for that and own that domain, so if GitHub goes away, or you ever wanna move off it or whatever, you're not tied to that URL, you're tied to a URL that you own. And then sure, host the source code where it makes sense. Cool. Well, that was off-topic...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That was a fun aside though, I think. \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** These are the things that I think about, and then I hear somebody talking about it and I'm like "Wait a second, I've been thinking about this, too."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Well, I'll put a little bit back on and I'd say that with open source -- I didn't actually know it was that, but there are companies that do try to use their open source to bring attention to themselves. They host their open source page on their main domain, or on a domain important to them. I've seen others (that I forget now) that do sort of use names that are aligned with their business. I don't know if they're like me and they're desperate for back-links, or if they just think it's cute to have a naming scheme that reflects your company... But I think a lot of companies could probably do better to host it on an open source sub-page and use that to focus attention a bit more.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I agree, absolutely. So that's the back-story of how Renovate came to be - you created it as a "scratch your own itch" shell script, you open sourced it for Google juice, because you had a cool naming convention going that you wanted to-- by the way, Renovate is a perfect name, so I know why you hopped on that and felt good about it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I love it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It plays very well, especially now knowing that you're in the real estate business, it makes it even more poignant, I guess.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Yeah. And from there, it required a few little rocket boosts to be where it is today, at the very early stage. One was when one enterprise user mailed me just out of the blue and said that the tool was actually really important to them right now, and they'd hate to see it just sort of die, and would I consider a way of getting paid for it, kind of thing. They wanna see it alive, and they understand... I declined that, I said "Thank you very much, it's not really necessary at this point", but that was a really good motivator, that people found it that useful.
+
+The second one was when another person from an enterprise posted about a year ago and said "Would you object to switching to the Jest testing framework? Because it's much better and I'd be able to submit quite a lot of tests for you if you did that." I'm just looking at that from my mobile - I was on holiday at the time - and just going "Okay..." I think I literally replied like "Well, sure. I can't say no to somebody promising me to add tests" kind of thing... Trying to reinforce like "Okay... That's what you offered." And sure enough, I switched it to Jest, improved a lot of things... I was not a testing expert, and it improved the test coverage a lot. That was basically I think him thinking that "Well, we use this and I don't wanna see it breaking on me, so I'm gonna add tests for this stuff that I know is important to me, so you at least get noticed if you break stuff that I need." But that was also really shocking to me, that someone would do that. It was probably like two days' worth of work maybe, and that again kept me going.
+
+Then the final bit which sort of turned it was that I had multiple people saying to me, even still though they said "Well, this looks really great, and this is actually exactly what I need, but I'm not gonna use it", and they said like "If you ran it as a service, I'd pay you to use it, but I don't wanna be running another server, another thing I have to monitor, to watch." That was really interesting, because when I heard that a few times, I thought "That's interesting." That's where I sort of got the idea that maybe this has a long-term future as like part service, part software.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[20:23\] There's a couple topics in there. It sounds like this was your... And I don't wanna say this negatively, and maybe just say it is the easiest way --this sounds like this is the first "successful" open source project you've had...
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Yeah, definitely.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Something that opened your eyes to how open source works and how to interact with the community, or even take in suggestions, like switching to Jest for testing, or whatever. And then also it's opened your eyes to how potentially this open source thing that you created as a scratch your own itch that you never really seemed like you were like "Hey, I can make a business out of this" now has some entrepreneurial business opportunities for you that you're now either planning or investigating, or at least opening your eyes to it. So it's two-fold there - your first step into open source, and then now it can be something that you can actually turn into a service.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Yeah. Like I said, these were sort of like turning points. If I didn't have those motivations, I wouldn't have put probably more time in it, I would not have got as many people, and so on. So chance and luck plays a big part in this sometimes.
+
+**Break:** \[21:32\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Alright, Rhys - well, the front of the package says "Automated Dependency Updates." That's a very simple sentence, but undoubtedly there's a lot that goes into providing that, either as a tool or as a service. Can you unpack it for us and tell us how Renovate does what it does?
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Yeah, sure. One quite interesting thing is that the tool behaves basically the same as the app. The app is actually a thin wrapper around the tool; there is no fork going on or a different behavior. So you could basically uninstall the app and go back to self-hosting. All the pull requests you have open and things like that will still be valid and updated, and so on. So pretty much everything I've described covers both the tool or the app.
+
+The way it works is at the base it runs on a schedule, and I normally recommend to people one hour, but some enterprises run every ten minutes... And it scans this repository for package files that it understands, like package.json, Dockerfile, Meteor, package.js files, Google's Bazel builder as well... And just recently we added NVM, RC and travis.yml files, because people wanted to be able to upgrade their Node versions in sync, and they can actually -- Node versions can be found in many different places.
+
+So it scans for all the files, it extracts the dependencies that it finds, it applies a cascading config to it, which gives you a lot of power, but also complexity. And then, based upon how you've configured it, it looks up updates and determines what you should be made aware of. It builds a list of "Okay, this is what we need to do." It checks what's already there, and if anything needs updating or creating, then it does it. And it actually does this by keeping all the state in the repository, so the tool itself you could say is stateless, in that it doesn't need any state file which could be corrupted, or out of date. It actually uses GitHub's Git repository and the list of branches that have been created or pull requests that have been closed, and it basically uses that as its state.
+
+The naming of branches and the naming of the pull requests becomes quite important, because they kind of become like look-up keys. So yeah, it just runs... One difference in the web app is that it's been web-hooked, so it listens to GitHub webhooks for every repository it's installed on, and if that webhook event looks meaningful, such as the person has updated a package.json file, or they've updated their renovate.json file, then it runs again on demand to update it. Then it's quite nice, because if people edit their dependencies, all their pull requests get updated if necessary. If they change their config, then again, everything gets updated if necessary.
+
+\[27:46\] Then it also has a listener for npmJS, so it basically gets updates or notifications using a kind of subscribe notify approach of CouchDB. So it gets updates whenever any new package is updated. We do keep a little bit of state, but it's in a way unimportant state. It looks for any repositories that had that dependency the last time they ran, and if so again, it puts them in the queue. That means that if a package you depend upon on npmJS gets an update, then you can expect to see a pull request within minutes. This gets particularly helpful when you have multiple repositories that belong to the one organization or the one project.
+
+An example is in GraphQL - there's a lot of GraphQL repositories using Renovate, and the Graphcool guys, and that'll often do an update in one upstream repository, and then that flows down to a downstream one where it needs to get merged, and that might flow down to another one. Thanks to the webhooks, it means that that can be done in minutes. It's almost like an alternative to the monorepo, because at least you're not having to update it manually, and it happens within minutes. That's a little value-add onto the app that you can't really do in a stateless command line tool; it would need to be alive and listening and you have to make sure it doesn't crash and all that kind of stuff that I take of with the app.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay, so it's not exactly the way that I was thinking that it would work in terms of the -- it's checking live, so to speak, each time it's run on a schedule, or if there's a webhook that comes in, of course, it knows and it sends the new version of that particular dependency. But when it does a full run on a specific project or repo that you have, it's going to go to all the sources - in many cases, that's just npm - and just check for the most recent version of that library. It's gonna do that for each of your dependencies, each time you run it?
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** That's right, with some caching, and so on.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, so caching is definitely important there. I was thinking more of like the Library.io's approach, where they're basically creating a huge dependency graph in the sky of different libraries and versions, and they have all of that data on their own, and then when it runs, it would already be preexisting without require a centralized service and all that. Okay, very cool...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And potentially even a lot of unknown knowledge you didn't really need to have. Rhys's version is on-demand, so it's not--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's more pragmatic for what he's up to, and Library.io's mission is much bigger in terms of what they're trying to do.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** The stateless aspect of it, where the state is really in the Git repository itself - it makes some things difficult to do, but it also provides huge numbers of benefits, because you reduce the risk of corruption or state mismatches or things like that, given that everytime it runs, it ensures that the correct view is there right now. To give an example, if there was some kind of error - it might be my error, it might have been a server-side error, like a bad response from GitHub, when we looked up at changelog.md... So if a pull request was created and the content of that pull request, which said "We're updating you from 2.1 to 2.2", and the changelog is empty - if the next we run and that problem has been fixed, or maybe the person wrote the changelog, then that pull request gets patched. Because everytime it runs, it ensures that everything is kind of like correct at that point in time, it makes it quite self-repairing. If it crashes halfway through, for some reason, then -- there's not type of crash I'm aware of that causes any state problem that requires manual intervention.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[31:59\] I think it would also make the conceptual model in your head, as you're writing that - which is a complex thing to run through, especially with those transitive dependencies and everything - more simplified, because you're guaranteed a known state at the start of every run, right?
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's all there, it's not gonna change as you're running.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I've got a question on that front, Jerod, since you've mentioned that... Considering how complex this is, and it's potentially always in your head, Rhys, and now that it's been open source and other people are contributing, do you ever put a visual to some of these things that like it's difficult to talk through, because maybe a visual can say "This is how the model works, in a visual standpoint" - do you have things like that? Is that important to you, visualizing workflows for this?
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** It isn't currently there, but it is quite a good idea. I mentioned earlier that it has a cascading config, and in my mind I think of it as like -- I use a term like "ridiculously configurable" or something, meaning that you can control the functionality so much, to the point that you can do things that are even silly. You can write a rule that says "For patch versions of this exact dependency, inside Dev Dependencies, in this package file, then do this" kind of thing. Like CSS, it cascades - you can have global rules, you can have rules per package, you have rules per path, you can have rules per dependency type, you can have catch-up rules for packages. So you can use regular expressions to define your matching rules, and things like that.
+
+Because I found that so many people, in their requirements, they have a lot of "if else/if else/if else" kind of requirements themselves. So they'll start off by saying "I just wanna get an update every week", and it's like "Yeah, that's easy. Just add this preset, "schedule weekly." And then they're like, "Oh yeah, but this package I need, that's my own package", and you're like, "No problem, okay. Add this exception to that rule." Then they're like "Oh yeah, but I only wanna order-merge the minor ones, not the major." It's like, "Yeah, that makes sense, so then you set this."
+
+So when people have the freedom to describe exactly what they want, then they end up having a quite wicked set of requirements. When people realize that they are in control of how Renovate behaves, then they start kind of getting more and more advanced. Some people have got amazingly complex configurations files that Renovate dutifully implements.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I noticed on your sale page - or on your homepage, I should say - you use the adjective "unopinionated", which seems like it's the opposite of what most softwares as a service, or frameworks, or whatever it is... People try to sell their software as opinionated, and most of us appreciate opinionated software because it has opinions, and that's making decisions for us. I found it interesting that you explicitly say "This is unopinionated", and it sounds like the reason for that is because there's so much variance in the way that people wanna handle their dependencies that I guess the 80% solution is not good enough.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Exactly, the variance is huge... And it's almost amusing at times, because I see people at the complete opposite ends. I see people that want the fire hose approach - separate everything, and then you see others that want to group everything together. You see people that want to have ranges in their package.json and other that say "No, let's lock this down to pinned, exact versions." You see people that wanna have a lockfile, you see people that say "I don't have a lockfile for this project." So the opinions of other people are very wide.
+
+\[36:05\] I don't know if you saw this one, but I added like a motto for the tool maybe about a month ago; half is a joke, but it's warming on me and I'm thinking of keeping it... The motto of Renovate is "Flexible, so you don't need to be", because that basically describes how I view the users - I don't wanna be in arguments with them, convincing them why they have to have a lockfile, or they should be pinning, or why they should separate them, so that one bad apple doesn't spoil... I just want people to do be able to do what they wanna do, and then maybe over time they'll realize "Oh, yeah, grouping all of them together every week basically always results in a broken build, because at least one thing breaks, and I end up merging nothing."
+
+The person that at first is very resistant and says "Oh, this will be disruptive" changes their mind and says "Okay, well maybe I'll just group all the minor updates then." Then over time they'll be like "You know, I'm still getting a lot of breaks..." All this disruption they thought would happen by having separate pull requests actually is outweighed by the disruption of them having to look through pull requests with like 12 different upgrades and figure out which one broke... Versus if you put them separately and configure them to automerge or something like that, you wouldn't have that problem. But I'm kind of proudly in that sense flexible or unopinionated - "You wanna do it? You can do it." I don't wanna be in the game of trying to talk you into why you should do the one way that I think is best.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right, you let people learn on their own by trial and error, definitely.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Yeah. And for sure, not everybody is gonna converge on the same behavior either.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I was gonna ask that - is there a best practice that you know what it is, and you're just letting people... Everybody's gonna eventually get there. Because if that's the case, then you might as well just start preaching and get people there faster.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Occasionally, yes. For example, I think that you should always have a lockfile, but there's some very smart people who have written a lot of great software better than mine who think that libraries should not have lockfiles, because then the thing that you're -- if you're not getting the random roll of the dice when you npm-install like your users are, then you're gonna be seeing something different to what they see... That's their argument, for example.
+
+There's other things - I think that pinning your dev dependencies makes a lot of sense. The reason why you don't pin dependencies sometimes is because you have downstream users and you don't want to be unnecessarily restrictive of your downstream users. They may end up with duplicates, or whatever. But your dev dependencies never leave your project, and it makes sense to be like "Yeah, these are the exact dev dependencies that we know are working for us right now."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I've definitely been in a situation as an end user of a library trying to upgrade, and the library I'm depending upon pinned their dependency too tight, whereas there was no reason for it besides that's just the version that they were on when they've last released, and you could go run their test suit against that new -- even if it's just a patch; I think it was just a patch, and it works just fine. If they would have just loosened that or not had it at all, then I would have been able to upgrade without having to bug them... But because they did pin it, now I need my dependency to unpin and/or update before I can even continue with my work.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What is the process of pinning? What is that?
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** At least in Renovate terms, that's when you install renovate and Renovate says "Well, now that you're automating this kind of stuff, you can pin dependencies." That would mean that for example rather than having like a range that says "ESLint 4.0.0" (the carrot), that instead you would say "ESLint 4.2.1", or something like that. And then, at your choosing, based on your configuration, when you wanna update ESLint, you can do so and you might upgrade it to 4.3.0, or something like that.
+
+\[40:11\] ESLint itself is maybe not a good example, but a better example might be, say, if you use eslint-config-airbnb, or something like that, because those ones are quite opinionated, and the whole point of many of the releases of those presets for ESLint is that they're introducing new rules or stricter rules, or they're catching something bad that they were missing before. So the whole point of a linter, in a way, is to break your build, but it's not very nice if you have open ranges in the lockfile, so users come along and run install and try to run the tests and they find that the lint fails because a new rule got introduced without explicit approval of merging. That's an example - you want to pin that down, because nobody gains from just having a random new version appear on some people's computer while others have a cached older version and say "Well, it works on my machine."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Exactly, yeah... All nothing but trouble. So we've been talking specifically in the context of npm and packaged JSON, but we haven't asked you yet if Renovate supports other packaged ecosystems or if it's just npm.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Yeah, so the two major ones are npm and Docker, but it's definitely in -- my goal is that Renovate becomes a universal tool... Universal in terms of language and as well as in terms of platforms. Because apart from GitHub, it supports already GitLab and VSTS, and Bitbucket support is in a pull request... So my goal is to make it cross-platform and cross-package manager. We've already added Docker support, and there's requests for others, like Python, or Java, Maven, and things like that. Yeah, the goal is to make it like a universal approach.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Did you have that goal from the start, or is it at least -- when I think of expanding beyond where you are, I think of "Well, I hope the architecture is set up to be pluggable to a sense. and not like "Okay, in order to support Python, for instance, we're gonna have to rewrite 60% of our codebase to do that."
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Yeah... It definitely was not in my foresight at the start. Most of the features of Renovate have come from users suggesting it; it's been very much like a user-driven thing. Almost every time a user wants a feature and I figure out a way to kind of gracefully add it, I kind of breathe a sigh of relief that whatever choices were made previously weren't too limiting. So yeah, again, it's a bit of luck there.
+
+It started with npm only, and then someone came along and asked if I could support Meteor. And because Meteor itself is really just referencing npm dependencies, it was like 30 lines of code in about six different files and it was done. When Docker came along, that one came along because people were chatting in maybe a blog post or in a Discourse discussion, something like that... And they were talking about the challenges of keeping Docker dependencies updated, in particular the hashes. Because even though most people use Docker tags -- even if you use a tag, like 8.9.4 for Node.js, that's not an immutable tag like in npm. If 8.9.4 or something is published to npm, you know that that's always gonna be the same, whereas in Docker those may look like a semver, but it's really just a tag, and you can change anything underneath a tag.
+
+\[44:08\] So the only way to have immutable references in Docker is to have an SHA-256 hash, which is enormous and it's very un-user-friendly. Someone actually commented that it's a pity there isn't like a renovate for Docker, and sort of mentioned me, or something like that... That's how Docker support came about, because I thought "Yeah, that's really good", because when we look at package.json dependencies, in a way you could argue that we're just automating something that people could do manually. You're automating a feasible manual job. Well in Docker you have these big, long hashes - that's starting to get to the line where it's like this automation is now essentially making something possible that really isn't feasible manually. Looking up hashes and pasting them in and not making a mistake - that's getting a bit beyond what's reasonable, and that's why hardly anybody actually uses hashes... Whereas now, when people use Dockerfiles with Renovate, and even if they have Node latest, even though they wanna do it that way, at least now it will pin Node latest at hash, and so every time Node latest actually changes, you get a pull request that kind of tells you it's changed and you can see if it still passes or doesn't break anything.
+
+Even if you wanna be "non-semver-versioning", you can still get updated whenever that hash is changed whatever tag on docker hub.
+
+I did some refactoring recently to make it a lot easier to add languages in, and there's someone who's told me that he thinks he can add in Docker Compose support pretty easily now, given that there's already Docker there. Hopefully, we'll see a lot more languages added a lot more quickly now that the code is a little bit more welcoming of outside languages and package managers.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You mentioned that with package.json you're basically automating something that people could do manually, and I'll tell you right now that you're automating something that I do manually for our application... We have an Elixir app which also has JavaScript, as all web apps have JavaScript somewhere in the mix. So we have a mix.exs, which is the Elixir side, and we have a package.json... And Adam and I were just talking about this, like "How do we keep up with the Joneses...?"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You sound frustrated just describing it...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, it's not like it's fun -- it's not fun work. I do it manually, a) because I haven't seen a compelling tool that will do it automatically. If this will work for our package.json, I would implore you to add Elixir support, or I would sign up on a list of people who will wait for that eagerly, although admittedly not probably high on your list in terms of language penetration... But yeah, it's just a task. I'm kind of (I don't know), maybe a pedantic, an obsessive control developer kind of person, so I want to see what actually is changing, and I want to pick and choose, "Yes, we want this update; no, we don't want that update." So I probably would have the super-complex configuration.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Yeah, I mean... Once people learn that they can control it, they start really going for it, adding exceptions to rules, and...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's a whole new yak shave, yeah.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Yeah, yeah. One of the points on the Renovate repository where I say Renovate's approach, where I try to describe what's my philosophy - the first point is that I believe that everybody can benefit from some level of automation... And if the way Renovate works now, whatever is you're gonna say "That's not really for me" - well, if it truly isn't for you, then I kind of think "Okay, but tell me what would be for you", because I guarantee you that zero automation is not the best for you.
+
+\[48:14\] Looking up the changelog for each dependency, figuring out which file the source repository uses for changelog, and then clicking and then manually looking at the delta, instead of just like a pull request that actually captures it... That's why I think that everybody benefits from some level of automation. It's up to me to try and make sure that I provide the capabilities that I can do that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right. There's some automation built into the package managers, so I don't go and look up all the dependencies and see; I run either mix hex.outdated, or yarn outdated or something, and it will show the version differences, and then what I'll do is I'll just update one, run the test suite, see what happened, maybe while it's running I'll go check their changelog... So there are some tooling around that, but I'm sure I'm doing way more work than I should be.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** There's a couple different points to consider here. One, it's the waste of time, and potentially time is money...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right, yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So the waste of time and the money, doing something manually that you could potentially automate if you feel comfortable with it, or the extreme flipside is just not doing it at all, and it's like "I'm just never gonna care, I'm just gonna keep moving forward." In your case, Rhys, earlier on in the story you'd mentioned how you'd seen some breakage and you were like "What's the thing?" and it was because something wasn't updated; it was probably because you were not doing it at all. So you've got Jerods, who are gonna do it manually until something like this comes around, you've got people who are extreme and wanna automate it, but they wanna start extreme with the configuration, they wanna highly configure it, and then start to maybe loosely unconfigure themselves because they've become more comfortable with it. Then you've got those who don't do it at all... But either way, you've got this menial process that essentially wastes time and potentially a lot of money. Can we quantify how much time and money has been wasted doing what is now automatable, if that's a word?
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Well, it's pretty hard to quantify, but there's certainly a lot of different ways to look at it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That would be an interesting perspective on your side. That's a selling point, because if you could say "I'll save your organization this because you've researched--", just like Nadia did, Jerod, with that hypothetical number way back with open source, which isn't a point I'll drive home here (look it up if you want to), but the point is you can to some degree...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** ...get a proxy for it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, get a proxy for it, and share that, and then quantify it for each individual team or repo or project or company, and let that be the selling point. "We can save you X."
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Yeah, by the way, you're right - this is getting to marketing, but I just was reading this week and I put a to-do that says "You should focus on what it does for people, not what the features are" kind of thing, and that's pretty much what you're saying now.
+
+One of my favorite anecdotes, and I've been tempted to put this on the web page, at least on the RenovateApp.com - it's from Equifax... You guys know the unprecedented...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We're aware, yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yes.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** ...leak of personal data. So the ex-CEO, who retired after it happened, when he testified - I think it was Congress, I forget exactly... But he basically said that "Well, this was caused because one individual in our development team did not pay attention to a notice that said we should update our web server version, and it's all his fault."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Wow.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** So basically, that entire leak of like half of America's social security numbers was blamed on like -- there was a single developer who missed a notice. That's a process failure; you can't say "I'm blaming one guy because he missed an email, or something like that."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** \[52:00\] I mean, it's probably more than an email, but the reality is that if you don't have automation, you are gonna risk having those types of things happen to you. You kind of need to keep up with patches, or you will eventually have problems; that's pretty much a solid rule.
+
+**Break:** \[52:22\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Rhys, with Renovate and really with all dependency management, as you've found - which is why it's so unopinionated - the devil is very much in the details, and you can shoot yourself in the foot, whether you're going the manual route, probably the automated route... If you're going the "Don't upgrade" route, you're definitely shooting yourself in the foot. But a lot of the details have to do with versions themselves, their meaning... What I think is 1.0 is different from what you think is 1.0; I even have a hard time deciding when I depend on a library... How volatile is this? Should I pin it to the patch, should I allow up to the major? What are your thoughts around that, with versioning, and what it all means?
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Yeah, thanks. So to paraphrase a saying about democracy, I think semver is the worst for of versioning, except for all the others; that's basically how I look at it, because there's lots of challenges, there's lots of things that are going wrong... But right now, it's still the way to go, it's not anything to throw out.
+
+The challenge is -- I think there can be a mismatch between people's expectations about semver... Like, is semver for the consumer, or is it for the producer of the packages? You used the word 'volatile', which is actually a really good one to include there, because semver works on a major minor patch, and in recent years there's been a movement to sort of clarify that a little as being like "breaking feature fix", mapping to the major minor patch.
+
+To give an example, if I have a JavaScript library and I do nothing except for deprecate support for Node 4, I just say "Okay, I'm not gonna support that from now on" - is that a major minor or a patch? It wasn't meant to be a trick question, sorry...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I was gonna say, it's a deprecation, so I would think that is a patch; you're not really doing anything.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** No, no, it's a major because it is breaking functionality.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** No, you're just deprecating it though...
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Oh, sorry, but removing support for it. "Node.js 4 is no longer supported."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, okay, so that would be a --
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** I'm not saying something breaks, but...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay. So yes, if you're removing support, then that's definitely a breaking change.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[55:58\] I thought you were just notifying of an upcoming breaking change. Okay, so you've got me.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** So we saw that a lot we saw people remove 4. But if you're not using Node.js 4, what's the volatility of that? It's like zero. It's not a risk to you.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** None of the actual code changed, it was just saying "Well, we're not gonna keep supporting Node 4 from now on, so if you're using it, don't upgrade to this major version."
+
+Now, the next thing is let's say I add a new language support to renovate, but I put it behind a feature flag, it's isolated into one file, and it does nothing unless you actually enable that feature. That's a minor, I've added a feature, right?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** What's the risk of that? It's behind a feature flag, it does nothing unless it's turned on... I mean, the risk to you as an existing user would be like "Well, I don't care." Realistically, that's a very low risk to you.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Shouldn't that be how every minor is -- there's new functionality, but there's no risk in upgrading, because...
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Ideally, but you can also have features that might touch 20 files, or things like that; I'm giving you the example of the simplest of features, but it is a feature. Now I'll give you the final example. Let's say I build an edge case, a corner case that's really complicated and really nasty to try and fix, and it takes me like 17 files of touching to add like an extra state across the whole app to track to remove it. Now, that's considered a fix, but that one's the highest risk of all of them, because I've had to touch 17 files... And I'll tell you, I've broken things with fixes; that's just how it is.
+
+But when I'm trying to work out my versioning, I feel compelled by this concept that I should be following breaking feature fix. If I'm truly fixing an edge case, I don't wanna call that a feature, or people will say "Well, who are you trying to kid? That's a bug." But the reality is you as the consumer - forget all of the breaking feature minor major, all you're trying to do is, like you said, volatility. You just care "What's the chance it's gonna break me?" That's really all you care about.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, exactly.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** And that's where semver is kind of not working for us very well, because as the end user, you just wanna know your risk level. A breaking feature fix is a good general rule, but it lets you down in so many times, and that's the biggest problem we have with semver right now. We could do a better job somehow (I don't have the implementation idea) of the producers being able to communicate risk to the consumers. The major minor patch by using feature and fix - that's not really working very well today.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What if we could add -- so instead of saying "Well, let's throw a semver out and do something--", I know you're not saying that, but like, let's have another standard that's better... What if we added more metrics in addition to semver, so that still is there to communicate the intentionality of the release, right? That feature -- what was the first one? Feature or something fix? Major minor patch...
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Yeah, breaking feature fix.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, breaking feature fix - that's our intention, so we continue to do that, we release things according to our intentions, but we have tooling around the history and the changes and all that, and so maybe in addition to that you have additional metrics, like "This is a patch, according to what it did, but it also added 17 files and touched 60% of the codebase." That would give you-- the things that you're describing to me... Because we can automate all that, that's what our tooling does already.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Exactly.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We can flesh it out.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Yeah, I mean... Again, that's why I firmly think that everybody needs a little bit of automation, even if it's just something that's giving you a report about like the estimated stability of this fix... Is it a typo, or is it 17 files?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[59:57\] Yeah. I like that, "Everybody could use a little automation." Or automate ability is what you've said? I like that.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Yeah, yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Rhys is good at these one-liners, man...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, we'll quote you on that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** He's flexible, so we don't have to be.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I like also that you talk about the risk management too, because that's something you don't really consider... That's one thing Jerod and I talked about in the pre-call; it was like, you know, it's essentially risk management of like how far you're willing to go, how configurable you make Renovate for yourself it's curbing risk management.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And then the ultimate extreme is this automerging feature, which seems scary to me... Can you tell us about that? Going back to our conversation months ago, Adam, about looping, with...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right, Tim Mecklem.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Thank you - Tim, where they would close the loop on their diabetes machines... What are those called? I'm dropping the ball on it, but...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I don't remember...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** The ultimate was to close the loop where it would actually regulate things for you in your body, and that was scary.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Predictive, too.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Automerging to me is like, "Okay, at least let me look at the thing before it gets merged", but why don't you tell us about that feature tell us about that feature.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Yeah, so to give you just some perspective... Automerge is where you give Renovate the permission to merge a new version to your master branch, whatever is your base branch, if it passes your test. So you do these for ones that you're confident of. And for example, like dev dependencies, or if you're updating Jest, you're updating ESLint... I mean, if you've got a new version of ESLint and all the tests pass, are you really gonna inspect anything else?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, exactly.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** So the rule that we use is like if you were just gonna click that Merge button anyway, why don't you save yourself the trouble? And if you wanna really get out there, there's the option to do what we call the branch order merge, where it just creates a branch, and if the tests pass on the branch, it does a merge onto a master without even raising a pull request, so you reduce your noise... So that's automerge.
+
+Right now, actually, when I look at the statistics, we have about a 2:1 ratio between manual merge and automerge. That's like thousands a week are being automerged by people. People are feeling safe enough to be increasing that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Nice.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's an interesting metric too to use for getting people's buy-in, to say "Do you know what the ratio is between the risky, which is automerge, to the Jerods that will inspect it manually, and/or just go the other way?"
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Yeah, yeah. I try to force myself -- whenever I merge a pull request, I think to myself, "Have I ever looked into that? Have I ever spun up a VM and checked that it still works, the whole search this/that, or am I just clicking Merge and waiting for someone else to find it?" And if the answer is "I'm not actually spending that time?", then I may as well let the bot be negligent, not myself, if that's the way I'm gonna be.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Especially -- I mean, if you're branching, you're testing and you're merging, then you're merging back to master... I mean, it's fairly easy; it is Git, you can roll back.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It'd be different if it was a permanent change you can never revert back to, but I guess if you're several commits in a line and maybe two deploys later - I don't know, maybe it's too far back to really do that, maybe it gets more complex infinitely, but for the most part it is Git, and that's the point of Git, is for people to roll down changes.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Yeah. So to give you a little insight into the future of Renovate as well, is that what I wanna do is augment that such that -- because now we have some scale, have fun... So there's now around 5,000 repositories using Renovate on GitHub alone, so that gives me some really good statistics... And what I wanna be able to do is allow people to configure automerge rules that say "Well, if it passes my tests and passes an expected number of everybody else's tests, then merge them."
+
+\[01:03:59.16\] I mean, for ESLint you don't really care, but say if it's a new version of like the Angular core or the React core, then we give you the ability to say "Automerge it if it passes 95% of tests." Or in the future you might say "Automerge it if 30% of everybody else has already merged it" - to allow people to have these kinds of metrics that give you more a feeling of surety or safety. I think that that's part of the future of the automation--
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's really interesting, actually... You're using the wisdom of the crowd and past performance to say "90% if people automerge this."
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Yeah, yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Where would that UI surface at?
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Well, it bases to be configuration; you can configurate thresholds... That's my intention.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Where would you communicate that information, the wisdom of the crowd? Where would that be communicated?
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Oh, in the pull request.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** I saw a nice trick that TJ Holowaychuck uses for something he does at GitHub polls. He actually embeds .svg files as an image into GitHub issues, if you're using his GitHub polls... That is feeding back to a lambda function that polls DynamoDB, and basically it gives you like a dynamically updating issue comment, where you don't have to rely on a bot to be continually refreshing it and saying "Okay, now 843 tested it." It's actually an image, and the image, every time you refresh, pulls the latest number from the back-end.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That is super cool. Can you give us a link to that in action so we can include it in the show notes and check it out ourselves? Because that's a great idea.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Yeah, sure. It's a really good idea. I'm actually considering making half of the pull request being essentially like a text .svg, so that you can kind of be able to dynamically update the information in a pull request description, graphs and so on, without actually needing to continue to be hitting the GitHub API, to be annoying people by popping it into their news feed, or whatever.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think it's interesting too how hackable .svg's are. I've seen some really interesting stuff, this included, as well as I think the way CodeSponsor did their thing with .svg's... That was really inventive; no one would have ever thought of that, and Eric did, and that was really cool.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Yeah... Sorry, if I could say just one more thing - I think one of the challenges with the updates, and this is the hesitance that everybody has... Sometimes it's the fatigue they have after the initial positivity is that the updates become a bit like a fire hose. Automation 1.0 is sort of like, you know, whenever there's an update, here it is; it's in your face. But I've continually worked to try to have ways to reduce that noise, and so automerging is really one of those, because if you can automerge it without you needing to do something, then that's one... But other ways include grouping and scheduling. For example, you can say "Don't submit any new pull requests during our working hours", which also has a benefit meaning that your CI machines can not be holding you up with application code during working hours as well.
+
+So grouping, scheduling, automerging - these are all ways to try to kind of reduce that noise, and reduce people's frustration, that you don't have to have the firehose. If somebody says "Are you interested in getting healthy", and you say "Yeah", and then they say "Okay, well the only solution is 5 AM boot camp every day", then you're like "Ugh, that's a little bit extreme." So if you say to people are you interested in keeping updated? and they say "Yeah", and you then you say "Okay, so here's what's gonna happen - I'm gonna hit you with a pull request every single hour of the day." That's like the equivalent of this 5 AM boot camp.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Some people want that, but by by having that flexible configuration, they can just be like "You know what? Let's make dev dependencies weekly/monthly." They have that flexibility to be able to just schedule things down.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[01:08:08.06\] I want the version that's likened to the machine that you walk into and it has a nice rubber belt that just jiggles... Do you know those things? They just jiggle the fat right off you?
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Yeah, yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's not real, Jerod.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Give me that version of automated dependencies. Just jiggle the fat right off my app, will ya?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, my gosh... \[laughter\] I thought you weren't going there, but you did. That's a good one, I like that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** My app, Adam.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes, your app. Well, Rhys, I think - maybe I'm jumping the gun here; if we have more to talk about on this subject we can, but I think during this conversation I've been revealed through discussion and your excitement for this that there's a serious business here for you, and you potentially accidentally stumbled on an open source itch that could very likely be a business, but that's kind of scary, because you're gonna build this business potentially around somebody else's product, and kind of volatile ecosystems, and Jerod asking you for Elixir support. What do you think about that?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] "How much money do I have?" is the question.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** It's exciting as well as a little bit stressful, because the concept of monetizing open source can be a hot topic at the best of times... But as I mentioned earlier, the epiphany to me was when somebody said "This is exactly what I want, but I won't run it. If you'll run it, I will pay you", and then I realized "Okay, I'm gonna work on this, because it's fun", but I think it tends itself towards being a service, and it also tends itself (as we've just talked about) towards having a network effect, where the more people are using it, the better it can be for everybody. That's essentially being the motivation. But until now I've been running it as a free app. It currently supports around 500 installs and about 5,000 projects on GitHub, which is quite a lot of scale, at least to me.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's a lot.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Yeah, I think so. I'm pretty chuffed with it. I still remember when each day you see it go from 25 to 26, or something like that... So yeah, it's been going very well.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Plus with some big names using it - you've got Algolia, Google Chrome Labs, Mozilla, you've mentioned Angular... So you have some very significant projects that are dependent on this.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Yeah, yeah. It's super exciting whenever I see big names on the installs. It's very like flattering almost. Yeah, it's really nice.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** How do you track the installs? Is it currently a service where these are their own installed version of it, or is it--
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Oh yeah, right. So these are actually only the people who have installed Renovate on public repositories on GitHub. I have a -- not that probably anybody has read it, but I have a point in my Terms & Conditions that says "If you install Renovate on a public repository, we have the right to use your logo and your name without further permission. But if you have that, you can tell us and I'll remove it within seven days." I put that because it's better to beg forgiveness than ask permission.
+
+That list of customers is actually -- or I should say "users", because no one's paying... That list of users - that's only ones that have installed it publicly. I actually have -- how would I say it? There's other unicorns, we could say, that are running it privately that I'm aware of, but I don't put their logo up because I haven't asked them, and it's self-hosted, so that's their own business.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So I guess the way then to get this into an open source application is to go to github.com/apps/renovate, which is linked to from your readme, and that's the way -- there's a big, green button up at the top, you click Install, and then you choose the repository to install it into. Is that the process?
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** \[01:12:13.07\] Yeah, that's right. GitHub gives you the option of either installing it on all repositories, or selectively picking them one by one. That interface is not particularly friendly, so a lot of people end up ticking all out of convenience... But yeah, basically you install it, you pick which repositories you want it to run on, and the next thing that happens is it gives you an onboarding pull request. And that one does nothing except say "Okay, here's our recommended default config, and if you use this, then here's what'll happen next. You'll expect seven pull requests, and here's what they'll look like."
+
+It gives people the ability to then edit that pull request, edit the config to add these exceptions, these configurations, and Renovate will then run immediately and give you an updated prediction. If you started with "Here's your seven pull requests" and then someone adds a preset that says "Group all together", then it'll (hopefully within a minute, or something) update to then say "You'll have one pull request called Update All Packages." It's sort of like an interactive onboarding where nothing happens until you then click the button to merge.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I guess the first step is to either choose all or choose the repo, then you have to add a config to your repo, is that right? So that's actually a file that lives in your repo?
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Yeah, that's right. It is actually possible to run it without a config file. So if you actually just close that onboarding pull request, that's good enough to get it to start, because you've already installed it on the repo, so clearly you want it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** So it is possible to do it without a config file. What that means is you just get the application defaults, and those are the ones which I'll call fairly unopinionated. Over time, over major releases, I've often changed default settings for configuration to make them (I'm trying to think of how to describe it) less action -- I'm missing a word, but you know... Less volatile. It does less by default as each one goes on, meaning that people kind of opt into things.
+
+For example, in the very early releases it was a bit more opinionated and said "Let's pin everything, let's do this...", whereas now you kind of have to opt into that if that's what you wish. It will attempt to autodetect.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I guess this couples with potentially a new announcement... I think this is fairly new for you too, which is inclusion in GitHub's Marketplace - do you wanna speak about that? Can you talk about those details?
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Yeah, absolutely.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** How does that reflect back on the two different processes to install it, so to speak?
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Yeah, so to be a part of GitHub's Marketplace you don't have to actually be a GitHub app; you could be an OAuth app, or things like that. The two are very closely related, but not tied to the hip. So if you go and install the app without going through the marketplace, it will install and run and give you the onboarding, and very soon - not today, but very soon, it will start giving people polite reminders that it is necessary to select a plan... Sorry, that's only if they're actually on a private repository, I should add. Soon it will start prompting people to say like "Renovate is available on the GitHub Marketplace. Please select a plan." Then eventually it will run out of patience and say "Well, you've got like seven days left", or something like that.
+
+That's my planned approach for how to nudge people onto the plans, if the use is in private repositories, rather than open source.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, this is only private repos, not open source repos.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Correct, correct.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So that's a clear distinction there.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Exactly. That's a pretty standard GitHub add-on business model - open source is always free. Sometimes people have to have reasonable use limits, but it's been going pretty well so far. Like I said, I've got 5,000 projects, and that's being fairly manageable, so I think that we can continue managing with open source being free indefinitely.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:16:15.02\] Does it make sense to mention this? I don't know if this is brand new or how long this will be real, but it seems like you maybe even have an opening special for personal plans, that's like $1/month... Is that on Git forever?
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Yeah, yeah. You know, it's challenging when you go from a free offering to saying to people "Hey, pay me."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** "Give me some money", yeah.
+
+4: Exactly... And I thought that one of the nicest ways I could do that is almost like a Kickstarter-like approach, where it's like, your earliest back is get the best price. So that's why it's opened with this opening special, where it's a price that will be as you are sort of asking; it will be grandfathered in, because that's actually GitHub's policy. GitHub's policy is if you sell someone a plan at price X, then you keep delivering it basically indefinitely, until that person cancels it. That works really well, because what that has allowed me to do is to offer this kind of opening special prices, and starting tomorrow, I'll be pointing some of the people I know have been using it for a long time and saying "Hey, sign up with this. You'll get that price forever. Thank you for helping promote Renovate."
+
+I thought that having this kind of carrot approach to pricing, rather than a stick approach which says "Pay up now, or else... You've had long enough", I thought that might be a nice way of transitioning, where you offer the existing users a price that they know is really, really fair.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** $1/month is really fair, for most fans.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Yeah, that's the...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The personal plan.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** That's for the personal accounts. I remember I would have been willing to pay like $5-$10 minimum kind of thing, so I think a dollar is good. And people can sign up and lock that in.
+
+Another reason for charging a dollar and not saying free is that I know that if I sign up to a service and they've got a free plan that suits me, I always have a concern that one day they're gonna say "You know what, we can't keep offering that, and it's now $35/month", or something like that. They'll go from free to a price that is just not valuable to you, it doesn't match with the value. So I personally prefer to have something where I can be like "Okay, I'm a paying customer then, and I get this price, and I know that there's a good chance they'll grandfather that in." That's another part of my line of thinking - not so much just like "Oh, I worry whether they'll be sustainable", because you know $1/month is not really gonna help with that, but it's more like "Oh, but I know I've got a price locked in, and that I like." This is the approach I'm taking.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I know it's tough to ask this question, and I won't ask you for the five-year plan, but give me some time span that's reasonable for you to share with the listening audience where Renovate is going, where you have dreams about going, and considering now you're in Marketplace, it's becoming a paid-for product that can sustain itself and grow, what's on the horizon for you? What's next?
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Yeah, so while I obviously hope that there'll be good take-up from the Marketplace, the marketplace itself can be very good exposure... People finding it via the Marketplace that wouldn't have otherwise heard about it. You guys haven't heard about it, for example.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We should hear about it, right, Jerod?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm glad Nicholas told us, because without Nicholas, we'd be in the dark still yet.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Yeah, thanks Nicholas.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's right, we need this. We need Elixir support.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Thank you, Nicholas.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** \[01:19:41.05\] Yeah. So look, my long(ish)-term plan for Renovate - fundamentally, it remains an open source-first tool, with a very good core that you can run yourself, if that's what you wanna do. I plan and hope that a lot of people will prefer to have the app. I'm only aware of one company who is running their own app, their own bot, or whatever you wanna call it, on github.com, meaning that most people -- it is free, but I still think that the convenience in having someone else watch it, monitor it, alarm it, and things like that, and saver logs, I think that'll benefit.
+
+I also plan to add some things to the app that are not really easy to do in an open source command line tool, and that's things like a web interface to view your history, like "Were there any failed attempts yesterday?" or "What was the log from three hours ago when it created this pull request that looks a little bit weird to me?", things like that... And that's only possible when you're actually keeping state, storing logs, providing a web interface, and so on.
+
+I think that the tool can remain a very powerful open source tool, while the app can provide what you expect from an app, as a service, rather than just simply software.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Very cool. Well, I know I'm excited. I think this was an eye-opening topic for me, because automating something can be pretty scary... Like Jerod said, he hasn't found a reasonable tool to do it for ourselves, so we've been basically wasting time and money, and I'd be excited to have Jerod have more of his time back, so we can make some more money or find just different, fun things to do, and it's just such a shame that there's so many -- like, you just repeat that 50,000 times, people wasting their time and money updating dependencies that Renovate could save so much out there, and automate it so much, too.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Yeah. My goal is that there's always some setting or some level that works for everybody, so for anybody that thinks it's not for them, there must be something that is right, and... "Well, if it just did this..." Because we've got some ideas, and if I find that people like them, then I think there's a few other approaches and models that could be used.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Well, Rhys, thank you so much for sharing your story and your passion for this project, and your commitment to open source, and just sharing the details around the sometimes tough subject of open source to business and how you balance all that. I know it's tough, but thank you so much for sharing your time today, and all your ideas with the show.
+
+**Rhys Arkins:** Yeah, thank you very much. It's been a real pleasure, and thanks for your time, as well.
diff --git "a/BONUS \342\200\223 Sustain Summit 2018 (Interview)_transcript.txt" "b/BONUS \342\200\223 Sustain Summit 2018 (Interview)_transcript.txt"
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@@ -0,0 +1,149 @@
+**Jerod Santo:** Alright, we're joined with Allen Gunner Gunn. Do we call you Allen, do we call you Gunner? What's your favorite?
+
+**Allen Gunn:** Most folks that I'm not married to call me Gunner. My mom and my wife have Allen as a preference, but I'm user-configurable.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very good. Well, Gunner is so fun to say... I think we'll just stick with that then.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I only knew it was Gunner. I'm sorry. I'm gonna call you Gunner, even if you didn't like it. It's sort of like a thing I do... Right, Jerod?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's right.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** If you give your nickname, we're calling you your nickname.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's right. Sustain Summit 2018... Gunner, you are the facilitator, you are a core organizer of this; we were at Sustain last year, and we'll have a presence at Sustain this year... I just wanna get the word out for people that this is a thing that's happening, it's an important event. October 25th, over the pond, this year, in London.
+
+First, let's go back to last year, because you were a facilitator. I was there, it was a lot of fun... I'll tell you what - I wasn't really expecting what I got. Whenever you have kind of a conference or a meetup style event, you think it's gonna be very, very laid back, but you facilitated, and it was very structured and organized, and it was a blast. Tell us about Sustain 2017 from your angle.
+
+**Allen Gunn:** I would agree with you, it was a blast. It was a great group of people, and I think it benefitted from being timely. I think Sustain is going at a lot of questions that a lot of people are asking, at a lot of levels. Sustainability of free and open source software projects has been a perpetual unsolved problem, but as they become more foundational elements of critical infrastructure and also critical human rights technology, questions of "What's gonna help them stick around?" and "What's gonna help them thrive?" have gotten more and more central in a lot of the discussions that we find ourselves in.
+
+I think a lot of people there, if I were to frame it this way, were playing for more like... keeps than you are at an average conference, and they were actually looking for answers, they were actually looking for insights on what sustainability looks like, and I really appreciated working with the other organizers - Open Collective, and Sticker Mule, and everybody else - because I think they apply such a broad interpretation of sustainability in a very healthy way. It ain't just about the money; it's about the community, it's about the overall health of your individual contributors, it's about the organizational health, no matter what type of organization might be shepherding your open source project.
+
+I just feel like the energy stemmed, in many ways, from both the timeliness and the urgency of the topic.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So the pitch for Sustain is it's a one-day event for open source sustainers, the people you've been telling us about. There's no keynotes, there's no slides, there's no expo halls... It's not a conference, it's a get-together. Tell people what they can expect in terms of what will actually happen, maybe in the context of what happened last year. Will that change, or will it be very similar? What's your perspective?
+
+**Allen Gunn:** Sure. We model these events -- I'm a chronic frequent flier, and we often say that we model agendas to be somewhat like airplane flights. There's a sort of taxing and take-off phase, we try to spend as much of our time at cruising altitude as we can, and then we try to "Bring it in for a landing."
+
+What we did last year, first thing out in the morning was really try and explore some foundational topics, and let people sort of move between a bunch of conversations, at their own pace, in their own sequencing, to sort of understand different facets of sustainability, different analyses of sustainability, and just really start to build some shared understanding.
+
+\[04:10\] The bulk of the day was spent in participant-driven sessions. What we mean by participant-driven sessions - we ask folks when they register "Hey, what do you actually want to get out of the event?" and we build a soft agenda slate from those topic suggestions, and then at the event we try to get folks in real-time to come up with additional topics that they would like to see addressed.
+
+We don't use terms like "unconference." Those terms are sadly overused and have taken on less and less meaning over time, as everything has been called an unconference. What we try to do is say that it is participant-driven, in that we try to source the material from participants, and we prioritize -- if you will indulge the notion that these events are knowledge markets, we're focused on the knowledge consumers, not the knowledge producers.
+
+Many conferences have what I call a "rich get richer" paradigm. Keynoters keep on keynoting, panelists keep on paneling... It's the usual suspects class hierarchy. What we try to do at these events is identify where the learning needs are, the growth needs, and the folks that have ideas they could use some help building out, and try to resource those conversations.
+
+We try to bring loving supply from knowledge supply-side, toward those that are looking for answers around sustainability, around project growth and maintenance and governance. In doing it that way, we try to setup sessions that are themselves outcome-oriented. Part of why we say "no slides" is slides are a fail before they start, because they assume the so-called presenter knows what those in the room want to hear... And once in a while, they might get it right. But most of the time, they tend to over-share, over-deliver, over-saturate brains.
+
+We try to set up sessions formats that are more transactional and that are more question-driven, where we orient facilitators, we give them some basic ground rules, so that they feel empowered and understanding the plan, but we try to emphasize to them the need to, first off, find out why people came to your session, find out what they really wanna know, and try to center the session focus around what they came for, not what you think they should get. That fundamentally transforms participant experience.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It sounds a lot like really interactive schooling, where the pupil and the teacher sort of come to a similar level, and it's really about what does the students or participants need to get, versus "Here's what I wanna give them.
+
+**Allen Gunn:** I would say that is correct. It is one of several different formats. I would say there's maybe... if you taxonomize it there's four categories of what you've just described as one. There's the interactive school, there's the (we call it) "around the world" or "choose your adventure" learning format, where it's basically the ability to drop in and just listen, so I think that's slightly different... But the two other formats -- the stuff I've just described is what we often call "first half of event format", where you're building shared language, you're building connections, you're getting people aware who else is in the room...
+
+The two other categories of session formats that we run at these events - one are actual problem-solving sessions. Instead of a sort of supply-side knowledge/consumer-side paradigm, we try to get people who are motivated to address a common problem or a common opportunity, try to get them into a session format with some framework that allows them to be generative around both characterizing the problem, but also putting forth one or more ideas for how to move that forward. What are believable ways to handle burnout? What are believable ways to take payments without selling out, or supporting any particular corporate infrastructure that you don't particularly find yourself in solidarity with? That category is the most compelling at these events. Once you've got the shared language, can we build some stuff together? Can we solve some stuff together?
+
+\[07:48\] In the last format type, which we try to do, even at these one-day events, is what we call "post-event focus sessions." Talk is cheap. It's great to be in a room and drink a lot of coffee and meet some good people, but we try to have a set of sessions on the agenda called "Where from here?" that focus on "Are there conversations you would participate in after today?" and if not, that's cool; this was a good, little diversion from your regular reality, good on ya. But if we can set you up to signal other people that you'd like to keep talking about business models, or you'd like to keep talking about community governance, we can see if that next conversation can be made to happen by identifying one person who's committing to actually say "I'll send out a calendar or an email" or "I will announce a time and a place." So it's in trying to put that arc together, from discovery and learning, to generative problem-solving, and then trying to turn it into something other than just a wave that crests on a metaphorical event beach, and lead to supposed big collaboration.
+
+At the end of the day, what it's all about is the long-term impact, not just the feel-good of sitting in a room, in rectangular chairs, looking at a bunch of other wonderful, bright, passionate folks.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I love that so much, the next steps... Because when you walk away from an event, it's always kind of "Now what?", and like you said, there is that crescendo, there is that -- you get a bit of a buzz of energy at least, or maybe even inspiration to go out and do something afterwards. But if that's unorganized, it dissipates pretty quickly. Maybe by the time you get off the plane and get back to your house, that's worn off... But with actionable next steps that people can team up on and move forward, it seems like you're actually making real progress.
+
+Now, I know last year one of the big things that came out as a result or as an output of this event was a report put out by the organizers... There's a 2017 report on the website, and it kind of summarizes a lot of what's been going on, and a lot of the things that everybody came to... What are some other things that people at least rose their hand, or -- I know there were those big pieces of paper, you sign up... What were some other things people were moving forward with? You may not know if they did or did not, but just to give an idea of the actionable things that were happening at the end of the day.
+
+**Allen Gunn:** Sure. I'm not looking at my list of outcomes, so I'll try and freestyle... But one that I've found really compelling, and I wouldn't claim this event led to this outcome, but it's something that was discussed at the event, and has continued to enjoy some very strong leadership... There's a couple of funders - Ford Foundation and Sloan Foundation, that are really thinking holistically about what they call public interest infrastructure. Open source software, in their parlance, is a critical component of public interest infrastructure, and they've continued to commission resources and commission research and also to allocate resources to really make sure that we're continuing to have this conversation with a research-driven lens, and really trying to characterize that which is and that which needs to be.
+
+I really salute them for the leadership they've shown, both in supporting participation in these meetings - they actually help us buy some plane tickets - but they and their larger program work are driving this dialogue with this research lens and trying to make sure that we don't treat this as a per-codebase, per-GitHub project type of paradigm, but instead think at systems levels around how open source supports critical internet infrastructure, critical public infrastructure and critical community infrastructure.
+
+Some of the other interesting conversations that have gone forward - I have the privilege of facilitating and organizing a lot of events focused on free and open source, so there are a number of ongoing conversations about sustainability that I think got wind in their sales at that event. Again, I'm not saying they started there, but I think they certainly found springboard moments in there, if you'll indulge me that metaphor.
+
+One project that wasn't there, and we're still trying to get them to this year's event - folks like the Reproducible Builds project. I don't know if folks are familiar with that... I think it's one of the most important free and open source projects going. It's a bunch of folks, many of them from the Debian community, that are trying to figure out "How can we build software that we know at a deterministic level is matching the source code we think it came from?" This matters for security, it matters for integrity, it matters for all kinds of code quality and code reliability reasons.
+
+\[11:57\] We've been working close to them over the past year. I think their approaches to sustainability are brilliant, because they are trying to do a multi-faceted model where they earn some money, fundraise some money, and otherwise sort of allow folks to contribute in kind... And I've seen a lot of communities doing that kind of hybrid sustainability models, and I think a lot of those conversations that happened last year have just given people food for thought, have given people ideas on trying "more than one thing." Because if I were to offer a loving critique of mini free and open source projects, they tend to be a single revenue stream paradigm. Rare is the free and open source project that really intentionally thinks about a basket of individual donations, large donors, grant funding, earned income... And there are other options, depending on your religion, including sponsorship and investment. But yeah, I think that's the kind of stuff that came up that I've found very gratifying.
+
+I think the other conversations that have been ongoing are the complex dynamics of the ecosystem. Some of these free and open source projects are tied to large for-profit corporations, and that is neither a good or a bad thing, it is a complicated thing, because values and priorities do not always align. What I find compelling about those dynamics is how resilient having free and open licenses makes that paradigm... And that is to say, with free and open source, you are always able to fork or go in a different direction if you are feeling that the way a project is going is not consistent with what you wanna be working on. But I think those are problems that we'll continue to discuss. How do we have free and open source projects enjoy the support of large companies, but also maintain autonomy and vitality independent of any one particular source of sustainability?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Long-time listeners of The Changelog will know that we did talk to Chris Lamb on Reproducible Builds, early in 2017; this is February 3rd, 2017 in terms of the published date of that show. We'll link that up in the show notes, but... Totally agree with you on the multi-revenue stream or sustainable streams of not just funding, but just support of a project. All to often do we see the focus simply being on money or the stigma of sustaining open source being just about funds or money, and I believe there's lots of different ways that the community can be involved, whether it's corporate community, enterprise community (which is kind of community) or anyone else getting involved.
+
+I think it's really important to give maintainers a new lens to see sustaining their projects and their communities, because all too often do we only focus on the money, or only focus on the grants, or only focus on one in particular, where you really need to think about it like a business might think about it, which is "If we only got money from this one client or this one customer and they failed to pay us next month, or their relationship with us changed, where does that leave us?" And it also doesn't allow multiple voices into the community.
+
+Having that polyglot thought around where sustaining comes from opens up the door for a much more diverse and much more rich experience when it comes to that community or that project.
+
+**Allen Gunn:** Exactly. And I think, to build on that, another tension that I think bears discussing - and I've certainly lived this many times - there's a tension, to your point, about people sort of having discomfort with money topics... There's also an interesting - I call it a false dichotomy, around volunteer contributions versus money flowing in a project. There are what I lovingly call "true believer" projects that don't ever wanna go beyond volunteer labor, because there is magic in the fact that everyone is just contributing with their time and nothing else... And more power to any project that can roll that way. I'm not throwing any shade on projects that are 100% volunteer-led, but I don't believe that's a 100% universal realistic model, and in particular there are people who have to pay rent, and feed family, and so forth...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+
+**Allen Gunn:** \[16:01\] So I think the false dichotomy that comes up is "Does introducing financial sustainability into a free and open source community compromise the volunteer magic?", and it's gotta be done right. I've seen it done wrong over the years. I've seen projects that got a big chunk of money and were not thoughtful or intentional about who got it, and that leads to an inside-the-wall/outside-the-wall badness... But I think done well, you see communities that make the transition elegantly.
+
+We've been working with OpenStreetMap U.S. (the U.S. version of the OpenStreetMap, global chapter community) and they are just this week announcing their first ever paid executive director, and it's been beautiful to see the way that they have, with their community, told the community this was coming, really worked with the community to understand what was gonna change and what was not gonna change, and have sort of gotten out ahead of that "Wait, hold it - now that somebody's paid, does that change anything about all us volunteer mappers, and are we less valuable and respected?"
+
+It's been really cool to see it done well as they have, because they have really been an open and transparent board. It's a volunteer-led board of that non-profit. They've just done a brilliant job of trying to get out ahead of the community's concerns and make sure the community felt part of the process. In the transition to both hiring paid staff, but also trying to scale fundraising and communications, which is what the new executive director will be asked to do, it's really compelling to see it done well.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** There's just certain roles in an organization - since you've said religion a couple of times, you could look at literal churches, or you could look at non-profits or ministry-based non-profits and look at their corporate or organizational structures, and there's some roles that just need to paid placements, simply because they have the expertise, or the experience and the time involved needs to be such that it's either very much part-time, or three-quarters times, or even full-time... If that's their sole focus, when we just break down life, we do need to earn an income to move along and to do our life together; those individuals need to be paid somehow, someway, and I like how you said they're preparing their communities for that, so that there's no uprising and everyone can share their feelings about how that impacts the project or the funds available to keep moving forward.
+
+**Allen Gunn:** Exactly. And let me give you a +1 on those facets - accountability. I love volunteer projects, but how many times have I seen the compellingly talented tech lead who is volunteering not hit deadlines, not come through on commitments, and their attitude is "Hey, come on, I'm volunteering. Back off." And that's legit, you are volunteering, and we need to back off, because you can't force a volunteer to do anything, but I think part of the beauty of paid roles is it puts an accountability structure in place that is pretty universally understood. They're getting paid to do stuff, per an agreement.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Especially the executive director roles.
+
+**Allen Gunn:** Exactly.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Those come with such experience from different -- they transplant knowledge from places... They may have been in industrial manufacturing, and they bring all this expertise of processes and in hierarchy that's just necessary, or whatever might be the case, I'm just spitballing here... But the point is they've brought some level of -- very similar to the way enterprises seek out, headhunt and find CEOs or CFOs, is because they've got some level of credibility and a discipline that can be used in the organization's need to move forward, and I think a community vetting that person, and even understanding that that person has a full-time role, and how they get paid, how important that might be, and even what that salary might be, or even having some sort of understanding of like not just simply the funds, but like you had said, the accountability back to that person... What do they bring? What do we get from this person being involved? And they may have been a player already in the community, and they're just graduating to that role. It doesn't mean they have to be transplanted from somewhere else.
+
+**Allen Gunn:** Exactly.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I like that.
+
+**Allen Gunn:** \[20:01\] To build on that, I think the other place where a lot of open source projects have room to grow - and again, I say this with intense respect - I think most open source projects have what I call a single-generational frame of reference, as in "We've got these folks who are on this project. We're gonna code, and code, and code", or whatever verbs are associated (design, design, design; test, test, test; support, support, support). And I think that part of what events like Sustain try to help us with is thinking multi-generational. What does it look like for founders to actually peace out of a project, or become advisors, as opposed to primary drivers. What does it look like, as open source becomes more of a given in our universe? There are those who say it's been a give for 30 years, or others that are just finding out about it this week... But I think the intergenerational/multigenerational view - there's so much value in those conversations, because people don't have enough succession discussions. They don't have enough inter-generational governance discussions.
+
+There's certain open source projects of the highest profile, that have recently experienced some turbulence in leadership, and it was interesting to see that in those situations there were well-defined succession paths, so that lieutenants could step up and become interim directors or interim leads. So to me, that's the other half of this - to look beyond a chapter, across multiple chapters of the project's evolution.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We see that with languages quite readily. We've got some interesting things happening right now; you've got some backlash in the Linux community, from essentially BDFLs either departing, or having controversy, and just changing leadership. You see this lifecycle in languages in particular, in our current landscape of open source, so I think it's interesting to have that perspective, because all too often do we think about now, versus tomorrow, or the next day, or ten years from now.
+
+Not every project is ten years from now projects or communities, but if necessary, I think it really makes sense to have that kind of lens. Sometimes we're just so focused on today, and surviving, that we forget to plan for the future.
+
+**Allen Gunn:** I totally agree. If I were to shout out, I think one of the real leaders of the Sustain community - I would presume to claim her as a member of the community; she can decide whether or not she self-identifies in the same way... But if you've seen Nadia Eghbal's report - I think it's called "Roads and Bridges", she's done a real analysis of the infrastructural view of what you were just describing, and tried to take a long-game view of what it looks like moving forward. If you haven't seen that report, I just think that is probably some of the most holistic thinking. That report now is a couple years old, but it has aged well, because it really tried to look at a systemic view of these projects and what it looks like, to figure out which of them need to be fit for purpose for the long-term, versus which of them are a little bit more ephemeral or modular in their critical in the ecosystem or systems.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, I'm sitting here, feeling like I'm being teleported back to GitHub headquarters last year, because these are the kinds of conversations that we were having at Sustain, and these are the kind of conversations that we'll continue forward at Sustain 2018. Let's turn our focus on that event, coming up October 25th. There's tickets available, it's in London... Gunner, tell us about the switch - we switched continents now; I'm sure that was an intentional move, so tell us about Sustain 2018 upcoming - why it's in London and what people can expect there.
+
+**Allen Gunn:** I will confess to not a massive amount of strategic thinking around the location. We knew we wanted to get out of the U.S. and try to invite more of the community, and I think we would still like to go further South in future Sustain instantiations... But London was a wonderful situation, where we had some fine folks that were able to help us out with resources. We just continue to enjoy a lot of love and support from Google and a number of other event sponsors; I can't say enough nice things about Cat Allman and her leadership over years and years, and all kinds of -- I lose count of how many events that Cat has made possible, and herself realized...
+
+\[24:05\] There was a convergence around and ability to take advantage of some resources being provided in that town. We are co-situated with the Mozilla Festival, and by that I mean we're not formally linked MozFest. I'm also a co-organizer of the Mozilla Festival, but we just figured that timing-wise it just made a ton of sense to do it in London, the same week as Mozilla Festival, because a lot of the communities and values and passions of the larger Mozilla Festival week and the Sustain overlap. So we just felt live it made too much sense... And there was just a confluence other logistical factors that made it the right place to be.
+
+One of the things that we're making clear to our community at this event and moving forward is we welcome the community to tell us where they think we should take this event in the future... And there's also been talk about federating it. Do we need to have one big event, or what does it look like to encourage people to organize slightly less resource-intensive local or regional versions of this event... But let's just say that we're grateful that London presented itself as a compelling option and a place to have the next round of conversations.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I had major FOMO as a person who, unfortunately, due to schedule, cannot attend this year. I've always wanted to go to MozFest, and this back-to-back event is the perfect -- two-for-the-price-of-one in terms of the people who are doing heavy travel... It's just a very good idea.
+
+**Allen Gunn:** Right on.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'll echo the FOMO, that's all I'll say. I'm super-bummed I can't be there.
+
+**Allen Gunn:** Dude, I'll send you all kinds of selfies and stuff just to make it feel really poignant.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Nice...
+
+**Allen Gunn:** You will be there in spirit. I think the voice you all provide is so critical, and I just think the bridge you create with inviting folks like me to share thoughts like this on a podcast - you can claim some credit for some of the energy that's gonna be in that room. We're really grateful for you all being that voice, sense-making and guidance within this larger journey around the planet, the event-to-event itinerant reality.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We appreciate that. We are working towards having some presence there. Tim Smith, our senior producer - we're working on those logistics now, literally; right now it's still unknown and questionable, but we think it's gonna work out... So we may still have a presence there, just not Jerod and myself being there... But Tim is a great proxy for our organization, well-trusted, great person to be there for us in our stead.
+
+At the same time, it's just such an honor to be able to serve the community. We've said this over the years - we like to shine a spotlight in the places in this community, whether it's in the actual software, knee-deep, getting nerdy, or at the macro level, looking at culture and community and how we all interweave... Because in the end, it's people.
+
+**Allen Gunn:** Yeah, exactly.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's Gunner on the other side of that Submit button, it's Adam on the other side of the database, looking at things, or whatever. So it's people, in the end. It's about relationships, it's a very interpersonal community, and we're just proud to be part of it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So the details are SustainOSS.org, October 25th in London. There are tickets available. There's free tickets for scholarship situations, so if you have that circumstance, definitely check it out. Tickets are $100. You can also do a pay-it-forward ticket, take a friend with you... Check that out.
+
+Gunner, any final words for us before we hang up on you?
+
+**Allen Gunn:** Just to encourage folks to be in touch if you can't make it. There's ways to sign up and be in contact on the website. We're really trying to raise our game on making this an ongoing dialogue, not just a once-a-year fun party to be at. So if these are topics that resonate with you, please do head over to the SustainOSS site.
+
+There are multiple ways to be in touch - social media channels, there might even be an email address buried somewhere on the About page... But get in touch with us, and if you're interested in the topics, we welcome knowing about what you're doing, especially if you're doing things that you think are worth sharing. If you've got approaches to sustainability - and again, we mean that financially, interpersonally, community, governance... You tell us. We really welcome people that are passionate about sustainability topics to be in touch, whether or not you can join us in London, because this is a global movement; this is a critical part of fueling the ongoing impact that free and open source software has in giving us control of our long-term technology destiny. So if it resonates with you, be in touch; we'd love to keep you in the loop.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[28:23\] Excellent. One more plug, because we do have Slack, and there is some community organization behind the scenes here that you can get involved in in real-time... And forgive me if I'm repeating this, but Changelog.com/community - a huge invitation; everyone is welcome, you are not an impostor. No matter where you're at in your developer path, this is a place to come and call home, but in particular for Sustain, we do have a channel for Sustain, so if you wanna be involved in some of these pre-conversations, or post-conversations, or what you had said before, Gunner, which is the "Where from here?" If you wanna sustain that part of it (to keep the metaphor rolling), then you can. So I would encourage anyone listening to this - we'll put it in the show notes, of course, but Changelog.com/community. You're invited, you're welcome. It does not cost you anything, it's free, so just go and do it, and get involved, if that's what is cool for you. It's good to be home, as we say. And thats got dollar sign in front of it and its all caps so it's super accurate.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Allen Gunn:** Nice.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Nice. Alright, Gunner, thanks so much for the call, and hey, have a great event. We're happy to help support it.
+
+**Allen Gunn:** Excellent. We are grateful for your support, and we look forward to continuing the conversation with you. Thank you both so much.
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+**Jerod Santo:** So we're joined by Camille Eddy with Girl STEM Stars. Camille, you opened up OSCON this morning, talking about cultural bias in AI - how we recognize it, how we deal with it... Give us just a quick synopsis, a re-run - don't go over the whole thing - of your keynote and what you're here to talk about.
+
+**Camille Eddy:** Yeah, sure. Thank you. Happy to be here. This morning I got to talk a little bit about how we reflect on our own biases and how that is propagated into the technology that we produce; the importance of recognizing that AI has made mistakes in the past based on those biases, based on things that we can't possibly know not to do, like faux pas... Like, categorizing black people as gorillas - that's a really bad thing, right?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's really bad, right? Yeah.
+
+**Camille Eddy:** So talking about those mistakes from the past, biases - but that we can't fix them without reflecting on those... And then different things, like explainable AI is seeking to come in and understand why algorithms make the decisions that they make, and the importance of having more technology like that prevalent in the future of machine learning and AI in general.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We'll definitely dive into those. Let's hear a little bit about your story, how you came to be keynoting at OSCON.
+
+**Camille Eddy:** Yeah, so I have been a really fortunate student, really, to be able to go about and do a lot of different things. I started in Idaho, that's where I'm getting my bachelor's degree; when I was in Idaho, I of course dealt with a lot of biases. I'm African-American, so one of the very few black people there... And it changed my story a little bit, and how I dealt with the people around me, and also what kind of opportunities I got.
+
+As a student, I kind of came into the understanding that life isn't the same, no matter how much you want it to be, and we all have our own biases. I started thinking about that more, and I was given the opportunity to actually talk about my experience.
+
+From that talk, one champion in one place at my school, someone invited me to go to San Francisco and talk. That's where talk kind of evolved; that was maybe over a year ago. So then I just kept going, because I have a mantra as a student - my mantra is there's three rules.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[04:07\] I like this...
+
+**Camille Eddy:** You say yes to every new opportunity, you don't do anything twice, and then you always make your accomplishments visible. So through that, I said yes to speaking in San Francisco, even though I'd never been in San Francisco; I was okay with that. And then I also make sure I keep changing... So now I'm at OSCON, which is just how it happened.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What was the last one, again? The last point...
+
+**Camille Eddy:** Make my accomplishments visible.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, I'm happy and sad about this mantra. I'm happy because you said yes to us, but I'm sad because now this is the last time we're gonna talk to you...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right, you can't do anything twice. \[laughter\]
+
+**Camille Eddy:** Oh, we'll just have to talk about something else next time.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I was gonna disagree as well, because I was like, "You have to come back." \[laughter\]
+
+**Camille Eddy:** I can do something else.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, so you'll break that rule. That's the loose rule.
+
+**Camille Eddy:** Well, I'll come back and--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** New conversation.
+
+**Camille Eddy:** A new conversation with y'all. Yes.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** New conversation. Okay, gotcha. Interesting.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So one thing that you mentioned this morning is about how representation matters and how you saw -- well, just tell the story about the African-American astronaut.
+
+**Camille Eddy:** Sure. So when I was 12, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do, because that's what 12-year-olds do... And I was home-schooled, and my mom gave us a lesson at some point about Mae Jemison, who was the first female astronaut for NASA... And I thought that was dope. But when she gave me the lesson of the first black female astronaut at NASA, Mae Jemison, that's when I connected and said "Oh, I actually identify with her, and I want to be an astronaut."
+
+So having that representation with someone who directly and strongly identifies with me made the difference in my choices. So from there, my mom was like, "Okay, so you're gonna have to do your own research, what you have to do to become an astronaut." That's where I saw that to become an astronaut you have to be a scientist, a doctor or an engineer, and I chose engineering, because I felt like that fit the best.
+
+Then I eventually ended up at Idaho and I got some informational lessons in high school, did Space Camp, which was really cool, and I was like "I'm really into this", and that's why I settled on engineering.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Cool. So that brought you to engineering. Is the dream alive, the astronaut dream, or you just settled in engineering?
+
+**Camille Eddy:** No, so the thing about becoming an astronaut is you can't become an astronaut when you're like 20, because you have to become the best in your field. So I feel like I'm on the way to becoming an astronaut, but it's not gonna happen until I'm like way older, so... I'm young, in my twenties now.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Can you reflect maybe on some experiences you've had where representation was there and not there for you? So how you felt when representation wasn't present, how did you feel about maybe exploring a role or being invited? And maybe the flipside of both of those.
+
+**Camille Eddy:** Sure. Yeah, so the thing about people like Mae Jemison, who was the first black female astronaut - she did a first, right? And so in Idaho I did a first, as well; I was the first black female student to lead my students' NASA research team. But one of the things that were different there was I had a lot of amazing mentors, other people who did it first... Like, Barbara Morgan was my mentor while I was in Idaho; she's the first female teacher to space; she is a former astronaut as well. But I didn't have any other black females to be my mentor... So people who have gone before me and said "Oh, I see how your journey is being different than everyone else around you, and this is why, and this is how you deal with it."
+
+So I was able to push through that, I was a first NASA research student; I did undergrad research, I led the team, which was, again, a first... And it was hard to have certain conversations with people. You know, you get into those eeky conversations about "You know, I don't understand why you just blew up at me in the middle of the room, and didn't see the fact that you didn't blow up at anybody else... But it was when I spoke that you blew up." Little things like that, that are just more cultural, that you wouldn't necessarily question...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** But they add up over time.
+
+**Camille Eddy:** \[07:58\] But it adds up over time. Yeah, adding up in a way -- there are other questions like "Where do you come from? What country are you from?" things that bother you, that they don't realize, and they also don't realize that it happens to me like ten times a day. So it's like, yeah, you might think you're the first one to ask me this, but I get this ALL the time. So just paying attention to little things that bother you and understanding my relation to that.
+
+Then when I came and did some internships out of the state I did find black people to be my mentors... And they helped me realize that I'm not the only one, I'm not crazy, and that there are other ways to encourage the conversation.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Not being crazy is pretty important.
+
+**Camille Eddy:** Yeah, it's really important for your sanity!
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm always looking for somebody to validate my feelings to some degree, like "Am I crazy...?" I ask Jerod this all the time, "Dude, am I crazy?"
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I don't always say no. Let's get back to the topic at hand, which is the cultural biases in general in AI... This is something that we've discussed a handful of times, because we focus on these things for Practical AI... But machine learning specifically, because you're training a computer by example, like "Here is a set of data..." I've heard them describe machine learning as "a bag of bias." Like, you're basically taking everything that you gather and say "Here, learn this, and then I'm going to reuse the results that you're learning based on..." - so it perpetuates a history.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's very perspective-driven, right? What you feed it is a perspective. It's essentially its own bubble, so to speak...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So I guess the question becomes "How do we fight that? How do we deal with that?" What's your take on the topic?
+
+**Camille Eddy:** I think part of the problem is there's humans in the loop, right? We're basically helping AI codify our experiences and then represent that again... But sometimes what happens -- we as humans have feedback all the time. We'll butt up against something, say something wrong, and then we're like "Oh, that was wrong. I need to correct that." But AI and machine learning doesn't always have that feedback in the loop, so it's really important to figure out a way - and there are different ways to do it - to provide feedback.
+
+I know Microsoft and Facebook have come out with their own bias toolkits for their artificial intelligence, that they said that it was very important for them to add.
+
+The other thing I like to talk about is explainable AI, or ex-AI, which seeks to understand why an algorithm makes the decisions it makes... So instead of having AI be a black box, it becomes more transparent.
+
+Another place to go look on the web for ideas around understanding why the biases exist and how to look at them is to look at the idea of transparency in AI.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I see. So that means displaying to the end user why -- let's say a recommendation engine for an example, because that's one place that we see machine learning applied a lot... You know, why this particular thing is being recommended to me by Amazon - because it is based on a model, and it will actually just say "Based on this, this and this." Is that what you're saying?
+
+**Camille Eddy:** Yeah, that's a good example. Let's do another one - another similar example is Facebook... Why do I see what's in my Facebook feed? Is it because someone liked it, is it because I know commented on it? Is it because I've liked this thing before? Is it because somewhere back in the day I liked this particular page, and maybe I wanna unlike it, or is it because it's based on my geographic location? Google also does this - they have like 21 or more different points that they look at when you do a search, like where you are located, what have you searched before, what kind of things have you bought, what are these socks and where are they coming from?
+
+And it's not just the end user that needs to know this, it's also the developer. I think Facebook is a really good example of this again... Because the developers have some of those tools and information, they just don't let us see it, which is up to them... But to release some more of those tools and have more transparency I think would help bring us along a little bit more.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** From an end user's perspective, I can say that I can trust AI more if I know the transparency point of it. If I know why you're telling me this is important to me, that I can confirm whether that's true or not, and help it even shape its future recommendations for me... Because if it's inaccurate, I want it to know. So if everybody can somehow influence that -- are you advocating for that? Or how do we shape those kinds of biases inside if AI in that case?
+
+**Camille Eddy:** \[12:19\] Yeah, I think one of the things to think about is -- this conversation has been happening for a long time, it's just not coming into prevalence... And this is kind of what happens when you engineer products in a box, basically; when you engineer in one lab--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** In a research lab.
+
+**Camille Eddy:** Yeah, when you engineer in a research lab...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...with perfect conditions...
+
+**Camille Eddy:** One set of scientists or engineers are like "Oh, this is great! This works for us! This helps our narrative. Our lives can work well with this..." So that's another point that I make in my talk, is not only have we not been having everyone in the room when we're developing it, we don't have a lot of users in the room, different users to test this product.
+
+And then on top of that, the whole world isn't online yet. There are large groups of population, of human beings in other parts of the world that don't have the access to the internet that we have, and if we're making all these decisions based off press products or conversations we're seeing online, we actually are missing a big part of that conversation... Because not everyone's online.
+
+So it's about being transparent, being able to see those ideas and being able to control it, but then also about continuing to get that conversation pushed, deeper ingrained into our processes of how we develop our technology.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Who's in control of this transparency? Who are the gatekeepers of the black box being transparent?
+
+**Camille Eddy:** It's literally every single person that walks into a startup, that founds a company - the non-technical founders, too - they're all involved in those conversations. We're developing - especially we're at an open source conference - these things and building on top of it, on top of it, and we're creating the legacy technology of the future... So literally, these should be the conversations we're having the first time we put up an idea on the whiteboard... Like, "Okay, who's not at the table? Who do we see not represented?" It's really the individual people.
+
+Larry Page, Sergey, even Tim O'Reilly - they were all individuals at one point, looking at their business models, looking at their ideas, and so it's on that level. If you seek or aspire to be any type of entrepreneur, leader, manager, just someone in the room engineering a piece of code, you should be having this conversation, or thinking about it, or getting more people to talk about it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So what's the practical way to make it transparent then? It can be at the table, but how do you actually implement transparency?
+
+**Camille Eddy:** So a couple different things... You have explainable AI, so making sure that you're making it visible to other people... Just turning it inside out, your development process. We're watching Facebook do this now, we're watching them do "This ad is paid for by..." That's a really good example. Really small, but it's leading in the right direction.
+
+Another version would be like when I go on my Twitter and I look at my Twitter analytics, I can see who's liking my posts, who's commenting on them, and also the impression footprint that it has... So maybe opening that up just a little bit more, like past just the idea of impressions.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I think to get that done you have to be able to convince the people who are making the product or the business decisions - or be one of those people - that this is valuable, this is worth their effort. So that starts with conversations, that starts with grassroots efforts...
+
+**Camille Eddy:** And then also the reflection that we haven't done it yet; we haven't done half of the work that's necessary yet. Not just to define the problem, but to create products, especially out-of-the-box products. They're not existing yet... Except for those couple of toolkits that I mentioned, that don't necessarily serve all of the ideas that I'm talking about, for Microsoft and Facebook... We haven't been talking about this in an actionable way long enough, and really, at the end of the day, I'm a mechanical engineer, right? I'm here to help dip people's toes in the water, and hopefully, as we start talking about it more, there's really cool books, like The Algorithms of Oppression, that really lays it out... It lays out that case use about why it would be helpful to your business model to do it. And then also just more conversations with people who are using it and not finding a great experience.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[16:30\] One great example - I got back to this all the time - is Instagram ads specifically, and the visceral reaction that Instagram users have had to those ads, so much so that people believe that Instagram/Facebook is listening to their conversations... Because the ads were getting good enough to where they will suggest something to you that you don't think you've google-searched, you don't think you've put into Amazon... You think you were just talking about it with your friend or your significant other, and all of a sudden they're advertising it to you, and you have no idea why...
+
+So people are convinced that Facebook is listening to them, like actually turning on their microphone. In fact, there was a great Reply All episode all about that, about whether or not it's actually happening... And it's not. They're not doing that. But they're applying AI and different other fuzzy techniques in order to make their ads so good - they're getting very well targeted - that it creeps you out because you don't know how they came to that distinction.
+
+Now, if I go to Instagram's head of marketing and say "Your ads are actually making people despise you and your advertisers because they're so creepy, but if you were transparent about how you came to those conclusions...", if here's your ad and I think "Oh, how do they know I even needed toothpaste...?"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** "We listened to your conversation..."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, "We got this because we were listening to you." No, if they actually said "This ad is based on these things that we know about you", then I would look at that and say "Oh, okay, that makes sense."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's my point. I could appreciate you serving me in that way. I should be interested in that, but it might also creep me out, like "Stop knowing that stuff about me."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right, and maybe you even opt out, but my point is that's the business case in that particular sense. Your ads will be more effective with the transparency added, because they're actually being counter-active in their current form.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I think so too. I think the transparency piece is a huge component. Netflix does this somewhat well... "We've recommended this because you watched X."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** "...because you liked this, or because you watched..."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And so they just give me one title, but I know who was in it, what the subject matter was, what genre of movie was it, what was its PG rating - was it R, or PG13? I can deduce all those things myself and do my own research, because I got at least the one thing they tracked me on to recommend this.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's why you never let your kids watch on your profile...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's true.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** ...because they'll watch one episode of a cartoon, and then Netflix will be like "Oh, you must love cartoons", and then all the recommendations are kids shows.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What's also interesting is the use of just an IP address, and not a profile... Because there's things that happen in a household or behind one single IP that doesn't reflect every person behind that IP.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's true
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So I may go and search "overstock", or some brand for a new couch, or some sort of decoration, and that may be a present for my wife, and now she may know, because she's getting advertised from her favorite brands, or something like that... Like, it's kind of revealing. I want my secrets to be my secrets, so that I can reveal them on my own terms, you know what I mean?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Camille Eddy:** You know, the way you could probably attack that directly is to start looking at recommender engines/algorithms (I think that's what they're called) and being like "Okay, this recommender algorithm... I'm gonna go back to see what its training model looks like, I'll go back and read the papers, and then I'm gonna present a really specific argument to whoever made that."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Is there a case where the recommender engine, as you say, is deemed somewhat proprietary, considering maybe the thought leadership of like "Here's what we can connect to make assumptions?"
+
+**Camille Eddy:** Yeah, I think Facebook has a big recommender engine. That stuff is definitely proprietary. That's why we can't see it. That's part of the problem, that's the wall there... It's proprietary, we can't tell you, we don't wanna tell you, and therefore you don't have the levers. If it was built on a more open source platform, then we probably would be able to go in there and finagle with it.
+
+\[20:11\] In that case, we have to switch it, make it inside out, and say "Hey, now we really do want these." Make the business case to the people; holler, scream, shout, pull hair, do all those things.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Open source for the win.
+
+**Camille Eddy:** Yes!
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So tell us what's next for you? Where are you headed next?
+
+**Camille Eddy:** Well, my main goal is to finish school, so I can get out... I love learning, but I don't like academics, so I'm really excited to finish.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What's the distinction there?
+
+**Camille Eddy:** The distinction is being in the real world. I took a gap year in the middle of my academics, just because I felt like I needed it, and it has taught me a lot about where engineering is going, where machine learning is going... And even being at this conference, I was able to do that because I was on the break and I was getting involved and being aware of the conversations being had... I don't know, I feel like -- I'm probably trying to grow up too early, but yeah, I'm definitely trying to get out of school soon.
+
+Other than that, I've been writing a lot and just making community and finding stakeholders -- stakeholders/champions is what I should say... Champions, people who are also on the same path, and talking. So I'm just trying to create conversations, I think that's really important.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What were some of the things you did on your gap year to kind of feed into that insight? Because I'm sure there's somebody listening thinking "Hey, I should probably do that. What should I do?"
+
+**Camille Eddy:** Yeah! So I volunteered a lot... For example, Girl STEM Stars was one of the places I volunteered. I'm on their board, and I help organize groups of girls from like 6-7 girls, between middle school and high school ages, and they went on tech days at companies. I would bring them to Google, and we'd have a whole tech day and they'd learn about coding. Some of them it was their first time they had ever coded.
+
+Similar, I did a cybersecurity camp just last weekend at Berkeley, where it was also for middle school to high school kids. I've spent 20 hours a day with them -- maybe not with them, but getting them ready, getting the materials ready, teaching them cybersecurity for the first time. They heard from cybersecurity professionals, as well as women in cybersecurity... So doing a lot of that.
+
+But in that time - you know, the people you bring in and talk to these kids are the people I'm networking with. I'm rubbing elbows with some really cool people.
+
+And then also just learning more... Right now I'm working on autonomous cars, which is completely different from the other robots I was doing in the past... So learning about a whole new system of technology and being aware of how it's coming to the conversation and the importance there, because that's a whole other big conversation... Immersion is just really helpful, which I can't necessarily do in academics, because you're doing a lot of different classes...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, you're immersed in academics. \[laughs\]
+
+**Camille Eddy:** Yeah, immersed in academics is not really what I wanna be, so I'm really looking forward to finishing up and getting back to being immersed in these other really cool technologies that are popping up.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So if we have any young girls that are listening to this show, or anybody that would benefit from Girl STEM Stars - is that it...?
+
+**Camille Eddy:** Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What's the first step to getting involved? Either as a mentor, or somebody to actually attend.
+
+**Camille Eddy:** Sure. Yeah, and this goes not just for Girl STEM Stars, but if you're interested in any type of organizing or volunteering across the country - just send me a ping on Twitter, @nikkymill. GirlSTEMStars.org is also open. But yeah, if you really wanna volunteer, we could totally use you. Just come down and send me a ping.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Nice.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Cool. This was a blast. Thanks, Camille!
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Thank you, Camille.
+
+**Camille Eddy:** Thank you!
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Pleasure.
+
+**Break:** \[24:01\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So Jerome, you do some pretty cool stuff for veterans, man.
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** Roger that. Well, thank you. I don't know if I do cool things for veterans. I feel like it's important work, but thanks nonetheless.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What exactly do you do?
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** What we do at Vets Who Code is we teach veterans how to program; we do this remotely (100% remote) and we focus solely on open source technologies, so React, JavaScript, NodeJS... Those are the main points of education, while doing a deep dive in computer science fundamentals.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So is this while they're still in active duty, or are they in National Guard, Reserves - what's their engagement currently with the military.
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** We usually don't care. We look for the type of veteran that's looking for a job. The average veteran that comes to our program is within a year from leaving service, or within six months of being out. By doing that, we can focus on people that are more serious, versus those that are maybe looking for a hobby... Because you know, I'm spending approximately 26 weeks out of my life educating, so I wanna make sure that people who are getting the fruits of this labor are serious about it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, legit. I was just thinking, having ETS myself out of the military at one point, all the process they have, as you leave... All the different briefings you've gotta do, all the ceremony involved in exiting the military in an honorable status, that that would be a great time to mention, "Hey, there's Vets Who Code, and as you look to new opportunities, there's this opportunity for you."
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** In my opinion - I'm not an expert - I think it's well before that. If you look at the current tech hiring process, the current situation we're in, if you're gonna actually look at technology as a viable sector to transition in, you need to be focusing on that like six months to a year before you get out, simply because it will take you 3-4 months just in building relationships and making sure your portfolio is right, your GitHub is correct, you're building relationships in your community based upon where you want to live, where you want to move, you've dwindled down all of the recruiter soup that you're going to get and find two or three recruiters that are actually gonna focus on knowing your strengths and your weaknesses and building that relationship with them. So I will argue a year to six months before you hit that transition button.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, it's a tough position in any soldier's life, regardless of what they did at their service. It could have been a three-year foreign engagement, they could have been deployed, they could have just been on a base... Either way, transitioning out of and back into civilian life once you've been through the process of being in the military is an experience nonetheless.
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** Yes, it's hard. It doesn't matter if you did 4 years or 20 years; that transition from that community to back in the civilian life is shocking, to say the least.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Is this a free program for veterans? How does it work? What's the charge?
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** Yes, we don't charge veterans a dime. It's all about finding the veterans that have the most promise. Usually, the average veteran that comes to our program - they're stuck, they have been trying to learn how to code, they've hit a brick wall... Like there's so much stuff on the internet and you don't know which direction to go, and that's our job.
+
+\[28:18\] We not only point them in the right directions, we provide a curriculum for them to go through. As they get more advanced, we supply a mentor, and these are the processes that we do; then we start helping them with the process of prepping for a job. We help them with interview prep, resume, looking at your portfolio, looking at your GitHub, looking at your LinkedIn, looking at how you present yourself when it comes to your resume - all of these things that come into play, and we make sure that everybody who's telling you advice, they've walked that road.
+
+I'm at CBSI. Our primary CTO - he is at USAA, and then we have our CDO who's at USA Today. These guys - we're all people at big companies, so we take that time -- you know, this is what you need to do, this is what we're seeing, this is how we would change... You know, keeping that feedback loop open.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What's the lifespan of that relationship?
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** It varies. On average, we do 14 weeks so I would say at least half a year to a year veterans are staying in contact. We have some veterans that since 2014 they are always in contact, they're forever fans... It's really weird.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, if you haven't got a job... I mean...
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** It's really cool, because it's my way of creating the type of community that I like, people who are goofy and serious... I like the work hard/play hard types; we are gonna finish this project, but I wanna play Cards Against Humanity after this, too. We have a hard deadline for Cards Against Humanity Let's go! These are the types of veterans that I find.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You mentioned finding the ones that are serious... How do you judge that? How do you formalize that?
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** Copy that. We have a three-prong process; we went from two to three. The primary phase is we put everybody in a Facebook group, we have the pre-work on GitHub, so they can look at the pre-work on the readme and go through this. Until they finish that pre-work, they don't get interviewed. Those who complete the pre-work, they get an interview.
+
+The first phase of the interview is always with me. I wanna make sure everybody that wants to be in Vets Who Code has done their prerequisites, talks to me face-to-face... Like, let's go ahead and zoom it up, chat, so I can get a feel for you. I treat programming like people treat boxing - if you could do anything else and make money, you should do it, because programming is a forever job. You're never gonna stop learning, you're never gonna know it all. You're gonna be the stupidest person in the room at least once a week. So if you have an ego, you might not like this...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Check it at the door.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Check it at the door, yeah.
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** If you're one of those guys that think this is like college... Like you're gonna go to college, get this degree, and then you're gonna stop - this is not for you, this is not your bag. That's the first thing.
+
+Then after that we have a technical interview; another person, that way there is no bias. So I don't handle all the interview phases either. We have a technical face, where Noel - he goes through their GitHub, he starts asking questions, seeing where they are on the technical aspects, so what things they've done outside of us... Because we're always sharing other things. That's the real gotcha - we wanna see if you're hungry. Like I said, programming is like boxing - you have to be hungry for it, you have to want it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** This is an analogy I've never heard.
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** As a person who is in the military, box, and does programming, I box in my spare time to release stress, so...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[31:56\] You see the parallels.
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** I see the parallels all the time. You have to be hungry, you have to want it, you have to show up every day. There's never a day or a time where you're like "I've achieved it all", because there's always somebody right behind you who's gonna know just as much as you.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Absolutely.
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** Programming and boxing - it's literally the same. Complacency kills.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Interesting.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's some military word there for you... Complacency kills.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, for sure.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's an interesting focus, actually, on veterans. I mean, what do you see -- I guess you're kind of biased because you've been through the military, but I'm thinking like how this might be for non-military to military. The mindset of the person, the change there. Can you maybe describe the mindset of somebody who's been through the military, served the country, been through the training?
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** Yeah. First and foremost, I am not one of those veterans that had like a technical job in the military. I was security forces. I carried an M4 carbine and a 9 mm to work every day. It was nothing about computers in my job at all. So that's the first thing I let people know, "You're talking to one of those veterans that didn't fit the criteria."
+
+Secondly, everything that we do in the military these days are a lot of procedures that we do on the tech side, they're just different names. You guys have Agile, in the military there's Rapid Deployment Procedures. We have components, and we have fire teams; the fire team is nothing but a component of an entire squad. So these are practices that are already ingrained in the military - that is also ingrained in software. The process of being able to read boring, dry, death by PowerPoint style documentation - that is the first thing you learn in the military, is death by PowerPoint... "Oh my goodness, this is 1,000 pages of useless junk, and I'm gonna be tested on it." Programming - just like that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** 1,000 pages of useless junk. Programming. \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, to get rank you do have to study some interesting things. You've gotta go before board, you've gotta come present it... But it comes with knowledge, and that knowledge is gained by you, not by somebody handing it to you. You've gotta want it; it's part of the boxing thing - you've gotta chase it.
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** Same with the military - on the job training, learning by doing... That's how you learn in the military.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, OJT.
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** Yeah, OJT. You go through basic, then you turn around and then you go to your training school, and then they send you to your base, and then your base teaches you how to do it the way they wanna do it. So you come here with a base set of skills, you meet the metric, meet the requirement, but then they're like "Alright, keep this, keep this, throw this away, keep this, keep this. I don't like that. Keep this; we might keep that." That's the same way when you go to your first company - "Do this, do this, do this. That's cool. I don't like that. We're not gonna do it that way." And pretty much that's how you start your first week of a software job. They look at the things you have, see what they like, tell you what they're gonna fire, tell you what they're gonna add, and then move on.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What hooked you about software? I mean, you also like boxing, but the way you're describing these things - they're very harsh... They're hard, difficult.
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** But I like it because it's hard and difficult.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay. That's what I'm asking.
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** That's the best part. I like...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** ...a challenge.
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** I guess Daniel Cormier says it best... He's the current UFC light-heavyweight and heavyweight champion. He says "Embrace the suck." That's something you hear like on a wrestling match, like NCAA - all these guys say that, "Embrace the suck", and that's what it is... I'm embracing the suck of software for the reward that it gives, like being able to have the type of lifestyle I want, being able to meet crazy cool people.
+
+There are people that I know today that four years ago I was in awe of. I've turned my heroes into my peers. That is cray. \[laughter\] You can't put a price on that type of experience. That's what helps me get up at 04:30 in the morning, and start focusing on making myself a better person.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[35:52\] Yeah. "Embrace the suck" reminds me of a saying -- a distinction that I've heard lots of times is like there's good suck and there's bad suck. This is the good suck, and that's the one you have to embrace... Like "Yeah, this is hard, this is harsh, this sucks", but you know what's at the end of the road is good. There's all that stuff that sucked that's like, just get that out of your life.
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** And that's the strength of military life. If you were ever deployed, if you've ever heard like "Hurry up and wait", you've been in that world where you're waiting for six hours, and then somebody comes out like "Hey, we've gotta hurry up and knock this out." I'm like "Really?" We have to move in 15 minutes; we've gotta move 40 people in 15 minutes. We've been here six hours, they didn't say anything to us, but now in these 15 minutes we have to move everybody. Okay, that's cool... Embracing the suck; that's the military life. If you've ever been on deployment, you have to embrace the suck. It's like, it's 120 degrees out here and everybody hates us, but you know, we're gonna go home soon, so we're just gonna embrace the suck and move on.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, my gosh... I've heard another one too, it's good training. Anytime you've done something, you're like "That was terrible. Why do we do that?" "Good training. Just get over it. Good training."
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** \[laughter\] Yeah, it was training.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's right. That's similar to what we were saying recently about decisions that we've made with Changelog, or in business... It's like, you go down a path and you realize it's the wrong path, and maybe you're six months down the road and you're like "Well, we've gotta go back to where we were", and it's like "Well, that sucked... That was a waste of time, money and effort", and then we always say "Well, education."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** "Now we know."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Like, could we have learned that otherwise?
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** Yeah, it's just good education, good experience.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's good training.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's good training.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I like that.
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** Good training.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** One thing I like about this is I'm learning lots of cool sayings.
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** Oh, I have a million militarisms.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Give me some other ones, c'mon. On the spot.
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** I don't know... I don't know, it's PG...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Keep in family-friendly.
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** Yeah, like I said, I'm trying to keep it...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Alright, you'll share with me the other ones later.
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** Yeah. See, now I'm brain farting, right? It happens in the moment; you're like, "Oh, there you go. Bam!"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's talk about maybe those active duty/military men and women who were out there serving our country, or they're transitioning out and they're looking for that opportunity... They're listening to this podcast, or somebody who knows one is listening to this podcast - how do they reach out? What's the first step?
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** Well, the first step is always go to vetswhocode.io. We have our application form on there. Once you apply, I'll pretty much always email them, asking them to have a Facebook group. Some people just go straight to the Facebook group, but I always email them personally and say "Hey, do you have Facebook? Here's our Facebook group. Join it, so we can start the application process with you."
+
+They're in there with the pre-work, they're talking to other veterans... It's a way to make sure that everybody has a fair metric that we can at least start off of... And not only that, it's a way for them to meet other people who are interested in this stuff. You know, it's better to embrace the suck with a group of people than to embrace it by yourself. Misery loves company, that's why everybody misses the military days... "Oh, those were the good, old days." No, they weren't, but you made some good friends, because...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** They were the best worst days.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It sounds like high school.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, so they were terrible...
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** Yeah, it's like freshman year in high school. That's how your entire military career is, like freshman in high school. Everybody wants to kick your butt... It's awful.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's awful. And then you get out and you're like, "Remember how good that was?"
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** Yeah, "Man, I miss those days..." \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** "I miss those days..."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So how many people have you put through this program?
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** Right now we've done over 100 people; they've gotten jobs, in 14 states. We've had people who are working here, people who are working in Seattle... We actually had a veteran who started two weeks ago in Microsoft, so that was pretty cool...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Awesome.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** This is a big deal.
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** This is our first cohort that we've gotten 100% success rate with...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I was gonna ask what your placement rate is.
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** Usually, it's around 95%-97%...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's amazing.
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** But that's because we're very hyper-focused. The way I look at it is like "Listen, you're not paying for this, and I have the real-world experience, so listen to me so I can help you, or don't listen to me and don't be around."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Hit the road, yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Don't waste my time.
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** \[39:48\] People don't really like that style, but I'm doing this because I remember every day how hard it was with the transition... So I'm here to make your transition easy, so you don't have to go through what I went through.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Alright. Was there somebody there for you?
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** No. The transition process when I got out of the military was trash, on top of trash, on top of trash.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Isolating, I would say... My experience was isolating.
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** Yeah. Well, the military transitions to help get you off their books; the military transition isn't about you getting acclimated into civilian society. It's like, "Alright, you don't wanna be a part of our team anymore? Bye!" Like some straight up, "Bye Felicia", type move! Like, "Okay, what will you do?", so you have to figure out these things...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's so weird too, going back into civilian life, man...
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** Yeah, it is, because it's just a whole dichotomy. We can get into this -- that's a whole podcast if we get into that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What about the placements for people? If we've got people listening to this podcast that are at places where they're looking for good programmers, how do they reach out?
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** There's a contact form on VetsWhoCode.io. You can just fill that out. Everything goes into our chat ops; my phone is buzzing right now because people are hitting me up... So pretty much in real-time, on like Slack, and they'll apply. So basically, what happens is you go to the contact form, you fill it out, I'll reach out to you and we'll start conversations.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I mean for the companies... Same deal?
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** Yeah, same deal. We start the conversation, because I wanna make sure you're a good fit. We've had companies come in and being like "We love what you're doing; we have colleagues who have hired your people. Would you mind doing Java?" and I'm like, "No... You don't understand how hard it is if I'm not actually there in front of that veteran to be able to get their machine prepped to do Java and Java Spring Boot well. We have to control the install phase. That's why we chose JavaScript; the ease of use of being able to get that veteran from not having a dev environment to having a dev environment is super easy in JavaScript, versus more stable languages... It's like, "Okay, it's very difficult to do that, so let's work on this, and then as they get interested, they'll be able to have this base of knowledge, then they can build on it."
+
+We had a veteran right now - he last week started his first day of work at J.P. Morgan as Angular and Java Spring Boot developer. We don't teach Angular, we don't teach Java Spring Boot, but he was able to get that job because of the deep knowledge base he got with us, and then being able to go and venture out on his spare time outside of class, with Java. I was like, "Alright, that's awesome! I don't care what you do, as long as you're programming. Cool! You're building. Never stop, dudes."
+
+That's another thing that programming has in common with boxing - you stop for a week and you pick it back up, and you will feel it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You've gotta do it every day.
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** Yup.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Anything else to share, Jerome?
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** Follow @VetsWhoCode on Twitter. If you're looking for any good React developers, any good JavaScript engineers, reach out to us. I am always looking for people who like to hire good people.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Cool. It was good seeing you, man. Thank you.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Thanks.
+
+**Jerome Hardaway:** Thank you.
+
+**Break:** \[43:13\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Alright, so we're joined by Abby Cabunoc Mayes, Working Open, Practice Lead at the Mozilla Foundation... That's a mouthful.
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** I'm sorry... Yes, yes it is.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It sounds like an important thing. Tell us what that means.
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** Yeah, it means I care a lot about how to work open, working openly, and about how to do that past just open source... So doing that in open science project, with civic tech, with the government. Are you writing curriculum - how do you do that openly? So just helping people do that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay. So it's not just open source, but it includes open source.
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** It does include open source, and my background is coming from open source.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay. But also open science, documentation...
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay. How did you get into that and how did you end up at Mozilla, doing this work?
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** I have a background in bio-informatics - just computer science, applied to biology. So I was writing software for scientists at this cancer research institute, and the longer I was in Academia, the more often you notice how people maybe fudge their data a little bit, or hide their datasets...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Like to come up with certain results?
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** Yeah, just so that they can get that really cool results and it gets published in Nature, and their career goes -- and just how you get forward in science.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh... That stinks.
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** It does. That's when I really got into open science... Because it's like, well, we really should be doing this so we can have the best innovation, so we can help more people.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay... What percentage of closed science, or not open science, when you experience this -- just give me somewhere to look at... Like, are 20% of people doing this, 60%? Is it pervasive?
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** So the lab I was in - I should clarify that - they were great; they did not do this... But you hear about it a lot. With collaborators, you're really scared about getting scooped, so they'd hide their data as much as they could, or maybe like just play around with the P value, to see what you can do to make the results show the story that you want, where the data itself doesn't really do that...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It sounds like a statistician!
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** Yeah, a little bit...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's important though, because in history you have like Einstein, who is remembered, but then the persons who actually had some theory of relativity before Einstein doesn't get the same credit, because Einstein was the one who was --
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** A lot of times you'll have that dual invention, and one person is just the one who gets all the credit.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So it makes sense to be secretive to some degree with your data and your research.
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** Yeah, it does.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Secret is okay, but tweaking it to fit your results...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, let's not go there...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** I think one of my former colleagues, Greg Wilson - he mined a lot of these research papers and looked at what the P value was, and there was a huge spike right before what we consider significant, in research... So a lot of people got their P value just right below that, the statistical significance...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What's the P value again?
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** It's the statistical significance of the results, so it shows that there is correlation there.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right. It's key. It's P.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[47:56\] It's P.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The P is key.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So you said open...?
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** Yeah, so that's when I got really interested in open source, because my lab was really writing open source software for these researchers... But then open science, generally; I was like, "Yeah, this is really important." A lot of people are really scared about -- like, there's something wrong with the research system if a lot of people are just hiding their data.
+
+So then Mozilla Science started, so that's why I joined Mozilla. And since then, my role has shifted to be less about just open science - I still do quite a bit of open science - and about working open across \[48:26\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Tell us a little bit about Mozilla, because... You know, intellectually, I know Mozilla does a lot of stuff, but instinctively, I think Firefox, and then that's pretty much where my brain stops. So tell us - Mozilla Science is not a thing I've heard of... Tell us some of the other stuff Mozilla is into, and how your work affects everything.
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** Yeah, so at Mozilla our mission is to ensure that the internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all, and we do that through products like Firefox, but also through movement-building, and working with different communities. Mozilla Science is one of those communities that they're working with, but also government civic tech - working with that.
+
+We've released this internet health report, so it's like "What is hurting and what is helping the internet?" We look at things like how open is the internet, how private and secure are we on there, how inclusive is it, what's web literacy like, who can actually make a change online?
+
+We do a lot of things like that, and then there's the Mozilla Festival every year in London, in October...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** MozFest.
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** MozFest.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh yeah, that's where it's at!
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** Yeah, it's pretty great. So it's all of that put together - all these different communities who really rely on the internet and really wanna make sure that it stays healthy, and they're there to really meet about that, brainstorm, make cool things...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's sort of the underpinning of the Mozilla brand too, to be open...
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** Yeah, yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So you're kind of like on the core mission of Mozilla at large.
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** Yeah, and I think our main goal is internet health, but then how we're doing that is through openness... So either building products openly, or by rallying the community to build something open.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What does your day-to-day look like when you're trying to educate, lead, mentor, build a movement? What does that look like in a tactical sense?
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** It's a lot of email... \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Very hard work.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** A lot of emails.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, a lot of emails.
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** A lot of emails, but also a lot of video calls. I spend a lot of time just meeting with people online. We'll have big conference calls for trainings...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So what kind of people are you meeting with?
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** All sorts of people. I run Mozilla Open Leaders, which is this mentorship and training program around how to work open... So people come with their projects, whether it's an open science project, or an open data project, or some civic tech project... So I meet with a lot of people who are running cool open projects from all these different fields, and just tell them "This is how you work open properly." Not that I know everything, but...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So what does that look like, working open properly?
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** Yeah, working open properly... I think a lot of people forget to strategize around how to work open, or plan to do this, so a big thing at Mozilla now is open by design, instead of open by default. I think because open is part of our DNA at Mozilla, we often forget why we do things openly... So by default everything's just online, but then it's not making that impact we really want.
+
+I think if you're doing open well, at the beginning you're thinking about "Who do you wanna work with? How are you gonna engage them? What's the value exchange gonna be? How are you gonna bring them from being a user to a contributor, to maybe a project lead?" Thinking all these pathways through, and then writing the documentation to make sure that they know how it all happens, and providing that support to people and mentoring them as they go through your project.
+
+So that's a broader view... It's different for each project, what that looks like... But yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Interesting. So take one of your projects, maybe even the Open Leadership project - I'm not sure how your projects break out - and then describe to us how that was designed to have a specific goal, or a specific end in mind.
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** Yeah, so this work started when I was a part of Mozilla Science, and what we are trying to do -- we just took a bunch of developers who were interested in science, and put them in touch with a bunch of scientists... But then we realized that scientists weren't great at working open; they'd have their project and they were like "Oh, I don't need you yet. Just wait..."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[52:08\] It's probably like cultural -- not clashes, but just differences.
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** Yeah. So then I started writing these little guidebooks... It's like, "Here's how you can open your work a little bit, so that you can benefit from all these developers that want to help you, that care about science." Then we realized these guides are really helpful for just anyone running an open project, so we started doing that.
+
+Also, my husband - at the time, he was running this startup accelerator in Toronto, and the way he modeled it was like a three-month thing, and I just took a lot of the ideas there... So we'd meet with them at the beginning, we'd have them set goals and figure out what they're gonna do over those three months, we'd work with them regularly... Yeah, so it was modeled after a startup accelerator, this mentorship program.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay... Is it working?
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** I think so. \[laughter\] And what really excites me about this program is that -- so I designed it so that people can come back and become a mentor after they've gone through it... So about 50% of the people that have gone through have come back and mentored other people. So we're showing people how to work open in a way that they get really excited and wanna help other people do that. That's what I think is the essence of building a movement.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Is a lot of this inside Mozilla only, or is it sort of like Mozilla and external?
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** The people in the program are from everywhere.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay.
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** Yeah. It's Mozilla only that's running it right now, but I'm trying to -- actually, we're partnering with a few people, so they can run their own versions in their organization or maybe in their language, or in their city. We've done that a few times, but I'm trying to make it more forkable, so that people can just run this program wherever they are.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So is that like a face-to-face thing? You mentioned you do a lot of video calls and a lot of emails, and stuff... Is any of this distributed, or is it all sort of collocated?
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** So the first iteration we had was a two-day event, where we ran the training at the beginning, and then we just followed up with mentorship afterwards. Then we realized, "Oh, we could do this all online", where we just meet every week online, do a little bit of training, and then alternate weeks you do one-on-one mentorship.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You mentioned guides... Are those guides open at all, or available to people?
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** Yes. There's the Open Leadership Training Series, it's on GitHub. You can edit it, you can remix it... Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Nice.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** How weird would it be if she said no to that question?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It would have been really weird.
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Like, "Actually, they're proprietary, offline."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** They're copyright.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** They're locked in a vault... Underneath the pillow!
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** "No PRs here..."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So what are you doing here at OSCON, what are you trying to talk about? I mean, obviously, the open stuff, but is there specific -- because this is about open source specifically, so we're software people... What's your message here, and who are you talking to?
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** Yeah, this is my first year at OSCON, this is really exciting. I gave a talk yesterday on open as a competitive advantage, and that was really about that "open by design", instead of "open by default." So like, what choices can you make to be really strategic about what you open? And like, are you opening something to increase your adoption, by giving away for free, or are you trying to lower your operating costs? There's different reasons why you can open different parts...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Looking at those reasons, is there ever a decision workflow wherein it's like, "You know what, don't open this..." Or is open always better, in your opinion?
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** I don't think open is always better. Some of the people in the mentorship program - they're a bigger organization, and just telling them to make everything open is a little bit too much... It's like, how can you start, what are little things you can do to start opening things up? And it might be just like getting ideas from your community, like "What features do you want us to do?" and let people suggest them and vote on it. I think LEGO does something like that, where you can suggest which kit you want.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right, yeah.
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** Yeah, so it's like a tiny way you can open it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Get people involved.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** When you say "advantage", it makes feel it's like a growth hack of some sort... Like, you're doing it as a hack to an alternative way, and somehow you're gonna get better benefits from -- as an advantage, so to speak... Can you speak to that? The advantages of being open, the growth hack part of it, like how you would be better off that way, the growth potential...
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** \[56:08\] Yeah. I think there's a lot of advantages to working open, but I think by working open and letting people see what you're doing, and inviting people to join in, you can -- well, with science, you get the best ideas, you get the best innovation that way, and it's not just one person trying to figure out how to solve this problem, but you have hundreds of people trying to solve it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, once you get de-facto trust, right?
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** Yeah, and people see how it's done... And if they can see all the data there, then they know that you didn't tweak it, and that you didn't hide parts of it. So that's a huge advantage. Just that buy-in from the community, and also that good will is usually pretty nice.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We see that with a lot of infrastructure companies that are open source, but they're also startups or small businesses, or big businesses, and we always ask them "Why are you open source? What's the point for you?" or "Where are you coming from?" and a lot of the times it's about trust, because they just think "This is table stakes. You don't have to trust that we're doing things with your stuff, you can see what we're doing with your stuff." So on the data side, it makes a lot of sense of like "My research is legit. Here's everything." Or if there's a problem, like, "There it is, in line 37. Help me fix it."
+
+With software companies, a lot of the times the advantages - we don't have to prove to anybody that we're trustworthy. I mean, you still have to, to a certain degree, but "Here's our proof right here. It's right there, out in the open." It's another example.
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** Or even just listening to people. I think that's a nice, open interaction that can build trust, even if they can't see -- or if they already trust what you're building... But knowing that you're hearing what they're saying, and making changes - I think that's really important.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** In regards to building a movement, or starting a movement, a lot of people - and I've had this in the past... Open source things, or write openly, or publish openly... Into the void.
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And so they want interaction, they want other people's ideas, they want contributors, they want all these things, and yet, there is a disconnect, or sometimes there's just too much noise and you can't even get your voice heard... With Mozilla, you guys have allowed voice in the community, so it's probably established that these things are going to have interaction, and stuff... But if you're just starting from square one, do you have to advise people on how to build that movement, how to kickstart the interactions?
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** Yeah, definitely, and I think something people forget to do is really have that concise mission, or concise vision around what they're doing, so people can understand it right away. We do try to amplify -- like you said, we do have big platforms, we do try to amplify everyone that we trust or that's coming through the program, to help give them that head start. But if they have a very confusing mission statement that people don't get, it's gonna be a bit harder for them to gather that community.
+
+We do a couple exercises around solidifying what you're doing and your messaging there, but then also once you start getting a couple people interested, how do you keep that momentum going, how do you follow up with them, and really find out why they came, so that you can give them the kind of value that they want coming out of this. Did they come because they wanna learn JavaScript? Then help make that a great learning experience for them. Or did they come because they really wanna help take down the browser monopoly? Then really give them that opportunity... Back to Firefox, yeah...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's a movement right there.
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** Yeah, yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[59:27\] You're also part of the Journal for Open Source - is that right?
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** Yeah, the Journal for Open Source Software.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What is that about?
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** So in Academia, a lot of times if you write open source software, you write software for science, you can't cite the software directly... You have to write a paper about your software and get that published, and then you get more citations, and then you can make the argument that you need more funding for your software. It's a little roundabout, so the Journal of Open Source Software makes it really easy for you to publish a paper on your software. So they just take the readme, and then we have a review process, which is similar to -- just like "Are you following best practices with your software?" and then it generates this paper that's all online, and it mints it with a DOI (digital object identifier), so that people can cite it in their real academic papers... And then you can say "Oh look, these ten people published about my software, used my software to do their analysis. I need funding."
+
+So it makes it a little easier to make software and science more sustainable... And it's a little hack between -- because right now you can't cite software directly, so it's just like... Adding that little step.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, that's what I was saying - it almost seems like it'd be more useful for papers...
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** ...but it's for open source software.
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** Yeah. I think you can sort of cite software directly, but not everyone thinks that's a good idea. \[laughter\] We're trying to make that happen.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's sort of frowned upon.
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** Yeah,
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So you say it's kind of a hack - is it a first step, or is it the end goal...? It seems like the kind of thing that would be generally useful for all sorts of research.
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** Yeah, yeah. I think the end goal would be you can just cite software directly. So you can get a DOI for your software, so you could cite it... Just a lot of publications out there are like "That's not a real paper." So this is just a way to make software a little bit more visible.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay. Because citations are super-important in Academia.
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** Yes. That is how you move forward in your career.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's like, that's your street cred right there.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** "I've been cited... They agree." It's a concur.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What's that?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's a concur.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** "I've been cited."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, like "I concur. I agree with you."
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** Although sometimes people cite it because they disagree...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's more like...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Notoriety, than it is...
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** It's like, "We used your research."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's similar with page rank, how it works with links. The more times you're linked, the more influential that you are.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That makes sense.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Sometimes they're agreeing/disagreeing, but you're obviously a part of that conversation.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, they consider the disagree part of that, but yeah, definitely. It just shows that you have some influence; whether it's negative or positive is to be seen by the reader.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's like how many stars you have on GitHub... No, it's not. Let's not start there...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** Yeah, Arfon Smith started the Journal of Open Source Software. I hope I did a good job explaining what that was... I'm sorry, Arfon, if I didn't...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I think you did. I got it. But we do know Arfon, we've had him on RFC, so I was somewhat familiar with this...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I wasn't... Not at all. Brand new today.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's where he works now.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I didn't know that either.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You learn something new every day.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I miss you, bro. Good to see you!
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What's up, Arfon? Shout-out.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The last time I talked to him he was traveling everywhere. He was like a vagabond with a family.
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** He travels quite a lot, yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We interviewed him from a -- was it a bus?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** RV...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It was an RV...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Parked outside of a Starbucks, in Canada somewhere.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's right.
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** That's not surprising, yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It was pretty wild.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That was fun.
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Cool. Abby, anything else you'd like to talk about?
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** I think that was... Yeah, that was good. Nothing comes to mind.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Adam, anything else?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Nothing from me.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Alright. Well, thanks for all the work that you're doing.
+
+**Abigail Cabunoc Mayes:** It's a real pleasure being here. Thank you so much for having me.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Thank you, Abby.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Thank you.
diff --git a/Building a secure Operating System (Redox OS) with Rust (Interview)_transcript.txt b/Building a secure Operating System (Redox OS) with Rust (Interview)_transcript.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..1e14cdd197720fde88cc753da1bbc888a0bc4705
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+++ b/Building a secure Operating System (Redox OS) with Rust (Interview)_transcript.txt	
@@ -0,0 +1,328 @@
+**Jerod Santo:** So Jeremy, the obvious first question when we speak with somebody -- I don't know if we've spoken to too many people who are writing an operating system, but I always just ask "Why? Why this huge undertaking?" Why are you (and others) writing Redox?
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** Well, that in many ways is the question people will ask, especially in the early days when there's not much work that has gone into it. When it was first announced, I didn't even know it would be announced... But someone announced it on Reddit; the first user of the operating system called Ticki, who also set up the chat server - he put up a Reddit post saying "Hey, look at this operating system written in Rust." I was not ready at all. And to be honest, at that point I'm not sure I even had a direction.
+
+To get started in the why I wanted to do this, a long time ago I was making operating systems in my free time using Assembler, just as a hobby, and to try to get to understand how computers work at a lower level. And Rust, when I first encountered it, really struck me as a language that would make all of the headaches that I had writing operating system-level stuff in Assembler go away. So I just started toying around with the Rust bootloader, then I wrote a little graphics stack, had mouse input, keyboard input, and it kind of ballooned from there. But now I think we do have a purpose.
+
+\[04:01\] The purpose of Redox is not to replace Linux or to replace the desktop operating systems that are currently out there, but to augment them. It's to provide an alternative that is secure from the ground up, that's built in a language that has some provable security aspects, and also has an architecture - because it is a microkernel - that's designed to be a little more secure and reliable with the default settings. So most of it comes out of security, at least for the official reason. But for the unofficial reason, it is a lot of fun to write in Rust, and it is a lot of fun to write stuff at a low level.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's interesting, I was thinking back when I said "I don't think we talked to too many operating systems developers", the last one that we did, Adam - the show hasn't aired yet, because we have to re-record, because we had Steve Klabnik on talking about intermezzOS, which is another operating system that has probably extremely different goals than what you're doing, but interesting to see how much is happening in the Rust community around OS's.
+
+I wanna go back to Ticki, because I was perusing the Redox book today in preparation for this, and Ticki's name is all over that. So it sounds like he's been a part of the community since day one, huh?
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** That's right. He started the community with that Reddit post, and the first commit to the repository was on April 20th 2015, and only a couple months later Ticki posted, and it kind of exploded from there. He set up the chat server, he started writing a bunch of this... He's got his code in the core utils, in additional utilities we have called "extra utils" inside the shell, in the kernel, and now he's working on the file system.
+He wrote some very popular Rust libraries like Termion, that is a terminal control library that quite a lot of people are using for outputting stuff to the terminal and using control characters and making nice, pretty terminal interfaces.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So after that initial Reddit post and the interest flared up, did you have a sense of dread, or just joy that all these people were suddenly interested in this operating system which was fledgling at the moment (not ready to even be announced)? Was there a sense of dread, or was it mostly just excitement and spurring you on to move forward.
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** Definitely both. Because what there ends up being is you know that there's so many problems that need to be fixed, because you're still working on it. At the time, it was a unikernel, and everything was running in the kernel, including all of the programs - they were just hardcoded kernel functions. I was just literally trying to figure out how to compile Rust at the kernel level and run it. That was it. I hadn't figured out how to launch applications in the user space with Rust, and all these other things hadn't been figured out. So the fact that there was so much, even at that state in development there was so much interest in it really probably changed the course of the project from being simply a hobby to being my second job.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Were you looking for a second job?
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** Not at the time... \[laughter\] But that's what it became. Like most programmers, it's hard to turn it off, to stop programming... So you have side-projects. And this ended up soaking up every single side-project I was working on. If it wasn't Redox, then there really wasn't a place for it, so it had to fit into that paradigm.
+
+\[07:52\] It's been a timesink, that's for sure. Sometimes I think I might work on it more than my real job, but... Yeah, it was enlightening just how many people wanted a Rust operating system, so immediately from there I started working on the things that it needed to have. It needed to have separation, where drivers and processes were running in the user space; it needed to have a kernel that wasn't a hack... So we actually had to rewrite the kernel about a year and a half ago, because all the memory management had been done incorrectly. And one I started trying to introduce concurrency, where more than one core would be running kernel code at the same time; things started breaking all over the place, so I scrapped the kernel code and rewrote it.
+
+A lot of that was -- Steve Klabnik has actually been very helpful in some of these areas, as well as Phil Oppermann, who wrote a blog about writing Rust operating systems... I actually ripped off quite a lot of his memory management code for Redox. Hopefully, he ripped off a lot of the stuff I had been working on in the early days to figure out how to set up the build environment.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Just like "great artists steal," it sounds like there's a lot of that going on in programming, especially when somebody trailblazes; there's no problem in walking down that hidden down trail. Nothing wrong with that.
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** Yeah. There are very few communities that really believe in sharing as much as the Rust community, too. Most everything is free software; there are only a few proprietary programs written in Rust that I know of, and those are in-house programs that we use to manage firmware here at System76. The majority of stuff out there though is open source and MIT-licensed, so it's permissively licensed.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So you started off, you were tinkering, it was a hobby; still, I guess, you would call it a hobby, although like you said, it's a second job at this point. It's a very large hobby, one that probably takes most of your free time. You didn't really have a goal in mind until you realized that you had to have a goal. Now I'll read a little bit from just the opening section of the book here, \[unintelligible 00:10:18.27\] There's a very nice statement here, "Redox is an attempt to make a complete, fully-functioning general purpose operating system with a focus on safety, freedom, reliability, correctness and pragmatism." I think that encapsulates it very well. That sounds like a very almost Serious Business, with capital S, capital B...
+
+Has the breadth of it and have the principles in this attempt to build this, has it made the scope of the project sprawl? Because that's why I always ask, "Why build an operating system?", because not only is there depth in the technical expertise required - I'll ask you to describe the microkernel and stuff like that here in a little bit - but just the breadth of things needed when you're starting from scratch, so to speak. To me, it is an overwhelming thought.
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** Absolutely, and there are probably 10,000 hours of work just from my time into things that I've written for Redox. It's an immense amount of labor. But the undertaking of that labor does have an end goal that all the code that's written, provided it follows the coding style that we use, which is Safe Rust, ends up being something we can verify more easily for security properties than other code.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Tell us about Safe Rust, as opposed to a different style.
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** \[11:54\] The coding style is very important in Rust, and actually what people don't realize is that Rust enforces your coding style, whereas other languages don't. Rust comes in and prevents certain things from happening, to an extreme. Passing around mutable pointers is trivial in every other language. In Java, you can crash a program very easily - concurrent memory access exception, right? In Rust, this is not possible. In Rust you have to structure things the way the language forces you to. In some ways that's a negative, because that takes a lot more effort to learn the language, but once you do, you start to get in the habit of writing things with Safe Rust, and using abstractions that are performant and safe at the same time.
+
+This especially is important in the kernel, where things can be run at any time in the kernel, because interrupts can be triggered by hardware, and they're services immediately by the kernel. It's a lot like signals in a user space application, code gets run in the middle of other code. So if you end up having to lock things, and then you hold that lock when the code that also requires to hold that lock, it's called you have a deadlock. Rust prevents these kinds of things from happening, unless you try really hard. So people end up falling into a coding style that I will call "the Rust coding style." It's not as though that coding style can't be translated to other languages; in fact, I would say my C now has more of a Rust coding style than it did before I learned Rust. That coding style is to check errors when they happen, and to return from the function when they happen; where that coding style is to check for the validity of pointers before using them, thinking about how things are being aliased... All of these things enter into your thinking in other languages.
+
+The only way that this could happen for an operating system is to rewrite significant parts of it, in a language that had very strong static analysis, like Rust does. Other operating systems, like if you look at seL4, they attempt to go even further with verification techniques. That takes a tremendous amount of time. Rust is one of the things that can bring a certain amount of verification into your program, but can be done in polynomial time; you can actually write a program, as opposed to having to write a program, write a specification, learn a lot about formalism, and basically end up having to say, "Well, this program is formally verified, unless the hardware operates incorrectly, or the operating system returns the wrong stuff from a system call, or the other libraries on the computer are not operating correctly", or this or that.
+
+By writing a lot of things in Rust at a low level, we have a form of guarantee that certain classes of errors are going to be thrown out. Those classes are double frees, invalid pointers, buffer overflows, things like that. So it was necessary to rewrite a significant amount of things to get those advantages.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, especially when you say buffer overflows - it's probably the most common cause of exploit out there against many programs, I guess... Unless you're talking about the web; then probably cross-site scripting is number one.
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** Yeah, absolutely.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, so getting rid of buffer overflows is hugely advantageous for security.
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[15:49\] So let's talk about the -- we stated the goal... And by the way, before we get into the design, because that's probably where we'll camp out most of the time, I always like to ask people what success looks like. Maybe Redox already is a success as it is, but for you personally, you've got so much time into it, so many lines of code, so much thought and effort or part of your life - what would success look like when you say that it's an attempt to make a general purpose operating system? What would success look like?
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** Success to me looks like I and only myself can run this operating system on my own machine, without having to worry about features missing. That would be success for me. I really am pretty selfish about this. I started developing an operating system for myself, based on the thoughts of what I wanted on my computer. I can't really dictate what other people will want. The lucky thing is though that most people in the Rust community want the exact same thing. They wanna run a secure and free operating system, so if I can deliver on that goal and I can have something that runs on my machines, can build itself from source, so it needs to be self-hosting - which we're very close to doing - and has a browser, has internet access, has hardware access to all the hardware that I need to use, then that would be a success.
+
+Then from that success I think it would grow to other people's forms of success, which would be "this is a widespread, widely used operating system in at least one sector." If that was, you know, "90% of IoT devices are running Redox", that would be an example. I'm not looking for the desktop, or server market, or any of that. I'm not looking for any market, I'm trying to write something for my own computer, so that I can feel secure, and so that I can tinker with things, and stuff like that. It just happens that a lot of other people want the same thing.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What I like about that measure of success is that's completely in your control... Whereas you can't control market share, you can't control traction and adoption and these other things that are required.
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** That's what everyone else measures success by.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right, and if it's like "I can run it on my own machine", that's a very -- I'm not gonna say it's an easily achieved goal, but it's like a clear goal that you are in control of, you and the community.
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** Right.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So I said one last question before we dive into the design, but now I have another one, so I lied... How close are you to that? You said you're almost self-hosting, but how close are you to getting to your vision of success?
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** So I already run Redox on all of my machines, partially. It's not full-time, that's the issue. To get to full-time, I need to be able to compile Redox on Redox, and I need network drivers for wireless hardware. Those would be the two things that I would need. We would get a browser at some point; I think the quality of that browser might be debatable, but once this system is self-hosting, we should be able to work harder on porting software... And I can always use my phone if I need to go to Facebook, or whatever.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** There you go.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm curious about the secure aspect of this. What does that stem from? What did you use prior to this and how is it not secure enough for you?
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** \[19:40\] So I've been using Linux for a very long time. I've been using Linux probably since I was 12 years old, maybe 10... And it has always been a stable and reliable operating system, and it's always been thought of as a secure operating system, and in many ways it is. Any Linux-based operating system is more secure than Windows; that's end of story, the truth. But there are flaws in the way that most Linux distributions handle security, and the way in which the Linux kernel itself handles security. There are about 400 system calls in Linux, whereas there are about 50 in Redox. Each one has, I would say, mathematical attributes around it in its use; in specific cases you use this specific syscall. It will not be duplicated. There won't be another syscall that does the same thing. That kind of design already yields itself to more security, because you have less surface area.
+
+Then, if you go further to some of the things we're trying to do with OS-level virtualization and with schemes, what you have is a file system that can be reliably contained, whereas with Linux, any process running in any user level can access certain hardware devices, either through ioctl's or through the dev file system, and most users have the ability to gain superuser access, at least what you run your browser as. In Redox all of the drivers run in user space, and all of the drivers run in a special container mode whereby they release privileges to access any hardware after they've gained access to the hardware that they need to control. What this means is that for example the disk driver will open the disk device, and then it will disable its ability to gain access to any other devices at any time in the future. A vulnerability in the disk driver now went from a privilege escalation allowing any system to be accessed, to a privilege escalation allowing the disk to be read and written. Just as bad, perhaps, you could rewrite things on disk, of course, you could rewrite the kernel, but you've contained that piece of functionality.
+
+An even better example is a network stack. A network stack that gets compromised on Redox is only able to access the network device that it's operating on. So it can send bad packets and it can lie about received packets. That's it. Whereas if you have a network stack that's compromised on Linux, it gains access to the entire kernel... Depending on how it's compromised, of course, but there have been privilege escalations in the Linux kernel that have been remote vulnerabilities, that have allowed remote attackers through accessing the network devices of another machine, access to the kernel and running arbitrary code at a kernel level, which is clearly a worse vulnerability.
+
+So firstly, the microkernel architecture divides devices into separate spaces; each one is in some process space. Secondly, OS-level virtualization prevents those processes from accessing any devices after they get into a working state. They open the devices they need, they disable their ability to access any more.
+
+Thirdly, everything is written in Rust. I hate to have to go to that point, because I think -- people who are on the fence about Rust, when you say "Well, you should rewrite it in Rust", they will look back at you and they will ask "How will that improve my coding quality? How will that prevent logic errors? How will that prevent programmer failures that happen in Rust anyways?", and it won't. They're right that Rust is not the magic bullet that people seem to keep pushing it as. Rust is simply one part of the puzzle. That's why we have to have a microkernel design.
+
+\[24:10\] Some people have asked "Why not do a unikernel design? If everything's written in Rust, it should be completely sane to have everything run in a kernel space, because you have protection from a language level." It's not true. It's not true at all. Rust is not perfect. Rust cannot protect against every single vulnerability, and so in this method you need to have different levels. You need to have the microkernel for protecting device drivers and services, keeping them separate. You need to have OS-level containerization, so that processes run in an even more containerized form than by default. Not only do they have memory access being prevented across process spaces, but you also have file access being prevented across process spaces. And finally, Rust to protect against programmer error, to prevent (but not completely eliminate) the possibility of buffer overflows, of bad pointers, and of double frees and things like that. Those three together are the reason why Redox is potentially more secure.
+
+**Break:** \[25:30\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Jeremy, let's pick back up with the microkernel you mentioned at the tailend of the "why Rust" portion there. Can you describe that in detail? The rewrite, what a microkernel exactly is... And then you mentioned the security benefits, but maybe if there are other pros and cons to that sort of a design...
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** Yeah, so the strictest definition of a microkernel is a kernel that only does what is necessary in the kernel space to make a functional user space. That is the strictest definition. By that definition, Redox is not a microkernel. But the definition that's typically used is drivers and services run in user space. By that definition, Redox is a microkernel. It isn't a seven system call microkernel like the L4 microkernel, but it is a microkernel. It's 10,000 lines of code, and what it does is provide a framework for filesystems that then user space can use to create file systems and to perform file system operations. That's essentially what it does.
+
+\[28:02\] The older kernel before the rewrite had drivers included, so it wasn't a microkernel; it was a monolithic kernel. And even older than that, if you go all the way back to the original write, the original Git commit, it was a unikernel. So the first thing that happened was to be able to run processes in user space, the next thing that happened was moving drivers into user space. In order to do that, we had to write some special system calls for drivers to hook into, but the majority of system calls in the Redox kernel are file system related. Opening files, reading, writing, seeking, closing and duplicating; that's pretty much it.
+
+There are some timing system calls, and there are some process control system calls, like exec and sleep, things like that. Well, actually clock nanosleep, or something like that; whichever one has the highest resolution is the one we implement. What this means is that in user space in Redox you have disk drivers, file system drivers, the network stack, network drivers, the graphic stack, graphics drivers, the input stack, input drivers are all programs. This is very different from other operating systems, especially other operating systems that are at this level of development. Because if you do look at other microkernels, they have tended to lag behind, in part because it's difficult to write a microkernel. And also, in part because there isn't a lot of interest in microkernels. But I think after realizing the security benefits, again there will be a renaissance in microkernels and Redox will be one of them.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Does that architecture put more strain and slowdown on the development of these specific -- like the networking stack in user space, does it make writing that portion of the operating system more difficult because it doesn't have kernel level access? Or once you get the microkernel setup it's really six in one hand, half a dozen in the other...?
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** I think that was the most difficult part, choosing what needed to be in the kernel, so that it would be easy to write drivers. Because I think now drivers are actually really easy to write. I've written several drivers for networking devices. Each one takes about a day of research and implementation effort, and most of that is looking at hardware-specific things, like registers, because actually getting to the point where you're accessing hardware is not too difficult anymore. The reason why user space drivers are so hard, and -- well, we could take Linux for example, because there are user space drivers, especially for the USB stack. There's libusb, there's lots of different programs that use libusb and implement user space drivers for devices. Things like fingerprint readers use user space drivers.
+
+What you don't have in Linux that is available for a user space driver programmer is the ability to get hardware interrupts delivered to the process. This does not exist. So you can't write drivers for PCI express devices, for example. You can only write drivers at a higher level, like for USB. This has been fixed in Redox by having a file system for interrupt delivery. So a device driver simply opens a file for that interrupt, and then gets a file event and can read the interrupt information when the interrupt occurs. So it's all event-based. They get messages from the kernel indicating that an interrupt happened and they can handle certain hardware operations. And this is fairly low latency.
+
+\[32:01\] There has been a lot of optimization in modern x86 CPU's to handle context-switching efficiently, which also lended itself to making microkernels easier to develop in. Now I would say for a new driver the things you have to do are create the file system to access that device, write hardware-specific code to access the registers of the device, and then link the two together so that you have something come in from user space from another process. It tries to open, for example, disk;0. You give it back a handle. When it reads from that handle, you read from the disk. Implementing this with the scheme mechanism in Redox has been fairly simple and straightforward.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Another aspect of Redox's design that interested me right away is this concept of everything is a URL, which those of us well-versed in Linux remember "everything is a file", or are familiar with that; "everything is a URL" seems like a take on that that seems more holistic or global. Can you talk about that design decision and its implications in the OS?
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** Yes. So I would say that "everything is a file" is still the methodology. Unfortunately, these two things are conflated. When people hear "everything is a file" in terms of Unix, what the original meaning was is everything can be treated as a file handle, not that everything had a path on the file system. What that meant was that maybe it would open a network socket. You would not open it from the file system in most Unixes. You would open it with a socket call, but you would read from it with a read call, you would write to it with a write call and you would close it with a close call. What Redox has done is unify all of this into the open call, and it's something very similar to what Plan9 did.
+
+First, we have everything as a file descriptor, now we have everything is on the file system, like Plan9, where every networking is accessed through the file system. You create files, you read from them, you destroy them... From the file system you are able to do networking operations, you are able to interact with the windowing system. Everything you can do in Plan9 you can do from the file system, with a file path. So now everything is a file descriptor and it's referenced by a file path.
+
+Now, in Redox it goes one step further. Both of those are true, and we add on segmented file systems. What this means is that the beginning of a path identifies a file system to interact with. This file system is implemented by either the kernel in the case of some of the low-level file systems like interrupt handling, or mostly by a user space process. And in order to create a scheme - which is what this level is called - a user space process opens a file. It creates a file in what's called the root scheme, so everything is file-based... Or at least file path-based.
+
+The reason why I say "everything is a URL" - the easiest way to conceptualize this for most people is the word "URL", because at the beginning of the URL you have an identifier of the protocol called "the scheme", and you have after that a path. So what happens in Redox is that path gets sent to whatever handles that specific scheme, and then it returns a file handler which the kernel holds on to.
+
+\[36:06\] And the kernel arbitrates between the two processes. It passes all of the system calls that utilize that file descriptor to the scheme handler, which then passes the results of each file descriptor operation back to the kernel, which then forwards it to the process that started the system call.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So do specific user space programs register as scheme handlers, or something? They say "I can handle this scheme..."
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** Exactly. So each scheme is typically owned by one process. So one process for each scheme. A process can have more than one scheme. Usually, they don't, but sometimes they can, in the event -- for example, the network stack, especially the new version of the network stack has TCP and UDP and IP all implemented by the same process. So any operations on those file systems gets sent to the same process. But what this means is that you can easily audit all of the open file descriptors and all of the available paths on the system. Who supplies them, what is happening to them - all of that can be audited from the kernel level. So by asking the kernel for all the open file descriptors, and for who created them and who is using them and all of those things, you can also design a more secure system. You can say "Well, that file descriptor shouldn't be open. I'm gonna modify this process to close that file descriptor." Or "This program should not have access to this file system. I'm gonna modify the permissions that it gets launched with", things like that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, it's like everything gets passed through this one waypoint, or this one -- like a canal, or something, so you can enforce restrictions right there.
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** Right, and it makes it super easy to do namespaces, which are a critical Redox concept for OS-level virtualization.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay, tell me more about namespaces.
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** So a namespace is created by a process much like a chroot is created in other Unix operating systems... Except in this case, since everything is going through the file system (everything), a namespace allows a user space process to control other user space processes almost entirely. So if you can control every access to the file system, you can redirect it to a different place; that's what a chroot is. But if you can control every access to the networking file system, then you can firewall a process. If you can control all the accesses to the graphics file system, the windowing file system, you can have remote windowing. You can do windowing over the network, for example. So VNC could simply be implemented as running a process in a windowing container, basically. Things like that. Every single thing a process can do can be watched by a process that spawned that process. We have a method of doing Docker basically, a method of doing chroots or jails that is more general, because every single thing that can be done by a process goes through this file system mechanism, so it can be intercepted by a higher privilege process and then redirected or modified.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That sounds pretty cool. So is this all -- maybe "hypothetical" is not the best word, but is there any of this tested out in practice, or are you speaking of the possibilities given this architecture?
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** \[40:01\] It is implemented, and there are usages of it. Right now we do have a chroot example that will do this in order to enable chroots. It will basically redirect file system calls to a different folder. We also have a method of processes entering a restricted mode where they can't open any file descriptors at all. This restricted mode is implemented using namespaces. So if a process enters into the null namespace, they lose the ability to access any file paths, and by doing so if they're compromised, their damage to the system that they can cause is limited.
+
+We do need to implement a more complex example, which I think would be to run multiple versions of Redox at different IP addresses and then do virtual networking in a user space process that then outputs them to the real network. Basically, doing LXC, which is Linux containers. They are OS-level, which means that it isn't virtualization; it is real 100% speed processes running on one kernel, but certain processes have different rights, and those rights are controlled by other processes. So doing something like Docker would probably be the best proof of this system, but we do have things using it already.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very cool. Anything else at the core to Redox's design that you wanna touch on before we broaden the conversation and talk about the ecosystem? Because there's a lot of other stuff going along around and in Redox that are notable.
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** I think that's pretty much it. We've talked about microkernels, we've talked about the file system... The kernel is the file system arbitrator, so I think that's most of it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay. So expanding the conversation and looking beyond the kernel and the file system, there's obviously a lot more that goes into a functional general purpose operating system, and you have a lot of other things going on, many maintained by you, many maintained by other people in the community... Where do we start? I mean, you've got the little editor, you've got the Ion Shell, you've got utilities, Orbital... There's so many things we could talk about. What's the best place to start there?
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** Well, the biggest and most important thing right now I think is Ion. It's seen the most work, it's not maintained by myself, although I was involved in the earlier implementation... I have been involved in implementing Redox-related things for it. It's maintained by Michael Murphy, who spends a lot of time and effort on updating Ion and making it work really well. It has better performance than other shells, for a lot of tasks, the syntax is not insane (like Bash syntax often ends up being), and it's written in Rust. What more could you ask for?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Is it ready to go, is it usable? \[laughter\] I guess -- what else can you ask for? Using it...
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** For the most part, yeah. For the most part it's usable. I think the remaining thing is to verify that things like Shellshock are not present in Ion, to verify the syntax and to formalize the syntax... Because right now the syntax has not been formalized. It's been implemented, but there's not a document identifying exactly what the syntax is.
+
+\[43:53\] That's not to say that the syntax is difficult to learn. We have tutorials, we have things identifying what the syntax is, there's just not a formal specification of it. So what we're working on right now is to fuzz Ion, to basically pass it valid syntax from a syntax generator that has different code, that has a different implementation of the syntax, creates what should be valid syntax for Ion, feeds it into Ion, and then validates the behavior... And does this automatically and randomly. If we have something like that, I think we could stamp it ready for general use.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Are you familiar to people who may be using Bash or C shell?
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** Yeah, I think so. So much of it comes from the Bash syntax - the way variables are handled, the way you call functions in pipe, and pipe into files, and pipe to other processes, the way that you background things, ctrl+C and ctrl+Z - all of those things are the same in Ion.
+
+The differences come out when you start doing if statements and loops, where we've simplified the syntax of the POSIX; it's not following the POSIX specification. So scripts that do need to follow that can use Bash. And I've been thinking about maybe implementing a compliant mode in Ion where it can act as Bash and it can run POSIX syntax scripts, or Bash syntax, which is slightly different.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I guess that's a point -- we haven't really pointed a finger at this very closely, but it's -- Redox is Unix-like, but it's not POSIX-compliant, and it doesn't want to be.
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** Right.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's close to POSIX-compliant...
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** It's to the point where most things that are simple will probably compile. But the thing it is compliant with is the Rust standard library, and it is compliant with a number of things at the C level, but not all. Not all. Because some of those things would invalidate the design. We don't have ioctl's, for example, because that would violate the file system design. We don't have -- certain networking calls have to be done differently. We've implemented BSD sockets, but the way it's implemented in the C library is not like other Unixes... And a lot of things are different. But those things that are different are usually for much more complicated use cases.
+
+We've ported Bash, for example. So all of the terminal control stuff is different at a lower level, but we have access to those interfaces at the C library level. I think the reason why we don't say POSIX-compatible, mostly it's because some design decisions force it to not be POSIX-compatible. The file system can never be POSIX compatible if it uses schemes. It has to be a single file system hierarchy for it to be compatible... Things like that, they throw out the possibility. So Unix-like because it implements most of the things you expect on a Unix, not POSIX-compatible because we can't possibly be... Although we don't break POSIX compatibility on purpose. We try to follow it as much as possible so that porting software is easy.
+
+**Break:** \[47:36\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So Jeremy, we talked earlier about security, and you talked about why you went that route with Rust, why it was important to you, and you'd mentioned essentially how Linux didn't fit your bill... I'm kind of curious, why not just contribute to Linux, BSD, the other operating systems out there? Why not just do that, versus essentially go it alone (accidentally, in some cases), and we're here right now with Redox? Why not go that route?
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** The major reason is because the design goals don't align... And at the very beginning, the design goal didn't exist, but when it did gain popularity, when this idea of a Rust operating system gained popularity, the design goals started to become more permanent... Those being a microkernel and Rust. Rust is possible in the Linux Kernel and in BSD; you can link to Rust, you can compile Rust, you can use it; the issue is that the microkernel architecture is not one that will be accepted. Those are monolithic by design. I don't want to change their design. I want to live alongside it, I want to attempt to develop something that may or may not work for a secure future based on a microkernel based on Rust.
+
+There are however microkernels that maybe I should have been contributing to, like Minix3, that do have aligned design goals... And I think the major reason is that the microkernels like Minix3 and Hurd don't feel very professional and very developed at this point. There haven't been a lot of people working on them, and they've been achieving things very slowly. It kind of bears the question -- you kind of ask the question "Why?" Why are these other microkernels not doing so well? Why are they developing slowly, why are they not being utilized? Why does it look like a ghost town when you try to find people who are working on Minix or working on Hurd? And I think it's because the interest died. Because these projects, in one way or another, kept hitting problems with microkernels, that perhaps were solved by hardware, perhaps were solved by software, but at the time were not solved.
+
+Hurd for 20 years stagnated. Very recently, Debian has had a version of Debian that runs on the Hurd kernel, which is a great achievement. It's probably more usable than Redox in terms of all of the software that's available, but it's not as promising as Redox. The reason is that the architecture of Redox I believe had to be designed for the time - for the software at the time, the hardware at the time, the architecture had to be designed from the ground up to produce a platform that could then burst into a fully-fledged general purpose operating system.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[51:59\] So we talked about what you're up to and how you have this second job now... What we haven't mentioned is that you do have a Patreon campaign, so you're giving it a go at people supporting your work on Redox. Not doing that bad, by the way - 123 patrons giving you $1,085/month to work on this, but haven't quite reached your goals. Tell us about your decision to hop on Patreon, how it's going and some of your goals for your personal sustainability on this project.
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** So before I started working at System76, I left the job that I was working at before - I was working at a very small company, at a startup, self-employed, basically... And we were working on computer vision. It didn't end up doing so well, so I left. At that point, I started investigating whether or not Redox could be my full-time job and what it would take to be my full-time job. The Patreon was created out of that, and I posted in the Rust Reddit asking for people to donate, and they did, in mass. It got up to about $1,000 at the same time that I had found another job. That money is used to significantly improve the amount of time that I can dedicate to Redox.
+
+I dedicate about 20 hours a week to Redox. Every single night, almost every hour of the night I spend working on Redox. And I feel like the more that the Patreon grows, the more that time will be Redox-related. Eventually, I may be able to dedicate all of my time to Redox if it becomes large enough.
+
+Patreon is a way for people to give back to the project what they feel they want to. There's no obligations whatsoever. You can leave at any time, you can join at any time, but I do have a couple goals that I'm working on achieving anyway. But as I stated before, my personal goal is to make it run on my personal machine. When that happens, these other use cases will be available.
+
+Number one in the Patreon is to run it on virtualized hardware. We're very close to doing that. The only thing left is self hosting and a better network stack. The better network stack is already, I would say, 90% of the way there. I'm using it in my own builds of Redox. The only reason I'm not pushing it out is because it lacks DHCP support. And self-hosting is incredibly close. I've gotten to the point where I can utilize Cargo, which is the Rust compilation and packaging system, from within Redox. So very few things are left before Redox will be able to compile itself, and potentially the build system will move to Redox.
+
+After that, the first goal I think will have been achieved. Running on virtualized hardware already works very well. Delivering an image to different cloud providers would be part of that, and that's something that I would see about doing once we have self-hosting. The final one, the final goal is the $4,000/month goal, which those numbers, by the way -- I had to put numbers there. I'm going to work towards those goals no matter what.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That was another question - is the dollar per month contingent, or the goals being reached contingent on the dollar per month?
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** No.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Because it seems like you've got momentum based on your recent posts, and the feedback, like "Wow, the releases are coming in thick and fast", "Great to see project momentum!" It seems like you're going at it no matter what.
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** \[55:57\] I'm going no matter what. If people leave the Patreon, I'm going no matter what. If I get $6,000/month from the Patreon I'm going no matter what. \[laughter\] If it's successful or unsuccessful doesn't matter; it's extra money that goes into funding development of Redox directly. What I did with the amount of money I made on Patreon up until the point where Google Summer of Code happened - I took $6,500 and I funded the development of our ACPI stack in Redox, as a separate Google Summer of Code project, not affiliated with Google Summer of Code. So we actually had two students working during the summer.
+
+I didn't tell anybody publicly that I've done this. The idea is if you give any money through the Patreon, it goes back into Redox development, as soon as possible and as efficiently as possible. We now have an AML and ACPI subsystem developed from the funds that were raised with Patreon.
+
+The second project was self-hosting, and it made significant progress. Both of these projects ended up being extremely beneficial for Redox.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That' awesome. When those Google Summer of Codes happen and the student works on a project - I guess in your case you had two of them - do they continue with the community? Are they still into Rust and Redox, or is it like "See you later"?
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** Yeah, they are. And they're still very important members of the community. I have read though that other projects have had issues with Google Summer of Code because these are students, they go back to school at the end of the summer. It's just a fact, they have other things to work on, and they're trying to start their career and get their degree and things like that. But they remain in the Redox community.
+
+We haven't lost anybody, but we have had school interfere to say one thing or the other, which is very important that -- Ticki for example is pursuing his degree right now, and he's been pretty quiet, but he still checks in from time to time. I don't think we lose anybody, which is another indicator of where this project is going. We've been gaining contributors and very few have dropped out. The two that participated in Google Summer of Code are still working on things in Redox. I had even more contributions to the ACPI stack after the Summer of Code had ended. I had more contributions to the self-hosting, we're almost done.
+
+Now Ian Douglas-Scott, one of the Google Summer of Code people -- well, THE one, because the other one was unofficial, funded from the Redox Patreon... He is working on porting the cookbook to Ion, so that it no longer needs Bash as a dependency. Things like that.
+
+There are a lot of students working on Redox actually, which has been surprising. I don't think you would see that with other projects. I think if you had a new C project, you would see older contributors, because the more experienced contributors are going to be older in age, they're gonna be out of school, they're gonna have careers and backgrounds. But with Redox and with Rust, we've seen a new language bring with it a lot of new talent. People who are in school who are really looking for something new and exciting to learn, and I think Rust has really been that language, more than anything else.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[59:48\] That's pretty awesome, and I think a great use of those funds coming in through your Patreon, just redistributing them back and really investing back into the project with that money, so props on doing that. It sounds like its paying dividends already.
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** Yup.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Let's talk about getting started and getting involved... What does a potential contributor -- what does their roadmap or their onboarding look like?
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** Yeah, the best place to get started is to go to the GitHub repo. The GitHub repo is a link to everything else. The thing that you should do though if you really wanna become involved in development is ask for an invite to the chat. It's invite-only simply because it prevents spam. If you send me an email at info@redox-os.org, then I will send you an invite back. If you send me other things, I may respond; I may not, I may forget it. I have like 100 emails that I haven't replied to yet unfortunately. But if you get on the chat, you'll have access to the (I think) 250 people who are already there, and probably a dozen people who are usually online, responding to things.
+
+If you wanna develop, you don't have to download all of Redox, because obviously, building an operating system from source is not something that -- it takes a lot of bandwidth, it takes a lot of time. I would estimate it takes about 2 GB of disk space and network downloads, and about 30 minutes of time to build it from source, the entire operating system.
+
+To contribute to a single project though, you can check out Ion, for example. It's a very small codebase, very easy to get into and very easy to start contributing to. Other projects are similar. Documentation varies by project. Some projects are one-offs that had to be written and probably don't have good documentation. An example is ransid, which is the ANSI driver. I have not documented it yet. So we need help in terms of documentation, we need help in terms of coding, and we need help in terms of just utilizing the system and telling us what you want, as a contributor. All of that you can do by joining the chat.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So it's interesting, I'm curious about how you balance your focus. One, you've got development of Redox. But then you've also got the contributing community coming into play, you've got a chat, you've got Discourse, you've got a book, you've got various resources that people can tap into. It seems like in Discourse there's some people mentioning some Trellos being created to kind of give people things to do, like Help Wanted tags, for example... Where do you centralize that? How do you balance your focus, how do you map out how the community communicates?
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** Well, for the most part Redox has ADHD. \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I was reading into that a little bit... I didn't wanna say it, but it seems like that. Because it seems like it's not centralized.
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** No, and that's why being on the chat is so important. We plan things in a "What should I work on next?" kind of way. Especially what I do, it ends up being holes that I find in the system, or something that I want to improve. And when a new contributor comes in and they ask "What should I work on?", I respond "What do you want to work on? What feels nice? This is an operating system, there's a whole world of opportunity. Any piece of the system you can pick and choose to improve or to change. What do you wanna do?"
+
+I think that yields better results than planning. You do have to plan, obviously. We planned the system calls, and we continue to iterate on what should be the stable version of the syscall API, because we will have to stabilize it at some point in the very near future... And we have to plan certain things, but usually that planning process takes place in the chat, at some point in time, and we reference GitHub issues.
+
+\[01:04:21.19\] Discourse is not very active; it's why at the top of the Discourse page I say "The chat is more active. Send an email to this address to get invited." The Trello is something that someone made, but probably will not be kept up to date with what we have in the chat and what we have in GitHub.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, it seems sparse, the Trellos being made.
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** It's not official, and in order to make it official, we'd have to develop a process around how to keep it up to date. So I think the best thing for a new contributor to do is to get into the chat and to start reading through the source code, and start utilizing the system and see what they think. Because in most cases, I think if you drive people to specific things, you can make mistakes by giving the wrong task to the wrong person, whereas if they're self-motivated and a task really appeals to them, and a piece of code really appeals to them, then they're much more likely to have good results.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The reason why I asked that was because I see a question around Redox on public clouds that aligns with one of your funding goals on Patreon. And it's unanswered, and... The chat is sort of real-time, you have to sort of pay attention to it all the time, and I was just curious, how difficult it is to go from where you were at before, wanting to work on this full-time, getting a full-time job, and then now you're at 20 hours a week, and you're an up by any means necessary type of person, so you're gonna get there, and I'm just curious how difficult it is to pull the community along with you, or establish a community... Because this is a pretty important question; August 6th, from AnxiousModernMan, about public clouds, and it's unanswered.
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** What's the question?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Essentially, how can we demonstrate to cloud providers the safety of deploying Redox? Maybe it's answered somewhere, but here's a contributor...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** If you answer it now, then we can just send the person a link and say "You need to listen to the last few minutes of this episode of this podcast, and you'll have your answer."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Well, it's less on the answer, and more on community management and just nurturing... And I'm not trying to call you out, I'm just trying to figure out where your pain points are and how people can step in.
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** The pain point is definitely keeping these things up to date, especially Discourse. I don't visit Discourse. If I was able to, I'd probably take it down, because we have a Reddit, we have GitHub issues, and we have the chat, so we already have real-time communication, and with the GitHub issues, we have not real-time communication... And that works better, because GitHub is tied directly to the source.
+
+So yeah, the Discourse is a poor example of the Redox community. In my opinion, it was a mistake, because we had a duplicate form already with GitHub issues. So I do have issues answering things on Discourse in a reasonable timeframe, but if something gets on the GitHub issues, it will be answered very quickly.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Why can't you change the main navigation to drop forum?
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** What do you mean?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You can't change it, or is it out of your hands?
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** Change the what...?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So here's how I got there -- I was... You know, this is a pattern we see; this isn't your fault, this isn't a thing you've done wrong. This is a pattern I see happening across any open source that's garnering or gaining community and doing its best to drive forward and sustain, and build a community around it at the same time.
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** \[01:08:12.07\] Right, right.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You've got all these different waypoints - you've got you as an individual trying to create Redox and create Patreon support, so you have that. Then on Patreon you have this Community tab, which is basically blank. But then you go to your homepage, which is great, but you have no community tab or no community navigation, so I was thinking "If I'm on Redox-os.org, how do I onboard? How do I find community if I wanna join?" Is it on Twitter? Probably not...
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** That's a great point.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So I was like, "Well, a forum is the next best thing", so I went there, and like you said, it's a ghost town, because you're not hanging out there, and important questions aren't getting answered, and it's not exactly your fault, it's just a fractured community system. You've got GitHub issues, you've got Patreon, you've got Twitter, you've got real-time chat...
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** How about this for a plan - how about the Discourse forum goes away; there's a Community tab on the homepage, and underneath that Community tab it says "How to get to the SubReddit, the GitHub issues, the chat and the Patreon page." And then the Patreon community page links back to the website, or Patreon links back to the website. Because I think it is pretty fractured right now, and especially -- there's so many different ways in... From the website we have links to documentation, the book and the forum, but not to the chat.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. It's nonexistent to this site.
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** And then the forum simply has this banner at the top to try and get people to go to the chat, but it doesn't always work, and there are a lot more people signed up for the forum actually than the chat, because we have (I think) 5,000 people in the forum...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow.
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** ...and because it's so easy to sign up, they just hit GitHub Login... I'm sure a lot of them left and probably won't come back, but with the chat, we have 250. So if every single person who went to the forum had signed up in the chat, well, it'd be pretty busy, but I'm sure it would be more useful for the whole community.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right, it would be more involved. It is less around as busyness and just more encompassing of truly what the community is. You've got the developer chat, which is invite-only, which is fine, except for it's like "Well, how do I get the invite? Where's the secret password? Where is the door at?" As you're trying to do what you're doing by any means necessary, you're trying to build a thriving community along with it - or maybe not... But if you are, then you've got to give people better waypoints to get involved.
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** True, true.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And it's not saying you're doing it wrong, it's just saying it's the plan of any sustainable open source project. That's a thing they have to do, and every project has their own challenges to do that.
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** I appreciate that feedback, because I think you're absolutely right that it needs to be improved. So with the invites though, the way they work - I get the invites, and I screen. Sometimes, for some reason, I may not send back an invite to the chat. I think that's probably a negative if that was the only communication mechanism that people could use... Because I don't want spam in the developer chat. And also, the developer chat is not really attuned to every single user. So I guess the problem with the forum is it was set up because we wanted somewhere for the general community to be, but then the developers don't use it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You can't have a segmented community though. I would actually flip that in reverse, because I think what you're trying to do with the invite system is for a good purpose, but I think you kind of have it backwards.
+
+\[01:12:05.23\] I would let everyone in and have a code of conduct that you can point back to and say "Hey, if you're involved in this, you adhere to this conduct, which means no spamming, you're part of the community, you respect...", all these things that are common when it comes to that. And then, if they step out of those bounds... Rather than put the barrier up at first, you give them a guidance, you set an expectation and let them fail with that, and then say "Hey, you've gotta go, because you've failed at meeting the community expectation." That's probably a better way to go than...
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** Yeah, we could probably do open invites.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And it's probably putting a lot of burden on you too, to be that gatekeeper. And that's the last thing you wanna be. You wanna be welcoming to anybody that wants to step in and get involved.
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** Well, in general, if they send an email to me, they will get an invite back almost immediately. The only times I've done screening is when it goes into my spam folder, which is a problem for whoever sent it, but... Or when it looks weird, which sometimes it does. I think that process scares people away. I think the process of sending an email rather than simply going to the site and setting things up scares people away from it, because it's an asynchronous process...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's confrontational.
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** ...where you have to wait, and... Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Somebody's gotta confront you personally to get involved, and that can be a scary first step.
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** That's why I wanted to have it, actually. I thought that having the confrontation would prove -- and it does; like, there has been no spam in the developer chat, ever. Not a single person has sent a message that I've seen that has been something that made me want to ban that person. Very few chats for open source project work that way. Like, if you hang around the GNOME IRC, since you can just join it, there are regularly really horrific spam messages that get sent out there. Or in the Ubuntu IRC. And then they have to kick that person, and ban them... But I think if we have the right process, probably -- because for the chat we're using for the System76 operating system, it's Mattermost, just like the chat for Redox, but it's open invite. And we haven't had any issues with that.
+
+\[01:14:39.24\] So we could probably set it up similarly, and maybe make a community page where it says "For real-time chat you go here. This is where the developers hang out. If you want any issues solved, you should go talk to them here. For issues, go to GitHub issues. For a forum-like structure, go to the SubReddit." That way there is less fragmentation, everything is available from the website, the invite system is fixed for the chat... Does that sound good?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I like it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. I just think that just having clear signage up... Like, "These people go here, you go there...", and then people just know. I mean, even just that clarity will go a long way for you.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. So in closing, the folks who are listening and wanna get involved, the best way is to email you at the email address you've mentioned to get into the private chat; that's to prevent spam. What's the email address again?
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** It is info@redox-os.org.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. So email that if you want in the private chat... Which is private to prevent spam, and then also this is where most of the real-time chat is happening, so that you can organize and plan out what's coming next, and ask questions, and all that good stuff. Any closing thoughts for those listening? It could be going to the Patreon page, which we'll link up in the show notes, of course... What's the best way you can ask for support? Not just money support, but support in general, to keep Redox going and keep you on your mission.
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** Well, I would actually throw something a little weird out there.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay.
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** Redox is going where it's going, no matter what. I'm not going to stop working on it, and neither is the community built around it. If you wanna be a part of that, I love that; come join us, come join the chat. Don't feel like you have to give anything. It is a free software project; I hope that people download parts of it and enjoy it. I hope eventually people can install it and enjoy it. I hope that we can work to make it better. But no matter what, it's going forward, and I hope you can join me and be a part of that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Awesome. Jeremy, thank you so much, man, for your initiative and your tenacity. You definitely have a drive, and that's to be appreciated. Thank you so much for your time today.
+
+**Jeremy Soller:** Thanks, guys. Thanks for having me on.
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+**Adam Stacoviak:** I personally connected pretty deeply with your (pod) with your talk, because -- I almost said "podcast", because it's on the brain...
+
+**Jessica Rose:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Because I think everybody's experienced some level of burnout, whether they admit it or not, and I kind of empathize you because you said you're getting older, and I'm also realizing that I'm not immortal and I'm getting older, so I realize that things start to hurt, or it's harder to wake up and be excited, even though I run the thing, I'm in control of what I'm doing... Aside from not really being in control.
+
+**Jessica Rose:** Yeah, it's one of those things where as we're getting a little bit older - and I think part of that isn't just getting older, but I think it's getting either this space within the industry, or sort of to backbone ourselves to say "Oh no, wait, I am tired. Oh no, wait, this IS hurting me." So the folks I see really impacted by burnout and swept off their feet are the young ones who feel like they're invincible. It's like, "Oh no, I'm going to be fine. I can work these 80-hour weeks..."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Weren't you there, though? I was there at one point in my life; I was the young one who was invincible...
+
+**Jessica Rose:** I've been old for forever.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I can remember pulling all-nighters often... I remember having insomnia and not being able to sleep just because, and still getting up and doing the work. I can't say I was the best at it all the time, but I remember days where I felt young and invincible...
+
+**Jessica Rose:** And I think that's a really important point. When you look at doing meaningful work, your ability to stop doing meaningful work ends after six or seven - eight, if you wanna go by standard workday hours - but that ends a lot earlier, and people keep working.
+
+I saw a really interesting -- someone said something really valuable to me, and I think they got it off the internet, where they say "If you're going at 150%, you're really just taking out a loan from your future self."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Can you talk about your very visual -- so it's probably difficult for a podcast, but this visual process of like memory load... Can you just remind me what the term was for it?
+
+**Jessica Rose:** Oh, fantastic! So I'm really into pop psychology, and I'm really into pop psychology from the '60s, because I'm a very specific kind of nerd, and cognitive psychology was sort of a -- someone is gonna hear this and fuss at me for what I got wrong...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's okay...
+
+**Jessica Rose:** No, I'm delighted for it... I'm pretty laid back about being wrong. Cognitive psychology was a period -- it was a specific branch of the study of psychology, and folks started thinking about and talking about the brain's organic processes and psychological processes in computer terms.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+
+**Jessica Rose:** So when you talk about working memory from cognitive psychology...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Working memory, that's right.
+
+**Jessica Rose:** ...it's exactly what you think it is - it's the amount of memory, it's the amount of space you have available for mental processes, whereas cognitive load is the amount of working memory you have booked up; it's how many mental processes you're doing and how much of that cognitive load they eat.
+
+\[04:16\] I often like to ask people to visualize having too many browser tabs open - that's eating up too much of your browser's working memory.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right, right. Last time I actually had a bout of this - I opened up Slack with the intention of going to a particular person's private conversation to pull back... Essentially what email is, very similar. I'm going into Slack to get some information I know they shared with me; I do a couple scrolls (I knew I had to do that), but before I knew it, I found out later, something else grabbed my attention, and I'm in Slack and I'm like "What am I doing?" I didn't even do the thing I was supposed to be doing, so...
+
+I was pretty tired last night. I flew in from Houston to San Francisco, I went to bed early, when I normally don't go to bed very early - maybe 10, 11, 12, or whatever, but I was--
+
+**Jessica Rose:** Wait, 12 being going to bed early?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** If my wife's listening to this, she knows I'm lying, because it's more like 1 or 2... I'm stretching it a little bit. I'm just trying to like not embarrass myself, basically...
+
+**Jessica Rose:** Well, it's one of those things where it's like "Do as I say, not as I do", to be like "Oh yeah, take care of yourself kids, but I'll stay up all night and worry."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** My wife's like "Do you have to work tonight?" I'm like "I don't have to, but I probably could do one or two things to make tomorrow easier..." And it probably makes it a little easier, but it still probably makes it just as hard...
+
+**Jessica Rose:** I love how -- listeners can't possibly catch this, but as soon as you said that, you made clearly the face your wife would have made, that sort of gentle eye roll...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes, yes... And she realizes that I try my best to do balance. It's tough, it's not always easy, but I can feel like I teeter on burnout... And I kind of say it's okay in seasons. Have you ever heard of this term?
+
+**Jessica Rose:** I have not heard this term.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I could accept being burnt out for a season, because I know I've got a lot going on... Say, the first quarter of the year, or the first half of the year... Or some kind of commitment where I say "It's okay for this length of time", but then once I get there and I'm starting to do what you said in your talk, I start saying no to things, cutting things out, in positive ways, that don't hurt you. But I'm making it about me; I wanna get back to you, and parts of your talk.
+
+Something you said in your talk was like -- and I think what a good message might be to share is like, it's okay to be overloaded, but to be realizing it and then say... Don't just like, eject all the things, and then screw your life up, you know? Pull out things that -- you said it in such a way, basically, that it seemed like "Don't hurt yourself in the process of saying no to things", and removing things that are bad for you to do and taking up too much of your time in your life.
+
+**Jessica Rose:** Even when you're critically burnt out, there are some things that you have to do to sort of save your future self. For me, when stuff got really bad... Internet grocery shopping is absolutely my savior. Buying a bunch of "healthy" frozen burritos, getting an accountant to make sure I was paying all the things that needed to be paid, and even outsourcing some stuff like having some folks help with cleaning and laundry, which is a massive privilege, and I feel so lucky to have been able to do... But just either getting other people to help, or me myself making sure that the stuff I'm dropping isn't gonna make my life much more difficult in two months.
+
+But I think a lot of our dear listeners may not have sort of the funds or the flexibility to do it. The advice I would still give is when everything seems overwhelming, "I've gotta do this, and the other thing's due" - really triage what's going to doom you... Well, everything feels like doom when you're overloaded, but what's going to make your life more difficult if you don't solve it. You probably don't have to call your aunt back. You probably do have to pay your tax bill. Like, yeah, just triage where you can.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[07:57\]There's a book by Brian Tracy, that may not be the best prescription for this, but I think it's called Eat That Frog, or Eat The Frog, or something like that. Have you heard of that?
+
+**Jessica Rose:** Oh, yeah...!
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Essentially, it's not a great to-do list type of a thing, but essentially, do the thing that you have to do that day, first. It doesn't mean literally eat a frog, it just means that if you've got this one big thing to do today and today's a success because you did that thing, do that thing. Don't wait two or three days to do that thing and call your aunt back, or whatever...
+
+**Jessica Rose:** Instead of taking my approach, where it's like "Oh, I'm really dreading this, so I'll just put it over in the corner..." Do the dread thing first.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's his basic advice. I'm not sure if it's the best advice, because it's difficult to do that, but I think what he means is just don't put the things off that matter most too far. Do them pretty quickly.
+
+You shared this story too about -- Peter may not realize this, but right now it sounds like you may be in a case of burnout; not so much from our conversation, but from your talk.
+
+**Jessica Rose:** No, I was really critically burnt out...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You're post-burnout...
+
+**Jessica Rose:** ...seven, eight months ago, and I got really lucky. Being able to successfully work through burnout is really rare. But I'm working over at FutureLearn now. We're like an edtech platform, and it's the most reasonable place I think I've ever worked. I'm managing a team of really brilliant engineers. I go home right at five, and I don't answer emails, and I don't do Slack, and I get to fuss at my team too, like "Go home right at five, or at six", and not do... The only thing I've ever fussed folks out for is like "I saw you were emailing on a weekend!"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes, I like that! We've been doing that... I'm not the best at it personally, however I do like it when my team is that way, because it lets me know they care about balanced life. I don't ever wanna make them feel like they have to do something that's for us, outside of like normal hours. It's just like "I don't want you to feel that way."
+
+**Jessica Rose:** But an important part of leading in that way is making sure you don't do stuff that they see...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I know, I'm kind of a bad example. I'm working on it. So that's part of burnout, too - you may not be able to get back to like perfect you in this burnout stage, to get back to some equal balance... I think it takes time. I'm a big fan of iteration. I realize that today's delivery might not be perfect, but it's good enough; it's enough to put out there and get a feedback on it going on to learn on how to better course-correct for the next iteration. To me, that's a pretty profound thing.
+
+So what does burnout feel like? What would you describe burnout as? If someone's listening to this and they're thinking "It kind of sounds like I might be burnt out..." What do you think burnout is? What was it to you?
+
+**Jessica Rose:** Fantastically, there's a ton of research around this that says burnout is effectively indistinguishable from clinical depression. Yay, it's just great!
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's pretty common though, right? Being depressed. Or clinical depression... Is it different?
+
+**Jessica Rose:** Clinical depression is just diagnosable depression.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, okay.
+
+**Jessica Rose:** It's really challenging, because the symptoms of occupational burnout both mirror depression and other mental illness issues, and can trigger them.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow.
+
+**Jessica Rose:** So it's like a one-two whammy of misery. If you are listening and you're concerned, like "Wow, maybe I'm burnt out", the Mayo Clinic has a really fantastic checklist, which you can search for it online and go through it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** A checklist... I'm assuming if I took that checklist right now, they'd probably say "Yes."
+
+**Jessica Rose:** If you were in my talk, if you said yes to any of those questions...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I said yes to a couple things.
+
+**Jessica Rose:** Well...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I was side eyeing, I didn't wanna say yes to any of those things, but I couldn't help but doing so. There's times when I get up -- I love what I do, and it's a shame, because I do really enjoy what I do... But not every day. I don't always enjoy it the first thing in the morning. And I was really listening closely when you said you have this bug, or this thing you're dealing with, with a code problem, or whatever... "Oh, by the way, I've gotta take care of the laundry, I've gotta help with this..." - that's what happens to me sometimes. I heard myself in your talk today, basically.
+
+**Jessica Rose:** \[12:04\] And everybody's brain works really differently, and neuro diversity is one of the most exciting things about the way people engage with the world around them, and mental processes and social processes are so cool... I think wedding self-care into the way we view our own mental processes and approach the world is absolutely critical.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What is that? What do you mean by that?
+
+**Jessica Rose:** For me, when I was burnt out and coming through recovery, one of the hardest things was you aren't running on all cylinders cognitively, so I had very serious memory issues, which is quite common; I was consistently despairing and miserable, and I had a really hard time seeing success in my own work. So I'd do something, I'd do a measurably good job, and I'd be like "Well, I guess that's okay..."
+
+And for me, if you've heard me wandering around the halls today, you've probably heard me sort of morosely go "Everything is fine..."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** To yourself?
+
+**Jessica Rose:** To other people as well, when they're like "Oh, this thing...!", I'd like "Everything is fine..." So I had to kind of -- not quite home CBT, but work to build new pathways. If I was like "This is terrible, and everything is bad", I'd be like "You know, it's probably fine..."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It reminds me of something that happened on my trip here. I had to drop off my car in parking and take the -- I guess it's some sort of bus over to the departures... And I was in a rush; she was only supposed to take C, but she decided to pick up A and B as well, and then everybody started piling on, and then I had to scoot over and share half of my seat with somebody.
+
+Long story short, I was just like -- she thought I was complaining, but I wasn't... But I liked her response to her thinking I was being an abrasive person. I may have been, but I definitely wasn't trying to be... But she says "It's a beautiful day." And I was like, "I'm not a bomb, but you just diffused a bomb." Because you can say that thing -- you say it to yourself, it's not like you say it to other people too, but it's that one thing you can say that's like "You know, everything's fine. It's a beautiful day." It's just something you can say to sort of like take away the stress and crazy chaos that might be coming. What do you think?
+
+**Jessica Rose:** I was gonna say, I've got something that sounds very nice and placid, but actually means "Piss right off!" and I suggest you doing that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Sure, you can do that.
+
+**Jessica Rose:** One of my favorite things is "Oh, well perhaps you know best...", which does mean like "Um, please."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** She's mouthing something. \[laughter\] We try to remove the explicit tag for our podcast, for our young hacker fans out there, but she's...
+
+**Jessica Rose:** I think if I'm ever in a situation with somebody being terribly unpleasant, I'd be like, "Oh, well I suppose you know best." Folks know what you mean, I hope...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Jessica Rose:** The one thing I would say about burnout, because burnout so closely mirrors depression, is that if anybody listening to this things "Oh wow, maybe that is an issue for me", one thing I'd encourage people to do almost immediately (well, immediately) is seek some kind of healthcare. So go and talk to your doctor, talk to them about how you're feeling... Just because it could be burnout, it could be depression, it could be one of a dozen physical or mental health issues. Just going and making sure that you're not listening to a podcast and going "Oh, well Jess said just balance my--" No, no! Go see your doctor, please.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right, right. This is not medical advice; this is only two people talking about -- sharing war stories of burnout. Jess, in your talk you mentioned that your doctor had actually written your prescription to quit your job. Can you talk about that?
+
+**Jessica Rose:** It was very jokingly.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So that wasn't real.
+
+**Jessica Rose:** No, she did.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It did happen, okay. Can you share the story?
+
+**Jessica Rose:** \[15:47\] So I went in to talk to my GP, and I'd been working as a contracting consultant for a while... And I went in to chat with her because I was having a really hard time sleeping, and I was lethargic... I was just pretty miserable, and my GP (general doctor) is just absolutely glorious; she's very sarcastic and absolutely delightful. She was like, "Okay, okay... Okay... Well, I can give you this antidepressant, this antidepressant, or this antidepressant, but you should probably quit your job and we can skip all of those." And I was like "Are you telling me that's your medical advice?" She was like "Yeah, yeah, look!" and then grabbed a prescription pad and just wrote "Please quit your job."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow, I mean... Technically, she did write it on paper. That was her medical pad -- I don't know what you call those things; prescription pads. It's a legit thing, right?
+
+**Jessica Rose:** It was just a bit of stationery, I don't think it was a proper prescription.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, okay. Cool. I was taking it a little further, but...
+
+**Jessica Rose:** No, you want it to be like a sticky pad, where they tear off at the top -- no, no, not quite so romantic.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. So did you quit your job?
+
+**Jessica Rose:** It was a contract, so I got to the end of my contract, and then yeah, I got into something that was less stressful... Which isn't fair to the contract. It was a completely reasonable job, and completely reasonable people, but had 60%-70% travel, and the early stage startups, you know...?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah... Just unhealthy for you. Not so much unhealthy in general, like to somebody else who could do the role. Just not the best for you.
+
+**Jessica Rose:** Well, I think developer relations folks talk about there being -- you could do it maybe two years... And at the time I'd been doing it four or five.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** There's actually several people I know that have been in head of something, of dev evangelists, or relations - whatever name you wanna apply to that role; essentially, telling people about products to encourage you to use them through developer means... Whether it's how to use something, or a demonstration, or meetups, or whatever. There's a lot of people I've seen do that job that eventually do for sure burn out.
+
+**Jessica Rose:** Oh yeah, we just drop off the map for a year and a half, two years, go to Thailand, backpack... Yeah, folks do tend to take a chunk of time off.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, it's fun to do, right? You may go into it thinking "It won't be me. I can conquer this job. I can travel the world and not get burnt out. I can put in 15-hour days, seven days a week", or whatever the time constraint is... What's a normal day? Is it like 10-hour days, 15-hour days?
+
+**Jessica Rose:** It really depends. I'm such a ham. I was doing a lot of traveling and speaking. I think I was in maybe 50 countries in two years. I was doing maybe two or three conference talks a week. My husband switched to being a house husband just because I would come home and need somebody to like swap out laundry and run my life admin. I don't necessarily recommend -- I love DevRel, I absolutely recommend doing it; I don't necessarily recommend that level of travel. I absolutely recommend house husbands, though. They're just glorious.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Is that right?
+
+**Jessica Rose:** Yeah. Everyone deserves one.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[laughs\] Well, how do you get one?
+
+**Jessica Rose:** I suppose you marry someone who is more caring than job-focused.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. Interesting. Parting advice - that's always good. What's on the horizon for you? Where are you going? What's next for you? What's some good advice to give back to people? How can we tail this out?
+
+**Jessica Rose:** Oh dear, that's so many question.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You've got options.
+
+**Jessica Rose:** So for me, I'm doing a lot less traveling and speaking, and instead I've been focusing on stuff that's scalable and I can do from my flat... So I run a podcast myself, the Pursuit Podcast...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, okay.
+
+**Jessica Rose:** ...which you've gotta scroll down a bit, because there's also a lot of church podcasts with similar names.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The Pursuit Podcast - yeah, I guess so. So if you're searching for it, you may find a bunch, but if you go to...
+
+**Jessica Rose:** It's the blue one.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What's the website?
+
+**Jessica Rose:** If you go to pursuit.tech, you'll find us there.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Nice, .tech.
+
+**Jessica Rose:** It's a good domain.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It is, pursuit.tech.
+
+**Jessica Rose:** If you wanna fuss at me directly, I'm at jessica.tech. Always very on-brand.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. What is the podcast about?
+
+**Jessica Rose:** So we tend to focus on a different topic each month, and we just talk to folks in that space, and about their experiences and about what kind of advice they could give. So we talked about wearables this past month, and then next month we're gonna be talking -- oh dear, that's like tomorrow, isn't it? In May we'll be talking about different types of funding. We'll be talking to somebody about bootstrapping, we'll be talking to somebody about working with VC's...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[20:20\] Okay.
+
+**Jessica Rose:** Yeah, I'm pretty excited for it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** When you read the summary of it, what's the promise of it?
+
+**Jessica Rose:** Oh, man... I wrote that like two years ago, so I think it's "Your guide to getting the things you wanted..." Oh dear, oh no... Um, it says some stuff.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It says some stuff. Okay, well listen to Jess' podcast and learn some stuff - Pursuit Podcast. Is it pursuit.tech?
+
+**Jessica Rose:** Pursuit.tech, or @pursuitpod on Twitter.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, easy enough. And parting advice...
+
+**Jessica Rose:** Parting advice is absolutely fall in love to saying no. The way I got so burnt out was like "Oh yeah, I'd love to come to your conference. I'd love to help with this project. Of course I'll work over time." And if you learn to say no judiciously earlier, you can make your life a lot easier.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Saying no is the toughest two-letter word in the English language. It's so tough, but I can agree with you that saying no has its fruits, because... I've said no to a lot of stuff, and have seen the rewards of that, so it's definitely got a good thing for it.
+
+**Jessica Rose:** And once you get used to it... Being a little bit burnt out - I have fallen in love with it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Are you familiar with Derek Sivers, by any chance?
+
+**Jessica Rose:** I am not.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Derek Sivers wrote several blog posts... He started CD Baby; he's got a really interesting life. He's a really interesting person, let's just say that... And he has this way of saying... It's either -- when he says, you know, a decision to do something for him is either "Heck yes!", or "No." He's either really excited about it, or he's definitely "No." Because if he's not really excited about it, he doesn't have time. Almost like in your talk, where you don't have enough hacks for something - it's like that for him; it's like "I don't have enough to do this all-in like I do things, so then it's a no."
+
+**Jessica Rose:** That makes quite a bit of sense.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's his way. I kind of like that one.
+
+**Jessica Rose:** I might politely disagree a little bit, because some of the stuff I've found was rewarding is stuff I never thought I should do or that I'd enjoy.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I could kind of agree with that too, because there's been times I've said yes to things I'm like "Ain't gonna work out... It's not gonna be fun." It worked out, and it was fun.
+
+**Jessica Rose:** It was great, yeah. Kind of the night out principle - when you're going for a night out with your friends, the nights where you're like "Yeah, this is gonna be great!" are often duds. And the times where you're like "Oh, I'm not sure I wanna go out..."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Best time of your life.
+
+**Jessica Rose:** Best time of your life.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I could agree with that.
+
+**Break:** \[22:52\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Henry, you're in the middle of an experiment which I think to some might seem risky, but you've got it kind of fleshed out. You've been down this road, you've been doing open source for a while; you've even said you've accidentally become a maintainer at one point, I believe, either on the React Podcast, or Request For Commits -- somewhere I've heard it, but I'm not really sure where. Where is this leading you to? You're in open source full-time now, but solo. A company is not paying you to do it, you're doing it yourself.
+
+**Henry Zhu:** Right. The reason why I left - part of it was that I don't think a company would pay me to do things I want to explore and experiment with. Mostly they're gonna pay you to work on features, or just the things that they need for their business. If you talk about "How do we build community or bring new contributors?" - they want that, but they're not gonna pay you specifically to do that. Or like "What does it mean to do mentorship?" when it's like an intern, but they wanna hire them to work on other things, not open source. All these companies don't wanna take ownership of open source (or Babel, for me) and it's like "Where can I actually do that?", and I feel the only way to do that is doing it on my own then.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It makes sense... A business has to have some sort of value from the exchange. At some point, you'll be your own business, so you may have to have similar considerations of how you spend your time - is it valuable? Does it help me? Or you may actually have to make a choice of being able to earn money or serve open source - what do you think about that?
+
+**Henry Zhu:** Right, because the things I wanna do aren't things that people would normally pay for... So it's like, either I have to make money doing freelance, which I don't wanna do, or get enough money from doing maybe consulting, or support contracts, or workshops for Babel, such that I can do the other work.
+
+This is why I made the Patreon, because then people can support me for whatever I'm doing. They wanna support the person, rather than the project. But I found out for most companies they only wanna support the project, because it's just better for them from a business point of view, or just talking about it to their boss; they don't wanna support a person.
+
+But individuals would rather support a person, because they understand who you are, and you're literally supporting their livelihood. I think that's more like something they wanna contribute to, rather than a project, where it's like - it could be a lot of people, you don't know how you're spending it (What are they doing with this money?).
+
+Learning to figure out how to spend the money for a project is really difficult. "What does that conversation look like?" and stuff.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So let's not assume that the listening audience is familiar with your story. Give me a quick version of not so much your getting started, but this transition - you worked at Behance, you decided to make the shift... Give us that, and we'll go further from there.
+
+**Henry Zhu:** Yeah, so first I got my job at Behance because of open source. I got involved in their project, and then they emailed me "Hey, do you wanna move to New York and on this team?" So I was already wanting to do open source more, so I was like "If they found me through it, that means they care about it." So I was kind of doing it, but I was working on the product team, because at Behance they're mostly focused on that... So it didn't really make sense for them to have someone working on it, like just for open source.
+
+But halfway -- not halfway through it... Like a year later, I'm working on Babel in my free time; we use it at work, so why aren't we -- like, we shouldn't wait for me to work on it if we need something... So like "Well, why don't you let me work on it at work then?"
+
+I think I asked for full-time and they gave me half, which was already amazing... So I was like, "That's cool. Okay, I'm good" and I kind of just started working on that. But the problem was that that's always gonna be hard, like "What does it mean to do 50%? Is it like half of my sprints are Babel and the other half is real work?"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[27:54\] But how did that work out actually practically? Did it work out? Were you still kind of saying "My responsibility is just like -- oh, now half of it really is this, but it's not."
+
+**Henry Zhu:** Yeah... I think it's kind of like that. It was an experiment for them too, because they'd never done that with other people.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I mean, kudos to them too for trying. Obviously, there's no hard feelings, but it's just like... That's risky for a business that's like brand new for them, even.
+
+**Henry Zhu:** I think it's just that a lot of people there have previous experience and culture in open source, in other projects like jQuery and other projects, so they understand what that's like... They see where my passions are and they wanna support that, because I'm still working on other things, and then the things I'm doing only help us, too. So they were able to justify it.
+
+It's just that in the end I would have my own guilt of not feeling good about doing open source even though it is my job, and... We have deadlines, so it's like, I would always tend to -- I wanted to do open source, but I'd be doing my other work. It's just like a weird situation, and... You know, everyone was really supportive, it's just like mentally I don't know if I could take doing it and then doing this other thing. So in the end I was like, I think I need to just figure out "Do I actually want to do this?"
+
+I had lots of conversations with my boss about what is it that I actually want; do I just say I wanna do open source because it sounds like a good idea full-time? The reality is a lot of people don't wanna do it full-time. It should be just like something that's fine, and you should have to worry about it your whole day, every day, and dealing with community and all these other things which are not just purely coding. But then I realized that's the part that I like; I like working on those non-technical parts.
+
+Anyway... On the board, when I said I wanted to leave, when I made the decision, they knew I was sure. They knew I wasn't just making it up, or something. My boss was like, "If anyone can do it, I think you can do it."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Were you concerned in those moments? I mean, I can just imagine me - I'm not you, obviously... I would be nervous. I would be like "Gosh, what are they gonna think? Is the world gonna think I'm an idiot for doing this? Is this the wrong move?" Take us through some of the morning of like, "I know today I'm gonna give my resignation..." How is it gonna go?
+
+**Henry Zhu:** I don't think I ever thought "People think it's gonna be dumb or bad." I actually never thought that. It was just more like "What's gonna happen to me? Am I just seeking after something and taking the risky road, instead of just having a safe, comfortable job and working on it half-time? Maybe I should be okay with just working on it half-time, which is already better than a lot of people." But I guess in the end I felt so convicted to wanna do it that much that I decided that was the right thing to do, and when I went there I felt pretty confident in going in and doing it.
+
+In the end, I didn't really have any issues, when I got to that point. But before, there was a lot of just not even wanting to think about it in the first place, because you're like "That's such a dream" or "That's such an impossible thing", that I never just thought about it seriously. So trying to do that, thinking about the taxes and insurance and all that... You know, just trying to make it seem more realistic; not in terms of like it's easy or hard, just that "Those are things I'm gonna need to think about if I'm gonna do this."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Maybe I'm just missing it, but what is a day like in your life? Not so much Henry's life, like "Get up, brush your teeth" kind of thing, but what is being in open source to you? You said you're excited about community, the things that they weren't willing to pay for, or the intangibles that are not so much code level, human level... What's that for you?
+
+**Henry Zhu:** Yeah, that's something that -- I kind of talked about this in my talk; it's something I always wanted to do, but I never really did it. I would kind of half do it. It's like, you have a picture in your mind of what a maintainer should be, and usually it's about code. So even if I wanted to do something else, I knew like "Oh, I have like this box" where it's like "This is what a maintainer should be", so I just focused on code.
+
+\[32:11\] But now it's like, okay, I don't really know what it looks like, but I want to figure out those things, so that means like -- right now I'm just focusing on getting funding and that kind of thing, but I do wanna spend my time like "Okay, should we make a Babel meetup, where instead of giving talks, it's just a meetup where we come... I'm there, and I'll teach you about how to contribute to open source or get involved in our project", instead of waiting for people to randomly show up in our GitHub, making a PR or an issue. Obviously, everyone is very intimidated, so if I'm there, then people will feel at least willing to show up and see what it's about.
+
+Maybe we make a podcast, maybe we do livestreaming, or we start doing more like video chat instead of just talking on Slack or Twitter... Like, just things that make it so that I seem more accessible, and human, instead of just like some person... And also, so that people know that there's a few people working on this, not just a huge company, a huge team, or something like that; it's like a few volunteers, but yet you're using it... And then people feel like "Oh, I'm not good enough", but it's like, I got started in the same way, not knowing anything, accidentally, and I'm here, and I wanna help other people get to that, if they want to.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So in a lot of ways you're the on-ramps to Babel/future open source work...
+
+**Henry Zhu:** Yeah, I think so.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And that on-ramp is defined by either face-to-face meetup workshops, intro to open source, first contribution to Babel or XYZ project, or "Here's how you use GitHub", or you name it.
+
+**Henry Zhu:** It's hard, because then if you're doing that one on one, or that kind of thing, it doesn't really scale... But I think maybe we get caught up in this idea of just like wanting to tell everyone about open source, and "Everyone should do it, everyone should be a maintainer", but I don't think it means that -- people can, it's just that I don't know if they know what they're getting into... \[laughter\] So we wanna make sure that they -- it's not like a prepare, it's just like...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** In a lot of cases, your warning signs...
+
+**Henry Zhu:** Yeah...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Not in a bad way, but you have to be committed. It's not that the road is bad or hard, it's just a matter of like, you've gotta be committed to do that kind of job.
+
+**Henry Zhu:** Yeah, and I think it's also fine if people wanna do those kinds of -- I guess we call them "drive-by pr's", or whatever.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Drive-by contributors, yeah.
+
+**Henry Zhu:** Yeah, maybe you don't have time and you can't do it at work, or you have kids, you have family - all these other priorities, but you still might wanna do open source, and there should be a way for you to contribute, like maybe once a month or whatever, and that's fine... It's just that, if you go about it in a certain way, you might find that you're taking on too much and you don't realize... You're like "Wow, why did I suddenly make my own project and millions of people are using it?"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** How do you think Babel will benefit from now you being essentially -- is anybody else full-time on Babel? Is there a full-time on Babel at all for the project?
+
+**Henry Zhu:** No, the other main contributor, Logan - he isn't full-time, but he left his job a while ago and he's my other partner in doing all this... And everyone else is a volunteer. So we don't have any full-time people.
+
+I mean, it's weird - I say full-time, but it's full-time for the project, but it's not full-time for the code. Right now, I'm basically not coding anything. I'm just trying to raise awareness, or get funding, which are like sales, I guess... And all these other things.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Business development.
+
+**Henry Zhu:** Yeah, business development; that's still part of it, it's just not what people normally think. And I'm mostly just doing like reviewing, and very meta level things, that I hope are like long-term things that we would never consider before. Before, when you're at work and you have limited time, you're always thinking about taking out fires, like these short-term things; but if you're full-time, then why aren't we doing these longer-term goals, like getting contributors, investing in people, so that maybe some of them will be committed, instead of just like asking a hundred people to make a good first PR.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[36:10\] So you've decided to go with the Patreon route, and I'm not trying to get in the politics of the different routes you could go to seek funding, so I'm not asking you to share the advantages of this platform versus another, but what is it about -- not so much Patreon, but how are you incentivizing people and/or corporations or companies to support you? Who is the customer that you're seeking? If you're doing business development, you're seeking out "Who can fund you? Who can believe in this mission? Who can help sustain you to make it happen?" Who is that person and/or company?
+
+**Henry Zhu:** I should probably have a better, specific group of people, but there's a lot of different people that it could be. First, I'll say that we have an Open Collective which is another crowdfunding site that's for the project itself, so I can take the money from there, which is good, because there's not enough from Patreon right now.
+
+The reason why I picked Patreon is because it's a way for certain people to be able to invest in a person, rather than in a project. I think there's gonna be people that would just rather donate to a person, other people would rather donate to a company, maybe companies would rather donate to the Open Collective for Babel itself.
+
+In terms of incentives, I don't really wanna go out of my way to make incentives, and I think that's true for anyone that does Patreon, because it becomes a job in itself, of like getting people to--
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, it's like the Kickstarter where you say "I'll just give you a bunch of free stuff, just give me the thing. I don't want the swag, I just want the thing."
+
+**Henry Zhu:** Yeah, and then you're like, am I gonna ship people stickers? That's like a lot of work that you have to do. So all of my incentives -- I'm kind of trying to make it funny, actually... I have one incentive that's like $11/month, and it's like the ping-pong tier, because at ping-pong you play to 11, so it's like "If you donate to this, I'll play you in ping-pong." It doesn't mean I'm not gonna play ping-pong with you, it's just like -- that's like a reason for you to pick that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** A bonus, yeah.
+
+**Henry Zhu:** I did one for video games, like Mario Kart. I had a 50 CC tier... So I'm just trying to get creative... You don't really get anything per se; it's just like, if you wanna donate that much, you can. And I did one for like board games. Just the things that I'm interested in, and maybe they're interested in that, too. So those are just individual people, and I guess it's gonna be difficult to get that, because it's more of an awareness thing.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+
+**Henry Zhu:** I feel like once people know, they might decide to do it if they know me... But for the higher tiers, I might have like $100, $500 or $1,000/month, and that goes to the -- basically, emulating what we did in Open Collective, where it's more like, we'll put your logo on our website... It's more like an advertising thing. That is kind of -- it's not risky, it's just that I'm gonna have to keep pitching, because once someone's like "Oh, we're not getting enough out of this logo for $1,000, we don't need you anymore, and then we're not gonna donate."
+
+So what happened was that a few days ago I had like $3,000/month, and then suddenly two people dropped out, they both were giving $1,000 for this next month, so now I'm down to only like $1,000. That's because these two companies - they're probably not that big, they're not like Google; it's just like two people, or something.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The goodwill, or charity almost... In a way.
+
+**Henry Zhu:** Yeah, and maybe they wanna support me for a month, or they have their own money issues... So it's like, I don't expect them to do that. But it does suck when you're living off of this number, where like one day it's all gone, and then you're like "Okay, now I've gotta think about that."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow... Yeah, the ups and downs of crowd-- I don't wanna say crowdfunding, but I couldn't think of any other way to say it... Like, donation-based living, I don't know. You have that number, you look at your own Patreon, you see what's coming in or what you think is gonna come in, or what's expected, and you probably plan life around that.
+
+It should also be said that you live in New York City, right? It's not exactly cheap to live there. I'm sure you've got fairly -- even if you trimmed your expenses, you'd be like... What size is your apartment now? I don't wanna say a smaller apartment, because maybe you're in the smallest one already, I don't know.
+
+**Henry Zhu:** \[40:09\] Yeah, it's not enough to cover the rent, and then I have to pay for insurance, too. So even the base of that is already very high... But the good thing is that our Open Collective has a good amount of money there now, so I can at least use that. Then the other plan is to reach out to companies, which I've done - and hopefully those go through soon - and it's like, okay, one idea is this idea of a support contract, which is something that Webpack is doing, where you pay a certain amount, say it's like $1,000/month, and we'll give you two hours of time to help you with whatever.
+
+Then that means I can work a lot less hours and you can still get paid. If you can convince them to do that, that would be really good. And you only have to do that for like 10 companies, but the problem is that now there's like a huge potential, but right now there's none, so it's like... Where is that?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So after hearing that, I would say maybe you could treat the human side of this equation for you, that these companies are also humans, right? Companies aren't just companies, there's humans behind that; users of Babel, potentially even contributors of Babel, right? Potentially, who knows? And that maybe this is a growth hack that you're using to 1) keep in touch with your constituents, and also potentially get some (for a lack of better terms) sales.
+
+**Henry Zhu:** Yeah, I think it's definitely a good way in... And it doesn't have to be two hours; it could be more, and they could just pay more... I have a lot of other ideas around "What if they wanna be contributors? Well, you can pay me to help you get into open source", although I'll probably still have the meetup for free... But then for companies, it's like, well, we can charge them.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** "Come to a workshop - how to do open source."
+
+**Henry Zhu:** Doing a workshop, yeah, definitely. Before, I was like "What kind of workshop would I do?" and I realized there's a few that I could do. One would be teaching people about JavaScript itself. I think it's pretty easy to market "The maintainer of Babel teaches you JavaScript." Then there is how to get involved in open source and maintaining open source, if someone wants to do that for their own open source... And then the last thing is "How do you contribute to Babel itself", and then talking about that.
+
+Some companies would be interested... I mean, I think most of would just be like "Oh, can you give a talk at our company?"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Well, you just put it into numbers for me, so that's why I maybe think about that, which is like, if you can say "Well, I need (for a lack of better terms) to have ten companies committed to doing two hours, because it equates to this number", because then you can start to determine it's gonna be there and start to live like it's gonna be there, and have some certainty that you don't have now. Well, how do you reverse that? Have some relationships.
+
+What I've learned from our business, and you probably know this already, but the biggest part that makes us successful is that we care deeply about not just our listeners, but also our sponsors, which we really call them partners, but the industry accepted term is sponsor. We really call them partners - people who work with us, that sponsor our content, are our partners. We work with them, we form a great relationship, and it's only beneficial if we add value to them. Sponsoring our podcast isn't charity; they get value, and it's up to us to help them understand how they get value, and help them TO get value, not just read an ad.
+
+So in your case, maybe it's the relationship side of the equation... Invest a little in those people, to get them to invest in you a little. That's just one way, though; that's just one of the things I'm thinking about.
+
+That's interesting though, man... The uncertainty... Do you sleep well? I mean, given -- I'm not saying you're in a bad situation, because you're not, but you know, there's some uncertainty... Do you fret, do you get upset? How's life for you right now?
+
+**Henry Zhu:** \[44:01\] It's interesting... I guess, oddly, I'm not too worried. In the end, I do have -- the backup is just like "Get another job", and it's fine. That's totally--
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's an experiment.
+
+**Henry Zhu:** Yeah, and I'm willing to take it as far as I can, and I don't really wanna think of that as an option at all, really.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Do you have what they call runway? Are you like a mini Henry Zhu startup and you've got runway?
+
+**Henry Zhu:** I have some savings, so I think I'm good, but unfortunately there's not that much rest in terms of like thinking about what's coming up, and yeah, there's definitely uncertainty... I don't know, I guess I'm very autistic.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** This is your choice, though. You chose to do this, so clearly you can't be that upset about your circumstances, because you chose the circumstances.
+
+**Henry Zhu:** Right. Someone to enforce me to do this... People would probably tell me not to, and I have to go out of my way to be like, "Okay, I think I truly believe this is a thing", and maybe writing the blog post or giving this talk helps me to form my thoughts better, to think "Okay, this is something I wanna pursue, and a goal that I want not just for me, but for other people, too."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, other people, too. So are you in a position yet to advocate others to follow in your footsteps? Are you still in an experimental stage, only to the point where you're like "Let me try this out for a bit and then I'll let you know?" I know that Feross Aboukhadijeh is also doing it... There's several others. We had a small list of people we actually wanna do a panel show with - you were one of them - around this topic of going full-time crowdfunded open source maintainer perspective...
+
+**Henry Zhu:** No, I actually don't think people should do it. For me, I spent a whole year thinking about whether this should be a thing or not... And I didn't wanna go rash, and just like "I quit my job! I don't wanna do this anymore!" and just do my thing. I wanna really know that this is what I want, before I do it. But I didn't figure it all out before making decisions, because I felt like then it would take forever.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You had to at some point take a leap.
+
+**Henry Zhu:** Yeah, and that's what I did. And I don't think my goal with doing it is to convince everyone else to quit their job and do full-time open source. That's definitely there, but I just don't see that as that viable at the moment. I would rather help people to be more aware of open source in general, and how we can support people that are doing open source, whether they're full-time or not... And probably the most important thing is "How do we get companies to either sponsor projects they use, or allow their employees to work on open source at work?"
+
+That's probably the best way, because they're usually unwilling to give money, but they're willing to let their employees work on the things that they want if they're going to ask for it. But the problem is that a lot of employees don't, and there's a lot of reasons, whether it's being intimidated, or not knowing what to contribute to, or not knowing how to say it... But I feel like there's a lot of people that would want to do that, especially if they're busy outside of work. Not everyone has the privilege or even wants to work on code. You're coding all day, and then you go home - are you gonna code again? It makes sense, you wouldn't wanna do it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You may have answered some of this there, but... I'm not gonna ask you for the five-year plan, but I'm gonna ask you for some -- project for me a time range... This is how I kind of work - "What is success?" A year down the road, a year-and-a-half down the road? What does success look like to you? Like, you've done this, it's successful, you can advocate others to try it, given some circumstances, for example... Maybe have put in some time, have relationship with the community; not just jump ship, of course, but give me maybe what do you think success is to you a year, a year-and-a-half down the road? Or just whatever timeframe makes sense for you.
+
+**Henry Zhu:** Well, one measure of success that I might think of is the idea that I could just go away, leave the project, and everything is good. So I could leave it now, and -- I kind of talked about this in the talk... You have this sense of like pride, where like "If I leave, everything's gonna go bad, and no one's gonna take it up", but that's not the case. I'm not that irreplaceable.
+
+\[48:10\] But obviously, I still feel like I'm needed (or whatever that means), and it's like "When do we get to a point where we have enough contributors?" I don't wanna say the boss factor... My boss - he said this is the lottery factor; that's like a better way of putting it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, I haven't heard of this one.
+
+**Henry Zhu:** Yeah, it's really cool. It's like "Oh, those people won the lottery, now they're not gonna work on this anymore, because they can do whatever they want."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. So they didn't die, they just hit it big.
+
+**Henry Zhu:** Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay.
+
+**Henry Zhu:** So how do we increase that, so that people can leave-- actually, it doesn't have to be I can leave the project entirely, it's just more like, we all feel comfortable, everyone feels comfortable to just take a break... Not just because mentally they were able to overcome their issues with that, but that everyone feels good that like "Oh, there's a lot of people working on this, and everything seems to be going well", that kind of state. I don't know what that really looks like...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So if I understand you correctly, it sounds like you're projecting that success is Babel being in a state where you can leave without any concerns of it imploding, for lack of better terms.
+
+**Henry Zhu:** Yeah, that's one way to say it. And when I say that, it doesn't mean I don't wanna work on it anymore. I still really wanna work on it. I just think it's a good attitude to have when we're doing this kind of thing, and I think that is a good level of success, because it's saying that I don't have to be around, and that it still moves on. Then you won't have the anxiety about whatever the issues are, and maybe you can work on other open source...
+
+I think for me I really like working on Babel, but I think another thing I like is just thinking about open source in general. It doesn't have to be tied to this project. I just happen to really appreciate what this project does, because it's unique.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's interesting. I guess my perspective so far has been you full-time on open source means Babel involvement; it sounds like that's not exactly... Not that you have plans, but just that your mind is open to one day Babel not needing you, that you may have skills and abilities to be put elsewhere, whether that's another project, or just a new thing, or whatever.
+
+**Henry Zhu:** I mean, for any open source project -- it's gonna go away eventually. In Babel's case that's not really true in the same way as most, because the funny thing is that most projects, maybe people just stop using it, but with Babel the whole point is that you're implementing syntax that goes with JavaScript. So as long as people still use JavaScript and we have new syntax, then there's always gonna be a need for Babel for the people that want to use it. So in that sense, it's always gonna be there. But people get bored, or whatever -- I don't think I'm gonna get bored with it, but the reason why I wanna look into the other things is just... It will help me think about open source differently, and maybe it's just -- I don't wanna leave the project, it's just... I would maybe look into how other people are doing things or getting involved, and that would help me do it better in what I'm doing.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I always get this guilt-free kind of perspective when I think about it like bands. Sometimes a band might tour with another band, or this band, or the lead singer might go to this band and do a cross-over. It's never like they're leaving their band - unless they actually do leave their band, but it gives you the freedom to sort of cross-pollinate. I think there's a lot of under-appreciated opportunities in cross-pollination.
+
+**Henry Zhu:** Yeah, and I think at least I should be trying to look -- if I have the time, then I can look into what are the projects that are related to Babel. It doesn't even have to be a different language, or something crazy like that... It's just like "Oh, Webpack is used with Babel, so maybe I should learn more about how they do things and we can work together" or Vue and React... I think that's a good way to kind of like naturally look into other projects.
+
+I had this idea in my mind of "What does it look like to be a JavaScript ecosystem maintainer?" So not just like one project, but a lot of what that is -- I mean, that seems like really burdensome, but you know, I think that would help coordinate things, or at least talk to people, instead of just like they're all in their little isolated bubble, or something.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[52:05\] Yeah. Anything I didn't ask you that you wanna share, that I just missed?
+
+**Henry Zhu:** I don't know, I guess my talk today was just about how we can think differently about open source... Not just like getting things for free, but actually helping and serving people. And I think the values that are there - maybe we don't really emphasize much, and we kind of get influenced by how non-open source works... So whether it's like adding transactions, or thinking about things in a very robotic way, when open source has its own views on things. We kind of just take those things and we copy them, because that's just the way we do things, and that's probably why we keep seeing all this behavior.
+
+We can change the medium in which we do open source such that it is building up people, it is bringing community, and those kinds of things. I think we should be thinking about that more. I don't really have an answer, and it's gonna be really hard, because this is all non-technical, versus the code itself... But yeah, I like to think, what are the habits or things that we can create such that we can reinforce the ideas that we want? In our minds are the ones we want, but in reality we don't act those out.
+
+**Break:** \[53:39\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Sitting down, talking to Simon Willison here, getting in the groove, talking about data. You are so - more than everybody I've ever met - excited about data, bro. Earlier I didn't tell you this because I was just enjoying the moment, but you got really excited about some data.
+
+**Simon Willison:** Oh, yeah. So back in 2009-2010 I was working for The Guardian newspaper in London; basically, I was hanging out with journalists, helping solve data problems... So it was in the world of data journalism.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The Guardian.
+
+**Simon Willison:** At The Guardian, yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** This is like the Mecca of like -- you're from the U.K., right?
+
+**Simon Willison:** Yeah. It's a very, very high-quality U.K. newspaper.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. So if you're working for a newspaper there, or anything journalistic, The Guardian is a good name to have on your resume.
+
+**Simon Willison:** Yeah, that's definitely true.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay.
+
+**Simon Willison:** And when I joined The Guardian, they had this fascinating onboarding process where they basically set you up on coffee dates with people from all sorts of different departments around the newspaper. So you have coffee with the sub-editor, then you have coffee with somebody who's involved in the print presses, and so on and so forth. And those people will talk to you and they'll introduce you to other people.
+
+After a few of these meetings, a bunch of people said "You know, you really need to talk to this guy Simon Rogers, one of the journalists", because Simon Rogers was the journalist at The Guardian responsible for the infographics, where you publish a graph in the newspaper, and somebody has to phone up a bunch of government agencies and gather the data. He'd been doing this for years and was really good at it. He could get data on anything, and all of this data -- I asked him where it was, and he said "Oh, I've got it in Excel spreadsheets on the computer under my desk." And I'm like "This is gold!"
+
+\[56:11\] So we got together, we started pulling it and we ended up thinking, okay, the easiest thing we can do is start a blog - we'll start The Guardian Data Blog and we'll publish these things as Google spreadsheets. We did this, and The Guardian still has a data blog today where they're publishing data behind the stories.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow.
+
+**Simon Willison:** That was really exciting, except Google Spreadsheets always felt like a bit of a shortcut to me... I mean, it worked, and all credit to it, that was fine, but I wanted to do something better. So last year I was still thinking about this problem. I've moved on from journalism and had all sorts of other adventures since then, and I realized that the combination of SQLite as a database format and ZEIT Now as a immutable hosting platform was actually a really interesting opportunity for publishing data. Because if you can take any data at all, you can always wrap it up to a relational database (they're really good at that). If you wrap it up into a SQLite database file and then publish it, you can build APIs on the top, you can build an interface on the top, you can start sharing data that way.
+
+So essentially, I've been building the software that I wish I'd had back in 2010 when I was working at The Guardian.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Really good for databases that don't change.
+
+**Simon Willison:** Exactly.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Meaning like, this is data that's never gonna change. It's in stone, it's done.
+
+**Simon Willison:** It's facts about the world. Some of the examples I showed in the talk today, one of my all-time favorite datasets is the list of trees in San Francisco. It's maintained by the Department of Public Works; they publish it through their open data portal. It's basically a .csv file with 119,000 trees, and each tree - it's got the species, and the location, and often when it was planted, and who looks after it... And it's just set there - this gorgeous data.
+
+So I took that, I turned it into a SQLite database, and I've published that as an API, and then started building things on top of it. I've got a website sf-trees.com, which is a search engine for trees. So you type "cherry" and click a button, and it'll show you all of the cherry trees in San Francisco. It turns out that's the website I always wanted to build, and I just never knew until the data was in front of me.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** A question about the data, I guess, is that if the data doesn't so much change from the past, but there's new data, how do you deal with new data?
+
+**Simon Willison:** So when you're deploying with static hosting like ZEIT Now, you just deploy a new copy. The tree data is actually updated pretty frequently, so every now and then I'll pull in a new copy of the .csv file, I'll turn it into a SQLite database...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Publish a new diff, basically.
+
+**Simon Willison:** I'll just overwrite the old thing with the new thing, and it works. I think it's about 80 MB when you deploy it, which is small enough that it doesn't really matter, and you can just keep on shipping new versions.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So for the uninitiated out there, who are not very familiar with ZEIT Now, you mentioned it was immutable, so that means that you can't write back to a database. So the databases are immutable.
+
+**Simon Willison:** Right. ZEIT Now is hosting where everything is fire and forget. You bundle up your code and other assets, it turns it into a Docker container, you fire it up to them, they deploy it and they give it a URL which will never change... So it will always live in that URL, and in ten years' time if somebody hits that URL, they'll spin it up and they'll start serving requests like that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think Guillermo said it was called immutable deploys - is that right?
+
+**Simon Willison:** Immutable deploys, exactly. And then you can also set an alias. So you can say "You know what - okay, that URL is gonna stay the same, but I'm gonna point sf-trees.com at whatever the current version is."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+
+**Simon Willison:** So you get atomic deploys, as well. You deploy a new version, you test it, and then you switch the alias over once you're certain that it's gonna work. And it's a really nice way of working. The downside is doesn't give you a regular database that you can post-write to. You can get those, but you have to get those from another vendor, like Compose.io or Heroku Postgres, or something like that. But if your data doesn't change, if it's, say, a list of 190,000 trees in San Francisco, you can package that up in a SQLite database and deploy it alongside the rest of your code, just as part of that regular deploy process. And that, it turns out, is a really cunning trick for doing all sorts of exciting things with semi-static data.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:00:06.24\] The demo you showed earlier well before your talk, but the demo you did was around, was fun, possums, no that was different.
+
+**Simon Willison:** That was a slightly different project, yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, slightly different project, but you're trying to essentially take datasets, deploy now, and be able to perform searches on those.
+
+**Simon Willison:** Exactly.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And in this case you wanted to auto-deploy a new site based on search parameters, essentially.
+
+**Simon Willison:** I've built a few different tools. They're all open source, they're available on GitHub... The first one is this script called csvs-to-sqlite, which is just a command line tool that takes .csv files and turns them into a SQLite database. That's all it does, it's like a one-shot pony. It can do a few extra things - you can tell it "extract this column out into a separate table", you can tell it to make things indexable using SQLite's full-text search, but essentially you run a command, and a .csv goes in one end and a .db file comes out the other.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+
+**Simon Willison:** The bigger tool is this tool I've built called Datasette. Datasette is a couple of things. Firstly, it's a little web server that given one or more SQL databases gives you an HTML user interface for browsing that data, so you can click on it and reorder by columns, and filter it, and so forth. And it also gives you a JSON API. So anything that you can see on screen, you can get back as JSON. This means that you can take a CSV file, turn it into a database file, and then turn that database into a JSON API that you can run queries against from JavaScript.
+
+The final piece of this is the Datasette Publish command, which as a command line tool, it will take that SQLite database, publish it on the internet with ZEIT, add the dataset application itself, and essentially in one go wrap the whole thing up and turn it into data that you can access as a URL, with a JSON API and an HTML interface.
+
+Then on top of that, I built another tool called Datasette Publish, which is a web app that does all of this for you, so you don't have to install any software on your computer at all. You go to publish.datasette.com, you upload some .csv files, click a button and it will deploy to your own ZEIT account that combined databases, all of the code, and just get things up and running.
+So the idea is that if you're somebody who isn't comfortable installing Python command line tools, you can still use this suite to take your data and turn it into something that's browsable and explorable.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You mentioned in your talk that you're really passionate... I think either it was in the past, or you're still currently passionate about this -- but data journalism. You mentioned The Guardian as your past - this is something where journalists are not typically programmers, they're not typically familiar with these tools.
+
+**Simon Willison:** It turns out some of them are...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** They have to be.
+
+**Simon Willison:** So data journalism is a very specific sort of subset of journalism where you've got journalists who are all about Python and R and Jupyter and Rail. They're very familiar with this stuff, and they have conferences where they all get together and share tips. These are my people; I'm a huge fan of what they're doing, and that intersection of skills I think is really interesting. But most newspapers can't afford to hire people who have that software engineering background. The really big papers - The New York Times, The Washington Post, they're all doing this stuff... But if you're a little local newspaper, the chances that you can hire somebody with software engineering and journalism skills is pretty slim.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What does it mean then, since you're building this kind of tools...? I mean, one, you're having fun, you're here at ZEIT day, you're showing off some cool tools that you've built, obviously showcasing the performance and abilities of ZEIT - or ZEIT Now, as a matter of fact... When you start to look at how this applies, some of the tooling you're building applies to data journalists, or just people who are curious about data... It seems like you're taking insights from data; what are you trying to build for them with what you're doing?
+
+**Simon Willison:** So the starting point, I think, is that .csv is actually a pretty awful format for sharing data.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It is...
+
+**Simon Willison:** But it's what everyone uses, because...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's a standard.
+
+**Simon Willison:** Well, a semi-standard. Once you get into quoting rules
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's ubiquitous, let's say that.
+
+**Simon Willison:** It is ubiquitous. Excel can produce it and consume it, and so forth... So that's fine, but it's not the most useful format, and actually, when you look at .csv files, where they really fall apart is when you are dealing with something a bit more relational. You get .csv files where a bunch of the columns are duplicated hundreds of times, because they didn't have the ability to bundle it with a second .csv file that's just got one set of the data in.
+
+\[01:04:17.03\] SQLite databases, I think, are the perfect format for this kind of stuff. SQLite itself is crazy stable. A SQLite database from ten years ago can still be read today. It's ubiquitous, it's one of the best-tested pieces of software I've ever seen, and it's in everything; my mobile phone runs SQLite, my watch it turns out has a SQLite database in it that tracks my step counts, which I can't get access to because I have to jailbreak my phone in order to get the database out of my watch, which is very frustrating.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Come on, now...
+
+**Simon Willison:** But you know, it's everywhere, and so if I can help show people that if you're gonna share data, sharing it as a SQLite database is actually a much more powerful and efficient way of doing it than just as regular .csv files, that's fantastic, especially if I can provide a toolkit that will take that database and spit .csv back out of it, so you're not losing anything by using SQLite; you're gaining stuff and you still get that .csv export as well.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So you've got .csv to SQLite... What about the other way around?
+
+**Simon Willison:** Not yet. That's very high on my to-do list, that feature.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. Prominent in open source, you're doing some cool stuff there... So the repo you mentioned, that is open source right?
+
+**Simon Willison:** Yes. The open source tools - csvs-to-sqlite is open source, Datasette is open source; they're both under the Apache 2 license.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Explain Datasette real quick, the spelling at least, so people don't go to...
+
+**Simon Willison:** It's spelled like the Commodore 64 tape drive, Datasette (like a cassette, but for data).
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Datasette, cassette... So think about that when you go there. I will have some show notes, so don't worry about that... Simon, what is it that gets you so excited about this data? Maybe a better a question might be what is it about datasets like this that gets you excited?
+
+**Simon Willison:** The San Francisco trees is probably my favorite dataset. One of the other ones I really like is one from the USPS, it's a dataset of polar bear ear tags in Alaska. In 2009-2011 they stuck GPS trackers in a bunch of polar bears and had them wander around Alaska, and they got back latitudes and longitudes and battery levels and temperatures and all of this stuff, and they published it online to .csv files.
+
+So I grabbed that .csv file with 40,000 known locations of polar bears, I converted it in Datasette, and then I used it as the demo for the first one of my Datasette visualization plugins... So I've been building up this plugin infrastructure so we can add additional features, and the first feature I built was one which looks for latitudes and longitudes and then sticks them on a giant map with clustered markers so you can map the whole lot at once.
+
+And when you put 40,000 polar bear ear tags on the map - and we'll definitely have a link to this in the show notes - one thing that's interesting that shows up is that most of the polar bears in Alaska, about 200 of those trackings, come from Seattle... And that was an interesting mystery; I'm wondering what these polar bears were doing in Seattle, so I zoomed right in on the map where these earmarks were, correlated it to Google Maps, and realized that there's a company called Wildlife Computers in an office park right there who sell ear tags for scientists to track polar bears... So evidently, they'd been testing the ear tags at the home office, and that data ended up in the data that was published as part of this survey.
+
+I don't know if the scientists who published the data would even notice, because they might not have that same visualization that shows them where the clusters are.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So they could be counting fake data.
+
+**Simon Willison:** Possibly. Who knows...? I need to figure out how to get in touch with them and see if they'd spotted this.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So here's something I thought about while you were sharing that story - if you reverse the scenario... Like, as a data person, you're concerned about analyzing polar bears, for example; if you had started out with your desire to have the data, they gave away, or just had available massive amounts of data that was so valuable to you - that was just not really valuable to them?
+
+**Simon Willison:** \[01:08:06.14\] Well, a wonderful thing about the U.S. government is that they release an awful lot of stuff. I think the default within government is often to release the data...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right, it's open.
+
+**Simon Willison:** ...and it's wonderful.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's part of the Open Gov initiative.
+
+**Simon Willison:** It's that, but also -- so I have an interest in zeppelins and airships, and it turns out that the U.S. Navy had some really cool zeppelins in the 1930's, and the photographs of those are all freely available, because every photograph taken by somebody in the Navy is copyrighted in a way that it can just be released by the government. So if you want photographs of awesome airships in the 1930's, the U.S. Navy photo archive has all of this stuff for free.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I don't think about data quite like you do, but it sounds like there is just a plethora of opportunity. Where do you see -- open datasets, immutable data now... What have you. Some things you've done here... Where can you see interesting projects that are exciting to you, or things that could be done - not so much tomorrow or next year, but over half a decade, a decade? Where do you see some of these ideas you're shaping, going to utilize public data in useful ways to analyze society and give back answers to make a better future?
+
+**Simon Willison:** So I feel like we've spent a lot of time as a industry dreaming of the semantic web, trying to say "Okay, if we can get all of the data in one standardized format, then we could build wonderful things with it." We've been trying that for ten years, and it hasn't really worked that well so far, but I think that's because that's sort of a boil the ocean approach - trying to come up with the perfect standard for data, and then to get everyone to do that... What actually does work is publish the data in a format that people can use, and then watch people integrate with that and say "Okay, well I'm gonna do a custom query against this, something custom against this, and then combine those together and build something myself." So one of the things I wanted to do with Datasette is not so much establish a standard, but just make it as easy as possible to put data out there in a way that people can automatically query it, they can pull from a JSON API, and then watch what people do with it once it becomes available to them, even if they have to do a little bit of work to clean it up and reformat it for their purposes.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm just amazed that you can find such use with such a simple .csv, for example... So much data out there available. We've done shows in the past about open government, we've done shows in the past about open cities - like the city of Chicago talking about manhole covers, and stuff like that... Just interesting--
+
+**Simon Willison:** Did they have a .csv file full of manhole covers?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm sure they do, because they have to register that. Those things are expensive.
+
+**Simon Willison:** I hope I'm gonna get that...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Those things are like $500 each, or more... The manhole covers are super thick, they're completely metal, and if they get stolen, they've gotta replace it, so think about the costs. So they have to track them... I remember talking about this around -- it was years ago; I can't recall the exact show, but I will put it in the show notes if we can... But just like, all this public data out there, and someone like you that gets excited about it like that being able to make it useful to people who are not exactly programmers, you know? And then advocating for ways to say "Share data in .csv, share it in whatever format you can, just to make sure that you can share it with whomever, so that it can be reused, in these cases."
+
+**Simon Willison:** I mean, with all of this stuff, the real delight is when people build things that you weren't expecting. And when somebody takes data that you have made available and uses it to solve problems in an interesting way, that's always a delight. If you're building open source software, the best part is when somebody uses your software for something that you'd never imagined it would be used for. That's certainly something that gets me very excited.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Maybe some parting advice then for anybody listening to this segment here that is half as excited as you are about some of this stuff; what are some good starting places, what are some skills you've developed over the years that has made it easier for you to work with and munge data to do some of the things you've described here?
+
+**Simon Willison:** \[01:12:01.18\] So as a Python programmer, one of the things I love most about Python is it's got an interactive prompt, and this is true of all of the other programming languages that I like working with. Interactive prompts make it so much easier to manipulate data, to suck things down, to reformat them... I've recently been learning my way around pandas, which is the Python library for dealing with tabular data... And if you combine pandas with something like Jupyter Notebooks, it's an incredibly productive way of sucking data and previewing it, formatting, and then you can write it out to a SQLite database and publish it in that way.
+
+I think the data science community has all of these tools as well which are constantly being developed, so keeping in with what's going on over there is super useful for those tools, for pulling things down, for cleaning up and for generating and manipulating things.
+
+Then the other one is just good old SQL. It's been around since 1979, and it turns out it's still a fantastically powerful tool for doing data analysis.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Any help needed on your projects in open source that you can give a shout-out to?
+
+**Simon Willison:** Yeah, absolutely. So both csvs-to-sqlite and Datasette are active open source projects on GitHub which are very keen on accepting contributions. I've been trying to label issues with "Good first contribution", and so on. So I'm very keen on having people dig in there, but more importantly, I want people to use the software and give me feedback. I need to know what works, what doesn't work, what are the features that would help you solve problems that I haven't even imagined yet.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** On your issues, do you share any -- not so much roadmap, but bigger ideas that you don't have time to tackle, that if someone did have time to tackle, that you would take a contribution that way, or do you only have the kind of issues you described?
+
+**Simon Willison:** I have a few issues that are some of those bigger ideas, but in Datasette the thing I'm most excited about right now is the plugin ecosystem. It's now possible to build plugins for Datasette that add additional functionality. That means that I can be completely hands-off, and if you want to invent a fantastic new visualization mechanism that does, like, time charts against columns automatically, or whatever, you can build that right now today without even talking to me, and you can start using it and shipping it and sharing with other people.
+
+So I'd love to see people starting to dig in with the build plugins, but also give me feedback on what other hooks are needed to make plugins more productive.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Who is Datasette for? Is it for developers? Is it for developer-like people? Who's the user for Datasette?
+
+**Simon Willison:** So my three targets for Datasette are data journalists, anyone who's collecting interesting data and wants to be able to share it. I'm really interested in museums, because it turns out museums have huge amounts of metadata around their collections, which often is locked up somewhere, and I'd love to help get museums start publishing that.
+
+The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has a spreadsheet with 400,000 items in it which I've turned into a dataset instance... And it's that kind of thing I think is really exciting.
+
+And then the third one is civic institutions. There are all of these governments out there that are publishing data in various different formats. If I can help them publish it more effectively and in a way that's more useful to people, that I'd find really exciting.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We were talking earlier - not in this podcast, but earlier today - that interface you were showing off where you can create a database (I think we were even talking about the museum example), was that Datasette? Because you showed me a couple things... That was Datasette?
+
+**Simon Willison:** Yes.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You were able to dig into a query and then even augment the SQLite or the SQL queries, I believe.
+
+**Simon Willison:** This is one of the most interesting things about doing things read-only; if you've got a read-only SQL database, I can just open it up to select statements, because it's not like anyone can cause any harm. They can't modify the file on disk.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Because it's on Now.
+
+**Simon Willison:** Well, because it's on Now, and also because when I open the database, I use SQLite's Immutable option, so SQLite will disable any writes that could possibly happen.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha.
+
+**Simon Willison:** \[01:15:48.25\] On top of that, I have a one-second time limit on SQL queries, so if you try and do something too expensive, it won't work... But other than that, you can just be completely free with it. JavaScript get very excited about GraphQL, because it lets them specify exactly what they want to get back from the server; with Datasette, you can do that with SQL. You can write SQL in your JavaScript, selecting the exact columns you want joining against different things... And it works, and it's fast, and it gives you back that data as JSON.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You were showing me (you got really excited about this, too) the example of Australia and dogs.
+
+**Simon Willison:** Yes. There are eight different counties in Australia who publish lists of dog registrations, when people go to register with a dog license, and they've got the breed and they've got the name... So I've got one little tool where I combined all eight of those .csv files, I've got them all in a dataset instance, and now I can say "Okay, for Golden Retrievers, what's the most common dog name?" So you can search by species, sum by the count of each name, and see what the most popular name for different types of dogs is. The answer is always Bella, it turns out. No matter what species of dog you are, Bella is the most common dog name in Australia. But it's still kind of fun to see the different naming trends.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And then for pugs I believe it was Ruby, right?
+
+**Simon Willison:** Yeah, Ruby beat Bella, actually, for pugs.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Only for pugs, though.
+
+**Simon Willison:** Only for pugs, and I think Pugsley came fourth.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So what I find interesting about that is -- here's some obscure dataset that maybe nobody's paying attention to, and because of what you've done with Datasette, you're able to query in these ways and find out this information... Maybe it's just for the curious, but I find that kind of interesting to me, that you can just play with this data like that... And of the entire (not even country) continent of Australia, right...?
+
+**Simon Willison:** Right. And the dog thing is kind of -- it's amusing, but not necessarily useful. A much more useful one is -- it turns out the members of Parliament in the U.K. have to register their conflicts of interest with the Parliament in the Register of Members' Interests, and it's public data... And there's an organization called mySociety who turned that into XML; I took their XML and I loaded that into a SQLite database, so now I've got a tool that lets you search 1.3 million line items of MP's saying who paid the money, who invited them to speak, who gave them a free watch... It turns out that the Sultan of Brunei hands out Christmas hampers to MP's every Christmas, and you can see which MP has had the most Christmas hampers from him. It's super fun, and actually this is news-worthy, right?
+
+If you're wondering why does this certain MP behave in certain ways to different countries, you can dig through all of this stuff and say "Oh well, it turns out they've been giving him a lot of free watches."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And it's undeniable data, because it's from the Parliament, right?
+
+**Simon Willison:** Yeah, it's official data.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's official data.
+
+**Simon Willison:** They publish it as a rather ugly set of web pages, but with a little bit of work you can turn that into a queriable database.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And how easy is it to refresh that work? If it's so hard to, you know--
+
+**Simon Willison:** Most of the work has been done for me by this organization mySociety, who've been scraping this for ten years, and dumping the data from that into these XML files... So I just wrote the thing that turns XML into a SQLite database and built on top of that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Simon, I'm sure we could talk for hours; I've promised you 20... It was a good 20, for sure, so thank you so much for sharing your story. Where can people find you on the internet?
+
+**Simon Willison:** Mainly on Twitter. I'm at twitter.com/simonw, and I've got a blog at SimonWillison.net as well, where I write about a lot of these kinds of things.
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+**Jerod Santo:** Lin, let's start with Code Cartoons, which is a very cool project. It seems like a multi-year project that you've been doing - and you're maybe not doing it anymore - and some of the questions that we have around it. This is where you basically are doing educational work by drawing awesome diagrams and cartoons around code. Can you tell us the concept, and when did you start doing this and why?
+
+**Lin Clark:** Sure. Well, the idea behind Code Cartoons is to take this technology that people sometimes find intimidating, and explain it in terms of metaphors that almost anyone can understand. A lot of people think that because it's like that, and I'm using cartoons and stuff like that, that it's meant for novice developers... But really, it's meant for almost more senior engineers, because I find that a lot of senior engineers sometimes have a hard time saying that they don't understand something, that they don't know what's going on, and if you present it in a very clear way and in a way that they can relate to quickly, it brings down that concern about losing face, so it can make senior engineers more comfortable having these conversations without getting that kind of bluster of "I know what I'm doing."
+
+So a lot of these posts are actually meant to help dialogues by reducing people's insecurity around not knowing something.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[03:54\] That's interesting, because I realized that kind of without realizing it - for those following along at home, you can go to code-cartoons.com to see some of Lin's work there... The topics are not novice topics. There's a cartoon guide to Flux, to hot reloading and time travel debugging, to Redux - to really things that are difficult to understand even for what we call "seasoned software engineers."
+
+You're really kind of bringing them down to a level that somebody -- it's like making them more approachable, and like you said, for people who may be too embarrassed to ask.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, and the visual aspect is a big piece too, because you can explain things, like you said, in metaphors, like "This person exchanges this paper with this person", so you can see the whatever it is moving from one place to another, and now the state has changed, or the responsibility of the state changes changed hands. You can see that in real visual artifacts that people can relate to, because they are in a real 3D world.
+
+**Lin Clark:** And I think also giving personalities to the characters that are interacting helps people latch onto it and understand more why something acts in a certain way. For example with Redux - and Flux, actually - I talk about one of the characters being an overbearing bureaucrat, because it doesn't want anyone else touching the state. I think that that helped a lot of people understand more what's going on with not being able to touch the state independently from different components, only being able to send these messages to that component, and then have it make all of the changes to the state.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's interesting, the personality comes through.
+
+**Lin Clark:** Exactly, yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And we should say it's not just cartoons. There's rich dialog and explanation around the cartoons. The drawings themselves are almost xkcd style, with stick figures and very simplistic, but draw with -- it's almost as if you draw them with skill, but you kind of draw them in a childish fashion on purpose. Do you have a background in drawing, or...?
+
+**Lin Clark:** Yeah, I do have some background, I took some design courses at CMU. But the reason that I do it that way is because that is a way for me to get out of my head, to stop thinking "It needs to be perfect." If it's meant to be messy and if it's meant to be a little bit sloppy, then I can just get it done. Otherwise, I would be overanalyzing and I would never actually finish one of them.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The color blue is pretty interesting, too.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, was that -- I know that most of these were Facebook-related libraries at the time; was that a Facebook theme, or where did you get the color scheme?
+
+**Lin Clark:** Well, kind of two things. It is partially because in the early days code cartoons were around React and the React ecosystem, so I did pick a blue that was close to that color blue because of that. But also, I just really like the visual style of blueprints, and so it's pretty close to the color that you would use in blueprints as well.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's better than black, because just like when you sign a signature for official documents, they always say "Sign with a blue pen", and the reason is that it's less likely to be copied or it's just got this official feel to it, I guess. I think there's more than that behind it, but on the web most things are black and white - black text, white background; that's the primary colorscape of the internet basically, so having them be blue... They stand out.
+
+There's a book to this though, too. Am I correct in saying that, or is there not a book?
+
+**Lin Clark:** Things have kind of changed. I've not done a great job, I'm not very good at the brand management part of all of this. Originally, when I started code-cartoons, I wasn't working at Mozilla, I was just doing it in my spare time, and I planned to do a book around all of the React ecosystem, doing code cartoons. And then I got a job at Mozilla... I was working in dev tools at first, but I managed to turn Code Cartoons into my full-time job at Mozilla, so a lot of the latest work is on the Hacks blog (Mozilla's Hacks Blog). I can send a link for the show notes for that.
+
+\[07:53\] There's no book in the works currently. There may be in the future, but I'm doing a lot more work around web technologies, things like WebAssembly, JavaScript, how the browser works right now.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You kind of answered one of my questions, because one of the things that I did notice on Code Cartoons is it doesn't appear that you've been publishing to that particular website anymore, so I was wondering if maybe the magic wore off, or if you got sick of drawing, or something... But it sounds like you just transitioned that into your day job, which is cool.
+
+**Lin Clark:** Yeah, and I need to do a better job of actually updating my site so that it points to all of the recent stuff as well. Right now it's just a Medium blog, so I need to just spend one weekend making that all work, but it hasn't gotten to the top of the list yet.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, if I found the right place, there's a treasure trove of them, and the very first one is actually on a topic we'll talk about later in the show, which is ES Modules, a Cartoon Deep Dive, which is very recent, in March.
+
+**Lin Clark:** Yes, just a few weeks ago. One of the things that I use Code Cartoons for is actually teaching myself about things that I need to learn anyways. For ES Modules I am working with the WebAssembly community group to standardize ES Module interoperability with WebAssembly modules, basically making it so that WebAssembly modules can be loaded using the ES Module API. That way, WebAssembly modules can be used in the same module graph as JavaScript modules, just as if they were JavaScript modules. But in order to do that, I really need to understand how ES Modules work at a deep level, so by doing the code cartoon about them, I taught it to myself, and it also is really helpful when I'm explaining it to, for example, people in the WebAssembly community group, who maybe haven't familiarized themselves with all the details. I can actually use these cartoons in the Standards Body presentations that I do... So it's a nice overlap.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I can say it's quite effective for me. I was reading in prep for this a recent post you had on the Mozilla Hacks Blog, which we'll talk about in detail, Making WebAssembly Better for Rust and for All Languages, and as I was reading along, I was -- I know Wasm a little bit, I get it from the outside, but even I didn't know that it only has support for taking integers, or erasing integers, or something like this...?
+
+**Lin Clark:** Integers or floats, yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, integers or floats, thank you. You can't pass strings, so you start going into the description of what we have to do in order to just have string support... And all of a sudden I'm seeing some code cartoons, and I'm following along, and I'm like "Oh, I'm learning. This is very effective." So I guess I would just compliment you on the effectiveness of sneaking them in there...
+
+**Lin Clark:** Thank you.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** ...and I'm learning by accident there.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I haven't gotten to catch one of your talks in person. Do you pull any of these into your slides, or is this a part of anything you do in person, or is this simply something you blog about and include on the web?
+
+**Lin Clark:** All of my talks are actually code cartoons. I think it's even more important when you're giving a talk, because things are moving so quickly and people can't really change the pace to fit what their learning style is, so I try to make sure in my talks that I'm extremely clear in the diagrams that I'm using what exactly is going on, where we are in this process, so if people zone out for a second, they can come back and seamlessly get back into the flow of the talk.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I might be going a little too deep here, but I'm curious of the process of actually making them... Is it a computer-generated thing, or is it a pen?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, and I was actually thing - is that too deep, or is it cool for me to ask on that?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** No, I mean... How do you make these things?
+
+**Lin Clark:** There's the physical process of actually making the cartoons, and then there's the mental process of actually figuring out what should go in them. I'll start with the mental process, which is basically consuming everything I can on a subject - video, blog posts, the spec itself, all of that... And just filling my brain to the brim. Then doing a lot of yoga, and jogging; I try to load up in the morning on a particular topic, and then when I go for my run, I'll just have that going in the back-burner, because I find that thinking about it consciously a lot of times doesn't work. I have to let those metaphors come to me.
+
+\[12:01\] So then, once I've had a few that come to me, I'll put them on post-it notes on my wall and I'll start filling in this wall of post-it notes until the narrative becomes clear through that. Then I fill another wall of post-it notes that actually have all of the images that I'm going to do in order. At the same time, I'll usually be recording... I don't actually write them, I say them out loud, because I find that that helps me keeps my words shorter.
+
+If I imagine the person I'm explaining it to, I tend to explain it in a much more accessible way, so I actually will record it and then transcribe it. That will be happening at the same time that I'm putting these post-its on the wall that are all of the images. Then at that point it's just a matter of busting through all of those images and drawing them all out. For that, I use Photoshop and the Wacom Cintiq tablet.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I was thinking you might use something like that, because I've done a couple things that are drawing-related and I used my Wacom as well. My setup is left hand has the trackpad that Apple has (the Magic Trackpad), keyboard in the center, and then right hand is the Wacom. So I kind of got that -- I almost feel like a musician, but different instruments, because the left side is that. In a lot of ways it's like my left hand is the scroll, and zoom, and all the gestures - which is kind of funny, because I'm right-handed... But I can totally relate to what you're using.
+
+**Lin Clark:** Well, it's funny, because I'm right-handed too, and I have the same setup. I have the trackpad on the left and the Wacom on the right.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I've heard it's become very popular. I've been doing this setup for six years, maybe more.
+
+**Lin Clark:** Oh, wow.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What do you draw, Adam?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I make the internet, man, I don't know... \[laughter\] I draw signatures, I do a lot of -- just like doodles. Before, when I was doing a lot more interface design, I would hop into Photoshop, click the pen tool, and I might even have a particular setting for doing this, and I would just literally draw out interface, with the Wacom tablet, in Photoshop, and then save that and hand that to our design team.
+I would product-manage and I would do UX design with them kind of in real-time, but we would sit there and -- this is going way deep into this, but maybe Lin's digging this and some of the audience at least...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] I'm digging it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...you know, you just draw some stuff out, and it's just -- it's paper and pen, basically, but it's not. And I would choose Lin's blue. That's my favorite -- not that particularly, but in that genre of blue... So we're definitely kindred spirits in that front.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I have two thoughts on this. The first one is I think Amy Hoy has a rant; I just loved, Lin, how you described your mental process first, and then you talked about the tools... Because we can all nerd out about "Which app are you using?" I think Amy Hoy has... I think it's a blog post where she has this -- you know, she's a great copywriter and a great designer, and she just puts out things that are envious... You see me like, "Oh, I wish I could have created that", and so many people ask her like "What app did you use?", as if you say "On a Wacom table" I can just go onto Amazon and acquire one and suddenly create what you're creating...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** All the skill.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Exactly. And we tend to boil it down to like "What's your process?" as if it's magic, but really it's -- the process, get all of the stuff in your head, go for a run, right? Think it out, boil it down... Those are actually even more actionable for people that want to do similar things.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It just reminds me I get out less, not often enough to go through the thought process, and it just shows the commitment Lin has to what it takes to mentally break these things down, and then it also reveals what time is involved.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We see in plain view a fairly simple drawing, but behind the scenes there's all these thoughts, and the run, and the processing, and the filling to the brim and then all the post-it notes to the wall... It's a process, Lin, that's pretty intense. It's true artistry.
+
+**Lin Clark:** \[15:57\] It is intense, and I'm so exhausted after every single one... I'm just ready to collapse.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** In reading these, what I was reminded of was "Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby", why the lucky stiff - talk about bringing advanced concepts to people who are intimidated... And your drawings are more -- I don't even know if professional is the right word; his were more whimsical, it was kind of crazy. Lin, are you familiar with that book, "Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby"?
+
+**Lin Clark:** I've never actually read it. A number of people have pointed me to it because they have said it reminds them of that guide...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It does.
+
+**Lin Clark:** I still need to read it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I guess that puts a bullet in my question... I was wondering if there's an inspiration from that direction, but if you have never heard of it, then apparently not. Where did you draw inspiration for this? Did you just take a shower one day and think "I'm gonna draw code cartoons"?
+
+**Lin Clark:** Well, I've seen a few people doing kind of similar things, but where I really got the inspiration from was I told the BrooklynJS folks that I would give a talk there, and I chose Flux, because I wanted to learn more about it... And as I was diving deep into the internals of Flux, it sounded like a conversation to me between the different parts. It really sounded like people talking to each other, and I was like "Well, the best way to explain it if it sounds like people talking to each other is to draw stick figures and have them talking to each other." So I did it for that talk, and then that talk went over so well. People just kept coming up to me afterwards and saying "That helped me understand it so much more. I've been working with it, and I didn't really understand it", so I thought "Well, I'll put it in a blog post so that everybody can see it."
+
+I put it in this blog post, it went up on Hacker News, got hundreds -- I think it's probably at 200k+ views now... So it was very successful, and I thought "Well, maybe other things would benefit from this kind of treatment", so I just started playing around and seeing if the style would help people learn other things as well. And when it consistently did help people, I thought "I should really run with this."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, you can tell by the numbers of claps these have on Medium. And I don't even know what a clap is anymore, because this is like pre-claps, right? This was back when there were just hearts, and now you can give like an infinity of hearts, or 50, or whatever... But lots of love on Medium; translated into multiple languages... That's when you know that you've really resonated. Did people approach you and say "Hey, I'd like to put this into Mandarin, or whatever language?"
+
+**Lin Clark:** Yes, I still get that on a lot of the articles; people will just comment saying "Oh, here's a French version" or "Here's a Russian version", so it's great to have all of those translations and to make it accessible to even more people.
+
+**Break:** \[18:46\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So Lin, you are at Mozilla now, where you work on -- well, what do you work on at Mozilla, besides drawing more code cartoons?
+
+**Lin Clark:** I do a few things. I work with some of the teams, like the WebAssembly team... As I mentioned before, I'm working on standardization of the interop between ECMAScript ES modules and WebAssembly modules. I also work a little bit with the Rust team on their work to make it possible to compile Rust to WebAssembly and making that integration between JavaScript and WebAssembly really nice to work with, so that you don't have to think "Oh no, I have to bring a WebAssembly module in here"; instead, it's just another module. So I work a lot with those teams.
+
+I've also done a little bit of work with other teams like our CSS style engine Stylo, which came to Firefox -- it was developed in Servo, which was a web engine that we used to test out the idea of parallelizing everything in the browser engine, and so once we figured out that that really works well, we brought it over to Firefox last year. So I do jump around a little bit, and I get to work with a bunch of different teams, which is fun.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Let's focus in on Rust a little bit, and something that you wrote, the first sentence in this post back from March about making WebAssembly faster -- or sorry, not faster, but better for Rust, and for all languages... You say "One big 2018 goal for the Rust community is to become a web language." So I guess the first question is why, and then we'll go to how... Why does Rust wanna become a web language?
+
+**Lin Clark:** Well, you can just reach so many more people; there are so many web developers out there, so making it possible for those people to use Rust in the context of their applications means that Rust can be used a lot more widely. And the Rust community also just really likes bringing down barriers, making sure that there's as few barriers as possible to working with Rust, so making sure that web developers can use it is a big part of that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So in order to do that, of course, WebAssembly is the gateway drug to the web for these other languages that are not JavaScript, right?
+
+**Lin Clark:** Right, yeah. I mean, WebAssembly is pretty much the first opportunity that any language besides JavaScript has had to really be a part of the web platform.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What about Dart? Isn't that another language that was sort of aiming at similar type of desires, to be a browser component?
+
+**Lin Clark:** Dart has shifted gears over the years from what I understand now. They had talked about having a fully separate virtual machine that would run Dart instead of JavaScript, and I think now they're compiling to JavaScript; I'm not totally up to date on what the Dart team is doing, but I think that that was what they decided to do.
+
+The thing about WebAssembly is it actually runs in the same engine as JavaScript. It will give you a lot of the same capabilities as JavaScript, and give you a lot of the same access, and a lot of the same security protections that JavaScript has because it is part of that VM and it can reuse a lot of the code.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** How should web developers who aren't very familiar with WebAssembly think about it? Is it a runtime, is it a compiler, is it a language, is it like Assembly language? What's the story on exactly what it is and what it provides?
+
+**Lin Clark:** It's hard to completely describe it, because it's kind of the first of its kind on the web. It is kind of like Assembly language, but it's more like a virtual Assembly language. It gives you pretty low-level operations, but they're not exactly targeted for a particular machine, like Assembly code would be. That's because you don't know when you're sending a file across the web what machine that other person is running on, so you can't have Assembly code that is specific to that machine.
+
+\[23:53\] What WebAssembly does is it gives you something that looks like Assembly and is pretty close to Assembly, but then the virtual machine will translate it into actual Assembly code for whatever machine that it's running on. So in the browser, the browser will do that short little hop between WebAssembly and actual Assembly.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So then for these other languages to run in the browser - so for Rust to run in the browser, its job is to somehow build or compile itself into a WebAssembly-compatible binary? Is that the right language?
+
+**Lin Clark:** Yes, basically it targets WebAssembly. So you put in -- when you're compiling your Rust code, you'll say "Target WebAssembly." The exact flag right now is Wasm32-unknown-unknown, which is not the most descriptive flag that we could have... \[laughter\] But that will tell Rust the compiler "Okay, you need to turn this into a WebAssembly binary."
+**Jerod Santo:** So any language that wants to run in like manner, the authors of that language, the community around it - whether it's Go, or Ruby, or any other language - would have to do similar work. Is Rust kind of leading the way? Do you know the landscape of different programming languages and their support for WebAssembly?
+
+**Lin Clark:** The ones that really led the way were C and C++. The reason for that - it was really the games industry that was the first user of WebAssembly, because it was very hard to run games in browsers because of performance limitations. When you're playing a game, you don't wanna have the frame freeze while it has to do some computation, and you wanna have that really fine-grained control over performance.
+
+So it was the games industry that really pushed WebAssembly forward for the first few years, and a lot of those folks are coding in C and C++, so those are the languages that have the best support for WebAssembly at the moment. Rust is coming along -- I'd say that Rust is right behind them. The work really only started in earnest to make WebAssembly compilation of Rust work well maybe six months ago, I'd say, but they've come a long way and are really pushing WebAssembly forward at this point.
+
+There are also other languages that are starting, too. I think that Go actually just landed their initial support for compiling to WebAssembly in the main tree. So there are other languages that are pushing in this direction right now, but Rust is definitely behind C and C++ the one that's gotten the farthest.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And one thing that I was surprised to find about WebAssembly - we talk about support from the language side, but support from the browser side is actually pretty good. Pretty much every modern browser except for Edge has it in preview mode, which maybe you can tell me exactly what that means... But I mean, it's out there in the browsers to be used today.
+
+**Lin Clark:** It's unique. The WebAssembly standardization effort is unique in how quickly and smoothly it went, I believe. They started standardization of it in earnest in 2015, and by 2017 all of the browsers were announcing that "This is ready, we're turning it on." So that was a really big deal. I think that a big part of that is that so much of the work and figuring out how it needs to work had already happened with asm.js; they'd figured out what you need for a minimum viable product of WebAssembly through that process. So it was really just standardizing, paving those cow paths but it's also a really functional standards body. They are able to move things along more quickly because they know how to work together really well.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** There's a lot of people who love JavaScript, and then there's other people that don't like it so much, and then there's a lot of people that really dislike JavaScript... So people are excited about Wasm for different reasons, but some people who are really into Go, or really into Rust, they're excited because they think "I may never have to write JavaScript anymore."
+
+\[28:01\] Some people may think the Rust community is trying to replace JavaScript ("You don't need it anymore, you need Rust"), but what I'm hearing from you and from other people - that's not the story here; there's more to it, or it's nuanced. What is the story with this interop and making them almost merge that you guys are trying to do, as opposed to just saying "Hey, we can just WebAssembly, we don't need JavaScript anymore"?
+
+**Lin Clark:** Well, there are a lot of things that JavaScript does really well, and it does it without increasing the barrier to entry for new developers. We don't want to tell new developers "Oh, you have to go learn a language that might be more difficult", we want people to still have that easy onboarding ramp, so JavaScript gives that. And there are also just a lot of places where the performance of JavaScript is fine and you really don't need to have a really fine-tuned level of performance.
+
+We think that having them work together better is really the answer, not saying "We're going to replace this really easy to use language with a host of other languages that may be harder to use." Also, there's just so much innovation that's happened in the JavaScript ecosystem because of this low barrier of entry. You have all of these different ideas that people -- you know, one person will create a library that does something cool, but maybe not in the most efficient way, and other people will jump in and help them make it more efficient... So I think that we really wanna capitalize on all of that innovation that's happening in the JavaScript ecosystem and make that available to people who are coding in other languages, make it seamless to integrate with those other tools.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What progress has been made there, and how exactly does it look like, the interoperability between the two? So you can use Rust when it makes sense, you can use JavaScript when it makes sense, and you don't have to have a partition between them. It sounds like there's a lot of glue that has to go into that.
+
+**Lin Clark:** Yes, and we're trying to make some of that glue something that people don't even notice, that they don't see that they're using. One of the projects that we've been talking about at Mozilla is called wasm-bindgen, because as you noted earlier in the show, right now you can only pass integers and floats into WebAssembly functions, but a lot of times you need to do something like pass a string into it... And the way that you do that is by actually encoding the characters in the string into their number equivalents using something like the text encoder API, and then putting those numbers into an array buffer, which is basically just like a JavaScript array, but what it holds is bytes.
+
+So you put it into this array buffer, and then on the WebAssembly side you just have to pass a pointer, (which is really just an integer) the array index; you pass that from JavaScript into your WebAssembly function, and then WebAssembly will use that array index to figure out "Okay, I need to start getting the bites for this string here, in this memory, and pull them out", and then it will decode them into characters again.
+
+That's a pretty complicated process for a lot of JavaScript developers, and even for people who are not working with JavaScript; it's just very low-level... So we have a tool called wasm-bindgen which will automatically wrap your WebAssembly module with some JS code that will actually do that for you, all of that conversion, and it will also make it possible to use Rust structs in JavaScript as classes, it will do a lot of that wiring up and marshalling the data for you.
+
+\[31:44\] So right now it is pretty Rust-specific. We're hoping that we can expand it to support other languages as well, so that all languages can then have this easy "Pass a string, pass a struct, pass whatever you want from JavaScript back to WebAssembly." And there's also some work that's happening in the WebAssembly community group to make this easier as well. There's a proposal called anyref, which will make it possible to take references and share them between JavaScript and WebAssembly, and there's also something called host bindings, which would do a lot of the translation of values at the boundary between JavaScript and WebAssembly.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I wanna say calling back to the cartoons, too - your visual description and then your code description of this is so much easier to step into, following along as you're talking through this... I mean, this post you wrote, and then obviously the code cartoons that go with it are just -- as you're talking through it, I can kind of almost hear you creating these in the transcription process that you mentioned earlier; I can hear your process for describing these complex things, and it's just so much easier to see as code cartoons.
+
+**Lin Clark:** I agree, yeah. I wish that all podcasts were visual and I could just be drawing as I'm explaining things.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That would be an awesome. Maybe an opportunity to mention our Twitch channel, Adam, as we're doing a little bit more video; we have been livestreaming some coding sessions, and we'd love to be bringing guests on those. By the way, to the listeners - JS Party is back; I'm not sure if you've heard... Every Thursday we are doing the JS Party thing. We have a huge cast of experts on that show, so check it back out. If you haven't yet, changelog.com/jsparty.
+
+We've talked about doing that live on Twitch, because you can always use a video component. We do believe in audio as a great final product, because of the versatility in which you can listen anywhere... But yeah, for certain things, especially talking about code, looking at code, drawing things, diagramming, doing the kind of stuff that, Lin, you're so good at doing, audio is definitely a constraining medium for your skills.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Can you talk a bit about the process for the other languages to take part? You'd mentioned that C, C++, obviously Rust, and even Go you'd mentioned... But you're inviting at the bottom of this post other languages to jump on board if you wanna start to support WebAssembly. What's the process for something like that to happen?
+
+**Lin Clark:** Well, really any language that has a compiler of some sort can build in support in the compiler, and figure out exactly what the high-level language constructs translate to when you're talking about these low-level operations that WebAssembly gives you. I could go into great detail about exactly what kinds of operations it has, but it would probably take a half hour to explain...
+
+Basically, it's this thing called a stack machine; if you wanna add two numbers together, you put two numbers into the stack, and then you say Add, and because the add command, the add operation, knows that it takes two things, it will take those two numbers off of the stack, add them together, and then put the value back onto the stack. Basically, you need to output code that can do things in that stack machine kind of way, with the operations that WebAssembly makes available.
+
+One of the things that WebAssembly doesn't support yet that a lot of languages do need is integration with the garbage collection in the browser. You can write your own garbage collection and ship it down with your code, and that works fine, but it also makes the file size larger, it can be hard to - if you have objects that are going between JavaScript and WebAssembly, it can be hard to keep track of those... And it's just kind of tricky to write a good industrial-grade garbage collector, but all of the browsers have really good garbage collectors, so we're trying to over the next year really push that forward and make it possible for languages to depend on the garbage collection in the browser.
+
+\[36:02\] Now, this isn't gonna work for all languages, but we think that there are a lot of languages that then will be able to target WebAssembly really easily.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Going back to the bindgen conversation and what you're providing there - it sounds like all the plumbing necessary to convert things into the right formatting, the serialization or really the marshalling into classes and stuff on the JavaScript side... Recently I saw a Hello world Rust thing in WebAssembly; by the way, there's WebAssembly Studio, which I hadn't heard of until maybe today even, which is pretty cool. For those out there who would like to play around with this stuff, webassembly.studio (we'll link that up as well), and you can see examples of people doing things... And they have a very simple Hello world where it's using wasm-bindgen, and there is a function defined in the Rust side called greet, which takes a string as an argument, and then there is a function on the JavaScript side which I think you're probably familiar with - it's called alert... So that one's built right in.
+
+They are both using the opposite functions - one of the JavaScript side, one on the Rust side. That is pretty cool. You can imagine all the places that could go, Lin. I mean, once you get this native support for all the functions over here and all the functions over there, now you have access to the best of both worlds, right?
+
+**Lin Clark:** Exactly, yeah. And WebAssembly Studio is a great tool for people that just wanna try out playing around with Rust to WebAssembly compilation, or really any language to WebAssembly... Because it means that you don't have to download the compiler toolchain or anything; it'll just run in your browser, which is fantastic. We're actually building a project around that for JSConf EU - it's this light environment... It's a space that this artist that I know from Pittsburgh is building, that has all of these LED bricks all over for the big space, and you can program it to have different animations on these LED bricks. We are going to make it possible to program it using WebAssembly Studio and write animations that can then be shown on this pace while people are dancing inside of it, or whatever.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Is this a WebAssembly working group thing? Is that right what this is?
+
+**Lin Clark:** That project in particular is a Mozilla thing, and the WebAssembly Studio is also a Mozilla thing. Michael Bebenita, who is one of our folks in emerging technologies, created WebAssembly Studio kind of in his spare time I think, and people were so excited about it that it's now something that he and a few other people work on.
+
+**Break:** \[38:45\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Lin, tell us about the work that you're doing with the Wasm ES modules spec. It sounds complicated.
+
+**Lin Clark:** It is complicated. In a way, it's actually pretty straightforward because the WebAssembly group really designed the module system to eventually work with ES modules, and then when ES modules were taking longer to be standardized, they switched to having this imperative JavaScript API for instantiating WebAssembly modules. But it was really designed for it to easily interop with the JavaScript ES modules.
+
+The complicated part is that you have to work with three different standards bodies that cross at least four different specs...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** There's your complicated, yeah...
+
+**Lin Clark:** Yeah. \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Red tape.
+
+**Lin Clark:** So it's a lot of explaining to everybody what's going on, why we have to make the changes that we are making, and so far everybody's been on board, which is great, and hopefully it will continue to be that way. But the goal of the work is -- right now, as I said, there's an imperative JavaScript API; basically, you have to tell JavaScript to build this WebAssembly module for you, and you have to go step by step. You have to tell it "Okay, fetch the file first, and then take the imports that I need to pass into the module and initialize those. Then pass those in, instantiate the module using those imports", and then finally you can actually use whatever export from that module you wanted to whatever function or value you wanted to from that module.
+
+So what we wanna do is move it to a declarative API, like what you have with ES modules, where you can just say "import foo from bar.js", and it just gives it to you; it does all of the other work for you. The tricky parts there are figuring out where exactly, because the ES module spec breaks up the process into three different phases. First you construct the module graph, you download all of the module files that you need, and you parse them into module records so that you know what's going on in this file... But this process has to happen in kind of an iterative way, because you first get the first file, then you have to parse that to figure out what modules it depends on, and then you go and fetch those from the web, then you parse them... So you have to keep going down and down and down, fetching and parsing and fetching and parsing through this whole module graph.
+
+Then the second phase, once you have your whole module graph figured out, the second phase is linking them together, so finding places in memory for exports and then connecting both the export statement and the import statement to that same place in memory when they are referring to the same thing. Then you actually fill in the values that will be in those variables.
+
+The second step, that linking step is called instantiation, and the third step is called evaluation. That's where you're actually evaluating the code that's outside the functions in the module. So figuring out how to make WebAssembly fit with this, but there are certain ways in which it can't quite, so figuring out what to do in those cases - that is a little bit tricky, but so far we have some good plans in place for how to make that work.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I can tell that you're deep in the weeds on this work, so we very much appreciate your efforts put in, because as you get these things ironed out and formalized, and then the implementation with Wasm... I mean, it affects everybody, because so many languages potentially can integrate.
+
+Where are you looking at in terms of progress and what we can expect this work to be done, and you can finally go out and -- I don't know if you have a drink, or celebrate your success...? \[laughter\]
+
+**Lin Clark:** It's always hard to say with standards, it's hard to give dates. We've been making good progress... I presented to the WebAssembly CG two weeks ago, basically explaining how exports are going to work in every kind of case - when you're importing JavaScript functions into WebAssembly, when you're exporting from WebAssembly to JavaScript, when you have cycles between the different things, and everybody seemed to be on board for the design, so now the next step is doing a rough draft of the spec text and making sure that everybody from the different groups is on board for that spec text.
+
+\[44:11\] So I'll be going to TC39 in May to talk to them - they're the standards body in charge of JavaScript - and working with them to make sure that everything that we're doing makes sense from their perspective as well.
+
+Once we've gotten everybody on board for the decisions and we have some spec text, we should be able to push it through... We also need to have some people implementing it, and I just saw on Twitter a few days ago that JavaScriptCore (JSC), the JavaScript engine that is in WebKit - they have already started playing around with an implementation, and we've had interest from other people, like folks on the Chrome team, folks in Node, so I think we're gonna be able to get the implementations done pretty quickly, too. So I think that it should be moving along at a nice pace.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Let's zoom back out again - we were talking about the low-level grinding that you and many other people are doing in order to push these things forward... Let's look at it from Firefox perspective, perhaps. All this goal for Rust to become a web language, all the progress on WebAssembly - what does this mean for Firefox?
+
+**Lin Clark:** Well, Rust in particular means multiple things for Firefox. We're using Rust - not Rust compiled to WebAssembly, but just Rust - in our codebase in Firefox now. Actually, that will be what I'm speaking about at FluentConf in June, about how we're using Rust to make it possible to parallelize different parts of the engine in a fine-grained way without it being dangerous, because you can introduce really dangerous bugs that way, but Rust avoids those bugs. So Rust is helping Firefox in that way.
+
+Once we have people compiling Rust to WebAssembly and using that on the web, WebAssembly is a lot easier for an engine to compile, so it's a lot easier for the VM that's in the browser to do a good job of making the code run fast when it's in WebAssembly than when it's in JavaScript... Because with JavaScript the engine has to make a lot of guesses about where it can cut corners with the code, and those guesses sometimes work out, sometimes they don't... It can be really unpredictable, and you have to have some really clever people working on the engine, figuring out what shortcuts they can take that won't negatively impact too many people's code.
+
+So it will be nice for us if more code is in WebAssembly on the web, it will be nice that we don't have to do quite as many hacks and quite as many shortcuts in the JavaScript engine.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Do you see a world - maybe 3-5 years from now, maybe longer - where WebAssembly is powering a significant portion of the web, not similar to WordPress, but you know, WordPress powers 25% of the websites; or jQuery was a ridiculous amount of times -- you know, of the percentage of websites you can go to and open your console up and find the dollar sign defined as the jQuery constant. What about WebAssembly? If everything goes well, do you think it will be a niche where only things like games and high-powered rendering video or what have you needs WebAssembly, or do you think it will reach out and have common use amongst (we'll just call it) regular websites?
+
+**Lin Clark:** I think that we are going to see it spreading. Once it gets into a few key pieces of software, I think we'll see it spreading pretty quickly. What we think is gonna happen is the frameworks will start building WebAssembly components within the framework, that everyone will be using them and nobody will realize that they're using WebAssembly, because they have a JavaScript interface to interact with that WebAssembly.
+
+\[48:01\] I don't know if you've seen the EmberConf keynote that Yehuda Katz and Tom Dale gave maybe a month ago... They talked about their work to using WebAssembly in the Glimmer engine, and we've talked with the React team about how they might use WebAssembly; there are other frameworks I know that are looking at how they can use WebAssembly for parts of their framework that don't really need to be in JavaScript and where they could see performance gains from switching to something like WebAssembly.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We just had a show about Ember last week with Chad Hietala... Adam, did we talk about that? I mean, he talked about Glimmer quite a bit, but this doesn't ring a bell.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I don't recall us talking at all about WebAssembly.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I don't either. He held out on us. So you mentioned Fluent, and you have a keynote coming up at Fluent, and hey, what do you say, we'll be at Fluent! Adam, why don't you tell the good people about our role with Fluent this June.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Absolutely. So we have a fun working relationship with O'Reilly and we always enjoy working with them, and we're actually going to be there in the hallways, kind of doing the hallway track. We've got Kevin Ball going, also known on JS Party and the fun stuff he's done for foundations, and then Tim Smith is a recent hire for us, senior producer here at Changelog, and we're sending both of them over to FluentConf to kind of do the hallway track, get some interviews, we're sending a video camera... Doing some fun stuff. So we're trying to do more stuff for our YouTube channel, and just different stuff we haven't really had a chance to do yet. Kevin and Tim are gonna go to Fluent, and at the same time Velocity, because they're technically the same conference, in the same venue, but at the same time... And just sort of peel back the layer of the hallway track, talking to people, talking to some of the speakers obviously, maybe Cory Doctorow might get on camera with us... We'll see.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Will they have swag? Will they have stickers for people?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I can't see why not, I mean... I don't know how much it makes sense for them to carry, but maybe a few... It might be better to take names and numbers and addresses and say "Hey, we'll ship you something."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, like get these guys some stickers to hand out...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, stickers for sure, but T-shirts - we'll see. Stickers - definitely easy; we're 100% on that for sure.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Alright, so find the guys with the Changelog T-shirts, Tim and Kevin Ball; he likes to go by kball, I hear...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right, kball.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** ...and hit 'em up for stickers at least, and hey, Adam's talking about T-shirts, so...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And check the show notes too if you're planning to go to FluentConf or you'd like to go. We have a coupon code for 20% off. The coupon is "changelog", and the URL will be in the show notes. It's kind of a cryptic one, it's one of those special ones, so use that. I think that might actually automatically get you the 20% off, but use the code "changelog" and you'll see a 20% off on most passes.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very cool. Lin, you are keynoting, as you mentioned, and your talk is called The Parallel Future of the Browser. Summarize it for us once again; I know you've mentioned a little bit, but it sounds like a lot of the stuff you've been working on, and a lot of the stuff Mozilla is working on about trying to make Firefox better, faster, stronger...
+
+**Lin Clark:** Yes, and in that talk I talk about not just what Firefox has to do, but what all browsers have to do to get faster over the next 10-20 years, because if you look at the direction that hardware is going, hardware is splitting up into multiple cores. You have these multicore architectures, and I know that you've had other people on the show to talk about this...
+
+Basically, before we would get speed-ups at a certain rate, it looks like that rate of speed-ups and processors, like how fast a computer can work, at least when you have one ship - it looks like that has a limit. We're only going to be able to make the circuits that are in there so small before they start burning up. So the chip manufacturers have started splitting up into multiple cores, so that they can have a core-- because you can think of a core as kind of like a brain. If you have one brain working on a problem, it can only go so fast; if you have two brains or four brains working on that same problem, it can go faster, but you can have some costs of communicating/coordinating between these different brains.
+
+\[52:15\] One way that people have gotten around that cost of communicating between the different brains is just have them work on pretty separate tasks. It's called core-screened parallelism. You might have one of the cores working on figuring out what to show inside the browser window, and another core working on the Chrome, the address bar or the scroll, or all of that stuff. And then another core working on whatever is in the background tab. That can lead to under-utilization of the cores. It can mean that you're leaving some of those cores without work to do, if the background tab isn't doing anything, if the address bar isn't changing.
+
+What we wanna do, and what we have been doing over the past year and a half or so, is introducing fine-grained parallelism into the browser, making it possible to split up work not just at that cores level of one tab goes to one core and another tab goes to another, but actually having the work that happens inside a single tab be split up across different cores. So that's what I am talking about in this talk, it's exactly how we're doing that and why we're doing it, and also how application code could then also be split up among these different cores.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Is that kind of where Firefox is heading now? What are some of the things that Firefox has already done to get there that you'll sort of say "Hey, here's a great example!"?
+
+**Lin Clark:** Yeah, so Firefox has really been looking at this. We released Firefox Quantum in November, and one of the big parts of that project was figuring out how we do this and actually taking some of the components from Servo, which was our web engine where we were exploring this, and moving them into Firefox. So one of these is Stylo, the CSS engine, where you can take all the different elements that you have on a page and split them up - split up figuring out which styles apply to those different elements across the different cores, so that you can speed up the CSS style computation, one part of rendering a web page.
+
+You can speed that up by however many cores you have, because it's splitting up the work in a really efficient way across those different cores, and that means that as chip manufacturers add more and more cores, we'll see automatic speed-ups in Firefox for CSS style computation.
+
+Another part of project Quantum is this thing called WebRender. When you're rendering a web page, you need to figure out the plan for what is gonna show up on the screen, that is parsing the HTML into DOM nodes and then figuring out the style for those, and then figuring out the measurements for where those things should go on the page (that's called layout). Once you have that plan in place, you actually need to paint it to the screen, you actually need to paint pixels.
+
+\[55:06\] So a lot of browsers, including us, have split things up into this compositing stage -- or rather a painting stage and then a compositing stage, where they create layers, and then basically put the layers together and take a picture of them. And what we're doing with WebRender is actually removing the distinction between those two, and making the work a lot more parallel by moving it to the graphics processing unit (GPU).
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's a popular thing happening nowadays too, especially as you talk about all the stuff happening with GPUs, and just the acceleration things happening on that front around NVIDIA and different hardware I've heard about. I'm not fluent in it, but I've heard a lot about GPU acceleration these days.
+
+**Lin Clark:** One of the neat things about GPU is that you have a whole bunch of different cores. With a CPU, you usually have maybe two or four or six or eight; you don't have that many. With a GPU you have hundreds or thousands. But they can't really do things too independently from each other. A CPU - the different cores are like different brains; with a GPU, they all have to be basically working on the same task, so you need to figure out how to tell them to do things in a way that's efficient... So that's what WebRender really does - it makes it possible for us to give instructions to the GPU and pass off all of this work to the GPU and do it in an efficient way.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** This isn't the roadmap for this year for Servo, right?
+
+**Lin Clark:** Well, it's already landed in Servo; it is in the roadmap for Firefox this year.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** For episodes on Servo, check out changelog.com/228. And for more on Moore's Law and high-performance computing, which is I think what perhaps Lin referenced there, episode \#284, Todd Gamblin. That was a recent favorite of a few of our listeners. So... Just cross-promoting over here. Just doing my job.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I love it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Lin, it sounds like a great talk. Everybody, go to Fluent; use our code, "changelog", say hi to Lin and attend her keynote... Do you have anything else that you'd like to chat about before we call this a wrap?
+
+**Lin Clark:** I think that we covered everything, and so many things. I'm excited about all of the things that we talked about today.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, thank you so much Lin for your time. It was awesome to have you on the show.
+
+**Lin Clark:** Thank you so much for having me.
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+**Adam Stacoviak:** Tim, I think the way to start this might be one day we were in what I would consider an after show; we were recording a podcast, it was over, we were all chatting afterwards, and the conversation came to be, essentially, how do we share software development, programming, computer science with kids, and I was like "I don't know where to send people." And someone linked up csunplugged.org, and I was like "Wow..." So I immediately was like "We've gotta talk to whomever is involved in this." We emailed, and you responded back, now here we are... So that's essentially how I found out about this awesome thing you're doing. Your story goes kind of far back, so maybe tee up what this program is and who you are.
+
+**Tim Bell:** Okay, cool. Basically, it started because I had exactly the same question, but for me it was when my son was five years old, which was back in '92... Which many of your listeners might remember -- in 1992 he was five, they were having parents along to their classes just to talk about what we did for a living... At the time, I was - and I still am - a computer science researcher and lecturer... But the week before me they'd had a cop along, who'd brought a cop car; the kids got to play off the sirens and all that kind of stuff... And before that, they had had a nurse I'd heard from my son, and she'd brought along fake blood and bandages, and the kids got all wrapped up, and all that stuff...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Hands-on stuff.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Nice.
+
+**Tim Bell:** \[03:49\] Yeah, and the kids were raving about it, and it was really fun. Then the next week the parent to come along was me, a computer scientist. At the time and for a long time after, my main research area was data compression; how to make data smaller, and all that sort of thing. And I thought "How do you explain this to kids?" They don't even know what data is, they didn't own a computer... Nothing like a data projector in the room or anything to demonstrate things... So I don't know why, but I just had this idea "Well, let's not worry about the computer at all, let's try and get to the heart of what I think about, what I care about when I'm solving problems, when I'm trying to develop a new program for something."
+
+So I sort of peeled things back and I thought, well, what are the key ideas that we're looking at? I just looked at a whole lot of topics that exercised my mind as a researcher in computer science, and I tried to think "Well, how could that be transferred into a game, or an activity, or something like that?" I came up with three or four activities, went along into the class... I was using nothing but cards and paper and string and chalk and things like that, and we had a great time with the class. In fact, it went so well that they invited me back, which was a very pleasant surprise, because I thought it might have been one of the least interesting talks that the kids might have had. So I ended up going back regularly, and developed a whole series of these things.
+
+And back then I came across a colleague on the internet who had been doing the same thing in Canada, Mike Fellows. Mike and I pooled ideas, we put them together and we said "Oh, we should get together." I went over to Canada for a month, and we sort of tried to put it all together in a book, and came up with about 20 activities like this. It seemed really good, so we sent it off to some publishers and said "Here's something a bit different... What do you think?"
+
+It was rejected 27 times by publishers, which is the best thing to happen... The reason was that they couldn't place it, so we sent it to a computer publishing place, and they said "Well, you're not using computers. It looks really cool, and by the way, can I keep a copy to do with my kids? ...but we can't publish it in a computer book. Why don't you send it to our education department?"
+
+So I sent it to them, and they'd go "Well, it's obviously about computers. It's got 'computer' in the title." Anyway, we got sent around in circles, and we got more rejections than Harry Potter, which I'm very proud of. But the cool thing about that is that in the end we thought -- because back in the '90s, open source and publishing into that wasn't a big thing... In fact, the web was really just starting to become a thing, and the public didn't really have access, or teachers and so on... But we put it up in the form of the web, and just said "Well, help yourselves, everyone. It's free, and we think it's a good idea."
+
+And it just sat there for probably about a decade. A bunch of people around the world started using it and came across it one way or the other, but around about -- I think it was 2003 at the ACM, which is the national body of computer scientists that set curricula, and things like that, started looking at K12 curriculum... And kind of almost unknown to me -- they'd probably emailed and asked me about it, but they published a thing about it saying "We think there should be a K12 curriculum for schools, and by the way, here's some examples of what to do" and about two thirds of their examples were straight out of our material... So suddenly, everyone was contacting us and saying "Oh, tell us about this method, tell us about your philosophies", and so on.
+
+Of course, at the time, we'd just gone back to our day jobs and we weren't particularly working on this... So the thing suddenly started taking off, and then even more so I guess in the last eight years or so, because all around the world countries are starting to say "Well, how do we introduce computer science or computational thinking into schools?" and this became a really easy touchpoint for that. Because of not using computers -- it took us a while to realize exactly what we'd done, but it means that it's using things that teachers are familiar with. So when you say "Put this on the card and draw this on the ground" and all that kind of stuff, they go "Well, I can do that."
+
+\[08:23\] But if you say "Oh, you're gonna teach computer science", particularly if you think about primary school teachers, elementary school teachers, they go "Well, hang on, I haven't been trained on this. It's probably all this thing called 'coding', which sounds really mysterious... I'll probably have to install something on a computer, and when I install it, it probably won't work, because then I'll have to install something else and reboot, and then I'll need permission from the school to install it... Nah, I can't be bothered." But when you say "Just print out these three cards and start doing stuff with them", it sort of becomes a very easy entry point.
+
+So it sort of evolved from an outreach thing for academics like me to go into a school and just talk to our kids, or try and drum up a bit of interest, to something that is being offered for teachers, who have been told "This is now part of your curriculum."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** This is basically an accident.
+
+**Tim Bell:** It is, yes.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Intentional, but kind of an accident to how you got to be where you're at. Since you mentioned Mike Fellows, the quote that from what I understand was a breakthrough quote to get teachers and administrators to kind of understand what you were doing... Like you said, there's no computers involved - "No computers required." The quote was "Computer science is as much about programming as astronomy is about telescopes." I think that makes complete sense, because you don't really need a computer to do this. You can just simply have the printable materials and different stuff like that to hand to educators and reduce all those barriers. I think that's such a happy accident, honestly.
+
+**Tim Bell:** Yeah, and I think Mike's quote has been a really useful one for helping people understand what we're on about. And by the way, probably some of your listeners are thinking "Hang on, didn't Dijkstra say that?" Because it's quite often attributed to Dijkstra... So just as a little side thing - Dijkstra did say it, but he had actually met Mike quite early on, and had that discussion. Dijkstra never claimed it was his own quote or anything, but when you're famous and you say something, they're gonna attribute it to you. That's kind of the history of that quote...
+
+And Mike, his analogy as he went through it, he said "It's as much as chemistry is about test tubes, or cooking is about stoves", and things like that. But yeah, I often draw that out, because if you think about astronomers, they're always using telescopes, they're buying telescopes, they want money for telescopes, they become experts in telescopes, and they have to be good at telescopes; that's really, really important. But it's probably not why they're astronomers. They might be the odd telescope geek who goes "Oh, I have to do these star charts just so I get to use a telescope?", but suspect that most of them are in it because they want to explore the Universe.
+
+It's the same with computer science. Of course we do programming all the time, and programming is how we put wheels on the great ideas that people have. In those couple of decades since we started doing this, there have been all sorts of great ideas that have happened... You know, search engines that search billions of pages in a fraction of a second, or sites that store any video that anyone wants, and social networks that let people communicate anywhere around the world, and podcasts... You know, just so many things that people have come up with. But the things that make them work - sure, you need a program that's actually making it happen, but if you do it the wrong way, then it won't be a thing.
+
+A good example is the most popular website in the world, which is Google - it's just a text box and a button. So from a programming point of view, that's not very hard to implement. But we know that what's behind it, the computer science - how do you search billions of things in a fraction of a second? You need to start thinking about different algorithms and processes, you need to think about communication protocols, security, how do you stop people trying to bring your site down or trying to make their website the most popular one on the search engine, and things like that... And so suddenly, there's a huge amount of stuff that you need to know that you're going to program.
+
+\[12:29\] Yeah, so the telescope analogy, for the general public I think often helps quite a bit there. And it's not to say that it's anti-programming or anything like that, but it's simply -- I think traditionally, for computer science, we've used programming as the gateway to computer science. So enroll for computer science and you'll learn a whole year of programming, and then we'll start showing you some cool stuff you can do with it... It would be a little bit like saying "This thing called astronomy - you probably don't know what it's about, but trust me, it's really cool. But first of all, learn about telescopes for a year or two, and then we'll tell you what it's actually about."
+
+What I've come to realize that Unplugged does is it kind of skips that and it says "Let's have a look at some stars, let's have a look at what's really going on. Is that cool? Okay, now you're gonna have to suck it in and learn how to use a telescope or learn how to program to really make stuff happen."
+
+I think one of the important social things there is that with the traditional view of "Well, learn coding, learn programming first, and then we'll show you some good stuff" is that it blocks out a lot of people who can't see the point of programming or coding... Whereas if you can show them the point, then they go "Okay, this is worth learning."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It makes the journey worth it, and you can kind of like deal with the pain because you've got some sort of motivator.
+
+**Tim Bell:** Yeah, and also I think one of the things that we get a lot is the gender difference, and also cultural differences and who gets involved in this, and we tend to filter out the people who aren't so interested in the machine and aren't so interested in programming... And one of the mantras that I try to push, particularly with teachers, is that we don't write programs for computers, we write programs for people, on computers. So the people who will write good programs are the people who understand people. Then that suddenly changes some of the stereotypes a wee bit. Because the assumption is that if you love computers and you're really good at programming, then you'll write great programs, but in actual effect, they might be terrible for people to use, because you haven't thought about the person. You need people who are good at both.
+
+So that's a big story coming out of the telescopes, but it is a very useful analogy.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Highly relevant, though. It makes sense, because you remove 1) a huge cost burden, especially if you're targeting primary, like you said, K12, or bringing it to a younger audience, or that kind of thing... You remove a ton of - I'm assuming, at least - cost...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Absolutely.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...because computers cost a lot of money to buy and maintain. That's a lot of expense.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** No computer required, yeah.
+
+**Tim Bell:** That's right, and I think especially with coming into school curricula -- someone told me this, there's 50 countries around the world that are introducing this into their grade school curriculum... And when I talk to people who are doing it, they go "Oh, now we're gonna have to buy a computer for every kid" and so on. Now, again, you do need a computer; I mean, in the end, if you're not writing programs, then you haven't quite got your fingers dirty and you're not really getting the whole thing, but...
+
+\[15:46\] One interesting bit of research that came out recently is that they tried -- I can't remember the exact numbers, but I think it was something like a series of about eight weeks on programming for young kids, using a language called Scratch, which is really popular for younger kids (a block-based language). And they tried two variations - one was to spend the full time doing nothing but teaching them how to do things in Scratch, and the other variation is they spent about a third of the time doing nothing but Unplugged material, and then the remaining two-thirds teaching them about Scratch and programming.
+
+And at the end, they found that both groups were equally good at programming, but the group that had done Unplugged first used a wider range of blocks or commands from the system, and had a much better understanding of just some of the deeper elements of what they were doing... Which actually was, again, not an intentional thing, but it kind of makes sense, because the Unplugged thing gets people thinking about "What's the big purpose? What are we trying to achieve here?" and I think often when kids get put in front of a computer, they just go "Okay, tell me what I have to type. Show me the model. I'll copy it onto the thing, and it's finished, and I've done what I'm required, and I'll move on." But by getting them away from the computer, you're actually getting them to think about the big ideas.
+
+I think one of the key things with Unplugged too is that -- people go "Oh, it will be so cool. One kid could be the CPU and one kid could be the input/output unit, and they could pass this onto their --" and that is so boring. Being a computer is quite boring; I don't know if you've ever tried it, but it's quite a repetitious sort of job... So the Unplugged stuff really turns things inside out; it will be a magic trick, or... It's things where there's an intriguing puzzle, and very simple instructions too, which is one of the really important points.
+
+For binary numbers we just say "Here's some cards. They can either be up one way or the other. You can't have them half-way up. Now I want you to show me this." That's the entire instruction set. So it's a relatively simple puzzle, but it gives the students a lot to think about as they work through it.
+
+Searching is probably another good example, since I mentioned search engines before. One of the ways that we've done that is we get a bunch of caps (paper caps, or something) and we put numbers underneath them. Then we basically lay out about 30 caps on the table and just say "Okay, I want you to find the cap that's got number 83 underneath it." And of course, if the caps are in random order, the kids lose a point; in fact, sometimes we give them a candy that they have to pay for each one they look at... And they go "Oh, we'll never find it... There's 30 there, and you've only given me four candies to buy a view underneath a cap." That shows the frustration of a linear search.
+
+Then we simply say "Okay, here's another set of caps. The smallest ones are on the left, the largest ones are on the right. They're in order. Here's your four candies. Are you feeling lucky?" And we don't say anything else, we don't tell them how to do it, or anything like that. Some kids will start at the left hand side and they'll go "Oh, it's number 3, it's number 6... Oh, hang on a minute..." Then they realize that if they're looking for 83, maybe they should look more towards one end than the other. But very often, particularly with kids around 8 to 10 years old, they'll go "Oh, hang on, the middle one would be a really good one", and they look at that and physically they really they've just eliminated half of the caps at the cost of one candy. Then they get to divide it in half in their way, but they have invented the algorithm themselves. I mean, it's a well-known algorithm, but suddenly they see the power of it.
+
+\[19:56\] And the next question is, "Well, that was 30 caps. What if I'd given you 60 caps?" They go "Oh, that'd be twice as hard." And then they think about it; the very first candy reduces the 60 caps down to 30. So then we start looking at that exponential growth, or actually, technically, logarithmic power of a binary search... "What if I give you 1,000 caps?" "Oh, that's... Oh, hang on a minute!" and then they start to realize that that's only 10 candies, and a million caps is only 20, and suddenly, a billion... And there's a lot of humor here, as well; like, imagine a billion caps... It's quite a lot, but it doesn't take too much to reason that you just need to look under 30 of them and you've found something. And now we're suddenly showing how you can search a billion things, like a billion web pages - it's not quite that simple, but you could search a billion things by only looking at 30 of them... And you suddenly realize that this is quite a different kind of thing to just doing a linear search or having to go through every single one... And the kids have come up with the idea.
+
+I think a lot of the point of it is that these systems seem magic too, and especially through the early 2000's, people were kind of locked out of knowing about things. You know, shiny gadgets came out - iPods and iPhones and things like that, that if you looked inside, it would void the warranty, and I think with a lot of them you couldn't even write your own program for them without getting it approved by Apple. So they were kind of saying "Just trust me, there's magic in here. You're not allowed to look, you're not allowed to change it. We'll sort it out for you" and it sort of turned people into users, instead of developers... Whereas back in the '80s, if you bought a computer, you switch it on and it says "Type a command." It's the first thing you have to do, and it's quite a different kind of invitation.
+
+So we end up with these devices that seem like magic. I mean, they are kind of magic, but if we can undo some of that magic and kids look inside and go "Oh, I can understand how that works", then that gives them some of the insight. And I think especially for teachers too, because more likely as teachers get into it, they go "Well, this stuff is a great mystery. Only a few very clever people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs understand it, and they're out of the business now anyway, so all the magic is locked up", whereas it's actually "No, it's stuff that lots of people can understand at some level."
+
+**Break:** \[22:37\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** First of all, I love the angle of the starting with no computers, and these cards and puzzles... Not just because it gets the kids excited, but because it actually reduces the anxiety on the teachers to feel like they have to be computer scientists in order to teach this stuff. That's awesome.
+
+Thinking about what you said there, starting with the fun, the intrigue, the excitement, and really getting people engaged into the ideas of thinking in these ways, before you get to the programming languages and those kinds of things. There's been a lot of efforts - not just with kids, but also with adults or young adults, trying to get them into coding, and a lot of times, when we start with the computer, there's two things that we normally try, because we're also trying to get that fun, that immediate feedback, like the early wins, to get them hooked... And the two things that usually are used, with varying levels of success, is games - actually creating video games - which gets everybody excited until they realize that's actually really hard to do without much skills... So it's difficult, right? There's a high level of entry there.
+
+And the other one is the web, and one that I've seen a lot of success with is just allowing people to see -- you pull up their favorite website and then you show them how they can actually manipulate it themselves, by opening up the DevTools, or creating something very quickly and putting it up on the internet, and they have something that they built before.
+
+So those are ways I'm just trying to think of like how you would bridge - from a child's perspective - this same way of going about teaching, to an adult perspective... And I guess all that is a long way for me to say this is obviously focused on teaching kids computer science, or the foundations of it... Could we take the same methodology -- maybe take out the puzzles and the crayons; Well, maybe leave the puzzles in, take the crayons out; but could we use this, broaden it and teach adults in the same manner that CS Unplugged teaches kids?
+
+**Tim Bell:** Absolutely. Although it was written for kids, it's been a big surprise to me how valuable it is for adults, particularly for teachers... I mean, it's essentially change management, or it's a psychological process for a teacher when they're told -- "You know, I signed up here to help kids read and write and maybe do some math, and now I have to do this thing called computer science or computational thinking." It's very scary for them... So it's useful there, but one of my favorite audiences for this is senior citizens.
+
+I don't know if you have that over there, but in New Zealand there are some very popular literary series for senior citizens where they get people from universities to come in and just talk about anything - the environment, politics, or whatever - from an academic point of view. And it's a wonderful audience, because these are clever people, who have achieved a lot in their lives and so on, but know nothing about this... And it's very empowering for them too, because often they end up finding out stuff that their grandkids don't know about. Often, people say "Oh, young kids, they know all about computers..." and you feel like saying "Well, ask them what algorithm Google uses to find something amongst a billion pages, or ask them what is the security that's used when you do online shopping, or something like that."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah... It's more like saying these people understand microwaves, because they grew up with microwaves, so they can control a microwave. But that doesn't mean they understand, right? That doesn't mean they get computers, just because they can use an iPhone and they can use Snapchat. There's a big difference there.
+
+**Tim Bell:** There is. There's time on task, which is a big part of it... And actually, the time on task then kind of takes me back to what you were talking about with programming. There's some wonderful sites that give kids a positive experience with programming in a very short time. The most famous would be Hour of Code. In one hour you get to write a program, you get some insight into what a program actually is, but of course, you can't learn all about programming in an hour.
+
+\[27:54\] It's a bit like with music - I could teach a kid to play a simple tune in an hour, and if they were eight years old and they turned up to their parents and played that simple tune, the parents would go "Oh, that's wonderful! You're a musician, you're a pianist! I'm really impressed." But if they continued doing that and became a concert pianist playing that same tune that they learned in one hour, then they're not gonna do terribly well. We know that there's thousands of hours of practice and learning and work to become a great musician, and there's thousands of hours of practice and work to become a great programmer.
+
+So one of the risk with anything, whether it's Unplugged, or programming, or whatever, is that, you know, we say "Well, you've done an hour or two on this. You're doing great!" and sometimes students can see through that and they go "Well, I can't possibly be -- well, either if it's that simple, what are we all missing? Or maybe I'm not doing that great. Maybe I'm just getting started."
+
+I think we really need to emphasize that we're just lifting the lid back a bit and we're showing you what it is, but we have to be realistic - there's hours and hours and hours of work to do to really get good at this stuff. Although, again, when it gets into schools, into primary schools... If you think of an analogy with maths, or something like that, what a 10-year-old can do in math is, as far as someone who has to do math all the time for a living, is pretty basic. But on the other hand, they are gradually building up those skills over a period of time, and we know where the destination is, even though a lot of kids and possibly even some teachers can't see the point of it... So a lot of it is to try and keep the end goal in mind with this teaching, no matter how you're doing it. So there's a lot of stuff going on in there.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You're not trying to make computer scientists with this curriculum. This is an approachable curriculum for a certain level, introductory to it. You're not gonna come out at the end of it with a degree and start programming; you're gonna come out with at least some curiosity, maybe some familiarity to get you to the next step.
+
+**Tim Bell:** Exactly. And of course, the original thing was actually analogous with science shows that you get, where people will explode a balloon and smash a banana, and things like that, just saying "Look, there's stuff going on... Maybe there's some surprises in here you didn't expect" and so on, and "This is my passion." I think a lot of it, originally, is just for someone to come in and say "I'm passionate about this. This is really interesting." Two months later, all a kid is going to remember is "Some person came in, they were called a computer scientist, and I think it was kind of cool what happened. I can't remember what it was exactly. Something about cards, or numbers, or something." Realistically, that's probably what the case is gonna be. But as kids get more experiences, and as they get deeper and deeper learning, they start to discover their own passion.
+
+And of course, the other side of it too, particularly with school, is that the goal is not that everyone becomes a programmer or a computer scientist, but simply that people get the opportunity to find out what it really is. Again, this is kind of retro-fitted, but over the years what I've discovered is that as a university lecturer, particularly the women who get through our courses, at the end of it talking to them over and over I hear this story that they got in by accident... They say "Look, all through high school there's no way I wanted to be seen dead with computer scientists. Everyone knew that it was a social suicide to be a computer scientist, and so on." And then they accidentally got into it and they said "It is so cool! Why didn't someone tell me how cool this is?!"
+
+So the question is "How do you communicate this to young people that, for some of them, it's so cool?" And also vice-versa, because I think some kids get into computer science because it's got 'computer' in the name, or programming because it uses computers... And they love computers; they love playing games, they love watching stuff on computers and so on... And we get this - they turn up and they go "So when do we start writing games?" by which they mean "When do we start playing computer games?"
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Exactly.
+
+**Tim Bell:** \[32:08\] And we go, "Well, we'll teach you a whole other stuff so you can write secure online games, with multi-users, and all that sort of stuff, sure" and they go "Well, that's not really what I signed up for."
+
+I'm personally quite happy if it actually helps a few people to go "Oh, maybe it's not quite my thing. Maybe I should get a job as a game tester, or something different." But just to help people find their way. I think a lot of the point of education is just to help kids find their passion, figure out what they really want to do in life, rather than just fill their heads with lots of information, as well.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Maybe a topic that -- this is something that came up actually in this post-conversation that started my journey to understand CS Unplugged... It was this concern of children, or young adults or anybody 18 or younger getting into computers too soon, because "You'll spend the rest of your life on one; that's the way of our world. Eventually, you'll have this." Obviously, they're gonna have iPhones these days, but essentially saying "Let's not get them in there too early." What are your thoughts on that, Tim? Is it too early? Obviously, you're going with the Unplugged version, so you're not requiring a computer, but it certainly would eventually lead to one, which might just be getting them onto a computer, onto a device sooner rather than maybe later?
+
+**Tim Bell:** Yeah, yeah. I mean, we do sort of see the Unplugged stuff is kind of a gateway drug... But I think a lot of it is about balance. Parents are rightly concerned about screen time, but again, we have to think "Are kids on computers consuming and being a user, or are they there creating and thinking, and so on?" And even with programming, if a kid is writing programs and creating things, there's quite different things happening in their minds than if they're sitting there watching stuff or playing things and so on.
+
+That's one of the things about computers - the same device can be so many different things to different people... So that's one element of it. But I think because it does take time on task, and also, you know, when I was talking about trying to get kids -- the main thing about getting pre-teens involved is that once they become teenagers, the hormones kick in, and particularly with young women, their opinions in general will depend a little bit more on what their friends think than what they actually think is cool. So they might actually quite enjoy something, but friends have a lot of influence through the teen years. Whereas with pre-adolescent kids, if it's cool, it's cool. They just get in and do it. That's one of the reasons that we do wanna start young.
+
+But absolutely, there needs to be a balance. And of course, there's physical issues - posture... Sitting in a bean bag, typing all the time is probably not great for your bone system, so kids need to learn about those sort of balances. But I think one of the things with Unplugged is -- and by the way, I think it's best used in schools alternated with stuff on the screen; it's not like "Do five years of Unplugged and then finally get onto the screen." It would be "Do a bit of stuff Unplugged, and a little bit of stuff on the screen", and so on. It's just keeping it in balance.
+
+A lot of our activities do involve a lot of running around, like physically running around on the playground, if you can; we mark up big things with chalk, and following lines, and that sort of stuff. And I thought that once you do it once, that's enough, but kids love doing this stuff over and over, and we've come up with lots of variations and different ways it can be used.
+
+\[35:53\] So the kids actually come in out of breath, sort of blood flowing through their system, and their brain is operating, and then we say "Right, now get on the computer and do this." And so just physically, it actually seems a lot better anyway, but also, you've really gotta get that balance between what are you using the computer for... I think more and more the computer of course is being used for education as well, not matter what you're teaching. If you're teaching math, or English, or science, or whatever, it's very tempting to say "We'll just go on the computer and work through these exercises, or watch these videos, or look through this website." Sort of ironically, it's probably not the computer science classes that are giving kids all the screen time, but it actually may be other ones.
+
+There are schools around the place who have gone paperless. Every kid has a device, and they can do everything, and it's the way of the future, and maybe that's okay, but the whole point is how do we balance physical activity, social activity and the so-called screentime, which I think needs to be broken down into different types of screen time.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, screen time is a big deal... Do you get involved with -- I mean, since you're a professor and you're an educator... Very schooled, basically, is what I'm saying; you're a very smart person... Have you ever gotten into or dabbled in any research around brain neuroplasticity, neurobiology in your studies? Do you ever do it for fun, or just read a book?
+
+**Tim Bell:** Not seriously at all, but it's obviously a concern that comes up. I think a lot of the science around that is still not well understood, and obviously, there are very passionate advocates in both directions as well, in terms of whether it's good or bad, and so on. And I think, like a lot of things, we'll eventually figure out that it's about moderation, and doing things sensibly, and all that kind of stuff.
+
+And of course, there are concerns from the past about the fact that if it was an actual CRT screen, then you've actually got radiation directected straight at you and that sort of stuff. There's a whole lot of concerns. I think even Wi-Fi, for example - that's a strong radio signal that's floating around, and there's a lot of it...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's true, and you can't avoid it. It is there.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's surging through my body as we speak, right now.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I like the fact that you've got all this activity though, which is certainly great. I was just curious, since your focus is on the younger generation with this particular thing, if you had ever looked at the ramifications on the brain. That's obviously the thing that controls us. Brain science folks - they are really big on screen time and the limitations of it, and how our society and brains have actually changed because of being a far more technological, screen time society... I was just curious.
+
+Maybe the more important thing to kind of dive into would be -- rewinding back at your story with not getting published, and it kind of stagnated for a bit, then got picked up... The idea of K12 schools using this - what's the state of that? Is this widespread? Is this curriculum being used in places? What's the state of this actually in school systems?
+
+**Tim Bell:** Unplugged in particular - we always see it as a supplement, or as a pedagogical technique. It's a part of it, so it's not a curriculum in itself. It's a bit like peer programming, or using Python, or something like that. You wouldn't say, "Okay, our entire curriculum is built around -- we're gonna teach Java." And in fact, that's one of the important things - we don't teach Java; hopefully, we teach programming using Java, or using Python, or using Scratch, or whatever it is.
+
+\[39:57\] "So what are you trying to teach?" Well, we're trying to teach programming, we're trying to teach computational thinking. "And how are you gonna do it?" Well, one of the tools is Unplugged, one of the tools is writing programs... And there's other tools: watching videos of people, and all sorts of things like that, and using a mixture of those.
+
+It seems to have become quite popular in that kind of role. It's been translated into about 25 languages. There was a period where just about every month I'd get an email from a different country saying "Can I translate it?" The answer is "Yeah, it's Creative Commons, you can do anything you want with it, actually", although we usually provide a bit of support. So it's very widely used around the world, and I what I've found is that as curricula appear in schools, people very quickly latch onto this for the reasons we're talking about it... It helps the teachers to get involved. And once people start using it, they actually see the engagement of the kids.
+
+One of my favorite quotes is from a teacher in Japan who said "Now I see the children's faces, instead of the back of their computer screens." It's a way to really get kids thinking.
+
+I've found when I get invited into a school - a couple of times I've been invited in and people have said "Oh, the computer guy is coming in", so they've put me in a computer lab, which is about the worst space for doing the Unplugged stuff, because you need lots of empty space, and get kids thinking.
+
+Whenever I've been put in a lab with students, it's like there's rubber bands from their fingers to the keyboard. They come in, and the model they have is "This guy from the university is gonna say something boring for ten minutes, so we'll ignore that, and then he's gonna give us something we have to type, so we'll type that and then we'll be done." And it's so hard to get -- you say "Okay, everyone, what do you think is happening up here?" and they're kind of going "Yeah, I'm just busy ignoring you... What do we have to type? Come on..."
+
+So it's actually a great thing to do out of the normal setting, which actually also means that it's quite good for improvising. It's also great when the data projector dies -- I don't know how many seminars you've been to where people spend ten minutes trying to get the data projector going, or something... \[laughter\] For me, that's actually a big bonus, because I just go "Well, actually this makes my point. Alright, everyone, I want some volunteers... Let's try this."
+
+In terms of how it's used around the place, it does seem to have been quite useful for getting teachers on board, and officials, actually... A couple of times, including -- I had this experience myself, actually. I was speaking in Wellington, our capital city, to a group of officials. And one of the things I tend to do is I like to do stuff and then talk about it, so rather than saying "We should be teaching our students about algorithms and programming, and things like that" and the officials are going "Yeah, yeah. They're big words, they must be important." I actually just jump in and say "Okay, I'd like some of you to pretend to be eight-year-olds. Could you stand up in the front and do this with me?" Then they sit down and we say "Okay, that was an algorithm" or "That was data." People talk about digital technology, and you say "Those were the digits. That's what digital technology is - just digits being manipulated", and you can see the light go on.
+
+One time I was doing this, and almost randomly our minister of education turned up unexpectedly. She volunteered and got up the front and did these things and so on, and afterwards she was saying "That's really cool! We should be teaching this in schools." Certain officials gloss over the surface and they say "The businesses are telling us we should do this" or "The teachers are telling us we should do it, so maybe we'll do it one day", but in five minutes you can actually do some computer science with them that's meaningful, and they can see the education in it, and they can see the thought processes, and they can see it's appropriate for kids, and all that.
+
+\[44:13\] Several times I've either had a first-hand experience or heard other people who have actually had officials get quite excited when they realized it's something understandable, rather than something mysterious that could be done to kids.
+
+**Break:** \[44:32\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Tim, we talked a little bit about one of the algorithms, the searching algorithm lesson with the cups... I have tons of questions. I have children of my own and I'm trying to teach them certain things; I'm trying to get them into computer science, and I've the Hour of Code and I've done a few things, and nothing has quite stuck yet, mostly because they wanna make video games, and that's really hard. But this looks awesome for them; they love puzzles, and games, and lots of stuff... But I struggle to even just describe certain things to them. I feel like I'm too close to it, or maybe I'm just too bad at describing these things.
+
+I've had the question "What is data, dad?" and I'm just like "Um, okay... What do we do here?" and I start talking about music, or pictures that you've made... Anyways. I won't tell you how I describe it, because it's not very good, but help us out with -- in addition to how to search things, what are the other aspects of the topics that CS Unplugged has in its curriculum that you think are foundational to teaching kids computer science, and maybe give some examples of how it goes about teaching those things... And then, how do you describe data to kids?
+
+**Tim Bell:** There's kind of two ways. One is that the Unplugged thing kind of dives in heard first and covers a lot of broad areas of computer science that you might not think you'd expose kids to. One of the things Mike Fellows was doing is he'd just say "What are my post-grad students doing? I'll go and do that with 6-year-olds, but I'll try and think of a way to explain it to them." So we have things like finite-state automata, formal languages, a lot of computational problems that are intractable, just to get the idea there's stuff that computers can't do, that sort of thing.
+
+But when it comes down to it, and we've had to think about this hard when we're designing curricula for school, is that computers really only do a couple of things - they store data, as you pointed out, and they apply algorithms to your data, and the way you apply an algorithm is you write a program to implement the algorithm. Essentially, you can boil it down into understanding algorithms, data and programming. We're a bit more focused on algorithms and data.
+
+\[48:06\] Of course, the simplest form of data is binary numbers. And again, people will say "Kids don't really need to know binary numbers" and in fact, if you ask anyone involved in technical computing, they probably haven't converted a binary number for years, but they do need to know the difference between a 16-bit and an 8-bit representation, or 1024-bit security and the fact that a 1025-bit security would be twice as good, and things like that when we're dealing with binary numbers. So it's the patterns in them that matter more than just knowing how to convert numbers... But it is kind of fun.
+
+One of the activities - one of the early ones that was developed, and it's a real hit - is, to get kids engaged with binary numbers, get about five cards and put dots on the cards. So the first card has one dot on one side, the next one has two dots, and the next one has four dots; it corresponds to the binary digits. And the rule is simply the card is either upside down and you can see the dot, or you can see the dot.
+
+So you lay these out on the table, and the challenge to the student is I want exactly 11 dots visible. You might need to basically say "So this card with the 16 dots - do you want that visible?" and they'll say "No, because it's too many." The one with 8 - they'll look at it and they'll go "Well, should I take the 8 dots?" If they look at the rest of them, they'll see that there's only seven left. "I wanted 11 dots, so yup, I'll have to take the 8." "Do you want the one with the 4 dots?" "No, that would be too many." "Do you want the one with 2?" "Yes." "The 1?" "Yes."
+
+And then just to point out to the student - what they've said is "No. Yes. No. Yes. Yes", which is communicating a number only by saying yes and no. And that's the whole point of binary, of course; we only need to store two different values. And why do we do it? Is it because people are just geeky, or it's a secret code, or something like that? Well, the reason is much simpler - it's just easy to build stuff that stores two values.
+
+Sometimes I'll ask them to do the multiplication table; you know zero times zero, zero times one, one times zero, one times one, and we stop there and we say "That is the entire binary multiplication table." Often, kids will go "Oh, can we just use that one? That's so much better than the one we have to memorize..." \[laughter\] But it kind of makes the point about why it would be easier to build a machine that works in binary.
+
+But the activity itself is just full of questions you can then ask, like "What's the lowest number?" and the kids will yell out "Oh, one." Then they'll think about it and go "No, it's zero!" The fact that most programming languages count from zero kind of ties back to the fact that the easiest number to represent is zero, the lowest number.
+
+And what's the biggest number, and there's all sorts of patterns there, like it's one less than the next bit, and all sorts of things like that... And adding one bit doubles the range, and whatnot.
+
+There's endless follow-up activities, but the other one is to use different representations... Kids can use sound - high and low notes, which of course ends up basically being a modem... And by the way, on the website, if you dig deep enough, we've actually got some songs that have got high and low notes in them, and if you decode them, they've got messages hidden in them...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Nice.
+
+**Tim Bell:** The point is, if you're only allowed two things, you can represent anything. Quite often I'll say "Look, I'll tell you what month I was born in" and it's "No. Yes. No. Yes. No." They think about it, and they go "Oh, it was October" and suddenly they realize that I've actually represented a month of the year. Then we can represent a letter of the alphabet as a number, and so on. Here might jump in and try and use ASCII code, but it's actually better that they come up with the code... Because the point is nobody needs to know ASCII or Unicode or something like that particularly. Many people have memorized it, but... It's just the idea that as long as I've got a number for every letter, then I can represent letters of the alphabet. Then you can ask them "How would you represent a color, or a sound?" and so on. It goes on endlessly.
+
+So that's an example of one of the activities where with just basically five cards with a few dots on them we've suddenly explained a lot of very fundamental stuff that's going on within a computer.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[52:33\] Absolutely. And at even a more basic level, for certain kids, depending on the age - as I see, on binary numbers that age is 5 to 10... So definitely at this point even introducing them to the thought that they are non ten-based number systems is hugely mind-expanding. I remember when I was a kid, and where I first learned there were negative numbers I had like a breakdown... Like, a good breakdown. I was like "Holy cow!" My whole world just expanded.
+
+So kind of going back to the idea of teaching this computational thinking and really the advantage of having this in school rooms for everybody, not just for people who are going to be programmers, is that you're expanding their mind and teaching them brand new ways of thinking, right?
+
+**Tim Bell:** Yeah, and I think that's a great example of engaging kids who might not have otherwise wanted to be engaged in this whole thing - they start seeing these patterns, and so on. And certainly, learning another number system - it's like learning a second language; you learn so much about your first language when you learn a second language. So just trying to get kids to think about things differently...
+
+I think also the other thing I found with binary - particularly for adults - the word "binary" is often that mysterious thing that only the elite could possibly ever know. They see it as used in the context of "The super secret stuff that I could never understand" and when ten minutes playing with a few cards and they completely get it and they completely see the power of it and so on - it kind of just shatters all of those walls that might have been between people and getting involved in this stuff, particularly for teachers and for senior citizens I've worked with, and so on... They just go "Oh, is that all it is? It's something that a human can understand!" \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Versus a superhuman... Yeah, I'm not sure exactly what it is that is the intimidation, but there's definitely an intimidation of "That's just for somebody that's super smart, was somehow born with this knowledge and they get it", and that's just not the case. In a lot of cases, it's curiosity and unraveling the onion, you know, by a career. You spend your whole career doing that, not just a little bit of time and suddenly you're an expert. You're always chiseling away at being an expert. You never really -- I guess you probably are at some point, but the point is that you're always learning.
+
+**Tim Bell:** Exactly, and I think a lot of it is time on task... Again, sometimes the people who become experts are simply the people who have been attracted to it one way or the other, and get drawn into it and spend a lot of time on it, and they don't notice the time going past; they don't realize how much they've learned about it. So drawing people in I think is a key part of it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** This reminds me of a funny story from when I was at university, with regard to number systems. I had a computer science professor who was, let's just say, harsh... Kind of scary. I learned a lot from him, so I don't begrudge him in this, but he had office hours and everybody was very intimidated to go in and ask questions, because he would be very hard on you. One time I had finally got the guts to take my question -- because you wanted to make sure your question was good before you asked it, and I was like "I'm pretty sure I'm stuck and I can't get through this; I'm gonna go ask him a thought. I've tried all the obvious stuff."
+
+\[56:06\] I'm walking up to his office, and there was a student in there before me, and the door was cracked, so I could hear what was happening. There was a loud smash as a book hit the wall, and I heard him say "If you can't think in base-8, you can't be a programmer!" \[laughs\] The kid walked out (well, kid - he was the same age as me)... The young person walked out completely defeated, and I was sitting in the chair to go in next, and I'm thinking "I don't know how to think in base-8. I can't be a programmer..." and I just turned around and left.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What a bummer, dude...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It was... He was kind of perpetuating that myth, of like "You have to be this brilliant -- be able to just change the way you think about numbers in your head, or you can't be a programmer." I guess I'm still a programmer to this day... I still can't think in base-8, so I think he was wrong.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Good job, Jerod.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Tim Bell:** One of the gurus in computer education, Seymour Papert, talks about a low floor and a high ceiling. So you want a low floor when kids turn up... That professor was sitting at a very high floor; you have to be, at least to this point, before--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** He was...
+
+**Tim Bell:** And I guess a lot of what we're talking about here, whether it's a programming language for kids or whatever, is that low floor where they get some instant achievement, and it's not hours and hours of study before they even see the point of it. But the high ceiling says "By the way, we can keep pushing this as far as you want. It's not just a little one-off activity that can't go anywhere."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So in terms of topics, there's binary numbers that you talked about, you talked about searching algorithms... We'll just list a few more - you have kid bots, and there's 50 different challenges in that. Sorting, error detection and correction... You all have put lots of time in this, and if you check out the website, there's a classic version, and this new version... As you said, these are things that you've been honing and changing and optimizing over the years. Tell us about CS Unplugged in the meta sense. Who's working on it with you, what have you been doing through the years? And we already asked a little bit, like what primary schools are -- has this gotten into schools? It sounds like it has, but maybe not in like a formalized way. Like, we use the CS Unplugged curriculum because, like you said, it's more of an adjunct or an attachment to other things... But tell us how you're interacting with educators and making CS Unplugged better for them?
+
+**Tim Bell:** You mentioned the classic site, and that's the one that we had up to about a year ago. It was aimed more at people who were already involved in the industry, or academics, and so on, and assumed that you kind of knew what it was about... But it said "This is how you could break it down for kids." And it's got quite a few activities on it, covering a big range of computer science.
+
+Has it got into schools? We were really fortunate to get funding actually from Google and Microsoft. Both independently approached us and said "Look, this seems to be widely used. We'd like to see it grow. It's great that it's open source. Can we just support your?" I actually got an email from Microsoft saying "Hey, congratulations. We've decided to give you some money", which I almost deleted, of course... \[laughter\] But it was for real.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Like one of those forwards where Bill Gates is gonna give away his fortune? One of those things that people used to forward around...
+
+**Tim Bell:** Exactly. So there's a branch of Microsoft called Microsoft Philanthropies; they actually support a lot of organizations, reaching out to kids in all sorts of different situations all around the world, and they had found that a lot of people were reporting to them that they were using Unplugged.
+
+One of the troubles with Unplugged - you don't go online and use it. You download it, print it out and then you never go back. We don't get to see who's using it, although one of the best ways we've discovered recently is just the Twitter feed, \#CSUnplugged. Following that, just every day, a different language or a different country, someone pops up saying "I've been using this." It's a good way of tracking it.
+
+\[01:00:12.02\] But until a couple years ago, Unplugged was me and a couple of students who happened to be doing projects on it, or something like that... But we've actually now grown to probably 3 or 4 full-time people who are working on different aspects of it, although a lot of this is now sort of driven towards creating -- you'd think we'd be creating more and more new activities, but actually people want the same thing repackaged differently for primary schools. Then there's a version of it which is not totally Unplugged, but it's called The Computer Science Field Guide, which is aimed more at high schools, and it's aimed but at the students.
+
+The Unplugged stuff is written for the teacher, it says "This is how you could teach it", with lesson plans and so on. The Computer Science Field Guide is aimed more at the student, saying "You're a teenager. Here's some stuff that will help you understand some of the big ideas in computer science." There's video, there's stuff to read, there's examples and online stuff that they can interact with. If any of your listeners want a quick taste of that, one of the fun things to go into - we were talking about data before - there's a chat room in the Field Guide on data representation, and it's got an interactive element where you can drop your own photo and zoom in, but instead of sort of blurring it or limiting it when you zoom in, it actually goes right down to the pixels and shows you the numbers that represent those pixels, the RGB values.
+
+It sounds quite simple, but it's quite an a-ha moment for a lot of people, where they go "Hang on, that's a digital photograph... It's made of digits! Who would have thought...?" So it's got lots of interactives like that, and we're busy preparing those sort of things... But a lot of introductory stuff, just explaining to teachers what this is about, why they should care about it, how it affects the real world.
+
+So we have quite a reasonable-sized group working on that, and then within New Zealand we've got a new curriculum in schools for this stuff, and we are also doing a lot of work to support local teachers. We've got tens of thousands of primary school teachers in New Zealand that we are helping to get up to speed with this new curriculum, and so on.
+
+It's a lot of fun, but it's a big job and it's just for one country. We're equivalent to the size of one state of the U.S. There's a lot of work to be done around the place, and helping people get up to speed in this area.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So you mentioned these independent sponsorships - Google, Microsoft, and then the U.C. Computer Science Education... Is that the university that you work at?
+
+**Tim Bell:** Yeah. In fact, that's the name of my research group.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Gotcha, gotcha.
+
+**Tim Bell:** While we have the people that develop it, there's actually a lot of volunteers contributing to it as well. Until not long ago, it was entirely voluntary... But even to this day, of course, a lot of students who work on it are effectively paying us to work on it, because they're doing it as part of their study, and so on. So over the years, there have been dozens and dozens of people who have contributed to it in one way or another.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Do those sponsorships come with any strings attached? Do you have to write reports back, or are those just completely -- like, the funds are up for you to use however you see fit, or how does that work?
+
+**Tim Bell:** They're very open, and one of the key things is that all of the material that we develop is Creative Commons, it's available for people to use. They help us with a little bit of a direction, because obviously -- I mean, their goal is not to advertise the company in particular, but simply to grow the expertise. Of course, at the moment we have a desperate shortage of people who have this expertise, and we know that there are people who would be good at it who are missing out because they don't get involved, so... It makes sense just to support schools and to support the system.
+
+\[01:04:09.11\] The Creative Commons license also just really frees things up for teachers a lot, because they're not worried that they'll get a bill for it, or that they'll get a copyright infringement, or something like that. They can just download it, they can copy it, they can republish it on the school's website if they want, print it out, they can edit it if they want to change things...
+
+Recently, we even removed the non-commercial restriction, because we've found a lot of people were coming to us and saying "Well, I run an after-school class and parents pay $10/session to come along, and I'm using your material and I'm making money out of it. Is that fair? Is that in the spirit of the license?" and so on. Or people would be putting together kits of equipment ready to go, and selling it... Anyway, we thought long and hard about it, but we removed the non-commercial restriction, which means, theoretically, people could sell it for whatever they want, but of course, given that it's available for free online, your reputation wouldn't be so good.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's not a good business model.
+
+**Tim Bell:** No, no. But it does just make everything a lot easier. In some countries, teachers much prefer to buy a published book than download something off the web and things like that, so it frees it up that someone could translate it and publish it as a book, and that's fine... And often, when people have done that, they've given us donations back to support the work that we're doing. It all works out really well.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** How much of your time goes into this? The forty you work each week - if you work forty, how much goes into this?
+
+**Tim Bell:** Probably about 45 hours.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, okay...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Out of forty... \[laughs\]
+
+**Tim Bell:** I do have a day job, I do teach as well, but at the moment, with all the curriculum change happening around the world, there's a huge amount of interest, so I'm spending a lot of time traveling around New Zealand and just working with people in New Zealand on this... But also, I guess over the last five years, there's been a lot of international interest, and as people have developed curricula, I get an email saying "Hey, would you fly over and talk to us about this, and help us to work out what we should be doing locally, and so on?" So it's actually involved quite a bit of travel as well, which I quite enjoy, so that's fine...
+
+We're just at a point in history, I think, where -- you know, 20 years ago when we were developing this, Mike Fellows especially would go to schools and they'd just shake their heads and say "This is never gonna happen", and now we finally got to this point where schools all over the world, and school systems, and countries are saying "How do we do this? This is really important. We have to get into it." So it's kind of been a 20-year dream, and finally we're at a point that we didn't even imagine that we would be at sometimes... So it's kind of neat that it's all happening at the moment.
+
+I think in a few years hopefully everything will settle down and people will know what they're doing, and it will just be a natural part of society, and education, and all that sort of thing. Not so much Unplugged, but just the whole idea that we actually empower kids to get involved in the whole area of computing, digital technologies, computational thinking. At that point - yeah, I'll take a day off.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We can't close this show without closing the loop on this one thing that you mentioned early in the show that it was the motivation for you to do this - I'm not even sure what year it was, but you mentioned...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** 1992.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, 1992... Your son was seven, I believe, or five. You did this because your motivation was your children, I'm assuming - your son, and potentially others, but... What's their status in computer science?
+
+**Tim Bell:** So in general we don't get a lot of feedback, but actually a few students have come up to me and said "You know, ten years ago I went to this thing, and that changed my direction", which is amazing.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's awesome.
+
+**Tim Bell:** \[01:08:12.20\] I have two sons who have grown up with this entire thing happening around them all the time. The 31-year-old basically runs the recording studio; his entire life is digital, of course... He just produces bits and puts them on the web, but he has ended up doing a lot programming and stuff, it's what he does, but his career is in music, which is fantastic. My wife is a music teacher, so as he went through and did a music degree and so on, she kind of put a little "1-0" on the refrigerator.
+
+Then our second son went through and he did a music degree as well, so it was sort of 2-0 at one state, but at the end of it -- and I think one of the problems... You know, children of people who do a particular area, they make a decision "I don't wanna be like that. Just because my dad does it, I shouldn't have to do it...", but he ended up doing a little bit of programming at the end of his music degree and got so interested in it (finally) that he did an entire computer science degree and now he works as a software engineer... So it's actually now 1-0.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So it was worth it...
+
+**Tim Bell:** Yeah...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right? I mean, you're changing the world obviously outside of your own family, but to see the dividends pay direct - that's awesome.
+
+**Tim Bell:** It has been good, but the thing that really means a lot to me is when I particularly see kids that would have been excluded, and I'm particularly thinking of women and people from other cultures who don't see themselves as part of that - when they get really engaged and are really enjoying it...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Absolutely.
+
+**Tim Bell:** And then they close the loop, because they go "I need to help you with this stuff, because we need to get into schools and get more girls involved, and get more people like me involved", and it's just neat seeing that feedback loop happening, and that it's just so genuine. It's like "This is a cool career, and I really want to share it with other people."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Let me give you this one here too, because a part of that conversation that spurred me learning about this in the first place was because I was concerned how I can share this with my daughter and my niece, who I very much care for, and they're both very smart in this direction, they just need that a-ha moment, the spark... And I'm like "How do I...?" I don't even know the things that I need to know. I'm that would-be teacher, to some degree, so I was like "What kind of resources are for me to hand to or guide through my daughter and my niece?" That was my motivation.
+
+My son could do it as well, and that's part of it too, but my thoughts were on those two, because they're so skilled with it, but there's no clear on-ramp for young girls.
+
+**Tim Bell:** Yeah. And of course, the other thing that's I think is really important -- I mean, we don't want everyone to become a computer programmer, it would be a very boring world, but it's important that young people understand this digital world that they're growing up in, and there's gonna be more and more happening to them and around them, with AI and privacy, and all the algorithms that make decisions for us and things like that, where even just a little bit of understanding of what these things might actually be, rather than just something mysterious that the technocrats have to sort out for us, then that's empowering them as a member of society to function well anyway.
+
+\[01:11:31.08\] So I'm perfectly happy if people learn this stuff and either go "Well, that may be useful when I'm campaigning against some particular thing or for some particular thing", or even "Well, I'm glad I know what it is, because I definitely don't like it." \[laughs\] But hopefully, more and more we are getting people to go "Actually, that's a lot more interesting. There's a place for me at this table."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Any words of advice to the educators? Let's say someone's listening to this and they're thinking "Man, I'm not an educator, but I know somebody; I've got kids I wanna influence" - any advice or any first steps for them to take with using Unplugged, or even the Field Guide?
+
+**Tim Bell:** I think the key thing is to let the kids do the thinking. Remember, the goal isn't - particularly for younger kids - that they know all this stuff, the goal is that they engage with it. It's called constructivism, where the kids construct the knowledge themselves. So you just say "Okay, here's a small challenge. How would you do this? What's happening here? How's that working?" and give them time to think about it; let them give the wrong answers, let them reflect on the wrong answers, let them come to the right answer with a bit of help. It's very much about letting them explore it, so that they're kind of empowered to go "Oh, I actually worked out how that works", rather than "Okay, I've been given a whole lesson of exactly what to do, and now I can do the thing they wanted me to be able to do."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Tim, it's been fun going on this lane with you. I'm very appreciative of your motivation for your sons, and obviously, the payout for the rest of the world as part of it. This 20-year journey for you, and Mike, and the rest of the team I'm sure is just profound, because you know, it was a happy accident at first, and now it's just lighting things on fire, so people are excited about it.
+
+Thank you for your work, and your motivations toward this, and obviously, sharing it freely, and even allowing people money if they need to to do the work to educate children.
+
+**Tim Bell:** You're very welcome. Thanks for the chance to share.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Thank you, Tim.
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+**Jerod Santo:** Zed, we invited you on to talk about somewhat of an epic Twitter rant you went on back in April... But now looking at your Twitter, it looks like you have it on private mode; are you on hiatus? What's going on with your Twitter feed?
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Yeah, yeah. Well, I have two Twitter feeds. I have the one that's just kind of me ranting about stuff, and then I have another one that's for my books... Like the "Mr. professional author of books", I teach people.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Living two lives.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Yeah, living two lives, just like a serial killer. \[laughter\] So what I did is I put that one on private just for a little while, just to see if it changes the way I say things. Also, just sort of like because I feel there's a lot of people who follow that Twitter feed, and then they're sort of like "It's a different tone than the book feed." So I'd rather have them follow the book feed... Because the book feed is low volume, much more positive, upbeat... And then my personal feed is me; it's my personal life and things I do. I kind of want to separate the two for a while.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's so funny that you're like that though...
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Yeah. I mean, I think everyone's like that, I'm just honest about it. \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, I'll give you that... To some degree.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It looks useful.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Yeah, you look at all these people who are like "Oh yeah, I'm Mr. Sensitive and I do all these things and I really love humanity", and then you find out that no, they're actually giant pieces of crap. Yeah, I'm just honest about it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You just wear it.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Yeah, I mean, I'm not a bad person, but I have no problem speaking my mind, speaking out about things that I seem to think affect other people, or myself, talking about my personal life... Things like that. And it's not like I have some weird personal life; it's pretty boring.
+
+And then there's also -- a lot of that personal account is a lot of art. I do a lot of painting, and I think that doesn't mix for a lot of people. I think there's a lot of people who follow me for the painting, and I'd like to have those separate. I can put some paintings out, I can do a lot more talking about art, things like that, keep it private, and then direct people towards the more professional book, programmer-oriented things.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[04:10\] See, I appreciate that, because I'm a long-time Twitter user, and we could probably just talk about the platform and the medium for an hour and call it a show, but we don't necessarily wanna do that... But while we're here, thinking about channels and segments of people -- I follow a lot of people that will say, like, you know... And I completely respect this take they have, but it's like "You get all of me. You're gonna get my software side, you're gonna get my personal side, you're gonna get all these things", and that's fine, but as a reader, as a person who's there... There's people that -- maybe I don't care about Zed's art, for example; just throwing that out there. So you're actually splitting those out for people; it's kind of a public service in certain ways, for those that just want this type of a thing.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Exactly, exactly. And also, you know, my books are targeted at beginners and they're trying to learn to code, so I think it's kind of not right if I'm also in there ranting about how terrible the industry is, and causing disillusion in people.
+
+I am very honest in my books; I do say the job is not that great. It pays well, but it's not like the greatest job in the world... So it's not like I'm lying, but I'm also sort of being like "Well, there's some issues in the industry, but for now, if you wanna learn to code, just focus on learning to code. Don't look at all that other stuff."
+
+So my private account - I'm just gonna keep it private for a little while, and just basically talk and be myself (like I always do), but then sort of shield people who are just poor, normal folks who don't really care about the programming industry and just wanna learn to code... They can go over to the other one, and I'll be all nice, and "This is the programming side." \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You think people are getting into programming for the wrong reasons?
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Not necessarily. Everyone wants a job, right? Unless you're independently wealthy and you don't care, most people want a job, so it's reasonable. Like, if you see people making lots of money programming, of course you're gonna wanna go into it for programming and to make money. But I think it's more that they're putting the cart before the horse. I think they're worried very much about how they're gonna get a job before they even know how to code.
+
+My thing is always like "Don't worry about that, just focus on coding. Get your coding done, get that out of the way, and then worry about how you can get a job, when you know you can actually code."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So you're the author of multiple books, like you said, for beginners - Learn Python the Hard Way, Learn Ruby the Hard Way - and had been an author of many open source libraries down through the ages... I guess we can say ages now, because internet time, right? So we had you on the Changelog episode \#34, which I guess makes Adam and it makes us feel old, because that's 2010...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Really old.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** ... so it might make you feel old. Maybe not. But that was back talking about Mongrel, Mongrel 2... A long time ago; it feels like ancient history to me. Catch us up on your books, what you've been up to, and really -- don't give us like a deep history necessarily of everything between now and then, but just to introduce the audience to the context you have with...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** With open source.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** With open source and with teaching people software and the industry at large.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** I think the best description of my position in the industry is someone once said "I'm the most famous a programmer can get without being a billionaire." \[laughter\] Right? Because I'm poor. I try to be very honest, and I've told people --
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You are not poor.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** No, I mean, compared to a lot of the other programmers...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Relatively poor.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** \[07:44\] Yeah, yeah. Not now, but there was a period of time when I was actually homeless, and trying to work as a programmer in open source... I'm honest about this thing. So it's funny, because I kind of like that description, because it's sort of like saying "Yeah, if you wanna be famous and actually successful, then you kind of don't wanna be a programmer. You wanna be a founder, and start a company." But also, it's sort of -- yeah, it summarizes it; I'll own that. I'm about as famous as you can get without actually running a giant billion dollar company. I don't know if that's actually accurate, but whatever; I'll go for it.
+
+And then I think the other thing about it is when we did that in 2010 I was kind of on the cusp of kind of coming to this realization that open source really wasn't the best way to move forward with my career, and I think it was right about the time when I started really pushing my books forward and started changing my career from being the guy who made all this software to the guy who teaches people how to make software. That's been the big shift for me; I shifted out of -- I took that fame that was really not doing much for me as far as an open source developer, and my skills at teaching, that I kind of just stumbled on... You know, I wouldn't say I was an expert already, but... I turned that into a new career as an educator; I teach people how to learn to code, how to pick up new skills, things like that. I do a lot of live teaching now... And that's sort of been my direction. And then on the side with that, I've been doing a lot of painting. I love art, I'm doing painting now.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So aside from the obvious answer "Read my books", if you were to take somebody, a smart person who is not a programmer, and turn them into one, what's the happiest path in your opinion and in your experience from zero to employable? You say maybe not focus on employment right away, but to let's call it "proficient programmer", what's the best way today?
+
+**Zed Shaw:** So I think it's totally fine for people to get work; that's totally one of the motivations. But I try to say "Look, if you're focused on work, you're gonna miss out on the process of learning and building your skills." So I tell people, going from zero to being proficient. Proficient means you can sit down on your own, and have an idea, and turn that idea into a working piece of software - maybe not a pretty piece of software... Because I think pretty and beautiful and all that is sort of very subjective, right?
+
+And I tell folks, you don't have to read my books, because I don't have a book for every language, or every skill... I tell people, just take any book and sort of do it the way my books do it. Take the books, get all the code working, then read about the code in the book... Because I think most books are actually written backwards, where they talk a whole bunch, and then show you a little bit of code, and it's way easier to get the code to work, and just sort of get it up and running, and then go read what they say about the code, because you get to see the whole thing in action and it's a lot easier to understand it.
+
+So a lot of times, I tell people, like let's say you wanna learn Go. I don't do anything with Go, I don't really have any plans for it... So they'll email me and say "Do you have a Go book?" I'm like, "No, but take this book. It seems to be really popular on Amazon", and it kind of doesn't matter; just get all the code working. Then just keep doing that, and getting code working, and understanding it and trying to make it work. It's like learning a language; eventually you'll get pretty good at it. Then go out and either try to make your own little projects and put them out. It's sort of like a demonstration of what you're able to do. Or go find someone else - and this is the thing I advocate a lot - find some open source project and go in there and fix bugs; find the simplest bugs, and slowly just keep squashing bugs. That's all you do. Don't make any new features, don't add anything to it, just squash bugs.
+
+So far, that seems to work for folks. I'm saying, you don't have to read my books, but if you go through a bunch of books and get the code working and then go and squash bugs, that's a pretty good path.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[11:54\] That's interesting too, because there's so many open source projects out there that are now -- we've talked about it on this show, and other shows, talking about how do you flag and give somebody an on-ramp? There's so many on-ramps out there in open source to easily take that advice and run with it.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Yeah. We're gonna get into it; I've got a love/hate relationship with open source, but I do think fixing bugs is kind of like the bread and butter for a lot of programming, especially entry-level programming. And the easiest place to find bugs to fix is projects that are totally open, and you fix the bug, and you send them the code, and they go "Oh, that's cool. Thank you for fixing the bug." So that's one way to kind of like build up your skills and also get recognition for what you're doing, and kind of build up a resume for what you're working on.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You don't have to ask permission, and no one's gonna turn down a bug fix.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well... \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, not many at least, right? Very few people turn down a bug fix.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** They're less likely to, yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[12:53\] It will merge.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Well, they might have a problem with your code quality, and usually they'll give you feedback; they'll be like "Hey man, you've gotta use these variables like this... Can you redo this one?"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And now you're in code reviewing, you're learning.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Exactly. And actually, I take this a little bit further, because -- you know how you hear about those developers who do an interview where they're like "Can you reverse the red-black tree without using any memory?" and I'm like "That's just the worst interview." Or "Why are manholes round?" Stupid questions. And I'm sort of starting to advocate like, I don't know, like the programmers who seem to have the most value in an organization are the ones who can fix stuff; like, you know how to debug software, you're just super good at fixing things. And for me, I would love to have it where you do your interviews and you hand them broken code, and you say "Fix as many bugs as you can in two hours."
+
+Then you come back and say "Alright, let's see what you did." If they can prove they can squash bugs, that's the kind of employment test I'd be looking for.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's true. Yeah, give them a piece of software and say "Fix some bugs."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Is anybody doing that out there? That seems like almost obvious now that you say it. I know we don't have the whole industry in our heads, but I wonder if we know of any businesses who are actually--
+
+**Zed Shaw:** I know nobody.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Alright.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Nobody. I mean, probably there is. We don't know every industry--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Listeners, if somebody out there is doing that and you know about it, give us a holler or email us.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's every day. I mean, I can't reference any particular tweets, but there's definitely -- as we watch what we do to do Changelog News and this show, Jerod, I see those tweets and I see people say "I can't possibly deal with one more job interview to do what Zed just basically said. I can't do that one more time."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You mean the bad way, or the way he's proposing --
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** In the bad way. Like "I can't go through one more of those scenarios of like 'Why is this that way?' versus saying 'Hey, can you code?' It's like these challenges that have no meaning."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right, right. I mean, is anybody doing it the bug squash way? That's what I meant.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, okay.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** No, no, no.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** If we're missing that one, then jeez, we're not watching... Because that's every day.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Yeah. Everyone has tons of stories where they go and they do a whiteboard, and the guy is like "Can you find a substring in a string?" And you could use a better algorithm, but if you don't do the algorithm that he learned in college, you don't know how to do it. So it's not even if you can do the thing they ask you to do, it's if you know what they know; if you're just like them. I think that's the biggest problem with it.
+
+Sure, it's great - everyone should know algorithms; that's a useful thing to learn. But if the point of algorithms is to make sure that you went to his CS 105 class in MIT, then you're just filtering people based on kind of socio-economic things, not really their skills.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. Experience, things they dealt with.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** But bug fixing is universal. It doesn't matter what programming language it is, it doesn't matter where you come from, where you went to school... If you can't fix bugs, I don't think you can really code. So it's an easy test... You can also do it without making people work for free. So you just point them at an open source project, you say "Fix bugs. That's your job interview", and they fix bugs. It's done for free. It's an easy way to check that they can understand code...
+
+\[16:13\] I think 80% of a programmer's work is fixing bugs. I think if I sit around, most of the time I'm coding it's "Oh, this doesn't work. This doesn't work. This doesn't work. Oh, now it works."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, the rest of the time you're just writing the bugs.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Exactly, yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] So you're not fixing them, you're writing them.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** I'm a professional at that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That could be a different job interview - how many bugs can you write in two hours?
+
+**Zed Shaw:** That would be another one I would do. If I was gonna hire someone for a security job, I would do the opposite. "How many bugs can you hide in this code?" Because then I would know that person - they know their security.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Exactly.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's interesting. I always enjoy -- I'm not sure if you're a fan of Mr. Robot, but that's kind of what I enjoyed about season 1 at least... All this kind of "How do things work?" and just the mind of a hacker and how they would get into or out of systems, and exploits, and how they would use them against somebody... I don't think that way, but I love hearing stories about someone who does.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Yeah. I live in this building with crazy security. They've got fingerprint readers, and all this crazy stuff... And I was getting really tired; they're just like Nazis, man... They're just crazy. They yell and scream at you, which is insane. And I started walking around the building, and I found out that there's back gate that has zero security and is never closed. So I was kind of like "Alright, I'll just start going through the back gate." And it's like a whole other world, and I'm thinking, this is the kind of things that describes software hacking - a lot of times nobody really does anything like Mr. Robot style hacking; most of the times people just forgot to close the back gate and you're just walking through the back gate, and you're just like "Well, okay. I'm gonna take all your Equifax data..."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, exactly. Well, I mean, the most famous hacker/cracker back in the '90s, Kevin Mitnick, he went to jail, and all these things he did... And at the end of the day, what he did most of the time was he just asked people for things; it was all social engineering. Because a lot of the times the humans are the weakest links. You just call and ask "Oh, I forgot my password. Will you reset it to this for me?" and then they just would.
+
+So yeah, security is tough, because you've gotta secure every little aspect. All the surface area has to be secure, but on the other side of the coin, you only have to find one problem.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Exactly, exactly.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's almost not fair.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** I found that there's also a sort of correlation, because if an organization is very insane about security and sort of touting that, usually they seem to be too focused on obvious security, and there's always some really simple side-chain that just gets around it. So it's really interesting... What was that -- there was a bug in Signal recently, where if you just sent someone an HTML document, you could completely own their machine, and everyone touted Signal as the most secure thing ever, and the dude is not even checking HTML documents. And for me, I'm thinking "HTML? No, you don't get that. That is not secure." I'm like "You cannot send HTML. That is the most terrible thing ever. Why would you want HTML?" But to them, they're like "Yeah, sure", and they totally got owned... Twice, I think. Even their fix got owned after that, or something.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow. You said you have a love/hate relationship with open source, and you mentioned -- and I'm not sure if this is a tough spot for you to talk about, but you mentioned being homeless. I'm curious of the relationship of yourself in that timeframe and open source, and maybe what happened. Was it your fault? How did this go down for you?
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Well, yeah... Ultimately, a lot of that is partially your fault, right? I mean, there's decisions that I made that I shouldn't have made. But I think at the same time I had created these projects that all these companies were using, and at the end of the day rather than hire me or get me consulting, they went the complete opposite direction and seemed to go out of their way to tell everyone that my software was terrible.
+
+\[20:18\] Twitter was, I think, the worst for that. They were using Mongrel at the time as an excuse for why their website wouldn't work... And it really had nothing to do with Mongrel. They just were terrible coders, and that's why their website didn't work.
+
+But that basically caught me up and being homeless, combined with a couple other things and bad decisions on my own... But it was nearly impossible for me to find work within the Ruby on Rails open source industry at the time. That sort of taught me really quickly "Don't get involved with these communities that promise you that you're going to get a piece of the pie if you contribute."
+
+After that, I turned all of my projects into "I'm helping the community, not the project." By helping the community, I'm getting some sort of benefit from it - they're buying my books, they're hiring me, doing something like that. That's the big change that came out of it.
+
+But the majority of the thing, like the homelessness for me at the time was basically for about six months I had to sleep on friends' couches and trying to scrounge for work. I didn't have anywhere to live, I didn't have enough money to get an apartment. So when I say "homeless", it's not like I was living on the streets, nothing like that... But it's still sort of like a big distance between what should have happened, which is if my project is being used by these companies, then I should have been receiving some sort of benefit, even if all that was was a job.
+
+There was sort of like this unwritten contract in open source that we had; the unwritten contract with corporations was if you wrote open source that they were using, you got some sort of job, or consulting fees, or at least some respect so that way you could find jobs.
+
+And I think there was also an unwritten contract with communities too, where like if you contribute to the community, you'll get respect and a piece of the pie. I think that was demolished that year. So after that, I just kind of moved on. I started to realize that "No, that contract has completely been rewritten. It's totally different now. If you write open source, you're not gonna get a job", and now what's been happening - and part of my tweet storm and whatnot about open source - is that it's gone the opposite direction, where what I see is sort of like almost direct action to prevent open source developers from making money... Which I find very strange, and I've been trying to think about that a lot lately.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Did the whole Rails is a Ghetto thing happen before or after that?
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Actually, "Rails is a Ghetto" happened after that, as a response to me finding out that a lot of the Ruby on Rails companies were actively going out and preventing me from getting work.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** So this wasn't like I wrote -- actually, writing "Rails is a Ghetto" helped me get work, because it freed me from (I guess I'm just gonna say it) the oppression of the Ruby on Rails community. And that's a significant difference. And then after I wrote that, people were trying to come out and say that "Oh, well the reason you can't get work is because you wrote that", and like "No, no, no. I wrote that because I can't get work."
+
+As we talk, you'll find out... That's a common pattern where like you'll do something to defend yourself, and they'll tell you "Well, you deserve everything that happened because of this thing you did to defend yourself." It's sort of backwards; it's victim blaming, basically.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's why I was trying to figure out the timeline there, because I remember that - and I don't know the story well enough, and here we are, somewhat face-to-face, at least audio-wise, to discuss this...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Voice to voice...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, and I see that in your history and I'm just wondering maybe what others assumed, which was like "Did that cause your scenario, or did your scenario perpetuate it?"
+
+**Zed Shaw:** \[24:04\] Yeah, my scenario perpetuated it, because keep in mind, I was working at Bear Sterns when I wrote that. So I was able to finally get a job, and the only job I could get was working at basically this crappy bank in New York, a bank that eventually collapsed. That's how terrible that place was. And I was not making all that much money. Pretty much Ruby on Rails destroyed my ability to work as a Java programmer, because of all the animosity that David Heinemeier Hansson created between Rails and Java. So the second I started becoming high-profile within Ruby on Rails, I couldn't get work as a Java guy because they were like the Anti-Rails to that point.
+
+And then I find out all these background deals that Ruby on Rails people made, and a lot of the things that people were saying about me, and the stuff that Twitter was saying to defend themselves from investors wondering why their system collapsed all the time... That was why I couldn't get work, and I'm like "Alright, screw this, I'm gonna write about it." And I came out and told the truth.
+
+**Break:** \[25:10\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That brings us to the tweet storm in question that caught both Adam and my eye. We interview a lot of people on the show, we talk to a lot of people in the open source community, so we see different perspectives... And one thing I appreciate about you, Zed, is of course some things you do say are inflammatory, so that gets people worked up, but you definitely see things differently than a lot of people, and I always appreciate a separate voice out there, crying "Here's a different thing than what you're hearing normally." So that's what caught my eye about what you were saying, specifically around what you just said with regard to making money in open source, and really the move of corporations into the community, which is something we've been tracking, of course, over the last ten years. It's been very obvious that that's been something that's happened and it's very intentional.
+
+So let's start with I guess kind of the money quote, because it plays right into what you've just said... And I'll just read this tweet back to you from the storm; links are in the show notes for those that wanna read the whole thing. We won't read the whole thing here, for brevity's sake. You said:
+
+"In the end, open source is now the domain of corporations, using code to illegally collude under the guise of peace and love hippie software projects. If you plan on releasing software, AGPL it and simply do it for self-expression. Save your real efforts for a real job."
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Yeah, basically.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's a pretty dystopian view. That's pretty bad.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Yeah, and I guess we're done... I mean, that's pretty much the whole thing, but... \[laughter\] But I can explore on that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Please do.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** \[28:03\] So it's sort of interesting that -- I mean, do you feel that's controversial? Like you said, it's dystopian, but do you think it's controversial at all? Do you disagree that corporations have kind of totally taken over open source and it's difficult to make money as an open source developer?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, I would say that it's always been difficult to make money as an open source developer, so I don't think that's necessarily new. I would say that corporations have definitely moved in in big ways, and have made open source an emphasis, and because of just the pure weight of their size - we're talking about large technical corporations like Microsoft, like Google, like Facebook; these are the big tech companies...
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Giants.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, they're giants. They'll dominate any space they go into in software because of their pure weight.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Exactly.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So I agree with that. "Illegally collude under the guise of peace and love hippie software projects" - I don't agree with that. "Illegally collude" - that's where you lose me... But I definitely see where the game has changed. And I've seen that be good in some ways, and I've seen it also be detrimental.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Yeah, yeah. So it's pretty straightforward to just say, like -- let's take just Google. Google's entire company, up until maybe eight years ago, when they started making Go and their own stuff, their whole company was based on open source. They used Linux, they used tools, they used everything... I don't really think they built too much of their own stuff. In fact, they got sued for that; they were using Java and they weren't paying for it, so they got sued for it, right?
+
+So if you take a company like Google - and they are worth 600 billion dollars, something like that; something really insane right now, 500-600 billion dollars. So they're benefitting from open source, and then the average open source developer that works on the tools they need makes almost nothing. In fact, what we see is an open source developer is gonna die from cancer and he goes on GoFundMe and begs people for money for his funeral. And then there's this company that's making 500 billion dollars.
+
+So that's the thing - it's really obvious, but for some weird reason programmers sort of all think that's okay. They can't really think about it. And in fact, they go so far as if you try to make money with your open source - like, you license it GPL; I remember I licensed something GPL, and all these people from Django started yelling at me that I licensed in GPL. Like, how dare I try to make money on it?
+
+So we go with this thing, this sort of like self-loathing, "If you wanna get paid, you're greedy", but the company who's making tons of money on your stuff is not greedy. They're allowed to make that money, they're a corporation. But you, the developer, you should be helping the universe with your free stuff, and you're just a greedy jerk for doing that, for trying to make money?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What do you suggest then? The thing of open source is that the code is open and it's free for everyone, regardless of if you can make money from it or not, right? So by having this stance, are you saying that because these corporations decide to use the game, use the rules of the game and use the software and make money from it, that they should somehow be required to give back? What's your point there?
+
+**Zed Shaw:** So I actually think that the thing that the corporations are doing is totally what corporations are usually gonna do. You can't blame them; that's a corporation, that's what they do. I think the bad thing is when we're telling open source developers that they can't be just like corporations.
+
+So yeah, corporations are gonna go out and do that. I'm not surprised. Are you surprised? I'm totally not surprised.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I have no problem with anybody making open source and making money from it, personally. I encourage it, please do that.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** \[31:56\] Yeah, but what we do is when I GPL-ed something, all these dudes came out saying I was a jerk for GPL-ing my stuff, because I'm gonna make money on it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Maybe they're just jealous.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** No, I think they really wanted to use my project without paying for it. That happens a lot.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I see.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Node.js started with a piece of my code, and then right after that they needed a new license, so rather than pay me for the license, they created a separate project that just had my code in it, and then Ryan Dahl emailed me and he's like "Hey buddy, can you just give me a free license for this?" Like, why are they trying to steal it from me? They could have just paid me, and I would have been like "Cool, just pay me and I'll do a new license, and we're done." This is capitalism - contracts, paying money, exchanges... That's how it works, right?
+
+So my problem with it is that if it's right for corporations to be making money, it should be right for us to make money, but that's not what's happening. There's something else going on, and it's taken me a while to sort of figure out that really this is sort of a strategy among corporations to kind of do three things at once. And these are three things that actually happened to me, or that are happening; it has been really easy to find it.
+
+The first one is they're just trying to commoditize their complement. Have you ever heard of that strategy? Microsoft - they sold operating systems, so they did a lot to commoditize hardware. So if you're Google, you make all your money on ads; you don't make money on hosting software, you don't make money on Kubernetes or any of that stuff, so what you do is you commoditize all that. You depress the market for those things, so that way it's always cheaper for you to run your infrastructure for the thing you actually make money on.
+
+That's what all these companies are doing - they're trying to use open source to commoditize their complement... Which, okay, great - someone releases, and then they're doing it, no problem. But then I've sort of noticed that there's been a change, and companies have started to figure out that if they keep -- and I don't know if this is explicit or if it's just sort of like emerged from this whole thing... But if they keep open source developers poor, it's easier to grind them out and then take over the project. This happened to me with Mongrel, it happened to me with Node.js, it happens to a lot of programmers where, you know, if you just grind some dude out, then you can take his code and he can't complain about it, he doesn't have any power to say that you're taking advantage of him - nothing.
+
+And then the other thing is they use it as a way to collaborate with other giant monopolies. So code is language, code is communication. If you've got people from Amazon and people from Google and people from Microsoft while working on Kubernetes, then they're illegally colluding. If they got together in a meeting and said "Hey, what we're gonna do is we're gonna collaborate on a project to commoditize hosting, so that way nobody can ever make money on it", that would be illegal. If they say, "Yeah, we're gonna collude to depress the price of ads", that would be illegal. But somehow, they're able to go and collude on an open source project that depresses the price of a complement they need.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What do you say when the foundation says "Well, we're a neutral base"? Because that's the response to that concern. It's like, "Oh, but we're neutral. It's a foundation, we're neutral, we have all the different acronyms (Technical Steering Committee, TCT)" and all that stuff to manage things, but guess who they work for?
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Exactly. My favorite example is every time some IETF standard comes out, it's always to-do's from Google and someone from Mozilla. The standard - you look and it's like a Facebook person, a Google person, and then a Mozilla person, because they need someone from a non-profit to say that "Yeah, yeah, yeah, this isn't anything that was baked in a back-room, based on code we already have. This is totally about the community."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[35:54\] So what's your response on neutral? Just that they employ people to be on these committees or the foundations?
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Yeah, so my response is basically "Show me the cash." Let's say you join the Python Software Foundation, or Software Freedom Conservancy - I don't know if they do any of this, but if you're a member of that, if you're in the Python community, if your project is there, and then they're constantly begging for money but they have these giant corporations that are a part of it, then you not that they're not actually a part of the community that they claim to be.
+
+I think the other thing would be if what you see is suddenly there's these directions that benefit the Googles and the Facebooks and whatnot, and sort of screw over the individual developers, then these are not neutral organizations. And I think that's the biggest thing. I think even a lot of these organizations, they pretty much exist just to make sure that these companies have free resources.
+
+I think my favorite example is GitHub. GitHub hosts all this open source, and they have investors that invest in Google, and in other projects and companies and whatnot, and when you try to make money off GitHub - they've shut down projects that help developers make money on GitHub. And every time I've said, "Why does GitHub not have a Buy button?" Why can't you go to GitHub, as a company, and say "Yeah, I wanna just buy your license, and you give me premium support, or something like that." Because if they gave these developers easy access to revenue, to money, then all their investors would lose money, because the complements would suddenly go up in value. So now the price of the complement that they're using - the web server they use, the small orchestration framework or whatever they're using goes up, because "Oh, well if we want support, we've gotta go and pay this guy." But you should be paying that guy; you shouldn't be getting your support for free.
+
+So what I've started to sort of realize is there seems to be a motivation or even a concerted effort to make it so that open source developers can't make money... And I believe the two things to that are open source developers kind of deserve it. There's a certain thing about, I don't know... The way they run their projects and the way they run their show seems to be that they're just open to it. And then also, the companies that are doing it - I don't know if it's super conscious, but I know in my case it was very conscious, that they were trying to make it so I couldn't make cash, and to take the project after I gave up... So I'm kind of curious if it's with other ones.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Let's look at the other side of the coin, because you haven't mentioned at all -- I mean, you mentioned Kubernetes, but you haven't mentioned at all the actual value-add that these corporations have given, freely... Like you said, it's a good corporate strategy to use it to commoditize your complements, but what that does is that actually lowers the playing field for everybody, and people are building very successful businesses and careers based on software that they never could have written themselves; they never could have afforded to build a Kubernetes, to build a TensorFlow, or these other things that wouldn't exist out in the open in he '90s, but now do, because of these reasons.
+
+I mean, we always talk about letting your code do the talking, like bring software, bring value to the community, contribute back - all of these things, and I agree and I think that corporations should be offering money to people... And in some ways they are, in other ways they aren't. We're seeing more and more emphasis on that from the developer side of like not just being open source friendly, but actually being like a supported or a sustainer of open source from these corporations who are doing very well financially... But what about all the value-add? Because these are very huge software projects, and many people are making livings off of TensorFlow, that they just would have never had a chance on their own?
+
+**Zed Shaw:** \[40:03\] Yeah, so in that respect it's that sort of enlightened self-interest that they're saying they do. I call it "fopen source", because it still serves the company. No matter what you do, what that company needs is what's gonna happen. And I'd be fine with it if they said "Yeah, this is an open source project you can use, but it's gonna be in our direction, okay?" So they come out and they say like "Hey, this is TensorFlow, and you know what? Google's gonna run it, and we do our thing; if you wanna contribute, that's cool, but what we do, what we want first is what comes out as what's gonna go in the project." But that's not what they do. What they do is they--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I think in many cases it's pretty clear... I mean, when we have these conversations on this show, we ask people "What kind of open source is this? Is this community-driven, is it a Google project that's open to be contributed to, but it's a Google direction?", and they're historically very clear on those things. Even -- hey, Changelog.com is open source, and we just say right on the front, like "This is our CMS. We have a product roadmap; you can contribute."
+
+I feel like in a lot of readmes, a lot of open source website, it'll say right there... And not all the time, granted... We're just picking on Google as the example, but I don't think it's always unclear who's driving the project. I think it's usually pretty easy to either derive, or it's explicitly stated in many cases.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** No, I think actually they kind of dance on the edge of it. I think what they wanna do is they wanna have sort of the community control that a sort of like "kumba ya" project has, but still also have their own control. It's never explicitly said "Look, if you want this project to go in a different direction, Google's gonna tell you no." They say, "Oh, come on, buddy, you can do it! You can contribute!", but really if you contributed something that was totally anti what Google wanted, they would shut it down.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, you would just fork it and give it a new name and do go your own way, right?
+
+**Zed Shaw:** I suppose, but I'd bet you anything if you tried to do that, they would use the community to come after you. That's what happens all the time when you try to do those forks.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Do you have any for instances on that?
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Do you remember FFmpeg?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I use it all the time.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Okay, it forked tons of times... Numerous projects, they fork... Oh, and Node. Node is a really good example. Node forked - remember they went and called it something-io, had a huge fight...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Io.js.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Yeah, yeah. All over the place, a massive fight, big internal -- and then Joyent had to change its steering, and its licensing, and everything to fight it... But they totally fought it. They had all sorts of propaganda going back and forth, yelling all sorts of stuff, fights... It was terrible, it almost destroyed Node, right?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We were pretty close to that one though. I think there were a lot of community members knee deep into the Io.js and Node fork and bringing the communities back together. From my perspective, I think there were plenty of community members that were what I would consider just peer-to-peer developers, not corporations that were -- I guess they were leading Io.js, but then they were also bringing it back to this recombination of Io/Node.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Right, after they got Joyent to sort of agree to their things. Because Joyent wasn't really running the project ethically; they were doing exactly what I was saying.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[43:19\]They were letting it languish.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Yeah, they weren't running it well; they were only doing what they wanted and what benefitted them, but then claiming "Oh, this is a community. We're all friends!" So then Io forks for that very reason.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Isn't that a success story though? Isn't that just like the actual open source thing working? Like, okay, Joyent was letting it languish, they wanted to maintain and control - and I'm just going based on memory; this was years ago, so maybe the details are not particularly clear... But the maintainers, which was Mikeal Rogers and friends - I can't remember the other names, but we interviewed Mikeal Rogers about it... They forked, they forced Joyent's hand, a lot of changes happened... Like you said, there was definitely propaganda back and forth, there was communication back and forth, there were blog posts written, there were conversations had... At the end of the day, I think the forked team were very happy to recombine and keep it a singular community. I think they got a lot of things that they wanted out of it... So I just don't see how that's a failure of open source in terms of if things aren't going your way...
+
+**Zed Shaw:** \[44:26\] I didn't really say it was a--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, I said "You just fork", and then you're saying that "Well, then they force you back in", or I can't remember exactly what you said...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** They use the community against you.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, yeah.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** So Joyent was worth like - what, maybe 10 million dollars? So Google is worth like 500 billion, right?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, it's definitely not apples to apples. That's why I'm asking for examples.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** See, I think you don't get examples. I think this doesn't happen too often for two specific reasons. One is the companies that are doing this are HUGE. Can you imagine if you had an open source project and you decided you wanted to re-copyright it, remove your license, and that would affect the bottom line of like, say, Amazon and Google. Let's say there's something they're using, that you know they're using, you're not making money, you're desperate for work, they don't hire you, so you say "Screw this! You can't use my stuff anymore. You've gotta pay me." Now, I guarantee they're gonna pump probably 2-3 million dollars into lawyers and just bury you. So nobody tries it. They know they're not gonna be able to do anything about it. If you tried to fork Kubernetes, they're gonna use just the way programmers are to keep people there - the way the community is run, the way open source is sort of like considered a community thing, "How dare you...!?" They do this all the time. So I think you don't have examples because the system doesn't provide examples.
+
+Then I think the second reason that all of this is allowed - I've gotta say, I'm not upset or really blaming the corporations for doing this, because the programmers let them. I can't say that -- corporations just do corporation. That's what they do. If they can make money anyway, that's what they do. I mean, they try to pretend they aren't that way, but that's the way it is, that's reality.
+
+So actually, for a long time I didn't blame the open source projects, I didn't blame anyone or anything like that in running projects; I said "This is just corporations exploiting people." But then, when I started talking about how they sort of allowed this, I would get death threats if I criticized a project... And there was this whole other side to open source, and I just sort of started to see that, like, really, the reason these guys are getting exploited is because they're just a bunch of servile fascists. They just like things being in charge.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Is that open source though, or is that just the internet? Because the modern mentality has infected the internet.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Oh yeah, totally. But the thing that I think in open source -- oh, so this is one thing that's really interesting about fascism, is you find it happens whenever there's a new communication medium. You find rises in totalitarianism when there's a new way to talk to people. This happened when ReadIO came out, it came out when printing came out, it came out with -- every time there's a new way to talk to people, someone figures out how to exploit it to control the masses.
+
+So the internet comes out, and suddenly you can use that whole propaganda tactic again to get a new batch of followers, and ta-dah! There you have it. But I think what I have started to find is that a lot of the people who are programmers kind of like that there's corporations taking advantage or harming the people that they consider their enemies in some ways, or that have a project they think is gonna become the winner, the programming language is gonna become a winner and wipe out every other programming language... And I'm like, "No, that's terrible. Why would you wanna wipe out every programming language? That's just awful."
+
+\[48:00\] And I started to realize, look, I think the reason why these corporations can do all this stuff - they can collude illegally and nobody cares, and they can just destroy people's lives, and take-take-take and never give back and all these sorts of things - because you too have been saying, "Oh, well they gave out Kubernetes", right? But Kubernetes is not cash money to the people that wrote the open source that started their company. So really giving back is helping the programmers that made your stuff, not "Oh hey, thanks for making that stuff. Here's this thing you totally don't need..."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I actually asked Brendan Burns face-to-face at KubeCon last year this very question; he was one of the founders of Kubernetes. I said "Why don't you just keep it for yourself? Why didn't you turn it into a corporation yourself, or a for-profit thing?" He was like, "It would have never gone how it has." It wouldn't have been the ride that has been. He had his own reasons, but he was like "You know, that's not the way it needed to go." It was by choice to do it that way, and he was one of the founders of the project.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Yeah. Actually, I think one of the other reasons why you can't really make open source is I think the imagination is you can just be a dude in your bedroom, crank out some code and you're gonna get a job, or cash, or something like that... And I think no. I think now to run a very successful, large open source project is so expensive that no small group of people being underpaid, as a hobby, can do it.
+
+I think you're now competing with a Google who has 500 billion dollars and can hire 1,000 people to work on their fopen source project... And you are not gonna make a competitor to that. You're not gonna be able to fork it, either.
+
+If this is a project that takes 1,000 people, you and your three friends who hate it are gonna fork it? No, you're not gonna be able to do that. And then what, you're going to get a job?
+
+I remember Google interviewed the dude who made Homebrew, and they didn't hire him. They used his software. And he can clearly make a piece of software and manage a team, which is way more important than any algorithm's knowledge... And they turned him down because he couldn't reverse a black tree. I'm thinking "That's insane." That's not the important part of making software. You can look that up... Like, "What's next? I don't get a job because I don't know the name of every king and queen in England?" It's just weird. I can look that up. Why would I bother learning that? I can look it up.
+
+So for me, I think if -- yeah, Kubernetes totally made the right decision... Trying to run a project that large without support, without money... And then, venture capitalists won't invest in a lot of these projects, because if you invest money in a Kubernetes, that Kubernetes needs to have a return on investment.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Adam said "founders of Kubernetes" - it was founded inside of Google, so it wasn't like a startup that Google acquired.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** They founded it, but they founded it as -- it was already owned by Google.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Right.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** But technically, they could have not presented it. They really pushed it to get funding inside of Google. Maybe I'm wrong, but if I heard correctly, it sounded like there was a choice of it could have been a Google thing or a "us three guys (I think it was three) doing this originally." There was a choice there.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, they were Google employees, so it would have been a Google thing. Yeah, anyways...
+
+**Zed Shaw:** So I think GitLab is a very good example of someone working -- like, it's two people that mainly started it, and then they just ran it, and then it got successful enough that they were able to actually receive a pretty large VC investment. But it's different... You can go with your crappy app that you hacked up in a weekend on your phone, do a pitch deck; if you know the right VC's at this company, they'll be like "Yeah, cool, here's 20 million." So open source is a much, much higher amount of effort to prove that there's a market.
+
+\[51:55\] I actually think if the guys who did Kubernetes went off to investors and said "Yeah, what we wanna do is create this thing that basically makes it so you can craft your AWS infrastructure, whatever." They'd be like, "Hm... Nah, we don't wanna do that, because a bunch of our portfolio companies need free stuff."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Now I'm just thinking of all the different people who built -- I mean, another trend that we're tracking, and I don't disagree that it's easy in 2018... I think it was probably easier in 2016 to get VC funded in the Valley with an app or just in general with a good pitch deck... I hear it's getting harder; we're not in the Valley, I've never written a pitch deck, I don't know those things very well... But the other thing that we're saying - we've been tracking this trend of large organizations moving in - also is VC-funded open source projects, and we're coming out of our ears with them.
+
+So that's a path that a lot of people are taking, and when I say we're coming out of our ears, maybe a dozen or so that I think of, of projects that are making that work, at least for now... We'll see if they can go for the long run, but...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** More than before.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Yeah, more than before. Right. But I bet if you look at them, the order of operations was not "Hey VC, here's my pitch deck and zero code. Fund me so I can make this happen." I bet the order was "I already have 20 million users, 5,000 users, whatever. I've already got a working project that's already used by all these companies. Give me some money to make it a product." That's the difference. It is much, much harder to pitch open source to a VC.
+
+Now, if you do any other kind of -- I mean, basically, I remember if you were living in New York City and you wanted to make money in software, the easiest way was to make something banks wanted, and write it in Java... Because they would just suck that up, no problem. It was like "Oh yeah, you have a Java-based, web sphere-based thing for managing doors? COOL! We'll buy that!" \[laughter\] If you wanted Ruby - "No. No, that doesn't run on our infrastructure that we spent 20 billion dollars on."
+
+I think in a lot of cases -- I really think that it used to be there was this sort of like contract where if you did open source, you at least could get a job, because that demonstrated that you could work... And they sort of changed that up. Now I think the contract is if you do open source, you'd better treat it like a job. You've gotta work for free, but act like you're a professional. They kind of slightly inverted it.
+
+And then when you don't really wanna work for free, like when you go "No, screw you. I don't wanna work for free. That's ridiculous. I don't wanna work for free", they're like "Oh, you're not a team player. You're a jerk." And that happens a lot. And all of that is part of this strategy. I don't know if anyone has articulated it as a strategy, but the strategy is if you keep the cost and the amount of money that these developers make down, then it's easier to take their project and use it, and they can't fight you back, they can't sue you in court if you violate the GPL, all these things, and then you commoditize your complement, and off to the races.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I doubt if you digged far enough into the vaults of these organizations you're gonna find that gameplan written down in a briefing that somebody proposed to their upper management as a gameplan.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Yeah. You know, I will say, based on the documents that we saw from Microsoft about their "embrace and extend" strategy - I remember there were things that they had said when they got sued... Remember back in the day a whole bunch of these emails came out? And we know what their strategy is now. I predict you actually are gonna see sort of a similar "embrace and extend" strategy come out of Google and Amazon and whatnot... And we're gonna find out that actually no, they've just been sort of exploiting open source to pad their pockets.
+
+\[55:56\] But again, oh well, I mean, that's companies. Why are we surprised by that? I'm not surprised by that. And then I feel open source developers, programmers in general I feel are very - I don't know why, but I think they're very fascist... Like servile fascists.
+
+Totalitarianism, right? Okay, so totalitarianism is basically the belief that somebody else should control things... And that's fine; somebody else controls things seems to be like, you know, governments, societies, religions, whatever. But then they add on "And anyone who disagrees with me is the enemy and should be destroyed." So that's kind of like the simplest way to say "That's totalitarianism."
+
+And then I like to say fascism is just totalitarianism for profit. I just put that out there, I'm like "No, if you're doing totalitarianism, you create an us vs. them, and you create an enemy, and then you allow your followers to attack that enemy, and then you do it so that way you can make more money - you're a fascist."
+
+What I see is a whole bunch of science -- I've been talking about this since like around 2010. I think most open source projects are run kind of like little fascist regimes. I mean, Python and Linux call themselves like "the benevolent dictator for life"? They say it's a joke, but I don't know... Right? Those guys are kind of jerks, so it can't be that it's all a joke.
+
+What I see is I see these programmers who like somebody else being in charge, they like watching their rivals be demolished or exploited or slandered, and they assume it will never happen to them because they are part of the community, they're a part of it... So they serve this sort of fascism. And it's a very gentle fascism; it's not like they're going out on the streets and killing people. But just from my own experience, you speak up about something and I get death threats, so I don't know, I kind of call it like I see it. If I see a bunch of people freaking out because I don't like Python, and I see projects who call someone the enemy...
+
+Oh, my favorite is when they say they're gonna win. Like, "Oh, JavaScript is gonna take over the entire world. We're gonna win." I'm like, "Why do you wanna destroy all other programming languages? That's so weird. That's something that only fascists say."
+
+So what I see is, yeah, sure, I think corporations are taking advantage of programmers, but I think there's so many servile fascists in programming that they kind of agree with it and they kind of like it, and so there's no way to fix it. There's no way you're gonna stop them. There's no fix, it's just how they are, and the only way to fix it for yourself is just don't go into that. Don't try to make money in open source. Try to maybe build up a career, but stay very far away from the communities, don't identify yourself with any one language or project or anything like that, and just basically play the game and try to get out and get ahead without getting hurt.
+
+**Break:** \[59:02\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Zed, is the cat-v link to Rails is a Ghetto - is that the canonical? Google says it is, I'm just curious if that's what you--
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Cat-v?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Harmful.cat-v.org is where the main Rail is a Ghetto links to; it's by "Zed's so effing awesome."
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Actually, I think that shouldn't be out there.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Is that rehosted, or something?
+
+**Zed Shaw:** No, I took it down, so I'm gonna have to sue that person and make him take it down.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Was it on your personal site back then?
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Yeah, it was on my personal site.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Is it down? Did you take it down?
+
+**Zed Shaw:** No, I think people should be allowed to move on with their lives, right?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's not supposed to be on the internet anymore, and we can't link to it anywhere?
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Go ahead and link wherever you want, that's fine. It is ancient history in a lot of ways... Like, yeah, I wrote that, but that's like ten years ago, right?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's gotta be more than ten.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Yeah, so it's time to move on.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I was a way different person in 2007, just so you know... So I agree with you.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Yeah, me too.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, we all were.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm thinking just more for like if the listeners are like "What the heck were they talking about? Is there a link to it?" Because we will get yelled at for not having links to things, especially something they wanna dig into. It's like, "Well..."
+
+**Zed Shaw:** I would say go ahead. You know, I am sort of honest about myself, and I did write that, so if you link to it, it's no problem.
+
+I'm gonna contact this person and tell him to take it down, because I own the copyright. You can also probably find it on archive.org, and a few other things... But yeah, I mean, if you do, I would say preface it with "Zed took this down because he wanted to move on with his life. This is Zed circa 2008, and he is different."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, sure.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Because I would say, yeah, I was making fun of people who are overweight in there, and I don't agree with that; I was saying a lot of pretty terrible things. But at the time, it was sort of like this cathartic -- like, I just wrote how I felt at the time, and part of that was I actually was being threatened by certain people, and stuff like that. So a lot of the things that I say in there are at specific people, but I don't believe in making fun of someone's disabilities, or anything like that. I think there's some things in there that I actually am ashamed of, so I took it down.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We don't have to link to it... I mean, they can google it. One thing, Zed, for us, is we're definitely about lifting people up rather than putting people down, so our goal is not to shame you, nor do we want to perpetuate you being shamed... So it could be googled, and that's something that's not exactly pertinent to our conversation, so I have no concerns about linking to it. I just wanna make sure if we do, we link to the right place; that's what my concern was, not that we can find you and get you.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Yeah, it's not problem. But you know, I will say, I have no problem with people disagreeing with me and telling me why they disagree with me. I don't know, I come from a different era, I think, where like you can disagree with someone and not hate them or think they're a terrible person. You can have wonderful disagreeing conversations, but I think what happens - I don't know if it's just a thing about Americans (I don't know), or the internet... I think they take disagreement to be an argument, and sort of like an attack from an enemy. I'm very different, I'm like "Well, no, I can disagree with you and I can still like you...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right, I think the line between disagreement and hate and dislike has gotten to some degree closer.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Yes, yes.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Because I don't agree with what you say doesn't mean I don't like you, or I can't show you love, or be kind, or help you, or serve you, or do something for you, or be there for you when you need somebody. Because I don't like the way you do things doesn't mean I don't like you.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Right, exactly.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** But you know, people think that way.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[01:04:07.15\] I know, I don't get it, too... I think, Zed, probably just looking at your career, I probably trail you by 5 or 10 years maybe, because you were writing Mongrel I was just learning how to write code back then...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Me too.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So you said maybe it's your age, or maybe just the generation that you're from, but like... I don't get offended when people disagree with me, and vice versa. I just feel like that's life, like discourse; that's how we learn and grow, and live. We don't have to at all. Some of that leads back into the show, because I see what you're saying, specifically with regards to this -- maybe we should just start the show, but... The developer fascism thing - I identify as a developer, but I don't see those things in myself and I don't see those things in... Like, I see nuanced what you're saying, and I feel like you're saying it in a blanketed, almost matter of fact way that I feel is maybe overstepping... Maybe you're just matter of factly stating your conclusions of something you admit is nuanced, and to a minor degree.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We should start there, because we almost ended that last segment with me saying that I disagree with Zed.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I mean, if we didn't have to end the segment for time-wise, I would said--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You just would have said "I disagree" and then end it. \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I just don't agree... \[laughs\] Because that's your experience.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Yeah, so this is the thing - I'm not saying it's a blanket statement on every programmer...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Sure.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** However, I do think that it is very endemic in how the tools work, how the writing has been, how the industry has been run... I think it's just there so much, it's so everywhere that they don't even notice it a lot of times. And also, I think a lot of these people are like "Oh, I'm totally not like that", and then they see other people being like that and they say nothing, and I think that's the thing. I've never ever had anyone stand up to an abuser of me and say "Hey, leave him alone. He's just saying he doesn't like this, or he doesn't like Python. You don't have to be abusive." I've never seen anyone say that, ever.
+
+So there's two types. When I say a servile fascist, I don't mean someone who's out there doing it -- I mean, it can be someone who actually really enjoys it and supports the regime, and goes along with it, and never disagrees with them, or someone who allows the regime to do what it's doing, or the corporation doing what it's doing, and then just assumes "Well, it doesn't relate to me, so I'm not gonna do anything about it. I'm not gonna stand up and help that person."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, let me present this angle, because -- and I've never been around the circles wherein you are disagreeing with Python and somebody's attacking you, so I can't give the contextual thing... But I think I was reading Rails is a Ghetto back in '08 or whatever, and I was in the Rails community back then... And my take, as somebody who was completely on the outside, but in the community to a certain degree - and this may be completely myopic - but Zed is a guy who does not need anybody's help in terms of staying up for himself. Like, you do very well, and you represent your side very well and strongly, so I wonder if a lot of the inaction that you've experienced - which I'm not necessarily excusing it and saying nobody needs to help you our or anything, but on the internet, you come across as somebody who can very well take care of himself, and so maybe that means people just remain silent, because they think "Well, people are attacking Zed, and Zed is defending himself or attacking back", and it's just kind of a side show.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** \[01:07:56.16\] I agree. I actually tell people "Don't help me", because the collateral damage to people who help me is pretty great. So I tell people "Hey, don't worry. I can take care of myself." But if we're talking about the general population, open source projects, things like that, then you don't really see this anywhere.
+
+I'll give you a really good example from Python. There was this project by Aaron Swartz called web.py. And web.py was great. They made Reddit with it; originally, they did Reddit in Scheme, and then I guess they did it in this, and Aaron Swartz was working there. And it was awesome; it was so cool, it worked really well. Very tiny, very small.
+
+At one point, I guess Guido (the benevolent dictator for life for Python) tried it and he decided that it was terrible, because it had too much magic. So rather than someone saying "Hey, aren't you supposed to support people in the community and not trash people's projects? Because you are supposed to be the benevolent dictator for life..." Everyone decided that his project was terrible, they said "Don't use it." Every time you'd try to use it, they went "Oh, it's terrible." And then they banished magic through all of Python. And by magic, they just meant usability, really. Like, you know, shorter names for function calls... I'm serious.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Really? I thought it was just metaprogramming...
+
+**Zed Shaw:** No... Like, they still did metaprogramming. Go look at Django - its ORM is tons of metaprogramming... But what they did is to make it not seem like magic, you had to type "render to template", and then there was another one "render to template with session or context." It was crazy. I'm like "Why can't I just have render?" "Oh, well that's magic." I'm like "No, it's not. It's just easier to use."
+
+And you can also say magic is just -- like, what's that quote...? "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." So you can say the opposite is the only reason you think something's magic is because you're uneducated. So these are people who are saying like "That's magic!" I'm like, "Well, you've just gotta learn how it's done, that's all." If they're making it easier to use, and you can go read the code... The code is there.
+
+So I think that's a really good example. Nobody really stood up for him. I remember I was one of the few people who were like "That's stupid. This thing works great." I put it in my book - people ranted at me. "Why are you putting it in your book? You should choose another project that doesn't have any magic." I'm like, okay, this is a developer who worked on stuff; he's a part of your community, and you're allowing someone to just blanket the side that this guy is terrible for writing his project and nobody should use it, and the way he wrote it should be banished? And you're agreeing with that and nobody's telling the benevolent dictator for life "Um, why are you doing that? That's wrong. He can make his projects, and... Yeah."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What was the specific things done there? Because on the other side of that coin, Guido has the right to his opinion on software, and because of his position, it makes sense that people respect his opinion... So there's like a natural leadership there that doesn't seem counter-productive. And again, I'm missing the detailed context of like "And then he did this, and it was mean." Was he criticizing software based on his own ideas of the way software should be written? That seems like a constructive thing to do.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Not really.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Because it's just style-based, or...?
+
+**Zed Shaw:** No, it was because he didn't like the way that it used these features of Python that were metaprogramming. That's it. That was all it was.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Didn't he write those features?
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Yeah, that's the thing.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** He should have left the metaprogramming out maybe.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** It's like, well okay, if you don't like that, then just don't have that ability, right? What it was though is some projects could do magic, but not this project could do magic. He had no problem with magic in all these other things, he has no problem with magic being done throughout the Python libraries... He has no problem with this magic. Just this one guy's.
+
+\[01:11:50.05\] And then, the actual point of the discussion - yeah, you're right, Guido is in charge, whatever. We're talking about people being servile fascists. So everyone who just went "Sure. Yup. Alrighty" and agreed with him and then also went on the offensive and banished all magic from their projects, and totally believed him without thinking about it, are what I'm talking about. Those are the people who are making it so that it's easy to exploit open source projects and take advantage of them... Because a corporation comes out and does whatever it wants, and everyone's like "Yup, sure. Okay. Yup, I agree that regime should be in charge and everyone who disagrees should be destroyed."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[laughs\] It's kind of like brainwashing or mindless followership.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Yes, it is. And the thing is the slickest form of that is the kind where people don't realize they are, and they just sort of believe it, and it's endemic everywhere, and they just think that's normal.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, you had me worried, because I was worried that I was some of these people, not even knowing it... I'm not, obviously, but you had me concerned that somewhat I was brainwashed and I'm just unwillingly out there as a fascist.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Yeah, and you know, actually, I think fascist is the wrong word, but there's not much of another word. I could say totalitarianism, but that's typically not with a profit motive. The reason all these people are doing this is they all hope to make a piece of the pie; they all hope to make some amount of money off of it, and historically that's a thing about fascism - there's always this corporate element to it, and things like that. But I think it's gotta have a new word. I could just say they're just totalitarians, but there's a difference between being a totalitarianist -- they're trying to do it without trying to make any money, and they are true believers. But all these people are trying to make money, they want a piece of the pie. So that's the only reason why I say they are.
+
+But in the same way, I mean, yeah, sure, not everyone in a fascist regime is totally fascist... Yeah, they're not totally fascist, but if they're allowing it to happen, maybe they're servile. They're just sort of like going along with it, because "Hey, they're not coming after me."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So I'm trying to think of some of the things here... So self-identification seems to be a -- I'm trying to think of the drivers of this, and I'm... You have a lot more experience with maybe pointing this out in your own mind, or pinpointing like "That's what this activity is" than I do, so I'm like very much processing and trying to think of examples, because we've been very active in open source for a long time, and having these conversations... So I can see some of what you're saying, but I haven't been part of like watching an attack happen and then nobody saying anything type of thing...
+
+**Zed Shaw:** I can give you a super good example.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** I came out and I was gonna do a new Python 3 book. I tried to use it, and it was slower; a lot of the features were not very good, and I would test it about every year... So finally it got to where I could kind of do it, so I said, "Alright, I'm gonna do a Python 3 book, but I really don't agree how the project is going." And I would tell people this all the time, and they would shut me down... So I wrote a thing, I said "Listen, I don't use Python 3. I'm gonna do a book on it, but it's not well run, it's not well written, it's basically just not a good project." And this was my opinion as an educator, the person who wrote one of the main Python books, a member of the community for a while... Everything.
+
+And immediately after I wrote it, a few high profile members of the PSF proceeded to go to all these people who wrote books and try to get my book removed as a mention in their book. People came to me, and they were like "Yeah, so-and-so-and-so are going around - here's their chat - trying to get people to stop using your book because you don't like Python 3." That's it. Just that I don't like Python 3, that's all.
+
+I asked my friends, or the people who would tell me this, I'm like "Okay, well why don't you say something about it?" and they're like "Oh, I'm afraid. I'm scared that I won't be able to work, or that they'll come after me next." So even people who claimed to be my best friend can't stand up to these people, this kind of like "Oh, if you criticize our project, you're the enemy and we're gonna go after you, because you might make it so we can't make money on it."
+
+\[01:15:52.11\] My favorite was someone tried to write a blog post saying I'm unqualified to teach Python 3. This person previously had recommended my book, so I'm kind of like "Okay, so does that mean Python 3 is unteachable? Because if I can't teach Python 3, then I don't know if anyone can teach Python 3." \[laughs\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Because you were teaching Python 2 successfully.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Yeah. Like, what's the huge difference in my -- and this person was recommending my books before this, so either they were lying about my books being good and they were giving them out, or they're lying about Python 3 being awesome and I'm just a terrible teacher.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Zed Shaw:** But not a single person, I didn't read a single blog post from anyone, not a single email, nothing, even my best friends didn't stand up for me. Nobody came out. People told me that they would talk to members of the PSF and they'd say like "Yeah, what do you think about Zed's post?" and members in the PSF would be like "Oh, Zed was the best thing that happened to Python, but I'm never gonna say that, because it will be really bad for me."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So your best friends, did you -- so with my best friends, if a stranger offends me, it's kind of like, whatever... Especially someone on the internet. Not that it doesn't hurt, but it's not going to affect my day-to-day. But if my best friends don't stand up for me, I would turn to them and say "What's up with this? Why aren't you...?
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So did you talk to them? What did they say? Why aren't they going to come to your side?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** They're afraid.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** In a lot of ways, I can't blame them, because this would be their livelihood gone. If they stood up to the PSF and did what I did, they wouldn't be--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So if they say "We're with Zed", they're gonna lose their jobs, or what?
+
+**Zed Shaw:** That's what they worry, yeah; they're worried they won't get their consulting gigs, they won't get their jobs, they'll be banned from the PSF... Because that's exactly what they're doing to me. So they're like "Oh, I don't want that happen to me. I'm gonna tell Zed it's going on, but I'm not gonna stand up for him. I can't do that."
+
+This is very common, like, all the time. I'm in a unique position, because -- I mean, after I wrote that and they tried to ban me, my sales went up. It didn't do anything to me. I work very hard to make sure that I put out something good, that helps a lot of people, and it works; I try to make it work as best I can... So it didn't impact my sales, didn't impact my traffic, didn't impact anything, and all their plans failed. I mean, "So what? You take me out of other people's books. Big deal." But it still kind of hurt that nobody stood up to take care of me, or at least just... I mean, my friend didn't even tell them "You're an a\*\*\*\*\*e." If someone did that to my friend, I'd be like "Oh, no, we're gonna have a problem here." I would just unload on them.
+
+That happens way more often than people wanna admit, but I think it doesn't happen too often, because the culture of programming now is that everyone just kind of goes with the projects, they're all very servile, and then when the next one comes along, they just leave, rather than trying to fix or change or contribute in that way in their previous project.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What do you think it is? I mean, not saying that you deserve this, but what do you think it is that you've done, or been involved in or around, that may make people feel this way about you?
+
+**Zed Shaw:** I think it started with Rails. That's where I marked the shift. Because before that, I feel like people in open source had a difference attitude about it, that was much more collaborative or discourse-based. You could totally disagree with the way someone did something. I would say Java, then Rails changed it to be -- you could use this sort of marketing tactic that was really similar to kind of like a fascist propaganda to convince people to join you and become rabid fans. And I think for me, I just have a very strong streak against that... So when I speak out against it, it obviously threatens what they're doing, and also it kind of questions people's core identities. Because the whole point of running a project like this, where there's fascist-style propaganda, is you become their core identity. So if there's this one guy who comes out and he's like "Look, that's wrong. Somebody shouldn't do that to you", they're like "No, no, you're wrong!" and they get really angry.
+
+\[01:20:06.20\] And it's understandable. I don't actually hate any of the people who necessarily don't like what I have to say. I don't really hate them. The only people I really have a problem with are people who send me death threats because I don't like Haskell. \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Have you actually gotten death threats because of that?
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Yes! You don't understand, like --
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I don't understand, I'm trying to understand over here...
+
+**Zed Shaw:** It's so weird, right?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That is weird.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Look, you can think I'm a jerk, right? I'm totally fine with that. You can disagree with what I say, I'm totally fine with that. But the response has to match the offense.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yes, commensurate. Exactly.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** If I don't like Haskell, you go "yeah well I don't like your project", and I go "I don't like your project". Maybe you can say "I don't like your face." Alright, that's weird, but okay. But if I go "I don't like Haskell" and then you send me this insane email about how I should kill myself, then that's kind of a disconnect. All I said was one tweet where I made fun of Haskell, and you want me to kill myself. That's a huge distance between what I did wrong to you and what you think should happen to me.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, since you brought it back to Twitter, this tweet storm we talked through here - which we didn't go through all of them, and I'm not sure we can actually link to it, because your account is protected, at least now...
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Yeah, yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We do have a version we could PDF and host it if that's okay with you, but aside from that...
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Yeah, go for it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...what was the response with-- I mean, you said lots of controversial stuff in this tweet storm... So any death threats? Any threats at all? What was the response?
+
+**Zed Shaw:** No, that's the thing that I find very interesting. I think all of the responses were positive. The only responses I got were mostly along the lines of the libertarian flair of "Well, that's corporations." And that's about it... Which si what got me thinking like "Wait, you don't have a problem with this? That's kind of weird... But okay."
+
+But the weirdest response that I got was all these people came out and they said "Hey, we're gonna try and solve that with blockchain." You wouldn't believe it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, that's because blockchain solves all problems...
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Yeah, yeah. No, this was bizarre - I had these people who were like, yeah, what's gonna happen is you put your project in my blockchain, my licensing open source blockchain, and then people say "Yeah, I bought that thing. I'm gonna use that thing", and then you get coins. So when people use your software, you get coins. So I'm like "Okay, can I just get cash? Because I've gotta pay rent. I've gotta buy food." I can't use an open source coin down at the Walmart, so can I just get some cash money? And they go, "Oh, well, I don't think anyone would use that." They think that they're only gonna use a blockchain-based licensing system, and I'm kind of like "No, I think exchanging money for licenses has been around probably as long as there's been humans, so I think people will be okay with that. I'll just throw up a PayPal, and then pay me money." That was the weirdest one. Everyone did that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, when all you have is a hammer, and that hammer spits out coins, everything looks like a nail. You're just like, "Um, blockchain that. Get some coins."
+
+**Zed Shaw:** So one thing I did think... And I don't wanna ruin someone's -- like, if you've got an idea, go with it. I'm probably not a very good predictor of what's gonna take off. Try blockchain; if people use it and programmers are getting paid, then I'm happy with that. Go for it. I don't think it's gonna happen, but whatever.
+
+The one thing I did think is one problem is if you're an organization that's really huge and you would like to pay developers, you don't know what software you're using. It's really difficult to account for -- let's say you're running thousands of machines to power your website, and you know that there's some hidden GPL in there. You know there's GPL-ed code in there. So what you could do is - a blockchain's only really useful thing would be you could register code into it, and then organizations could use that registration to confirm whether they are complying with licenses, whether they need to release software or whether they need to contact you and get a license. I think that would be something viable.
+
+\[01:24:13.20\] You would probably just have to sell that tool to larger organizations, and then offer programmers -- say "Yeah, what we'll do is we'll send you a report with all these companies that are willing to say 'Yeah, we're using your GPL. We made these changes. Here you go.' and act as a proxy and solve that problem for them." But otherwise, I don't know; if I'm getting coins, I don't think I can eat. I want dollar bills, you know? The best coin ever.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I mean, I can agree on one part where the blockchain makes sense as a ledger, but the coin part obviously is the stretch. It's like "Well, not really a lot of value there." And there's a lot of volatility.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. Well, and the ledger isn't the hard part of the equation, right? The ledger is workable.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** That's easy, yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's like the social constructs, and it's the industry...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The buy-in...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, there's a lot bigger problems to solve than how you're gonna prove that this is happening in a decentralized fashion.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And Tether somehow makes it -- you know, tying it to the real world...
+
+**Zed Shaw:** So one of the things that you would get with a blockchain solution is companies are kind of really scared to announce what tech they use, because that's how competitors can compete with them. So if they're able to do this locally, with this distributed database, and then reach out to the people that they owe code or money to, then they might be into that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's true.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** So they don't have to make calls out to some central repository that's tracking everything they use. They can keep that a secret.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Which you can run data analysis on, and machine learning and algorithms, and ranking...
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Yeah. Can you imagine - if you're a company and you're doing this; everyone is checking their software, and you've got a central database, you know every company and all the things they're running. Then your competitor buys that company, and you're like "Oh man, now they know everything we run." So if it's like blockchain distributed, you just do that locally... You're like, "Okay, cool." People are registering their source code into it, and then you look, you go "Oh, great." Then the next step is you go and hand that person money or code. Like if it's GPL, you give them their code back, or you say "Hey, we don't wanna give you your code back. Can we just pay you cash?" A quick exchange of licenses and you're done.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So in your opinion, if every corporation were to agree that the best thing they could do with regard to open source software is to give cash money - in whatever denomination the developer desires, according to their locality - to the people who are writing the open source software that the company runs on, what would be the threshold...? Are you talking like a percentage of net revenue? How would that break out, that would make Zed happy, like "Okay, now everything's right in the world because these companies are doing X"? What would X look like?
+
+**Zed Shaw:** If you take, say, a company like Google, they're worth like 500-600 billion. 1% would be like 50 billion dollars. I think that's more money than all of the open source industry ever made in its entire existence, right? So it wouldn't take much. You could do fractions. Google could go down to one billion dollars, and it would still be so much money. So it doesn't have to be very much. I don't think this will ever happen, by the way.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's why I said -- this is in your fantasy.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** It's NEVER gonna happen. I think actually what's gonna happen is people are just gonna stop making open source, and then these companies are gonna be fairly desperate. But I think if they donated fractions of percentage and they just gave it as direct money to developers, or worked it in a system where like "Hey, we just wanna pay you to work on this, doing exactly what you're doing. We'll just pay you a salary as an employee." We used to do that, but it doesn't happen as much anymore.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We've definitely seen that happen... It's something I would love to see happen a lot more.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** \[01:28:07.27\] A lot more, right? A typical strategy is "Hey, buddy. You wanna come work on your open source? Oh, sorry, can you go move that CSS button over two pixels left? Don't work on your open source." It's like a bait and switch.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Once you get there, you're not working on it anymore?
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Totally not. You're working on whatever is gonna make the company money. So I think if they don't start making it so that open source is a viable career choice, where I can say "I'm an open source programmer. I work on this project, and this project gets this much from these companies that use the software to keep it going", and then that open source project/company hires people to keep working on it... Then I think they'll avoid the problem in the future that I suspect, which is all of this just collapses. It's not like it's gonna be a violent revolution or anything, it's just people aren't gonna make open source. They're gonna be like "I don't wanna be like that guy who when he died he went on GoFundMe to beg money for his funeral. I wanna be someone who's got a job, and starts my own company, and puts stuff on the internet myself, and making my own apps. I don't wanna work for free."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, it's been a fun trip down this lane with you, Zed, going back to the beginning of your open source career, on through to this (I guess) happy place you are. You seem happy, right?
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Mostly happy. You've got your rants, but you're happy. You're making money, you've got your books, you're doing education, you're helping developers...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Making music, making art...
+
+**Zed Shaw:** I think one of the things that people misunderstand - they sort of see a one-sided person in everyone. We're very good at stereotyping people into one thing.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Zed Shaw:** So they think if I disagree with the way open source is run, that I'm an angry person, I totally hate it, I'm miserable... But it's not true; it's just thoughts, disagreements... I maybe wear them a little strongly, but it doesn't mean I'm in my bathroom trying to cut myself to the latest Cigarettes After Sex album, or something... I'm not doing that. I'm just typing thoughts, I'm fairly calm, and expressing myself. And generally, I'm very happy. I think there's been times when working in the software industry has been hard, but I would consider myself pretty lucky that I've managed to dodge a lot of the problems that I talk about because I start becoming aware of them pretty early, and turned that into a viable way to keep myself employed and able to work and produce something useful, and also then learn hobbies like painting and whatnot.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:30:47.06\] Well, Zed, thank you so much for coming on with us. It's been a blast. You came on the show before, I didn't get a chance to talk to you -- it was so long ago... But to now finally get a chance to circle back, eight years later almost (ish), it's been a blast. Thank you so much for sharing what you've shared here, and keep the tweet storms coming. I like that stuff.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** He's off Twitter, man. Zed, what's the best way people can get a hold of you? If they're not going to attack you, or give you death threats, or anything like that... You're open to conversation, right?
+
+**Zed Shaw:** Totally.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We've had a great conversation here... So is it email? What's the best way -- folks can't catch you on Twitter anymore; how should they get in touch?
+
+**Zed Shaw:** What you can do is I have my blog, ZedShaw.com. That's kind of my personal little thing; you can go there, pop a comment in... I'll probably write a little blog post about this and announce it, so that way people can go and comment. And if you wanna talk to me about books and stuff like that, you can go to @LZSTHW (Learn Zed Shaw The Hard Way). That's my Twitter.
+
+Yeah, that's pretty much it. If you wanna buy my books, I would really appreciate it. You can go to LearnCodeTheHardWay.org and you can get them there. I'm also in the future gonna be producing a painting book, a painting course, totally free. I'm gonna take the money that I make from my programming books and I'm gonna see if I can do some free painting education... So just putting stuff up on YouTube, and totally free for people to learn how to paint... Because I love it, and it has helped me so much. It's one of the best things I've ever done in my life, and it's really not that hard. I think if people are making money off piles of garbage and that's considered art, then you can paint some really crappy oil paintings and it's totally art, and it's fun.
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+**Jerod Santo:** Daniel, we last had you on the Changelog when curl was 17 years old. Now curl has turned 20, and a lot has changed in those three years... But I think we should start with this quote from a tweet that you put out recently, which I loved and we retweeted, which said "20 years of maintaining open source, and all I ever got is an awesome career, friends all over the world, and a gold medal from the Swedish king." You've gotta start with the gold medal, right? Get to the important stuff first. Tell us this story.
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** So I was awarded an engineering prize in Sweden. It's named after a Swedish engineer called the Polhem Prize. It's an old, distinguished prize that they have been handing out for I think 120 years or so. Really a prestigious prize, given out to engineers and inventors of different things over the years.
+
+In 2017 I was awarded and given this prize, and it comes in the form of a gold medal and a cash part.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Nice.
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** At the award ceremony - in October I believe it was, in 2017 - I was awarded this gold medal from the Swedish king, who was there and gave it to me, so I got to shake his hand and say thanks.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's awesome. And in the tweet, which is linked in the notes, there is a picture of you shaking - I assume that's him - the Swedish king's hand there...
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Yes, yes.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Now, you just tweeted at us a few days back - May 18th; we're recording this on May 22nd, 2018, so on a time delay... Did something bring it to your mind, or did you finally get a copy of the picture that you could share? Why the delay on the tweet if this happened late last year?
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** \[03:57\] So I brought it up from a completely different reason, actually. Previous to that tweet, I tweeted another image that was one of these funny things, about one of these fake O'Reilly covers from a book that says "Thanklessly maintaining open source" and a sad lama on it... You know, more of the constant mantra that is maintaining open source is a bit of a thankless job many times, and we do a lot of things... And then someone replied to me and said "Well, you got a gold medal." \[laughter\] So I had to sort of show the other side of the coin really, because I think I have gotten a lot of good things from open source, and I enjoy it a lot. It's not an ordeal or a struggle for me, it's a pleasure and I do it for fun... So I definitely wanted to bring out some of the goodies and goodness that I experienced from working with open source.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, this is only your second time on this show, but it's probably the umpteenth time that your name has been mentioned since we had you on three years back, because you impressed us so much with the 17 years of dedication to curl, and just this relentless pursuit of what is such a popular, widely-used tool, and so relied upon. This is definitely the web's infrastructure type of a thing. And so many people burn out, fizzle out, projects change...
+
+So many things go what we might consider wrong - wrong in terms of sustainability, but with you it's like, you're 20 and you're still rollin'. Do you have a retirement date in mind, or what are you thinking for this?
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Sometimes I think about what I would do if I wouldn't do this, but no... I'm still enjoying this so much, and I don't see anything else that I wanna do as much as this. This is really my baby still so very much, so I keep on doing it for the fun of it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think what is kind of interesting about the 20 years aspect is not so much the length of time, but the -- the amount of time I guess is somewhat the same, but a slightly a different side of the coin is that it's been involved in your life. It's been a part of your life since 27; I'm assuming since it's 20 years you're now 47, doing some basic math here... Doing some basic math here. That's a lot of time - that's your 20's, your 30's, and your 40's.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Almost half.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's a lot of time.
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** It is totally a part of my life, and I've been doing it -- the first code I wrote was even before curl. Its been like 23 years. Yeah, it's older than my kids, it's older than my house, I've switched jobs like 3-4 times since then... So it's one of the most constant factors in my life, really. It's been with me since forever. So yes, it's really something that I don't really consider giving up ever, because it's me, really.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Do you own the full copyright to curl, or is it a community? What's the structure, maybe the legal implications of the ownership of it?
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** I own most copyrights, but not everything. I haven't really been very strict about it either, so if people contribute a chunk that they want to have their copyright on, that's fine; so we have a bunch of different other copyright holders on various parts, but I would say that maybe 70%-80% of everything has my copyrights on it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I ask that mainly because of the question Jerod asked, which is what would you do otherwise, essentially? At some point you'll have to pass it on.
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Of course, yes.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You know, by force or by desire.
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Exactly.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm not being morbid here, or anything.
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** But it is open source, and its licensed extremely liberal, so anyone is free to continue wherever they feel like at that point, or at any point, really.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[08:08\] It kind of reminds me of this conversation we had off-air at Build with the Python theme there, Adam, about really the passing down of the torch from Guido van Rossum to whoever is next with regards to the Python project, and when you have a BDFL, if that BDFL is really good at doing BDFL things, everything goes well... But eventually, there needs to be a passing of the torch. Have you put serious thoughts into that, or are you far enough away -- of course, with that we always bring up the somewhat morbid conversation of the bus factor, like "What if something bad happens to Guido or to yourself, Daniel?", but more likely, an eventual retirement from software or from open source... Is that something that is actively in your mind, or does it just feel like it's really far away at this point?
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Both yes and no. I would say that it is active in my mind, in the regards that I've been thinking about it and I've sort of given it thoughts about how to do it at some point in time, but it's not something that I consider doing any time soon, sort of hand it over to someone.
+
+My ideal case or my ideal situation would be that within the project there would be one or two or three persons that would be sort of the natural other people that would take over if I would just get bored one day, and they would just more or less transparently just shoulder the tasks that I've been doing, and just continue in whatever means they think they should do it.
+
+But at the same time, the way I do the project, I also know that I have a pretty strong presence myself, and I think that I sometimes also don't let others reach that level sometimes before -- because I think I sometimes do a little bit too much myself... "You know, why wait for someone else to do it when I can do it myself?", sort of... And I think that sometimes isn't constructive in that regard, and it doesn't really encourage others to step forward and show their abilities.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** But it's also in one sense very much so your life's work... So, talk about difficult to pass on or to let go, even if you know it's constructive in the long-term to let more people into the fold, or the ones who you trust, to give them more responsibilities, or allow them to come into that, when it's like... You know - curl. Daniel is curl. It's your project. It's hard to let go of that, right?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Synonymous.
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Right, yeah. But of course, I would like the project to be more distributed to more people than we are right now, and I'm trying to make that happen, but it's not -- I think I've sort of laid the groundwork for one way to work, and it has sort of developed into this, so it's not that easy to just say that "No, no, I just wanna do a little part in my corner here. You go ahead and do everything else", because there aren't that many others who are prepared to jump in and do the other stuff.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I can recall several years ago when we talk to you before, you mentioned how some of the income you've been able to make obviously has been because of contract jobs that you've done for various companies to add features, or specific things... You know, I'm just imagining that it's very difficult to piecemeal and break off some of that whenever it's so kind of you focused in the minutiae of it... And it's not exactly - I don't wanna say not the funnest work. I've never done it, obviously, but it doesn't have this lure, like some other popular projects may have, like "Hey, come and be a contributor, and you'll have this glorious open source lifestyle." \[laughter\] I'm not sure there's much draw; how do you draw people into this project with you?
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** \[12:01\] Yeah, that's a good question... I don't know.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I mean, it's the pipelines of the internet, right? It's internet plumbing.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It is.
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Yeah, and I think that might be what attracts people then, because it's sort of a fundamental thing that is just everywhere.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Massive effect.
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Yeah, so if you contribute to curl, you can get your real piece of code into a couple billion devices over time... That is, of course, an interesting feeling or challenge.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow... I didn't consider that. Okay, I take it back.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's one of the things I've been thinking about... I've been putting off a blog post about developer and leveraging software; I feel like software developers live at what is perhaps right now the height of a human's ability to leverage things... And the fact that you can write one line of code, Daniel, and then do a release, and then that eventually has to trickle down and go through the release process, but that's going to affect billions of devices, millions of people - that is an incredible amount of leverage, and I do thing that that's attractive from a software developer's stance, because how can you live the most meaningful life...? It's to have the most positive impact on the most people, and software really lets us do that.
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Oh, absolutely. Sort of, just do something little in my corner, and it can seriously influence the entire world, in some ways, at least.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. So let's zoom out and talk about your community a little bit, because as I've been watching curl and your blog more closely since you were on the show, one thing I did notice is you do keep it fun, you do celebrate victories... Like, your 20-year celebration post was awesome with like the Titanic reference... I can tell that you're still light-hearted and having fun with it, even though you've been doing this for 20 years. You have a curl conference now, you've got stickers... Tell us about some of the stuff that you're doing in the community and who all is part of it with you?
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Yeah, I think all these other things around the project that isn't code also makes it fun... I mean, some of the oldest other contributors or maintainers in the project - they've been around for... I think the oldest guy has been a little over 15 years now. So some of those are really my old friends by now, so setting up a little conference to me over a weekend and just talk curl for a weekend - I can't think of much other things that are more fun to do in a weekend... So that's just awesome.
+
+And of course, making -- one thing about becoming more known, and things like getting awards and prizes makes people get your eyes open and see us in a slightly different light or angle... Suddenly, people approach us with money, or ideas, and they can print stickers for us, and hand them over, or they can borrow us their conference rooms for a weekend, or stuff like that. So stuff also gets easier when you become known, or people realize the impact and people get friendly... We get friends all over, so that is fun.
+
+So of course, I like curl and I like working with it, and of course I then try to sort of bring up those fun moments, like celebrating 20 years of curl, or now we have 32,000 questions on Stack Overflow, or now we have 1,700 contributors in the Thanks file, and stuff like that. I wanna help out the other contributors and everyone, to make sure that they feel appreciated, and that we all appreciate what they do... I think it's fun.
+
+It also goes back to this constant question... I say, "Yeah, I've been working with curl for 20 years", and then they're like "Well, I used it 10 years ago, and it worked exactly the same. What have you been doing?" \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think we asked you that on the last podcast... \[laughs\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[16:02\] That was actually one of our questions, was "What's new with curl? What have you been doing these last few years?"
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** What have I been doing - that's a completely natural question, and it's not a bad question, it's just that, you know, when you're working with something and the facade or the front is the same, and the whole point with the tool and the library is that it should work the same way... We work really hard to make sure that it keeps working the same way, but of course, we added a little stuff, and we fixed bugs, and stuff. But the point is that you shouldn't realize that a lot of stuff underneath actually changed and we sort of replaced half of the engine, and added a lot of other things, or documented everything again in another way; you don't have to think about that.
+
+I wanna sometimes help people in the project and people around me to realize that we are actually doing a lot of things that even if you may not think of all these changes and you used curl the same way ten years ago, we have actually also added a whole bus load of things just the last few years, and here are some of those things that you can now do that you couldn't do before, and blah-blah-blah; why that is good, and how this helps your application or your usage of this in the future, and so on. And also -  we're adding a lot of features. We have 215 command line options...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Wow.
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Sometimes I feel a need to highlights parts of that to help people actually find out about things that curl can do.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Almost discovering hidden features or hidden gems, so to speak, because you're not paying attention to the changelog, or whatever...
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Exactly. So even if the things might not be new, I can sometimes just write about it - "Well, imagine if you wanna do this, you can actually do it like this with curl." You've been able to do it for a long time, but maybe you didn't think about it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Has anybody ever written a curl cookbook or some sort of thing where it's not necessarily -- like it's just a pamphlet, or maybe it's even only digital... But it's like "Here are 25 things that you can do with curl", and then specific examples of those commands... Because that would be so useful.
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Yes, there are pages like that. I try to do that sometimes, but I'm not the right person to do it. I'm so entrenched in the details, so I just get lost in... \[laughs\] I've actually written a book about curl that I'm posting online. It's called Everything Curl, and it's really everything curl.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So is it gonna be like a big curl bible kind of thing, or is it going to be -- how long is it? I guess that's what I'm trying to get at.
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** It's long... \[laughs\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's right. That's how I thought you might say it. You said "It's EVERYTHING curl." I'm like, "Well... It might be too much curl."
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Yeah, yeah. But it is. You can just google it, and if you print it, it's like 250 pages or so.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Is this an ongoing thing?
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** It is an ongoing thing...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It started in 2015(ish), something like that; late 2015.
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Yeah, exactly. I think it was after our last podcast... But yes, it's been going on for several years, and it's never gonna end either, because it's just so much -- I know curl changes all the time too, so if I wanna keep up, I need to keep up with the book, too.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** But it's an effort to describe curl and how to use curl in a way that isn't really just man pages, and reference documentation, but actually sort of help people to read up about it in a different way.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's kind of like a "Did you know...?" kind of thing. I think that would be so useful. I was thinking - you know, kind of a callback to a recent show - maybe there was a Devhints out there for curl, and of course, there is... So devhints.io/curl. This is kind of what I'm thinking, but it's light on examples. There's three examples, and I think you could probably come up with some complex use cases where "This would be super handy for this particular case, and then here's your curl command."
+
+\[20:06\] One thing I have seen a lot of, which is really neat, is different HTTP tooling - specifically some desktop apps for Mac - will actually have like an "Export to curl" button once you've crafted a specific request, right? And then you can just get the curl export and put that in your terminal, and that's really cool.
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Yeah, the "Copy as curl" has really become a popular feature, and I like that, too.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Firefox, Chrome and Safari now all have this "Copy as curl." If you're using their dev tools, you can copy from their specific -- you know, if you watch the network traffic from your browser, you can select a particular request and do "Copy as curl" from that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Spectacular if you're trying to replay a very specific thing in the terminal and capture the output, or whatever you wanna do from there.
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Oh yeah, it's really handy, and it's a great way to learn how to use -- if you wanna do something with curl and get "It's roughly this that my browser just did", and just get a copy and edit that command line. I mean, the command line is usually quite long, and...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** 215... That's a lot of features.
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Right. They're often really repetitive, because the browsers set a lot of headers, so you wanna have the exact headers like the browsers do; they set a lot of them... Very long command lines. But still, you can look at that command line and see "This is how you could do it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So speaking of headers and speaking of features, I actually found on your blog recently a feature that I'm very much looking forward to, which is a small change, but you said the core feature set has stayed the same, and people say curl works exactly like it used to... You're doing some UI brush-ups, specifically with the -I command, which is probably -- like, if you go through my history with curl, in my command prompt, you're gonna find curl -I (capital I, of course) almost every time, because I use it in headers... And you're adding bold key values on the header; so the header names are bold, and then the value (the text) is not bold. So that's like a very small thing, but you're not ignoring the facade or the paint; you're still making small improvements to the output, as well.
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Yes. And sometimes I have a hard time to decide what to focus on... But I think it's fun to do that, too. I try to sort of move around a little bit. I can work a little bit on how things appear on the command line... I changed one of the progress bar outputs a while ago too, just because of -- it is actually somewhat important to some people, and why not...? And it's fun to work on that sometimes, and then go back to debugging HTTP/2 streams for another day.
+
+So I mix it up, and that's what makes me, of course, enjoy this, since I can do various things. I can play with a UI one day, and then go back and work with protocol stuff another day, and then work on documentation a third day, and then write a blog post another day.
+
+I've actually just landed it in Git, so it'll be for the next curl release, the code that outputs the headers as bold. The name part is bold, and the value -- well, the value part is not bold. It's actually a very long time coming feature request.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, I'm sure a long time coming, but you also mentioned that this was not an insignificant amount of code change. Maybe you weren't set up to do this kind of output, or -- why was it a bigger feature than maybe people would think it is?
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** \[23:50\] I think it's mostly a lot of internal decisions on how to do HTTP, and show headers... You know, we have this concept of headers, and curl supports a lot of different protocols, and some of them have the internal concept of headers, but I only wanted to do the bold for HTTP headers. So it was mostly because of how I had done this with curl until now, or not done it.
+
+And also, I had to change -- I don't know how to explain it, but headers come until the carriage return line at the end of a feed, so you wanna make sure that you actually do this on a complete header, and not on a partial header. So if it would be an extremely long header, it would still need code to handle -- that would only do the left part and not the right part of it, so it was a lot of finicky internal things.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Good old-fashioned yak shave.
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Yes, and I've sort of done a lot of decisions a long time ago that were convenient because I didn't do this, and now when I had to go back and make sure that I could split up the headers like this, then I had to just remodel a couple of things and shape it up. But I think it was all good. I think I improved some other tiny things in the process, and I know that a lot of people will appreciate getting the headers bold; however small it may sound, it's one of those details that makes it look better.
+
+**Break:** \[25:31\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So I guess we came to this conversation through an embarrassing moment for me... It was early in the morning on a Sunday, and somebody in our Slack - Daniel - had said "Hey, what's the state of HTTP/2 and where is it going?" and I'm like "Great question, we should ask Ilya. We've had him on the show a while back, and it'd be great to catch up. I send him an email with the subject line "Current state of HTTPS?", not /2, and I had to quickly check that, because that was obviously not right... But I was reaching out to essentially get an update on TLS 1.3, QUIC, and some other stuff... So maybe help us understand -- he said that you're working on this; you've got a lot of stuff going on. What's going on?
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** There's a lot of stuff going on. Well, HTTP/2 - that shipped three years ago, right? Our last episode... And the RFC was published in May 2015, so yeah. And now, three years later, the work is of course no longer going on standard-wise on HTTP/2 very much. There are still things happening in HTTP/2, but the fundamentals are there, and it's good, and it's working, and it's being used.
+
+\[28:00\] I could just add perhaps that if we look at traffic done by Firefox, we can see that Firefox is using HTTP/2 in about 75% of all HTTPS traffic, so I would say that is pretty good; a significant amount of the traffic is HTTP/2 now... Counted by volume, of course. If you look at the other ways - how a large percentage of all the web servers in the world that are providing HTTP/2, it's not as nice numbers. I think we're approaching 40% of the top 1,000, and in the top 10 million it's like 25% or so.
+
+But it's still moving, and I think the numbers are still rising pretty quickly. I think they doubled roughly the last 12 months or so. They've been doing that for a while. So it's growing, and it's being used, and it's being understood, and I think there are areas that have been more successful, and some that have been less successful in the protocol.
+
+I think already when HTTP/2 shipped, there was this notion that the next protocol revision wouldn't at all take 16 years to happen, it would happen much sooner...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] That would be nice, wouldn't it?
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Yes, and a lot of the HTTP/2 work was also laying the foundation to make sure that we could iterate protocol versions much faster and easier and more effortless in the future. HTTP/2 brought a lot of that infrastructure.
+
+At the same time when HTTP/2 shipped, Google had already been running their QUIC experiments in their Chrome browser and in their server side since (I believe) they went public - 2013, or so - with their QUIC efforts.
+
+Anyway, Google took their efforts to the IETF and said "We should make a standard version of the QUIC protocol." They did that in late 2016. And QUIC being an experimental protocol that Google invented then, which is HTTP/2-like, but it's done over UDP. UDP is not reliable, it doesn't do retransmissions or anything, and there's no security in there or anything, so you basically implement a transport stack -- basically, a TCP-like stack that also features security then, because wanna have the not HTTPS, but HTTPS-like...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So you have UDP and TCP - don't those operate kind of at the same level of the stack? Why would you take UDP and then make it TCP-like?
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Exactly!
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Exactly. \[laughter\]
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Well, I can take one step back first - why wouldn't you invent a new protocol? If you wanna make TCP better, why not make a TCP 2, in parallel to TCP? That has basically been ruled out because of all the middleboxes and NATs and firewalls and everything in the world; that makes it really hard to introduce any new transport protocols nowadays.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Hm... So you're stuck.
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** So we are pretty much stuck. TCP or UDP - those are the ones we have to choose between.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[31:56\] So now the answer is "Well, we can't change TCP enough to make it faster or better or more secure, but we can take UDP, which is very lightweight and doesn't have any of these things a TCP has, and make it TCP-like", but not with some of the trappings, I guess?
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Exactly. By choosing UDP and basically "Do it all yourself", then you can basically decide how to do it... You just do whatever you want. And in Google's case, they have a fairly large client-side implementation and a fairly large server-side implementation. They were in an excellent position to experiment with doing their own protocol over UDP, and implement all this and check it out, see how it works... And it worked really good, and they figured out that "This is a protocol we should make a standard for the web and the internet."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Can either of you give a 10-second/60-second version of the difference between TCP and UDP?
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** TCP is like setting up a string between two computers - a physical string - and you pass on data in one end, and it will arrive in the other end. Or it might get connected, but the data will arrive or not arrive at all. But it will arrive, and it will unaltered, and it will arrive in the same order that it was sent from the sender.
+
+So it's basically a way to transport data and make sure that it's a reliable transport in both directions... But UDP on the other hand is basically sending notes in the air, writing pieces of paper and throwing them away.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Message in a bottle.
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Yeah, it might arrive, it might not... And it might arrive in another order, too. So it's much more lightweight, and it's been used traditionally for DNS, MTP, and traditionally also for RTP, for video.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** But it was never on a really wide scale, high-speed internet scale like this... So that's always been one of the biggest concerns, "Will UDP break stuff now? Because we haven't designed things for UDP at this level." But over time it has proven that most of the things actually work pretty well anyway, and over time people have also adjusted things and improved infrastructure, and routers, and things... So things are going better.
+
+And looking at Google's numbers, they claim that they -- my number is old now, but they said already like a year or two ago that 7% of the internet is QUIC already, and that's quite a big share of data running...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So QUIC is the new version of what HTTP/2 has been, right? The evolution of HTTP/1 to HTTP/2 is now coming to QUIC, and...
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** And QUIC is a lot of things... Because first, it was the QUIC that Google made.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right, and now it's evolved to something else.
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Yes.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Because it's a long time ago when they started this, like 2013, 2012 or something like that when QUIC was begun...?
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Yes, exactly. So I think they went public with it in 2013, but then they had already been working on it in private before that... But then they produced what I call Google QUIC, and that is basically sending HTTP/2 over UDP, with custom encryption code. So you could almost use your HTTP/2 implementation and just provide that QUICK stack, and it would work. But when they took that protocol -- well, they kept up with documenting how the protocol worked, and they had a website for everything, and they made it all in the public, and they took their latest update of the drafts to the IETF and said "We should document this protocol. This is QUIC from Google", blah-blah-blah, and when they brought it into the IETF and they started to look at it and decide on how to move forward on this, they came to the conclusion that this bundled solution that is one transport protocol that is only sending HTTP/2 wasn't ideal for a protocol or a transport like this. So they came up with the conclusion that QUIC should be split in a transport part and an application part.
+
+\[36:39\] So it should be able to also transport other things than HTTP, and DNS was one of the first things that were discussed and it has been one of the second protocols that have been in discussion all the time. So then QUIC became "QUIC the transport", and "HTTP over QUIC" is the new HTTP...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Is that the final version of QUIC, or is that a transitionary version as well?
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Well, it's not final, because it's not done yet. So they took it to the IETF, and they created a QUIC working group in the IETF, and within that group there have been a lot of activities since then. They're now doing draft 12 of the specs, and they have four different specs I think. The plan is to be done by November this year, 2018...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** With the spec.
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** With the specs, although there are several... I think there are four or five specs. But yeah, I don't think they will stick to this plan, because there are still too many loose parts and moving parts.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I guess to zoom out, the question might be -- this is all in an effort to obviously make progress, but to make it easier to iterate on something that has been traditionally harder to iterate on.
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Yeah, but also sort of -- when HTTP/2 shipped, we all were aware of a lot of shortcomings and things that we could improve further in the transport protocols. So when we went to HTTP/2, we improved a lot of things from HTTP/1.1, but there are still a lot of other things that HTTP/2 can't really do, and where it has bottlenecks, or problems that we can solve... And we couldn't really solve them with TCP in the HTTP/2 context, but going to QUIC we can solve some of those problems that are still present in HTTP/2. I mean, apart from just fixing things in TCP... Fixing things in TCP is really, really difficult in general, because not only -- there are many reasons why TCP is difficult to change, but two of them are that again we have a lot of middle boxes over the internet. You're talking through NATs and routers and everything, and they "know" how TCP works. So if you change how TCP works slightly, you add a little thing here or there, you break X percent of those boxes, and they will refuse to send it because they know that's not TCP anymore.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Even if you're just tuning parameters, or if you fundamentally change the protocol? Because tuning parameters - they shouldn't break... That would just be really bad programming on those boxes.
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Well, yes, but that's the reality... Just as sort of a little story into this - one of the features they added in TCP... I think like seven years ago they added a TCP Fast Open, which is a way to send data already in the first SYN packet in TCP. You know, when you do a TCP handshake, you do a SYN, and SYN - there is a three-way handshake... So in order to gain roundtrip, they invented this method where you could add data already in the first SYN packet, so you would save a roundtrip; you would get data earlier. And you know, a lot of this struggle is to get data earlier; reduce roundtrips, get data earlier. So sending data already in the first packet of TCP - that's potentially saving, if not tens, but sometimes hundreds of milliseconds if you're far away; it's a huge benefit.
+
+\[40:27\] But implementing and using this TFO over the internet today - it turns out to be a struggle and a pain to make sure that it works, because there are so many machines out there that block that little new bit that comes saying "Here's the TFO", saying "Nuh-uh... That's not TCP the way we want it. Deny!"
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, that's a tough problem. You just have so much infrastructure out there... It's not feasible to change the boxes in the middle, because there's just too many owners, too many places, too many situations that you're never gonna be able to replace those.
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Exactly. That's what they call ossification nowadays. And the grand solution to that is encrypt everything, so that none of these middleboxes can actually peek into those little bits and bytes.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Sniff your packets, yeah.
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Exactly, they can't figure out you wanted this, because they don't know it, they just have to pass it on... So then you can add things, over time. That is one reason why QUIC is now really encrypted, as much as possible, really.
+
+But that shows how it's hard to change even TCP over the wire, but then also just changing the implementations of TCP. They're kernel-based stacks; it takes forever. This TFO - the spec came seven years ago, and it was only a year or so ago that Windows finally implemented it widely... So it takes forever for this to be implemented widely. So if you wanna iterate fast, you can do it like that.
+
+And then there is another technical problem, for example, that TCP has and HTTP/2 - it's the problem with packet loss. When HTTP/2 was introduced, the new method of doing transfers was a lot of streams over a single physical connection... So you would typically do 100 streams of the same TCP connection, just a lot of logical streams over it, which is a good way to do a lot of parallel transfers, but only using one connection.
+
+This is really good, as long as your network is decent, and it turns out that if your network turns out to be very lossy and you start losing packets, then having just a single TCP connection is really not ideal... Because then losing one packet in the middle there, that means that you're waiting for one packet to get resent to get those 100 streams continued, while previously you would do typically perhaps six connections per host, and you would do sharding, you would maybe have 20 connections or 30 connections with HTTP/1.1 to sites.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So it's almost like faster networks get faster, but slow networks get slower. Slow as is in -- unreliable maybe is the better word. Not slow, but unreliable.
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Exactly. Slow as in bad radio...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Connectivity.
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Exactly, because HTTP/2 is really good if you're far away. So for people really far away from their servers, it's excellent. It's possibly those who actually gain the most by HTTP/2.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Because they need to make less TCP connections?
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Yeah, and much less roundtrips. You can fire off 100 requests at once, basically, and get the responses, instead of this ping-pong - request/response, request/response, sending/waiting, sending/waiting.
+
+\[44:10\] This TCP limitation is not there in QUIC. In QUIC you create connections, but they're not connections in the same way as TCP has them. When you're sending a stream, the streams themselves are reliable within the stream. So we can send things, and you know that the picture or imagine or whatever you send will arrive in the other end unmodified and exactly as it was sent from the source. But the streams - they are independent from each other. So if you drop a packet somewhere in the middle, that belongs to stream one. Stream two can still continue, because it still has all its little packets. It's only the one that actually has lost packets that has to wait. So this makes the lossy network situation completely different, because then if you lose a few packets somewhere - yeah, sure, those streams that belong to those that actually have lost packets, they will have to wait and resend packets and everything, but the others can continue.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It sounds like "Thank goodness for UDP", because it's provided us a loophole around the ossification, right? We would have been stuck if this UDP hack wasn't available to us.
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Exactly. It is exactly like that. That's why it has to be UDP, and that's why we're doing all this work, implementing TCP-like stacks in user space in both ends. QUIC, as a protocol, is (I would say) far more advanced than HTTP/2, because now you also have to implement the transport part, and then the HTTP part on top of that.
+
+**Break:** \[45:57\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Daniel, if you were to describe QUIC's mission, what would it be?
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** It would be to reduce roundtrips and work pretty much transparently the same way as HTTP/2, but better, and secure by default, and always. There's no clear text QUIC. And of course, that is the HTTP over QUIC, how that will appear. There will be more QUIC after this QUIC.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] "There's more QUIC coming after this QUIC." Wasn't HTTP/2 supposed to be all encrypted too, and maybe they backed off on that at the last minute?
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Yeah, exactly. Well, HTTP/2 in reality, I would say, on the internet, over the web, is encrypted always, but the standard allows for both...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** The spec...
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Exactly, the spec is sort of you can do it either way. But for QUIC there's no unencrypted version. You need TLS 1.3. You can't avoid it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[48:03\] You said there's more QUIC coming... This QUIC hasn't even arrived yet; how can we look that far down the pipeline?
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** I think that is maybe -- we don't have to care about it right now, but...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Phew!
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** But when Google took this into IETF, they decided we should split it into transport and application, and the application is HTTP. And we should prepare for another application, maybe DNS. Then they also said "Well, we also want QUIC to be able to handle Multipath...", which is -- I don't know if you know about Multipath TCP, but that's setting up multiple paths between two endpoints over the internet.
+
+But then they decided that "Maybe we don't have time to get into Multipath in QUIC v.1, so we'll postpone the Multipath part." So there's already this talk about "Oh, but then QUIC v.2 will be making sure that we can actually do DNS, and do Multipath, and stuff like that..." Basically, postpone because it hasn't been enough time to cram it in into version one.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So you mentioned earlier that 7% roughly - and that might be an older number - of the internet is using QUIC; specifically if you're using Google Chrome and you're speaking to Google services, you're most definitely using QUIC and you just don't know it. What about the rest of us? What's the roadmap look like in terms of adoption, or production use, and when we should start thinking about it? Many of us are still trying to get on HTTP/2, so maybe this is a little overwhelming... But maybe we can skip HTTP/2 and go straight to QUIC, I don't know.
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** I get that there's some notion of that. Maybe if you haven't gone to HTTP/2 by the end of this year, maybe you should consider just going to QUIC at once. But I don't know. Well, the Google QUIC was not implemented by many others than Google alone. The Caddy server has an implementation, and there are a few other standalone implementations, but they have never been widely deployed or adopted... So the Google QUIC version is primarily used by Chrome and the Google servers; that is basically what 7% of the internet traffic is.
+
+But the IETF version of QUIC, which is quite different over the wires... It's sort of this divide, and they changed the crypto layer, and they changed pretty much everything in the protocol. So the IETF version of QUIC is being implemented by a lot of different players... All the ones that you can expect - the browsers, the big server vendors, and the big service vendors (Facebook is on it), and the CDNs, too. Going into the future, we will see this getting deployed and used by all the big players that were involved with HTTP/2 deployment.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So are you working on this on Mozilla's behalf, on curl's behalf? Both, perhaps? How does it fit into your life now?
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Well, I'm actually not that involved in QUIC. I'm reading the traffic, I'm getting the news, and sort of following that steady stream of GitHub issues, and stuff like that. So yeah, I'm participating a bit for both interests - from a Mozilla perspective and a curl perspective, but because of course I wanna make sure I learn and know how it works and understand everything, and then as soon as it becomes possible and I get the time and energy, implement it and support it in curl.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What kind of timeline would you expect for that? Would you wait for the -- the draft needs to be formalized, right? So that November 2018 that they're shooting for - you wouldn't start any sooner than that, would you?
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Yeah, I would, depending on things...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Tell us more. What things?
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** \[52:01\] Well, it's like building a tower, or building a house - when can you move in? When I implemented HTTP/2 for curl, I went in pretty early, and I started implementing support already in one of the drafts I think a year before it finalized. That turned out to be really useful, both as feedback back into the standard process, but also a lot of just trying out things and getting everything working, and interoping with all the other implementers. I think it's really useful to get in as early as possible... But not too early from my point of view, because in the QUIC world there's so much transport here, and I wanna have the transport part fairly done by the time I start adding the HTTP parts on top of that transport stuff.
+
+Then I need to cooperate with others to do a library; there are already many libraries that implement this, but I am having a particular one in mind, and when I work with those guys, to make sure that we get an HTTP over QUIC library that works fine with curl, and that I can make sure that curl uses.
+
+I'm expecting us - or me - to start doing that soon. I already started by now, but I think the spec hasn't really moved on as fast as I anticipated it, and the libraries are also not really there, and I haven't really had the time... So maybe in a month or so, I would say, hopefully during the summer, I could get to start on it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, we talked about the ossification of our infrastructure, at least in curl's case, and on the software side. And on the client side, we appreciate that you are so eager to jump in and to help beta test the implementation of these things, and maybe even write one of the early client-side implementations of supporting these things, so that we can continue moving forward... Because when curl adopts something, a lot of devices around the world now can speak that language, right? So that's pretty cool.
+
+You mentioned DNS as the other potential application of QUIC underneath DNS. I'm assuming there you would gain any speed, because UDP alone has gotta be faster than QUIC, right? Because QUIC has additional things... But there you're gaining that encrypted connection. Am I on point there?
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Yeah, and I think there's an even bigger goal here, too. This term that has been used within the IETF several times, that I can drop here - they talk about the post-TCP world... If you wanna go to things completely TCP-less, then you need to do the other protocols over quick, basically.
+
+I'm not sure why they picked DNS as the other protocol to use here, because... I mean, DNS has its own road forward in other ways, so I'm not sure exactly how this is going to turn out; I can't really speak much about why they picked DNS or what they want from that over QUIC, because nowadays we see a lot of DNS going over TLS, and DNS over HTTPS coming... So we're already sort of fixing up the security parts and the privacy parts for DNS like this... So I don't know.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So a "post-TCP world" - I've never had this consideration. This is my first time thinking about what are the implications. Dan, you probably thought about it a little bit more - what does that imply? What does that change? It seems like a simplification, but maybe not, because you've gotta put so much stuff in QUIC...
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** One of the interesting things without TCP is what is an HTTPS URL, really? Or an HTTP URL, for that matter... But HTTPS URLs - they are basically implying TCP, right? Or HTTPS is... Since they're not saying "Connect to me on UDP port 443", because you probably don't have that. So that's one of the greater challenges - how to move away from that.
+
+\[56:26\] I didn't mention that, but the way you bootstrap into a QUIC world from HTTP (or HTTP/2) is that the server is replying with an alt Alt-Svc header saying "You can connect to this origin over on this server, using this protocol", blah-blah-blah, and then you continue from there and you cache that information.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I was actually gonna ask about that - is that then a UDP request? Like, the client sends one of those first? It can't be a TCP request...
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Well, the initial one will be an HTTP... Or you'll rather upgrade to HTTP/2 probably first, and that response will say "The next one you can continue on over here, using QUIC, this version", blah-blah-blah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So you still have to require hand-shaking, and you still have the setup time on that very first request, because you don't know if it's gonna be a QUIC server basically, until you do, and then from then on you can assume that and you can also cache that in the client.
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Yeah, and it has a lifetime. So if you know you're gonna provide that for a year, you can set up a really long lifetime, so everyone will cache that for a long time. But going back to the ossification, UDP is also not as successful to use over the internet as TCP is. There's still this single-digit percentage of connections that will fail over UDP. That sort of never handshake QUIC at all. So you still have to have that fallback mechanism to go back to HTTP/2 if the QUIC connection doesn't work... At least that is what we're doing now, and for the forseeable future.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Now, you're telling me that there's no such thing as a post-TCP world then, because suck with this forever. \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Post-TCP-first.
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Possibly... You know how everything gets done. There's always something left of the old technology somewhere. We'll never get rid of everything.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah... And I'm really just wondering what the implications are. Why is IETF using this term now internally in their conversations? And it's like, I don't understand why you would want a post-TCP world, unless maybe because it's just old, and QUIC's better in every single way, eventually.
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Yeah, I guess... I guess it's because it then solves the ossification problem. It allows you to keep on developing the protocols freely, much more freely. So if you wanna implement Multipath next year or in 2020, you can do that, because you have encrypted everything from the beginning, so there won't be any middleboxes that prevents you from implementing new, cool features that you come up with in the future. So I think there's a lot of that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Except for that first request. \[laughs\] You've still gotta get it through there.
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Yeah, that's the current approach, but I guess there will be those who will do the happy eyeballs approach, when you try both at the same time and you go with the one that responds, and stuff like that. That is also a solvable solution. You can probably invent something in the future that will do it differently.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So where should developers out there, in open source land, where should they be putting QUIC on their radar, and thinking about it more or less important in terms of maybe somebody's running a website, like Changelog.com, or maybe they're running a network service, like Twitch or something...? Is this something that we should all just be patiently waiting for, should we be getting involved? Maybe that depends on who you are and what you're up to, but what would be your advice with regards to QUIC?
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** \[01:00:04.01\] It's of course a technology that if you're into low latency serving things from either end over the internet, this is a technology that is coming, so of course, getting familiar with it and how it works and what it means for you - that's a good start. But it will take a while until they are reliable and solid implementations of this. So if you wanna work on code now, you're pretty early on, and you get to get a lot of funny things and rough edges if you try it out... But of course, it's a chance too to work on this bleeding edge protocol stuff.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So Daniel, you have the ear of the open source community, you're an elder statesman now, if you will, being awarded a medal by the Swedish king... I mean, that's something that doesn't happen every day, so you've got that going for you... If you could give some closing advice on this time around to our listeners and to us with regards to open source, software development, life - whatever it is, as parting words, what would you share with the audience?
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** My general advice when it comes to open source and software development like this in general is first to make sure that you try to find what is fun for you and work on that, because of you don't do that, you end up not doing it at all. So finding your project or your ideas or whatever scratches -- I mean, you scratch your itch; that makes you actually do something, and that's fun, and then you can possibly become productive.
+
+Then I think you also need patience. Whatever you do in this area of work, you need to be sure that it's -- some things just take a lot of time. Not only time to get things done, but also time to make sure that others find your project and that you find your users or whatever, that you get your stuff completed. Things take a lot of time.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Speaking of patience, going back to the beginning of the conversation, the 20 years post... You mentioned Titanic, you mentioned that Google wasn't even formed yet, and here we just talked about Google leading QUIC, or at least beginning QUIC, and where it's at now... It's pretty interesting to see the patience it must have taken on your part to deliver curl and then evolve it over years and be patient with all the change.
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Yeah, and just looking back over time and seeing what a different world and a different society we had back then... It's only 20 years, but most of everything we know today - it wasn't like that 20 years ago.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Cool. Daniel, thank you so much for spending time with us, thanks for coming back again, thanks for your super awesome service to the community in ways I'm sure that the future generations or the entire world will truly appreciate... Maybe lesser than we need them to, but having something that's so widely adopted and so widely used, I'm sure it will be around forever, for as long as the internet needs it, right?
+
+**Daniel Stenberg:** Yeah, exactly. As long as it's needed, it's going to be there.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's 20 years so far, so... 20 years more at least, for sure.
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@@ -0,0 +1,491 @@
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Rico, it's 4 AM, and we're excited, because normally we do this show at 2 o'clock PM our time, but it's 4 AM your time... How do you feel?
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Well, you know, I haven't really had coffee yet, but I'm really excited to be here. I didn't really expect anyone would nominate me; basically, someone just mentioned on GitHub that you should have me on your show, and I got a notification thing and I said "Hey, why not? I've been tuning into the Changelog and I'd be excited to do it", so here I am.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It was kzap on GitHub, a fellow Philippines native with you, Andre Marcelo-Tanner, I believe... Is that right? And he had lots of great things to say about you - different talks you've given, the things you've done, everything from the phenomenal cheatsheets, Devhints.io, which is awesome, and various other projects we'll talk through... That's awesome.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Rico, we have to apologize for the 4 AM wake-up call, because like kzap, you're over there in the Philippines and I was not thinking about that when I scheduled our regular 2 PM time slot, so thanks for waking up for us. Why don't you help us out by understanding really the vantage point of open source and software development over there in the Philippines?
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Very interesting question. The guy who nominated me (kzap), he's actually part of a local Slack group that we have, called PHackers.com; just Philippine tech hackers... Which is pretty good, because it's only in the last few two years maybe (2-4 years) that we were getting people online, and people are starting to congregate online and... The way Philippines is - it's pretty fragmented, there's lots of cities, and we have some meetups, but it's not as active as it would be in other countries, so a lot of things happen online.
+
+But we do also have local meetups for interest groups like JavaScript and Ruby, so it's very nice to see that people are actually getting interested into open source, especially now that the open source community is getting pretty big as well.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very cool. The main one I believe that you're a part of is the Manila JavaScript community meetup... It sounds like a lot of folks are interested in that, and you've got some big speakers, as well as yourself talking about such topics as "Why is npm slow?" - of course, we'll get a little bit into npm down the road, but... Great to hear that there's at least a start of a local community where people are getting together and doing cool stuff.
+
+Before we get to the major topic, which we want to talk about your cheatsheets - these are things you've been working on for a long time and you finally gave them their own home on the web at Devhints... But before, let's hear a little bit about you, Rico. Tells us a little bit of your origin story; how did you get into the software game, what was that all about?
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Actually, my background is more into graphic design, and I was doing a lot of UI and web design before I got into this whole web development thing. Once upon a time, my day job was doing plain web design without any sort of coding. Then I met some very interesting people who are way smarter than me, who are into this thing called Ruby, which was very new to me. So I gave it a shot, and we cofounded a small startup a couple of years ago. It basically started from there.
+
+I didn't really have any professional experience with web development at all before this, and suddenly I was there doing Ruby, doing Sinatra, and Rails, and all these things with the help of some other people who have a lot more experience than me. That's pretty much it.
+
+Eventually, I started being somewhere in between. I was a developer/designer, and that was 2009, I think... I was just kind of the person who would like to make things, and every now and then I'd make a project and realize how easy it is to get things online, now that we have Git, we have GitHub and all these platforms.
+
+\[08:05\] I remember asking my friend, "How do you get something out there? Is there a process?" and he told me "Well, I don't know. Push it out there and tweet about it", and that's what we did. \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's funny, we've been hearing that for years... We've started this podcast in 2009; that's been somewhat of the maintainer/open source inventor feeling, as like "I created it. How do I market it, how do I share it with the world?" That's generally what people did, but part of the motivation for us to do this show, and the blog we've done in the past, the newsletter we created was to shed light on the interesting things happening in open source.
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Oh yeah, a lot of times people would ask me "How do you get a project out there? How do you get it popular? How do you get people to look at it?" and there's really I think no good answer to that one. Sometimes you never really know.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I was hoping you were just gonna school us and give us all the tips and tricks right here.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What worked for you? What were some of the things you did that seemed to work?
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** I could tell you a couple of things and what I think worked, but I can't really say if it is what contributed to success... One of the interesting anecdotes I would tell my friends is that there would be times where I would pour my heart and soul into something that I really like doing. I would basically make an entire compiler of JavaScript, because that's what I like to do, I like to tinker around with compilers. I've built js2coffee based on another AST generator, but the thing is these are the things that I like to do, these are the things that I would stay up all night sometimes just to build... And sometimes the smaller things that seem like they don't matter -- I made a small progress bar, and suddenly that's a lot more popular than something I've put so much effort into.
+
+You just never really know which things would become popular. But I think what really helped in general is you have to understand that the people who go to your project on GitHub or on your website are not necessarily people who would be using your work. So your intention should be "How do I make something and explain it in a way that would interest people?"
+
+Let's say for example you're making a React component, and you might be talking to someone who's not really using React, but if you tailor your readme or your website in such a way that makes it seem like "Oh, this is actually an interesting one and I might be using it right now, I might be using it in the future, or a colleague might like it..." You know, you have to sell what it is you're building in your documentation. It's not just describing what it is and how to use it, it's also telling an interesting story.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Do you have any examples of what an interesting story might be? You say "selling" - what does it mean to sell someone in a readme?
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** It's actually very straightforward, I think. I mean, you would see a lot of projects out there, and they would be wondering why people aren't really looking at it, but there's usually no examples or no screenshots, which is kind of a bummer.
+
+Compare that something that even though it might be a simple project, but it has a very clear screenshot describing what it is, at a first glance, in 30 seconds, instead of a readme, and you kind of already know what it is.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[12:01\] Well, for you as your nprogress project, since you've mentioned that, I think the landing page for that is just perfect because you've got four examples there, you click it and you see it literally in progress. You see it working, which is the point. I think that's sort of like the "Get to the point", it's kind of what you mean by selling.
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Yeah, exactly. It's something that you go through the website and in 20 seconds you know what this thing does.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. I was thinking about this for us, Jerod, because we use Turbolinks.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yup... As far as using nprogress.js?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Well, it says right there, "Perfect for Turbolinks, PJAX..."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Doesn't Turbolinks 5 have that built in?
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Yes, Turbolinks 5 has that built in now.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We have that feature, Adam, it's just our website is too fast, you never see it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I never see the progress bar because it is just that fast.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** This is a humble brag. \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Our code is on GitHub, so if you wanna check it out, you can.
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Cool.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I was gonna say it's not anything that we did that's special, there's a lot of...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It just started there...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** ...very smart people that made it fast that weren't us.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's from the Ruby community, right?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Which one, Turbolinks?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Turbolinks, yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, it came out of Ruby on Rails, but it's a standalone thing now. Speaking back to your point there, Rico, about demo-able... I mean, we share a lot of projects; like Adam said, it's what we do. They're rarely ever our own things; we're trying to help other people get the word out about what we think they're doing which is interesting... And so in the days of analytics, especially with Twitter metrics and stuff, we can know after the fact what did and did not resonate with the community of people that at least follow the @changelog handle on Twitter, and what I've seen in the last probably two years - it used to be somewhat avant-garde and now it's commonplace - is the rise of anymated gif's in order to embed a movable, demo-able, visual thing right there at the top of your readme, which I think probably today if you had to pick one thing that would sell a project, is a high-quality animated gif that actually displays the value proposition of what this thing does before you get to all the details, its technical merits, how you use it, and stuff. It's just like, "Here you have on nprogress.js", like "Let me see it right away." And if you can't do it on your own website if you're on a readme, animated gifs are a great way of doing that.
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Oh yeah, and it's very true, and it's also very portable, because they show up on GitHub, on npm, on Twitter, and pretty much everywhere. So that's absolutely great. It's actually pretty interesting to see how much just developers love animated gifs and emojis. I didn't expect it to happen that way.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It was funny, because the first one -- I think my first exposure to emoji... And Adam, maybe you can recall this, too - I think it was when Apple added them to the iPhone keyboard back in iOS 4, or something. I mean, besides the old emoticons... And then like Skype had some weird-looking smiley faces. Besides like the typical smile, laugh, blah-blah-blah, like the full icon set.
+
+At first I was very down on them. I thought these were for kids, and silly, and I don't know... And then over time, they just swayed me. Does that resonate with you guys, or was I just curmudgeon to start with and you all thought they were awesome from the start?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[15:47\] I'm with you... My at the time girlfriend, now wife, Heather, she was before the Apple swing; it was when you had to actually install that separate keyboard. It was like an app you could download, and you had to go into your keyboard settings and add this Chinese or Japanese -- it was some sort of...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Character set?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, some sort of character set that you had to add. It was like a special thing. And it was sort of like kludgy, and I can remember seeing weird characters, and I couldn't see the things because I didn't have the keyboard in place. So this is pre-then. I'm like, "Are you and your friends talking in these emojis, or whatever these things are?" I didn't get it. Clearly, I'm born in 1979, because I'm showing my age. But... I think they're cool.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What about you, Rico?
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Well, we've got people putting emojis in commit messages, putting them on blog posts, and pretty much anywhere you can squeeze in an emoji. Command line apps all have emojis now, so it's actually pretty interesting just how much emojis have been starting to ingrain itself into open source developer culture.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Absolutely. And that's another thing, if we talk about things that optimize for the retweet or the star in terms of... You know, projects will put an emoji in their description, and there's something about it that just -- I don't know if it's just a visual aid, or... You find the right emoji that represents your little library or whatever, and it gives it an extra little boost.
+
+So it's funny how it's pretty trivial aspects... I mean, for people who -- the developers who reach you like about meritocracy, and like "What's the technical merits of this thing?" and very much the numbers and the tech and the architecture, but at the end of the day we're all very much just sold by animated gifs and emojis.
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Well, I like to think we're still about the usefulness and the merits of projects, and those are just things we use to convey them.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Not at all.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I would like to believe that as well. \[laughter\] As with all things, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think what's interesting too, to go back to the earlier conversation around the vantage point you have on open source, and you mentioned how the community is getting driven, and how recently the Slack was formed and there's community being formed, what do you see as community drivers for you in the Philippines? Do you feel like the United States or Europe, do you feel like they're more advanced? Where do you see the Philippines in your local area in terms of developer community?
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Okay, so whenever I go to meetups in other countries, one thing I would really notice that is different from here - it's something about culture as well of people being in a room with other strangers, and there are some cultures that welcome this kind of setup pretty openly. You would go to meetups in other countries and they would be more like parties, they would be very social gatherings, and this is wonderful.
+
+The thing about our culture here in the Philippines is a lot of people are pretty shy, a lot of people aren't that outgoing, so as a result sometimes they don't get a lot of people attending meetups, or when they attend meetups it's just a different kind of vibe than it would be in other places. One thing I think is great is now that we have online communities, we're starting to get people out there connecting to more people, not just offline, but also online. I think that's great, because it really goes well with our culture of being reserved people.
+
+\[20:02\] I remember a couple years ago there would be a lot of great talent, there would be people who are really great at what they do, but you'd just never really hear about them because they would never go out, they would never really put themselves out there. Now that we have more avenues to express ourselves - we've got Facebook, we've got Twitter - I think it's just fostering this really good sense of community.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Do you find that you're less shy, more outgoing, more confident online than in real life? Does the community reflect you in that way, or do you feel like you're somewhat different from your surroundings in that regard?
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** I don't really know... There are times where I would feel a little more seclusive, there are times where I would feel pretty outgoing. Just like any other person, I probably have different moods and swings... So I'm not sure I would be a good representation of everyone.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Looking back a little bit to the sale side, which is a term that probably a lot of us don't love, like selling your open source projects or getting people interested (whatever you wanna call it), you mentioned that you really came from a design perspective into software and open source, and that's very much reflected in all of your work. If you go to devhints.io, and then on your others projects, RSCSS.io, and the JavaScript one (which is very similar), they all have very thoughtful and aesthetically pleasing design. That seems to also play to the strengths of getting people interested in your work. Have you found that to be something that resonates with folks in terms of the design effort you put into it?
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** I can't really say definitively that it's yes or no, but there are people who would say that it is; there will be people who would say that they are more interested in something because it doesn't look ugly. So I definitely think there's something there. Like I said, I came from a background of design, so sometimes just to make an open source project is probably one of my excuses to design something, so... Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I think from that perspective I'd say you're very fortunate, because there's many of us - and I can put myself in this particular bucket - where I have a taste for design, but no ability to create it. Lots of times that will stop me from releasing things, or I dread creating the super simple website that I know this thing needs, because I'm gonna struggle so much by not living up to my own standards in design.
+
+It seems like so many open source projects could benefit so immensely from design help, and there's like this chasm that we need to bridge between the two. I don't have any real answers on how we could actually bridge that - Adam, maybe you have some ideas...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think I'm observing what you're observing. I'm assuming, Rico, that the documentation sites you've got there for like rsjs is homegrown... Is that homegrown, or is that something that you pulled from somewhere else?
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Yes, it's homegrown. It's powered by a project called Docpress, which a couple of contributors have helped me put together.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Just like Jerod said, I think that you come into your documentation, your sites - even nprogress was a very aesthetically pleasing site. I think what you see there when you have good design is not so much like "Oh, because of the good design, I love this project", it's more like the thoughtfulness, the care, the intention is what comes across in those moments. Because if you go to somebody's projects that -- not that using the default GitHub pages designs as bad, there's nothing wrong with it at all, it's a great starting point, and it may be a great forever point for some projects, but going above and beyond like Rico has shown this person has a significant care for how this project is perceived to the community, so it deserves an extra look.
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** \[24:27\] I see.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Maybe not even just care, but also skill, to be blunt... Because the sentiment that I'm displaying is like "Even though I do care a lot, and I have the thoughtfulness, and maybe my API design is spectacular and I'm good at things like that, or the CLI interface is really easy to use, so I have user experience, but I just can't put together the design", and I'm just using me as a proxy for people who are in this particular situation - maybe in that case it's like "Well, just use the GitHub pages default theme and just rock your API design right upfront there", but... Rico definitely has a design skill that -- I guess I'll just say it's enviable.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I like it, I want it. I want it to be mine. Very enviable. So you mentioned Flatdoc; I didn't look at the details further in this... So this is powered by -- Flatdoc is the fastest, as you say in your sales process; you have the fastest way to create a site for your open source project. That essentially is a JavaScript framework that fetches the pages, like markdown and stuff, but then you also have this theme option as part of this. We'll get probably into it further, but maybe before we hit the first break, give us a tee up to this one.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And also Docpress... There's lots of stuff to move in here - Flatdoc, Docpress... Tee us up.
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Docpress is a very small library that basically takes a bunch of markdown and makes a website out of it. It's not a new idea, but it is an implementation that I did, and trying to make it in a way that is very simple and extensible. There are other projects that do the same thing, but this one's mine... \[laughter\] Anyway, a couple of sites that I run, like rscss.io, have been built with the help of Docpress. Docpress itself has been built with the help of some other contributors, which is very nice, because they also started using Docpress on their own sites.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha. When you said -- before I heard you say "something-doc", and I looked into my notes and I saw Flatdoc, and I made a mistake... So it's Docpress, and then you also have Flatdoc. So they're completely different projects, obviously. Are they similar in any way?
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Yeah, they are similar in the sense that they make websites out of documentation, but the way they do it is a little different. Flatdoc is more oriented towards things that are pretty small, things that can fit in one page, and Docpress is more for things that would fit into more pages, like a small book or an API documentation.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Interesting.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I think in that regard you're definitely using your design skills for the greater good here, because you create something like Flatdoc, which is a very nice-looking theme, and it's responsive and all these things, and you can just use it for your project, so in that sense you're taking your design skills and allowing them to transfer to others, so there you go. You can have those enviable skills of Rico Santo on your project.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes. They are mine; I will now use Docpress every time. \[laughter\] I love the design, it's definitely -- it's perfect for docs, in all honesty. I think that it's clean, it's simple, and it focuses on the necessary content, so I like it. Very good job.
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Thank you, thank you. There are a couple of other projects out there that do the same thing, and probably even better. For example, GitBook is very similar to Docpress... One of the things that really interests me as well, that I might be making a couple of things, but other people were doing better, or put more effort into it - that's just kind of how it is, but it feels humbling to be part of that collective effort of many people across the globe, just honing an idea, making implementations of it, and even if other people will be using other projects, like you would be using GitBook instead of Docpress, I kind of feel like I still had some part of it in some way into shaping the idea of what, say, a documentation site generator would be.
+
+**Break:** \[29:00\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Rico, the thing that I knew you for prior to kzap telling us we should interview you is your cheatsheets, which I'm a sucker for a good cheatsheet; I love learning by example, I love that TL;DR pages project that blew up on Twitter maybe a month ago. Adam, remember that one? It was saying main pages are too dense and difficult to read; I don't think that's necessarily true, but they hide the examples at the bottom; that's absolutely true. Let's have a new thing that's just examples - I love all that, and I've enjoyed your cheatsheets for some time.
+
+Tell us the story of this, because you finally have a proper Devhints.io, it's like a thing now... But these cheatsheets have existed, so give us the back-story on this project.
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** It used to be just a humble repository with markdown files, so if I have notes on something that I'm learning, I just put a markdown file with the same project name... And for some reason, some people started starring that project, which is very strange. It basically had a readme of two characters, which is a smiley face, just to really drive in the point that I wasn't really expecting much of it.
+
+It started getting traffic, and I decided to put it online on my website, on my personal domain; I didn't really notice for a while, and when I came back to the analytics, it turned out that it was getting traction and people were starting to actually link and starting to tweet about it... And I figured it's probably time that I make it into a full-blown website. So just very recently, I launched Devhints.io, which is basically the same thing as my old cheatsheets website, with a shinier coat onto it. Basically, a domain name where you can just type in devhints.io/something, like /react, or /es6, or whatever it is... That makes it a lot more convenient, because I would sometimes give my cheatsheets to my colleagues, and with such a long URL to type, like my domain name ricostacruz.com/ \[unintelligible 00:33:04\] so on and so forth. Now we just have Devhints.io/ react.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Certainly nice for just pointing somebody to, you know, /sass, /react, and for those just looking for a refresher on certain things, like if you go to /sass, you're doing Sass style sheets... It's very easy to be like "Oh, that's how you do variables" or "Oh, that's how you do nesting, that's how you implement an extender etc." That's really -- not every language is the same, so you can probably rinse and repeat that for most of the different languages, but if you go to React for example, you've got different components and some of them are more complex than others... And the design is pretty awesome, but you can go there very easily and just point anybody to it (obviously) and they get kind of a bird's eye view of what you can expect with certain common implementations in the language.
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** \[33:59\] Oh yeah, and I do like how it's very bite-sized. You could go to any cheatsheet on Devhints and digest and soak up everything, in a minute. One of the things that I'm trying to do is run a Twitter account where I just kind of tweet a random Devhints page with a random snippet, for a daily TL;DR sort of thing.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's a good idea.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I like that, especially now that you've got 280 characters to work with; it gives you a little bit more room for shorter code examples, or at least something that can be bite-sized in a tweet, with maybe a value proposition and a URL.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Just as a sidenote, I think the 280 character limit has been quite a nice change for accounts that aren't personal accounts... That's fine too, but actually our @changelog account or our @GoTimeFM account - these have room to breathe, especially when we're like tweeting about a show; you can actually put some stuff in there now, whereas before it was like you had these emoji, because you don't have characters to represent things, and it was like squeezing every last character... So yeah, another great example is we can fit to tweeting out some TL;DRs, or some tips and tricks; you can actually fit a little bit in there. At first I was like, "Whaaat...?" and then I was like, "Not bad... Not bad at all."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm not sure if everybody knows this either, but I literally do not touch our Twitter account. Aside from the occasional response and/or direct message response or something like that, Jerod handles it all, and I'm always super impressed with his abilities to be tongue-in-cheek with certain things, and just funny in certain things... You do a great job of using these 280 characters really wisely, because some people can just go on on a tangent, or even overuse the characters... But you use them wisely; you use them to give the tweet more room to breathe, as you said.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, thanks.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** A little sidebar there... You're welcome, buddy.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Thank you. Rico, one of the things that I did back in the day - when I was first learning Vim specifically - was I searched for cheatsheet PDFs, and I would print one off, and I'd like have it at my desk next to me, and I remember also when I was learning Ruby... And I would just say like -- I would have loved, loved, loved to have this website back then, because this is exactly what I was looking for, and they were impossible to find. And the ones that you found were either abandoned, or the person that put the PDF together wasn't very good at design, so it was hard to read them and stuff. So I'm basically just maybe complimenting you on this project, but also wondering if these are meant to be printed, or if you've put thought into print stylesheets and how all that would play out...
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** A couple of people were asking me that, but it actually isn't that easy to implement for Devhints. I'm hoping to get print stylesheets in there sometime, but at the time being we don't have that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Maybe I can ask this then - do people really wanna print these, Jerod? I mean, the day you mentioned was several years ago.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** This was probably like 12 years ago, but I don't know if that--
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I gave you "several" to not make you so old, but anyways...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** People still print stuff, like reference...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Do they?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Don't you?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Rico, when was the last time you printed something?
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** When I was renewing my passport I needed to print some forms...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** See? Exactly... The only time I print things is when I'm returning things to Amazon.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Like to put it on a shipping box?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right, yeah. I will fight somebody over printing something; I'm saving the trees -- no, I'm just kidding. I just hate printing, so I just wonder if like... Is anybody asking you to print these things?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Just me. Well, he said a couple people...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[37:58\] Two people. Okay... Two people. Anyways, I'm just playing devil's advocate here. I was just thinking like, do people print these?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** No, I get it, and I agree that printing is on its way out. I feel like if you're trying to learn something and it's complex... I mean, if you look at all those different things you can do in Vim - I'm still learning Vim, after 12-13 years of using it - and you want to commit it to memory, print it off... Even, heck, if you're anal retentive laminate it. Lamination is great.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Whoa...!
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And maybe it's because we're schooling around here, Rachel owns laminated things... And it's nice to have a nice, hard reference. Have it there at your desk - physical thing, you can reference it, you don't have to flip your tab back and forth. There's value there.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I can't disagree with that, and I won't.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** But don't print these, because they won't look very good. Tell us about the technical implementation. You mentioned they were markdown files; I'm assuming that they're still a GitHub repo. Is it collaborative? How do they edit it? Who creates these cheatsheets? Tell us all that stuff.
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Yes, it's collaborative. There's more pull requests than I can manage... And like what you said, it's a repository with markdown files in it, and we've got Jekyll, which is GitHub Pages' default plug static site engine. At the moment, that's working pretty well for us. So what that does is we just push a bunch of markdown files into a repository, then GitHub Pages will take care of turning it into a website with a bunch of templates, and that's how it is, pretty much.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** There's some aspects here that it feels interactive. I mean, maybe it's just all in HTML search -- because like, the first thing you have here is the search bar. Is that just filtering content on the page, or there's no backend here?
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Yeah, that's a very lazy implementation; the search, as you know, is not very good, which is something that I'm hoping to push some improvements on some time next year.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So it's all static, all rendered... Keep it simple, man. I like that.
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Absolutely. There's no server-side component or anything.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So 17 open pull requests... This is a new cheatsheet, cheatsheet added for pm2, added cheatsheet for Bulma, added C\# 7, create angular2+... I mean, these are almost all new cheatsheets or changes to existing cheat sheets. And that's the pull requests; there's 181 issues, so there's probably other suggestions and bugs and whatnot, but are these places where you would accept help if somebody were to come through and say "I'm the cheatsheet master", or is that something you like to keep close to the chest? The management of this seems like an interesting aspect of it.
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Oh, no, definitely. It's not something that I'm keeping to myself, and there's a lot of contributions into Devhints; a lot of people will contribute anything from small typo changes to new sections to totally new cheatsheets, and I totally welcome that because I can't write everything. You've mentioned, I think, 180 issues, so there's probably more than when I last checked. Most of that are people requesting, "Oh, can you put a cheatsheet for...?" whatever their favorite library or language is. Sometimes I don't even know these languages or libraries, so it would be very helpful if other people could put together something, put together a pull request.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, you are not lying, because I'm looking now at the open issues, and they're almost all cheatsheet requests: Mercurial, Polymer 2, elm, Rust, Markojs... One says "APP\_NAME\_HERE" They didn't actually figure out they were supposed to put the app name right there... Actually, two of them. Anyways...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[42:01\] I think something interesting too, Jerod, is something that comes a little closer to the hacker heart of Changelog.com is José Valim contributed an update to the Phoenix cheatsheet, which was to use proper directory structure for Phoenix... So you kind of have this language creator, somebody who is playing heavily in Elixir and Phoenix saying "Oh, let me help you out here." It's already in place, somebody has already contributed, but something's been updated and somebody like José comes by and says "Oh, let me send a PR for this." That's awesome.
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** That's actually pretty interesting... As you said, José Valim is one of the people who have put together Elixir as a language. Phoenix was the project of someone else (Chris McCord), but anyway, I worked with these two guys before, because when they were building Phoenix and Plug and their error pages, they took a template that I did, started up with that, and I basically told them "Hey, why don't we build one from scratch?" and I built something and contributed to Plug and Phoenix with their help.
+
+I was really surprised to see José Valim's name in a very recent PR in Devhints, because I didn't tell him anything about the project... I'm really surprised to see like "Hey, you stumbled upon my new project." That's pretty cool.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Any pressure to change the name, considering it began as Cheatsheets, now it's Devhints... Any concerns there around branding, or just name collisions?
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Well, I didn't really wanna call it like "RicosCheatsheets.com", but... \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It still says "Rico's Cheatsheets" when you hit the Devhints homepage.
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Yeah... The main idea behind getting a domain name is to get people to be able to type it from memory, so I just tried to pick something that was easily rememberable and not taken, so I went with Devhints.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I didn't notice that, Jerod. It does say that. It's the headline, "Rico's Cheatsheets."
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Yeah, I didn't wanna lose the homegrown feel of it, because at the end of the day, 95% of this is stuff that I typed out, and I'm not gonna deny, a lot of these cheatsheets have a bias towards some approaches that I feel would be better -- I mean, they are kind of opinionated in some way, so I just thought like "Yeah, maybe I'll keep that headline in there."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, just a signal to people that "Yes, this is community, yes, these are all open source, but these are Rico's cheatsheets, alright?" \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** One thing I was noticing too was the process of writing a markdown file, which can be kind of tough if hand-type a table, like you may have to for (I believe it's) the zsh cheatsheet. So if you go to devhints.io/zsh, you will see what I'm talking about, and right there at the top with the markdown version of this it says Expressions... Luckily, we have potentially sites online that make it a little easier to actually create a markdown table, because it's fairly cryptic to read as markdown... But rendered, you've got this beautiful-looking table, but it's essentially a heading and some supported content that gets designed out.
+
+Considering how simple I guess the style guideline may be in terms of how you implement a new cheatsheet, have you had any pushback Rico? Do you actually have a styleguide? I know you have the contributing document, but is there anything that says more clearly "Hey, when you create a heading that's H2 in a markdown and follow it up with a table or a code example, expect that to fall in line or fall into this grid and it'll look beautiful on the site." How do you instill good guidelines for people to follow?
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** \[46:23\] Good question. There's actually a cheatsheet for that...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Is that right?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, snap!
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Is it called Guidelines?
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** It's called Cheatsheet-Styles, and I think it's the link from the contributing.md file.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I see it there.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm looking at it now. Okay, nice. So you've got variance, you've got h3 sections... Interesting.
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Yeah. It's not like a super well thought out documentation, but it seems like it does its job for now. A couple of people are submitting their cheatsheets and I'm actually very pleasantly surprised that they all look good without me helping them out.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I mean, it's a Jekyll site, so that's fairly easy, aside from maybe, say, getting the right Ruby in place, or Gems in place; there's still some things people trip over. Aside from something like that, getting Jekyll to run is fairly painless, but being able to see even the online documentation, like this URL we're looking at, which is Devhints.io/cheatsheet-styles and comparing that to its counterpart in the repo, you can kind of look at the markdown and say "Well, this is how it's gonna look once I ship it or once it's rendered on the site." It's good.
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Yeah, so what I really like about how everything is set up in Devhints is that I try to make it so that it's optimized to authorship a very easy thing to do. I basically just wanna go from idea to cheatsheet, just by opening Vim, typing a couple of things out, and then suddenly it's a cheatsheet. Like you said, it's all markdown, there's not much special about it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Looking at this, I can't help but think back to the good old days - if you guys will go with me - of Defunkt's cheat tool. Do you guys remember that?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I do...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I don't know Rico if you were around back then, but Chris Wanstrath -- I can never say his last name.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wanstrath.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Wanstrath (Defunkt) - of course, well-beloved hacker and one of the co-founders of GitHub - used to have lots of really awesome open source projects. One was called Cheat, and Cheat was a command line tool that did basically exactly as described, cheatsheets from the command line; they were text-only, you'd type "cheat Rails" or what have you, and it would pull them right there in for you. This is very much in the same vein as that, so I can't help but think "When is Devhints coming to my command line?" That's what I want - I want cheats in my command line, because Chris' thing is long closed down, and this is maintained, and it's got great design and tons of information. Are you bringing it to the command line?
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Interesting that you mentioned Defunkt's Cheat, because that was one of the things that I was also referring to and one of the things that was I guess an inspiration for Devhints. Like you said, it's not been maintained for a little while; I don't think the website's working right now, but yeah... This is one of the things that I was referring to when making Devhints.
+
+For the command line - it's interesting, I've been actually thinking about this, like "What's the best way to bring it to the command line?" and the way I do it at the moment is you just use a command line browser like w3m or lynx, and Devhints is mostly just markdown and it's mostly just simple HTML; they come out pretty great in the command line as well.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[50:07\] Well, that's a good hack for now. I think ideally I'd love to just type like "hint es6" and then have like an actual ncurses-based rendered thing that's like native. But I'll try that here... So you can just -- I'll use lynx, and just put a full URL in, /es6... Should I allow cookies? Oh, man... Am I allowing cookies? Hopefully, that's a -- eh, not bad. Got pagination there... I haven't used lynx since I was a kid, so that's cool. Good idea, I like that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And you just have it handy? Lynx is just handy for you?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Lynx should be default on most UNIX's.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, is that right? I didn't know it was baked in. I wondered if it was something you had to app.get or homebrew...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Maybe -- it's actually in user/local/bin, so maybe I homebrewed it, I don't know.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** But what was the other command line based browser you mentioned there, Rico?
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** w3m.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I don't know that one. That's a new one to me, w3m. Is that a newer one, or older...?
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** It's newer, but it's still pretty old. I remember using it back when I couldn't get X Windows to run in Linux... So it's been out there for a while.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's an interesting concept too, to use a text-based browser and the command line implementation of that to just essentially browse a fairly simple markup site. The markup for this site isn't very complex. I would say it's a good temporary; I'm not sure it would be a good long-term, but I could be wrong. Some people just demand more, and if you don't give it to them, they'll create it on their own.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** One thing you could do just to like "How could you get it done really quickly?", even if you weren't Rico, if you're just like "You know what, I could hack a command line tool around this" is -- does a markdown file exist on the Devhints domain, or is it just the rendered HTML?
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** It doesn't on the domain, but it does on GitHub. It's all just a wrapper, so you could just fetch it by HTTPS, I guess.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, you could just resolve it just from the -- because all the naming is very conventional; this is similar to how we do our transcripts, where all of our names are basically conventional around showtitle-slug.md, what have you... So you could just write a little wrapper that basically goes to GitHub, you could type "hint" and then "es6" and it just resolves Rico's repository, the raw version of the markdown, and then parses it, and then displays it in some sort of good fashion there.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, all these markdown files are in the root, so...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Easy peasy.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Somebody do that. Tweet at us, let us know about it. Any last thoughts on Devhints before we switch subjects on you?
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Well, do check it out and tweet about it, and contribute something if you see something that you could edit or something you could make for it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Any call to creators out there that are like "You know, my thing has to be in every hinter..."? What's the best way? I guess you probably just--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** "My thing has to be in every hinter", who thinks that? \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I would imagine that... Like, if I'm the creator of Elixir, for example (José Valim), I would make sure that all my hints are in your base.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] You've gotta give José credit, man... He's everywhere. The guy is everywhere.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** He is everywhere, yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So what's the best way to get your projects' cheatsheet in Devhints.io?
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** A pull request.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[54:01\] A pull request... But you've got a lot of them pull requests; how do you float to the top of the pile? How do you get an easy merge button?
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Good question... I'm just trying to clear out the pull request queue right now, actually...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** While you're on the show?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I was just seeing, they're going away right now... \[laughter\] That's a good call to action, actually, to say -- I'm imagining that a lot of these pull requests are not so much "Rico required", right? This is something where if you care about others getting leveled up, then lend a hand to clearing out some of these issues, or at least giving some feedback, additional eyeballs, so to speak... "Yeah, Rico, this looks good. You should merge it."
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Yeah, definitely, and that doesn't just go for my project; I think that goes for every open source project out there. One of the easiest ways to contribute to something is just lend a few eyeballs into whatever is out there, a couple of issues or a couple of pull requests; give your review or give your thumbs up.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Absolutely... Just maybe give me a quick moment to give a shoutout to Chris48s, who has contributed greatly on our transcripts by basically doing that - he was just doing some transcripts, and you can fix some \[unintelligible\] words, or add links, sometimes proper nouns don't get transcribed correctly... And I gave Chris the commit bit, and now he's actually merging other people's pull requests and helping out quite a bit. So thanks, Chris, and Rico, maybe something that you can look into is find somebody who's excited about Devhints and helping out in the PR's, and then hand them the keys and let them manage those pull requests and take a little bit of the weight off yourself.
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Yeah, absolutely.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I have to say something too, because I saw the two PR's get closed earlier this morning, and they both had "Thank you for your changes, they're live here" - very our style, very intentional, very clear, and Chris, thank you so much for that. To wake up to some pull requests being merged that we didn't have to manage is very appreciated. It's nice having that burden spread, that's really sweet.
+
+**Break:** \[56:30\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Alright Rico, so a couple other projects that you are up to, we mentioned them when we were talking about your design and your different documentation-based generator tools... You have RSJS, which is a Reasonable System for JavaScript Structure, and then you have RSCSS, which is - you can guess it - a Reasonable System for CSS Stylesheet Structure... So have opinions, and are willing to lay them out there for people, which is always appreciated when people have well thought through opinions.
+
+Tell us about these two projects, why you decided to put effort into these, and really the message that they're trying to send.
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** The first one out of the two is RSCSS, that came first... Which is, like you said, the Reasonable System for CSS Stylesheet Structure, which by the way, coincides with my name's initials.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, nice.
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Anyway, so the way this was born is we were just doing things at work, we were just making CSS the way we usually do, and we just kind of felt like there must be a way that we could standardize the way that we do things. So basically, RSCSS is a system that grew organically with us doing CSS one way and then thinking "Oh wait, let's improve it this way" and so on and so forth, until it became RSCSS.
+
+At some point we just kind of felt like "How do we get new hires to absorb all of this knowledge that we have with how to write CSS?", so I figured like "Okay, why don't we just write some guidelines that we could show to anyone?" It's a very small document, it's something that you could read through in 30 minutes or less, and it's basically how RSCSS was born. Anytime that someone would ask "How do you guys write CSS?", we go "Oh, just check out RSCSS.io."
+
+The way it grew is it was out of our frustration of other CSS structures out there as well. A very popular one out there today is BEM (Block Element Modifier). It does its job very well at the expense of being overly verbose, at least that's how and some of my colleagues feel about it. So RSCSS is kind of a middle ground where we try to take the ideas of writing modular Atomic CSS, but trying to make it so that it's not as verbose and not as -- something that would be more friendly to your fingers, with less typing involved.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We did a show recently with Adam Morse about Tachyons, and -- what's it called, functional CSS, Adam?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, and so this whole movement -- I'm familiar with BEM, as you've mentioned... There's other ones, like OOCSS, and what's the other one...? SMACSS maybe? I don't know, there's so many. But would you classify your system as kind of like BEM Light? You said there's Atomic and modular - is it about components? Maybe just give us some of the highlights of what you think are good ways of doing it; we don't have to go through every particular aspect, but maybe high-level...
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Alright, good questions. So when we talk of Atomic CSS or modular CSS, it's not necessarily conventions or a way of doing things, but it's an idea of how you build for you a component library which is you have to put things in compartmentalize components. There are things you mentioned, like BEM and OOCSS and SMACSS, and RSCSS itself - they're ways to make sense of how you implement this idea of making things modular and componentized, and how do you formalize them into naming conventions and how you write your class names and such.
+
+\[01:04:09.17\] And yeah, in a sense you could say that RSCSS is kind of like BEM Light, in the sense that it solves a very similar problem with something a little less verbose. But yeah, it's less feature-rich than BEM, but at the same time I think it's a very welcome -- I think it's good that it is that way, because it's easier to write.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, it definitely seems like -- I'm not sure if I would call it BEM Light though, because it doesn't have the underscore identifiers and stuff like that, some of the key attributes that come with BEM - unless I haven't gotten far enough into the guide yet, but... It seems less framework and more like a guideline, I guess.
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Exactly.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And I think you even say it in your documentation that it's not a framework, it's more like "This is kind of what we do that works for us, and maybe you would like it, too."
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Exactly.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think the components -- being very specific, where you say "A component will be named with at least two words, and then obviously elements are inside those, so we're gonna name those with one word, and would prefer to use the child attribute for these reasons, the child selector wherever possible..." I think you're stating some of your core reasons for it and giving visual examples.
+
+I also have to compliment you on doing a great job of using readme's very well. This is a great example of a project using a readme very well to sell it, as we said in the first part of this show... Which is you give an introduction, what this is, what this isn't, and you agree with a continue link, and then a continue link from there... Each step just takes you a little further into essentially navigating GitHub readme's throughout the project. Pretty cool.
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Thank you, thank you.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** One thing you have here which I love when people do this -- and a lot of times they'll call it an FAQ and then they'll answer questions, but you actually have a note section with pitfalls, apprehensions, and then other resources that people can go look at. I love when people are presenting an idea or a system or something that they believe is potentially good (or good in certain circumstances) and preemptively - or perhaps maybe do the feedback - they list "Here are the downsides." Because so much of what we see is like "This is a panacea, this is a silver bullet, this is the best way ever", and we know that there's trade-offs and there's pitfalls. So I love that you have those clear and available to anybody who's looking for them.
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Yeah. One of the things that I also like doing in the same idea is whenever I make a project and make a readme for it, I make sure to link other projects that have a similar goal to what I'm doing, and mention how mine is different. Like you said, there are a couple of people who would be writing things in a way like "Here's our solution, here's why it's so great", but they kind of fail to go to the side of "What about other projects? What do they do that you're not doing? What are other solutions that are out there that are different from what you're doing?"
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I think when it comes to CSS, many of us are like "Just give me some sort of system. I just need something, because the Wild West leaves me in a terrible position." Having a system in place, at least then we can all follow a convention and live with the ups and downs of the particular system.
+
+\[01:08:12.10\] With JavaScript it's way more flame wars... I mean, that's just in my experience. With CSS we're like, "Okay, this could be better than BEM, or worse... I don't know. But it sounds cool." With JavaScript, all of a sudden, now them is fighting words. So you have RSJS, which is a Reasonable System for JavaScript Structure; it's living off of RicoStaCruz.com, so it doesn't have its own domain like the other one does, and you said the other one came first... So I'm wondering where you are with RSJS and if people have given you the feedback about it, that probably I'm expecting will come if it hasn't yet.
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Right. So we build Rails apps at work... We build Rails apps, and we write a bunch of JavaScript for those Rails apps, and one of the things that we couldn't really figure out is how do we organize everything that we write? How do we organize all those JavaScript files? Because Rails doesn't have all those conventions; it just gives you a file, like application.js says "Put your JavaScript here", which is not very helpful. Anyway, so again, just like RSCSS, RSJS is a bunch of guidelines that we had, built organically, based on what we thought worked, what we thought didn't work, and it's kind of an iterative process until we settled on "Okay, this is how we kind of think about it."
+
+Now, it's not like something that you could use on everything, because obviously there's probably so many ways to write your JavaScript... Someone who would be writing a single-page app would be doing things a little differently than someone doing a more traditional Rails app. So anyway, this is one of the ways that we try to manage our JavaScript in an app that is a bit more traditional, and I just kind of thought, like, why not write it into a small document as well, so there's just more formality into the way we do things?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Before we ask a couple more questions, I wanna go back into RSCSS, because Jerod, you were mentioning the pitfalls, apprehensions in other resources, and I have to say I clicked on those links and I found them, and I got lost... And I loved it. \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You got lost in the other resources, or where did you get lost?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** In his resources, and so I wanna make it clear just for those listening thinking like "Okay, how is this close to BEM? Is it not BEM, is it BEM?" You give a great example on your Other Resources section where you say BEM is nice, but some might be irked. I think you mentioned its verbosity in comparison to maybe your short form, which is very BEM-like, I guess, except for... You're essentially giving an example of how BEM works (or B-E-M, or however you pronounce it; I just say BEM because it's easier); you've sort of given a component example of how it would work in BEM and how it would work using your conventions. I like that, that you share that there, so we'll link it up in the show notes... But for those listening, can you kind of give us a verbal walkthrough of that to some degree? Because with BEM, you might say for a component - which has to be two words - "site-search" in this example, using a hyphen between the two words, and then you would say... You know, if you had some sort of variant to it - if it was full, or if it was partial, or if it was minimized, you might, say, put the class again, "site-search--full", in the case of your way, you would just simply have one class "site-search" and then a modifier class of just "-full" and then beneath that, anything that's inside of that component would not have site search again and then \_ \_, if you're all following me... You would just simply have the one single keyword, which is part of your description.
+
+\[01:12:22.02\] I think that's kind of interesting, because it does -- that's where I kind of got tripped up. It's like "When do you include the \_ \_, and when should I not?" Coming back to you're using child modifiers or your child selectors, and then the syntax, now it is a little bit more clearer to me.
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Yeah, and one of the things that I wanted to emphasize with RSCSS is you just write class names as you probably would have when you were starting to learn CSS. So you wouldn't have things like \_ \_ -- and you wouldn't have to remember where an underscore goes or where a dash goes...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That was the hardest part at BEM for me, honestly. I like it visually, but the practicality of it, it made sense after I went away and came back, and I was like "Where does this go again? How do I resume building up this component?" That kind of thing.
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Yeah, that's one of the reasons why we wrote it as well.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What's the theory on two words? Why two words?
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** It's just a way to differentiate itself from elements which would have one word. There's not really much science to it, it's just a convention that we could implement so that when you look at a classname you know what it is. It's two words - oh, it's a component; it's one word - oh, it's an element; it starts with a dash - oh, it's a modifier.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And coming back to RSJS - this is very similar to... You're obviously trying to accomplish a similar goal, which is "You know, this isn't a framework, this is kind of a guideline of how we write JavaScript."
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** That's true.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And also specifically for non-SPA's. When I was talking about a lot of the argumentation that happens, it's usually around how to structure single-page applications. So actually, this is something I haven't seen... I have myself what I believe is a reasonable system (which I have never written down) for structuring JavaScript in these more (let's just call it) classic server-side rendered -- you know, what DHH lovingly calls "JavaScript sprinkles" types of applications, and I've never seen anybody else... I've never seen anybody (I can't say anybody else, because I've never done it) write down a system for those, similar to how we have ideas around how to do them with single-page apps, so that's interesting.
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Yeah, thank you. That's precisely why we wrote it... Just to get things formalized into an actual document, which are probably just kind of knowledge floating around between the team, and now we have a document that we refer to.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think something that's admirable with the type of developer I assume you may or may not be, Rico, is that it's one thing to be a developer that gets it and can implement it themselves, it's another thing to be the kind of developer who can then distill that into coherent documentation that looks good, is publicly accessible, it embraces the idea of open source and community, and shares that with the world. That's a whole different kind of person, and that's you, and I appreciate that, because we need people like you to sort of distill down the trial and error stuff that all bloody knuckles -- you know, so many people have bloody knuckles, but don't share why or how they avoid that in the future, and you seem to do it so well.
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Right, thank you. I'm actually glad that there's a lot more people who are also interested in putting things into words. I've got a lot of developers publishing their thoughts on Twitter, Medium and pretty much everywhere; I'm very happy to see that people are writing down their thoughts.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:16:07.14\] With these two projects in particular, since this is the last segment here, is there any community involvement with this? Since this is your bloody knuckles trial and error, so to speak, and it's your guidelines, how does the community get involved or participate?
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Very interesting, because RSCSS has been translated in a couple languages; all these languages I don't speak, so it's been very humbling to see people just contribute their own translaions of it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Awesome. So far Chinese, Thai, Japanese, Spanish, so there's still plenty of languages out there... If you have a native tongue and others can learn from Rico's experience, that's a great way to help out. I assume the actual content of the documents is -- I wouldn't call it necessarily static, but these are your findings, so it's not necessarily that you're looking to expand or change, unless you all learn something new at your work... Is that correct?
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Yeah, and in a sense, I would like to think of it as more or less complete, and if there's any more additions to it from this point forward, it would probably be more clarifications.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So there's actually a Translations branch... Is that where the translations live? How does this get implemented, this translations portion? So that if we have somebody listening that's like, "Hey, I speak two other languages, I can probably help out with something" and they wanna look at it, how do you go about helping to translate?
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** They can fork the repository, make some edits, and they could publish their own version of the website, and I can link it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay.
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** It's pretty easy... There's our documentation in the repo on how to do these things.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha. So the intention is then for someone to fork it and host their own version of it in a different language?
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** At the moment, yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha. Okay.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I'll just say that there's a Russian translation, and a French translation, and some other translations sitting in Rico's PR... So there's a theme happening here, and I think what Rico really needs is somebody - and maybe more than one person - to just help him out at his GitHub and provide a little bit of help and grease the skids and keep these projects going, because there's activity, there's improvements, there's lots of people who are wanting to help out, and that's a lot for a single person to handle. So if you have some bandwidth and you can help him out, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit in terms of ways that you can have a beneficial contribution to the community. I would advise somebody out there to hook up with Rico and help him out with some of these PR's.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I like that, and we'll definitely put the links in the show notes, so if you're listening to this, the easiest way to do that is to not try to rewind or fast-forward and find the link we mentioned... Just go to the show notes, it's there.
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** \[01:19:05.14\] Thank you, guys. It goes not just for my project, but for pretty much everything you use in your everyday life, in your open source life; all projects on GitHub could use a set of eyes just to look through the comments, look through the issues, look through the pull requests and leave a note when you feel like you've got something to say.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Absolutely. Well, Rico, thank you so much for your time today, and just again - I'll say it again, just sharing those trial and errors, the bloody knuckles, the guidelines back to the community there; they're so important... And if you're out there and you're listening and you've got Rico-like type things in your brain and you haven't shared it yet, the first thing to do is what, Rico? Create a repo and share it, right? Just tweet about it - that's the advice you were giving with "Create open source and share it." Is that what we should share with the rest of the community?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** There you go.
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Absolutely, just put your stuff out there. It's so easy.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Just put it out there... And tweet at Rico; we'll link his Twitter up in the show notes and whatnot, and he'll retweet it for you, because he's that nice.
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Absolutely.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Alright, Rico, thank you so much for your time today, man. I appreciate it.
+
+**Rico Sta. Cruz:** Thank you so much for having me.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** No problem.
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+**Adam Stacoviak:** Angie, we are definitely not deep in the weeds on Drupal, so we're coming to this show in high hopes that you can catch us up on all things Drupal. I think I can go back to potentially when Leo Laporte started TWiT; I recall that brand new site they launched, and this was maybe 2006 through 2008 range, somewhere in there; that's where I really saw Drupal be really well used... But at the time I was using WordPress, was really getting into front-end development, CSS, design and things like that, and I just never find myself getting into Drupal very far... But Drupal has such a rich, rich history, great people; you're obviously a core contributor and core committer, co-author of books... The list is long, so help us understand. We have an audience who's not very familiar with hearing more Drupal news... Catch us up. What is it? What are we missing?
+
+**Angela Byron:** Yeah, sure. Well, I try to explain Drupal in a couple of different ways. The biggest way that I find to explain it - I call it a "framlication".
+
+**Jerod Santo:** A what?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** A "framlication".
+
+**Angela Byron:** Yeah. There's a lot of projects that are frameworks, and they're for developers, and they expose APIs, and they are meant to be used by people who'd write code for a living and they're fine with that. And then there's applications that are meant to be used by non-technical users, who don't know anything about the code, but they know how to fill in forms, and press buttons, and make things happen that way. Drupal is kind of at this interesting intersection where it is an application, it's a content management framework, there's buttons to click, there's forms to fill out, there's content to be modeled, this kind of thing... But then at the same time, it offers robust APIs and extension points that allows developers to really get into it.
+
+So it kind of started as a project that was by developers for developers. At the time - this project started in 2001, so at the time, cutting-edge things like RSS, and stuff like that... It kind of attracted this developer audience, who then wanted to make it as flexible as possible.
+
+\[04:11\] So there's extension points for everything under the sun, there's 30,000 modules that you can use to add different types of functionality to it, and the whole thing is done in a really well-architected way, so you kind of use the same concepts throughout.
+
+An application like WordPress, if you want a photo gallery, there might be 70 or 80 different photo galleries you can pick from, and you pick which one is closest to what you need. In Drupal, you will build your photo gallery up, and you build it by using an image field module that will add images, support to upload things, you'll add a view, which displays images in a grid or in a listing, or something like that, you add a pager, and you add these other things... So you really customize it to be exactly what you want. For the most part, all of that is done without writing any code. But if you want to take what's there and then extend the crap out of it and make it really custom, or have it integrate with some external system, or you want it to output all of the data as JSON, so you can use a decoupled front-end, or a mobile app, or something like that in front of it, you can also do all of those things.
+
+I like to say that Drupal is for -- if you were a VCR kid back in the day, you know your parents' VCR would blink twelve and they didn't know how to fix it, so they'd call you over... And every VCR is kind of different, but you can kind of figure it out, like "Okay, well I'll press buttons, and there, it's fixed." So if you're okay tinkering with things and you kind of get a charge out of that, and kind of figuring out how stuff works, I think Drupal is a really great solution. It is not at all a good solution if you want a website up and running in five minutes that you never have to touch again. That is not what Drupal is for. For that, lots of other things - WordPress, Squarespace, other types of things would be a better fit.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Sure. I have just a little bit more experience Drupal than Adam. I had one experience on a client contract where I was basically extending an existing Drupal installation; this was probably in the 2010 range... And my takeaway then -- first of all, I had a successful install and extension, so I accomplished what I needed to accomplish... And everything seemed like it was pretty well organized, it wasn't that hard to understand, but there was so much there. I was like, "Wow, this is like you walk into a library and you see all those books." It felt that way. It felt like, "Wow, this place has a lot of books."
+
+I'm always curious or I'm always interested in the architecture of things and why things are the way that they are, and like why WordPress is the way WordPress is, and why Drupal is the way Drupal is... A lot of times we can tease that out of its history, and especially with open source projects, it's like "Why does it exist in the first place?" and sometimes you can kind of tease why the architecture or why it is the way it is because of its original goal... So can you help us understand that genesis story of where Drupal came from? I know it was around the turn of the century; it's been around for a very long time. By the way, also, 40k contributors... This is maybe the best-kept secret in open source. This is a huge community, right? But where did it come from and why did the creators create it?
+
+**Angela Byron:** So I wasn't around for these days. I came into the project more like 2005, but back in 2001, basically how it started is the project founder Dries Buytaert basically wanted a website thingy so that people in his dorm could communicate to one another about what types of things were going on. So he built this thing in PHP and MySQL, because at the time that was the cutting-edge technology... \[laughs\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It really was, yeah.
+
+**Angela Byron:** \[07:48\] Yeah, and kind of like built this thing, and then others of his friends - because he was in a computer science type of program - contributed to it. Then he was very inspired by what Linus was doing with Linux, and kind of the open sourcing of that, worked a bunch on Linux stuff as well, and so he really wanted to make his project open source. And at the time, the only other real open source CMS back then was PhpNuke, and I don't know if you still have the battle scars from dealing with that whole mess, but...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I definitely had a couple of run-ins with that one...
+
+**Angela Byron:** Yeah, yeah. So PhpNuke was this very monolithic -- it was driven by one developer, monolithic, did all the things built-in, and it was kind of a big mess... No offense to the people who -- I'm sure they worked hard on it... I used it, it worked, it was THE thing to use back then, but it was really large and clunky and insecure and all of these different kinds of things. So Drupal came in to be the opposite of that. We wanted something that was modular, and flexible, something that had a really solid architecture, something that was well-documented, something that was easily extensible by developers...
+
+I remember PhpNuke had these websites, like PhpNuke hacks, and by that what they meant is "Find this file, go to line 119, and start editing it, and then make it say something different than what it does." And then God forbid you use two different hacks and they collide with each other, and the god forbid again, you upload...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And 119 is no longer the hack line. You've gotta act accordingly.
+
+**Angela Byron:** Right, yeah. And then a security update comes out, and then you have to figure out how to get the security update with your hacks... It's just kind of a mess.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, the days, yes...
+
+**Angela Byron:** Yes, yes... Sorry, I should have put a content warning before I started talking about that, because some people are like "Nooooo...!"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Some people are on the floor right now, crying from unexpected autobiographical memories they have totally purged, but you brought back into existence.
+
+**Angela Byron:** Yeah, I'm sorry. I apologize on behalf of my web development brethren. So that was kind of the age. Drupal really set out to be absolutely not any of those things at all. Drupal shipped with a very small core offering, which basically had some basic functionality handled, like user logins and permissions, and roles, and stuff like that... It handled the ability to post content, the ability to -- I don't even know... Again, it was before my time. But some basic functionality to be able to maintain content through web forms, and stuff like that. But it was all built with the premise that we don't know what people are gonna do with this thing; we wanna make it super-flexible, so what shipped with core was very small. Then if you wanted to do more things, like, say, be a recipe database, or be a ratings and reviews website or something like that, you could still do that, but you would install these add-on modules, and then the add-on modules would be able to extend the Drupal core system just through the APIs, and not through having to have PhpNuke hacks kind of site.
+
+A lot of developers really got interested in this, so the early days of it were developers being like "Oh, thank god this is open source and it's not this monolithic, horrible thing. Yay!"
+
+Early days, back in 2004 I wanna say, Howard Dean ran for president, and that didn't end up working out very well, mostly due to him...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I remember -- didn't he have this chant he was doing, and that basically ruined his entire run?
+
+**Angela Byron:** He did some kind of a scream, or something... It's really funny how our threshold for what gets you throw out of politics has shifted, let's say, over the last several years...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I know... I was just thinking, Howard Dean gotta be rolling in his grave. Or maybe he's still alive, but he's gotta be angry.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** He ran for presidency of the United States?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yup.
+
+**Angela Byron:** Yeah, yeah...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay... I was thinking maybe president of Drupal, or something like that.
+
+**Angela Byron:** No, no, sorry...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** This is a big deal. Okay...
+
+**Angela Byron:** Yeah, he was a presidential candidate. He got pretty far, but he attracted a lot of these young technologists who were very passionate about somebody with half of a clue, like, maybe becoming president... "Oh my god, wouldn't that be me...!?" So they started this grassroots political campaign, and they used Drupal to do it.
+
+\[12:02\] So what they did is they built what's called a distribution of Drupal, which means like a pre-setup version of Drupal with a bunch of things already done. Kind of like, you know, you can build a Docker container that already has this version of PHP, and this version of that, the other thing. Drupal has this concept of distribution, so you can say "I want these seven modules, and I want these settings set this way, or whatever, and then you can kind of cookie-cutter out websites based on a template.
+
+So they built one of these for the Howard Dean campaign - Howard Dean Connecticut, and Howard Dean California, and all these different locations would spin up a Drupal site, they all could talk to one another, so people were able to log in to each of the different sites, and share content with one another, and it was the first time that technology was really used to power a political campaign, and that kind of got Drupal on the map, honestly.
+
+The other thing that got Drupal on the map is kerneltrap.org, which was a big Linux news site back then, also adopted it... So that got a lot of Linux nerds really super-excited about Drupal, as well.
+
+So yeah, that's what got Drupal on the map. And I came in very shortly after that, so I got to miss those beginning parts, but I got to hear about it kind of, and then I kind of accidentally got into this project just as it was taking off... And these days, grammy.com uses it to run the Grammies during the busiest traffic day of the year for them, a lot of sports websites use it, government websites use it, non-profit websites use it... Anybody with what we call a "ambitious digital experience", whatever that means, tends to use Drupal for it, because it's scalable, it's flexible, it's customizable, and it's become a household name in a lot of different areas. We're running 2% of the web right now, which is pretty significant...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Not too bad, yeah.
+
+**Angela Byron:** ...considering that it's not for like cat blogs, and stuff like that. You can build a cat blog with Drupal, but that would be like swatting a fly with a Cadillac, or something. You don't need that--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right, it's overkill.
+
+**Angela Byron:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So just a quick follow-up for those following along, in the show notes I did link up "2004, the screen that doomed Howard Dean" YouTube video. So if you want to catch up on your history...
+
+**Angela Byron:** \[laughs\] Great, so we can all study up on our history, and what used to end a political career back in 2004.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.
+
+**Angela Byron:** Good stuff.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Are we gonna have that in the show notes then?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, that's gonna be in the show notes for you all, so go watch that. It's only like a minute.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. I wanna catch up with that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, catch up on that. So what brought you to it? You said you came in right after that first wave of adoption, and the groundswell of people thinking "Okay, Drupal is something I have to catch out." What about you personally? Why did you get involved? What attracted you to the "framlication"? Did I get it right?
+
+**Angela Byron:** \[laughs\] Yeah, sure.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** ...and then why have you stuck around so long?
+
+**Angela Byron:** That's an interesting story. I first got a computer when I was like 16, which was a lot of years ago, let's just put it that way... It was back when Debian Linux fit on 7 floppy disks. It was a long time ago.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, floppy disks...
+
+**Angela Byron:** Yeah, good times... So I learned about open source and Linux and all that kind of stuff back in like the mid-90's, and just fell in love with this idea of like "Holy crap! All these smart people kind of band together and they work really hard on this problem, and then they give the solution away for free, and then anyone can take it and modify it if they need, and this is such incredible benefit for humanity - the educational institutions, non-profits, non-government organizations, everything." So I got really, really interested in open source and Linux and all these kinds of things, but I thought I was not good enough to actually participate in an open source project, because I figured you had to be like Einstein, or something to do that.
+
+\[15:49\] So I looked up to all these dudes who were running the open source world -- or I think it was still called "free software" back then... And just in awe of what they were accomplishing, but kind of felt like I was on the outside of that and could never really break in. So Firefox, back in the day, set up a Drupal site for SpreadFirefox.com, and it was a really interesting website that allowed anyone to upload, say, posters, or post events of things that were happening at their campus, or this kind of thing, to try and do a grassroots marketing campaign around Firefox... And I'm one of those people that goes around viewing source on every website I visit, because I'm just curious how it works underneath... And I saw the name "Drupal", and I had never heard of it, but I kind of made a note for later, because it was like "Oh, that's neat. Drupal is powering that thing. Cool!"
+
+Many, many years later, I was just graduating my final program in a community college, and they announced that there was this program - this was in 2005 - called "Google Summer of Code." Google Summer of Code, for those who don't know, is where Google pays you a stipend over the summer to work with an open source project, and you basically take something off of their hit list, or you propose your own project, or something like that, but you basically work three months embedded in an open source community, and then as long as you do a good job and you don't slough off, then you get money. Yay, money! And code, and everything.
+
+So the idea is programmers don't have to go flip burgers over the summer, they can instead flip bits, you know? It's a pretty good system.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Nice...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I like that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[unintelligible 00:17:24.00\] burgers.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Was that their marketing campaign, or did you just come up with that one yourself?
+
+**Angela Byron:** No, that's theirs. No, I'm not nearly that clever. But yeah, so I saw Drupal on the list, and I figured "What the heck?", so I applied and got accepted.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Awesome.
+
+**Angela Byron:** Yeah, and once I was on this side of the "You must be this smart to contribute to open source", I was like "Oh, crap! Anybody can do this!" and people are super-grateful when you come and you're like "Hey, I know how to test things, and I know how to write documentation, and I know how to test this core patch, and I know how to do this...", and I found that people were incredibly gracious, and incredibly welcoming, and I just kind of dove in head-first.
+
+Then I got kind of way too into it. I was on the webmasters team, and the security team, and the documentation team, and the core developer team. I got REALLY into Drupal, because it was basically like ten years' worth of excitement build up, and I just went crazy, and went helping with everything.
+
+I ended up getting a job out of that, which I thought -- you know, I figured once Google Summer of Code was done, I would go write boring .NET accounting applications, or something; I didn't know what I was gonna do. But instead, I actually got a job doing open source in this thing that I loved, in this community that I loved, and it was amazing. So I try really hard -- now I have a much higher profile in the community because I worked my butt off for like... 13 years it's been? Jesus!
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Wow...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** In the trenches, for sure.
+
+**Angela Byron:** Yeah, so I try really hard to help other people who are facing that sort of impostor syndrome wall, because it definitely held me back, and I think it holds back a lot of people that would otherwise be really into what we're doing, but don't think they're good enough to contribute.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, you're amongst friends, because that's exactly part of our mission with the Changelog - to break the veil of open source, and make it more open and show the community that everybody has value and can contribute, and when we are that way, everybody benefits.
+
+**Angela Byron:** Yay, that's awesome!
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So that's an amazing story... I'm happy that once you got past -- and I had a similar experience. It's so scary, and you feel outsidery, and "How do I do this thing? These people are all better than me" kind of feeling... And then you realize there's so many ways to contribute, and there's so much value that you can provide. I'm excited that -- first of all, your excitement is a bit contagious, so I'm getting excited about Drupal all of a sudden... But I love that once you got into it, you just went all-in and made a career out of it. That's amazing.
+
+**Angela Byron:** Yeah, if anything's worth doing, it's just overdoing, basically... That's how I live my life. But yeah, and it was also helpful because the attitude was so great. I've been part of communities where the attitude is "Oh, you don't know about the blah-blah-blah module? Pfft, whatever..."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[20:19\] Right, RTFM...
+
+**Angela Byron:** And in this community it was the opposite. It was like "Oh, you don't know about the blah-blah-blah module?! Well, let me tell you about it, because it's awesome, and then you'll know about it and we can talk about it!" That really, really helped, and I think that that kind of mentorship built into the DNA of the community is really important, and that predates my involvement, but I definitely have tried to shepherd that forward myself, and seen amazing efforts by other people in the community to shepherd for those efforts as well.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What's interesting is that your story of going from impostor to contributor to full-time open source predates most of the stories we shared here on the show today, which are I guess maybe current stories, and it seems like a trend that's happening today, meanwhile it happened to you - I don't know what year; I'm just guessing 2008-ish, 2009-ish, based on just trying to track your history there?
+
+**Angela Byron:** Yeah, I guess my first job would have been in 2006...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay...
+
+**Angela Byron:** Yeah, but I'd say when I became a core committer, that was 2008; that was a big deal, leading up to the Drupal 7 release... Which was one thing I was gonna mention - if the last time you tried Drupal was 2010, you really should maybe look at it again, because we have been working on it since then, and it's a bit better now... \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What do you think has kept you in Drupal? Obviously, you've got a lot of passion and there's energy, but there's only so many things like that that can keep you there... The community, the tech... What is it that keeps you or has kept you? ...or I guess hooked you is probably a better term, because -- I mean, you didn't try to leave, did you? You stayed, so something got you...
+
+**Angela Byron:** Yeah. By the way, we call the extension points in Drupal "hooks", so you accidentally made an epic Drupal pun, so... Nice lead-on.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, nice job, Adam... \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I've done my homework, Jerod...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Angela Byron:** I would say it's probably a combination of things... And I would say three things, but I might end up saying four things, I'm sorry. The primary one is definitely the people. We go to DrupalCons, which we have a couple times a year, and it's like a family reunion, a lot of times, and it's like, people are there, and they're hugging each other because they actually like each other, not because they're trying to make some kind of a signal, or something like that... It's genuine.
+
+Also, the point at which I got in the community -- I went through some really tough personal stuff at the end of 2015, 2016, and I realized that my friends that I know from the Drupal community are actually my friends, and some of them I've known for like a decade, and all of them kind of coming up and helping me in various ways, cooking me waffles, or whatever... It's just a really amazing community, and I love being part of it.
+
+Part of it too is just there's such smart people there and I learn new things all of the time. There's people who are very passionate about, say, accessibility, or about making JavaScript work in a modern way that's friendly to new developers, and all these different things that people are interested in, so I get to learn about all of this stuff that I wouldn't if I was still building my own custom CMS's, which is what I did after the PhpNuke age, because I was like, "Nope!" But if I was still doing that, I would still be in my little silo, and I wouldn't know all these great things about internationalization, and all the different aspects of Drupal that it kind of covers for you, and security, and all these kinds of things.
+
+So constantly learning new things, and then... I think the technical problem is really interesting as well, because you're building for multiple audiences. Every time you build a feature, you have to think not only about "How are we gonna write the APIs so that developers can extend this where they need to, and the classes and objects and stuff are all named in a way that makes sense to people etc.?", all those problem space... But then you're also thinking about "How would a non-technical content author use this feature?"
+
+\[24:19\] They're not gonna know anything about modules, or functions, or any of that stuff. They're gonna be presented with an interface, so how do we build an interface around this brilliant piece of technology, so that they understand it and they can use it? And I find that dichotomy really interesting and challenging, and I don't know if that comes up in other projects that are based around just one of those audiences.
+
+**Break:** \[24:47\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Alright Angie, you teased four points, and you gave us three... I feel like there's one more reason why you might be sticking around the Drupal team, so... What else have you got?
+
+**Angela Byron:** What is this, holding me accountable to the things I say...?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Angela Byron:** I would say the fourth point is actually my employer and my job. I work for Acquia, and Acquia is a startup that is co-founded by Dries, the BDFL or project lead of Drupal. So the BDFL is my boss. No pressure. But I somehow lucked into, well I didn't luck, I lucked in, and I also worked my butt off for many, many years... But I have this job where I basically get paid full-time to make the community awesome. That involves flying around the world to sprints, and sitting with developers, and getting whiteboards, and "Let's figure out how we're gonna solve this really tough problem", or it involves talking to the different initiative teams, trying to figure out what they're trying to build, trying to communicate that in a way that humans can understand it, and trying to figure out how to unblock them from being awesome. Sometimes that's promoting the work that they're doing, sometimes it's we plan a sprint for them in some locations, sometimes it's "Let's fund this expert to just bang out this piece of code that's blocking everybody", or whatever it is.
+
+My job is basically to find the toughest problems for Drupal and solve them... And it's amazing. And Acquia was really supportive of me as well when I went through a crappy time... So yeah, I think it's that combination of the people, the learning new things all the time, the - whatever my third point was... \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It was a long time ago.
+
+**Angela Byron:** That was like ages ago. There was like a break in between. But anyways, it's a combination of all those things I think that really got me involved and keeps me involved in Drupal, and excited about it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I asked you what hooked you, but I think maybe what might be the answer for those out there in the community of Drupal might be many like you, with the kind of energy and enthusiasm, and it seems like you're a super-kind person, so...
+
+**Angela Byron:** \[28:02\] Oh, thank you.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Tell us about the community piece of things. Are there many you's out there, with the kind of care and enthusiasm and - I don't know, just... Cool person? \[laughter\] Is that what keeps people there?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Are there more cool people?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Is there more than you?
+
+**Angela Byron:** No, I'm the only cool person. \[laughs\] Just kidding, no...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What do you think keeps others, basically?
+
+**Angela Byron:** There is a lot of cool people in Drupal.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, you mentioned the conference, which seems to be just never-ending, and huge... How big does that conference get, DrupalCon?
+
+**Angela Byron:** Yeah, so DrupalCon is a really great experience. There's about 3,000 people who come to DrupalCon North America, about 1,500-1,800 that come to the European one, so they kind of go every other... DrupalCon is a really great experience though, because you get to sit and listen to people talk, and these are people that you know from the community, and you get and sit and have drinks with them, or work next to them at a sprint, or this kind of thing.
+
+My favorite thing about DrupalCon, in addition to the knowledge sharing and the hallway track and all that stuff that's at any conference really, we do a -- the last day of the conference is called The Contribution Day, and that's where we have basically two huge rooms, ballroom-style rooms in the conference center, with tables set up everywhere. One of the rooms is for new contributors. In that room, they do a section at the beginning of the day that's like "Here's how to get the development environment set up. Here's how Git works. Here's how the Issue key works. Here's how to make your first patch", and that kind of thing.
+
+Then they pre-fabricate a bunch of issues that would make good first patches for somebody, and then there are mentors that walk around in brightly-colored T-shirts and basically work with the people there to make sure that they're getting some value out of the experience.
+
+The other room has people who are established in Drupal, and tables are all set up so that, say, "This table is working on media. This table is working on configuration management. This table is working on automated testing", or whatever it is... And you just go to a table that has a label that you're interested in, and then ta-da, you're working with the three people who know everything about that, and you just get to join in with them and they're happy to have you.
+
+And then mid-way through the day, the people who have just written their first patch, they get to come into the big room with everybody else, and we co-mingle. And then my favorite, favorite thing is we pick one or two of those patches and we do what's called a live commit, so someone like myself or one of the other core committers will get up on stage and do a whole song and dance... This is usually where I find out all the ways that use Git incorrectly, because I hear this dramatic gasp from the audience when I type something, like "Okay..." \[laughs\] So I basically use fear-driven Git, that's my thing.
+
+Basically, we do drum-rolls on the tables and stuff, but we actually do a patch review live, and talk about it and then commit it to the software, show their name and the commit log, and all that kind of stuff, so... And people just get super-excited and they leave feeling like they've contributed to something bigger than themselves, and everybody -- it's just a really great way to feature awesome people. We get the people who wrote the patch up there, the people who mentored them up there, the people who provided a real view up there to kind of show that it's not these one-off rockstar people that are getting this thing done, and it's actually -- it takes a village to get a change made, and stuff... So that's a really, really fun experience, and I look forward to that every time.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's a portion that requires, as you had said, somebody to show up - these people that knew all the things... So I think of it from one lens, which is like "Great! The people who have been around, know all the things, they show up." That's kind of required for some of the interaction you just mentioned there. And without going a little too far into the "what keeps people around" aspect, but I wanna know, once you're past a certain stage of a project, or your involvement, or your knowledge space of it, you kind of get bored, maybe you move on... What is it that makes those types of people show up?
+
+\[32:12\] Because that's a really important piece to community that I feel like, Jerod, that Drupal has just done well... And we haven't covered it much; not because we don't care about it, but just somehow, someway this news isn't bubbling up to us, or we're-- I'm not really sure, but maybe you can give us a purview into what makes these types of people show up, so that you can have new contributors, you're gonna have these experiences you just described.
+
+**Angela Byron:** I mean, to a large extent it's the same factors I described earlier that keep me involved, also keep these people involved. We are trying to be better; I wouldn't say we're perfect yet, but we're trying to be better about not burning people to a crisp, because that's usually what happens when someone's really passionate about something - they work and work and work, and then they start turning into patient zero, making everyone else around them burnt out on Drupal as well, in their behavior and in the way their interact, and things like that.
+
+So we've tried a number of different things. One - built into our governance structures, at least for core (we're still working on this in other areas of the project), we have what are called provisional maintainers. A provisional maintainer is someone who you think would make a great maintainer, but maybe either they aren't ready yet, or you're not quite ready yet to see them in that position... So we bring them on as provisional maintainers, so they can try out what it would be like to be a maintainer, so they can commit patches, they can review patches, this kind of stuff. But it's sort of done with the idea that that's like a mentored position. Then once they've met or exceeded the threshold, then everyone's like "Oh, this person is great!", and they become a full-fledged maintainer.
+
+Having that provisional maintainer thing is useful, because it sort of puts it in the back of everyone's mind, like "I should definitely have a replacement for me at all times." And as long as you have someone in that provisional slot, then it lets you kind of go "Phew" a little bit, and you don't feel as responsible for everything when you know that there are other people to carry the load. So that's one aspect that we've done.
+
+Another thing that we're playing around with - this first happened in the Drupal Association, which is the non-profit foundation, that is responsible for the website, and marketing, and all the things around the Drupal project, except for the code... They started doing term limits, and then overlapping terms, and stuff like that. So the idea that when you sign up to be, say, the security working group lead, or you sign up to be on the community working group, or something like that - that is a fixed position, so you can choose to extend it if you want, if you're still feeling good about it, but there's also a way to gracefully roll off, if this is no longer your scene... And I think that helps a lot with combatting that, because it gives a maximum amount of burnout that people can be subjected to, and it gives people a way to save face when they're just like "I can't with this anymore." So that's been really useful.
+
+I think also we have a lot of people who care a lot about people in our community, so we have the diversity inclusion initiative, we have the community working group, and they are really trying hard to make the community a welcoming and open place for people, and to take people aside when they're not making the community like that, and try and work with them, just be like "What's going on? How can we help?", this kind of thing.
+
+I think all of those different things add up. And I wouldn't say we're perfect. We've definitely had some very high-profile flame-outs in our community, but I think that the people there are well-intentioned, they're really trying hard to make it a place where people come, and you know, if you need to take time off, that's awesome; we actively encourage that, please do that.
+
+\[35:59\] But you still get people - and I was one of those myself - who are just like "I have to stay, because nothing will happen if I don't!", this kind of thing, and an overwhelming sense of responsibility, and stuff... I think we're just a bit smarter about that, because it's an old project; we've seen people flame out like this multiple times, so I think trying to catch it earlier, when we can, or taking people aside, when we can - those are different ways we combat it... But I don't think we have this down by any means, but that's some of the strategies we employ anyway.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It sounds like the community definitely has its scars over the years... Any open source project that's gonna be around for 15, 16, 17 years - like you said, humans are gonna human, so we're gonna have issues...
+
+**Angela Byron:** Yeah, exactly.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** ...but it sounds like you all are doing a lot of the things right, or well, and that probably comes from time and experience, but it also comes from caring and trying. You're not gonna do things well if you don't care to, or if you don't try to. That sounds like a spectacular aspect of the Drupal community. While we're talking about the people and how awesome they are, probably a good chance to mention Gabe, and thank him for getting this show put together. Gabe - help me out with the last name, Angie... Is it Solis?
+
+**Angela Byron:** Solis.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Gabe Solis - without him, this conversation would not be happening. Gabe - long-time listener. He suggested Drupal when we put a tweet out a couple weeks back, asking "What are things that we should be covering that we're not covering?" and he mentioned that we haven't really done anything on Drupal... Now, much to my surprise, I was like "Dang, we really haven't talked about Drupal ever", so we got in touch with Gabe... And props to Gabe, because we asked who would be a great person to talk to, and most of the time that's when people will say "I would be pretty good at talking about that..."
+
+**Angela Byron:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Most people do that, which is fine, and it's often the case... But he didn't say that. He said "Actually, Angie Byron would be a spectacular representative", so thanks Gabe for listening and for helping us put this show together.
+
+**Angela Byron:** That's awesome. And Gabe - what he does in Drupal is he co-leads the API-First initiative. This is the initiative that's working on Drupal's underlying REST API, working on putting JSON API support into core, working on making sure that when you write a decoupled front-end or a mobile application or anything of that nature that's consuming data out of Drupal, or putting data back into Drupal, that you have a wonderful and fun time doing so. Asterisk - we're still working on it, but you know... \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, that might be a good segue in the modern Drupal, or what Drupal looks like in 2018, and I guess (gosh) it's almost 2019. The people who are just coming to the project, and maybe they have just heard this show, and they've heard the history, and probably the awesome community, and is like "Okay, that's something I can get into...", what should they find? What kind of technology is there? Where is its sweet spot? What does Drupal look like nowadays?
+
+**Angela Byron:** Sure. I'd say what Drupal has focused on a lot more in recent years is filling out -- I mentioned before that Drupal used to be a very small core, very unopinionated, and very bare-bones. It was basically like "Here's a box of legos, dump it on the table. Have fun with that!" I'd say what we focused on in more recent years is, okay, so we still want the box of legos, and we still want the ability to put the legos in different places, and all this kind of stuff, and build the castle, or the canoe, or whatever it is.
+
+However, there's certain things that 80% of websites are gonna want, for example the ability to upload images... \[laughs\] Lately, it's been the ability to moderate content, so build content in a draft mode before it's published, and have control over who's allowed to move things from Draft to Publish, and these kinds of things. The ability to do a page layout building experience, and some of these other kinds of things.
+
+So what Drupal has really concentrated on in the last, I'd say - this is since 2011, so seven years, eight years almost - is really making the core that you download something that is usable out of the box to build a good chunk of sites, so that you're really only needing to go to the contributed modules or custom modules for stuff that actually is kind of off the beaten path. So for your average content management experience, it's all kind of built in there and ready to go.
+
+\[40:13\] Drupal 8 is the current version of Drupal we have. If you used Drupal in 2010, that probably would have been Drupal 6... Which was a great release, don't get me wrong, but Drupal 7 and 8 really focused a lot on the usability piece of things... So you wouldn't recognize the interface at all anymore, I don't think. And it's also really focused on making the out-of-the-box product a lot more feature-filled, to the point that we just had the Drupal 8.6 release a couple of months ago, and it ships with a demo that shows what Drupal can actually do... Because that was one of the biggest things - you'd install WordPress, and it's immediately obvious what WordPress is and what it's for, and then you install Drupal and it looks like an ugly blog from 1996, like Slashdot, or something... It's like, "Why would I ever use this thing, when I can use this other thing?" So it was not doing a good job at all of really highlighting Drupal's strengths, which is the ability to create structured content, so you can create these things called entities, the entities can have discreet fields on them, of different types, like a numeric field, a date/time field, a geographic field, storing lat/lon, or whatever... All kinds of different things.
+
+Then you can enter content in a structured way, you can mix and match the content out -- say, you can just post the whole thing as one piece of content, or you can say "Make a sidebar block that pulls in the title, the teaser, the author" and that's it. You can output the entire thing as a JSON feed... It's very flexible in what it allows you to do, but we weren't highlighting that aspect of Drupal at all.
+
+Drupal ships with a little demo called Umami - a fake restaurant website. So it ships with some sample content, with some images, so you get to see what Drupal's media experience is like, you get to see how we built out the content types and the relationships between the content types... So I think recipes relate back to articles, or something like that; they use some kind of a reference field to show off that. They're working for Drupal 8.7 on a multilingual demo, really showing off that capability of Drupal, because that's pretty unique, something that we offer that a lot of people don't really know about, which is -- you know, why not show it off?
+
+And then as the media and layout experiences get more and more fleshed out -- right now those are both kind of offered in an experimental way, because we're still actively working on them, but as those get finalized and production-ready, then you'll see those things going to the demo as well. So that's something I'm really excited about.
+
+My role in Drupal is I'm a core committer, but I'm also a product manager, so my job is to keep an eye on what all of our various competitors are doing, keep an eye on what our users are complaining about, keep an eye on the gap analysis between those two things and figure out where we should be focusing our efforts.
+
+I'm really excited about this direction change, because it basically eliminates 30 hours of messing around, downloading modules and configuring them just so, and whatever, with every site build. You just download it, it's ready to go, and then you work on the really interesting parts of your site, that are not like "How is the content author gonna put stuff in here?" So I'd say that's the biggest directional change.
+
+I could talk too about some of the development initiatives we have going on at the moment, if that's of interest to people, or if you want more of like a high-level things, it's basically like "Make it more powerful out of the box", is the biggest directional change.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Make it more powerful... That sounds like a high-level goal right there.
+
+**Angela Byron:** Yeah. \[laughs\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** "Let's make this thing better!"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It seems kind of Rails-ish in a way too, where it's sort of convention-by-configuration, but not quite the same configuration...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Also a different level of abstraction, but similar--
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, exactly, but similar roots in terms of ideology.
+
+**Angela Byron:** \[43:57\] Yeah, and what's interesting about it too is even though we are, say, configuring a default experience that will work for like 80% of people, you still at all times need to be mindful of that 20%, because that 20% is very vocal, and definitely does not wanna be cut out from being able to do the crazy things that they wanna do.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.
+
+**Angela Byron:** Back in 2007 or 2008 or something, there were people that were building little tiny Drupal distributions that fit on a USB stick, that could be shipped to a disaster area so that they could just plug a USB stick in and start gathering data of all the different people who were in need. People do all kinds of crazy stuff with Drupal. They use it to run ship lines, and stuff, or what's coming up on the TV -- all kinds of things people use Drupal for, so we don't ever wanna reduce the amount of flexibility you can do with Drupal, but at the same time, at the end of the day, most people just wanna put their content in it and get it out and have it not look like crap; that's the dream. \[laughter\] And also have the experience not be super-frustrating... So I'd say that's mostly been the big shift.
+
+We've also built a lot of new powerful developer features in Drupal as well, like the configuration management aspect... Everything can be exported, and then moved from dev, to stage, to live via Git, it's all in yaml files, and that kind of thing... And the API-First Initiative, which I mentioned, which Gabe is part of... And some of the other ones are very focused on that developer audience. We definitely don't forget about them ever, because they're the people doing the work, so they definitely care about the stuff that affects them...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Sure.
+
+**Angela Byron:** But yeah, the directional change of like also really prioritizing the content author, aka "the victim of Drupal", who' gotta use the thing that you set up every day...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** The victim... \[laughter\]
+
+**Angela Byron:** We're making sure that they actually have a good experience. Because when they don't have a good experience, they're gonna gripe to the IT people and they're gonna replace the thing with something else, so... We want them to have a good experience.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I'm curious from a product manager perspective you mentioned that one of the things you do is keep an eye on competitors and see what they are up to, and I'm just wondering what's the most apples-to-apples comparison of a competitor. I think people would think of WordPress, but there's definitely some differences there with origination, and... WordPress was a publishing platform that people have definitely molded into more of a generic CMS, but when you think of Drupal's competitors, what's the top three that you're like "These are things that pretty much do the same thing, and maybe do it in a different way"?
+
+**Angela Byron:** It's interesting, because while we're still in this framlication mode - we'll see what the future brings, but while we're still in framlication mode of trying to reach all ends of that audience, I'd say our big three competitors are everything from enterprise CMS, like Adobe Experience Manager, that end of things, to WordPress; we're seeing WordPress in different competes, and stuff like that... All the way to something like Contentful. And Contentful is a purely data modeling back-end that you then pipe out to JSON.
+
+I would argue the advantage of Drupal is that it can be all three of those things. But if you want only the decoupled back-end thingy-thing, Contentful might be a better choice for you, but... I like Drupal because I'm fundamentally a very lazy person, I'll just be outright with it... And I kind of feel like I often get clients that don't know what they want... So this allows me to learn one thing, and then when they want just a basic website set up, it's like, boom-boom, done! "Oh, and also it needs a photo gallery." "Okay, great." Click, click, click. "Oh, and also it needs to integrate with Salesforce." "Okay", well that's a click, and a couple of codes, and that kind of thing. It's really flexible that way. And then "Oh, now my CEO got this Blackberry from 1992, and he wants to make sure that can work with it...", you know this kind of thing. \[laughs\] It's able to evolve with the changing needs of a site really easily, which is awesome.
+
+So that's kind of where I would say we look at our competitors, it's kind of the range of those different things.
+
+\[48:10\] I would say things that are not our competition would be things like Squarespace, Wix... Those would definitely be like down-market for us; those things that are like -- you're building a five-page website and you wanna do it in four seconds, and you don't wanna think... We're not in that space. We're not in the space of Tumblr, or things of that nature. But I would say for anything above that, that is definitely the area that Drupal plays in. And yeah, it's fascinating to look through some of the case studies at Drupal.org and see how people are using Drupal, because it's used everywhere.
+
+**Break:** \[48:50\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So I would say developers are probably lazy to some degree...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Big-time lazy.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...we have maybe a large audience of developers -- I'm just assuming some things here, having done 320(ish) of these show before, so... I kind of have an eye for what our--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We might have the laziest audience of all podcasts. \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, exactly... In a good way, of course.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Said with love.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So I'm imagining there's a skillset that's been built up by most developers, that they can reuse or easily move to something else if they wanted to. This excitement, this community, this energy you bring, Angie, may be a surprise, potentially, to a lot of listeners of this show... And they're thinking, "Geez, well what does it really take to be a Drupal developer?" What skills do they need to have? Maybe they've already got them, and it's like "I don't have to go relearn something new... I've already got the necessarily skills." Break that down for us.
+
+**Angela Byron:** \[52:05\] Sure. Well, I should say that Drupal is still written in PHP, and MySQL, JavaScript, that kind of thing in general... I would say the skills you need generally speaking though - you don't wanna start coding with Drupal until after you've tried to do everything you can without coding. And what I mean by that is that often people come into Drupal, and they're a PHP developer, or they're a Java developer or whatever, and they come in and they're like "I know how to code. This is gonna be great." So they immediately go in, find those extension points, and start going crazy. That is not the right approach for something like Drupal that has this huge community of contributed modules and 40,000 contributors and all this other kind of thing, because usually, whatever problem you're trying to solve has already been solved by somebody.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, that's awesome.
+
+**Angela Byron:** And they've been solved not only in a way that solves your problem, but in a way that solves general problems, and that's where we get into the flexibility of being able to handle all these different use cases. The Views module is a fantastic piece of art, and this is something that ships in core now... But the Views module is essentially a UI around an SQL query builder, more or less. So you can create listings of content, of users, of taxonomy terms, of whatever you have on your site, products for e-commerce, that kind of thing.
+
+You can filter those products to say "I only wanna show ones that have this tag" or "I only wanna show ones that are by this author, or this kind of stuff", you can sort them, you can do all the things you can do with SQL, and then there's a layer on top of that where you can say "How do I want that output to be displayed? I want it to be displayed as a grid view" or "I want it to be displayed as a table, with sortable columns", or "I want it to be displayed as a sidebar block", many different things... A calendar, whatever. And learning that one piece of Drupal saves you an infinite amount of time doing anything that you'd be doing in code, because you just click these things together in minutes, and then your site all of a sudden starts looking like your actual site. So those kinds of things.
+
+There's some learning curve to go up, that are kind of like "drupalisms" that we do in Drupal, that you would not necessarily be used to if you knew SQL by the back of your hand and you were already a confident PHP developer. That can actually get you into trouble sometimes with Drupal.
+
+So I would say first make sure no one else has already solved this, or that there's not already a generalized tool to solve problems like the ones you're trying to solve. Then after that, if you write your custom code that is some PHP development, we use object-oriented PHP in Drupal 8. It follows all the PHP-FIG standards, which for people who aren't PHP people that means nothing, but basically, it looks a lot like every other modern PHP application, so it's nice, because when you come into it, you can be like, "Oh, yeah, I know how this works." So lots of classes, lots of PHP files with little bits of code in them, that kind of thing...
+
+You also generally build a user interface for any functionality that you're adding, so there's hooks and stuff like that for that, so you can easily expose, say, an admin page for your piece of functionality, that has a bunch of form elements in it; there's an API for that. And then if you wanna be fancy, you can also add in some CSS and JavaScript that gets pulled in there. You wanna be careful about that though, because again, Drupal, an infinitely flexible thing, we want all of the output of Drupal to be (what's called) themeable, so that means it's overwritable... Just because you picked green buttons or something for your thing doesn't mean that every site is gonna have green buttons. So we actually run everything that's output to the screen through a theme system, and that allows individual site authors to build their own customizations over what you're providing.
+
+\[55:57\] I would say the actual mechanical tools required to be a Drupal developer are quite similar to being any kind of web developer, really. I mean, there's PHP, but if you know Java or Ruby or any other language, PHP is pretty easy to pick up. It has a lot of dollar signs in it, that's about it. \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Dollar signs is simple.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** As you were describing it, I was not gonna ask, but I wanna ask it now, so this is a slight break in here for this...
+
+**Angela Byron:** Sure.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It seems like you could be an extreme PHP-type person to help build out some of the deep innards, maybe...
+
+**Angela Byron:** Yes...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And then maybe somebody who's not - and I don't wanna say this in a negative - not really a developer; somebody who's kind of developer-esque... Familiar with, but maybe not comfortable with building out modules and hooks and APIs, but somebody who understands the web language and can put things together... Is that accurate to say?
+
+**Angela Byron:** I think that is accurate to say. I think if you're gonna become a core developer, you definitely need to know the inner guts of PHP, and all that kind of stuff... If you wanna do that, we would love to have you, but that's something people only usually do after they've already--
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's not required to be productive on day one.
+
+**Angela Byron:** Not at all, no.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay.
+
+**Angela Byron:** And we do go out of our way, because again, the non-technical user is one of our primary audiences; we call them "the site builders", the people who don't know -- they would never be able to write their own SQL query, but they know how to click together a block in Views, showing hot content, or whatever. They know how to click that together. So I would say most of the time when you're building something in Drupal, you should be able to do it without writing any code, and then the areas where you can't do things without writing any code, usually there's a module already available for that, say bibliographies, or podcasts, or something like that... You could find modules for those kinds of things. And in the event that your use case is so specialized because you're integrating with some third-party AS400 that was invented back in the 60's, then there's API to do that stuff, and then you do need to start writing PHP.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It sounds awesome.
+
+**Angela Byron:** Yeah! Why not, right?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's right.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's talk about -- here's the one hiccup I always find in that case of the site builders, as you mentioned... Maybe that's the word; I think that's what you said...
+
+**Angela Byron:** Mm-hm.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...is -- you've got your dev environment, and then you've got your deploy process and you've got this live site. What's the scenario there for someone who's not really that familiar, who can put things together but is like "Do I FTP this thing?" What's the process to take it from a dev environment, or as you mentioned, different output being themeable, or adopting this theme system...? How do you give someone the skills to play, have fun, built out, maybe even tinker and solve some true problems for their business, and then get it out there, actually usable?
+
+**Angela Byron:** You can upload everything with FTP still, if that's your workflow. Most of our users, especially in Drupal 8, are a little bit more advanced than that. They use often times Git to do their deployment workflows; they keep their website files underneath a Git repository, and then they will commit stuff to the dev environment, and then cut a tag, and then cut that over to production. So that's often times how people do it.
+
+There's also a PHP tool called composer, which is kind of similar to npm or something of that nature, that allows you to say "I require these and these and these Drupal modules, plus these external libraries, plus this, that and the other thing", and a lot of people use Composer in their deployment workflow, like Composer Update to get all the new code, then commit that to Git, and then fire it over... You don't need to do any of that stuff. If you are a totally non-technical user -- again, we cater to both audiences. If you're totally a non-technical user, then the way you would do that is there's a user interface for the configuration management system; so you would click-click-click-click to change your site all around, add some content types, add some blocks to the page, change some themes, do whatever configuration you're going to do, and then you go to the screen, you click Export, you get a little zip file full of yaml files, which is all of your site configuration, then you go over to your production website, you upload that zip file, it extracts it automatically for you, and it says "Here's all the crap you're gonna change. Are you sure you wanna do this?" and you say yes, and then boom! Your stuff is live on production.
+
+\[01:00:15.15\] Again, everything in Drupal pretty much has both a developer-friendly way - we have a tool called Drush, which is a Drupal shell that can automate all of this stuff; you can run it in shell scripts, and it can enable modules for you, or update configuration, or all kinds of things. They have commands for just about everything. So you can go that route, or you can even just click everything together yourself if you wanna do that... So it really caters to both audiences.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'd say many audiences. There really isn't an audience that Drupal doesn't cater to. I mean everyone from \[unintelligible 01:00:44.07\] wants to get as deep as a core committer, or someone who wants to be a site builder... It seems like the type of developer that is catered to from Drupal is to some degree infinite.
+
+**Angela Byron:** Yeah, it's interesting, because Drupal 8 was our big pivot point as a project. This is where we started embracing all these modern best practices with using object-oriented PHP, prior to that it was all procedural language, mostly because PHP just wasn't very good at object-oriented programming until about that time. It started adopting external tools like Composer, and all these -- I could list a bunch of PHP libraries that you don't know... Symphony is one of them; it's like an underlying framework for starting HTTP kernels for applications, and stuff like that... But we shifted focus from Drupal from being kind of a "not invented here" sort of attitude to "Hey, let's get off the island and embrace the best solution for every problem that we have." So some of the stuff does make sense for us to do ourselves, like the whole entity system that I talked about, but some stuff, it's like "Let's just use Guzzle, because it's really good at parsing web service data, and doing that kind of thing, so we'll just let that handle it.
+
+That transition though to adopting modern best practices, object-oriented programming, this kind of thing - it did cause a big rift in the community a few years back, when Drupal 8 first came out... Because our users up until that point have been a lot of like "I know how to copy and paste code and modify it, but I don't really know how it works", that kind of stuff. So they can make a module based on copying and pasting some other module and kind of messing with it, but Drupal 8, with using object-oriented programming, and Composer, and all these new things, requires a bit more upfront learning if you're gonna be doing development stuff on it. That kind of scared a lot of people, and they didn't know if they can make the jump or not. Fortunately, many people have made the jump, and people who were already developers - they love it, so we don't have to convince them. It's mostly the non-technical "Site Builder++" people that knew enough about PHP to be dangerous, but not really enough to be a core developer. They struggled a lot with that transition, and some of them still do. So I would say that that's one area that we definitely have to watch, and make sure people are okay when they're making this jump.
+
+Fortunately, the site building experience between 7 and 8 is very much the same. You just get more cool stuff in Drupal 8, so that's really nice. But for people who were doing any kind of coding stuff, there was that transition... But the nice thing is once you've made that transition... You know, Drupal 8 is built in the same way you'd expect any other modern application to be built, so that's really powerful. Once you level up your skills, it only helps you for anything else you're gonna do.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Where do you think the community is growing most at? Is it site builders, users, people who need to build sites using Drupal, or is there a parallel to even contributors or those joining the community to be -- I don't wanna say developers, but somebody who's helping drive the project at a technical level. Where are you seeing your growth, and where are you seeing maybe plateaus, where are you seeing hockey sticks? Help us understand growth, generally.
+
+**Angela Byron:** \[01:04:03.12\] I think we saw a few major changes. It's almost a 20-year-old project, so we've been through a lot of major changes. One major change used to be where the business would make the decision that "In order to maximize efficiency, we're going to choose a content management system." And then they give that task to the IT department. Then the IT department would go and look and a bunch of different things, and then they would pick one. In that kind of scenario, Drupal does really well, because they can see the power of it, it's flexible, it's got APIs for everything, we can extend it easily to whatever weird, new requirement is gonna come down the pipe... So Drupal would often score really well, and in fact a lot of times how Drupal got into these larger organizations that you would necessarily expect to find it is because there was a techie at that company that was tasked to find a tool that did a thing, and they found Drupal, and then that took off like wildfire within the organization.
+
+But there was a shift that happened a few years back - maybe as many as ten years back, I don't know - of letting the "victims" of the CMS be involved in the selection process. The person who has to use that thing every day to add boring press releases - those people, having them involved in the process. That makes a ton of sense. Any agile development thing is like "Have all the stakeholders in the room when you're making big decisions." It's like - totally, it makes sense. But Drupal at the time would fall down absolutely flat in that situation, because it was a tool built for developers; it didn't have a WYSIWYG editor, it didn't have the ability to upload images out of the box... All of these different things. Because you know, from a developer point of view, it's like "I could download that. I know how to get that, that's no problem."
+
+So we saw Drupal struggling a lot during that period of time, so that was one of the driving things to focus so much on the user experience and making sure that it is full-featured out of the box, so when you do stand Drupal up next to anything else, it looks and acts about the same, and then they can focus in on the stuff that makes it different. So I'd say that's one huge trend.
+
+Another huge trend that happened in the recent years is the mobile thing. You know, "Back in my day...", I'm swinging my thing on my stick, and shaking at the kids on my lawn, whatever... But back in my day, it was like -- we had a deal with 800x600, then 1024x768. Or I think that even came later. At first, it was just 640x480 and 800x600, and then "Whoa, whoaa, man... Now we've gotta deal with three screen sizes? What is this...?!"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, hang on a second... For those listening, she's talking about resolutions for screens...
+
+**Angela Byron:** Sorry, yes... \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Just in case...
+
+**Angela Byron:** We used to have screens, and they were apart from the computer, and you had to -- \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. Responsive design has arrived, it's not going anywhere... It's a thing, and it's just the way it is now, and it's very difficult to enter the space today and not assume that's how it is, because you've got TV's, you've got mobile phones, you've got tablets, you've got -- you just can name all the IoT-related or connected devices that have some sort display... A watch that's just like a 2x2 screen on your wrist... So the screen is infinite.
+
+**Angela Byron:** Yeah. So you have no knowledge of how what you're creating is gonna get consumed, at all, anymore. You never did - people could always do different things - but today especially it's not possible.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The web was confined, and now it's free... To roam.
+
+**Angela Byron:** Yeah, now it's free. And it's wonderful that it's roaming, except all web developers everywhere are crying into their soup, but you know, that's what it is. But what was great about that is we were uniquely poised - not necessarily accidentally, but sort of accidentally - to take advantage of this... Because Drupal has always been built by nerdy people who care about things like semantic markup, or whatever, and they care about things like structured data... So when the requirements now became like "Oh my gosh, we have to have a separation of presentation and logic... How do we do that?" It's like, "Oh, well we've already had that since 2002."
+
+\[01:08:04.17\] And when it became like "We need structured data so that on the mobile app we can create a smaller view of this thing, that doesn't have all the doohickeys and the fields...", it's like "Oh, well we've already got it in the database that way, so we'll just output it slightly differently." So that was really great. Drupal was able to really meet the needs of modern web development really easily that way.
+
+The one area that I'd say we're struggling in a bit is in the JavaScript area. I don't say we're struggling - we're working on it, but this is an area where people will look at this and be like "Mmm..." Because originally, JavaScript - again, back in my day, shaking my stick on the lawn - was something you used to make annoying alert boxes, and that was pretty much the only thing you did with JavaScript. Then Ajax was a thing, and then Gmail was a thing, and then "Wow! This language actually has some legs to it!" and stuff.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+
+**Angela Byron:** So we did eventually see the value of that, so we adopted jQuery back in 2007, I wanna say... Which was really cool, actually, because it kind of put jQuery on the map, and also got us up and running with a JavaScript framework that people could use to build neat, dynamic UIs, and stuff like that. But a lot of that legacy code now is still showing, ten years later, where it's not quite so fun anymore. So we have a team working on implementing a redesigned admin experience with React, and using modern JavaScript practices, and introducing perhaps a build step, or introducing different types of things, maybe figuring out how we're gonna render things if we're gonna do it on the client side, or if we're gonna do it on the server side. So this is a really interesting place that Drupal is in right now, where we've kind of formulated this as a formal initiative, it's the Admin UI in JavaScript Modernization Initiative, and they've built some prototypes in terms of "Here's how React works, how it can work with Drupal", this kind of thing.
+
+People are already building decoupled Drupal sites, so that's nothing new, but trying to design a core framlication that's infinitely flexible in React is a totally different problem than building, say, a website front-end in React. So that's been a really interesting process, to see those different things come together. The modernization of our JavaScript is something we're actively working on, but we're definitely not there yet, so if you are a JavaScripty person and you look at Drupal, it'll make you plug your nose, but don't worry, we're working on it.
+
+In the meantime, there's a lot of great energy around that initiative, and they're really trying to build the admin front-end in a way that adopts modern best practices in the JavaScript community, just like we did with the PHP community with Drupal 8... Trying to build it based off like -- I think it's called Create React App, or something like that. It's like a standard best practice way that people will start building React applications. They're using GitHub instead of Drupal.org as the main development hub - these kinds of things, to try to really meet JavaScript developers and that JavaScript community where they're at, and get them involved in Drupal that way.
+
+Dries has always been really great at -- the phrase is "skating to where the puck shall be", so he's really good at spotting these trends and trying to spin up initiatives, make sure Drupal is there to meet it... Because Drupal kind of got its start by being cutting-edge and being at that outer edge of all these things. It's great that that continues, and even almost 20 years later we're still working on this stuff.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I was gonna ask you what your biggest challenge is. It sounds like that maybe just answered it... Is that the biggest challenge right now for Drupal?
+
+**Angela Byron:** I think another big challenge is just the way -- this is sort of a pendulum swing. It's sort of like how client server, versus peer-to-peer, versus client server - that's a pendulum swing that goes back and forth. There's also a pendulum swing that goes back and forth between picking something that does 80% of what you need, maybe not exactly in the way you want it, but you can extend it to make it better, versus just starting from complete scratch and building your own custom thing.
+
+\[01:12:05.24\] I think we're right now in a pendulum swing where a lot of people are hiring JavaScript developers, JavaScript developers wanna build a front-end in exactly the way that they wanna build it, they wanna talk to a back-end that gives it exactly the information that they want out of it, and these kinds of things, and they would look at something like Drupal and say "Oh, that's too bloated for what I want." So that's an interesting area that we find ourselves in, because there's trade-offs. If you build a custom thing, you definitely can't get a non-developer site builder to click around in an admin interface and add additional columns and add additional blocks. That requires talking to a developer and getting them to change some code, and then now you've got the block where you want it on the page.
+
+It also issues a lot of the advantages of Drupal, because Drupal's theme system supports -- I think we have AA rating accessibility markup; not AAA, but AA rating accessibility markup, so we've already solved all those hard problems. You get something out of the box in Drupal that is very useful on a screen reader, even the dynamic bits and pieces that we have, like the toolbar, and whatever - they're all vetted by the accessibility team before they go out. So you throw out all of that, you throw out the themability...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's excellent.
+
+**Angela Byron:** Yeah, it's awesome. It's so exciting to see how people just spring up from the community and they're like "I care about this thing!" and you just get out of their way and they do amazing things for you. It's really cool.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Mm-hm. Especially when something that you think is important, but you also think is maybe boring to implement, or not the highest priority, but to somebody else it is the highest priority, and then everybody gets the benefits of it... That's the great stuff.
+
+**Angela Byron:** Yeah. I mean, we're a huge open source project, and we've got even on just core, there's like 4,500 developers. It's huge, it's geographically distributed, and there's a lot of volunteers, so they come in, do one thing and then leave and never come back again. We've had to handle this by -- the core development process introduces these things called "gates", which like "A patch doesn't make it into core unless it satisfies these gates." There's a security gate, an automated, testing gate, we have to make sure we don't introduce a bug twice... There's an accessibility gate, a usability gate, and I'm forgetting some of the other ones... A front-end markup gate... All these kinds of things to make sure that all the new code, even though it's written by 4,500 people who probably never met each other, that it still works and conforms the same way when it gets integrated. It's something we take really seriously, because -- they are no longer running it, but the White House was running Drupal for many years... So that's like the highest target site you can think of.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's a big deal, yeah.
+
+**Angela Byron:** Yeah, it was a big deal. We try very hard -- we have a lot of "enterprise" (in air quotes) users, and so we try really hard to incorporate best practice standards that work for them. We have a security team that handles not just the core itself, but all of the contributed modules, and they will issue what are called security announcements, they use the CVE system, all the stuff. We do it on a scheduled, regular cadence, so everyone knows "The second Wednesday of the month is gonna suck for you...", those kinds of things. \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's nice to know.
+
+**Angela Byron:** But that way you know when to buy pizzas for your whole department or whatever, that kind of stuff. We've learned a lot. Basically, this project sprung up organically; it was one dude's brainchild, and then other people found uses and values out of it, they contributed back to it, other people found even more uses and values and they contributed... It's just grown organically and it's become this amazing thing that people use for all kinds of stuff.
+
+I love that when I fix a bug in Drupal, I'm also fixing it for like the ACLU, or Amnesty International. It's like, "Yes, this is great!"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:15:59.09\] Wow. That's one thing that really gets you, right? When you can make a change or an impact that seems so small, because it's "open source" or free time, or volunteer, or whatever, that you can impact literally millions of people's lives. I mean, that's the easiest way to pay it forward, right? As you said, flip some bits, versus burgers, and boom - you impact millions. That's so cool. I love the fact that you're so focused on the longtail. Nothing you've said is short-term goals.
+
+**Angela Byron:** Right.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And you don't even seem to be phased by what might be today's challenges, which is why I kind of framed it that way. What are you challenged by today, because it seems that you have personally the right kind of attitude, but corporately, as a culture and as a community, the right kind of attitude to persevere through it might seems like hurdles or roadblocks to the next step, to get past those and focus on the longtail... Because you have such a wide, diverse user base, contributor base, and that's so awesome to hear that. I'm pleasantly surprised, Jerod - I don't know about you, but I didn't quite expect this level of just happiness for such a cool community. \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You thought you'd come on here all depressed, and be like "This is the worst..."
+
+**Angela Byron:** They give us great drugs, I'll tell you that... \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I wasn't sure what to expect.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And I'm personally just that surprised by it. How about this - let's close this way... I'm sure there's somebody or many people listening to this, probably tons of Drupal fans who've been there since the beginning, maybe tons that this is their first experience, or they've heard of it before, but they just don't know the back-story, and they're like "Where do I go to keep up?" So where does someone go that is keeping up or wants to keep up? Where do they go to keep up with Drupal?
+
+**Angela Byron:** There's a Drupal.org/planet. Planet Drupal is kind of a good starting point. That's where people will talk about new modules that they're working on, or they'll talk about different events that are happening, this kind of thing.
+
+Also, if you could -- there's Drupal user groups that get together all over the world, and I think the best way to really learn about Drupal is to meet some of the people involved. Because the first time that you say "Drupal" in front of another human and they don't go like "Bless you!" or something, and it's like "Wow! Oh my gosh, there's people who know about this...!" So I would say if you have access to a local community, go there; go to a local camp or a local user group meetup, something like that, because... I mean, obviously, it's a big community, there's lots of places, but I've never been to one of those - and I travel a lot - and not felt a warm, welcoming presence from everybody there. So I'd say that's a great way to get involved. If you can make it to a DrupalCon, that's even better. You can be part of that sprint experience, and all that kind of stuff that we talked about.
+
+If you're looking for online resources, I'd say Drupal Planet is probably the widest range, that will get you everything from really super-technical, in-the-weeds articles, to kind of philosophical things and all kinds of stuff... And the Drupal Association also would be a good source of high-profile case studies, different initiatives the community is working on, and that kind of stuff.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Awesome. We'll drop a few of these links in the show notes, so if you're listening, don't pull over now; wait till you get back, check the show notes. We also obviously do awesome transcripts - thank you, Alex, for making that happen - and the rest of the community... I mean, Hacktoberfest has been huge, Jerod, for us; I'll put that out there. You've been -- how many PR's, Jerod?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I'm burning a hole in our merge button.
+
+**Angela Byron:** \[laughs\] Nice!
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It just says "Mer" now...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We've been pleasantly surprised by the community support. That's right... It is now "Merged" button, because everything's merged.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:19:46.20\] Yeah. So our transcripts are open source, you can contribute back that way. If we've said something that seemed unintelligible, go to the transcript, if it's there - you can just search "unintelligible" and easily get a PR that way. If it's still the month of October, maybe you get five of them and you get a T-shirt for Hacktoberfest...
+
+**Angela Byron:** Oh, wow...!
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Hey, do it for the LOLs, do it for the greater community, and just make this conversation easier to read. Likewise, our show notes are also open source, so if we've said that has a link, that you're like "It needs to be in the show notes", go to the show, and there's a link that says "Edit on GitHub." You can fork it, add it back, get a PR really easy. Easy way to get into open source. We are kind, we are friendly, we appreciate your support, obviously, for our show notes and transcripts. And likewise, again, these links will be in the show notes, so check that.
+
+Angie, any closing thoughts? It's been such an honor to talk to you... You've got so much energy, you got me fired up for a Wednesday... I love it, way more than I expected, and I love that, too...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Ditto.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...so help us close by just sharing any final thoughts around what you've experienced here on the show, or parts of your community that we just need to know more about.
+
+**Angela Byron:** I really like the format of this show. You always get kind of stressed out about any public speaking kind of thing, but I just wanna say you guys make it really literally like a conversation. It's like I'm talking to old friends, even though we've never met, and I love that very much.
+
+I also love the idea of encouraging your listener base to improve the transcripts, because those are so helpful, both to people who can't listen, for whatever reason... Also, I'm sure people take those and probably translate them into different languages, so...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Not yet. Not yet. Jerod, we haven't dealt with that yet...
+
+**Angela Byron:** Oh, well there you go! There's a PR for you. \[laughs\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That'd be cool.
+
+**Angela Byron:** I'm so happy that Gabe put us in contact with one another, because this has been a great experience.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes. Let's close by saying "Thank you, Gabe."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Thanks, Gabe!
+
+**Angela Byron:** Woooo, Gabe!
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Thanks, Angie. Great talking to you.
+
+**Angela Byron:** Thank you. Yeah, you as well!
diff --git a/Elasticsearch and doubling down on open (Interview)_transcript.txt b/Elasticsearch and doubling down on open (Interview)_transcript.txt
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@@ -0,0 +1,335 @@
+**Jerod Santo:** So we're here to talk about Elasticsearch, and I don't know about you, Adam, but I've gotta claim a little bit of ignorance on Elasticsearch - and I'm guessing you as well - because I've never touched the thing. I've heard some hand-waving on the internet; I'm very conservative in my data stores and my search engine, so I haven't actually played with it, but I'm excited to learn about it, and we have Philipp Krenn here to talk us all about it.
+
+Philipp, let's start with Elasticsearch - what it is, where it came from, what problems it's solving, and then we'll get into where it's at today, and where it's going.
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** Right. The base library we're using is Apache Lucene, but that's not really the story we normally try to tell. There is a kind of cute or interesting story around it. Our currently CEO, Shay - he started Elasticsearch back in the days, and actually the first iteration wasn't even called Elasticsearch, it was called Compass. Compass was kind of like the tool for his wife to search her recipes, because she wanted to be a chef, and she had a ton of recipes she needed to search, and he started building a system to make that possible.
+
+She is, by the way, still waiting for that recipe search solution, because he kind of over-engineered that... \[laughter\] So he built Compass 1, and then he found out "Well, that's kind of like a dead end." Then he redid the entire thing, and it was Compass 2. Then a third iteration, which is kind of the lucky number obviously - it wasn't called Compass 3, but that he called Elasticsearch. That was back in 2010, when he first released that. That's kind of how it all got started.
+
+What his idea was about that, that search should be kind of a ubiquitous solution, that it needs to scale, that it should be simple to use, and that's kind of where Elasticsearch started from. It was scalable right from the beginning, and it had an easy to use Rest API, and it should just work. That was kind of like the promise or the start where it all began.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Gotcha. So Apache Lucene - I think that's a Java project; it started all the way back in the nineties, late nineties, early 2000's... How does that fit into the Elasticsearch story?
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** \[03:58\] Lucene is kind of an incredible piece of work. A lot of work has gone into that already and it's very mature... If I say the de facto search solution that everybody is using, or the standard, it's maybe a bit of an overstatement, but it is kind of the most commonly-used base library that people are using for full-text search. The problem is it's really just a library; so yes, it's written in Java, and you could include that in your own Java application, but it's really a library and you just have to call it very explicitly, and the API is not the most user-friendly or nice to get started with... So that's not really what you want to do. It's a bit bare-bones, but it has all the necessary pieces.
+
+What Elasticsearch then did basically around that - it does the distribution and the replication of your data, and it provides a query DSL and a nice Rest API to the outside.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, so as somebody who's not a Java developer, with Elasticsearch it's also Java, but you don't have to care about that, because it's a Rest-based API that any client library can speak to without having to include Java embedded into your application.
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** Totally. Yes, since Lucene is based on Java, Elasticsearch is Java as well, but Shay already saw that -- initially, he had the entire system (Compass) very tightly coupled with the Java ecosystem, but he saw that that is not really what people want, and if you just bind yourself to one ecosystem, it's kind of very limited in the long run.
+
+So with a nice Rest API, and then we have drivers or clients for all the major programming languages, it's much easier to get started and have kind of like that base system that everybody can use, and then everybody can just build whatever they want, and we really don't care what is your programming language. Whatever makes sense for your product or project, that is fine by us. We are just trying to provide the right client, and then you build awesome stuff with it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So he set out to build a recipe search, and he ended up building quite a large company called Elastic, which is where you work.
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** Yes.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Tell us about Elastic versus Elasticsearch. Give us the lines between the open source project, the company, and how all that shakes out.
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** Right. So initially it was Shay, and I'm always imagining him sitting in his bedroom and coding day and night; at my job before Elastic, we were already using Elasticsearch and we were always curious how that one guy could produce so much code, and he was answering all the issues, and writing the documentation, and still coding so much every day.
+
+At some point later on in 2012 he joined forces with three other guys to start a company. Back then, since the product was Elasticsearch, the company was also called Elasticsearch. Since we have then added a few more products along the way, we had to rename the company at some point, since it was not only about Elasticsearch anymore, even though Elasticsearch is still kind of the core of everything, and everything else is built around that and around search, kind of... The company is now -- I think we're about 820, or something like that, though it's changing pretty much every day by now.
+
+We've kind of built various other tools around it. People might be familiar with the ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana). Logstash is the thing to get data and transform it and then put it either into Elasticsearch or some other system, and then Kibana for the visualization part. We always say we want to democratize data.
+
+Basically, you have a nice browser-based tool where you can just explore your data, build dashboards, and just see what you have there.
+
+Later on we even added the Beats, which are like lightweight agents, forwarders, shippers - whatever you want to call them - written in Go, to collect log files, or system metrics, or ping systems... And that's when we renamed the entire thing again, back from the ELK Stack, and we're now trying to call it the Elastic Stack, since -- well, our products are always about kind of being scalable, and ELK Stack...
+
+\[08:09\] First we tried to call it BELK, or ELK B, because Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana + Beats... So out of those four letters, the only thing we could make up was BELK or ELK B; we even had a logo for that. There was like the B with the elk horns, which was a cute idea, but since we're always about scaling, we figured out this is not really that scalable, because if we add any other open source products, we would need to redo the entire branding again, and making up new animals, which whatever letter we would get afterwards, it would not getting any easier.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Typical naming.
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** Yeah. Now we're trying to call it the Elastic Stack, and internally every time somebody is doing a meetup or some other event and calls it ELK, we raise the internal ELK Alert and somebody will reach out and say "Hey, this is super cool, but we try to call this thing now Elastic Stack.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** But the ELK Alert is pretty interesting, because we always get called Change Log, or ChangeLog - all sorts of formations of it, and we need a Changelog thing, Jerod... We need to do this.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Like an actual log?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, something that logs the fact that people are saying it incorrectly. I love that. But naming... Geez.
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** So for Logstash we had actually -- the original logo was a wooden log, and people found it super cute... Though now everything is just letters. At some point, as you grow as a company, the cuteness has to take a step back and you need to grow up a little and try to be more professional.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Elastic the company supports Elasticsearch and these other services as well... Is the model basically you're hosting around the infrastructure, or is there also like an open core thing? How does it break out in terms of the open source projects (I didn't realize they're plural now), versus the proprietary stuff?
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** Building a sizeable company is kind of a challenge if you're an open source company. We're actually trying to do kind of a bit of everything. We provide Elasticsearch and Kibana as a service, which we call Elastic Cloud, but we also have this open core model where you've got the core features as open source, and you can just do whatever you want; it's Apache 2 licensed, so go crazy, do whatever you want. But we do have some commercial plugins around that.
+
+We don't have a special commercial version, like some of our competitors or other vendors in the database have, where they have like a community version and an enterprise version; we don't really believe in that model. We have like -- it's really plugins that you plug into that core system. So even the paying customers, they're using the same open source base, but you just add some functionality on top of that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** One thing that I -- I said I've read some hand-waving... Most people when I see Elasticsearch come up, it'll be somewhere along the lines of "Hey, try Elasticsearch", and then the person will say "Well, I don't really need advanced search" or "I don't need that much for my search", which maybe Adam has heard me say that to him sometimes... And then they'll say "Elasticsearch is not just for search", and then they'll go into -- that's why I said the hand starts waving, and I'm sure they provide ample evidence for that, but I usually close tab... Does that ring true for you?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[laughs\] At least you're honest.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, they begin evangelizing and I duck out. Is Elasticsearch more than just for search? Is it like a full-on database? What's the core use case that it really slays out?
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** Yeah, I'm very careful about the term 'database', because people have a very specific expectation of what a database does, and I'm not sure we're 100% that, since we're -- first and foremost, we're a search platform... But we kind of want to be the data platform for lots of different use cases. We started off with a full-text search use case, but then we found these other use cases... And we always think about it that everything else that we add around it is always a search problem. For example logs, which is kind of one of the most common use cases - for us storing the logs itself is not that helpful; what you actually want to do is you want to search them in the end again, and find what is going on... And we're extending that further and we're doing metrics by now, and we're doing more and more in the security space, and we're also adding - we always say we add to the family - more companies and features and products to the family.
+
+\[12:43\] We have a machine learning component now, and we're trying to do the application performance monitoring (APM space) as well and adding that to the platform. So we're trying to broaden out. We're also doing search as a service now... So we have been adding more and more companies around that, and trying to get from the kind of like these core functionalities also more into the solution space, because some people are a bit overwhelmed when you just give them the options and say "Here, you have this building block, and then you can build pretty much anything you want with that."
+
+Some are kind of like more "Okay, I need a solution for this exact problem", and we're also going more and more in the direction to add more of these solutions. So you just need search for your website, for example. We want to provide you a solution to do that. You can totally build it yourself with the open source tools, but we also try to give you more of a solution just to get to the result quicker. Or you want to build a logging platform, and you can totally build that yourself, but we're trying to get you started in a kind of quicker way.
+
+So we always have these building blocks, and Elasticsearch is kind of (I would still say) the centerpiece, and everything else is built around that... But we are trying to give you more solutions; we try to help you with the heavy lifting.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That actually reminds me of something; Adam, I'm not sure you remember this conversation, but back on a GoTime \#48 Alexander Neumann was talking about Restic, which is his back-up solution... And he said something really poignant during that episode - he said "Nobody wants back-ups, everybody wants a restore." He got some pushback on that, but I thought it was so insightful, because back-ups are actually a pain in the butt, and they're not the endgame, right? They're just like an artifact that you have to deal with... And if they can't restore, they're worthless, so what you really are after is the restore.
+
+You said something there, Philipp, which made me think of that with regard to logging, and collecting the logs and having them, and storing them... And it's like, nobody really wants logs, right? Nobody wants this stuff; what we want is answers. Even with search - search is a means to an end; we're looking for insights, we're looking to find that piece of data that we remember.
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** Totally.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So it seems like what you're trying to do is build around that, like you said, these solutions... Like, "Give us the solutions, not necessarily the tools."
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** We are happy to cater for both, because we have people in the open source space to say like "Oh, it's awesome. I want just this building block and then I can take it wherever I want." Then there are others who are like "Oh, I have this business need, and I just want to get to the solution quickly." We're happy to help both of them, because while we are an open source company, and we are doing our open source work, you can just build anything you want around that... But then again, we try to broaden that out into the solutions space.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[15:46\] It makes sense too, going back to what you said with the fact that you're growing, which we haven't really talked much about the company size; not that we have to go too deep on it, but from what I understand, you've got a pretty large company, and your model is build open source tools -- or at least it seems; you can tell me if this is true or not... Build open source tools that you can give freely out there, but at the same time you're about solutions, so you take these open source tools that Jerod or I or anybody else can freely grab, contribute to and use and build our own solutions, but you've gone ahead and as a mission, as a business model, built solutions around your open source as paid-for services to sustain yourselves and grow.
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** Well, not only paid services... Some of these solutions are also in the open source space, so you can run them yourself.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Really? Okay...
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** For example, the APM company that we acquired - the base components for that are all in the open source space. That was because we saw an opportunity there, that in the APM space there are not that many open source solutions that you can use today. But we think for us as a data platform it makes a lot of sense to not only have logs and metrics, but also cover more things like the tracing or APM functionality there.
+
+So we're trying to extend that, but of course, if you don't want to host it yourself, we're happy to host it for you and provide that as a service. Or we have some more features around the entire thing that you might be interested in as an enterprise, and you want to get our open core features, or you also want support... But we're always packaging support and the plugins that we have together.
+
+**Break:** \[17:34\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So Philipp, when I said 'as a database', you were very careful around that word, and you said that it's very much a search platform... Perhaps you could say it's a better complement to a data store, or an additional data store that you have in your application. I'd like to kind of take a small look at Elasticsearch from a micro perspective of an application maybe perhaps similar to Changelog.com, which is a relational database on Postgres that has some search functionality that's just using Postgres as full-text search, and how an Elasticsearch would fit into that equation and really be a good complement, and how it would do better at the search side of Postgres, but then do worse at maybe the asset side or the relational side of Postgres.
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** \[19:36\] So with Postgres and the full-text search features in Postgres it's kind of an interesting approach, because Postgres is first and foremost the relational database, and then they have kind of added more and more full-text features around that just because you saw that, well, people need search at some point. That's fine, it's just like, at the core of Postgres there is still kind of the relational database, whereas Elasticsearch for the search use case is really built on having as many features and being as scalable around search as possible, and it's not just an afterthought, as with other products where they have some full-text search capabilities, which is often like -- I'm not saying this is Postgres in specific, but on some products we have the feeling that it's kind of like this checkbox where you say "Oh, we do full-text search as well", and then when you press further it's like "Yeah, we're doing these one or two things", but if you really want to take advantage of it, then it's not going to help you that much.
+
+What Elasticsearch does basically is whenever you store some text, we have this analysis pipeline. For example, we know something is an English text, and for an English text to search, you have some rules for what makes sense and what doesn't make sense. For example, you do something like stemming. Stemming basically means you cut off -- English is a very simple language in that regard... You cut off the ending of a lot of words, because you don't really care if something is a singular or a plural; you're just interested in the concept, or you're not concerned with the specific form of the word, you're just really interested in the concept that you're looking for. Then you're normally kicking out stuff like stop words, which are very common words that appear in nearly every sentence or text, but they add very little meaning, because 'and' or an article would be in nearly any sentence, and you don't add any value. So that is what full-text search does, and Elasticsearch is kind of elaborate in that area.
+
+We support a lot of languages, we support a lot of features to refine your search, and that is where the benefit of full-text search would come in normally.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I think that's where I'm driving at - can you enumerate those additional features that you're gonna get by complementing your relational database with an Elasticsearch platform? What additional things is it gonna give you in terms of search relevance?
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** What searches generally give you... I'm always comparing it -- the databases are very much black or white. You're searching for something, and then you get a hit or you don't get a hit... Whereas a search is much more shades of grey. It's more like "How relevant is that to what I have entered?" and it is normally a number that is being calculated in the background; I'm not sure how deep you want to dive into that, but there are multiple factors that play into calculating that relevancy.
+
+For example -- so the one sentence I'm always using from Star Wars is "These are the droids you're looking."
+
+\["Let me see your identification."
+
+'You don't need to see his identification."
+
+"We don't need to see his identification."
+
+"These aren't the droids you're looking for."
+
+"These aren't the droids we're looking for. Move along, move along..."\]
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** So if you store that in Elasticsearch, the sentence "These are not the droids you're looking for", after removing the stop words and stemming, what remains is "Droid you look", because these are the three main concepts that might stick out, or that people might be searching for. So they're all irrelevant, even the 'not'. Full-text search doesn't generally understand what you're saying, like if this is positive or negative or what this is; it's kind of just matching on these terms, and "Droid you look" are the three terms that would remain when you do the search.
+
+Depending on the sentence, you will have more or fewer stop words, and we really kind of extract these base concepts. Then, since we're just storing this stemmed version of the concepts that you have, the lookup afterwards is very fast, because whatever you're searching for... If you search for "droid" or "droids" - it doesn't really matter; this term you're searching for runs through the same pipeline. So the stop words are removed, we're doing the stemming, and then we can just go on the direct matches, and then you can see "Oh, we are searching for droid, and this sentence contains droid."
+
+\[24:10\] Then we're doing the calculation of how relevant the specific text is. For example, if a text contains droid multiple times, that is probably more relevant for your droid search than if droid term was only appearing once in the sentence. Then we're assuming, "Okay, droid is kind of like a relevant concept", we give a specific weight to that, and then we will also take into consideration how long a specific element is.
+
+For example, if your search term is appearing in a title - titles are normally very short - that is much more relevant than if it's just appearing in text body, because that is much longer. The base concept that is being applied there in the background, which I've tried to describe here, is called tf-idf (term frequency-inverse document frequency) which is kind of calculating this relevancy.
+
+The algorithm has been slightly refined by now, it's called Best Match 25 (BM25); so it's the 25th iteration of the Best Match algorithm, and this one is slightly better now. This is what is doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes for your search.
+
+If you compare that to the classical search a lot of people are probably still doing in the relational database, you will have a hard time, because this doesn't support anything like stemming. This also doesn't support anything like fuzzy search; this doesn't support synonyms, and lots of other concepts. And if you have the wild card in the beginning, so if you're doing the like percentage (whatever term you have percentage), you cannot even use an index, so your search will always be very slow, because you're basically going through all the entries.
+
+Since you have the wild card in the beginning, you cannot use the index because you don't even know where to start; you basically need to go through all the entries... Whereas full-text search just extracts the right terms and then you basically check where are these terms, in which documents do I have appearances of these terms that I'm trying to find.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And these different facets that -- I'm just thinking of like an equation like "This factor plus that factor plus that factor equals relevance rank", or some sort of scoring. Is all that stuff tweakable, customizable, either at Elasticsearch configuration time, or maybe even at query time, with regards to how you get your results back?
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** There are a lot of tweaks that you can apply. One you can tweak some parameters in the search, but a lot of the functionality is also like the way you store the data. For example, if you resolve synonyms at index time, that is some index time feature; or you could also do that at query time, where you say "These five terms are equal", and if the user is using any one of them, I want to find all the other four as well, or all the other four places where these synonyms are appearing.
+
+You can build quite complex queries. We have a proper query DSL that is giving you lots of power, where you can say "This must appear, this must not appear, these terms should appear" or "At least two of these three terms should appear", or you can say "I'm looking for either one of these terms." Or if you have them as a phrase, or in combination, like first one of them, followed by the other, then this should be ranked higher... So you have a lot of ways to actually tweak that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I suppose the underlying BM25 algorithm - I would suppose that itself is not tweakable, because after 25 tries, they probably are doing better than I could go in there and --
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** You can still slightly tweak it. If that is improving your search a lot is very much up to you, or up to your use case. We always like to say it depends... Whatever you're doing there depends on what exactly you want to achieve. I would just start with the basics and try to expand from there, and not overthink it from the start... Otherwise it can get kind of a bit complicated.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[28:10\] How well is full-text search in Postgres, Jerod? Since we're asking him on Elastic side, how it compares -- what are some of the things that you know about Postgres and its full-text search that we like or dislike? ...in terms of indexing, or being able to query at index time, or being able to create indexes and all that stuff.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, so you can do full-text search specific indexes in Postgres that allow it to not do full scans on specific queries, and it does fuzzy searching and stuff like that... But you can't -- I don't know; maybe you can do more than just that, but you can't do all of these different relevance facets that he's talking about, as far as I know.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's a specialized thing.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, and Postgres' full-text search is better than other RDBMSes reputationally, as being slightly better than a like query, so it gets you a little further, and in many cases, for small data sets and small uses, like if you're not searching very often, it's fine... But in many cases - like you said, you know when you outgrow it, I think. And probably we're at a point now, Adam, where we're just getting to the edge... I know we have user story in our Trello board about search and some different ways that it should be matching, which it's not, and maybe I could stretch our current implementation to work that way, but at a certain point it's going to become -- especially as our data set grows, it's just gonna become less relevant over time, and we'll probably end up reaching for something like Elasticsearch when that makes sense.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, because it seems that things like plurals, which, Philipp, it sounded like that's something that's just baked right into Elasticsearch, where pluralization of nouns, or different things, different terms - that comes for free; you don't have to be an exact match... I find that a lot of times I don't find something because I haven't searched precisely enough, where it should be a little bit more forgiving to the user.
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** Yeah, and once you start growing, probably you need to scale past what Postgres can give you. For example if you're searching on Wikipedia, Stack Overflow or GitHub, behind that search box there's always Elasticsearch doing the hard work for you, well-hidden behind the scenes.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I was just trying to quickly google the feature list on Postgres, and we're just picking on it because it's what we use.
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** Postgres is actually pretty feature-rich.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, pretty good for RDMBSes. But it does do stemming, it does do ranking, it supports multiple languages, has fuzzy search... So it can take you ways, and like I said, I've never used Elasticsearch, I've never used a search engine, a thing that's built for search, for any of my client work or for Changelog.com, because my data sets are small and my search needs are usually very trivial... So that's why I was kind of claiming the ignorance on this, because this is an area that I've never had to move into.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You're currently examining it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I very much feel like you know it when you need it.
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** Once you hit the wall, yeah, you will feel it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. You're kind of like "Okay, these results are getting less and less relevant all the time."
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** And the other thing is that once you have Elasticsearch for one use case, there are all these other use cases where it's coming in handy, so we are trying to give you a broader tool to cover kind of a lot of base for that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Can you give some examples of like "Once you're using it, it can also do X, Y or Z"?
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** Well, so once you're using it for search, then probably some analytic use cases come along. Like, you have whatever kind of data your company is having or what you're trying to do, especially in combination with Kibana - you can then just store all of the data and build fancy dashboards by just clicking a few buttons, basically.
+
+Or you have logs. For example, who is visiting your website? I don't know what your architecture is in the background, but if you have an Apache or NGINX or something, you might want to collect those logfiles and just see like "Who is visiting our site? Which IP addresses, which we can then translate into a region and do a GeoIP lookup", or "What errors do we have? How many 404's, how many 500's? If we change anything on the website, who has changed what, and why are we suddenly getting more 404's? What is up with our system?"
+
+\[32:32\] And you could add metrics, for example either business metrics, like "How many people are coming to our website? How much time are they spending?" But it could also be metrics like CPU and memory usage, or if you're using Docker or Kubernetes, or whatever system basically you have. We're very good at collecting a lot of metrics for that, and then you can bring all of that together in some dashboards, and then you get the overall view, both of your business data, but also on the IT system side - what is my infrastructure doing?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I was just thinking about the logging aspect - you said you don't know what infrastructure is like... Well, we just pushed everything off to Papertrail, which is a service that we use. They probably have Elasticsearch on the back-end, or some sort of search tool allowing us to then run our searches through them. So that got me thinking about Algolia and some of these other searches as a service, and I'm just curious how either Elasticsearch self-hosted infrastructure, or even Elastic's offerings - how they differ and measure up to other search options that are out there for developers to pick and choose from?
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** So we're getting into two different areas here. Algolia for the search use case - we have recently acquired a company called Swiftype, which is basically in exactly that area... And while their product was already based on Elasticsearch, they were just doing the crawling for you and just automating that search process, basically. That is one of the solutions -- like, I've talked about solutions before, and this is one of the solutions we want to add. It's still built on the open source search platform that we have, but it's more of a solution that you probably don't want to build yourself, because you totally could, and if you want to jump into that for a weekend project, you can totally do that, but maybe you'll just say "Oh, I just want to have a site that is easily searchable. I just want the solution. I want my page to be crawled automatically, and maybe I want to fine-tune some searches. For example if I enter this term, this should be the order that I want to have, or I want to have some features..." When you need some fine-tuning, you can totally do that. But generally, it's just a solution that you can get started with.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Swiftype - I think I actually run that on my blog - because it's a static site - to add search. They provided it free for small/personal use for a long time... So I think maybe I've got Elasticsearch power on my blog search...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And you didn't even know it!
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And I didn't even know it. \[laughter\]
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** Well-hidden behind the scenes... \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** This is awesome.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I love it, I love it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, you said we're getting into different territories when you talked about logs versus like search for a database or content... Can you go into that more? Does it end with Swiftype?
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** For the log use case, you can totally use one of these smaller solution providers. But then again, it's one more island, because your search results basically sit on their solution or their site, and if you want to access anything, well, you're going there. Then for any other data, like business analytics, you might have another island. But it's just like lots of different islands, which you then need to go to each individually to get the bigger picture.
+
+Our vision is more to have like one dashboard where you can show different things... Where you can have both like "Okay, my website did that much revenue today", but also "How did the latency of my website or how did the number of errors affect that?", and it's just like one tool where you have the overall and bigger picture for that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[36:10\] Maybe you can go deeper into it, because I see the user types caring about those interfaces as one team, but different cares... Meaning I care about search, and maybe as a marketer I care about terms, or I care about relevancy, or I care about people actually finding certain things, or I care about the content that's getting searched... But if I'm a developer, I care about logs, or if I care about performance, maybe I'm a different sector... And it seems like those customer types or the user types of those three different things in one dashboard -- why one dashboard?
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** Well, obviously, you don't have to. Probably everybody will have the one big TV screen in their office with the custom metrics that they're most interested in... But maybe you want to have the bigger picture - how did one influence the others? ...which right now, if you have different solutions for that, might not be all that easy. And maybe also this kind of like siloed approach is a bit partly because you had the different tools, and everybody was kind of like using their own view, and there was no easy way to bridge those different views.
+
+I think that is part of our vision, to get the bigger picture and to have a better integration between all of these different departments. I hate the term DevOps, but I think this is kind of partly that idea that you break down those siloes and that everybody is doing the thing that they had been doing in the past... But you want to get beyond that and get to the inherent value. Where is the value in your company? It's not like doing one of these things, but it's getting the bigger picture and see how you can strive and what you can push forward there.
+
+**Break:** \[38:01\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Philipp, Elastic recently published an article called "Doubling down on open"; in fact, Shay wrote this, February 27th, 2018... And I misread it, I thought it said "Doubling down on open source", so we're gonna talk about that... But it stopped short - it says "Doubling down on open", and it kicks off with him saying he's excited to announce that y'all will be opening the code for your X-Pack features - security, monitoring, alerting, graph reporting, so on and so forth... But this is not open source this is opening the code. Can you give us the distinction and tell us what's going on here?
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** This is very much a definition problem, but I think the [OSI](https://opensource.org/) has a definition of open source which says something like "You can see the code, you can modify it, and it's freely available." The "freely available" is kind of what we're not doing there. Since we're a large company, our salaries need to be paid somehow... So what we're doing with these features - and you can get the source code on GitHub; there will be a directory or a folder with these non-open source parts... So what is Apache 2 licensed right now, that will stay Apache 2 licensed, but we will add the code for the commercial features to GitHub, so you will be able to see everything that is going on there, but to use it in a production environment, you will still need a commercial license.
+
+\[40:46\] So it's not open source, but I always say it's open code, because you can see the code, you can totally open issues for that, you can even contribute patches back... We don't really expect anybody to contribute major features to our features that we will sell afterwards, but you can totally see what is going on... And that has multiple reasons. Firstly, especially around security people always want to see what they are getting, and with bigger customers, sometimes they wanted to have an audit of the source code behind that. Well, it's much easier to tell them "Well, the code is open. Just have a look there, and you can really see what you are getting."
+
+Secondly, for us internally it was kind of a problem, because we always had the open source GitHub project, and then we had the X-Pack ones, where the commercial code was living. And then you always had the problem of how do you work efficiently with that? You cannot do atomic commits, because a part of the functionality might be in the open source part, and a part of the fix that you are contributing is on the commercial side.
+
+How do you communicate the issues to the outside world, because the issue for the commercial part is in the private repository, so nobody can really see what is going on. That will also make the communication and also the process for us internally much easier, and we just think it's the right thing to do, and everybody can see what they are getting. You will still need to pay for some or most of the features; you can see that in the feature matrix what is commercial and what is actually free to use but not available under an open source license... So there might be some minor restrictions, like you cannot provide it as a service for customers, but you can totally run it for your own projects on premise.
+
+So this is what we're trying to achieve there, to kind of find a way to have or be an open company and build on open source, but still survive as a company and not end up like, I don't know -- for example RethinkDB, I think that was one of the products that was really widely loved, but it was just not enough commercial in there that the company made the cut in the end, and I don't think that it's benefitting anybody.
+
+So it is a fine line to walk, but we are doing our best to kind of be open and make users happy, but also have a sustainable business model and be around for a long time and build good products for a long time.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Are you guys following in somebody else's footsteps on this, or is this paving a new path with regards to this particular layout that you've come up with? ...with the X-Pack features in a separate folder, and the license being in the way of it being completely open source...
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** It's definitely not very common. I think one or two other companies have looked into similar things. I think CockroachDB is one of them, though they are much smaller and much younger as a company. I'm not aware of any other more established or larger company doing that.
+
+\[44:02\] Also, from the legal perspective, it is very interesting, and on the one hand side, we really want to kind of like keep the legal text there to a minimum and not scare anybody away. On the other side, it needs to be water-proof so that nobody can find a loophole to legally use our commercial intellectual property to make money themselves, or just use it for free and work around that.
+
+Some people have had the concern that while you can just take the code, modify it and kind of like comment out all the licensing restrictions, but we don't assume that this is kind of an issue for any established company. Anybody who is capable of paying, or at least in the Western world... I'm not sure how it's like in the rest of the world, especially with the legal system there, but we don't see that as a major risk, that somebody could just easily modify the source code now and run everything because it's open.
+
+We have thought about that, we are not afraid of that; we're still in the process of drafting that legal document or that license that we will add, and we're also kind of right now cleaning up the code for the opening, because you need to make sure what was closed source code there are absolutely no credentials, there cannot be any references to customers, you don't want to have anything else that might be embarrassing... So there is kind of a cleanup process right now that the colleagues are going through.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The legal document may be process; what I can say for sure is that between this blog post doubling down on open, and then also "We're opening X-Pack" is well documented, so you're definitely doing a good job of communicating your intentions, which I think is probably the hardest hurdle to get over when making this kind of shift, especially something that can be this controversial, or be mistaken or feel misled if not described carefully... You're saying why you're doing it, what's changing, when it's gonna change, how things will be affected... These two documents - which will be in the show notes - greatly communicate your intentions here.
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** Well, we are really trying, because even internally, people were confused at first, and after the announcement, somebody accidentally from within the company, even on the private account, wrote like "Oh, we're open sourcing X-Pack" and it's like, no, that's not what we're doing.
+
+It's an ongoing fight, and obviously, once it's being posted on Hacker News, everybody goes crazy and posts whatever they think it means or doesn't mean, and everybody has great fears... And we understand that people are at first a bit surprised, because it's not a common model, but we are really trying to do the right thing here, and we think this is a model that might have a lot of benefits for companies as well, so we kind of hope that this will be more common in the future... Or at least we're risking it and seeing where we can take this.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm curious what you mean by doubling down; it could be the risk portion of it, or just the fact that something indicated that you should have such a belief in this direction that you're doing it.
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** I think it's both. We really see open source as the driving force and how to get software out there, and also what is making us successful. We always see it like that. Every paying customer has been an open source user in the beginning. That is really where everything is starting. Even the salespeople understand that, even though of course the salespeople never want anything in the open source space; they would love to have everything closed source and commercial...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Jerks...! \[laughs\]
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** But they're kind of understanding that model, like "How do you get where you are right now, and how can you take it further?"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You've gotta get paid, you know?
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** Well... And they have like 50% of their salary being based on what they are selling.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[48:01\] Yeah, as a salesperson, you want no ceiling on your revenue opportunity, on how much money you can make, because when you're in sales, usually you risk what is often a salary; you usually get some sort of stipend, or a base - or a draw is what the common term is used for it... And it's very small, nothing you can actually rely upon. So in that position, you're like "I don't want any restrictions. If I can sell a lot, don't restrict me. I'll sell a lot. If I can sell very little - well, then you fire me. Or I will starve. One of the two."
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** Totally. Believe me, we commonly have these discussions, and the engineering would of course want to make everything open source, because, well, who doesn't...? And sales obviously wouldn't want to make anything open source. We need to strike the right balance, and of course, it's an ongoing discussion, but I think we're doing the right thing here. We'll see how that develops over time, of course.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, when it comes to security, I think that's -- you mentioned that earlier when you first started to share the details here... But I think that's so crucial. You hear so often tooling or something being in the security space, and you can't get access to the source code.
+
+Jerod, you kind of reminded me of - which is totally opposite of this - the third-party CSS not being safe, where Jake Archibald said "The real problem is thinking that third-party content is safe." In this case it's third-party code or dependencies, and so many issues stem from a dependency that becomes -- what's the term for it? Not safe anymore.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Unsafe. \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Unsafe. That wasn't what I was looking for, but that works in this case here... You can't trust it anymore; it becomes compromised, that's the word. And you've got that in your codebase and you don't even know it, but the point is that you can see these because you have opened them up... And it sounds like you also have issues open; you're not looking for people to contribute, but you want people to be able to see the code, scrutinize the code, maybe even file bug issues and/or patches that may be security-related... Is that correct?
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** Oh, totally. And especially if you're a more advanced user and you run into an issue, the first thing you might want to do is just check out the source code and see like "Okay, this is what it's doing and this is what it's supposed to do", and then you can say "Oh, either I'm using this wrong, or there is a bug. I can report that bug", and then I can see the progress and I can be part of that discussion. It's all on GitHub, where it's much more inclusive in the regular process you have around everything you do in the open source space... And we want to give people the opportunity to participate in that as well, and be able to show like "Hey, this is what we are doing and this is when this release is coming out."
+
+Otherwise, that communication was very complicated, because you would have had somebody to always communicate that "Oh, we have fixed the bug and it will be in that patch that we'll release." And then you shouldn't forget anybody, otherwise people are surprised, like "Oh, is my issue now fixed in that release or not?" And it's just creating an unnecessary barrier that we're tried to get rid of.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** For the developers out there that are thinking "Okay, so how big is Elastic? Great, you've gotta make money, but how much?", why don't we share with them how many people you've got in your company, so they can kind of quantify that number, so to speak?
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** It's changing every day. We're I think like 820, or maybe we're already 830 today. Right now we are growing by 50 a month, which is an insane number. If anybody is looking for a job, by the way, just shoot me a message and I'm happy to connect you. We have for pretty much any technology that you can imagine. We're not just Java, we have lots of other stuff as well, and lots of open positions.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What's driving that growth?
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** Obviously, we have more and more products, and we're getting more into that solution space, so that is the engineering side... But of course, since we have all these solutions, you also need to sell them, so we have also a lot of sales and marketing people there.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[52:12\] How has your community responded to this new direction? You have your customers, you have lots of users of the open source project... Even just on the Elasticsearch repo on GitHub there's 983 contributors over time. Now, maybe with 820, maybe you've got a lot of those be your employees, but surely there's other companies using this, other individuals, and now this change for this direction of open, but not open source, proprietary open code things that are gonna be in the repos, and this vision that's been laid out... I know there's been some confusion, but has there been a backlash? Have people received it pretty well? What's the response been?
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** I think partially confusion and partially people are waiting, since the final license is not out there and they don't really know what it means. I guess we will get the final vote once that is being done.
+
+On the other hand, if you're an existing user, nothing is changing. Like, what has been out in the open source space is staying out in the open source space; we're just adding more viewable source code. So if you want to take a look behind the scenes for those features, that is totally possible in the future. We're not taking anything away, we're just adding more features.
+
+I think a lot of people care more about the free part than the open source part, to be honest. For those, not too much will change in that area.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's an interesting question, Jerod, to consider the response, obviously... I didn't think to ask that; that seems like the obvious thing to ask, which is like, "Okay, you've got this many employees, you must have a large customer base; what's the response?" It looks like this announcement was made at Elastic{ON}. How do you say that, Elastic On, or Elasticon?
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** We normally say Elasticon, right. It's our annual conference.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. And maybe it was just timing, but have you asked, or are you aware of why you have announced this change prior to the end user license agreement being available? Because you said confusion... It seems to me that maybe some of the confusion can be guarded, I guess, or just not there at all if the whole deal was clear and that's the missing piece.
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** You want to announce something at your annual conference, and we really wanted to put that out there and show our commitment to openness. On the other hand, there is not that much prior art there, just finding the right legal text is a lot of legal work, and we're not there on the legal side for having the text. We were aware that it probably would have been better if we had the final text there, but on the other hand, speed in that regard could really kill if you just put out something that is not foolproof or does have some loopholes that would totally impact the company. So we really want to draft something that is substantial there and is doing the right thing.
+
+And the engineering discussion is very interesting. It's like, "Oh, so since you have the part of the source code that is Apache 2 licensed, maybe you could just modify the Apache 2 license code to circumvent that license check for the commercial part." Maybe you could do stuff like that. This needs a lot of discussion, both between engineering and the legal side. On the other hand, we don't want to make this too restrictive to scare anybody off.
+
+So we are really trying to walk a fine line of doing the right thing, and unfortunately, that takes some time, and it's really a back and forth.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[56:04\] I think it's important maybe to put into perspective the reasons why. There's a lot of confusion on the details, but the Why usually helps everyone understand the direction, and maybe even gain some trust. The Why is because you need to be a profitable company, and survive, and continue to have the necessary employees to innovate and to deliver services, right? That's the Why, right?
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** I mean, that's not the Why for opening it, but that's the Why why we need to have commercial features, that you can continue to get cool features and we can innovate other products. But like we said, we're also committed to this openness, and it's just like finding the right balance. We would love to see that we're not the last ones to do something like that, where you have a commercial offering because once you have a company you need that, but also having this open part... And not be like, I don't know, Oracle, where you just cannot see anything in the source code, and then something doesn't work out, you write to support and then you wait for some answer from support, and maybe it's not giving you the right answer of how something is supposed to work... Whereas once you have the open code approach, if you're knowledgeable enough, you just look up "How is this working behind the scenes?" I can just figure it out in 10 minutes myself and see what is going on. I think there is tremendous value in that, as well.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** If you don't go this route - you've referenced RethinkDB earlier, so it sounds like you're familiar with that story... If not sustainable, Elastic could see a downturn in employment... That means lost jobs, that means -- heck, that could potentially mean we see you on Patreon at some point, rather than finding ways to sustain yourselves in ways that meet your own business model.
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** Right.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Not that that's gonna happen; that's an extreme case. We see open source projects and/or products attempting to - and in a lot of cases succeeding in sustaining through OpenCollective, Patreon, direct support, obviously your company, so that may be slightly different... But the point is that if you don't find a way to deliver these things you want to in a commercially viable way, then it means lack of success, and company failure potentially.
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** Yeah, and it's in nobody's interest to shut down a project, like it happened to RethinkDB. I mean, the code is available on GitHub, but I checked just a month ago or so and I think pretty much nothing is happening there, so this is (I guess) pretty much the end of it, and nobody is benefitting from that... Because it was a great product and it was also widely loved, from what I understood. That's not what you want to do.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We'll put it in the show notes, we did the -- what was it, "The future of RethinkDB", Jerod? Was that the last episode we did? It's a great show; I mean, it kind of end-capped the chronicling of this podcast covering RethinkDB, which was two episodes Slava, and I can't recall the person we spoke with right now...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's right, Mike Glukhovsky, episode \#266, "The Future of RethinkDB."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I got the title, but the person I forgot. Mike was great to have on. He greatly shared the back-story, the founding portion of this, and then ultimately how the IP was bought by the Linux Foundation, and what that meant... Yeah, we'll put that in the show notes.
+
+Philipp, anything else we can cover here? Maybe what's next. This is probably the hottest topic in your company and in your projects... Where can we go from here? What's best to cover to close out the show?
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** So continuing kind of like the open theme, we're doing Google Summer of Code this year for the first time. It's sponsored by Google and organized by Google; it's basically open source organizations can apply to run student projects, and a student will then implement a feature for the project in three months, and Google is paying the student for that.
+
+\[01:00:07.12\] That has been going on for -- I don't know; I don't even know which year we're in, but 10+ years from what I remember, because I think I was a Google Summer of Code student like 9 or 10 years ago, and participated in the project. Now we are trying to be there - or we are there - as an organization as well. We're currently selecting the students, so unfortunately it's over for this year, but if you're a student and you want to work in open source during the summer and don't serve drinks or anything like that, then it's a great opportunity; keep your eyes open in February for the call for that, and then you can see more than 100 open source projects where you can apply for either ideas they are putting out, or you can come with your own project ideas. If you're being selected, you can work on that code for three months during summer and being paid by Google. So that's kind of a very nice thing for students to do; I can highly recommend that.
+
+We also see that as being part of that open source ecosystem and the openness. We are participating in initiatives like that, and try to bring on students into the projects, the new generation, into open source, and help them getting started.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You were a student in the Google Summer of Code?
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** I was a student in Google Summer of Code; I worked on a PHP-based CMS system called Silverstripe, which nobody knows because it's from New Zealand. That was kind of like my start into the open source world. I worked on the project, and then I kind of kept ties with the project, and then 2-3 years later that organization was a mentor organization, and then I was a mentor with them as well.
+
+That's kind of a common topic - you bring on people or students on the student side, and then they continue as the mentors, or as we now do on the organizational level, driving that to kind of help the next generation of strive in the open source ecosystem.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I'm looking at their homepage, 13,000+ students, 108 countries, 13 years, 608 open source organizations, and 33 million plus lines of code over at Google Summer of Code's history. Pretty impressive statistics, and what an impact it's had over time...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, Philipp, thank you so much for schooling us on the use cases of Elasticsearch, how a relational database like Postgres can leverage it, potentially how you can bridge the gaps across various different vectors... Yeah, thank you so much for sharing that back-story, because that certainly educated me quite a bit... And the fact that this is open source, and it began as open source, and the direction of your company... It's so great, so thank you for sharing that, and thank you for being a fan of the show and thank you for coming on. I appreciate it!
+
+**Philipp Krenn:** Thanks for having me, and I hope you can fix all your search problems. Let me know if you need a hand!
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We need a hand.
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+**Jerod Santo:** Chad, it's been a very, very long time since we've talked about Ember on the Changelog. In fact, our last episode with members of the Ember team was called The Road To Ember 2.0, with Tom and Yehuda Katz back in November of 2014.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** 2014... What?!
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Coming up on four years. Ember's still here and kicking. We have a lot of catching up to do, but first let's get to know you a little bit and maybe even look at Ember through your eyes. Tell us how you came to be an Ember core team member.
+
+**Chad Hietala:** The path for me to get into the Ember core team was I joined LinkedIn in 2014, and at that time we were building a lot of applications that were interactive-heavy, and so we were using Backbone for this... But a lot of the meetings that we had internally at LinkedIn at the time were many hours of figuring out how to do some of these very basic patterns - how to do routing, how to do child views, how to efficiently tear down parts of the UI, as the user interacts with it and navigates away from page to page. What I kind of recognized was that this is a huge cost; we're talking like 20 people sitting in a room, trying to figure out all of these ideas of how to build these applications and these fundamentals.
+
+So I started at LinkedIn looking at potential solutions to this problem, how can we build these rich applications, and kind of up-level people in terms of what they're actually concerned about. We have a lot of engineers at LinkedIn that are product engineers, and what we want them to be able to do is build these really great product experiences for people, and not spend a whole lot of time figuring out problems that frankly I felt were already sold by a variety of frameworks and technologies in the space at the time.
+
+In 2014 we did a big internal project at LinkedIn to kind of taste test a bunch of different technologies. One of the technologies we kind of landed on and I championed was Ember, just because I had built these types of applications that Ember was kind of the audience for, and that's kind of like how I got involved in Ember in general - we had a need, we were building very rich applications, and I thought Ember did a very good job at doing the routing, and the components, and views, and all that type of stuff for the client side applications.
+
+We're one of the larger consumers of Ember, and because of that, we were working on the framework and everything like that. I got into contact with Tom and Yehuda at the time, and they did a little bit of consulting work with us at the beginning. We as LinkedIn, we had specific needs, so LinkedIn pays me and several other people at LinkedIn to work on Ember and other open source technologies... So just by virtue of working on larger and larger portions of the open source project, they asked me to join the core team about a year and a half ago. So that's kind of how I got involved with the Ember project.
+
+I also was doing a lot of things with Ember CLI, which I think is what Tom and Yehuda were really excited about when you talked to them in 2014 - it was Ember CLI. I worked with Stef Penner on a lot of things early on with Ember CLI, and that was kind of like my kind of getting my feet wet, working on somewhat large open source projects.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, I think we should maybe give credit where credit is due, and give props to LinkedIn. What do you think, Adam? We talk about companies putting their money where their source code is, and this is a shining example - LinkedIn really coming alongside a framework that didn't start there. We see companies like Facebook having React coming out of Facebook, but here is Ember which preexists and exists out in the open source world, has its own ecosystem, and then LinkedIn really buying into it and supporting it for a very long time.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I mean... From a consulting side, on through to now... Does Tom still work there?
+
+**Chad Hietala:** Yeah, Tom is at my team at LinkedIn.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And it sounds like your employment at LinkedIn predates Tom joining, so you may even be a part of that whole process.
+
+**Chad Hietala:** Yeah, so I was there basically from the beginning, and I'm still there today. I've just celebrated my fifth year at LinkedIn, so I've been there for quite some time.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Is it safe to say that the reason that LinkedIn has gotten involved and supports Ember is because of you?
+
+**Chad Hietala:** I don't think I would say that. I think that the business has specific needs. We think that from a core team's perspective we want Ember as a framework to cater different sized companies, different use cases and everything like that. This was kind of one of the luxuries of having everything be open source - you see all of these different use cases and everything like that. I think what I brought to the table from the open source perspective is like, you know, a rather large company with hundreds of engineers - how do we build a better system to suit those types of use cases.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, one thing that we can say about Ember - even back when we had Tom and Yehuda back on in 2014, they were talking about playing the long game. Do you remember that, Adam?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I do, and we liked that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, how they were investing for the long term... And one thing that we can say about Ember is it has just continued to iterate, continued to improve; there's been many innovations that have come out of Ember... The focus on the CLI I think was huge; there was another one I had on top of my head that I just lost, but...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Glimmer...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Glimmer - yeah, absolutely. The mindshare of developers kind of ebbs and flows, and we've seen other things come along... You know, Angular became big, and now React is very big, and Ember has just continued to be kind of the "slow and steady wins the race" attitude, of just like continuing to push and push and push, and it's kind of a picture of sustainability in that sense.
+
+**Chad Hietala:** Yeah, I would agree. It's kind of funny sitting here in 2018, and a lot of these ideas that I think Ember kind of championed early on - things like having a conventional CLI tool - were pretty radical I think at that point in time. Now you have Angular CLI, there's a Vue CLI, there's a React CLI tool for kind of like scaffolding out these projects.
+
+The other kind of interesting thing is the way that Yehuda and others got involved with the standardization process. There's this manifesto, it's called The Extensible Web Manifesto; I think multiple people that are pretty prominent in the industry wrote and said that they were gonna become part of the actual standardization process... You had people that weren't like academics or language designers, but actual practitioners, going and working on the standardization body. So you kind of see some of those things in how Ember APIs have been created. In the past they were (I think) very forward-looking, and this is one of the things that I'm probably most excited about - the Ember 3.0 Roadmap... It is finally having a lot of the now specced out things to be the main line APIs inside of Ember.
+
+For example, I think Yehuda has been working on ES6 decorators, or if you're familiar with Java, there are annotations for two years now... That looks like it's going to finally land, and that's kind of the last feature that we need to represent all of Ember's object model in native JavaScript syntax. So the first thing was we need a class system - that came on ES6 and Yehuda was very involved with that in the beginning; now we have this notion of like computer properties which we need decorators for.
+
+I think within Ember 3.0 we'll definitely see how this class system that when was released was targeting browsers like IE7, IE8, IE9, that have no shot of like ever having these JavaScript features, and how we have evolved from a class system and those days, to the framework that I think everybody would expect you to have in 2018... Using basically a non-userspace-defined class system and other APIs like that.
+
+So there's other APIs I think in Ember itself - there's a whole innumerability class, and mix-ins and everything like that, and those APIs have now been standardized, I think, in IE10 and forward.
+
+I think it goes to show that not only was Ember early on some of these concepts; the APIs themselves I think were ahead of their time, and we have just been -- we're slowly but surely going to land everything that these APIs were kind of designed for, or at least for forward-looking in terms of landing the actual native thing.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, and then the web itself is better off for it, for sure. The other thing that I had top of head and couldn't remember as I got mid-sentence is the release cycle, which was -- I think the Chrome Dev team really was the trailblazers of this continuous release pattern every six weeks with the multiple channels... But Ember was very early, if not the first framework. Right now Chrome is an end user program, but the first dependency framework to really say "This can work for us as well", and just continue down that road for all these years has been... We've seen that mirrored elsewhere, so that's another place where you all have innovated.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** On the Builds page it's actually laid out pretty good, too; the path of 3.2.0 is laid out graphically even, and it seems like it's part of this release cycle to say "Hey, this is where we're at April 10th, this is where we'll be at May 21st, and here's what you can expect in between now and then - beta 1, beta 2, beta 3..." It sets an expectation to developers contributing, and also community stepping in to say "What is the release cycle path for the next release?", that kind of thing. It's very good to set that expectation, because that's half the battle of diminishing confusion.
+
+**Chad Hietala:** Yeah, I think one of the other things that we are really trying to push forward is we actually have a status board. The Ross project I believe has a similar thing; if you go to Emberjs.com/statusboard or /status, you can see all of the efforts that we're currently working on, and what's the state of those things, the RFC's associated with them, relevant PR's and all that type of stuff.
+
+Some of the things that I mentioned, like updating the object model is one of things on there. Glimmer Components is another thing that's on that list. We're still playing with it, but we want to let the community know how we are actually evolving the framework over time.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And just in case you're listening to this and you went to /status -- it's actually /statusboard, so... Check the show notes for the true link.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That is very cool, and I definitely would advocate for other projects to have similar -- I mean, just very explicit and clear on where things are, where they're heading, and that's super valuable.
+
+Just thinking about Ember and this kind of Energizer bunny of JavaScript frameworks, and really as a model for sustainability. It makes me wonder, at a macro level... Can you describe to us how the Ember -- not Ember.js the source code works, but can you describe to us how Ember the open source project runs? Governance, we talked about the release cycle a little bit, sponsorship... Give us a picture of how this machine moves down the road.
+
+**Chad Hietala:** The way that the core team works is that there's individuals that are kind of stakeholders, I would say... They own their own business, they work at a company that uses Ember, their consultants - those people have been kind of like hand-selected by other people on the core team. Obviously, this started off as a core team of two - Yehuda and Tom. As the project ratcheted up and people put more eyeballs on it, they identified people within the community that were I guess contributing a lot to the system, that had a fairly good understanding of the system, and were moving forward.
+
+I think every year at EmberConf they kind of announce new people that they recognize to become part of what's known as the Ember core team... But there's also other core teams. There's a core team that is responsible for the actual Ember CLI, we have a learning team, which is all the docs and the learning resources; they also do infrastructure for the emberjs.com website. Then there's the Ember Data team, which is responsible for everything related to the data layer.
+
+We think of all of these teams as being peers to one another there's isn't this over-arching group that is the core team, or whatever. We really would like to think of it as -- we have people that are just very focused on very important parts of the overall ecosystem.
+
+Now, the Ember core team historically has met I think once a quarter face-to-face. We have two days, we go somewhere and we talk about -- we have different types of meetings. There's like "Okay, what are the things we wanna do the next quarter?" We kind of come up with a plan, we write RFC's during that time...
+
+Then there's kind of the long game type of face-to-face meetings, where we kind of ask the question of "Where do we wanna take Ember and what are the logical steps of getting there?" They're both long and short-term meetings that we typically have. I guess the funding for the meetings and everything like that is a lot of people's employers -- LinkedIn sends me to go to those meetings that talk about the future of the framework and everything like that.
+
+Other people are funded or sponsored in some way through -- if they're consulting at the time and they're working on something specific, that's kind of blocking what they're doing in the consulting work for, then they can kind of get their trip paid for, or whatever. But I think a lot of it is people do actually spend their own personal money to drive the framework forward, because they care about it and they have kind of a vested interest in terms of where the technology should go. A lot of people have different points if views in terms of where it should go because of -- like I mentioned before, Ember is trying to suit the needs of many different things, from consultancies, to small applications, to really large applications... So having people with their own viewpoint is super helpful.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Is there a trump card? Let's say there's a disagreement about a direction... Can Tom just say, "Yeeea-no", because Tom's one of the two? How does that work?
+
+**Chad Hietala:** We're largely a consensus-driven team. All of the teams -- you have to get consensus of all the members on the team. There's no BDFL, "I'm gonna come in and tell people this is the way that it's going to be."
+
+As one can imagine, consensus-based things can be typically grueling at times, when people aren't convinced that a specific direction is the way to go.
+
+A lot of it is thinking about all of these use cases and all of these concerns that people have, and trying to come up with the best solution for it. Typically, when people do have concerns, it's not like flipping tables and telling people "You're just wrong!" and you give concrete examples of why that specific direction is wrong. It's more or less there are very true things that just need to be incorporated into the larger design that a person is pitching.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So then eventually some sort of vote...?
+
+**Chad Hietala:** We don't really vote. It's more or less we ask like "Does everybody agree?" and then we move forward.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's kind of a vote.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Speak now, or forever hold your peace, right?
+
+**Chad Hietala:** Yeah, right.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's not an official boat -- boat, gosh... Not an official ballet, that's what I was thinking. I said b for -- anyways...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** If there was an official Ember boat, that would be neat.
+
+**Chad Hietala:** Yeah, another thing that is kind of interesting is the RFC process. The vast majority of the ideas that we talk about in these face-to-face meetings - and we also have weekly meetings on Friday - are talking about the design... If we're writing an RFC or there's RFC's that the community have talked about - everything is out in the open, and that's kind of the point of the RFC process. There isn't some smoky room where we're concocting up all these plans, or whatever... No, it's like -- everything that we do, that we talk about, becomes an RFC. Then the community can comment on it and think if it's a good idea or not.
+
+For instance I have a couple RFC's out right now - they're somewhat controversial, I guess, so we're hearing from the community in terms of like what they think about some of these ideas.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** How do you go about starting an RFC? I'm trying to find docs on the process to get there, and just poking around the EmberJS website... Where would somebody go that may not be aware of the process to learn this, and then at the same time know how to actually fulfill an RFC? Someone that may not be familiar with the process.
+
+**Chad Hietala:** I believe that the process is outlined in a GitHub repo. It's at github.com/emberjs/rfcs. Basically, anybody can write an RFC. There are required parts to this document. This document has to give a quick TL;DR of what are you trying to solve with the RFC, and then give a very detailed breakdown of why, the new in detail design, and then after that you have to explain how this thing is gonna be taught. So if you're introducing a new API, one of the issues with that is 1) you have to be solving a problem that is real, and then 2) if the API is so convoluted, then nobody is actually gonna use it, or know how to use it.
+
+That's probably one of the more important sections that we've added recently - how do we teach this concept or this API? Then you also have to include drawbacks or alternatives; then there's like an open questions thing, and then basically anybody -- you can basically open up a PR against the repo, and then typically the core team will look at it, take a glance at it, give feedback in it, and then ask the person... If we think the idea is good, but it requires some rework in a couple areas, we provide that feedback and it's a very iterative process.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I like this "How we teach" part of this RFC process, because it's like -- maybe \[unintelligible 00:24:28.01\] Jerod, if you like this too... But it feels like it's like teachable-driven development, which is like, you know, not only "Here's the problem and here's the design for how to solve it", and maybe even some open-ended questions that may be out there, but how do we actually teach the community how to use this? That seems so -- does that happen often out there? I haven't really noticed that this process is part of like the RFC baked-in process anywhere else. I'm looking at the repo, actually; the RFC repo actually is pretty informative, and there's a template in the repo that kind of goes through all this - the summary, the motivation, the detailed design, how we teach this... And you've got blog posts for boilerplate. for saying "This is how this process works. This is what we expect to see here. This is an example of what you might put in here." Drawbacks, alternatives, unresolved questions... This is pretty thorough.
+
+Maybe this is a huge credit to the stability of this project - you've got a process for how a change should go in, and how changes get proposed, and it becomes a much more successful project because you've got good guardrails up.
+
+**Chad Hietala:** I think that having that section actually changes a little bit on how you introduce concepts, because you have to think about the teaching aspect, and to some level, the documentation and the guides aspect vary, before you've actually written any code, right? So it puts that, I guess, in front of you, to answer that question very early on, in like how it fits into the bigger picture.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The only thing I'm kind of bummed about - maybe this is just me not googling well enough yet... Is just not seeing this template further along earlier in the process, like a blog about it, or something like that. This is such core information, I think, that's really useful to would-be contributors, that they may have to dig a little too far to get.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** My intuition on that is - and Chad, correct me if I'm wrong - by the time you get to the point where you're going to write an RFC, you've kind of been initiated in to the Ember community long enough that you've stumbled upon or you've seen other RFC's, and you've talked -- so for the uninitiated maybe it's overkill or maybe it's overwhelming, so maybe that's why it's not upfront.
+
+**Chad Hietala:** Yeah, I think that's kind of the way that we think about it - the people that are really passionate about things in the community and have a somewhat detailed understanding of how the community works and everything like that are the people that typically write RFC's. We definitely talk about it in (I think) different blog articles. It's probably been several years since we introduced the RFC process. I think it might have happened right around 1.0. So once we hit 1.0, when we locked down the API we said "Okay, this is the operating model going forward in terms of introducing new APIs." So it may have been just a long time since we've introduced it.
+
+And we're kind of continually -- I'd mentioned we added a learning section recently, so it is something that we're still iterating on, as we learn new things from other people that are doing RFC's now. I believe React is now doing RFC's, Rust does a lot of RFC's... So yeah, we're learning from other communities as well.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** The amount of detail, and the template, the fact that you have this all written down -- I was even thinking, as I read through the RFC's readme, where you talk about substantial changes... Like, you don't need an RFC if it's not a substantial change (that's a typical pull request) and then I was like "Well, what is a substantial--" because there's quotes around the word "substantial" a couple times... And I'm like "Well, what is a substantial change?" and then it goes on to describe "This is what we would consider a substantial change..." So it just speaks to how...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's funny.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** ...how much thought, time, and really iteration has gone into this just over the years, just constantly churning, improving, getting better, and fleshing it out. This repo - the RFC's repo - is the sign of a very mature project, and community that's been through stuff and learned along the way... So it's just very impressive.
+
+**Chad Hietala:** Yeah... I don't know how many JavaScript half-lives Ember has been through, but it'll probably go through several more... \[laughter\]
+
+**Break:** \[29:02\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Alright, Chad, so do your best to catch us up -- you don't have to give us the full four years between Ember 2.0 and Ember 3.0, or 3.1, which is the latest release... We'll talk a little bit more -- I know you got into a little bit of the innovations and also where you see things going with the status board, but tell us what's new... For those people who have maybe used Ember a couple years ago, or check it out then and moved on, didn't dive deep into it and have it on a production application; if they revisited the project, what would they find now that they wouldn't have found last time around?
+
+**Chad Hietala:** I think a large portion of what we spent the time on during the 2.0 series - it was a fairly long series... And what we kind of recognized was some of the infrastructure that we have, primarily around the rendering layer, wasn't going to set us up for success. So around 1.0, or going from 1.13 to 2.0, at EmberConf we talked a little bit about this project called Glimmer. The name has evolved from that point, but what Glimmer was trying to do was modernize the underlying rendering engine. In Ember 1.0 it was primarily doing string concatenation and interpolation with dynamic values... Then towards the tail end of 1.11, or towards the end of the 1.0 series, we released this thing called HTMLBars, which was going from string interpolation into just generating compile templates that were effectively what you would handcraft if you were to write all the DOM methods to construct the DOM, and then there was a system there to keep that DOM up to date.
+
+And then right around that time, that's when React came out and really made us kind of rethink on like what the programming model should be, and that is like driving all the state through property setting, or in React it's "set state", which causes you to basically re-render the entire view. So the first iteration of Glimmer was kind of getting to those similar semantics, and not necessarily using the virtual DOM itself, but the same idea that whenever you need to update the UI, you call this set with a new value, and then you basically have committed that change into the system and then the rendering engine figures out how to most optimally update the view. That was the first version of Glimmer.
+
+Then 2.0 kind of started, and then we realized we wanted to implement what was known as these angle bracket components, which were supposed to be a lighter weight version of what existed in Ember 1.0 and still exists today is these Ember components, these Glimmer components is what we called them, or angle bracket components, were meant to be a lighter weight thing that did have some of the performance issues and APIs that we just don't really wanna live with anymore, but when we try to implement them on top of this infrastructure, the HTMLBars with these React-like semantics, they weren't actually faster... So we felt that the underlying architecture made a lot of assumptions on how the old rendering engine worked. That kind of started this big kind of iterative change to figure out what the new rendering engine should look like.
+
+We typically are all about incremental improvements over time, and not do big bang rewrites... So I think Yehuda forked the HTMLBars repo in 2014 or something like that and started working on the next iteration of what we called Glimmer 2.
+
+Glimmer 2 is kind of from the ground-up rearchitecting how we think about the rendering engine from an architectural point of view. Templates themselves are kind of an interesting concept. A template is at its truest form a pure function. You have a template and you have a context, and you mash those two things together and you get some output. Now, if the context and the template are the same, it's referential transparent, right? If the context doesn't change, then you'll get the same output every single time.
+
+So we think about the templating -- we've changed the focus of how we think about the templating layer from like this thing that creates views and we actually wanted to model the underlying rendering engine as if the template language was an actual programming language. So we think of the templating language now more as a functional language itself, so part of what the Glimmer rendering engine does is that -- or it is a virtual machine. So what we do is instead of compiling the template into a bunch of JavaScript code that is then just kind of like called into from JavaScript land and then it produces the DOM, the first iteration of the new Glimmer rendering engine was compiling the templates into a JSON structure, and then we interpreted that at runtime and we compiled into a program that then created the view.
+
+This is a pretty fundamental difference between -- where I think a lot of JavaScript frameworks are today is that you have things like JSX, or you have Angular templates, and they're all compiling into JavaScript and then running it on the client.
+
+One of the founding principles is that we felt that we could make the compiled output much smaller if we compiled to a JSON format, and then interpreted it at runtime. That turned out to be true.
+
+When we did this work and we landed inside of the LinkedIn application, I think we reduced the compiled template size by I think 5x...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Wow,
+
+**Chad Hietala:** So we went from almost 10 MB of compiled JavaScript templates down to whatever that is -- it was like a pretty massive reduction, because we can see the templates kind of at one time and we can do different types of optimizations that you wouldn't otherwise be able to do if you were compiling to a JavaScript program. This is like hoisting interesting parts of other templates that may be shared, and everything like that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So they're stored as JSON then - is that what you said? I'm just making sure I tracked you.
+
+**Chad Hietala:** Yeah, so the first pass of it was "Let's take the templates, compile them to JSON." There's kind of some interesting articles out there around the performance of JSON parsing versus if you were to have that same string in JavaScript land. A lot of engines, because if you use a JSON parser or whatever like that, the parsing of the JSON string has to do less checks and everything like that, because the grammar of JSON is much more constrained than JavaScript. You can have a string, and all of a sudden it's calling a function, and now you have to go into that function and get the return value out and interpolate the string. So parsing the JSON and then putting it through basically an interpreter - we got some runtime wins from that as well.
+
+If you've looked at other functional programming languages that are built on other languages - if you look at something like Clojure, that's built on top of the JVM, you kind of have a similar story as to like the next evolution... So instead of doing this JSON format, we would go from the JSON format into an actual bytecode set. We wrote our own bytecode set that we compile the JSON into, and then we have the actual virtual machine loop through that, and it's encoding all the instructions to build the UI. That was somewhere in 2.0, towards the tail end.
+
+Then I worked on a project at LinkedIn last year which was if we're compiling at runtime, this JSON into this binary format and then running it, can we actually do all of this stuff ahead of time? We felt like it was 100% possible, but part of the challenge of this, with a templating system, is that you have a very declarative -- a template is very declarative, but it's talking about things that are in JavaScript land, so you need a way of bridging this gap between "I'm talking about this declarative template, and then calling into JavaScript land to create components, and everything like that."
+
+So one of the challenges is if we are going to precompute the binary that we're creating at runtime, we have to have some way of resolving components at build time, so we built almost like a bridging technology that when we discover an invocation to a component, what we do is replace the call site with a number (which we call a handle) and at runtime what you're responsible for is basically replacing that handle with a live JavaScript object.
+
+This is similar to how things like, I think, Emscripten worked this way, or the first versions of asm, where we're gonna create this -- which became WebAssembly, but you have to have some way of talking about invoking things that are actual JavaScript objects, versus --
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right, a reference.
+
+**Chad Hietala:** Yeah, a reference inside the binary code. So we did that, and we were able to reduce the template size further, because now your programs don't get compiled into JavaScript, they don't get compiled in JSON, they actually get compiled into an array buffer. And the reason why we felt like this was where we wanted to go is one of the things that a lot of the folks at Google have been talking about for the past couple of years in terms of like JavaScript performance or getting up and running -- I think Addy Osmani has written an article about JavaScript startup performance... And one of the big costs of these client-side applications, especially on mobile devices, is parsing compiling JavaScript. So you're going from this high-level code, and it has to compile it all the way to machine code, and there's definitely costs to that.
+
+So we felt that if we can compile templates, which represent a rather large portion of a client application, into something like binary data that doesn't have to go through the JavaScript parsing compile pipeline, then we can get some decently-sized wins from that. Especially as your application grows and grows and grows, the more templates that you'll have inside of your application, and if you're compiling to JavaScript, you have to incur the JavaScript parsing compile cost.
+
+So this is kind of like the state of where we're at with Ember. We haven't landed the compiling to binary code inside of Ember yet. Last year's EmberConf we announced this thing called Glimmer.js, which is a lightweight component library that you kind of like equate it to kind of like React; it's just the view layer, it isn't like a router or anything like that. It's like a class object, and a template, and it allows you to put components onto a page.
+
+So we use that project kind of as a proving ground for a lot of these crazy ideas, like "Can we take this templating layer and compile it to binary code?" Ember has strong guarantees around stability and semver and everything like that, so we can't just go off into the desert and come up with some crazy idea and try to shoe-horn it back into Ember. We have to design a system that allows us to make large leaps, but then also bring everybody in the community along for the ride in terms of like the performance.
+
+So with Glimmer.js it's the same rendering engine that Ember uses. They have the same dependency on it, so what you can express -- the VM, you can think of it as just like a virtual machine runtime; the templating language between these two things are equal, so it ends up working out. So you're able to basically do this experimentation, but have the guarantee that it is going to eventually land in Ember in some form.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You're answering a few of my questions as we go along there, I think... Because the first one I started having was these are major rewritings of the underpinnings, so do the ergonomics change, from the Ember.js user perspective? And it sounds like you're saying no, because you've gone through great pains to take the volatile bits and move them over to Glimmer, and then slowly introduce this back into Ember. Is that what you're saying, or am I not following you?
+
+**Chad Hietala:** The way that we have designed the VM is that we put a hard constraint on "This has to be able to work in Ember", so while we've done a bunch of experimentation with the underpinnings, the semantics of the system have to basically remain the same. We think that React got this bit right, in terms of how to think about the programming model, so as long as we have the same semantics of like when I need to update the state I call some method or I set some property and it updates the view - that all remains constant. It's more or less that because the templating language gives us an abstraction that isn't JavaScript - we're not tied to the JavaScript runtime or whatever like that - we can fundamentally change the underpinnings of this system.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And then my other question I was having - and I believe you've answered this, but I'll reiterate it so we're all on the same page... Glimmer.js - which actually has its own website (glimmerjs.com) - could be used completely standalone, and perhaps you would maybe even advocate for people who just need a UI library and don't need all of the other things that Ember offers... You could just use this by itself.
+
+**Chad Hietala:** Yeah, that was the idea with Glimmer. We kind of recognized that there is a spectrum of applications that one may want to build. There is the highly interactive, single-page application experience that Ember I think is well-suited for, and then there's like "Hey, I need to put this dynamic widget on this page, and I just need a little bit of state management, but I don't need a full framework."
+
+That was kind of the idea around Glimmer.js, but what we're actually thinking about with Ember is how can we make an actual experience like that inside of Ember? This is thinking about "Can we serve a bare backbone of Ember, that can do the same things that Glimmer.js has?", so that's why we don't bifurcate. While the Glimmer VMs are the same between these two things and you can totally take -- you'll be able to take a component from a Glimmer.js app and put it in an Ember app and it just works... That's one of the things that we're actively working on right now. But we're also coming from the other end and saying "Can we make it so that you can build very lightweight applications with Ember itself?"
+
+**Break:** \[48:08\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It sounds like Glimmer is similar to the way Vue is heading, in terms of drop-in, ease of use, that kind of thing.
+
+**Chad Hietala:** I think yeah, that's kind of the use case that it's trying to solve - this very lightweight thing that you can just drop it into an application, do a little bit of interactive components, and then be done with it. At LinkedIn we have a couple different use cases - embedded widgets and CRM's, like Salesforce or something like that... And we want to have just a little bit of functionality; it's not a whole app, it's just a component that needs to go somewhere in another person's website, but you could use it for any type of website... But that's kind of the use case - a small component library that can be used inside of a sort of rendered application, or it can be... The idea is that you can also use these components inside of an Ember application. So you have this cross-stack use.
+
+Another use case we have at LinkedIn is we have a bunch of internal shared components, and we wanna be able to have high leverage, so no matter what stack you're on, you're kind of writing these components for -- if you're on like an old application that is still server-side rendered, you can still write using the Glimmer component API, or if you're working on an Ember app, you use these components and drag and drop them into your application. So that's kind of the idea - to basically span the spectrum of use cases for this template-driven approach to UI.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We all might need to change your tagline, because it's "A framework to create ambitious web applications", but it sounds like it's "...and any other thing that you might be creating."
+
+**Chad Hietala:** \[laughs\] Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So a follow-up to that might be will this be able to be dropped in with just a script tag into HTML, and if I wanna pop it into a page or drop the script into a head - is that how it might be used, or is there a different process to make it that lightweight?
+
+**Chad Hietala:** Glimmer.js uses Ember's CLI to actually produce the asset, so at the end of it you have some script tags, but it isn't like \[unintelligible 00:51:51.23\] just grab a script tag and drop it onto the page. Now, you could probably do it if you wanted to; it's not gonna be fast, because you need a compiler basically to compile the templates into something. So I don't think it's like how jQuery was, where you can just drop it on the page and start using it. There's still a little bit of build step to get the app running.
+
+One interesting thing that we've thought about is we can totally vend the Glimmer components inside of a custom element, and we have -- I think there's a repo on the Glimmer.js repository that basically did this. So the way that you would introduce these components onto a page wasn't necessarily through a script tag, but it was like a custom element that could fetch all of its resources and render that component to the page.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Tell us a little bit more about tree shaking. The way I understand it is you have Ember the library, and it exposes N numbers of functions - maybe there's 500 functions - but in my application code I'm only actually calling into three of those, and maybe those three call into 17 others... So of Ember's 500 functions - I'm just making these numbers up, of course - my system calls 20... And so tree shaking is the process by which we can actually just shake those 20 out and leave the rest of Ember on the cutting room floor, hence reducing the dependency weight? Is that what it is?
+
+**Chad Hietala:** Yeah... I mean, I don't know why in the JavaScript community we've come up with new words for explaining --
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Crazy words...
+
+**Chad Hietala:** It's dead code elimination is basically what it is. \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's not tree shaking.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I know. It's mystical... You know, you're gonna shake a tree...
+
+**Chad Hietala:** Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Before you go forward, Chad, what's a good way you say it? What was the terminology you used for this?
+
+**Chad Hietala:** It's static linking. You're just gonna link all of the -- so you're gonna follow the imports back basically to depth, and you retain only the code that you have statically set inside of your JavaScript that you're using. There's projects like Webpack that do tree shaking, Rollup does tree shaking... It's just another way of saying that we're gonna remove all the code that you're not calling into.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** But you just used the phrase we're trying to get rid of based on what you've just said in your description of it...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Well, that's the industry phrase though. He's just using the jargon. On the lines of tree shaking - maybe you guys know this, maybe you don't. I've learned this recently - do you know that there are web performance junkies who will effectively tree shake their web fonts? I think they call it subfonting or subsetting. So you're loading web fonts, and they're expensive for performance and what have you, but you're only using - let's just say of the English alphabet, 26 letters, I'm only using 17 of the letters, so I'm gonna actually tree shake out the other letters out of my web font, and reduce my web fonts' subset to just the letters I'm using. Ain't that crazy?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Is this at render for the individual user, or just like add a new compile time for the app?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I don't know, man... I've never looked into it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Because if it's on demand, that's pretty crazy. It makes sense though, because if you have many more characters than 26 and you're using only 10, and the font weighs 2 megs and you can cut it down to less than 1... Why not?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's true. But "Why not" is because that's a lot of work.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** But you do it for your JavaScript, why not do it for your web fonts?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, why don't you just use Times New Roman, and it's already there? \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Talk to your designer. Talk to your designer, Jerod.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Anyways, I've derailed us, but I found that amazing, just the length that people will go to to squeeze out a little bit more performance. It's kind of cool. So we were talking about tree shaking in JavaScript, and I probably completely derailed us... We were talking about the term itself, but maybe... You mentioned that Ember isn't there yet, like we can't do it. We want Ember to be this framework for both ambitious and non-ambitious websites; we would love to be versatile and have like a slim version of Ember that we could do via tree shaking, but you didn't sound like you were there yet, so I guess the next question is - and maybe this is asked and answered, but just bear with us... What has to change and when is it gonna change, so that Ember can be used in that fashion?
+
+**Chad Hietala:** I think as of like the past couple of days it's basically done. One of the challenges we had with Ember itself is internally there's circular references to things, and you have to be able to sort all that type of stuff out, but I believe Robert Jackson who's on the core team has a branch working where we not only have the modules API completely fleshed out as ES6 imports... The other thing is that we ship Babel with Ember CLI as a default to transpile the ES6 or the newest syntax of JavaScript into something that can run in a variety of browsers... So one of the things we've done there is introduced the notion of targets.
+
+What a target is is if a browser supports all of these new language features, then don't compile it into code that could run in like IE10. So he has a branch where we're not only doing the modules API, so you can tree shake out the app, we're also only transpiling the features that aren't implemented in any browser.
+
+This is kind of a way that you can target evergreen browsers, which has kind of been one of the issues of trying to get Ember to a place where you can target different browsers and different types of -- or sorry, not targeting different browsers, but targeting different use cases... Ember comes along with a decent amount of polyfills that are polyfilling things for APIs that aren't there in older browsers. So even though Ember is on 3.0, we still support IE11, and then everything else is evergreen. So because everything else is evergreen, we kind of have to have an answer of like -- I shouldn't have to down-compile this code, I should be able to maybe create multiple builds and I can serve assets for IE11 that will run in IE11, versus I can just use the native JavaScript inside of like Chrome, say. So I think very soon this is gonna become a reality.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I looked it up while you were talking there, just to confirm I knew what an evergreen browser was. I mean, I kind of understood that it was future-proofed, but I didn't know how. Can you break that down real quick?
+
+**Chad Hietala:** Yeah, so an evergreen browser is basically a browser that automatically updates; it's keeping everybody at the leading edge, so that people do not get stuck on specific versions. Internet Explorer was notorious for like -- you had like IE6, IE7, IE8, IE9, and everybody's just waiting for these browsers to kind of phase out in terms of their usage, where an evergreen browser, if you have Chrome or something like that, it'll tell you "Oh, a new version of Chrome is available", and then you basically opt in and you have the new version of the browser.
+
+It's very difficult for somebody to get stuck on a specific version. It's kind of pushing everybody forward. Every major browser vendor now does this; Edge does this, Chrome does this, Firefox does it... I believe Opera, because it's effectively Blink under the hood; they're doing this as well. It's just a way to make sure that everybody is towards the leading edge of the technology.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's kind of funny to think about that. I've just checked my About page for Chrome, and I'm on version 65 and plenty dots after that, obviously... But could you imagine marketing Chrome 65? Like, "Hey, what Chrome are you on...?" You know, you probably still say that behind the scenes in dev land...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** In tech support.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, but general users aren't saying -- they just know they use Chrome. And I guess going back to the question of being more nimble, Vue has being able to drop a script tag, and obviously you've got the VM, so it makes it harder; you're compiling down to machine code, or bytecode, or something like that to make things faster... You know, one of the issues with jQuery was just the fact that it would ship so much and didn't do all this tree shaking like we've just kind of talked through. You kind of had to ship all of jQuery and support all browsers regardless, but you wanted to use jQuery features. That's what made it sort of go out of style - this lack of modularity.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, smaller is definitely always better, and especially now that we've found the internet very much exists on mobile devices, and those mobile devices are very much on slow internet connections, with low latency, out in the boondocks, and to stay competitive in the front-end space I think you have to be able to scale up and scale back down, and Ember was always in the space of ambitious web apps, so if you know that you need that interactivity, and you need routing, you need all this stuff, it was a great choice... But if you don't need all of that and you still need -- if you're thinking about doing font subsetting because you need to squeeze out that extra bit of performance, it really takes Ember off the table for you, and then hopefully this will move it back into a place where you're like "Okay, maybe I can still just use the parts that I need", which is great.
+
+Tell us what else... We're wrapping up here soon, but what else is coming down the road for Ember? ...things that you're excited about, or something maybe you're working on personally.
+
+**Chad Hietala:** Yeah, so one of the -- I think the biggest boons for the community is actually adopting ES6 classes in Ember itself. It's one of the things that as an Ember developer that you use every single day - you're writing classes, or updating classes, and everything like that... And at this point it feels very old, so we're doing this big refresh of the class system just to use ES6 classes, and I think that's what people would kind of expect of a JavaScript framework in 2018.
+
+Like I mentioned earlier, the reasons why is that we wanna support the entire class model, the entire class system inside of native ES6 syntax, and we should be able to do that here pretty shortly. Certain things work today, but not the entire scope in which the Ember object model falls in today. But I agree with the sentiment that -- I think the web has a pretty big advantage when it comes to the mobile market, so I am personally kind of excited about this idea of like how small can we get the framework so that we can address different concerns for different markets, and everything like that.
+
+The web in general I think has an opportunity in emerging markets, and Google talks a lot about the next billion users that come online - they have poor connectivity, the phones aren't great, you also have data plans that are rather restricted inside of these markets... So downloading native applications inside of those markets is pretty -- a big non-starter. I think the web can be extremely useful in these use cases, you just have to think pretty diligently about things that you're sending down to the browser and everything like that... So I think it's great that Ember is really taking this seriously and we're doing a bunch of interesting things to bend the curve in terms of what we think about web applications, from the kind of like static HTML applications, to the highly dynamic Ember applications that we have today, or like React applications...
+
+I think that there is a good middle ground, which is taking the best from both worlds - having server side rendering for the first route, and then client side rendering all the subsequent routes. I think that's a huge -- it's a very good pattern that I think a lot of applications should follow, and I think as we land some of these things in Ember, that will become hopefully the default way that we think about building these client side applications, and that is with a very performance-focused point of view from the start, but at the same time acknowledging that as your requirements of your project change, you have to have something, right? You can't just say like "No, we're not gonna build that feature." We have to have some shared architecture for us to build these ambitious things.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's kind of been the MO for Ember going back to 2014, Jerod. That's the way we heard from Yehuda and Tom - borrowing the best ideas from the community; not so much not coming up with our own, of course, but just like paying attention to what's happening out there and doing their best to adopt best practices that are happening elsewhere, and not just turning a blinder on because it's competition or a different framework or different ideas...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Exactly.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's like, "Is it working over there? Okay, how does that fit into the ecosystem of Ember and how does it make sense for the mission of Ember?" Since we've kind of covered a lot of ground here in terms of where Ember has been, where it's going, your involvement in it, maybe share with us -- I think Jerod even asked this question earlier, like "What makes someone come back to Ember if they haven't seen it in a while?" I'm thinking more along the lines of they've never seen it at all, or if this is fresh and new for them, or maybe they've only ever seen React. What makes someone choose Ember? What are good use cases for Ember and maybe what are some good examples of applications in the wild? Maybe even at LinkedIn, how are you using it?
+
+**Chad Hietala:** The value prop that has kind of always been with Ember is we do look at what is going on inside of the community and we try to roll those best practices into the application. This is like the whole "Stability without stagnation" MO, which means that we're going to create really stable APIs, but you're not gonna be left behind by what is happening in the larger JavaScript community.
+
+So that's kind of the way that we think about it, and if you're building applications that are going to live for several years, that have many developers working on them... Or they don't even have to have many developers working on it; it's more or less like "I'm building a business. I wanna think about the business, I want the technology to allow me to continue to make my business successful, but I want to not have to think about which libraries should I use for routing, or what's a good way of doing change tracking or how do I efficiently update the view? It comes along with -- it encodes a lot of the best practices... And I think that it still resonates with me. I've been working with Ember since 2012-2013, and it still resonates with me that we have shared solutions to problems, and recognizing that not all applications are special snowflakes. There's common things that we can build up from. Inside of my organization, this removes our long meetings and "How are you gonna do this thing that is critical to the technology, but it isn't mission-critical for the business?" I think that's one of the areas where Ember strives - the stability without stagnation aspect of it.
+
+I think for people that have used Ember and have left and then are taking another look at it, I think what they will find is I think some of the things that may have been difficult for people to pick up at the beginning was API docs around 1.0, and still kind of like through the 1.x series, where they were good, but they weren't great at explaining how the entire system works together and everything like that.
+
+I think we've invested a lot in documentation and actually having a docs team, so that the concepts are easier to learn. So that's one category of people, it's like "I don't get this thing, it's hard to learn. I took one look at it but the documentation didn't really tell me why I should do this."
+
+Then there is the performance aspects to it. I think we are doing a lot of interesting things, and we have written about the ins from doing those performance things... So if you got into situations where Ember was falling down because of performance or whatever, I think we've addressed a lot of those cases, and in some cases leapfrogged others in the space. So those are I think some of the things that I would kind of like re-examine.
+
+The other thing I guess is the things about the JavaScript community are -- it is definitely like every so many years a new thing comes along and makes you have to go and rewrite your entire application, and maybe people have been through this at this point, because like I said, Ember has been around for a decent amount of time... And some people get burnt out by that...
+
+Always chasing the hype train or whatever is another thing that I think brings people back - they went off and tried a bunch of things, but then they're like "Oh, this thing actually works and I don't have to worry about what..."-- basically having FOMO.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's certainly the truth. There's definitely a hype cycle in JavaScript, and I think the interesting thing with Ember is that, like Jerod said at the beginning of the show, is that you've been this Energizer bunny... You say it's stability -- what was the phrase you used?
+
+**Chad Hietala:** Stability without stagnation.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** There you go. I mean, you've been that for years... Six plus, seven plus years. You personally even, not just Ember. That's pretty cool to see that. You certainly give a lot of confidence into the future of Ember. We'll leave it there then. Thank you so much for your time today, and thanks for coming on the Changelog, I appreciate it.
+
+**Chad Hietala:** Thanks for having me.
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+**Jerod Santo:** So Kevin, Gitcoin sits at the intersection of two topics that we've been tracking for a while now. The first one is sustained open source, and the second one is cryptocurrencies and blockchains and all that jazz. So let's start with the sustainability side of Gitcoin. Why is this a problem that you're personally interested in solving?
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** \[04:01\] Yeah, that's a great question and I love starting with why, because I think that everything sort of flows from that. I've been a software developer for the last 15 years, I have a degree in computer science, way back in 2006. Since then, I've built my entire career off of open source software and the GitHub ecosystem, which I think is like a pretty generational thing. If I was born 15 years earlier, I probably would have been doing a lot of Microsoft stack stuff and a lot of closed source stuff... But my career has been built upon Python and Django and NGINX and Postgres, tools like that. Those are all open source projects, and at least the pattern that I've seen with my own open source projects - if you go to my GitHub, you'll see that there's about 15 of them - is that they kind of shark-fin, in that the interest really peaks when I get a fit of inspiration, I put something out there, build a small community, and then something else happens that I'm interested and I move on, but the bug reports and the community relying on the software doesn't end... So by using blockchain for incentivization mechanics and to sustain open source and to delegate tasks to the crowd, we are meant to try and fix that problem a little bit.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So you're doing it with Gitcoin. Give us the elevator pitch of what this is and what it does for people.
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** Yeah, sure. So Gitcoin is a portmanteau of GitHub and Bitcoin. What that means is we take any GitHub issue you already work on GitHub, and we allow you to incentivize that issue by attaching a cryptocurrency bounty to it. So if there's some bug on a repo in open source that I'm relying on, and I can see that that issue board is overwhelming or it's got a lot of issues on it, I can place a cryptocurrency bounty on that issue in order to incentivize the repo maintainer to turn around the scope that I would like turned around preferentially. So it adds incentivization mechanics to open source software.
+
+The community is about 1,700 people at this point. I'd say that people join Gitcoin a) to make a little bit of money in open source, but also just to learn about blockchain with a set of peers that are also excited about Ethereum and Bitcoin and the evolving Web 3.0 ecosystem.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Cool. We'll definitely unpack the Web 3.0 topic here soon.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** This is the first time on the show too, Web 3.0. Nobody's ever said that yet.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's right. We're...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We're crackin' it here.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You started the Web 2.0 Show back in the day, didn't you?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, that's an interesting aside there... The Web 2.0 Show obviously came around with Web 2.0. A lot of gradients, a lot of rounded corners, we used to always say. Yeah, that was a fun show; it started back in 2004, and I think it ended around 2009.
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** Okay.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Maybe we'll have to get the Web 3.0 Show going after this, what do you think?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** There you go. Bring it back, man.
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** I just find it so amusing that you're describing -- that the way you define Web 2.0 is rounded corners and gradients... \[laughter\] For me it's the iOS apps and social media, but you know...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, really? I think iOS came after Web 2.0.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I think Web 2.0 was -- for me the epitome and start of it was Ajax, specifically digg.com; so you had the democratization of content. Digg.com was huge, and they had their little Digg button, and the first time - I remember this very distinctly - I clicked that Digg button and the counter updated without the page reloading, I lost it, I flipped out. I was like "What is this magic?!", you know? And that was when Ajax just became beezneez, and to me that's what 2.0 was. But definitely Adam speaks to the design style back then, because he's bringing a designer's eye to the game.
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** \[08:16\] Yeah, for sure. I forgot about Digg.com. Wow, it's been so long... Reddit is where it's at; Reddit was like the number two back when Digg was the number one content aggregator of that era, so... Times have changed.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, they kind of self-destructed. I was anti-Reddit because I was such a Digg fanboy that I skipped Reddit, went straight to Hacker News, and then Hacker News became a cesspool, so I went back and found Reddit, and I'm like, "Okay, now I've got a few cesspools to hang out in", and that's the current state of affairs, at least in my life.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow. Interesting. So Web 3.0...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Web 3.0 - we'll table that for a second. Let's get to the name Gitcoin, because Adam, you and I were arguing about this.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes. We were searching for like at least 20 minutes, like "Is it really a coin or not?"
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right, because you said people can place bounties with cryptocurrencies, so the assumption that I made - and I was searching for it - I was wondering the current sale price of the Gitcoin, looking for a token, and a ticker symbol and all that. To be clear to the audience, and you can explain some of the mechanics there, Kevin, is that there's no Gitcoin, it's just that portmanteau of GitHub and Bitcoin, or Git and Bitcoin. But there's no Gitcoin.
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** Yeah. And that's actually a question that we get a lot. I don't know how many of your listeners are familiar with the ICO phenomenon, but there's this phenomenon in blockchain right now that's called ICO and it stands for Initial Coin Offering. The way it works is that if you have an idea for a startup you wanna build in the blockchain ecosystem, the standard has become you publish a whitepaper describing the idea, and the whitepaper also includes discussification for something called a token sales.
+
+Tokens are just unique assets that are available and trackable on the blockchain, that entitle you to some right related to the project. So if you have a distributed file storage network, then you could release a token called Filecoin, that would give you rights to store information on that distributed file network. That's like a very basic example of what a token is.
+
+So we've kind of gone through this last year, in which token sales have become really hot; people were 100x-ing their money on some token sales, and people kind of expect a blockchain project to have a token and a token sale associated with it.
+
+I have 15 years of startup experience and I've never seen anyone ever raise 50 million dollars, 80 million dollars without even having a product to market yet, so just spiritually it kind of felt wrong to back Gitcoin with a token when there wasn't even a network. I'm talking about this fall, when I was putting the project together. So what we decided to do was sell funds for a little while, and build a community and reach a product market fit. It's possible that there'll be a token down the line, but I think that it's really important to have a culture that's focused on building things and learning about the ecosystem instead of like -- you go on the Telegram channel for some of these tokens, and all they talk about is the price of the token. It kind of like poisons the culture, I think, if you tokenize too early.
+
+\[11:53\] So that's sort of where the project is at, but it's something that we're trying to work out with the name - how do we capture the conciseness and the spirit of the project with the name, but also let people know that there's no token, it's just a network that's built around building.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We've been camping out in this sector for a while now, and have never really had deeper conversations like this on the show other than the Ethereum show and the shows we've done around Blockchain and Hyperledger... But then you just said "tokenize too early", which I had never heard that phrase yet. So I guess if you're on the in, if you're where you're at, maybe that's an often thrown around phrase.
+
+Maybe another thing to talk about might be the attachment to the brand Git. We've seen some brands use it - obviously, GitHub is the most influential user of a Git-based business brand, and there's several others that have come and gone or still exist... GitLab is another one that's a direct competitor to GitHub. What's your attachment to -- what's the financial ramifications of that? What are some of the downfalls, what are some of the reasons why you chose the name Gitcoin, or even Git involved anyways? Why is that thing?
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** I think there's obviously the attachment to Git, the version control system... When I moved from CVS to SVN, and then over to Git, with version control, it was just one of those mind-exploding moments, to see how easy it was to do branching and merging with the Git software. I think that was doubly important, given the framing that I gave you earlier, about open source software powering hundreds of thousands of technical careers, and open source software being a path to middle-class life for millions of Americans, and probably tens of millions of people worldwide. So I think there's that...
+
+There's obviously the sort of like action-oriented way that you can use the coin, with the double entendre - you're "getting" coins, which I think is cool. As you mentioned, there's GitLab, there's GitHub, there's another project out here in Colorado where I'm based called GitPrime, and hopefully we don't see any fatigue or any of these projects at each other's throats because of the mutual use of the word "Git." It's kind of becoming an overloaded term.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Isn't Git itself trademarked and owned, copywritten by Linus or the Linux Foundation or some legal entity that would own the rights to that?
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** Yeah, it's something that when we were starting the project we talked to our friends at another project that had used the Git trademark, and we had worked out sort of a scheme in which we had thought that we can use that and still be in good legal waters, but... It's not that easy to email Linus, believe it or not, so I'm trying to find a way to get in touch with them.
+
+Well, a) I just think that they're the spiritual ancestors of a generation of open source software, and I'd love to get in touch with them and see what they think about using blockchain for incentivization. If you read The Cathedral And The Bazaar, all the stuff about being open to the point of promiscuity, and delegating everything - I think a lot of that came from Linus, so I'd love to get involved in that respect. And yes, obviously, the trademark stuff is something that we're looking at also.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Cool. So the general flow of this conversation - I wanna talk about really the idea and the model first, and then we'll dive into the technicals and the details, and you can unpack a lot of these words that are either confusing or jargon that we don't understand, as people who aren't building blockchain technologies - Metamask, ERC20, Web 3.0, dApps... All of these things that can intimidate people when they're coming to this space, we'll dive into all that afterwards.
+
+\[16:04\] Let's talk about the concept a little more. You mentioned incentivizing open source contribution through currency, right? Through a programmable currency. What does that look like? The obvious one is bug bounties. Is bug bounties in terms of the model of payment the end-all-be-all of Gitcoin, or is it just getting started?
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** I think that we're focused on incentivization on any GitHub issue, but that said, there's specific types of issues that are more easily delegatable than other GitHub issues. Obviously, if you're kicking off a large \[16:47\] or a large project, you don't wanna delegate that just to the crowd, because that's gonna need central architecture and the left brain talking to the right brain on that project. So we'd like to say that any issue where the ROI is high of crowdsourcing it, is a good issue to put on Gitcoin.
+
+I think you gave the example of bug bounties, and I think that that's a great place to start, provided that the readme is up to date, the codebase is well tested and the issue is reproducible. All of those things make it very easy to specify a bug that needs to be fixed, and those types of issues are really delegatable out to the crowd.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What are the kinds of projects that would be able to fund? In other words, you're creating a marketplace of workers and payers, and you're using cryptocurrency as the mechanism for payment... But that's not necessarily generating the money. So if I have an open source project and I have some stuff that I want done on it, and maybe it's really valuable in certain ways, but I'm not necessarily a big business or I don't have a stack of cash on me, I can't incentivize work on that based on Gitcoin, because I don't have any coin, right? So who's gonna be bringing the money to this platform, because it's the classic two-edged network problem of chicken and egg. You need to have bounties, you need to have money there for developers to be interested, and you have to have developers for people with money to be interested, so... How are you gonna bridge that gap and bring those people together?
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** Yeah, I think that starting a double-sided market, as you noted, is kind of a chicken and the egg problem, right? So how is Gitcoin gonna do that? There's the short-term strategy and there's the long-term strategy. I'll start with the short-term strategy, so you can see how we're getting the wheels turning.
+
+Gitcoin has now partnered with ConsenSys, which is a large blockchain venture studio based out of Brooklyn, New York. They also happen to sponsor some of the best projects in Web 3.0 and the Ethereum ecosystem; projects like Metamask, or Truffle, or ConsenSys Diligence, Grid+ are using Gitcoin to incentivize action on their repositories. Those names might not mean a lot to a lot of your listeners, but if you're in Ethereum, then those are A-list brands.
+
+I think that having Gitcoin being used on some of those amazing projects, some of those foundational projects has really started to juice the wheels on the double-sided market. Right now, since we're all in the same portfolio, blockchain venture funds, due to all being involved in ConsenSys, there's kind of -- I don't wanna use the word synergy, but I'm just gonna use it because I can't think of anything else...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[20:08\] Don't do it, don't do it...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Synergy!
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** There's a synergy there where we place bounties on their issues, and it gets more users to Gitcoin, and it also pushes their repos forward. So that's how we're getting it started. But the long-term vision is to sell into projects that are cryptocurrency-based, and to let them see that -- you know, if you're a project that just raised an ICO of 10 million dollars (a token sale of 10 million dollars) and you've got some Ether to spend and you're trying to hire up, Gitcoin is a great way to augment your development team with crowdsourced tasks, and it's also a great way to recruit, because everyone I know who's recruiting software engineers likes to do a little test pilot project with them, or at least some sort of technical interview to see what it's gonna be like working with them. And what better way to figure out what it's gonna be like to work with someone than to work with someone on something that's actually on the roadmap, as opposed to something that just approximates what the working conditions would be like.
+
+That's the short-term view, and then the long-term view is that Gitcoin is building up a suite of tools that are meant to help incentivize work in open source software, and in the future, it will not just be paying money in return for directed action on your repo; we'll actually allow repo maintainers to raise money using their GitHub repos.
+
+The first step that we've taken towards that is by partnering with CodeSponsor.io, and Eric Berry, who is the CEO over there, has done an amazing job of building an ethical advertising network for open source software to allow repo maintainers to make a little bit of money off of the value they've created for the world. I think that that project pairs really well with Gitcoin, in that repo maintainers can raise money with CodeSponsor, and then potentially spend that money on pushing their repo forward.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very cool. That's exciting, we're big fans of CodeSponsor and friends with Eric, so happy to hear that that's going down and he continues to work on that project, which otherwise looked like it was going to stall due to limitations on GitHub's platform. So that's very cool.
+
+We mentioned directed action, and it makes tons of sense to me that your prime place to get people to bring funds to the platform is blockchain companies, because like you said, a lot of them have a lot of dispensable money that they may or may not have earned through displaying the ability, the future potential of their networks and products... And like you said, they're also looking for people with applicable skills. What about security audits, because that is a necessary thing, especially now that more and more of these developers who are working on these projects are writing code that directly moves money in and out of people's pockets... Surely, security audits are gonna become more and more essential, as more and more companies have programmatic money. Have you considered Gitcoin as a potential platform for soliciting audits, and that kind of stuff?
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** \[23:41\] Yeah, I mean... Just to take a step back before I answer your question - it is horrifying to go from web development, where the worst thing you can do in the world is drop a table on your database, or send an email erroneously, to a place where you're moving tens of thousands of dollars programmatically, using your code.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I can imagine.
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** I think that that's a conceptual need that if you're coming from web development, then it's sort of like a skill that we as a generation of software engineers needs to build, so... I think you framed that really nicely when you said that these smart contracts are moving around a lot of money. But to answer your question, the applicability of Gitcoin that we've seen has been around security bounties in this area, so basically what you do is you put out a bounty for, let's call it, two Ethereum, which is worth roughly $2,000 right now, and you say "I invite anyone in the community to find a security hole in my product, and according to the \[24:40\] model, if you find a critical issue, then you earn out the entire bounty, if you find a major one, you earn out 60% etc."
+
+I think that when you're talking about security audits, which are more of like a -- you don't really want the crowd working on a security audit, you want someone who's got a lot of experience with smart contracts, and you probably are better contracting with ConsenSys Diligence in order to get that done, I think.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's an interesting take too on funding open source, because traditional models have been -- you know, here on your homepage you've got "Find Funded GitHub Issues", which is the exact reversal of "Hey, just give a community or a project or several maintainers just money and hope they do well with it", where this is actually funding directly... Not so much somebody buying issues, because somebody could just say "Hey, project, here's $10,000. Convert that to ETH or BTC and fund whatever issues you need done." This is an interesting model of funding the work, rather than just -- hopefully give you money altruistically or charity-wise... This sort of like puts value on the table, on both ends - monetary value for those who are doing the work, but at the same time, ways for open source to thrive and move forward in terms of progress.
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** Yeah, and I think that one of the things that's really important in the Gitcoin model is that the people who are funding the work are aligned on the roadmap with the leaders of the repository -- like, there's a Venn diagram there of the incentives and the governance of the repo, and the ideal case is that that Venn diagram has heavy overlap. But I think that the \[26:29\] that you're seeing with Gitcoin and some of these other projects that incentivize software development is the unbundling of corporate sponsorship of open source software. There's the Red Hat Foundation, there's the Apache Foundation, and there's all these other corporate sponsors of open source software; what if you could unbundle those business models and allow the crowd to sponsor open source, instead of just having corporate sponsorship of open source? And I think blockchain allows you to manage things a lot more granularly than the legacy financial system does.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I think from a developer's perspective, eventually you may find -- if we find success with this model, a potential race to the bottom in terms of we're commoditizing our work to a point where it's not worth as much, which maybe that's just the fact of life, but that seems like a potential downside for developers... Because now you're basically -- not necessarily bidding, it's not an auction for these things, but you have the projects placing the value, and more and more people coming to that, the competition gets stiffer, which will be fine... But then the other side of that is you have kind of a local maxima problem, where the work that is going to be done needs to be very small chunks and very well specified, and it's never the big-picture stuff... Kind of like you said earlier, Kevin, your left brain and your right brain talking together. It's difficult to crowdsource a Vitalik Buterin to do his job, that kind of a thing. So your thoughts on those...?
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** \[28:10\] I think that that's a great point. The commoditization of work is something that I think about a lot, because Gitcoin is a fairly mission-driven project, and it's built by developers for developers, and I like to think that we're building a world that's gonna be better for developers, that the developers wanna live in. And there's sort of like the Upwork problem, or like the Top Coder problem, where you're basically racing to the bottom to bid for work that's not priced very well. So we're taking steps to make Gitcoin a place where people can build their careers and build their portfolios and gain leverage over their lives.
+
+One major step that we've taken since we last talked about Gitcoin is taking a stand against spec work. Spec work is just basically like you turn around work for a bounty submitter and you might get paid or might not get paid, so it's called speculative work. We're trying to do a better job of allowing someone to claim a bounty and then have like a semaphore, like a lock, so that they're not doing spec work.
+
+And the other thing that we're looking to do is to branch Gitcoin from just being bounties and tips for open source software to being an entire suite of tools that allows you to be successful in this new blockchain-centric world, where the work is unbundled from working from a company and more centric around "What project am I working on?" and "What issues am I working on this week?" A couple products that you might see come from us that are meant to support the community in that vein in the next several months are a) a mentorship tool - so if you're a junior developer and you wanna get paired up with a senior developer, someone who has experience in blockchain, then we will hook you up with that. We're also looking at putting together a project, like a co-founder matching sort of system. Basically, if you're a technical person and you need funding for your project, if you're a funder and you're looking for a mission to get involved in, then Gitcoin has a lot of candidate flow and a lot of developer flow right, so Gitcoin can hook you up with people who can help you advance your agenda and advance your career in the longer term. Those are all things that are on the roadmap, and it's an evolution that we're looking to go through in Q1 and Q2 of this year.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I actually think that that suite of tools addresses my other statement as well, regarding the...
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** Small chunks, I think...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, the small chunks as well... I guess the point I was trying to get to is there's certain developers or certain minds that the best model for them is to find a sponsor or a group of sponsors that allows for them to just work and just do their thing, and the world will be a better place if that just happens.
+
+Maybe with a suite of tools - not just bug bounty, not just tips - you have this mentorship thing, you have co-founder matching, suddenly you're like a Tinder for developers (Oh, that's crazy...), and you know, perhaps there's even space for different kinds of scenarios to be built into the platform, so I think that answers it.
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** Yeah, I think what we're doing is we're basically building the emergent future of work, and if you think about the legacy model of how people find work, it just seems very broken to me. I wrote this whole series of blog posts about two years ago about how recruitment for software engineers is just fundamentally broken.
+
+\[32:13\] You get this spam message from someone on LinkedIn who barely understands your profile and barely understands the job that they're pitching, and they get paid out 15% of the first year's salary of that engineer in exchange for getting that recruitment task turned around.
+
+I just think that you're fundamentally better off when you have the people that you're working with involved in finding work and matching those people up directly. I think that what we're looking to do is disrupt the way work has been done traditionally in large corporations, and bring that more in sort of like a granular blockchain direction.
+
+**Break:** \[33:00\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Kevin, why don't you tell us how Gitcoin works from a user's perspective? Then we'll talk about it from a technical perspective after that.
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** Yeah, sure. Gitcoin, as we mentioned before the break, is a double-sided market that allows you to crowdsource work on any GitHub issue. If you are a repository owner or a maintainer of some sort, you can go to Gitcoin.co, click on the Fund Issue button, and when you paste in a GitHub issue, we will preload a bunch of metadata about that issue, like the title, the description, the keywords associated with the skillsets that you would need in order to turn around that issue, and provide you with a nice little Fund Issue button that you can click, and that will submit that funded work to the blockchain.
+
+Once that funded work is on the blockchain and you've staked some Ether or some Ethereum-based token associated with the work, it'll get dished out to the Gitcoin Issue Explorer. The Gitcoin Issue Explorer is the repository of work that bounty hunters can turn around. We've got a community of about 2,000 software developers who are looking to learn blockchain, who are looking to make Ether or Ether tokens in exchange for doing software work, and from there, they can claim the work, turn around the work, and they can get paid out in exchange for turning around the work.
+
+\[36:17\] That's sort of like the end-to-end of the use case, but the outcome for both parties is that the repo maintainer got some work that was on their roadmap turned around, and the bounty hunter makes some Ethereum, adds to their GitHub cred, also their Gitcoin reputation, and they also have formed a new relationship that could lead to future work or maybe even a full-time job in blockchain. So that's sort of like the end-to-end of the bounty flow on Gitcoin.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very cool. I'm looking at the issue explorer now - and for the listeners' sake, Kevin and I have chatted a while back, maybe a month, a month-and-a-half ago, and it looks like he's got a lot more open issues today that he did back then, so congrats on getting a little bit of progress on that front.
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** Thanks. Yeah, I think the statistic is $50,000 has been exchanged on the platform over the last couple months. We didn't even realize when we passed that milestone; our community guy was saying, "Oh, we should have celebrated!", but I guess we'll have to celebrate once we cross 100k.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** There you go. But on the technical side, as you load up in the top left corner - I don't know what your's is, Adam, but mine says "Web 3.0 disabled. Please install Metamask."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So here's where whatever the current web is meets this new Web 3.0 thing. Tell us about this and what Web 3.0 is and why I need to enable it to use Gitcoin.
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** Okay. Web 3.0 is -- oh man, I've gotta take a deep breath, because once you start going into blockchain, you're just in the rabbit hole of this whole world... Yeah, hold on to your butts, because we're about to go there. \[laughter\] So Web 3.0 is what the Ethereum community calls "our vision for the web when the web is blockchain-enabled." Just to unpack that a little bit, when you browse the web, you're using a web browser - I'm a big fan of Google Chrome, but I also have Brave, and I have Opera and Safari installed, and those applications are great at making HTTP requests to a server, and then receiving a response and rendering all of the HTML, CSS, JavaScript, that kind of stuff.
+
+In the Web 3.0 model of the world, specifically the Ethereum Web 3.0 model of the world, your browser will become blockchain-enabled. What that means is that they can read from and write to the Ethereum blockchain. That's an important capability for a browser to have in the Web 3.0 world, because the Ethereum blockchain is a store of value and a store of information that can be shared across the entire internet. It allows for something called fat protocol, which is just basically a way of saying that Gitcoin can share bounties information with -- The Bounties Network is another bounties project that's out there... And what this does, the reason why it's pretty neat for it to be on the blockchain is that it prevents us from having vendor lock-in for our data.
+
+\[39:51\] If you think about some of the problems with Web 2.0, or at least in my opinion some of the problems with Web 2.0 is that your social network is locked into Facebook. Your search history is locked into Google, and if you wanted to transfer them to somewhere else, then it wouldn't -- it's not self-sovereign; you can't just go to a different social network and take your Facebook social graph with you. And I think that this is a real problem if you look at the prevalence of hacks that happened, particularly if you look at the Equifax hack that happened about six months ago... You as a consumer don't have self-sovereign control over your identity, and in the Web 3.0 world you will, because there's these fat protocols where the data is stored on the blockchain in a way that can be migrated from site to site, and you as a user have control over your identity and who you wanna give that information to through your Web 3.0-enabled browser.
+
+I know I just took you all through the rabbit hole of what some of this means and what it could potentially mean, but the TL;DR, the sum is that if you install a browser extension called Metamask on your Chrome, Brave or Opera browser, then that will give you Web 3.0 capabilities in the web browser that you already know and love.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So is Web 3.0 an Ethereum thing, or is it a blockchain thing?
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** You know, it's like you're in a car and you take a look over your shoulder and you almost don't know your own blindspots... I don't know. I should know where I'm going with this analogy. \[laughter\] I think I screwed up the analogy. I think I don't know what I don't know, because I'm so -- Ethereum has 30 times the developer interest that the next biggest smart contract platform has, so maybe there's other projects that have this vision of Web 3.0, but Ethereum is by and large the one that's got the most momentum towards building it. And I also don't pay attention to the other platforms, because I just think that Ethereum is becoming the emerging standard for this. I guess this is the long way of saying "I don't know", but who cares if it's not Ethereum.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I think there's -- maybe tunnel vision was the analogy you were trying to apply there, or maybe that has more of a negative connotation than you'd like to apply, because... It seems like - and I'm moving now from the technical details to the kind of more philosophical ones again, but it seems like you're saying that there's these silos of information and they live in your Facebook, in your Twitter, in your Gmail, and Web 3.0 is this freedom of my data that move about and these other things, as well as basic payments involved. But if it's all on the Ethereum blockchain, then I'm basically just moving from one silo to somebody else's silo. And Ethereum is definitely the initiator of the smart contracts movement, and the very first thing of its kind, but rarely is the very thing of its kind the only thing that has success in that space, or often not even the main thing ten years from then. So I'm just wondering, if the Web 3.0 is very much like Ethereum people are doing this, or if they're trying to bridge all the blockchains, or...? I'm just asking.
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** I think it's good to have this check on the Ethereum vision. I think that one of the powerful things about blockchain is that if you don't agree with the governance of them, you can fork them, just like you can fork a GitHub repo if you don't believe in the product roadmap or the product maintainers... You can fork it, and you can do the same thing with the blockchain, and just create your own -- you know, I could create Kevthereum and do whatever I want, and the more people that agree with my vision in the world, the more people will follow my fork instead of Vitalik Buterin's fork.
+
+\[44:17\] I think it's a little bit apples to oranges to compare Facebook's and Google's data silos, where they've built this business model off of spying on their users, and they're not gonna give up that data, like, they're gonna hold on to the doorframe on the way out, whereas Ethereum is built around this open model in which anyone can fork it. So I think that's a primary difference there.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I think the line I was drawing is more along portability, not necessarily evil intention, but I definitely agree with you that those are definitely two different things. Let's talk about Metamask, because it says Web 3.0 is disabled - we'll get back to the technical side, and also maybe the adoption side. Because when it comes time to Web 3.0, we talk about like, you have your normal browsers, and then now we have Web 3.0 browsers, which don't really exist... So Metamask is a Chrome extension. "Please install Metamask." So right now, to ride the Web 3.0, the Ethereum-based web, you're basically talking browser extensions. Is that ever gonna be really adopted to a point where it could be big?
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** I'm sort of here to shill Ethereum, so I'm gonna say yes. \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** He's honest, at least.
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** But more seriously, I think that when you look at any new technology, it's all about drivers and barriers for a consumer. One of the big drivers for people getting into blockchain is they wanna get rich. I've purposefully not talked about the price of any of these assets on this blockchain, because it's just not our niche and it's not something that I think is the best use of our time... But I think that when people read -- the articles about the price that you see the press writing bring a lot of people in, and once they're in and sort of learning about this rabbithole of blockchain, hopefully their incentivization moves from just getting rich quick to seeing this whole vision of the Web 3.0 world that has less intermediaries, can dis-intermediate the financial system... I think the potential that I sum up the drivers in this ecosystem is -- I think that blockchain can do to the financial industry what Napster did to the recording industry. That's how big I think this could potentially be. That's how I like to sum up the driver side of the equation.
+
+Then the barrier side of the equation is just like "How freakin' hard is it to use?" And the answer - you know, and this fits into your question about Metamask... Metamask is beautiful; they've got their logo, it's this polyfill fox that follows your cursor around, and it just looks very nice and polished, but you still have to install it in Chrome. And the answer in 2018 is yeah, it's kind of a pain in the butt to install this onto Chrome, but we're building a platform for the future of the web and the time horizon for what we're building is 10, 30, 50 years, so I think that you're gonna see adoption increase. If you build the right product for the next five years, you're gonna see adoption massively increase over that timescale.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I don't know about you, Adam, but when I see "Install Metamask", I'm just like "Close Tab. I'm done." And I'm an early adopter, generally speaking.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[47:59\] Well, I guess it depends on your real reason. If we're just here as journalists doing a podcast, maybe close tab. But... Just kidding. \[laughter\] It kind of depends on your motives, right? But any sort of hurdle that is above and beyond the norm of everyday internet as we know it, it's probably like "I'll wait until I hear feedback from really close friends, or a really good article said thought leader, and then I'll dip my toe in." So maybe we need some of those to say "Hey..."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Or a killer app, right? Something that's so compelling.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Something that drives you.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** For developers, Gitcoin could be that, because like I said, you could get paid, which is what I think Kevin's speaking to. It's like, "Well, there's good money to be made here", and that's a great driver for people, as we see people talking about price action, or mostly trying to make money quickly. So that could be a motivating factor. Or some sort of website that you go to and everybody's talking about, and it's not like a crypto kitties type of a thing, but it's actually somewhat revolutionary, and it just says "Install Metamask." At that point, you're like "I really wanna use this thing. I guess I'll do that."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So is it a browser in the works then at some point, do you think, Kevin? Or is this like you'll just leverage the fact that Chrome and others are out there and you have extensions?
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** The honest answer is I don't really know. The Mist browser is the Ethereum native one, and I think its adoption is like 0.0001%, or something like that, but it's more of a referenced client.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So that's not a direction to go then.
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** To be honest, I don't know what penetration is gonna look like in the next several years. One of the routes that we've thought about going is having a custodianship model of your funds on Gitcoin. Basically, in this hypothetical version of the world, Gitcoin will hold your private key, do all the Web 3.0 bridge stuff, and then you can just interact with it with a deposit or a withdrawal function on Gitcoin.co. So I think that that's one direction where things might go, and I think that the big question that's up in the air right now is how much of this blockchain-enabled functionality do we wanna put in the end user's hands, \[50:21\] and how much do we wanna hide from them and just have blockchain in the back?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I honestly think that that model makes a lot of sense for the short-term, because people are -- especially with small amounts... If I wanna sign up for Gitcoin, maybe I make half an ETH this week, maybe one... We're talking hundreds and then maybe thousands of dollars. Over time, of course, it would build up, but then you could just transfer out; people will trust exchanges, like you said, with a custodian model, for small amounts and small amounts of time, and it greatly reduces that barrier of people who are intimidated or don't want yet another extension, or to use Mist, or... Doesn't Brave have a lot of this stuff built in? I think Brave's an up and coming browser that a lot of us nerds would be more willing to try... But yeah, we're not necessarily here to give you product advice, but maybe we are.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What he's describing is very analogous to the freemium model of web apps. It's like, you've gotta provide some sort of path to give people the option to try, and you can do it with limitations. In your case, you can do that with, say, limited funds, or some restrictions to protect both them and you, and incentivize them to take the plunge and install Metamask or do whatever necessarily hurdles or hoops are required to become a full-fledged Web 3.0 user.
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** \[51:43\] Yeah, and I think that it depends on the -- you've gotta build the right product for the audience that you're going after. One of the reasons why we're sort of making a strategic bet on Metamask is that we're building a product that's for open source software developers, who by definition wanna work on blockchain stuff. If you're not gonna install Metamask on your browser and use Web 3.0, then you're kind of not willing to put up table stakes to even be serious about this system. But as Gitcoin grows and we try to capture more Web 2.0 projects, we're gonna have to either adapt, or the users are gonna have to adapt. That's just the reality of consumer internet.
+
+**Break:** \[52:33\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So let's dive into the technical nitty-gritty from an implementation perspective, and we'll talk more about Metamask, because you can tell us exactly how that browser extension that represents the users (as a wallet, I suppose) interacts with Gitcoin specifically, but I'm sure it will apply generally to Web 3.0 websites. Explain to us how it works from a technical perspective, implementation of the Gitcoin website with Metamask, and the interactions between the browser extension and the website, and I'm sure there's servers, and there's the blockchain... Tell us how it all works technically.
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** I think you can think of the Ethereum blockchain as a giant distributed database. What the blockchain does is it allows you to manage trust between parties across the internet. One of the reasons why that's really powerful is we can store all the information about the bounty task on the blockchain, and that can be the source of truth for all parties about the state of the task.
+
+So in contrast to a legacy financial system crowdsourcing platform like Upwork, for example, Gitcoin never actually is an intermediary that holds any of the funds between the bounty submitter and the bounty hunter. So when you post a bounty to Gitcoin, you're actually submitting it to the Ethereum blockchain, and the funds that you're associating with the issue live on the Ethereum blockchain, which is just a massive simplification over the credit card and legacy financial system where we would have to deal with translations between currencies, and having a legal structure associated with doing Escrow and stuff like that.
+
+Basically, the task goes onto the Ethereum blockchain, and the way Metamask works is it's just basically an Ethereum wallet that allows you to confirm that you meant to put that information on the blockchain, and the technology that powers Metamask is actually RSA public/private key encryption. So if you wanna do a transaction to the Ethereum blockchain, you're signing it with your private key, and that's how the rest of the computers on this giant distributed database know that the funds are authorized to come from you, and that the information actually came from you. So it all goes out there into the blockchain world, and then other people can pick up the funded work and turn it around by submitting their own transaction to the blockchain, which claims the funded work on the platform.
+
+All this functionality lives on smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, and that's a pretty powerful way of removing the need to have an intermediary, the need to do international translation of currency...
+
+The other powerful use case that this enables is the ability to pay your bounty hunters with tokens. If you think about all these ICO's who have raised 10-20 million dollars to fund their projects, they probably have some Ether on hand that they can use to incentivize actions of their community, but they also probably have a native Ethereum token that they can use to incentivize work on their repo.
+
+\[59:13\] That's powerful, because it allows them to tie their incentives as repo maintainers with the incentives of the person who turned around the work, because they both hold the same token that rises and falls in value associated with the success or failure of their project. So I think that that's an interesting use case that could never even exist in the legacy financial world.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So Ethereum is the network, and so Ether is the token, but you're saying that people can use their own compatible tokens for their specific projects...
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** Yeah, and that standard is called ERC20. Think of it like a Java-style interface that defines functions like deposit and withdrawal and transfer, and things of that nature. So you can basically mint your own token that can be used for -- think of it like a software license for a product that you're putting out there. It's a unique, scarce asset that you can put out on the blockchain.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very cool. So you can actually post those on Gitcoin as... Let's just say there's a Log token, and it's just for us; it's only for us, and we have our issues, and you can say "This is five Log", and then people will get paid in log, and then that would be fungible with Ether, or do you have to convert to Ether before you actually post it?
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** Yeah... I was just giggling over here a little bit, because I'm a visceral person, and I think of log and I think of a little tree stump, or something like that. But yeah, that's basically how it works. It's sort of a contrived example though, because the tokens that are most valuable represent some sort of enforceable right to do something special with the tokens. Your Log tokens don't do anything other than have a sort of like branding association with your project. In order to give the Log tokens actual value so people would care about them, they could be redeemed for something associated with your project, ideally.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well... You're just assuming our Log tokens don't have any value, but maybe they have all sorts of value that I didn't tell you about yet.
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** Yeah. Well, in today's ecosystem, I wouldn't be surprised if they went 10x, but... \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I'm cranking out a whitepaper tonight, and we're gonna have Logs in the morning.
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** But you know, I try to take a long-term view on this, because I think it's really 1996 right now for blockchain. That's how early we are in this whole new world. The pump and dumps and all the tokens that are just cash grabs, they're eventually gonna get filtered out, just because of the Darwinian nature of capitalism. What's gonna be left is the Facebook or the Google of Web 3.0. Well, I don't know. Invite me back on in 2025 and we'll see what happened.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We will.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I don't know specifically about Web 3.0 and Ethereum, although like you said, it has a huge advantage and the developer focus is on it... But my current take - and I've been watching this space relatively closely - is that is it a mania and a price bubble and all that? Yes. Is it also actually revolutionary technologies that someday will change the way things work? Yes. I think both of those things are true. It's tough to see the long-term when you're staring at all of the frauds and the scams, the Bitconnects that are going to zero while everybody loses their savings... But that doesn't mean there isn't real value underneath. I think there is, that's my take.
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** \[01:03:16.12\] I largely agree with you. I think that another parallel is the internet bubble, and I think the key is to invest in the Yahoo! or the Amazon, and not the Pets.com. The internet bubble was a bubble, but it was also a fundamental shift in the way the world organizes its information. I think that what we're seeing here is the fundamental shift, and possibly a fundamental shift in the way the world organizes its finances. I think that what TCP/IP did for information, there's the potential that the blockchain will do for the financial system. There's obviously huge upside there, but under the guise of upside, there's gonna be the Bitconnects of the world, or projects that are just looking to hang on to the trend.
+
+This is actually one of the reasons I started Gitcoin - to allow people to have the skills to thrive in this new blockchain ecosystem. I think that educating people and helping them learn to use the tools and build meaningful relationships is how we mature the ecosystem. It's one of Gitcoin's missions.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, let's actually go there then. Let's imagine a developer who would love to get on Gitcoin and get paid, pick an issue... Most of these are related to the Ethereum network, so they're gonna have to have working knowledge of that. I'm trying to pull one that would actually be good for a use case - multi auth methods per resource.
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** Sounds simple. \[laughs\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, these are hard to parse live on the air. But let's just say they pick one out, and it's for a specific -- here's one that was posted by the Truffle team... How does somebody get started? Maybe you can even tell us about how you got started, although I'm sure it's better now that it was back then; it's been a couple years of maturation... But the jargon, the interaction with the browser extension, with them EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine), writing a smart contract... What are the best ways that people can actually dip their toes in the water and see if this is the kind of coding that they wanna do?
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** I think that everyone's got different learning styles. Me personally, I learn best through immersion, so I went to hackathons, I read the Truffle docs, I built one of their little tutorials...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What's Truffle, for the audience?
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** Oh yeah, I'm \[01:05:59.20\] in this that I forget that I'm using buzz words, even when... But anyway, so Truffle is - think of it sort of like Ruby on Rails, but for the Web 3.0 ecosystem. It allows you to manage your smart contracts and your tests for them, your migrations, your deployments, stuff like that. So it just makes Solidity and smart contract programming way easier.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay. So you said immersion - you went to the hackathons...
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** Yeah, I think that the number one value proposition that Gitcoin has for its users is immersion in a community that's excited about blockchain. If you join our Slack, there's channels for Python, for Solidity, JavaScript, C\# or whatever programming language you're into. And there's people in there that are excited about blockchain and helping you gain the tools in order to be successful there. I think that's the first place that I would recommend people check out when they're trying to get involved in Gitcoin.
+
+\[01:07:14.29\] Then the second thing that you can do is you can go claim an issue out on the issue explorer. That's just an opportunity to get paid to work on open source blockchain issues. I think that the average hourly rate for a blockchain engineer on Gitcoin has been about $40-$45. So if you're into making a little bit of extra capital while you learn a lot, then that's another way to do it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's an interesting perspective too, because some people out there will be doing these things and not really finding a way to financially gain, right? And this is one way you can do what you've just said there - do something that you already kind of know a bit about, use your expertise, but at the same time learn a bit more and also get paid. That's not something you see often.
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** Yeah, and I think another piece of upside that's sort of important here, if you're playing the long game, is the relationships that you're gonna build in this ecosystem... Because the people that you're gonna meet on the Gitcoin Slack, or when you turn around an issue for Truffle, are gonna start companies or important open source repos that could potentially be hugely important in this new blockchain-based ecosystem. So I think that's one of the upsides that I think people should be focused on, in addition to the extrinsic monetary capital gains stuff.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, it definitely feels like an ecosystem which is burgeoning, but small enough that you can definitely make connections... The projects -- there is some sort of... I don't wanna call it a symbiotic relationship, but there's like an interesting crossover between open source and blockchain technology. Most of them are open source projects as well, they're just open source projects that have their financials either as the foremost thing, or at least figured out right up front, so they operate -- they have issues with how they're gonna run their governance, and there's people trying different governance things, they have issues with how the funding all works, and \[01:09:35.12\] and who does what, and the bounties...
+
+There's a huge crossover between the two. So it would be familiar and yet different, I guess, when you dive into those things. But I guess the point I was trying to get to is when you get involved in an open source project and over time you make friends, like you said, you network, and there's a real community that forms, and in this case that same thing can happen to people who are building these things, because it is small and burgeoning, and you can often go on to build interesting and different things as well.
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** Yeah, and I think the key thing about Gitcoin is it's a way to get involved in the ecosystem when you're not exactly sure what your play is. We've got a lot of people in there who have corporate jobs that they're looking to make a next move from, or they're freelancers who are looking for their next gig, but they recognize that blockchain is this new frontier that could potentially be important... And it's only one way to do it.
+
+I'm going to the Boulder Blockchain Meetup tonight to nerd out with people in the local community, and there's gonna be an Ethereum Hackathon out here in Colorado called Eth Denver in the middle of February... And by the way, applications are still open; if this airs before 30th January, applications are still open. But there's a lot of people in the world who aren't privileged like I am, and get to just go down the street and go to a blockchain meetup, so by providing an online hangout for people to figure out this ecosystem, I think we're gonna help people immerse and be successful. That's what the mission is - to push open source forward and to help people navigate this new ecosystem.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[01:11:24.14\] Well, I mentioned your updates to the website since the last time you and I chatted... You've also slightly tweaked your mission statement, your tagline, which was "Push open source forward", and now it's "Push open source repos forward." Slight change, maybe we're staring at the trees and not looking at the forest, but that was curious to me. I wonder what your shift in motivation for adding the word "repos" in there was.
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** I think you've stumbled upon an A/B test that we're running right now... \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm a B test too then, because I've got that as well.
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** If you're listening to the podcast and you wanna tweet us and let us know whether you like "Push open source forward", "Push open source repos forward" or "Grow open source", it's something we're trying to figure out right now.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very good.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I like them all.
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** That doesn't help me call it a test, though...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, exactly. I think I would go for your original one, just because it's just one less word and it's implied, and it also has a larger context, because things might live outside of repos.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, if you're also reading into the language, pushing sometimes can be slightly aggressive, right? ...even if it's for the goodwill of the person or the thing or the object you're pushing. Sometimes it's not even willingly being pushed, so...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's true.
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** I think of open source -- I'm kind of leaning towards "Grow open source", and it's because growth is something that happens naturally, when you give something the right conditions to grow, and I think that open source... Obviously, if you look at a map of how Linux has evolved over time, it kind of looks like a tree, but I like the analogy of the natural world, just because, let's be honest, I live in Colorado and I'm kind of a hippie, and I love spending time outdoors.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Actually, the more I think about it, I think I like "Grow open source", too. I went from A to C. Now I like C the most, on your A/B/C test. Well, Kevin, anything else you wanna chat about with regards to Gitcoin before I let you go?
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** You know, I think my parting thought would just be that the ecosystem is kind of crazy right now - the blockchain ecosystem - and if you hold on to your values and you focus on building and don't get caught up in all of the hype and all of the hubbub, about price and just focus on building skills and making meaningful relationships, then that's how I advise people to get going in this ecosystem. Build something meaningful.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:14:09.29\] What about to those maintainers out there that are thinking "Geez, I can find more support or find interesting ways to leverage this new stuff happening out there, and also fund issues or fund the future?"
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** The way to get involved with all of that is to follow Gitcoin on Twitter. We're @GetGitcoin. Or to go to Gitcoin.co and sign up for the Slack channel. There's a bunch of smart people in there nerding out about blockchain technology, not the price, and building great stuff, so that's a way to get involved in the community.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Cool. We'll leave it there, man. Thank you so much for your time today.
+
+**Kevin Owocki:** Thank you very much for having me.
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+**Adam Stacoviak:** So Jason, what is this service mesh, what is this Istio thing? Why is it important?
+
+**Jason McGee:** Yeah, kind of a strange name, service mesh... We spend a lot of time arguing about what to call it...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's kind of confusing if you don't know, right?
+
+**Jason McGee:** Yeah, it is, absolutely. Let me maybe put it in a little bit of context. My personal background - I spent the first half of my career at IBM, building Java app servers (20 years ago, I guess). The goal of the app server was to build a platform that developers could use to build applications, and to kind of solve all the common problems that you encounter when you build particularly kind of network-facing applications.
+
+What I think is happening today in the cloud is we're kind of reimagining that idea that platform idea in the era of cloud... And there's some pieces that make up that platform, and some of them we've already agreed to - containers, with Docker, is kind of the foundational technology that we think new apps will get built on top of, and we've all kind of agreed on containers as the way to package and run software.
+
+The next layer that we all kind of agreed on was Kubernetes, and the problem Kubernetes was solving is "Alright, I don't have one container, I have many of them. How do I deploy them and control them and scale them and keep them running, and kind of solve all the lifecycle problems that exist when I'm running a bunch of containers?" We've all agreed on that as the kind of de facto technology to solve that problem.
+
+Service mesh I think of as the third layer of this new platform that we're building... And the problem service mesh is trying to solve is "How do I actually control the interaction between different applications that I'm writing?" If containers let me write an application, in real life most interesting things are solved by having lots of pieces of applications talk to each other... So how do I actually see and understand how those different components talk to each other and have some control over that? At its heart, that's what service mesh is trying to do, is give us control over the interaction between apps.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So you were one of the founders of Istio, is that right? What's the story there? Several members, and you were involved -- obviously, you've been a veteran at IBM... What's IBM's role, and what's your role?
+
+**Jason McGee:** Sure. Like many things in the industry today, there's quite a lot of collaboration in technology. I run the platform as a service team for IBM Cloud, and as part of my role, we look at new technologies that we wanna bring to market... And a couple of years ago we were thinking about this space - how do we help with microservices, how do we help developers build and manage microservice applications? We have all these different components working together... And we started building a piece of technology -- we actually open sourced a piece of technology called Amalgamate, which was kind of our viewpoint on how to do programmable routing and control between different services within a cloud architecture...And we've put that out there a couple years ago.
+
+About two years ago at KubeCon I was talking with some of my counterparts at Google and came to realize that we were solving similar problems and we kind of viewed the microservice management space in a similar way.
+
+\[06:51\] We got together, had some drinks and chatted about the space, and decided "You know, we actually see the world the same way... Maybe we should join forces and combine some of the work that we're doing."
+
+At the time, Google was really focused more on security and telemetry, or kind of how do you get visibility of the traffic between different services... So we decided to join forces, we combined our technologies together and we created the Istio project. We kind of worked on it, you know, not in secret, but largely just the two of us, along with the guys at Lyft, who contributed one of the key technology components to Istio, until about May of last year, when we launched the project.
+
+So it was really the coming together of like minds around how to solve one of the emerging problems in the cloud-native space.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Maybe break down Istio for us... I know it's Connect, Secure, Control and Observe, but break down each of those and why those are important to, say, service mesh and how it applies.
+
+**Jason McGee:** Yeah, so there's kind of three key features, if you will, or capabilities that Istio tries to provide... And remember, it's always in the context of kind of multiple services talking to each other.
+
+The first is traffic management - providing a way to programmably control how different services talk to each other. I'll give you a really simple example - how do you roll out a new version of an application? When you roll out a new version of an application, you might want to test that new version with 5% of your traffic, to see if everything's working okay... Or you might want to have a subset of your users try the new version. Maybe everyone on the East Coast is gonna try the new version, while everyone else in the world stays on the original version.
+
+You need the ability to kind of control the roll-out, so one of the goals of Istio is to give you that kind of programmability of routing, so that you can decide who calls who, what versions get routed to, how the traffic gets split... And that's something that everyone has to do on some levels, but everyone has kind of solved in their own ways. Kubernetes doesn't solve that problem directly... Lots of people have built custom solutions to do that. Istio tries to kind of bake that into the service mesh. So that was one key - advanced traffic management for DevOps, for resiliency testing and things like that.
+
+The second key thing Istio is trying to do is security... And this is actually turning out to be a really interesting space with Istio; we could probably dive deeper here, but historically, the way security was often implemented was down at the network. You would define firewalls and network rules and segment your networks to control who could talk to who, and which services were visible to each other.
+
+That model doesn't work very well in the era of public cloud and in the era of very distributed architectures, where maybe part of your app is running on IBM Cloud, and a part is running in a data center, and parts are running on Amazon... You don't have one network that spans all of that, so with Istio what we tried to do is say "Can we move all of that security up closer to the application? ..so it's not defined in terms of the network, but is defined in terms of the application itself", and automatically set up secure connections between services, and allow you to specify policies about who can talk to who, but independent of the network. That's turning out to be incredibly powerful for a lot of the early users of Istio, because it gives them a different way to secure their applications.
+
+\[10:34\] Then the final thing that Istio was after was observability or telemetry - how do you actually see what's going on? One of my favorite case studies in the microservices space was some material I read around the Gilt Groupe (online shopping) site. They're not a customer of mine, they're not an IBM Cloud customer, they're just people who have talked about their own journey to transform to a microservices architecture... And the kind of tidbit that always stood out to me with them is, you know, their original architecture was a very classical kind of web and database application.
+
+You know, maybe there were ten instances running in a cluster to handle the load, a single monolithic app... And over a period of years, they refactored that into a bunch of microservices, and when they got done, they had like -- I forget the exact number... It was like 300 or 400 microservices; each of those microservices, you have to imagine, there's probably at least 3 instances running, so you go from running like 10 things to running 1,200 things, right? So you have this much more complex environment to manage... How the heck do you actually see what's going on? If there's a performance problem, where does it exist, where are the bottlenecks?
+
+You need a totally different way to kind of observe behavior in a much more complex network of services like that... So part of the goal of Istio was to provide ways to automatically gather all of that data about who's talking to who and how it's performing, and tracing, and log collection, and everything, in a transparent way, and to make it so every developer didn't have to figure out how to solve that problem themselves.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So like a single interface, essentially... It's a single end point for everyone to check into, essentially, across multiple networks, multiple clouds... That kind of thing.
+
+**Jason McGee:** Right, and one of the really (in some sense) magical things that Istio does is it manages to do all of this without really having an API that you have to write to as an engineer, as a developer. It does this through a technique of using what's called a sidecar to capture all of the traffic coming in and out of every service, and then give us a control point where we can redirect that traffic or secure that traffic, or collect data about that traffic, without changing anything about how you write your app.
+
+Netflix Open Source is another kind of popular framework that people have used to build microservice apps... Obviously, written by the guys at Netflix for their own purposes. And one of the characteristics of Netflix OSS was it was written in Java originally, it has APIs, and you change how you write your code to take advantage of it. With Istio, you don't have that. You can just use normal TCP connections, normal HTTP connections, and the mesh kind of captures the traffic for you and transparently gives you all these features.
+
+That means it can be language-neutral, it can run in any environment, and as a developer, you don't really have to do anything; in fact, you can kind of just turn Istio on on your app without changing anything, and turn it off later if you don't want it... Which is a pretty nice characteristic.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, that's super awesome. As a developer, I wanna do as little as possible and gain as much benefit as possible, so... \[laughter\] That's quite a selling point.
+
+**Jason McGee:** Exactly. Developers are lazy, right?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, absolutely... That's like one of our core competencies. So how does it plug in though? You said sidecar, or sideload... Where does it actually plugin? We're talking like a switching layer, like routing? How does it just capture all the traffic and redirects stuff?
+
+**Jason McGee:** Right, so the way to think about Istio is there's kind of two big pieces - there's a control plane and a data plane. The control plane is responsible for collecting policies, and giving you a way to manage the system, and the data plane actually handles all your traffic.
+
+In the data plane there is a key component called Envoy. Envoy is another open source project; it was originally created by the guys at Lyft, and Lyft uses it to manage all their service interactions and their production systems.
+
+Envoy is basically a small C++ implemented layer 4-7 proxy or router. It handles all the traffic; it can do load balancing, it can do circuit-breaking, it knows about all the different protocols, and essentially what Istio does is run an instance of Envoy next to every single instance of every service in your applications. That's what it's called a sidecar - it kind of sits right next to your app.
+
+\[15:18\] So if you wrote an app in Node.js, right next to that app would be an instance of Envoy... And Envoy captures all the traffic. Now, when you run this on top of something like Kubernetes, we can do all that for you. We can automatically inject Envoy into your application without you doing anything. We can set up Kubernetes so every time you run your containers, we automatically insert this extra container that has Envoy in it, and then we redirect all the networking through things like iptables, to say "All inbound/outbound traffic for this container goes through this Envoy thing." So it can become super-transparent. It's awesome in Kubernetes, because literally, you can just turn it on and off like a switch on individual namespaces or applications.
+
+If you run Istio somewhere else, like in a VM, you might have to do a little bit of configuration to configure essentially iptables, normally, in your host operating system to redirect the traffic... But that's kind of a one-time thing you do to force the traffic to flow through Envoy, both directions.
+
+Once that's there, then Envoy can kind of do all this magic, and the goal of the control plane, the Istio control plane, is to program all of those Envoys. If you imagine, the architecture I just called out, if you mapped to Gilt's architecture, which I have not data to say they're actually using Istio, but just to use their numbers - if they have 1,200 things, there'd be 1,200 Envoys running.
+
+So then the question becomes "How the heck do you program and manage 1,200 of these things?" and that's what Istio's control plane does - it does all that for you... So you can define some simple policies, like "When application A talks to application B, use version 2" - that's a policy you configure, and we translate that into Envoy configuration and push it down into all of the sidecars for you... So you can kind of ignore them. You just manage them through Istio, we manage their configuration, and you kind of transparently get all of this behavior.
+
+So it's a pretty cool approach, that makes it very easy to manage and makes it very language-neutral... So it doesn't matter how you build your app, you can use any programming language you want.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** One question I always have with these kinds of things - it sounds like with Istio by the time you need it, you probably already know that you need it, like you're feeling that pain... But with microservices more generally, the question always becomes "When to microservice?" or "At what size?", or if ever... And there's a lot of opinions on that.
+
+Aaron Patterson, who's kind of a Ruby core developer, had a great tweet a while back about microservices where it says "It's how you turn a function call into a distributed systems problem..." \[laughter\] So there's a lot of people that I think reach for them earlier than they ought to, and then they find that... I'm just curious about your take on that, because you talk about companies -- our audience goes from all sizes; we have single-developer shops, all the way up to people working in the Fortune 100's, to the tech giants... So we kind of have people in all different areas; how do you know, in your opinion, when to microservice and when Istio is gonna be something that you're gonna be interested in?
+
+**Jason McGee:** Yeah, it's actually a tough question, because it depends on technology factors and a lot of people dynamics. Let's take the microservice part of it first, and then the Istio part second.
+
+\[18:46\] For me, microservices is fundamentally about people and teams, and like how you organize a team of people and how you organize an application to have independent parts... And how big each microservice is or how many of them you have varies a lot. I don't actually think there's some magical size of code or something that makes it a microservice. I think it really comes down to microservices are useful if you have a high rate of change... If you are working on something that's changing a lot, and you need to be able to rapidly deliver, microservices is a good approach.
+
+In fact, I always think that microservices makes this explicit tradeoff - you're trading off more operational complexity in exchange for faster velocity.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's a good way to look at it, yeah.
+
+**Jason McGee:** Yeah, you get faster velocity because you have -- basically, people don't have to talk to each other as much, in my experience...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You've decoupled your development...
+
+**Jason McGee:** Yeah, and decoupling really is probably less about technology and more about "This group of 12 people can kind of act with some autonomy - they can make their own decisions, they can deploy when they need to, they can make changes without having to coordinate with everybody else."
+
+And if you're changing stuff a lot, that's super-valuable... So you tend to see microservices in environments where there's a high rate of change, and if you look at (let's say) traditional or existing applications, a lot of people have debates about "Do I go refactor some existing app into a bunch of microservices?", and I think again it comes down to "Is that app changing?" and "What parts of that app are changing?" There might be pieces of an application that make sense to kind of refactor into a set of independent services, because it allows you to change those parts quickly... And there's other parts of the app that you haven't changed in ten years, and there's no inherent advantage of moving it to a microservices.
+
+So I think you have to just get down to how do you organize and where are the places where you need change. I mean, I look at my own team -- one of my other jobs on my team is I run the Kubernetes service for IBM cloud... It's called IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, and it's a managed Kube platform; that platform itself is built with more than 100 people, it has dozens of microservices... We built and deployed the whole thing in five months, we make 100 updates a day... None of that is possible without kind of a microservice architecture underneath you to give you the ability to decouple all those changes.
+
+Now, if you go give a look at Istio, the question then becomes "Do I not need Istio until I have a bunch of microservices?"
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah...
+
+**Jason McGee:** ...until I get to some scale. And I don't think that's actually true; I mean, I understand completely why people kind of go there, because even the way I described Istio sounds more valuable when you have lots of things... But the reality is observability, for example, or version routing are useful even when you only have a few things... Being able to collect data about what's going on, and being able to control updates is really valuable.
+
+One of the things we've tried to do in the Istio project is make Istio very incremental, meaning you can adopt it in pieces and you can adopt it incrementally on portions of an application. So it's not like a big all or nothing switch where one day you just decide "We're gonna Istio-enable the whole world and turn it on." You can bring Istio in and just use it for monitoring, to see what's going on, or you can bring it in and just use it for version routing, or something like that, and then kind of grow with it as you go.
+
+The sidecar thing actually helps a lot with that, because you didn't have to change your app to do it... So you literally can decide one day to turn on Istio on one of your services and we'll inject the sidecars and it'll start doing new things and you didn't have to change anything about your app.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[22:53\] So it sounds like even in the small, if you have microservices, there's value there... But know that you don't necessarily have to adopt all that Istio has to offer. I think then the deciding factor would still become the cost of operational complexity, or moving parts, versus the value provided by observability or whatever specific features that you're looking for... And then is there an operationally cheaper way of accomplishing similar means? I guess that would probably be the cost-benefit analysis there when you have a small amount.
+
+**Jason McGee:** Yeah, I think that's a good way to look at it. I think that's actually one of the real challenges, if you will, in the container ecosystem today... Have you guys ever seen the -- the Cloud Native Computing Foundation maintains this landscape chart...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** No...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's huge.
+
+**Jason McGee:** It's huge. This chart of basically like all of the technologies in the cloud-native space, and all the vendors and startups and everybody who has solutions in each category... And it's like the most densely packed collections I've ever seen. \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's a good slide at KubeCon, that's for sure...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's getting crazy out there, that's for sure...
+
+**Jason McGee:** Yeah, yeah. And on one hand, that's awesome; it means there's just a ton of really amazing innovative work going on... But as the average developer or the average company assembling all those pieces, it's hard... Maybe too hard, in some cases, to warrant. So you do kind of have to make this judgment call, and like what extra stuff do you want to bring into your environment... And I think that holds true with Istio today.
+
+Today, if you wanna use Istio, you have to make a decision you wanna use Istio, and you have to install Istio into your environment, into Kubernetes, and you have to do some work to manage it and update it, and things like that... So there's a cost to using it, and you have to kind of weigh off "Does the cost warrant it for whatever I'm getting out of it right now?"
+
+I think what will happen with Istio in particular is there's just a tremendous amount of excitement and energy behind Istio, and I really do believe -- it's hard to predict the future, but Istio has all the hallmarks of a key technology that will become kind of a de facto part of the environment that we all work with, and therefore it'll start to get built in.
+
+In IBM's case, our intention is to build Istio into our Kubernetes environment... So it will just be there. If you use Kube to run workloads, the Istio pieces will just be there all the time, and you can just decide to turn them on or turn them off... And therefore, the kind of overhead of just choosing to use it goes down.
+
+I think that's what's gonna happen in the industry in general; you're starting to see people adopt platforms. They're either using a public cloud platform, and that public cloud combines a bunch of the capabilities in that crazy picture, with all the icons, or they're using a software distribution that kind of combines some of those pieces together... So you kind of defer that work to the platform provider to do the integration for you.
+
+**Break:** \[26:17\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Jason, we are on the cncf/landscape GitHub repo here, where some of these images that you referenced earlier are sitting... So listeners, if you'd like to look at these images, they are informative and a bit overwhelming; definitely check out our show notes, they're right there for you... Or if you are at your computer, just got to github.com/cncf/landscape and there you have it. There's a trail map and then there's the current version of the landscape, which is what you're talking about, which has all of the different icons or avatars there.
+
+And on the landscape specifically, we have service mesh and discovery at step five -- excuse me, on the roadmap, which is kind of like a step-by-step thing of how you accomplish this, or... I don't know what's at the end; success is at the end of the road... And step five is "Pick a service mesh and discovery", or something like that.
+
+We see Envoy, which you mentioned, we see CoreDNS and Linkerd. Istio is not there... If we look at the landscape, Istio is there, but there's like 16 other icons next to service management, so it seems like at least -- I don't know how fresh these are, but at the time of creation of these docs, Istio was one of many options; you're saying that it will (hopefully, in your eyes) become the de facto for this particular section of the cloud...
+
+Maybe speak to the fact that it's not in step five yet... Of course, on the Cloud Native Computing Foundation stuff; this is not IBM stuff... But just tell us about how it fits in there and how it's gonna beat out these 16 others.
+
+**Jason McGee:** Sure. Let me help explain the charts maybe a little bit. So the trail map and the big boxes on the landscape chart are the official CNCF projects. They're the projects that are kind of managed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation as open source projects.
+
+The landscape has everything that's going on in this space, so you see projects, but you also see technologies and companies that aren't necessarily part of CNCF. Envoy as an independent project is officially a project under CNCF now, so the Lyft guys -- Matt Klein at Lyft donated Envoy to CNCF last year; I forget exactly when that happened, but in the last 6 or 8 months.
+
+Istio is not there yet, so Istio is not currently an official project of CNCF. That's in progress, so that should happen over the coming months. We really wanted to get Istio to kind of a 1.0 level, get the core architecture set before we made that step... So that's happened now, in the last couple of weeks, and we feel really good about where we are.
+
+The journey to 1.0, kind of as I alluded to, is a two-year journey to bring all these technologies together. Now the kind of core design is set, and if you actually looked at the evolution of Istio, there's been some pretty substantial changes in the conceptual model, in the APIs of the control plane and kind of how it works over the last year... So we felt "Yeah, let's get this thing in a good spot and then we'll bring it to CNCF." So it'll come.
+
+CNCF is an interesting foundation, because it's not trying to pick winners and losers... So you will often see what are essentially competing technologies live within the umbrella of CNCF. In the container world we have both containerd and Rkt. In service mesh space we have Linkerd, and there's a related project called Conduit, which is really an alternative to Istio that exists underneath CNCF. That's cool, that's fine... This is a community of people kind of building out the best technologies to solve these problems, so Istio will slot in there in the coming months.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[31:08\] I thought that Conduit was folded into Linkerd, at least version 2.0.
+
+**Jason McGee:** Yeah, that might be true. It's hard to...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's hard to keep up, there you go...
+
+**Jason McGee:** ...keep track of all these things. \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Even for Jason.
+
+**Jason McGee:** Even for me. I spend every day on this and I'm like, "What the heck...?"
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right. There's this great Mitch Hedberg line... He's one of my favorite comedians, and one of the things he says -- he said "I'm sick of chasing my dreams. I'm just gonna ask them where they're going and catch up with them later." And I kind of feel like -- I wonder when is this landscape going to shake out a little bit, and all of the... There's tons of innovation, so it's a gift and a curse, right? You've got all this innovation, you have new projects, you have excitement... It's Cambrian explosion kind of thing, but any space where you need a roadmap with like ten steps, and then there's like "Choose your own adventures along the way" - it's really kind of like... They actually have dragons on their roadmap (or trail map), which is kind of fitting, because it's kind of like "There'll be dragons there..."
+
+I'm just curious, when will things start to shake out and settle down a little bit, to where it's like clearly -- like you said, clearly it's Docker. Clearly, it's pretty much Kubernetes for orchestration. When do you think the rest of this will be really kind of shaken out and we can just catch up with it later?
+
+**Jason McGee:** Yeah, I guess if I really knew the answer to that, I could make some money... \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And if you told me, I could make some money, too.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Fortune telling.
+
+**Jason McGee:** That's right. I could create a whole business around that. Look, I mean... I think it will settle out in layers. There's pieces we agree on, and there's always kind of the hairy edge that everyone's still experimenting and trying to figure out what to do...
+
+I do think the container layer is essentially settled with Containerd. I think orchestration is settled with Kubernetes... Service mesh you can't say is settled, because we're still early in the adoption curve, but all the indicators, from who's working on what projects, where different companies are invested, the level of excitement... I really feel confident that Istio will take its place as that third layer.
+
+You know, higher up the stack of stuff that's here in CNCF - yeah, it may take a while, to be honest... We're at the beginning still of what I think is a pretty formative foundational change in how software is built... Not only cloud, but containerization. If you think about environments like Kubernetes and Istio, they're incredibly metadata rich, meaning they give you a ton of information about how software is executing and who's talking to who, and you can do some really interesting things. You can take something like Istio and watch all the traffic flowing through it and automatically detect who you're talking to, or what protocols are being used, and apply security in new ways... You can take all the data and apply machine learning to it and make better decisions about resource management, routings...
+
+All of these companies are exploding because we have this level of access and control over the environment that just wasn't possible before... So I think we'll see that diversity for a long time. I think for the next -- it's hard for me personally to look much more than three or four years out in this space, but certainly over that time period I think the core diversity will still be there. I think the bottom layers are settling out...
+
+\[34:37\] I think what also tends to happen is you look at -- there's different personalities of how people adopt technology, and for the bulk of the market, for most companies - certainly here at IBM I spend a lot of my time talking about larger enterprise customers... They're gonna look for a partner that helps them assemble these pieces... And public cloud is one form of that, where we -- either it's IBM, or Azure, or Microsoft, Google, we're all kind of delivering a cross-section of this whole picture as a service on our clouds... So that's one way to deal with the diversity - you have a platform provider who does it for you.
+
+I think the same thing happens on the kind of software distribution side. Most people won't do "choose your own adventure", most people will pick a partner who can pull some of these pieces together for them.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** One of our questions in the list here is "Why is service mesh suddenly so interesting?" and it seems like maybe because of this roadmap now that question seems to be answered to some degree, because like you said, Docker is the container, so that's step one. Step two is CI/CD; those are for the most part -- there's different platforms for it, but if you're doing a public cloud, you have your own ways of doing that. And you've got orchestration - that's Kubernetes, Helm; those are involved there. Prometheus is a graduated project, so that's a clear winner...
+
+And then five is the next step, which is Envoy, CoreDNS, Linkerd, and then obviously Istio here... So it seems like, as you mentioned, the layers - these are beginning to be solved; that's just the next step, obviously, to pick a winner... And I'd assume that you pick a winner by integration. You mentioned that Google's involved in this, IBM is involved in this obviously, Azure has their own thing, something called -- what is it called again? Service Fabric mesh, so one more level of obscurity in there; now it's Fabric, too.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Is that a competing thing, Jason, or is it just by name? Because I know sometimes Microsoft and names don't necessarily jive.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Jason McGee:** Yeah, I don't know actually how directly aligned that is. They've been doing a lot of stuff, so...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What I see happening here thought is that at each level, as we start to pick away the layers of cloud-native, it's essentially the agreeability; we all agree that Kubernetes wins, we all agree that Docker wins, we all agree that Prometheus wins... So the next might be which do the public clouds choose, and that's the winner. Is that fair to say, Jason?
+
+**Jason McGee:** I do think it's fair, and I certainly think that public clouds have been a big influence on who the winners are... You know, not always. Watching Kubernetes kind of become the de facto is quite interesting. It seems very obvious sitting here right now that Kube is the winner; if you went back in time 12 months or maybe 15 months it wasn't as obvious, right? And there were some big players who hadn't made that choice yet. Amazon hadn't made that choice, Docker hadn't made that choice yet... But there was so much momentum around the developer community around these technologies that eventually everybody had to acknowledge they needed to support it, they all put their weight behind it, and that kind of takes the air out of the room on other stuff.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Tell me if you remember this term, Jerod, and Jason, too... DC/OS. Data center operating system.
+
+**Jason McGee:** I do.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, Mesosphere, right?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm going back a couple years in our history -- in 2015 we talked about Mesos and Mesosphere, and this kind of goes back to what Jason is talking about.
+
+**Jason McGee:** Yeah, I mean... Yeah, they had a moment there where DC/OS could have become what Kubernetes is now. That didn't happen for a variety of reasons, and now all of that energy has moved to Kube.
+
+Istio is interesting too, I think... I always try to look at like -- look, I've been in IT for... I'm not that old, but I've been in IT for a long time, and to some level it's the same problem...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** How long have you been in IT? Come on!
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, spill it.
+
+**Jason McGee:** 22 years(ish), 23 years. You know, at some level it's the same problems, right?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yes.
+
+**Jason McGee:** \[38:46\] We're not solving -- maybe with the exception of machine learning and AI, to a large extent we're not solving fundamentally different problems; we're just solving them in better, more efficient ways... So you've gotta look at a technology like Istio and go like "Why now?" Why was this approach possible now? And I look at it and I go, okay, to me there's like two factors. One is the adoption of new approaches like microservices that's generating a need. We now have these very distributed systems that are made up of lots and lots of components, so you need something like an Istio to help you manage that.
+
+And then the second component is the approach... Like, "Let's run 1,200 independent proxies to route all the traffic" would have been a ludicrous thing to do five years ago if that meant "Do all that yourself", like install them all yourself, configure them all yourself... So the fact that we all agreed on containers and Kubernetes and the capabilities at that base platform, right, it made it feasible, maybe combine that with public cloud, which kind of brings as a service an infrastructure into the picture, it makes it feasible to run an architecture like that. So you have a need, and you have a technology foundation that we've built up that makes it possible to take that approach. Istio kind of falls into that gap in a really nice way.
+
+It's funny -- I haven't looked at the numbers in six or seven months, but when we've launched last year, within a few months of launching the project last year we were watching the open source stats on project adoption, and it was tracking ahead of where Kubernetes was at the same point in its lifecycle... So like four months in of Kube versus four months in of Istio. Istio was actually tracking higher than Kube, and I think that's a sign to me -- not that Istio is more popular than Kube, but that Istio is building on top of the momentum.
+
+It's like when the iPad came out. The iPad outsold the original iPhone. Well, that only happened because we all had iPhones already, so we understood the model, and you could see that added value... And I think that's what's happening at Istio, too.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's interesting too that Docker sparked the conversation of what it obviously did, and then when Kubernetes won in this landscape, it seems like they were the keys to enable the next level... Like you mentioned, you wouldn't wanna do 1,200 proxies by hand, you'd want something to automate it for you, because otherwise you're just silly. It's silly.
+
+**Jason McGee:** Yeah, exactly. It's interesting how all of these layers kind of build on each other and enable the next round. And even if you look at Istio, how it's built internally, it really is built very deeply on top of Kubernetes... Not just from the standpoint of how sidecars work and everything, but the actual implementation of Istio's control plane itself extends Kubernetes' data model, extends the Kubernetes API server...
+
+I think on some level that's a little bit the untold story of Kubernetes - most users think of it as a container orchestration platform for running their apps, but Kubernetes is also becoming kind of the de facto control plane implementation, and you see lots of projects who are extending Kubernetes with new kinds of resources... So instead of having just pods and deployments, which are kind of Kubernetes concepts, you see builds, and in Istio you see virtual services and gateways... But those are all built into the Kubernetes API server.
+
+It's really interesting to watch how as we introduce these new technologies, you're able to build on the momentum of the layer below in a pretty interesting way... Whereas in the past we would have had to build all that infrastructure out again, and you'd solve all the same problems, like "How do we protect the Istio APIs? How do you control access? How do you run it and scale it?", but all that is already solved, so we're just leveraging it.
+
+**Break:** \[42:56\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Jason, before I put this landscape picture away - because I still have it pulled up and I'm still looking at it... One thing when you see all these icons and businesses, and you see all these open source projects, it's interesting because it is kind of like "Here is some CNCF stuff, here's a company, here's an open source project...", and besides the sheer number of players involved, the other thing that strikes me, specifically in the cloud-native area of open source, is you have a bunch of for-profit (really) competitors in business collaborating on open source projects, and Istio is no exception to that...
+
+Like you said, IBM, Google, Lyft, Red Hat. Surely, if you look at the full contributors list, it's probably people from many companies, so... Tell us about that milieu, that relationship where you're basically -- I don't wanna say "sleeping with the enemy", because that's probably too harsh a term, but like... You're collaborating with people who -- I mean, IBM Cloud is a direct competitor with AWS, with Google Cloud, with these things. What's that like?
+
+**Jason McGee:** Yeah, it's interesting, it's full of conflict sometimes... But it's also just how the industry works, and it's been getting more and more like that over the years. I started this show talking about my 20-year-old app server experiences, and back then we collaborated on like specification documents, and we all agreed on some spec, and then we went off in our corners and tried to create the best implementation of that. That was the old way to collaborate.
+
+For a long time now, the way we collaborate is we create open source projects, then maybe you extend on top with additional capability, or you differentiate on quality of service, or integration, or how you deliver it, user experience... So I think on one hand it's like -- maybe I'm so used to it that it doesn't even phase me anymore, because you're always having this conversation in your head about, for any problem space, what's the stuff that really should be open, collaborative technology that we all agree on together...
+
+Because the one defining behavior of both developers and companies today is for the most part nobody wants to build a tie to some proprietary technology. That's always been true on some levels, but it is exceptionally strong today. You always have to have this debate about like, when you're solving a problem, what should I do in the open with others and what should I productize?
+
+What I actually think is really different right now is the VC -- the availability of venture capital is frankly so easy right now that you also get this just tremendous explosion of independent companies, small companies who are trying to build a business.... Istio is a great example of that. When we started this two years ago it was just the three of us, Google, IBM and Lyft, and now I think there's like 4 to 6 VC-funded startups in the Valley just around Istio.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Competing with Istio? Or building on top of Istio?
+
+**Jason McGee:** Building products around Istio by contributing to the project, and then building a product around Istio.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So what would be a product? Don't name it -- you don't have to say "Here's one, for example...", but what would be a business model or a product that would say "It's Istio plus our own stuff, so we're gonna contribute back"? What does that look like?
+
+**Jason McGee:** Yeah, so an example of what it might look like - the simplistic business model is you're a distributer, so you provide a supported distribution of the code, that can install and run and be supported by you... You know, a company isn't -- they have a throat to choke when something goes wrong...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** There's not much value-add there...
+
+**Jason McGee:** There's not much value-add there; the only company that seems to have made that model really work for them is Red Hat, over the years...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.
+
+**Jason McGee:** \[48:04\] More interesting, I think if you look at Istio -- the way I think about Istio is Istio is fundamentally building blocks, kind of low-level primitive controls that you can use to do these fancy things we've been talking about. So there's a tremendous opportunity to build UI and capability around those controls.
+
+You could build a CI/CD system that automatically used Istio to do version rollouts, or Canary testing, or rollbacks by kind of controlling the flow of traffic.
+
+One of the things we pioneered at IBM and Istio is a set of resiliency testing features. I'll get a little bit gorpy for a second, but if you think about most distributed systems, where services are calling each other over the network, one common technique is everyone has timeouts; you make a call, you wait for some amount of time before you give up and assume that the other guy is never gonna come back to you. In a distributed system one of the common problems is everyone independently decided how long they would wait... So A calls B and B calls C, and the guy in the middle is not willing to wait as long as he should for the answer, so you get failures that aren't really failures... And you can spend a lot of time, especially when things go bad, like the network slows down, or something - all of a sudden, things all fall apart because of all these incorrect timeouts.
+
+Well, in Istio you can actually artificially introduce delays between any two services, and simulate what would happen in the event of the network slowing down.
+
+You can imagine -- and we actually did some research in IBM exploring this exact problem... You could actually write a tool that took a network of microservices and went through and programmatically changed all the delays and measured the results of the system and calculated for you how to attune the system so it behaves properly in the event of failures; it sets all the timeouts automatically.
+
+So that's not Istio itself. Istio is just giving you the knobs to turn... But you could build a product on top that was like a testing tool, or a performance tuning tools that uses those knobs to actually do some higher-level things.
+
+So there's tons of opportunity like that across security in all kinds of dimensions of Istio, where you could imagine building product that took those controls and actually solved some end problem that people have.
+
+So that's what you're seeing in the VC community, and frankly, that's what you're seeing in companies like IBM and others that are building Istio onto their products, and figuring how to take these new tools that we have and solve some high-value problems for people.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What are some heuristics that you use inside of IBM to make these decisions, like where you draw those lines between "This is an Istio open source core contribution", versus "This is a value-add that's proprietary to IBM and we're gonna sell it", versus "This is a service", or whatever... I'm sure there's probably hundreds of those a week, some bigger than others, but do you have guidelines, or is it just your own personal gut, like "This is gonna go in open source and this is not"?
+
+**Jason McGee:** Yeah, it's a blend of guidelines and gut feel for sure, and some of these things you don't know the answer to until you make some guesses... And you adapt. Sometimes it's better just to optimize for being wrong and changing, instead of trying to get it right at the beginning... But one of the kind of core measurements I use is anything that's gonna touch the application itself. Of course, APIs are the obvious example, that you would program to in your code... But also any files or artifacts that you would put into your application and into your deployment pipeline.
+
+Things that actually touch the app should be part of an open community. That's the kind of core contract you're trying to create for people - whatever you're writing could run somewhere else, or could run on another provider... So I use that a lot. If it looks like to solve this problem I need an API, then either that API needs to be in open source, or I need to find a different way to do it, so that the application can become portable across different merchants.
+
+\[52:14\] There's others, of course... You can do the feature chasing game - if you add a feature that nobody else has, that's possible; that's a tough game. I personally think that's a really hard game. If you create a feature that's an add-on on top of an open source project, one of two things usually happens - it's either not that useful of a feature, so nobody cares and nobody copies you... So you have this unique feature, but it's not very high-value. Or it's really valuable and useful, and eventually it will just show up in the open source project, whether you want it to or not. Somebody will go "Oh yeah, that's a great idea" and they will add it into the open source project.
+
+So you wind up having like a window of time, where maybe you're ahead... That's a hard game; sometimes that's an interesting game to play, but it's a lot better, especially in the cloud world, to differentiate on 1) being the thought leader and defining these projects... You know, if you look at Istio, lots of people will have Istio; at the end of the day, IBM and Google are the kind of key thought leaders behind what's going on in that project and will have a lot of influence over where we think it evolves to, so you can lead through leadership in open communities... And then some of that comes down to "How do you deliver?" Do you deliver it in public cloud, do you deliver it as a service, do you integrate it with everything else you're doing so it just becomes super-easy to use? ...so you're not making a decision on a single piece of technology, you're making a decision on this full platform that you wanna go use, right?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It seems like a very complex game of chess.
+
+**Jason McGee:** The old best of breed versus best in class kind of decision... It is complicated, I agree with you.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Which makes it fun and interesting, I'm sure, to participate in... Not on the side of what goes into the open source, but on the other side of what doesn't get to, or what directions are wrong for the projects...? So let's just hypothetically say Google has a vested interest in Istio moving, as a project, in a specific direction that plays to Google's core competency or their strategic advantage in business. Who makes the calls and how are they made on what stuff goes in in the case that IBM is like "Neah, we don't really think that should be happening..." Well, now what happens?
+
+**Jason McGee:** Oh yeah, so what you're talking about is basically how does open source project governance work...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** In this case, yes.
+
+**Jason McGee:** In this case -- so every project has some governance structures. Google has been a great partner with us on this project. We have it set up where we have essentially an executive steering committee and a technical steering committee, which have representation from across the community, from all the major vendors involved, from [various] positions from the community itself, and those committees are basically there for exactly the purpose you talked about, which is "How do we make sure we're making project decisions in the interest of all the parties involved?" and not decisions that only benefit one party. It's a sign of health of an open source project if it has a good governance structure.
+
+It's funny, 20-30 years ago IBM was maybe the pinnacle example of proprietary, but over the last quarter century we've been doing open source deeply in our DNA for a long time, and one of the things that often happens behind the scenes at IBM is when we join open source projects we do a lot of work to try to make sure there's the right governance structure in place for that project to allow these kinds of decisions to be made in the right way...
+
+\[55:55\] And if you look at the container space, for example, IBM and Google and others worked together to create the Open Container Initiative, and to create CNCF, and form those projects and foundations explicitly to make sure that if you looked at container tech -- you know, at first that was an open source project, but it was all run by Docker, and Docker has been a great partner, but we all knew that if this was gonna play the role we thought it was gonna play as the kind of foundation for software for the next 20 years, it needed to run in a project that had the right open governance structure, so we created OCI together, and we created the containerd project, and we kind of set up a structure that allowed those decisions to be made more fairly.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think what's interesting though when you mention governance, and maybe why Jerod asked that question is because 1) it's not clear by going to the Istio website... You know, like "Here's how this project is governed." For one, to be an invitation to say hey, I know that the thought leaders are Google and IBM; however, if you would like to get involved, there's certain ways you could technically influence the direction of this project.
+
+From what I understand about CNCF, and maybe potentially why you may want to become an incubated project, is that they provide that for you. There's essentially neutrality. When Jerod asked that question earlier, like "How do you interact with Google and how is that--" I forget what term you used, Jerod, but... You know, one of the benefits of being part of CNCF is that neutrality, and sort of the "Let your guard down when you come here, because we're not trying to steal your bacon, we're trying to make it possible to make it."
+
+**Jason McGee:** Yeah, I think CNCF is interesting in that way. I do agree that that's the role of CNCF. CNCF is a little bit different than some other communities. Apache is maybe the opposite example, where Apache has a particular process, governance structure, and all projects under Apache follow the one governance structure. CNCF itself doesn't impose a particular governance structure on each project; they can make their own decisions.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. The only thing they say is you have to be neutral. That's the only boundary they have. You can run it how you want governance-wise, but you understand that if you join CNCF, you need to be neutral.
+
+**Jason McGee:** Exactly. CNCF's philosophy is "We all agree on what the results should be. How you get to the result can be project-by-project", whereas Apache's approach was "Here's the process to get to the result."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+
+**Jason McGee:** In the case of Istio, the process is documented; there's links on the community page on how to contribute in different working groups, there's links in there about the Technical Oversight Committee Working Group, which is the kind of overarching technical group... And then part of kind of moving forward is -- and obviously, this has evolved over time, but... You know, how do we get to voting procedures, and what's the formal governance rules, like the charter, if you will, and that's been kind of evolving over time.
+
+I think at Istio there's no confusion about like "This thing is gonna run the right way." We already use the CNCF code of conduct... It's gonna have the right blend of who gets to participate. That's pretty important to us at IBM, for sure, so we're not gonna run a project where somehow we have undue influence.
+
+The challenge sometimes is getting projects over the hump, like getting them birthed into the world...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Needed, or usable... Yeah.
+
+**Jason McGee:** Yeah, exactly. Those early decisions, like you have to keep this kind of -- before you open it up too broadly, you have to kind of get it to a baseline, otherwise it becomes like the Wild West. That's what I think people have seen happen over the last 12 months, is Istio kind of going from 0.1 to 1.0, and we have a pretty good baseline now.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[59:53\] Back in July, 1.0, you mentioned - I think it was in either the second segment or this last segment - there's a lot of excitement around the direction and the future of Istio. What's in the future? What's next?
+
+**Jason McGee:** One of the big challenges we had over the last four months was just like -- there were so many interesting things happening in Istio, we had to kind of pull back and say "We've gotta get what we have out the door, out to 1.0, and stop working on new things." So we're pretty excited to have done that, and now we can start working on new things again.
+
+There's lots of interesting spaces... One I think that has a lot of excitement right now is kind of multicluster meshes, or mesh extensions. If you think of the idea of the service mesh, obviously it's about connecting different services together... Services live in all kinds of environments. They might be on different cloud providers, you have some stuff in the public cloud and some stuff in your data center, on-prem, and you logically want one service mesh that spans all those environments. Maybe some stuff's running in Kubernetes, and some is on Cloud Foundry, and some of it is in virtual machines... So you have this notion of "How do you configure and manage a service mesh that spans these different environments?" So there's a bunch of alpha work in the project already, to allow you to set up these more distributed mesh environments where you connect different systems together... And I think that will be really valuable.
+
+I actually was in Australia a couple weeks ago for a week, kind of visiting clients and talking to them about the space, and we spent a lot of time talking about Istio... And the notions of security Istio, and being able to do application-level security combined with this emerging idea of a hybrid mesh that spans their data center in the cloud - that was super-interesting to every customer I talked to, because it's one of the challenges they have. They want to adopt the public cloud, they want to enable all their teams to go fast, and build microservices, and use all these new approaches, but all those apps are talking back to their existing systems, so they need some way to kind of govern over the top of all that, and Istio gives them a way to do that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** One thing I see on the Istio homepage is a Learn More, but not a Getting Started... So what's the first step to adoption? I know you mentioned that you don't have to adopt all of it earlier in the call; you mentioned that you can just sort of like take little features of it as you need it, and at the same time you don't even have to change your application, so what's a good first step to adopting Istio?
+
+**Jason McGee:** Basically, do the setup, follow the instructions on the website for setting up the quickstart with Kubernetes, and then there's actually some great examples built into the Istio project. There's an app called Bookinfo... So the first way to get going is just like get it installed and try it, and learn the concepts. To help make that happen, we built kind of a sample microservices app that has Istio applied to it, that is pretty extensively documented, as part of the project; it can help you deploy an actual app that has three or four microservices, and then explore how intelligent routing works, or how to get telemetry data, or how to secure it...
+
+So there's some pretty good guides in the documentation section of the website that will kind of walk people step by step through how to make use of Istio. That's where I always tell people to start... It's like, "Don't apply this to your own thing first. Go try it out." You can do it in any Kube environment, you can do it on Minikube on your laptop, or in public cloud service - wherever you have Kubernetes, you can get going pretty fast.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Cool. Alright, we'll link up to this quickstart with the Kubernetes documentation; I found that, I just had to dig a little bit. One thing we try to cover, at least in the last portion, is like where is the project heading, how can people get involved, and what's a good on-ramp, so that when a listener closes out, they can easily go somewhere and we have links in the show notes for that.
+
+**Jason McGee:** Yeah, and that's good feedback, too. We spend lots of time -- you know, part of an open source project you also have working groups to work on the website, and we have lots of arguments about how to organize the information and make sure people have an obvious path to get involved.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I would say if there's two people in the world that have good insights into what are core ideas you should have on homepages, Jerod and I would be those people, so...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Aww, thanks...
+
+**Jason McGee:** That's good, I might pick your brains later.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I said your name first, Jerod, of course...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, thank you, I appreciate being included in the list.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You're welcome, sir. Jason, thank you so much for taking the time to cover Istio with us. Congrats on the 1.0, congrats on all the work being done here. Clearly, great progress, especially on the security side, having considered that as a core piece of it, and how it moved from the network up to this layer is certainly an important piece. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
+
+**Jason McGee:** Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having me.
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+**Jerod Santo:** So David, I guess the thing we're here to talk about is how the JavaScript sprinkles that were inside of Basecamp turned into a full-fledged framework, Stimulus JS. Can you tell us the story of sprinkles to Stimulus?
+
+**David Heinemeier Hansson:** Absolutely. So since the very first version of Basecamp, since we started dabbling with JavaScript, both in the form of sort of pre-Ajax, and then post-Ajax, and then through Prototype, and jQuery and all the other libraries, we've always adopted a sort of distanced approach somewhat; what we were trying to do was we were trying to build some HTML documents that were linked together - I know this is terribly novel... \[laughter\] At the end we would adorn them progressively. Progressive enhancement is sort of the fancy term for it, but that doesn't even fully describe our philosophy, because it's not so much just progressive enhancement in terms of "Oh, your entire app should be able to be fully functional if someone turned off JavaScript." That wasn't why we did it, that wasn't why I was interested in progressive enhancement.
+
+Progressive enhancement was more an architectural technique of how to build great applications, which is actually similar to how I came to REST, and the REST principles for building HTTP applications. It wasn't so much that I had this pure affection for representative state transfer and the thesis behind that. It was simply because it was a wonderful architectural pattern for guiding development and guiding how I should put an application together... And so it is with progressive enhancement - using HTML and having the server side generate that, and then sort of sprinkling little bits of dynamic dust all over the application. "Oh, this little button, instead of being a full page change, we're just gonna have it dynamically update a tiny bit of the page."
+
+\[04:06\] It was really appealing to me, because the kind type of applications we build at Basecamp, including Basecamp itself, lends itself very well to that style. And I think that's perhaps where some of the differences sometimes come in.
+
+Basecamp and applications like it, including GitHub, that use a very similar style even if we don't use the same frameworks, they have something called PJAX, that was a predecessor to Turbolinks, and that idea (which we can talk about later, too) - they actually go well together, Turbolinks and Stimulus; so that's part of a two-pack punch. But in any case, applications like that, where it's not about presenting a let's say desktop-like, super high-fidelity, super-connected UI, where you're sort of changing a little thing over here and then there's five different other points that need to update at the same time... That was the world we were in, right? And some people are in a different world.
+
+If you're trying to make some sort of dashboard in a phase where you're tweaking little dials and having all sorts of ramifications and updates, you have a different domain, and you should actually use different solutions for it. That's one of the things that long has annoyed me, both with software development in general, but JavaScript development in particular - this idea that there's one template for applications for the web, and that we should all embrace React and Redux as a lifesaver here. Or before that it was Angular, or before that it was something else. We have all the same kinds of applications and they all fit in the same mold, and I just couldn't relate to that at all. So that's why for however long it's been that we've had these heavy JavaScript frameworks that used client-side MVC and tried to do all the generation of HTML on the client side, we've rejected that; we didn't see the fit.
+
+First of all, it didn't fit obviously with progressive enhancement, but it also didn't fit with what we were trying to do or made anything better. Over the years, we've had our dabbles in using frameworks like that, and it never ended up that the code was better afterwards. One of the techniques that I'm very fond of is doing VAB. You take a piece of real production code, a real feature, and you write it five different ways. That just tells the truth incredibly quickly. And the truth that I derive from that --
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So did you try--
+
+**David Heinemeier Hansson:** Sorry, go ahead.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** In the process of time, did you try out like an Angular or a React and dabble with the Basecamp source code, and do these different things?
+
+**David Heinemeier Hansson:** Yeah, I tried a bunch of different frameworks. Actually, just before going head into Stimulus, I did another broad search, essentially, evaluating all the frameworks that were already out there and saying "You know what, I don't necessarily want to create another framework." We have frameworks coming out the wazoo at Basecamp, right? I have my hands plenty busy with just Rails and Turbolinks and whatever. Is there a way that we can just adopt one of the existing frameworks, as we actually did with jQuery.
+
+When jQuery was the hotshot, we just decided "Okay, we have this other framework prototype that we had extracted from Basecamp", but it wasn't really different enough from jQuery. And jQuery clearly had the momentum... Let's just switch to jQuery. And we did the same thing with Rails, right? For many years, Rails shipped with jQuery in the box because that had the momentum, it was close enough, and it was actually a great framework. I, to this day, still like a lot of things about jQuery and I think its focus on ergonomics and API design were wonderful, and in some ways lost in this transition to the so-called "modern era" of JavaScript development.
+
+In any case - where was my train of thought here? Did I try these things, was that what you were asking?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Exactly, yeah.
+
+**David Heinemeier Hansson:** I was down this rabbit hole...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[08:13\] Well, you're the kind of person who has your own thoughts, has your own viewpoints on elegance, especially when it comes to code, and it would make sense that maybe you wouldn't try it, but it seems you did.
+
+**David Heinemeier Hansson:** Oh, absolutely, because I get inspired by it, too. Oh, that was where we were coming from, whether there was another existing framework out there that could serve our needs... I mean, I'm sure there would be; it's not like the most terrible thing in the world would be if we used React for some things, for example, right? I don't have any fundamental opposition against that. In fact, I think React in particular had an incredibly correct core inside, that instead of maintaining this complicated sense of state, you would just blow away the world and rerender it every time. I think that's a great inside and actually quite similar to our views on how to do things. It sort of then went downhill from there, in my opinion. That was the sparkling moment where I thought "Oh, there's something really interesting there", and then I started seeing the mismatch of smashing all the considerations and concerns around components into one big file. We've spent I don't know how long trying to separate things out such that we can be on different rates of change and all these other good things, and now here we go, React, HTML smashed in with code, smashed in with state management, smashed in with everything, and I thought "Meh, I don't think that's actually progress."
+
+So in any case, I reviewed all of these things, and then I also reviewed the JavaScript ecosystem at large, and I actually liked a whole lot better what I saw there than what I saw in the particular framework expressions that came from that world. I love absolutely the fact that ES5 onward was such a better language, especially for the type of JavaScript that I wanted to write, which was a more object-oriented style, and obviously influenced by the fact that Ruby is my true love, and I like that style of programming where it's mostly object-oriented, and then you sprinkle in some functional programming techniques where they make sense. But at the core, I like to structure my code in an object-oriented manner, and ES5 forward just made that not be this horrible hoop-jumping exercise to do so, where we had to use CoffeeScript essentially go get an even half-way same syntax for declaring classes.
+
+So I saw all that project in the JavaScript ecosystem and thought "This is wonderful, and it's extra-wonderful that we don't have to wait for the browsers to catch up." The fact that we have Babel, the fact that we have Webpack, the fact that we have this whole toolchain that allows us to use almost all of the future-heading features of JavaScript today, in existing browsers, that people are actually using. That was what was so exciting.
+
+So I basically took that exploration and said "Alright, I've examined both the ecosystem at large and the particular frameworks. I don't care so much for the particular frameworks, I care for the ecosystem improvements. What can we do here? Can I just try to get my sense of progressive enhancement, my love of sprinkles into a more cohesive structure?" At first, it wasn't even about the rest of the world, it was just about how we write JavaScript at Basecamp, it was about reforming that way. Because what I had come to dislike was we had such a high standard at Basecamp for writing beautiful Ruby code, and then we had a very uneven standard, in some ways, for writing JavaScript. On the one hand, we had some wonderful, deep-diving JavaScript explorations with Sam and Javan.
+
+\[11:59\] They've made both Trix, and they've made Turbolinks, and it's beautiful, wonderful code, and it's really pure and wonderful... And then we had specific support sprinkles for a feature here, a feature there, and we had like four different styles of doing that, four different ways of attaching event handlers, and so forth... And someone coming in new to the Basecamp would go like "Which path should I follow again?" and then usually they'd just open some file that vaguely resembled what they were trying to do, and kind of follow that... Which wasn't great, right?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You probably had heaps of CoffeeScript code at this point too as well, didn't you?
+
+**David Heinemeier Hansson:** CoffeeScript as well. CoffeeScript is not one of those things I look back on with any sense of regret. I think CoffeeScript was a monumental step forward for the syntax of JavaScript prior to ES5, and in some way still is, but the gap has now narrowed so considerably that I don't know if the CoffeeScript path is necessarily worth it anymore, but it was totally worth it for those years when all we had was ES3, right?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** How were you guys managing that migration inside of Basecamp? File-by-file, converting it to plain ES5 or ES6 JavaScript, or were you leaving the CoffeeScript in place? What's the progress on that and how are you guys doing it?
+
+**David Heinemeier Hansson:** We're basically looking at things in sort of new horizons. When we make something new, we will make it to the best of our abilities, to the best concepts and whatever that we have, which today is Stimulus. So when we write new features, we write Stimulus controllers and that's how we go. If we go back and revisit existing features and we have to update them in some way, we will sort of weigh whether the change is large enough to warrant a full conversion to Stimulus, or we should just leave it in place. Because the thing is you don't really need to do this mass migration. The wonderful thing about having Babel and these transpilers is the fact that we can mix and match as we please. In fact, we do, even with modern code; Stimulus itself is written in Typescript, not in just vanilla ES5 or ES6. That's because Sam and Javan enjoy using Typescript when they're writing framework code... And I'm not a huge fan of sort of statically-typed or explicitly-typed (I should say) code.
+
+So that's not what I really wanna write and it's not what we need to write when we write features, but they enjoy doing it for the framework itself, and since they're doing the work, I'm like, "Of course you guys get to pick what you wanna do." It doesn't matter, it all just compiles down to the same thing in the end, so what do I care whether the parts of Stimulus that I didn't have to write is written in Typescript, or CoffeeScript, or whatever?
+
+There's something to be said for having a general style in your application code perhaps, but these aren't drastically different languages, right? They're like dialects. I'm from Denmark, and in Copenhagen we speak one dialect, and I mostly still understand people from Jutland and the dialect that they speak. It's actually not a big deal. I think people have a tendency to make it a much bigger deal than it really is.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That makes a lot of sense. I know as somebody who has dug into the Turbolinks source code, and I've written a fair bit of CoffeeScript back in the day, but hadn't for maybe a year, 18 months... As a casual contributor or potential contributor, I maybe just opened a bug report or something, but looking at the Turbolinks code, which was CoffeeScript, I know that there was definitely some cognitive overhead, some catch-up I had to do in order to read that dialect.
+
+I think on the other hand Typescript for libraries actually makes it easier to contribute because of the documentation available and the types being so obvious and stuff like that... Whereas CoffeeScript may have been a detractor for third-party contributors. I think Typescript might actually make it even easier for people to get involved.
+
+**David Heinemeier Hansson:** \[15:54\] Maybe... \[laughter\] I'm not too convinced that that's the main barrier to entry. In fact, I think that technologies have the tendency to overstate the differences in the technology choices versus the actual cognitive barrier there is to understand systems.
+
+To contribute to, say, Turbolinks, there's a fair conceptual model that you have to understand before you can contribute...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, that's true.
+
+**David Heinemeier Hansson:** ...and I think climbing that hill - it's a taller one than the subtle dialect differences between CoffeeScript and either ES5 or ES6 or Typescript. But to each their own... I think what's just great is the fact that we don't have to go through these violent transitions, where in order to have new features, for example of our application written in Stimulus, that uses Typescript, written in ES5 or ES6, we don't have to rewrite everything that we did before that, because I think those types of transitions are incredibly painful, and I think in many ways it's actually a blessing that we're using transpilers all over the place, and it all just boils down to whatever you're compiling to, whether that's ES3 or ES5 or whatever your final output target is... It just matters less and less these days. I think that's a real progress.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Since you mentioned Sam and Javan, and from what I understand, the process was -- it sounds like you were doing some evaluation of JavaScript, the ecosystem, you'd done some research, and one day you prototyped something. And that kind of worked, and then Sam and Javan took that and rewrote it into what is now Stimulus, and that's what you're talking about, which is Typescript is the language that that's written in. Can you kind of walk through that process of discovering this and kind of getting to the point where you could prototype something, what that was like, and then the transfer from you to them and how that played out?
+
+**David Heinemeier Hansson:** Sure. So as I said, I did this huge survey of the landscape on all the major JavaScript frameworks, and I read through all of them and I played with all of them, and I tried to see which ideas I could get inspired by. And then I started up basically just play with all the new features in ES5 and ES6. This was sort of the first time I had really dug back in and tried what's at the forefront of the JavaScript ecosystem development in quite some time... And I started using all the Babel packs for all the in-progress proposals for all sorts of things, and I just wanted to sort of like -- if I could use the latest and the greatest, what would that feel like?
+
+So I played with a bunch of different things. At first it was just general experiments, and then pretty quickly thereafter I became focused on "Okay, let me review all the JavaScript we have in Basecamp, let me try to see if I can pick out and extract the best styles that we're already using, and kind of jell that into a framework that will guide people to stick with that style. Because a lot of what we had was basically just sort of subtle conventions of writing code, which I'm a big fan of conventions, but I think they're much stronger when those conventions are backed up and enforced by a framework.
+
+So that was basically what I was trying to do. I wasn't necessarily trying to invent anything here, as I usually do with frameworks; I was trying to extract the best ideas that we already had, from this progressive lean hands to a sprinkles approach to JavaScript. I'd spent about two weeks doing that, and I pretty quickly came up with basically the DSL, the design of what Stimulus was going to be, and wrote it in ES6 with a bunch of plugins... There was enough there, we sort of stopped out in some ways; it didn't have the full mutation of server and so forth, but my sense of the design was really focused around "Let me take an existing piece of JavaScript code in Basecamp that supports a given feature, that I don't really like, that I feel like is messy or smelly or whatever, and then let me rewrite it in this proposed format that I have for stimulus and see if it's better.
+
+\[20:13\] I rewrote a bunch of different pieces of functionality and I was astounded by just how much nicer they were to work with when I had rewritten them in Stimulus. So after going through that process, I sort of chimed up Sam and Javan, who have been doing most of our deep-dive science projecty JavaScript development for a long time, including both Turbolinks and Trix. So they were sort of the natural team within Basecamp (we call them Research & Fidelity) to take this on.
+
+Basically, I wanted what I had written up to really work, and not just be stopped out and not just be a prototype, but be the thing we actually wrote new JavaScript in. So they took this on and integrated another framework that Sam had been working on around MutationObservers called Sentinella and we ended up merging the two directions, and it became Stimulus. As I said, they rewrote the whole thing from scratch. In fact, since I wrote the initial prototype of the framework, I haven't written a single line. I think if you do a GIT blame on the current repo, you're not gonna find my signature on any of the lines written in Typescript.
+
+My role - I sort of just shipped it from "Okay, I built a prototype, and I have a very clear idea of where I want the final API to go and what the client code should look like, so let me provide that guidance and let me help sort through some of the conceptual issues that we then faced on how to design the API, especially around targets and so forth", and here we are.
+
+**Break:** \[22:00\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Alright, so let's talk about the architecture or the concepts of Stimulus, how you designed it, how it works and how you use it.
+
+**David Heinemeier Hansson:** So one of the things I really wanted with Stimulus was I wanted to solve a couple of specific problems or bad patterns that I was seeing in our sprinkles code at Basecamp. One of the first things I wanted to address was the notion of how do you find the elements that you want to mutate or work with? We had a bunch of different styles.
+
+\[24:07\] Sometimes we were using a hierarchical approach where you'd say "Oh, give me the parent of the parent of the parent here. I know that the structure of my DOM tree is like this, and I know I want the third parent up." That's a pretty brittle way of targeting elements, right? Someone reorganizes things or puts them in a different way and all of a sudden you're getting the wrong element. So that wasn't a good pattern.
+
+Another pattern that we've used was targeting elements by finding them through CSS classes. So we'd say "Give me the elements that match this CSS class", which on the one hand seems okay, because a lot of times the CSS classes are explanatory. They say "Oh, this element is about the title of a person, or something", so when you query for that in the code, it kind of explains what you're trying to get, but it's also pretty brittle.
+
+And it's also not compatible with a lot of the modern CSS styles of writing classes, which are things like BEM, that have a very particular way of writing the classNames, sort of the BEM format, that actually detracts a bit from when you're trying to use them as code identifiers, but they're very helpful on the CSS side, right? The designers at Basecamp are really happy with BEM and the advantages that BEM affords them. But it's brittle. Well, it's two things - it's ugly, and then it's brittle. It's ugly when you're trying to target elements that have BEM classes in JavaScript code, because BEM has this format that makes sense for CSS and doesn't make sense at all for code.
+
+So I didn't like the ugliness of the code, and I also didn't like the brittleness of it. But BEM often times -- like, you add another --down or a --pad, or whatever it is that you add to a BEM class to ever so slightly tweak it; well, the designers were doing that. Well, again, it broke the code. So that sense of brittleness I wanted to sort of get away from, and that's where the concept of targets came up.
+
+Basically, Stimulus implores you to only find DOM elements you want to work with through the concept of targets, which is basically just an explicit name that says "This element is going to go by this logical name that belongs to this controller." And then we can move that name around and it's not tied to this specific type of element; this could be an input element, it could be a button element, it could be spam element, and as long as it has a data-target that's of a certain thing, you can always find it... Which not only gives you this sense of clarity around what elements when you read the HTML code are actually used by the dynamic behavior, and in the code itself, it's very clear when you're referencing a specific target what that target is and what the purpose is.
+
+It also gives you a sense of generic distance from the specific structure of your DOM tree. As I said, a data target of let's say hello.name can be applied to an input text, a text area, a span element... So you can write these generic controllers that work with all sorts of different kinds of specific DOM tree expressions, which is really neat... Because that was the other thing I noticed when I was reading through the Basecamp codebase, that we had a lot of feature-specific JavaScript that really was quite generic in its essence, and it was only tied to a specific feature because it was naming certain types of DOM element types, or it was specifically naming certain types of CSS. So you couldn't really reuse these pieces of feature from one area of the application to another because they were tied to a specific screen and a specific layout.
+
+\[27:58\] And I wanted to get a bit more generic around that, such that we could build up a library of generic behavior that we could apply to any sort of structure, regardless of how the designer wanted the page to look. So I wanted that distance between those two things.
+
+That's one of the other reasons why I'm not really a big fan of tying the specific DOM layout to the code, as React does and what a lot of component-style development does, because it doesn't afford you this sense of reuse that you can develop generic concerns and generic aspects of your dynamic behavior that you can tie to any DOM tree.
+
+That was one of the considerations, so that's the target concept, that's a prime motivator, and then the other thing -- there's really only two other things. There's controllers and there's actions. And actions are quite similar to targets. They are the triggers. A lot of code we had in Basecamp was using explicit event handling, where we would tie an event handler to usually somewhere up the tree, to some parent, and then we would sort of interrogate that event as it bottled up, to see if it was relevant for the behavior we were trying to match, and then do some code.
+
+Usually, what we were doing - we were using the attribute called data behavior, and then we would scan these data behavior attributes as the events bottled up, and then if the attribute was a match, the data behavior was a match, we would trigger the behavior. Well, that does not provide very readable code always, I'd say. Sometimes we would provide a data behavior on a parent element, and then there would be specific DOM elements inside of that parent that would trigger behavior and we would catch these events and we would do something.
+
+One of the things I really disliked about that was I wanted to get to the point where if someone opened up a piece of the HTML, they could see what was going on, that it didn't have this shadowland of event handlers living somewhere in some JavaScript files far, far away, so you couldn't tell what the HTML actually wanted to do. I wanted it to be explicit, such that "Hey, if you click this span, if you click this button, you know what's going to happen." That's the concept of the actions. We make those explicit in the HTML itself; we don't hide them away as event handlers in the JavaScript code. I mean, underneath there's an event handler and that's what Stimulus provides you. It provides the plumbing to do that. But what I've found was a lot of JavaScript code was very, let's say, low-level. Yes, event handling is the way that we process this way and we deal with the UI, but that doesn't have to be the way we actually write it, and it certainly isn't the best way to provide understanding of how a system works.
+
+So now you can do data-action on a button or a span or an input or a submit button or anything else that you want when the user clicks that or submits that or hovers on that, or some other sort of event trigger - you can trigger a specific action, and that's spelled out. So it's data-action equals, for example, click points to hello@greet. So you read what that button does. You don't actually need to read the code, you can read "Okay, if a user clicks this button, I'm going to call the greet method on the hello controller." That's super explicit, and it means that most of the time I don't even need to look up what the code actually does, I don't need to look up the underlying JavaScript controller to understand what actions are available on this view, and I found that that was just so liberating.
+
+\[31:52\] The second part of that was that just like data targets, the actions were generic and they could be moved around. So if we currently have an action on, let's say, a button, and we move that action to a link, the controller could remain unchanged, because the controller didn't actually care or know what type of element invoked its functions, which again is quite different from when you marry the HTML structure with your component and with your dynamic behavior. Then you're kind of locked in step and you can't reuse these things and you can't move them around. So that seemed like a big advantage.
+
+Then finally, the last concern or the last concept is this notion of the controller, which is basically an encapsulation of all the behavior that relates to one aspect of one feature up the system. That's where we basically just use JavaScript classes, and these classes have methods on them, and these are the methods that we call through the action triggers, and those actions and the methods that they correspond to interact with the targets that we've made, and that's it.
+
+There's three basic concepts, and it doesn't take a long time to learn it. Even without learning it, you can read the code, you can read the HTML structure and you can understand what's going on, and that's really all we needed. In fact, I was kind of shocked when I first started extracting this stuff; I was kind of thinking "Oh man, there's gonna be so much stuff here" and it was the real epiphany of seeing that those three basic concepts - the controllers, the targets and the actions - were enough to extract such a wide body of behavior from Basecamp.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Going back to the targets for a second - I guess I have a comment and then a question as well... I guess the comment would be that you seem to have formalized -- honestly, David, this is what I love about what you do in the open source community, because you conventionize things that often times people are doing informally... Because I've been doing a very similar thing for years in kind of a half-hacked way, which is trying to balance between selectors, classNames, dealing with the design side, dealing with the functionality side... So what I've been doing for a long time is just using like a js-prefix on a className, and saying js-, and then you're basically doing a target. That is then a signal to the designer that "Okay, this class does not have to do with the look and feel. This is a JS-specific thing", so therefore they won't get changed based on someone trying to change the way something looks.
+
+Then secondly, it also signals that this thing has some JavaScript attached to it somewhere, because like you've said, we've detached the handling to some place in the sky, and so there's a little bit of a signal there. But I like the data-\* way of going about it; there's no drawbacks... And I guess the question comes in, when it comes time to actually modify things - so you mentioned BEM, and the problem is classNames pulled out from underneath you or what have you... These are issues, and this is genericizing that and pulling it out of the className and putting it onto a data attribute... But how can you genericize it when it comes time to actually modify the elements? For instance, "This click handler actually hides an element, or changes it to a variant that's a larger version or a smaller version." Aren't you still dealing with classNames in terms of the current look and feel of elements, or is there somehow that you guys are also genericizing that so you don't have to worry about the BEM classNames in your controllers?
+
+**David Heinemeier Hansson:** I love this question, because this is literally the fourth concept that we'll be introducing shortly and that I've been working on for some time. It's exactly as you say, we do almost all of the mutation of existing elements through classes, whether we want to hide something - well, that's just adding in a class that hides it; or we wanna show something, or we wanna play an animation, we use CSS animations... Classes are really the way to mutate the DOM the vast majority of the time. And those classes are explicit, right? They are BEM-ed, or whatever they are...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[36:14\] Exactly.
+
+**David Heinemeier Hansson:** ... and you shouldn't let those BEM-ed classNames leak into your code, because you don't want your designers to have to open up some JavaScript controller just to change a BEM class to add a bit more padding, right? So what we're going to basically do is a similar construct where you can declare a data attribute that includes the BEM class in the HTML, which is where the designer would be changing it around and then you can reference that BEM class in your code and say "Hey, I want the CSS class that's for hiding. Give me that class" and then apply it to this element. We return it to this sense of genericism.
+
+We're gonna be working on that next. I'm hoping that Stimulus 1.1 will include the abstraction of classes into this structure, such that we can use logical classNames that make sense for the code, rather than concrete classNames that make sense for the designer, that adhere to BEM, that do all these things.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Does that mean that the className will get set through a data attribute?
+
+**David Heinemeier Hansson:** Exactly, yes. So there will be, for example, somewhere on the controller, so they can be changed by the designer in the HTML. So the designer does not need to monkey around with the controllers, at least as long as it's a stable set of logical classNames. If they add additional classNames or whatever, you might still have to have some involvement, but in many cases, especially with BEM - BEM has this idea that you can mutate and you can combine a single presentation of an element through a mutation of one className.
+
+That is really something we want to abstract and get away from. There should not be BEM classNames inside of a controller. They should be logically referred to.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It would be rad if there was some sort of declarative way that you could set that all up upfront, maybe in one place, where you could map these things, whether it's just a map in your JavaScript code or something, or it's like these logical representations... Because there's a handful of them; like you said, you could cover 80% with defaults, and these map to these particular classNames... Just so that the designer is not necessarily having to add data-\* className to all of the elements all throughout the HTML.
+
+**David Heinemeier Hansson:** Well, you only have to do it for the CSS classes that you need to dynamically apply, remember that. Most of the CSS classes you don't need to do this work with. It's only for the ones you need to dynamically apply to something, like if you have a specific class for hiding an element or something else like that.
+
+I don't actually think that in most cases you can go generic with them, especially if you follow BEM. A specific presentation of one feature might have a logical className for hiding things, but the concrete implementation in BEM for hiding something might be slightly different than it is somewhere else, because it adds or removes padding or margin in some ways.
+
+We're still sort of feeling that out for now. I'm pretty confident that a huge step forward would simply be to go abstract with the CSS classes you need to dynamically apply, and then declare either the same element that holds the controller name, or on the target or somewhere else where it makes sense. Just disconnecting these two things so we get on two different trains of changing them.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's interesting that, Jerod, your version and David's version is essentially not the same, but it's very explicit; you were prefixing JS, and David's solution is reusing the concept of data attributes, and again, being explicit and saying "This is different, this is not your normal class. It's for a special purpose."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.
+
+**David Heinemeier Hansson:** \[40:11\] I think it's coming from the same motivation, right? We want to be able to read a piece of HTML and know what it does. We don't want it to sort of just magically have things happen to it because far, far away there's some JavaScript class that declares an event handler that just happens to match this thing. We want the explicitness and we want to be able to read it. I think that's just good code practice. So whether you do it one way or another, as you've found, there's just a clear motivation to solve that problem.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, and I think I was trying to get back to something that we lost when we went from writing your click handlers right there in the HTML, which is decidedly too low-level to be in your markup... Moving away from that, when we switched to that style of markup to "Now we're going to put everything into jQuery click handlers" or what have you; we lost that connection. Now there's a lot of people rightly saying "Hey, this is actually a step backwards, because now you have random things happening that you don't know about. There's no connection in the code, so this kind of bridges that gap and puts a nice happy medium in place.
+
+**David Heinemeier Hansson:** Which really comes back to why we're doing Stimulus, and why aren't' we just picking an existing framework that's out there. There's certainly plenty of them in JavaScript land already... And I think some of it is because I just saw regressions; I saw that we took certain steps forward in certain domains with this new set of JavaScript frameworks, and then we took huge steps backwards in all sorts of different ways, that apparently people just didn't care about - and that's fine; we don't all have to care about the same things... But I cared about those things, and I could live with those regressions. So Stimulus is a way to not take those regressions. Get back to in some ways a simpler time, which is -- I mean, it's always dangerous once you get into arguing what's actually simpler and what's not simple...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right, the good old days...
+
+**David Heinemeier Hansson:** ...because a lot of it is tied up into -- exactly, first of all, good old days. The good old days were often not that good. And second of all, just that we have different applications and they work in different ways. If you're trying to make this very intricate UI with tons of related things and blah-blah-blah, then maybe these heavy frameworks do make sense. If you're trying to make an application like Basecamp or GitHub, they don't make sense and they are overly complex for what we're trying to do.
+
+And I just felt like there was an under-representation of frameworks that were trying to tackle the class of application that GitHub and Basecamp finds itself in, which is not a small class. I would argue, in fact, that it is the larger class, and it's been severely under-served by this recent advent and explosion of JavaScript frameworks; they're all focused on the same paradigm, that the server-side was now just tasked with producing JSON, and then you would have some client-side agent that would take that JSON and turn it into an HTML and build up a DOM, whether virtually or otherwise, and... All the frameworks are just the same, which is why I was sort of chuckling a bit when there were such furious wars between like "Or, are you using React or are you using Angular or are you using whatever...?" If they all come through the same paradigm of server-side generated JSON that's then dynamically translated into HTML. I mean, come on, guys. It's the same idea, right? We're really furiously arguing about the small details.
+
+Stimulus provides a completely different paradigm, a paradigm where the server continues to create the entire HTML document, and then we sprinkle this remaining behavior that we need onto this through a progressively-enhanced approach. But even when we do dynamic stuff - so we have Stimulus controllers, for example, that will trigger a behavior on the server side; what the server side will return is a fragment of HTML. We use HTML as the transport protocol. Very rarely - although sometimes - we will use JSON to do it.
+
+\[44:22\] So when we want to update a part of the page, we ask the server-side, "Hey, can you give me this fragment of it?" Which allows wonderful things like fragment reuse, which you're familiar with. In Rails we call those partials, and the fact that you can use the partials, the fragments of the HTML, both to render the initial version of the page and the subsequent updates, is a huge step forward.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's interesting. I'm curious about this. I know that in Ruby code, David, you like to remove comments and rewrite code, or replace comments with more readable code. And in your process of evaluating Basecamp and looking through things of this transition to Stimulus, I'm curious how much of that happened in your code, like how many comments were joyously removed in replacing with this prototype version that you created?
+
+**David Heinemeier Hansson:** A fair amount of it, and I think that that is exactly the attraction to adorning the HTML with this very explicit tie-in with how things are called... Because when you have a button that says -- it has a date or action where if you click this button we're gonna call the greet action on the hello controller, that's incredibly self-documenting. You do not need a code comment to explain what's coming on. And on the controller side, the same thing, right? When you have a declaration of action methods upfront, you don't need to comment on how those are hooked up. You're relying on the conventions that Stimulus affords you, and those are already documented in Stimulus, so we can really cut down on the amount of needless documentation that we need in our application code... Which for me, whenever you have copious amounts of code commenting, it usually tells me two things - either that you wrote convoluted code (that's probably the most common); 2) that you have a set of conventions that you're just still waiting to extract, and then once you extract these, you can remove all this repetitional commenting... And these are the driving motivations for why we want to get rid of them. Why? There are code smells.
+
+In some rare cases, what you want to do is actually just counter-intuitive, and sometimes it's basically around browser bugs, or something else. You're doing something that does not make sense if you just read it, and you need a code comment to explain, "You know what? That's because i.e. Edge does something stupid here, and this is why we need to do this monkey dance to make it happen."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**David Heinemeier Hansson:** But even in that case, I often find that you can still encapsulate that monkey dance in a method that succinctly explains that it's because Edge or Safari or Chrome or whatever is doing something that you need special consideration for.
+
+**Break:** \[47:19\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Alright, David, you said what you saw was a lot of regressions, and maybe even side-steps in certain cases... One of the things I remember back in the day when Backbone.js first hit the scene - because this was one of the very first front-end frameworks that specifically said "Get the state out of the DOM. Get it into JSON, get your state out of the HTML." And that was a step, and everybody started doing that in different ways, so it began completely detaching the front-end and the back-end. And like you said, Stimulus offers really a different opinion or a different way of going about building applications than a lot of the other front-end frameworks out there, and one of the things that it says on the home page is "State is stored in the HTML, so that controllers can be discarded between page changes, but still reinitialize as they were when the cache HTML appears again." So that's definitely a big difference from other things out there.
+
+Can you tell us about how that state is stored, how you deal with change? I know you mentioned it a little bit during the last segment, but let's go a little bit deeper into how that all works.
+
+**David Heinemeier Hansson:** Sure. So we store state in much the same ways that we declare the targets and the controllers and so on, through data attributes. We basically just set these data attributes on usually the root element of that controller, and that stores the usually minimum amount of state. I think one of the reasons Backbone and other frameworks have argues for extracting state into something else is because maybe they had a ton of it.
+
+We try not to have a ton of it. We try to have very little state within the DOM itself, but just enough so you can reinitialize a controller, and it can come back to the form that it was. For example, a state could be -- we have a collapse controller that allows you to click a certain element to open or close another element, right? Like a Show More, or See Less, or whatever. And the state of whether that is open or closed is something you can store in the DOM. In that particular case, often times the state is actually just an application of the classes. Classes provide usually most of the state that we need.
+
+For example, for the collapse example we will apply a hidden class when the element is closed, and we will remove that hidden class when the element is open. That right there will store the state in itself. We try not to duplicate or create a shadow state of what the DOM already has, because we're trying to enable you to get HTML from anywhere. Most of the time this HTML is coming in the form of the initial render, and the controller simply has to take that initial render and instantiate themselves based off that.
+
+Then if you have other updates, it could be websocket updates; you have a websocket channel that inserts new HTML into the DOM. When that new HTML is inserted, it needs to include its own state. We don't have something else to also pass that state along with. As I said, we use HTML predominantly as the transport layer, not JSON. So the transport layer has to include its own state, and that's where we found this is actually a nicer way of doing it.
+
+Then just the fact that we go back and forth between pages - we're using this together with Turbolinks, and Turbolinks stores a nice cache of the pages we've been switching between. So if you have controllers that have been mutating the DOM, usually just by adding CSS classes or whatever, Turbolinks will remember the state of that when you go from one page to another. So we get to sort of keep that state alive through the Turbolinks cache, and that's adequate and actually a useful constraint in most cases to not go hogwild with a whole bunch of intricate state.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[54:24\] I suppose that works just fine without Turbolinks, you just don't get the advantage of the fast refreshing at a full page's reload.
+
+**David Heinemeier Hansson:** Yeah, and you've just gotta be a little careful with those full-page reloads and what the browser ended up caching... Whether it ended up caching the final version of what the DOM looked like, or it'll reinstantiate it from scratch. Turbolinks helps a little bit there in terms of making it more fluid and making it easier to keep that state cached.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So were there specific changes that went into Turbolinks to support this? I know you called a one two-pack punch, or something like this... I was wondering if that just happened -- they just paired well nicely, or if Turbolinks requires some specific upgrades or enhancements to actually support Stimulus natively?
+
+**David Heinemeier Hansson:** It didn't, because we were already basically writing Stimulus before we were writing Stimulus. This approach of using progressive enhancement and storing state in HTML, and using HTML as the transport layer - that has been our pattern and our paradigm for a long time, and we built Turbolinks originally with that paradigm in mind. So Stimulus is basically just an encapsulation of that paradigm, and packaging it up in a nice way. That was really the missing second punch to Turbolinks. We would pitch Turbolinks to someone, like "Hey, this is this wonderful thing that can actually cut out 80% of all this dynamic behavior you're doing, because it'll speed up the page changes to such a degree that you don't need anything else." There's a lot of dynamic behavior we're doing for performance reasons, because it feels too slow to do a full-page change, that you no longer need when you're using Turbolinks because the page changes are really fast. So you can just send the whole page again, even though you're making a relatively small change, in a lot of cases.
+
+But then there was still the last 20% where you didn't wanna do that, right? You had some small change, like a collapse show thing, as we've just talked about... It's a little excessive if you're showing or hiding, which is basically just applying or not applying a CSS class to an element required a whole roundtrip to the server, and sending down all the HTML for a whole new page, just to apply a single additional class. That doesn't make sense. That's not proportionate, and it's not gonna be fast enough to feel really good.
+
+So that was this missing grey land, the last 20% of behavior where we kind of just waved our hands and said "Um, have you looked at MutationObservers?" and then left it as an exercise for the reader, which was actually a fairly large task for someone to do. So I could see how not having a clear answer for that last 20% held back Turbolinks in some ways. So I'm really happy that we now have Stimulus to provide 100% of the answer for applications like Basecamp, and if you wanna write them in this way, you now have all our tools; there's nothing hidden under the carpet here. Everything that we use to write Basecamp the way it is today is open source, packaged up as an easy-to-use library or framework, and the story is now complete... And I think that that's really important - if someone is looking at their application and they can't visualize how they're going to solve this specific part of it or this specific feature, it's hard to gain adoption.
+
+\[57:35\] I think Turbolinks suffered for some time with that... It also suffered for other reasons, for example this notion that apparently it was hard to understand the concept of a persistent process, and that you couldn't just drop in any jQuery plugin that was written with the idea of every page change blowing the process and the instantiated application away, even though that was exactly the model that people had been following with single-page applications in the heavy frameworks, right? They all are run in a persistent process where every click of a link is not a full reload... But for whatever reason I think a lot of people just saw like "Hey, I should be able to just use Turbolinks in any odd jQuery plugin that I can find on the internet" and those things need to just magically work together out of the box... And they sometimes just didn't. You had to do special considerations to deal with the fact that Turbolinks does not change the full page, right? It gets a whole HTML document, but then it does the updating of that document in process, and it keeps the state of the JavaScript around, and it keeps the interpreted CSS around, and that's where it gets its super speed, its turbo speed.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Turbo, yeah. \[laughter\]
+
+**David Heinemeier Hansson:** Exactly. At Basecamp we just didn't use a bunch of JavaScript or a bunch of jQuery plugins. We wrote most of our code that we needed ourselves. And sometimes we used some jQuery plugins, and we just altered them, so they were compatible with Turbolinks. That never seemed like such a big deal to us, because the benefits that we got back were so monumental, and what it allowed us to do especially in terms of the majestic monolith and applying a simple application that was automatically updated across five different platforms was just such a huge win that it was really hard for us to imagine that anyone would look at the small changes or concessions that you had to make to get those wins and go like "Oh yeah, that's not worth it."
+
+Anyway, I mean, Turbolinks and Stimulus - they're very much for writing for ourselves. I'm doing these things because we need them in Basecamp, and when someday that day is going to come when I write Basecamp 4, I want them to be available and packaged in clean form so I can just use these frameworks off the shelf and get on my merry way. And if someone else ends up using it, that's great. And if not a lot of people end up using it, that's also great; I really will continue to do it. But it's sort of the same approach I have with Rails...
+
+When I originally wrote Rails, I wrote all of it. I needed a way to talk to the database - well, I wrote Active Record. I needed a way to render templates - well, I wrote Action View. So at Basecamp we have a tradition of writing our own tooling, and then we share our tooling more out of gratitude to the rest of the community for the tools that we do use, and just because that's a nice thing to do, and sometimes it ends up taking off, as in the case of Ruby on Rails, and we get some benefits from that. And if it doesn't take off, that's also fine and we get to use them.
+
+I think that's really a sort of ambivalent or distant relation to the open source process, that we open source because we can and because we like it, not because "Oh, it has to gain adoption."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right. Just hypothesizing a little bit about Turbolinks, because I've been around I think for the length of its run, and I've seen the community reaction to it over time, and as you know, we were fans of Turbolinks, we opted into Turbolinks with a non-Rails app, which I think is somewhat unique... But I think some of it had to do with, like you said, that problem with existing jQuery plugins and the fact that Turbolinks was such a plug and play aspect of a Rails application; you could literally just comment it in or out, and it would or would not do everything for you. In terms of Turbolinks itself, it was just so easy to flip it off - pun not intended, but perhaps it should have been - so easy for people to just use Turbolinks as the scapegoat.
+
+If it'd be on, this JavaScript issue doesn't happen; oh, it must be Turbolinks. So it just got a bad name right off the bat, just because of the existing ecosystem it came into. And then you know, it was kind of like the Siri situation - it gets this reputation upfront, and then over time people kind of just naysay it or don't give it a second look. But maybe through Stimulus people will give Turbolinks a second look, or maybe not. But like you said, you're ambivalent to it, so...
+
+**David Heinemeier Hansson:** \[01:02:11.09\] Well, I think also a part of it is you have to understand what it's doing for you, and I think perhaps that was the drawback of having it be so easy to turn on and be included by default... If you don't fully understand the benefit that you're getting, you don't understand the tradeoff. And if you don't understand what benefits you get, any cost is too high. If I perceive the benefit as nil or nothing, then if I just have to pay just a modicum of work myself to get it, I'm gonna say "That's not worth it for me." And I think we're perhaps getting to the point where more people are realizing that using these heavy-duty client-side frameworks, "Oh, wait, they also have costs", and they also have in many cases towering complexity, and I think we're getting some veterans that are coming out of that process that go like "You know what, if I'm gonna build another thing, I'm not gonna do it like this again. That was just painful." I think that pain is exactly what we try to address. And until you've suffered that pain, I don't think you can fully appreciate the salve that we are offering, the band-aids that we are offering... Which in many ways was the same way that Ruby on Rails came to be. There was so much pain that a lot of people had experienced using Java frameworks or PHP without any frameworks that they were very in tune with the pleasure that Ruby on Rails could bring them because they knew the pain. I think until you know the pain, you don't have space in your brain to appreciate or even properly evaluate the solutions to it.
+
+I think everyone should go and build a full application in the heaviest duty of JavaScript frameworks, regardless of whether the application warrants it, just so they can suffer through it on their own skin and come out scarred and battered on the other end and go like "You know what, maybe there's a better way."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's the bitter and sweet, right? You can never really understand the sweet goodness of the chocolate bar unless you've had that nasty piece of candy after dinner, or whatever. You've gotta have the bitter to enjoy the sweet.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's right.
+
+**David Heinemeier Hansson:** Yes, and I think that that goes for all sorts of learning. I think that's why lists of best practices for example, divorced from the pain from where they arose, often don't make a whole lot of sense or they don't stick. People aren't ready to internalize lessons until they've encountered situations that really demanded those lessons in flight. I think that's just part of the learning process; you can't appreciate everything up front. I think plenty of people end up going off to college and they end up having all sorts of courses in philosophy or whatever and they can't apply them to their experiences of where they are in life, and they go like "Oh, this is worthless. What's existentialism about? I can't use that for anything", and then a decade later they go, "Oh, wait a minute... Let me hear what Camus has to say about the meaning of life", because they're at a different station in life.
+
+I think there's a lot of technology that works like that - it doesn't really reveal itself until someone has suffered through the long road.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Something that goes to teaching and documentation, and one of the things that is very difficult to do through readme's and docs, and even blog posts - blog posts are a little better, but they're so hard to find over time - is like "What were the circumstances in which this solution came to be and why does it exist?", which is some of the gaps that we try to fill with the Changelog and shows; conversations with the people to give that historical context... Because there are no panaceas, there's no silver bullet, and all of these have trade-offs and all of these have reasons why they were created.
+
+\[01:06:03.10\] So if you lack that historical context as somebody who's coming to a Stimulus or coming to a React, and just picking the tool off the shelf based on the readme, and you don't understand the historical context in which those tools were developed and why they exist, then you're basically doing a coin flip, and you don't know how you can apply it to your given circumstances.
+
+So it's tough... Like you said, sometimes you just have to live and learn, you have to just go through it and realize it, but I think we can work together to give these historical contexts to people, so they're more equipped to make those decisions.
+
+**David Heinemeier Hansson:** I think that's spot on. I think there's so much technology that's presented just as the how, not as the why, and it's that why that gives us the context to evaluate whether this is a good fit for us. Can we see ourselves (the person who developed this solution) and their troubles in our troubles? That was one of the reasons why when we introduced Stimulus we did it with a document called "The Origin of Stimulus", which basically walks through "Why did we extract this? Why did we make this?", and tells the story of the Basecamp code and our journey of making a Majestic monolith, and how we use Turbolinks together with Stimulus, why the concepts make sense, which -- one of the problems, as we've talked about here, right? Like the problem of using CSS classes for targeting - it's brittle, it's all these other things... It's not just like "Oh, here's how to do that", right? And I think that that's often missing, and I think sometimes people sort of evaluate things from the wrong perspective.
+
+One thing I've heard a lot of times is "Oh, I wanna use React because Facebook is using React, so it's gotta be good enough for me." I've heard that with a lot of other pieces of technology. "Big company is using X, thus it must be good enough for me." I actually think it's often the exact opposite. A lot of the patterns and even outright technologies that large companies use are the worst thing you could pick when you're just starting out, or if you're a single developer or a small team, because these things are designed to work with much larger teams, in much larger companies with all sorts of different considerations and specializations, and a stomach for a different level of complexity. When you're trying to serve a billion and a half people, you just have different problems than what we're trying to solve at Basecamp.
+
+We're trying to solve servicing a few million people at the most, right? It's different orders of magnitude, and the correct and applicable patterns and practices that are relevant for someone trying to solve for a solutions base of a few million people less is just very different from the kind of people like Facebook, who have tens of thousands of people working on the product and are trying to solve for a billion and a half. And I think sometimes people just get enamored with this "Oh, I wish I was Facebook. So if I just start using their toolset and their methodology maybe I'll become Facebook." No. If you looked at any history of actual Facebook, do you know what their code originally looked like when Zuckerberg wrote it? I don't think there's any of those practices left anymore at the company, because they evolved and they turned into something else. But if Facebook had started out with the heavy duty patterns and practices and methodologies that they're using now, if Zuckerberg would have had to do all those things as just developer one Facebook would never have happened.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right. I have a counter to that, though. Twitter used Rails, and many people use Rails.
+
+**David Heinemeier Hansson:** I think Twitter is this great example, a great scarecrow, a great reminder that there's so much more than technology to whether someone fails, even technology-wise or not. Twitter in the early days of the Fail Whale blamed Ruby on Rails for its trouble, because it was much easier to blame an external vector like Rails than their crappy architecture for why the site kept falling over.
+
+\[01:10:15.26\] And then just recently, a few days ago Twitter - or some former executive from Twitter - through an article in Vanity Fair, blamed Ruby on Rails for the fact that Twitter ten years into its existence has still not dealt with harassment and abuse in a proper way, on Ruby on Rails... Which is just wonderful. It's a wonderful anecdote of how humans are so desperate to diverge and deflect blame and accept responsibility for their own actions, and they were just trying to find any scapegoat.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's all your fault, man.
+
+**David Heinemeier Hansson:** Exactly, right?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** If you hadn't released Ruby on Rails, they would have never had this problem with harassment.
+
+**David Heinemeier Hansson:** And actually, that is true, right? That is actually true, in some sense, because maybe Twitter would never have existed, or it would never have taken off, or it would never have gotten done in time, or they would have run out of money, or something else. So in a way, I think Ruby on Rails is implicated in the harassment problem at Twitter, because Ruby on Rails helped Twitter get started and helped Twitter get off the ground.
+
+The fact that maybe it's been 10+ years and they've still done so poorly at addressing the fundamental problems of harassment and abuse on the platform - maybe that blame falls elsewhere, but anyway.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's move into something I guess a bit more promising. So you've had your hand in obviously writing frameworks, we know that... You do some great writing on Signal v. Noise, you've got a podcast, you've written books, you race cars, you've got kids... You're like everybody else, you've got all these cool things, but next up is YouTube for you. You've got this cool new channel maybe not everybody has heard about yet, but I've been enjoying it, and one thing I think is pretty interesting is that you get this chance to essentially sit down with you and look through the Basecamp codebase, and you're just sharing all the reasons why you've done what you've done. Can you take a moment and just kind of share what your plans are with that channel?
+
+**David Heinemeier Hansson:** Sure. The channel is called "On writing software well", and it's just on my YouTube. It's basically just me opening up an editor and taking a topic that could be testing, or callbacks or whatever, and showing how we use that in Basecamp, and showing how we use Rails and Ruby to solve the problems.
+
+What I wanted it to feel like was if I sat down with another programmer and we just looked through some code together - I always love doing that, because I find that many programmers when they're talking in the abstract about code and patterns and so forth, they have these fierce arguments: "No, this is the wrong way of doing it! This is the right way of doing it!" And then if you sit down with them and you look at the actual code, you end up agreeing way more often than not, because the pressures and the concerns of a specific piece of code guides most reasonable people in a similar direction, at least when they have somewhat of a shared background and experience. There may be functional programmers who are like "Oh, anything object-oriented or side effect-laden is wrong" and whatever, you're not gonna find common ground with them perhaps, but for anyone who exists in the same paradigm and somewhat have shared beliefs, if you look at concrete code, we end up liking the same things a lot of the times, a lot more often than if we just argued about it in the abstract. And this is one of those lessons that I've learned time and time again. Ruby or Rails back in (I think) 2009 merged with another Ruby Framework called Merb. And Merb was born for a lot of different reasons, and some of the reasons were that the people behind Merb cared about different things than what I cared about; not that I actively didn't care about them, they just weren't top of mind. There were some extensibility concerns that they had and some performance concerns that they had, and we thought we had these fundamental, underlying philosophical differences about how to write a framework in Ruby.
+
+\[01:14:08.05\] So I sat down with Yehuda Katz in particular, who was one of the guys involved with Merb at the time, and we had these fierce debates when we were just chatting in Campfire, and then we sat down, looked at the same piece of code and went "Oh yeah, we believe the same thing." And we're like, "Wait, what?!" We were just arguing our heads off in opposite directions, and then we looked at a piece of code together and we came to the same conclusions. I've done that so many times now that I believe that it's really the primary way you should be arguing code patterns and principles - by looking at actual real production code, and doing A/B's. "Let's write it your way, then let's write it my way, then let's see if there's one or the other ways that's the best, or more likely that there's a combination of the two ways that turned out the best that we both like." I find that that happens just all the time.
+
+So I wanted the YouTube channel to have that feel as though we were sitting down at the keyboard together and looking at code together and coming to similar conclusions. That doesn't mean -- I mean, everyone is not gonna sit down and watch these videos and go like "Oh yeah, I would have written it exactly like David would have written it", but at least if you hear the why, why we wrote it that way, how we weighed the tradeoffs and came to certain conclusions, you'll understand why we did it the way that we did, and I think that that understanding is often sorely missing when people are talking programming and talking shop.
+
+That's why the arguments get so heated. We start having these violent disagreements that in many ways are completely unnecessary, completely unjustified by actual code... And it can't be solved or it can't be addressed just by looking at example code. It can't be addressed by the stylized, idealized version of what programming looks like because until you have all the real constraints and pressures of production code, you're not taking all the complexity into consideration, and often times that's exactly what tips the scale as to whether to go one way or the other way - to look at the real code.
+
+For example, I did an episode on globals. Rails 5.2, which is just about to be released, has a new encapsulation of globals for dealing with things like current used and current account within the lifecycle of a single request. And if you just sat down and had an abstract conversation about globals with a programmer, most programmers would say "Well I learned/heard/know that globals are considered harmful. Why are you using globals? Globals are terrible? Don't use globals. Are you a bad programmer? Are you terrible? What's going on here?" \[laughter\] And then you sit down and like "Yeah, all those things have strengths of truth in the aspect that globals are dangerous and you do need to be careful, but hey, let's look at this code.
+
+Let's look at how much simpler and easier it actually becomes to understand once we use a global. It's not a thing you should use all the time and in all circumstances, and you can certainly get carried away with it, but in this particular instance, using the feature on this particular aspect of the code, it gets better. This A is better than that B."
+
+I think that those are the concrete tradeoffs, as I said, that are really just fascinating, and I think it opens people's minds much more than just a blog post that says "Global is considered harmful."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's one thing I've really appreciated about this series with you, is that you explain your preferences, and then you look at the code and you say "This is why I'm breaking my own rule. This is why I'm putting these methods out of order in the private method, rather than as a table of contents, like you normally would. This is why, because it reads better, so I'm willing to trade off and go against my typical grain for these reasons." You kind of get a chance to step into your mind, watch how you program an actual application called Basecamp, you're looking at actual Basecamp code. I think that's a pretty interesting concept and I'm glad you're doing it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[01:18:09.02\] That is really I think the pivotal thing, the nugget, the justification of it. The fact that there are all these principles and patterns and best practices of how you should write software, and in isolation, they all make sense. But when you write a real application, usually all of them disagree. There will be one pattern that tells you to do things this way, and then there'll be a best practice that tells you to do things in the other way, and you have to weigh these things and consider "Which one is more important in this particular instant, and which one will I put more weight on?" and that's where the wisdom is hidden.
+
+I find that a lot of programmers apparently seem content to just learn the recipes, to just learn like "Oh, I can recite all the patterns. I can recite Solid, I can recite the Law of Demeter", and then they don't really know what to do when these principles are in conflict with each other, and that is really where actual code is written. It's written in conflict, it's written under one pattern and one consideration pulling in one direction and another pulling in another direction, and you have to carefully weigh - and sometimes subtly so - which you're going to put more emphasis on.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I agree with everything Adam said about the saw. A quick suggestion or a feature request for upcoming -- and this might be a little harder for you to organize, but it'd be cool if you would sit down with Sam or with Javan or with somebody who has a different opinion about even Basecamp code, and you guys could talk through a refactoring, or talk through things where it actually is a dialogue. It might be an interesting alternate style format for this show.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Pair programming.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.
+
+**David Heinemeier Hansson:** Yeah, I'd love to do that. I think that is basically what I'm trying to do. I'm having a dialogue somewhat with an imaginary programmer sitting next to me, and the two minds -my own and my head, right?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**David Heinemeier Hansson:** But part of it too with this -- so I've produced five episodes, two hours of content or so, in like a week. The reason I can do that and the reason I can churn these things out is because I do one take, and I just flip on my browser, I load up a couple of tabs of code, and then I'll just freewheel it. That is crucial to why this is happening.
+
+If I had to put in diligence and preparation work that perhaps it would take to include multiple participants, I just couldn't do it at this velocity and perhaps it'd be harder for me to maintain the stamina to do it at all. I think that's why it's kept me back from doing this before, because I thought "Oh, it's gonna be big production, it's gonna be a big thing." No. I mean, most of these episodes have like literally 5-10 minutes of prep work where I'm picking out the files I wanna talk about, and then I hit record, and then I push Stop when I'm done, and that's it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's a tradeoff.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** In a good way. It's a pretty simple production process for you.
+
+**David Heinemeier Hansson:** I think 'production process' is even a very fancy word for it. I mean, I'm hitting Record and then I'm hitting Stop, and that's it. There's not a lot of post-processing or second takes.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha. Was there anything else to share about the future of Stimulus, maybe the next version of Rails before we close out? Any sort of planned convergence? I know that Rails does a lot of generation in terms of scaffolding; any plans of Stimulus being baked in and HTML going down the pipe with data attributes? Anything left unplugged?
+
+**David Heinemeier Hansson:** What is coming is greater integration with Webpack. We already have wonderful integration with Webpack through a gem called Webpacker, which gives you a way of using Webpack in a Rails application in an easy way... And Stimulus is made for that. Stimulus is made for use with Webpack, and sort of -- you can use it outside of that; there is a compiled version, you can do that, but most people most of the time will use it with Webpack or something similar. That's the direction we're moving towards. We're moving away from generating or compiling JavaScript through the asset pipeline...
+
+\[01:22:13.23\] The asset pipeline goes all the way back to I think 2008 or something, where we had to build our own tooling for compiling JavaScript, because there just wasn't a good ecosystem around JavaScript itself to do it. Well, that's totally different now. There's actually multiple competing ways of compiling JavaScript, and many of them are very fine, and we've decided to pick Webpack as the default... And we should take full advantage of that, because that's where most of the development is happening.
+
+So the asset pipeline can kind of step back now that the job of compiling JavaScript is so eminently handled by the JavaScript community itself, and say "You know what, I'm just gonna hand this responsibility over." So Rails 6, as we're coming up upon after the release of Rails 5.2, is going to figure out a way to make that blend beautifully, and have an emphasis and a focus on Webpack out of the box... Which then also means a focus on making it super duper easy to use Stimulus out of the box, because you'll basically just be able to say "Rails, New, My App --Webpack = Stimulus" and we'll set you up with a default scaffold for using Stimulus... Even though there's not that much scaffolding to set up, but I find often times what keeps people back and stops them from using something is just getting Hello World, right? Just getting all the things wired up... I mean, the joke, particularly in the JavaScript community, is that you have to spend two days setting up your compilation pipeline before you even get to Hello World.
+
+So Rails certainly wants to sort of assist you with that, such that you can run one command and you can see Hello World is already there, and then you can start filling in with your own application code. So that's one area that we're focused on... And just mending relations perhaps in some ways with the JavaScript community - I think I've certainly had a contentious relationship with JavaScript for many years, because I thought ES3 was kind of a crappy language, to be quite frank, for this kind of style (object-oriented focused) that I wanted to write, and that the ecosystem around interfacing with the DOM, and the differences between browsers just made it a miserable experience. Well, lo and behold, ten years makes such a difference, and things are different now, and I've come to really enjoy JavaScript in many of its forms, and Stimulus is certainly one of those forms, so I'm just really excited to share that with the world and share a different paradigm, as we've talked about... From the "JSON over the wire is the only way to go" idea, to say "Hey, do you know what? HTML is actually a wonderful wire format and we've used it successfully for 30 years now, and it still has likes in it, and then some, and it has clear advantages on productivity and other things.
+
+So let me promote that as an alternative path; I have no illusions that just because we promote this, it'll turn into the path and that everyone will switch to it. I think there's tons of momentum - and deservedly so - around a solution like React, and elsewhere. And we don't have to win total domination.
+
+\[01:25:16.01\] I think development communities sometimes have this mistaken notion that it's all about market share, and it's all about picking a winner. To me, there's just such wonderful beauty in the diversity of the web. The fact that the web was this first platform that allowed us to pick any kind of implementation language that we wanted on the back-end, that you could write it in Perl, Ruby or AppleScript, and as long as it output HTML, the user is none the wiser... Which just gave a rise to just such a wonderful diversity, that we could have people of all different inclinations and brain shapes find exactly the language and the environment that spoke to them, and I hope that everyone has the opportunity to find a language and an environment that speaks to them as much as Ruby and Rails has spoken to me. I think we can carry that into the JavaScript land to a large extent now, because of the advances with transpilers and so fort... And so should we with the proliferation of different paradigms.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, David, thank you so much for your time today, man. I appreciate your willingness to experiment, to dive into Basecamp and extract patterns and come out with what is now Stimulus. And then your passion for open source, to release it because you can, and because you have gratitude back towards the tools that you've used. We appreciate that about you, so thank you very much.
+
+**David Heinemeier Hansson:** Thank you. I can honestly say that it's entirely my pleasure.
diff --git a/Jeff Robbins is an actual rockstar_transcript.txt b/Jeff Robbins is an actual rockstar_transcript.txt
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+[0.00 --> 6.70]  Bandwidth for Changelog is provided by Fastly. Learn more at Fastly.com. We move fast and fix
+[6.70 --> 11.42]  things here at Changelog because of Rollbar. Check them out at Rollbar.com. And we're hosted
+[11.42 --> 17.24]  on Linode servers. Head to linode.com slash Changelog. Hello and happy Friday. It's Tim
+[17.24 --> 22.36]  Smith, senior producer at Changelog. I'm doing a feed takeover today to play for you an episode
+[22.36 --> 27.70]  of my new show, Away From Keyboard. Away From Keyboard is a show about the human side of
+[27.70 --> 32.04]  creative work where I talk to creative professionals about their story, what makes them tick, how
+[32.04 --> 37.20]  they do what they do, and the challenges of life and creative work. The following is my
+[37.20 --> 49.22]  latest episode with Jeff Robbins. Enjoy. From Changelog Media, this is Away From Keyboard,
+[49.22 --> 52.90]  a show exploring the human side of creative work. I'm Tim Smith.
+[52.90 --> 60.38]  Where do I even begin to introduce Jeff Robbins? You see, Jeff has had a few different successful
+[60.38 --> 65.68]  careers in a time that most of us get around to one. He worked on the web before there was
+[65.68 --> 70.36]  a web, started a company that's built some of the most famous Drupal websites. And as
+[70.36 --> 75.30]  if that weren't enough, he was in a band in the 90s that signed with A&M Records, toured
+[75.30 --> 81.04]  the US and Canada, and played some of the coolest events. So where exactly does Jeff's story
+[81.04 --> 84.58]  begin? In a magical place called the 80s.
+[86.52 --> 92.60]  Okay, let's go into the way back machine, Tim. Man, so I mean, I've been interested in computers,
+[93.30 --> 100.36]  you know, and that kind of stuff for a long time. And I'm old. So it goes way back, you
+[100.36 --> 106.58]  know, in the 80s, my dad bought a IBM PC Junior, which was like the cheaper one that you could
+[106.58 --> 110.58]  that people could afford for their house. And I started learning basic programming on
+[110.58 --> 116.34]  that. And then I did all kinds of stuff. I had a Hewlett Packard programmable calculator
+[116.34 --> 122.02]  that I'd won in the state math fair, or it was the science fair. My town, it was the math
+[122.02 --> 126.42]  fair. Then we went to the state science fair. And I won this calculator, and I programmed
+[126.42 --> 132.96]  it to play Monopoly. So I, you know, I'm a nerd going way back to the 80s. And, and then
+[132.96 --> 139.80]  I bought an Atari ST computer that had a MIDI port had MIDI ports on it. So I could hook
+[139.80 --> 144.12]  it up to my synthesizers and drum machines and stuff like that. And I remember I worked
+[144.12 --> 150.36]  all summer to save up the $1,200 or whatever it was that the Atari cost. And then I realized
+[150.36 --> 155.68]  like, if I got a modem, I could connect to these bulletin board systems and talk to people
+[155.68 --> 159.54]  and I don't know, find out information and stuff. And so I did that, you know, with the
+[159.54 --> 165.40]  various bauds of modems over the years. And I eventually realized that I could make some
+[165.40 --> 172.04]  money with my computer skills. And I started doing temp work on Macs and learned desktop
+[172.04 --> 176.80]  publishing and eventually learned Freehand, which was kind of a precursor to what we now
+[176.80 --> 183.00]  call Illustrator and ended up getting a job at O'Reilly doing technical illustrations for
+[183.00 --> 188.76]  their books. And they were connected to the internet, which was really cool. And so I
+[188.76 --> 194.28]  could FTP out to things. And I, there was a thing called Gopher, which was a precursor to
+[194.28 --> 200.04]  the web. And I could connect to these free software, like actually free software, not pirated software,
+[200.46 --> 205.32]  but you know, like open source software boards and download software. And it was so much faster
+[205.32 --> 211.58]  than doing it over my modem. And then the web started and O'Reilly being kind of one of the,
+[211.58 --> 219.70]  kind of at the crossroads of that stuff, you know, writing about books about TCP IP and all of,
+[219.82 --> 225.40]  you know, they had a book about Gopher and FTP and all that kind of stuff. The people at CERN who
+[225.40 --> 233.78]  were developing the HTTP protocol and, and HTML came to Cambridge, came to the office in Cambridge,
+[233.78 --> 238.58]  where I was working and kind of did this pitch like, Hey, you need, I'll need to get into the web.
+[238.58 --> 242.66]  The web's going to be the big thing. We want this to be a big, big thing. And O'Reilly should write
+[242.66 --> 247.96]  books about it. And Tim O'Reilly and, and Dale Doherty being the visionaries that they are said,
+[248.04 --> 252.88]  well, we're going to do more than that. We'll create an online magazine and use our publishing
+[252.88 --> 259.54]  skills to, to do web stuff. And so they started creating the global network navigator, GNN.com.
+[259.70 --> 265.26]  And I was involved in a lot of the brainstorming of that. And the woman who would eventually become my
+[265.26 --> 271.00]  wife was the designer. So my, my wife is the first commercial web designer. And I got so excited
+[271.00 --> 276.28]  that before GNN even launched, I started one of the world's first web development companies in
+[276.28 --> 282.74]  1993. And it was an uphill battle because no one had heard of the web. No one wanted a website
+[282.74 --> 286.66]  because they didn't know what it was. They feel like they were, they would say things like, ah,
+[286.66 --> 292.80]  I got burned. We spent all this money on a CompuServe page. We invested all this money in Prodigy and,
+[292.80 --> 298.22]  and now Prodigy is shutting down. How is the web going to be better than that? And, uh, and so I
+[298.22 --> 305.00]  would have to do sales pitches that were like that. And then, uh, about a year later, um, my band got
+[305.00 --> 310.74]  caught up in a, all record labels were very excited about it. We got caught up in a bidding war and I
+[310.74 --> 317.78]  said goodbye to, uh, web stuff and spent the rest of the, the nineties, uh, in a van driving around the
+[317.78 --> 325.26]  country. And, uh, we eventually played Lollapalooza and all sorts of radio festivals. And I got to see
+[325.26 --> 330.10]  most of the places in the United States and Canada and a few places in Europe and, and all that kind
+[330.10 --> 337.02]  of stuff. And a lot of my web friends went on to found what are now very big empire kind of.
+[337.40 --> 342.98]  Right. And, uh, but I was there, you know, cool guy who they met through web stuff who was in a band
+[342.98 --> 346.38]  and the band was touring around and playing Lollapalooza and stuff. And for me, they were like,
+[346.46 --> 351.58]  Oh, I know the guy that started Flickr and Blogger and Twitter and Slack and things like that.
+[351.58 --> 356.90]  So, so what, what did you do with your company when you decided to tour with the band?
+[357.06 --> 359.82]  Uh, I handed it over to my business partner.
+[360.02 --> 361.52]  Was that a difficult decision for you?
+[361.66 --> 368.62]  I got offered a record deal, Tim, in 1994. It was like rock and roll. No, it was not a difficult
+[368.62 --> 374.38]  decision. I figured that'd be the answer, but I wanted to ask just in case.
+[374.54 --> 381.08]  Uh, you know, I mean, I also, I started doing web stuff for, for the band. We were, uh, we created
+[381.08 --> 386.54]  the first, uh, record label website for the little independent record label that we were running,
+[386.54 --> 393.32]  uh, on the side. My band was one of the first bands to have a website. Um, uh, and, and then we got
+[393.32 --> 397.22]  signed to A&M records and I was in there talking to them about like, Oh, what are you guys doing with
+[397.22 --> 401.60]  this whole web thing? And they kind of looked at me like, um, well, if there are any conferences
+[401.60 --> 406.92]  that you want to go to and you could speak on behalf of A&M. And so I kind of, for, uh, you know,
+[407.02 --> 411.16]  I don't know, a couple of years before they kind of got going with it, I was sort of like the de
+[411.16 --> 415.66]  facto web guy for A&M records while I was in one of the bands on their label and stuff like that.
+[415.70 --> 417.10]  So I kept my hand in.
+[417.38 --> 418.44]  What brought you back to the web?
+[418.60 --> 423.26]  Well, in, in about 2001, there were a whole bunch of record label mergers. There were in the,
+[423.26 --> 428.68]  in the nineties, there were, uh, nine major record labels. And over the course of about a year and a
+[428.68 --> 433.80]  half, that number went to three. So basically they just all sort of collapsed in on each other.
+[434.04 --> 439.86]  And, you know, our first album had done well, but basically A&M came back to us and said, Hey,
+[439.98 --> 444.76]  you know, we think you've got momentum here rather than squeezing everything we can out of this album.
+[444.76 --> 449.22]  Why don't you go in and do another album? Uh, however, when the accountants came plumbling
+[449.22 --> 454.08]  through to try and decide which bands to keep and which to leave while these labels were merging,
+[454.22 --> 459.52]  we just hadn't sold enough records. And so, uh, we, we lost our record deal and, um, we kind of
+[459.52 --> 464.50]  fumbled on for a while. We put out some stuff independently and went back to that record label
+[464.50 --> 470.74]  that we'd started back in like 91, 92. And, you know, it was a few years before the, uh, label money
+[470.74 --> 476.80]  dried up, but I, you know, started, put out my shingle and started doing, uh, freelance stuff.
+[476.80 --> 483.20]  I got a job at an ad agency, uh, through a series of circumstances and coincidences. Uh, my wife and
+[483.20 --> 489.60]  I ran Ringo Starr's website for about three, three years. And that sort of led to bigger and other
+[489.60 --> 495.08]  projects for sort of celebrity type people and, and kind of bigger and bigger web projects, which
+[495.08 --> 501.76]  eventually led me to Drupal. Uh, and in trying to build a really big and difficult Drupal website,
+[501.76 --> 507.22]  I met Matt Westgate, who was just a guy doing work in the Drupal community. And I met him on a
+[507.22 --> 512.18]  message board because he was just the most friendly person answering my questions, all of my really
+[512.18 --> 517.48]  like kind of beginner-y questions. And, uh, and he was super friendly. And I said, Hey, can I get on
+[517.48 --> 520.64]  the phone with you? Can I just ask you these questions? I would pay you. I'd done the math.
+[520.72 --> 526.60]  And if like, I could pay you to answer these Drupal questions for me, then it would save me time.
+[526.60 --> 531.26]  And, and it would be well worth it for me to pay you out of my own pocket. And so I did that. And
+[531.26 --> 534.84]  the whole time I'm saying, this is so great. This, you really know this stuff. This is like,
+[534.84 --> 538.66]  you can't find this information anywhere. And, uh, as the project was starting to wrap up,
+[538.68 --> 544.08]  I kept saying to him, like, I, I, we got to do something. I, I, I, I gotta, I gotta pay you back
+[544.08 --> 548.90]  more than just the money I'm paying you. Like, let's do some, let's start a company where we can just,
+[549.00 --> 553.16]  you can explain to people how to use Drupal. I know how to start a company. I know how to promote
+[553.16 --> 559.56]  things. And, uh, and that's what became Lullabot and Lullabot started in, in, uh, 2006 and it was
+[559.56 --> 564.20]  still really early days, uh, you know, with, with Drupal, there weren't any books out about it or
+[564.20 --> 569.24]  anything like that. So we, you know, Lullabot people authored some of the first, well, Matt
+[569.24 --> 574.72]  authored one of the first Drupal books. And, uh, we started the first Drupal related podcast and did
+[574.72 --> 581.02]  the first Drupal trainings and, um, and built a lot of the kind of first Drupal websites that people
+[581.02 --> 586.78]  have heard of. We launched on January 1st, 2006, uh, mostly to just make it easy to remember.
+[587.68 --> 593.90]  And by, by March, I have pictures of us sitting in a pub in London where we were starting work on the
+[593.90 --> 599.42]  MTV UK website, which was kind of the first website where, you know, cause previous to that, it was like,
+[599.48 --> 605.62]  oh, the, you know, university of Calgary has built, uh, their, you know, uh, this website, you know,
+[605.62 --> 611.78]  like, oh, that was really cool. Like, okay. But it wasn't like MTV, you know? And, uh, and so,
+[611.90 --> 617.24]  you know, from there we, we did all kinds of stuff. Think, think back to 2006 to you. What,
+[617.24 --> 620.78]  what was the scariest thing of starting a company?
+[623.44 --> 632.58]  I, I don't know. So about a year prior to that, maybe a year, a little over a year prior to that,
+[632.58 --> 638.06]  I had a job at an ad agency and my wife and I were running Ringo Starr's website and the people at the
+[638.06 --> 643.96]  ad agency kind of thought that was cool. And a little bit like, why, why, why are you here at
+[643.96 --> 650.18]  this little Providence ad agency when you're doing all these things out there? Uh, but my wife was
+[650.18 --> 657.20]  pregnant. Um, we just bought a new house and I walked into my manager's office to ask for more
+[657.20 --> 661.86]  time off. I was out of my vacation days, but there was another web conference I wanted to go to.
+[661.86 --> 665.54]  And I thought it was fine. Just don't pay me, you know? And, and he turned to me and he said,
+[665.62 --> 671.80]  what are you doing here? Like, why are you working here? You could be doing other things. You know
+[671.80 --> 678.28]  that, right? And I said, uh, yeah, I know. I guess so. He said, go do other things. I said, uh, okay.
+[678.38 --> 683.78]  All right. And so I left there and I left that job. And as I was driving home, I was thinking,
+[684.02 --> 689.96]  wait a minute, did I just quit or was I fine? I just bought a house. I've got a mortgage and I've got,
+[689.96 --> 695.82]  I've got a, you know, my son was born like, you know, three months later. And like, so jumping off
+[695.82 --> 703.86]  into the abyss is kind of my skill. And so I'm not saying that it's not scary. I'm saying that
+[703.86 --> 711.80]  perhaps my skill is just not being able to estimate how scary it will be. Right. So was Lullabot scary?
+[711.80 --> 717.22]  No, not at all. It seemed like the next thing to do. And, and we had a whole lot of, of success
+[717.22 --> 722.12]  early on. I mean, the fact that we got MTV within three months of starting was key. Like, you know,
+[722.18 --> 727.04]  it felt like, Oh, this, this is good. It's a positive feedback mechanism. But you know,
+[727.04 --> 733.16]  as we started to hire people, there were definitely fearful points, you know, why, why am I doing this?
+[733.16 --> 737.44]  Um, and it always, it's the same, it's the same thing with the band or anything. It's like, well,
+[737.46 --> 741.56]  why am I doing this? The answer is because at one point I thought it would be really cool.
+[743.02 --> 743.42]  Right.
+[744.82 --> 750.42]  Ah, that'd be cool. I'm going to do that. The metaphor I always use is like, it would be really
+[750.42 --> 756.06]  cool to swim across this lake. And about halfway swimming across the lake, it's like, what the
+[756.06 --> 762.70]  F? Why did I do this? You know, this is crazy. You know, I have no idea how I'm going to get across
+[762.70 --> 766.26]  this lake, you know, and then you get to the other side and all these people come up and go like,
+[766.50 --> 770.72]  wow, it is so great. Well, how did you, I don't know how you did that. That's so great. You know,
+[770.72 --> 777.16]  it's like, cause I was going to drown otherwise. There's some lessons in there somewhere for
+[777.16 --> 780.22]  somebody I'm sure. But, uh, yeah, that's, that's how I work.
+[787.14 --> 791.46]  Coming up, Jeff talks to me about why he's such a champion of remote work,
+[791.46 --> 796.08]  why he thinks it's the future of work and adjusting to life after leaving a company he
+[796.08 --> 797.92]  built and ran for so many years.
+[804.86 --> 809.72]  What's up AFK listeners, Adam Stachowiak here, editor in chief of Changelog. If you've been
+[809.72 --> 813.66]  enjoying Tim's exploration of the human side of creative work, you'll probably love our show
+[813.66 --> 818.44]  Founders Talk. Founders Talk features stories from founders, CEOs, and makers about their journey,
+[818.44 --> 822.28]  their lessons learned, and the behind the scenes of building and running their company.
+[822.72 --> 827.10]  Here's a preview of Pia Mancini, co-founder and CEO of Open Collective. She's sharing some of the
+[827.10 --> 832.66]  struggles of being a mother and a startup founder. The first few months are absolutely hard. So
+[832.66 --> 836.96]  super challenging, you know, they need your attention. They can't walk, they can't do anything
+[836.96 --> 842.62]  for themselves. And, you know, you're trying to keep doing, but then also, you know, doing your
+[842.62 --> 848.16]  responsibility as a parent. And it's just like, you know, it's just probably the most challenging,
+[848.44 --> 853.52]  challenging parts of a parent's life is, is those first, you know, six months to nine months
+[853.52 --> 854.88]  of a child's life.
+[854.96 --> 861.56]  Yeah, for sure. But it also, it also gives you an extra energy, like an extra, I don't know,
+[861.64 --> 866.82]  creativity. I don't know if it's the hormones or what, but it's like, you have that, you know,
+[866.82 --> 873.26]  you go into a, yeah, you go into a different gear and you just, you just keep pushing forward.
+[873.34 --> 879.00]  I don't know. That's something that makes you, yeah, just shift gears into that extra thing
+[879.00 --> 885.88]  and you can, and you can do it. Also you, what I found mostly with motherhood is I don't have
+[885.88 --> 893.32]  time for BS essentially. I don't, I guess I don't have, I have very little time to waste
+[893.32 --> 900.36]  for two spare. So you become, at least I became really good at saying no to things and just
+[900.36 --> 908.32]  really cutting, you know, cutting loose things or, or, or situations or people that just, yeah,
+[908.40 --> 913.48]  I didn't, just didn't have time. It made me much more focused because the time I have away
+[913.48 --> 917.44]  from my daughter is like, I'm doing this right. Otherwise I'm with her.
+[917.44 --> 922.00]  So Founders Talk is all about in-depth one-on-one conversations with founders and makers.
+[922.00 --> 926.80]  If you dig that, learn more and subscribe at changelog.com slash Founders Talk.
+[931.04 --> 936.02]  From ChangeLog Media, this is Away From Keyboard. I'm Tim Smith.
+[937.52 --> 943.86]  When Jeff and Matt Westgate started Lullabot in 2006, they decided that it would be a distributed
+[943.86 --> 950.20]  company from day one. I've always thought it was such a brave decision, but Jeff describes it more as a
+[950.20 --> 956.46]  happy accident. In itself, it was a little bit of a, a leap of faith, that missing part of my brain.
+[957.02 --> 963.78]  And, and, but it worked really well. And even just sort of, because it was an experiment,
+[963.78 --> 969.80]  it allowed everything to be more agile and thoughtful that like, I don't know, how should we
+[969.80 --> 974.78]  talk to each other? How should we keep in touch? How should we communicate? How should we, you know,
+[974.78 --> 979.82]  when, when you have these barriers where you're not all coming into an office and kind of falling into
+[979.82 --> 984.84]  these legacy systems and processes of like, ah, of course I know what it means to work at an office
+[984.84 --> 990.22]  and commute for an hour each direction. Like I know how that works. Um, but this, none of us knew how
+[990.22 --> 995.40]  it worked. And so, uh, it was really great to kind of figure it out as we went, but as we figured it out,
+[995.40 --> 1001.36]  it was like, this is great. Like, I want to share this with other people. And, um, having worked at O'Reilly,
+[1001.36 --> 1007.16]  uh, media in the early nineties and being a friend with, uh, Tim O'Reilly, Tim has a saying that
+[1007.16 --> 1011.94]  everyone has a book in them. What's your, what's your book, you know? And, uh, and, and my wife has
+[1011.94 --> 1016.84]  written several books about web design and, uh, continues to do that. And so I thought like,
+[1016.88 --> 1022.54]  I want to share this, but I, I don't quite feel like I can speak on behalf of a community of
+[1022.54 --> 1027.32]  companies that are doing this. I could just talk about what Lullabot did, but I don't know if that
+[1027.32 --> 1031.32]  will help anyone because it's kind of built into the company's DNA. And I kind of want to get a good
+[1031.32 --> 1035.78]  cross section of like what's going on. And I think that for companies to talk to each other
+[1035.78 --> 1040.82]  would generally be good. And so I had this idea to do, um, a conference, but, but a sort of a
+[1040.82 --> 1045.62]  discussion, uh, round, what I call a round table discussion conference. And we decided to call it
+[1045.62 --> 1051.84]  Yonder, where we invited people that were running, uh, distributed companies, remote teams, company
+[1051.84 --> 1059.20]  leaders and managers to just kind of sit around in a room together and, and share, ask questions,
+[1059.20 --> 1063.54]  share ideas and, and, uh, and to have a discussion. And that's how Yonder got started.
+[1063.66 --> 1069.34]  As I started to make my way out of Lullabot, I, I took the brand along with me and started doing a
+[1069.34 --> 1075.04]  podcast and eventually hired some people to do content. And we have a, a, an active newsletter.
+[1075.20 --> 1080.34]  Now Yonder.io is where people should go to, um, find out more about Yonder and get on the mailing
+[1080.34 --> 1084.00]  list and, uh, listen to the podcast. If you're a podcast person, and if you're listening to this
+[1084.00 --> 1089.08]  podcast, you probably are a podcast person. Uh, you know, there's a, there's a fair amount of,
+[1089.20 --> 1096.22]  uh, resources out there that are sort of aimed at remote workers or, or sort of digital nomads,
+[1096.32 --> 1103.00]  you know, but my fear is that that discussion is a little bit of an echo chamber and it doesn't
+[1103.00 --> 1109.40]  actually expand the job market. It doesn't create more jobs for those people. So my focus has been
+[1109.40 --> 1118.26]  trying to talk to companies and about companies and how companies hire and manage and, and, and run
+[1118.26 --> 1123.32]  remote teams. I think remote workers will find it interesting and, you know, may it sort of this
+[1123.32 --> 1127.78]  idea of like managing up, you know, for, for the workers to understand what good management look
+[1127.78 --> 1132.24]  like. They can kind of nudge their managers in the right. Hey, have you heard this podcast? And, uh,
+[1132.24 --> 1137.30]  you know, ultimately kind of create a better work environment. Um, but that's, you know, my goal is to,
+[1137.30 --> 1142.60]  my mission, uh, with, with Yonder is to really expand that market. And, you know, it's, it's
+[1142.60 --> 1147.98]  happening slowly. The people that are doing the companies that are doing remote work, there's so
+[1147.98 --> 1154.74]  much excitement and elation around how good it is that it's easy to kind of think that everyone must
+[1154.74 --> 1160.96]  understand that. But really like in that world of like fortune 500 companies, we're just not there yet.
+[1160.96 --> 1165.96]  Those companies are not champing at the bit to make remote work work. But I think, you know,
+[1165.96 --> 1170.96]  we're going to hit the tipping point in, in the next few years, uh, and the podcast is going to
+[1170.96 --> 1176.30]  become very popular. Yeah. It's already pretty popular, but. I like the, I like the description
+[1176.30 --> 1183.54]  that remote work is the future of work. And, you know, I really do think that the companies that have
+[1183.54 --> 1190.94]  latched onto this idea have only benefited because they have this amazing pool of people that they can
+[1190.94 --> 1197.74]  hire from, uh, that isn't tied to any particular location. And I think a lot of the times you find
+[1197.74 --> 1203.88]  people who are really great workers, you know, um, who are kind of devoid of the, the, uh, as,
+[1203.94 --> 1209.44]  as I like to say, ass and seat mentality, where as long as I'm here for eight hours, I did what I was
+[1209.44 --> 1217.12]  supposed to do. Right. Rather than, I feel like the remote work kind of whole idea is to be productive
+[1217.12 --> 1223.74]  in the moments that you're in front of your desk. Well, yeah. I mean, remote work is autonomy. Like
+[1223.74 --> 1230.64]  the idea of autonomy is, is not an add on to work when you're doing remote work. Like you can work
+[1230.64 --> 1235.78]  at McDonald's and you're not going to have any autonomy. You could work at Starbucks and, oh,
+[1235.78 --> 1239.48]  there's a little bit more culture and they give us a little bit more choice. You know, I have some
+[1239.48 --> 1244.66]  autonomy, you know, this feels great. If you're doing remote work, people can't look over your shoulder.
+[1244.66 --> 1248.88]  There, you know, there, there are certainly companies that are developing tools for this
+[1248.88 --> 1253.32]  sort of big brother shoulder looking over, but you're kind of fighting against nature a little
+[1253.32 --> 1257.80]  bit there, you know? And then there are some prerequisites for allowing some autonomy, which
+[1257.80 --> 1263.72]  is trust, uh, respect oftentimes, you know, and you mentioned this, but, uh, you know, to sort of
+[1263.72 --> 1268.94]  expand on it a little bit, one of the reasons that companies who are hiring remote workers can get
+[1268.94 --> 1274.58]  such great talent is because there are so many people that want to work remotely. And,
+[1274.66 --> 1278.76]  you're not only are you choosing from a larger talent pool, kind of by definition,
+[1278.76 --> 1285.66]  you're offering a better job, right? Because, uh, it's more flexible and, and, and offers probably,
+[1285.66 --> 1291.12]  uh, autonomy and trust and respect along with it. Right. Hopefully. Yeah. Oh, hopefully,
+[1291.22 --> 1294.24]  hopefully I don't, you know, companies have all sorts of different cultures and even
+[1294.24 --> 1299.22]  distributed companies have all sorts of different cultures, but this means like most of the companies
+[1299.22 --> 1305.38]  I talked to, uh, you know, I was just talking to Addie Berry who runs, uh, Drupalize Me, which was a
+[1305.38 --> 1311.62]  spinoff company from, uh, Lullabot that does Drupal, uh, training online. Uh, and she was saying they
+[1311.62 --> 1317.24]  were hiring a, uh, customer support person. She said that they got, I think it was like 3,000
+[1317.24 --> 1324.92]  applications in four or five days or something like, it was just like, uh, incredible an amount
+[1324.92 --> 1329.68]  of like, you know, and, and so from that now you're, now you're just playing numbers, right?
+[1329.68 --> 1334.26]  This is just statistics, you know, how many, how many of those people are good? How many of those
+[1334.26 --> 1339.86]  people are great? How many of those people are better than you could imagine? Like, you know,
+[1339.90 --> 1344.00]  just sift through them and find the ones that are better than you can imagine and then hire them.
+[1344.00 --> 1348.10]  And now you've got people working at your company that are better than you can imagine, you know?
+[1348.62 --> 1355.26]  So, so it's, it's been a few years now, uh, that you've left Lullabot. What, what led up to that
+[1355.26 --> 1361.84]  decision? Well, uh, you know, uh, I'm, I'm a, I'm a starter. I'm a big thinker. Um, you know,
+[1361.84 --> 1369.36]  I like solving really difficult problems and, um, I like, you know, making things that are kind of
+[1369.36 --> 1375.96]  indistinct, more distinct, uh, you know, things that are confusing, more clear, you know? So that
+[1375.96 --> 1381.14]  comes into like things like branding and kind of building culture and all that kind of stuff.
+[1381.14 --> 1387.60]  And I also really like working with really great talented people. And so, uh, over the years with
+[1387.60 --> 1393.20]  Lullabot, there were a lot of big problems to solve, you know, who are we? How do we talk about
+[1393.20 --> 1398.48]  ourselves? What do we do? How do we do what we do? What is health insurance? How do you offer health
+[1398.48 --> 1403.00]  insurance to employees? You know, things like that, that are these like, ah, uh, and so over,
+[1403.14 --> 1408.48]  over time, I'm not saying that I did all of that, but I helped to find really great people to come
+[1408.48 --> 1414.64]  in and help Lullabot to do that. And we have hired a really great leadership team of really capable
+[1414.64 --> 1419.24]  people. I don't tend to carry a whole lot of ego when it comes to that kind of stuff. I'm happy to
+[1419.24 --> 1424.88]  relinquish control and let other people, uh, do things when they're, when they're capable. And so I
+[1424.88 --> 1428.60]  kind of got to a point where I, you know, was surrounded by all these really capable leader
+[1428.60 --> 1433.82]  people, uh, you know, who were running the company and we had kind of figured out who we were.
+[1434.00 --> 1437.40]  There were a couple of years that were kind of looking for the missing pieces. What do we,
+[1437.56 --> 1440.72]  what are we not thinking about? What are we not thinking about? Like, what are the pieces that
+[1440.72 --> 1446.42]  are falling between the cracks? Like I've, you know, found somebody to do sales and I found someone to do
+[1446.42 --> 1452.54]  HR, you know, what, what are we not thinking about? But, you know, as even those pieces started to get
+[1452.54 --> 1459.06]  kind of at least defined, if not fixed, um, I found myself sort of, uh, I wouldn't say with
+[1459.06 --> 1463.98]  nothing to do, but just kind of getting antsy. And my business partner, Matt started to see me
+[1463.98 --> 1467.74]  kind of in that position. And he said, you know, what do you, what do you need? I said, I don't know.
+[1467.82 --> 1471.44]  Well, do you want to take some time off? You know, maybe you could take a sabbatical and just sort of,
+[1471.44 --> 1478.38]  you know, find your mojo. And, and, uh, when you're running a company, it's like having children,
+[1478.38 --> 1483.36]  you know, you don't, you wouldn't ever consider not being there for them. Right. You wouldn't,
+[1483.48 --> 1487.64]  you know, it's, this is, this is just, you know, this is my life. It's not even, you don't even
+[1487.64 --> 1492.86]  think of it as a responsibility because there's not the option to not do that. You know, you'll,
+[1492.96 --> 1497.40]  you have a responsibility to feed yourself, but it doesn't feel like a burden. It's just what you do,
+[1497.50 --> 1501.72]  you know? And in that same way, I was just running lullabot. But as I started thinking about kind of
+[1501.72 --> 1507.16]  stepping away and kind of catching my breath, um, it was really more appealing than,
+[1507.16 --> 1512.48]  I really kind of surprised myself. And, uh, so I, I, I did that, uh, for a while. And about six
+[1512.48 --> 1517.52]  months later, Matt came to me and said, listen, I've been thinking if you wanted lullabot to buy
+[1517.52 --> 1522.62]  you out, we could do that. That would be a, you know, a way that we could go. And, um, and he'd
+[1522.62 --> 1527.38]  been doing a whole lot of research about, um, employee owned companies and just sort of the
+[1527.38 --> 1532.48]  financial models around all of that. And, and, uh, and he said, let's, you know, we could do this for
+[1532.48 --> 1538.50]  you. And then if I, Matt wanted to do that, maybe at some point down the road, you would be paving the
+[1538.50 --> 1544.14]  way for a model for me to do that if I ever wanted to do that. But it, you know, it's taken me a good
+[1544.14 --> 1550.72]  period of time to kind of, uh, find my identity, you know, um, for so long it was, you know, the
+[1550.72 --> 1554.80]  lullabot guy and people would even say like, Oh, do you still play music? And I'd say, well, I don't
+[1554.80 --> 1561.04]  know. How long can you go like not playing music and still call yourself a musician? And, uh, and,
+[1561.04 --> 1565.16]  you know, cause it was just like, I was so, you know, entrenched in the lullabot stuff. And it was,
+[1565.24 --> 1568.78]  I mean, it was emotionally rewarding with, there were great people. We were working on great projects,
+[1569.24 --> 1573.50]  uh, you know, all of that stuff. I'm not saying that it was, but you know, I was kind of,
+[1573.50 --> 1579.44]  I definitely had sort of set that part aside. What is that adjustment period been for you?
+[1579.56 --> 1586.26]  Because I would assume that when you build a business and it's so successful as lullabot has been
+[1586.26 --> 1592.82]  and you running it for so many years, what is that adjustment like to walk away and,
+[1592.82 --> 1598.48]  you know, now, now try to have to, like you said before, trying to figure out what your identity is.
+[1598.98 --> 1605.68]  Yeah, it's weird. Um, but it's been nice not to carry that weight. You know, it allows me to even
+[1605.68 --> 1611.04]  relate to the people who continue to work at lullabot in a different ways. You know, I'm not the boss
+[1611.04 --> 1615.88]  anymore. And I also, I started doing business coaching and, and talking to other people that
+[1615.88 --> 1621.88]  lead other companies about, um, what they're doing and kind of help them to think about their
+[1621.88 --> 1626.28]  companies. And that's been super rewarding. You know, uh, it's a, you know, a lot of the same stuff
+[1626.28 --> 1630.80]  I was doing as the CEO of lullabot, but I get to kind of help these other people who have different
+[1630.80 --> 1634.74]  problems out, you know, and, uh, and share, share my experience. That's been really rewarding.
+[1634.74 --> 1643.24]  And then I, I, I started a new band, uh, last year and we put out a five song EP earlier this year.
+[1643.24 --> 1648.48]  And that's been getting really good reviews and responses and people, you know, so I'm out,
+[1648.70 --> 1653.28]  I just had a show on Saturday and it was really great. So it feels really good to kind of be
+[1653.28 --> 1660.70]  exercising those muscles again, recording and kind of the more like entrenched creative side of things,
+[1660.70 --> 1665.64]  because, you know, I mean, I, I think that business is creative and it ought to be creative,
+[1665.64 --> 1672.26]  but kind of at scale when there's a lot of money involved and I guess a lot of people involved too,
+[1672.64 --> 1677.18]  you want to double check, right? You want to make sure the math adds up. So it's, it's just really
+[1677.18 --> 1683.16]  nice to be kind of back, you know, where I can just like, I'm going to write a song that has one
+[1683.16 --> 1688.08]  note. The whole song is just one note, you know, and like, I can do that. People are going to say,
+[1688.08 --> 1692.60]  oh, that's weird. I'm curious to listen to it. Not like, oh my God, you're going to drive our
+[1692.60 --> 1698.40]  company to the ground. You know, like, that's a crazy idea. Why would you do that? You know?
+[1698.66 --> 1702.26]  So it's nice to have that outlet and yeah, just nice balance.
+[1705.54 --> 1710.96]  Jeff Robbins. You can find him at dayjeff.com. Listen to songs from his band's latest EP at
+[1710.96 --> 1718.06]  123astronaut.com. AFK is produced, edited, and mixed by me, Tim Smith. The beats are from the one and only
+[1718.06 --> 1723.18]  break master cylinder. I'm Smith, Timmy, Tim on Twitter. You can find the show at AFK underscore
+[1723.18 --> 1729.66]  show. Thank you to our sponsor hired head to hire.com slash AFK. Our bandwidth is provided by
+[1729.66 --> 1734.44]  Fastly. Learn more about them at fastly.com. We move fast and fix things here at changelog
+[1734.44 --> 1740.22]  because of roll bar. Check them out at rollbar.com and we're hosted on Linode servers. Head to
+[1740.22 --> 1745.74]  linode.com slash changelog. We'll be taking a bit of a break so that I can take a much needed
+[1745.74 --> 1752.22]  vacation and we'll be back on August 29th. One last thing before we go. Jeff told me what life
+[1752.22 --> 1758.84]  is like having a record deal. I mean, uh, it wasn't particularly lucrative. You know, it meant that
+[1758.84 --> 1764.50]  there was money to record, but more than that, it meant that like people cared, you know, there was
+[1764.50 --> 1770.48]  sort of a support system. You know, we paid ourselves very minimally, uh, just enough to get by
+[1770.48 --> 1775.12]  because we wanted to, you know, invest the money that was out there and making sure that the band
+[1775.12 --> 1779.50]  could get out and have the money to tour and promote and be successful and stuff like that.
+[1779.56 --> 1784.34]  So it was really, you know, it was, it was great. You know, had a lot of like peak life experiences,
+[1784.58 --> 1791.24]  you know, there's really nothing quite like standing on a stage playing to 20,000 people.
+[1791.24 --> 1797.06]  Like that's pretty cool. And it's hard not to walk off stage and go like, that was really cool.
+[1799.04 --> 1801.56]  I'm Tim Smith. And this is away from keyboard.
diff --git a/Join the federation! Mastodon awaits... (Interview)_transcript.txt b/Join the federation! Mastodon awaits... (Interview)_transcript.txt
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@@ -0,0 +1,559 @@
+**Jerod Santo:** Eugene, let's start with the start of Mastodon. Where did this come from and when did it happen and what problems were you trying to solve?
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** I started developing Mastodon when I was studying computer science at uni. It was around March 2016, and it was sort of a throw-away project for me at the start, because I was just curious to play around with the technology, and I wasn't really sure it would go anywhere.
+
+The situation around Twitter was a little bit different at the time. It wasn't so obvious where things were gonna go, to put it that way... It was less about how bad Twitter was and more about principles and interesting technologies.
+
+I've been aware of the existence of federated social networks for a few years. Back in 2010 I think was the first I heard of them from a friend. We used to discuss that technology and we used to even post on Identi.ca, which was the federated network at the time (that's what it was called).
+
+Back in 2010 it was kind of a promising technology actually, because they had support from Google; Google was developing their own social network, which was the predecessor of Google+, and it was, I think, called Google Buzz. They actually had a hand in developing some of the protocols that were later used in Identi.ca, which was later renamed to StatusNet, which would later become GNU social.
+
+\[04:08\] In March 2016 I just wanted to check, "Well, how is that GNU social thing doing right now?" I saw that it was still alive, but it obviously looked kind of awful visually... So I was like, "Yeah, I like using TweetDeck; I kind of wanna make an interface for it that works like TweetDeck, and that looks good, and maybe people will switch." But I didn't have any big ambitions about that; I just I'd make something that people who really used GNU social would just switch to. I wasn't expecting anyone from outside that circle to make a jump.
+
+I soon found that GNU social had a rather arcane codebase, and very old-style PHP. I kind of decided to try starting from scratch... And so I started. The UI became kind of like a secondary thought; I started developing in Ruby, and I started with an API-first approach. The first few months that Mastodon existed, I was using it from the terminal, using Curl. That's quite a long story about just March, isn't it...?
+
+When I graduated from university, I had the opportunity to just sort of have a break and do whatever I wanted for a while, before I needed to start searching for a new job... Because I actually had a freelance gig at the time. So I decided to make an interface for Mastodon and finish it and see where it goes, and start a Patreon for it.
+
+In the first few months of that, the Patreon was really low, but it was more than I expected... It was like, I don't know, 20 bucks...
+
+Then in November 2016 is when the interface was ready enough that I posted a link to it on Hacker News, and that was the first time Mastodon actually got users. To be fair, there were users before that, just because Mastodon was part of the OStatus network, which was also part of GNU social, Friendica etc. It's that protocol that unites all those platforms... But Mastodon itself had (I think) one or two users at the time... Probably my friend, Trev, who just made an account... He didn't think it would go anywhere; he just wanted to - what do you call it...? Just to play along with me.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** Yeah. But in November it was the first taste of the fact that there was actually a niche for this kind of thing, and that there was a zeitgeist for a Twitter alternative. The first wave of users was very technical - obviously, people from Hacker News - and that was when I got the first feedback and started developing according to feedback. And then, I don't know, the rest is history...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, it's a bit interesting to me that it started not as an answer to Twitter, but as really you, based on principles that you learned really kind of messing around with federated technologies more than anything else, because it seems very much like an answer to Twitter, and it's definitely pitched that way now... But it sounds like you kind of backed into that a little bit.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** Yeah. I mean, the ambitions grew with more success, I'd put it that way; when I noticed that it was actually getting popular, I wasn't satisfied with it just being a niche thing anymore. So if you have the opportunity to make a real alternative to a big platform and for it to become the future of social networking, well, you don't really wanna pass up the opportunity.
+
+\[07:56\] So yeah, nowadays it really is a Twitter alternative, but not in the way that it's specifically made (how would I put it...?) for Twitter, like a Twitter clone... It's not that, and it's never been that. It works this way just because it's how it felt natural to me as the Twitter user. So from years of using Twitter before, this is what I would have expected from a social media platform.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. I think what's interesting about Twitter is it's become a utility. They originally opened up the question, which was how Twitter began similar in nature to yours, like just kind of accidental. I'm sure that they didn't think they would build the business they built today; their ambitions grew over time as success grew. It originally began because it wanted to answer the question of what's happening right now for you, like "What are you doing right now?" That was either delivering a pizza for delivery drivers or whatever, and a messaging system... But now it's become so popular that it's become a utility. And I think once you get to utility status, that's when we had to start breaking down the walls of like corporate interest in that, and I think that's where maybe your angle is with Mastodon... Is that correct, or somewhat accurate?
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** I'm not sure - could you elaborate what you mean by corporate interests?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, Twitter's owned and operated by one entity, it's not federated, whereas Mastodon is a protocol, it's a framework, there's a lot of opportunity, it's open source it's free... It has freedoms that Twitter does not have, but the point I'm trying to make is it's become a utility, so it's become something that pretty much a good majority of the world relies upon to share real-time information. It's a social network, but above that, it's also just real-time communication.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** I don't think those things are mutually exclusive; in fact, I'd say it's exactly the same thing... I think that social networks are a utility. I mean, they're indispensable nowadays. You need them for work, you need them for friendships, and the fact that one company owns most of them...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Controls...
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** ...controls each one of them, or in the case of Facebook, controls two of them and a chat service - it always kind of bothered me. And certainly, I had that angle from before I even started Mastodon. I think for a few years before that I was thinking "Oh, Twitter should be public utility", except obviously my idea hasn't formed back then, and I was just thinking in terms of some kind of government control, and the server becomes a public utility kind of like water pipes, you know?
+
+Then, obviously, that idea evolved, and I no longer think that's a very good idea, because governments owning large amounts of private data about citizens isn't really a good idea anymore, certainly not after -- which year was it when we got the Snowden revelations...? In any case...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** 2014 maybe.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** Yeah, I was thinking about that time... I think the idea of multiple organizations and individuals owning in equal parts their independent servers that intercommunicate with each other is a lot better anyway; it scales a lot better, it works a lot better for self-determination... If there are servers in Germany, there are servers in France, and they can operate according to their own customers and values and laws - I think that's just a lot better than if just Twitter was owned by the U.S. government, god forbid.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[11:53\] Right. There's a lot of nuance in things at play here. You have Adam saying it is a utility - well, not in a governmental, political sense, it's not a utility. We're saying that it's very -- I think your word was "indispensable", which I think is a strong word... There are people who want it to be a utility - these things should be taken over; there's lots of ins and outs and what you about really the politics around these things, and definitely I think we can all agree - at least us three here on the call - that having a large amount of data and really broadcast ability in the hands of a few entities, whether those are public or private... Like you said, the U.S. government owning these things - maybe not any better than Twitter Inc. owning these things. Who knows...?
+
+But this federated model that you're doing with Mastodon definitely is a response -- or not a response to that, but it answers a lot of the problems that singular control introduces. Now, it probably has its own problems, but...
+
+Let's get back into that federation and let's talk -- well, let's talk a little bit how Mastodon works, and we'll go from there.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** Okay. Federation will be familiar to those who use email, even though they might not know it by name. It's the principle where a server hosts users and works internally completely independently. So if you are on Gmail, you can send emails to other Gmail users... But it also works with other servers. So if your friend is on Hotmail, your Hotmail friend can send you email and you can send them email, and it just works. That's what federation is, and that's also how Mastodon operates.
+
+Each server is in itself independent and self-contained. It could be the only server in the universe and it would work fine. Users sign up just like on any other website, and they can send each other messages, but if there's more than one message on the servers, they can address each other, follow each other and talk to each other as if they were on the same website.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So you're localized to a server or to a host, which could be multiple computers, but a single entity running an instance... But then you're able to cross boundaries because those instances are federated just like email servers are federated, and they have their own protocols to intercommunicate.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** Exactly. The protocol it uses is called ActivityPub, and it's been accepted as a W3C recommended standard last year or this year, I don't remember exactly. Last year it was a draft, that I can tell you for sure, and we were the first platform to implement it. We switched from OStatus, which I've mentioned before, because it was a bit antiquated and had a lot of missing links and flaws. It was actually quite a massive undertaking, switching an entire federated platform from one protocol to another, and it certainly involved supporting the OStatus protocol as a server legacy thing, which we still do... So currently Mastodon supports two protocols.
+
+They're not 100% compatible with each other -- well, that's a weird thing to say... I should say it like this - a message that comes from OStatus is not strictly compliant with ActivityPub, but it still works, just because we made it work... That's how I would put it. But people really shouldn't care about that anymore, I guess; it's a very niche thing to care about.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, it's somewhat interesting... About a year ago (Adam, you'll remember this) we had Evan -- and I can never remember how to say his last name... Prodromou?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Prodromou.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Prodromou, thank you.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** Yeah, I know, I know.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I'm sure you do, because he's one of the pioneers of a lot of these protocols (OStatus) involved in the W3C's -- what's that working group on social web, or something like this?
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** The Social Working Group.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[15:55\] Yeah, the Social Working Group. This was episode 257, for those interested. Very interesting guy, very fun conversation... And one of the things that I said back then, we were talking about -- even a part of the title of that show is "The problem with social networks", and we were talking about how a lot of alternatives to existing networks pop up, they come and they go... You mentioned Google Buzz, which I had actually forgotten existed...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I had forgotten that, too. What about Wave?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Wave, yeah... So Google has had a few bad cracks at it... Although Wave had tons of inertia for like three weeks, and then just never got any better.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** App.net, the Diaspora, if you recall that one... And on that show I mentioned Mastodon, and I said "Mastodon had its day in the sun" or something along those lines, and then I said "And then it kind of disappeared." And one thing that I would say about Mastodon - and this is what Adam and I were kind of talking about leading up to this show was it just keeps bubbling up again... It hasn't disappeared. It just kind of gets some press and then it goes back into doing its thing, and then it gets some more press... It seems like the more belligerent Twitter management is with their network or their product, Mastodon gets more and more traction.
+
+So maybe tell us about the adoption... You've mentioned the Hacker News post, and that was your first users, but have you sensed waves of interest, and then it kind of waxes and wanes?
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** Yes. It's actually interesting to hear about the impression that it leaves on people outside Mastodon's circle, because obviously, from our perspective, we're not really going anywhere; we keep existing, and then people are like "Oh, Mastodon is bubbling up again." I think it's more to do with how the press works and how attention on the internet works in general, because something is only in the public view as long as it's new; so a new release of a podcast episode would maybe top Reddit on some day, but once it's a few weeks old, it's not gonna appear again.
+
+People always want something new, and the same thing is for news. They only public an article if it's something newsworthy to talk about, like a new version of Mastodon is released, or it's launched, or stuff like that. But it really doesn't go anywhere. The attention goes, but it stays there. Mastodon has currently 1,500,000 registered users, and it's had over a million for a while. Within our network, we're quite happy with that, we're quite satisfied. It's not like we have a driving force behind this to force this to bigger and bigger numbers; it's not like we have any investors to impress, so we're just happy when we have a network where we have friends, and we can talk about things with each other and find interesting content. And that already happens, and you don't really need a lot of people for that; you just need, at best, some way to find the good people.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So it's really not about winning.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** Yeah, it's really not about winning; I mean, we've already won just by being here. That's sort of the attitude that a lot of people on Mastodon have.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I think you inherit some expectations or anticipations because you will sit in the shadow of Twitter to most people's eyes, and they will naturally compare you, so by nature, they will assume you're trying to win.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** Exactly.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** But you coming on a show like this and saying "Hey, we're not trying to win, we're just trying to achieve success, which is--"
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** It's not even just that; it's not even just that. It's people's criteria for winning is not adjusted for what Mastodon is. It's a new concept. Email is old, but nobody thinks of it as a social network, and nobody really talks about the success of email. I mean, it's pretty clear it is used by everyone, so I guess it's already successful but nobody really talks about it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[19:51\] That's because there's no press releases for email, right? \[laughter\] There's no certain entity saying "Look how successful we are", because it's like a public good, or it's a concept...
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** Right. People judge a new social network using the criteria they have from other social networks like Twitter or Facebook that report on active user numbers, they report on quarterly revenue, they talk about monetization, how you put ads into it... And all that stuff is kind of irrelevant to Mastodon. Even the question of celebrities, like people say "Oh, there's not enough celebrities on Mastodon." Like, do we really care about that? I mean, we kind of have local celebrities, just people who are talented, who collect following... But do we really need a random person who was in a Hollywood movie on Mastodon? What would they really give us?
+
+There's certainly a demographic that cares about that sort of thing, that follows celebrities on Twitter, but... I don't know. It's just never appealed to me. So yeah, I'd say the expectations that people have for Mastodon's success are just not adjusted, and in its own way, Mastodon is already massively successful.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That reminds me of a quote that I saw, and I think I saw it, ironically, on Twitter... It was about humility, and it was saying something along the lines of "You can't beat me if I'm not competing with you." So these comparisons -- because as outsiders, we're trying to get a gauge on something, and of course, in the tech industry, even in open source, there's vanity metrics and there's things that we think growth is like a common thing that everybody just thinks about; it's like "What's your numbers like? Where's your growth? Where is it coming from? What are you trying to do?", and it's like, one way to compare it is like "Well, how many people are using Mastodon?" and it's like, maybe that's not even -- maybe the people that are using it, that's not even like a thing that they care about necessarily... As long as it doesn't feel like a -- what do you call it, when there's nobody in town?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** A ghost town.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** A ghost town.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** A ghost town, thank you; I thought I was close to that. As long as you're there and your friends are there, and you're doing your social networking, that's kind of success, if you're not trying to build a big business, right?
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's the point. That's what Slacks are basically, too. I mean, Slack communities are not extremely different, really... They're kind of like instances, right?
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** Yeah. There's a lot of overlap in concept with Slack groups, Discord servers, or even Subreddits. It's not exactly one-to-one conceptually, because they don't really think about "Oh, can I follow a user from a different Subreddit?", but thematically, the way that communities tend to form around a single server, so we have a server dedicated to technology, or a server dedicated to CyberPunk, it sort of tends to veer towards being like a Subreddit, thematically.
+
+That's not to say that user growth is not important at all. I think there is that old proverb, that a social network is only as useful as the amount of people you can reach through it... And then there's that formula where its usefulness is like the square of the number of users, or something like that... I have a vague memory of it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, the value of a network, and there's a statistician who put his name on that... Metcalfe's law.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** Obviously, I am interested in appealing to new users, in appealing to the mainstream, in growing the platform, because with every new user it becomes more useful to everyone else. And certainly, as it's becoming more active, it's becoming more interesting and you find more cool cat pictures... But yeah, I guess it's just an existential thing... Like, there is no time pressure on that sort of thing.
+
+**Break:** \[23:48\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So let's talk about that new user experience. One of the things that definitely differentiates it from a centralized platform is the first thing you have to do is pick an instance, which seems like a bit of a barrier, because "Where do I belong?" Tell us about instances, how you join, and kind of how a regular person interfaces with Mastodon, both in a local instance, and then kind of the federated network.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** It's true, it's a little bit of a barrier, because obviously, centralized social networks that people are used to don't even put that kind of question in front of people. You know, you don't need to think about "Where do I sign up on Twitter?" because it's right there, there's the Sign Up button.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** On Mastodon it's just a little extra step. I mean, it's a big step, but it's just one step, and you have to pick a server... But it's not so new to people. I mean, coming back to email, you had to pick an email server at some point. Most people join Gmail nowadays (I personally use FastMail), and some choose Live, or Yahoo! or something.
+
+Picking a server - a server is operated independently by either an individual or organization. It has its own rules, kind of like an old style forum, or in fact a Discord community, or a Slack chat, whatever. It has its own terms of service... So when you're picking one, you kind of need to pick something that you'll be happy with.
+
+If you want to be in kind of a safe space environment, you're gonna go and get one with a strict code of conduct, that forbids certain behaviors. And if you just want something different, you go and you check the code of conduct and you see "Oh, this and this is allowed; this and this is forbidden" etc. This is a bit of a tall order, so I understand that not a lot of people go through that sort of thing; most of them just end up on Mastodon.social, which I run. I'm okay with that, because I believe that as long as they do sign up on Mastodon, they always have the opportunity to learn about how it works more, and to move to a different server later... But obviously, if we lose them before sign-up, they'll probably never check it out. That's my view on that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Just like lots of people sign up for Gmail is not a big deal; lots of people sign up for Mastodon.social, which is the instance that you run. There's a slight disconnect there though, because when I'm picking my email provider I'm not thinking of it as like a community, or as -- there's no locality to it. It doesn't mean I can mostly speak with Gmail people, or... There's a little bit of a social -- like, you know, if you're on AOL.com, you're an old schooler; I don't know what the exact connotation there is, Adam...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Not cool.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You're not cool, okay. \[laughter\] So there's some of that with like what is your email address; it kind of signals to people what kind of person you are.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's a label of sorts.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** But not so much as like "I hang out on this forum, or this BBS." That's a stronger association, so probably a bigger decision.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** Definitely, definitely.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[28:08\] In fact, I have some friends who have joined Mastodon, and I'm a very technical person and I've definitely stopped and looked at it and thought "Yeah, I'm just not sure which instance I would pick", so I just go back to email and Twitter... But you're saying "If you don't know, pick Mastodon.social." Can you migrate later on? Can I switch instances?
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** Kind of. Currently, it's a bit of a manual process; you do have to tell your followers to follow the new account, and the content doesn't move, but there is at least a helper in terms of displaying on your profile that you have, in fact, moved... So it's halfway there. We're working on something better, but it's a tall order. I mean, not a lot of federated networks have solved this kind of problem. You can't really migrate an email address either; you have to tell all of your contacts to update their address books. XMPP had a similar problem as well, which was the federated chat service that Gtalk used to use and WhatsApp used to use, and they removed federation from those... But yeah, it had the same problem, that it was based on contacts, and you had to kind of let people know to friend you on a new account if you wanted to move.
+
+So definitely not a new problem, and definitely not a solved problem anywhere, so it's taking a while...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Is there a resistance to sort of a -- maybe this goes against the entire idea of like a central directory, and then the cost of planting your roots somewhere... So that I can easily pick up my roots and replant myself somewhere else should I choose to, that kind of concept. It seems like it would make sense.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** There is definitely resistance in the community towards any kind of centralization. I mean, people critique Mastodon.social for being so big and accepting new users...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** And I think people are right to worry a little bit. I mean, I know that I won't do anything nasty with that sort of power, and I don't even consider that that much power; it's more like a huge burden and responsibility to host that many people, but...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I guess the question is how often would somebody need to jump ship to a new instance? Does it happen often? I'm sure it's a needed feature, for example, how you've outlined it for getting started; it's an easy first step, move wherever you want later, but aside from that, is it truly useful? Is there really a need to be able to go someplace and then leave an instance and go somewhere else? ...especially if it's federated and you can message across places... Do you have to belong somewhere?
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** People do move their accounts all the time. I often see on my own timeline, "Hey, I've got a new account. Please follow me there." It can get even a little bit annoying.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** Now, the annoying thing about it not being automatic is obviously that once you move, you rely on people having seen your messages that you've moved, to refollow you... And if somebody's inactive, they are not gonna do that. So you kind of lose inactive followers as you're moving, but I think that's not a big loss, except in terms of just having big numbers that you like, you know?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. It seems like this is a technical problem that can be solved in time, and not necessarily a fundamental flaw, or anything like that, right?
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** It can be solved, yeah. It's not really -- I mean, the thing is you could really solve everything if you just use brute force... Like, "Okay, so I've got 40,000 posts on my account, and I've got 139,000 followers. Let me move to a different server!" If I wanted to, okay, go through every one of those 40,000 posts, re-download them on the new server, and go through 140,000 people and resubscribe them to the new account. I mean, it's possible; the only problem is that's a bit of a computationally-expensive operation, isn't it? That's the only real obstacle on the path there.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[32:11\] Yeah. Where it gets a little bit confusing for me - it makes sense as a new user, just sign up for Mastodon.social. I definitely understand where there would be people saying "Okay, now we're basically centralizing on this single instance. Potentially bad, especially if Eugene goes power-hungry and changes everything, or something." But then it's like "Okay, maybe I don't wanna do that. Maybe I wanna pick one", so here's another one, Mastodon.technology. This is just one that I've found; there's a little picker where you can through some of the instances... This Mastodon instance is for people interested in technology. Discussions aren't limited to technology, but because tech folks shouldn't be limited to technology either... So it's not like I have to talk about technology if I join that instance, but it's for people who associate with technology - it seems like a pretty broad brush.
+
+It just feels like such a big decision, like "Am I a tech folk?" \[laughs\]
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** There's an absolute freedom in how people can run their servers, so there's different types of ways that people define what their server is for. There's general purpose, like Mastodon.social or Octodon.social, where it's just like -- there's no theme, there's no topic. You just sign up, you have an account, you talk to your friends.
+
+But then there are ones that are like oh, this is for LGBT people, or this is for CyberPunk enthusiasts, or this is for Star Trek fans... But most of them actually don't say "Oh, you can only talk about Star Trek here." It's more like, "Oh, you just wanna hang out with Star Trek fans, but talk about your life." You're fine to do that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** In your specific case, with Mastodon.technology, I'm pretty sure that's the case.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right. But that being said, let's take the analogy back to our Slack team, which you haven't seen, but all Slacks are like this, right? We have different channels for people who like JS Party, which is another show that we have. Or there's one for Elixir, for people who like Elixir. And then there's one for general conversation. But you can just join all these different channels, because I happen to like technology AND I like Star Trek... So is there a cross -- can you join multiple instances? Maybe you just have a separate profile...
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** I get this question a lot, and I find that it's a bit of a conceptual misunderstanding... It's because these servers are created with topics in mind that people start asking "Well, can I join multiple topics?", but that's not really how it works. I mean, you have an account and you follow anyone, anywhere. If you just wanna follow everyone who's a Star Trek fan, you can sign up on Mastodon.social and follow everyone who's a Star Trek fan. You're not limited to that sort of thing.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right. Just like -- going back to email, if I'm on Hotmail, I can talk to anybody on Gmail; there's no topic-specific email server, so I guess the question becomes why do these instances associate themselves with topics? Why aren't they just like "Jerod's instance, Eugene's instance", for example?
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** It's an interesting phenomenon that comes from one particular feature... Mastodon still has a firehose. I don't know if people would be familiar with the term, but Twitter used to have a public timeline, where every public post would appear, and they called it the firehose. They still call it the firehose, but it's a closed API nowadays.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** So Mastodon does have that. There is a timeline of every public post, and you can filter that by "Posts from everyone" or "Posts by people on your server." That's where the whole topic thing comes into it, because you can look at posts just from your server, and so you get this kind of feeling of community, with your neighbors, and that's where the potential for hanging out with people with the same interests comes into it... Because you can see posts from people you're not following yet.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[36:05\] Gotcha.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** It's kind of like a big chat room. But it's funny, because it's kind of an incidental feature; it wasn't really made for this, it was more like "Here's a timeline of everyone, just so you can find somebody to follow. Here's a way to filter it", and suddenly here's this whole thing where instances are created around specific topics.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It kind of reminds me, Jerod, like, if we did one -- because I saw that there's a feature for organizations, which I'm sure we can go into a little deeper... But just thinking, so typically you may be a community, but then you might be like an organization, and if we had a Mastodon instance, we would essentially be topical too, just by nature, right? We would be laser-focused on, say, a software developer's life, for example.
+
+Essentially, what our Slack community represents - if that became a Mastodon, we're essentially putting up a flag saying, "Hey, if this type of topic or community is of interest to you, here's your invitation. This is the kind of people you can expect to see here", not "You can only talk about this."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And you could follow anybody on that instance without having to be on the instance. That's why it feels like there's barriers between these instances, which aren't actually there.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. Un-needed, really. And then the instances is mainly just to probably give the federated part of it - which seems to be leading into potentially security and safety, which is like "Hey, you can go somewhere and be just there, and not feel like somebody else can cut your social off because they've changed the rules on you", and that seems to be what it's driving towards, but in effect it's also caused some sort of un-needed hurdle and some confusion points.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** Yeah, exactly. That's kind of the selling point for organizations, in my opinion, because there were those stories from Facebook changing their algorithms around fan pages, and essentially killing people's businesses... Because suddenly, the people who marked themselves as your fan don't actually see most of your posts unless you pay up. The rules of the game are being changed without anyone's real input, you know?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And on the developers' side too you've got API changes. Think about the recent Twitter API changes that basically fractured the user experience.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** I feel like that's a whole separate topic that we can talk about.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** But as I was saying, for organizations it's a big plus to run their own Mastodon instances because nobody except them can actually shut them out. They own their space, they own their social media megaphone. It's kind of an opportunity for a bit of branding as well, because if you host other people, they have your brand in their username, which can be an advantage...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, that's true.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** And obviously, it's the ultimate verification, as well. On Twitter, you're relying on Twitter giving you the checkmark. On Mastodon there are no checkmarks, and how would there be if there's like 4,000 different admins and somebody could fake one... But if you run your own server on your own domain name, then everyone knows that you're the real Jerod from the Changelog, and not just any Jerod.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Like that other Jared from the Subway commercials - not that guy...! \[laughter\] So can the federation then ban an instance? Let's say the Ku Klux Klan gets their own Mastodon instance, and they can do whatever they want on their little island, because it's a free world and all that... But can the federation then ban them from --
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** You can't sink the island, unless you go to their domain name registrar and request them to be taken down. That route works, like with any other website. However, I as a developer do not have power over other servers, just to be clear. I developed the software, it's open source...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I thought you did, this whole time...
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** ...somebody installs the software on their server - it's theirs and I have no control over that. But because it's a very practical case that does occur, there are ways in Mastodon to shut out servers that you don't like.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Like a firewall, essentially.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** \[40:13\] Yeah, essentially like a firewall...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** In concept.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Conceptually.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** Yeah, pretty much. From the user's side you can decide "Oh, I don't wanna see anything from this domain", as a personal decision; that's step one. And on the administrational level, you have the ability to shut out posts from a specific server, or completely remove it from your database, so that there is zero interaction between them. That's what you would do if such a Ku Klux Klan server would spring up.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's pretty cool, and that all makes sense. How about the moderation? You said each instance is individually owned and operated, so they have their own codes of conduct, their own moderators, their own rules of the game with regard to what kind of content you can be posting on that instance... But what about subscriptions? So, If I'm on Adam's Changelog instance as a user, and I subscribe to the Ku Klux Klan member - does Adam need to moderate that because it's on his instance, or is it only me that sees it anyways, and so it's kind of a mute point? How does that work?
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** There's different levels of moderation that are available here. On one hand, you could completely shut down, as I said, the Ku Klux Klan server from your side, so that you wouldn't be able to follow them. On the other hand, there is the other level - for something perhaps a bit less extreme, you could sandbox it, so people can still follow users from that server, but they just don't appear in the firehose view, and they cannot appear in notifications of people who don't follow them.
+
+For example, if they tend to send harassing messages to strangers, you sandbox them, and voila, they no longer appear in those strangers' mentions and cannot harass them. So that's that.
+
+Now, the leading question into this was "How does moderation work when the servers have different rules?" and the point is that each server enforces their rules locally. So you have your moderators, you have your own rules, and we have the ability to essentially modify the user records of people from other servers, as they are seen from your server... Because they're essentially a local copy. So you receive messages from the other server, they're saved in your database, so you can work with them and moderate them. You have the ability to suspend, to sandbox people, just like you can suspend and sandbox your local users. That's what we usually do if there's a problematic user in another instance.
+
+There are also ways to forward reports from people, from one server to another. For example, if I see some kind of mean message from a different server, I report it to my admins and I have the option to forward that report to the admins of the other server if I think that they might also not be okay with that being on their server. So that's more or less how it works.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That makes sense, because you essentially have some hierarchy, and you've got your local copies, you've got the leaders of that local copy, and you've got rules you all decide upon, and I'm sure that's ran however those individuals feel, like forums were... But then you can also cross have concerns, and like-minded instances come to some sort of an agreement saying "Hey, you reported this person on my instance doing behavior that wasn't right. Thank you. I'll act accordingly (or not)" and that's a good community.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** Exactly.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[43:59\] Those are good community effects. People aren't forced to agree with you or do what you say; they have the option to hear you, receive that, and then do what they feel. But at your local level you can still make your choices for them.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** Exactly.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It sounds pretty cool. So you get past that initial road bump of which instance to pick - let's just say I pick Mastodon.technology, because I'm a tech folk...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And I get going. It probably feels a lot like any other social network. There's some differences, of course, in the content you can post... Give us the rundown. 500 characters, you can do video... What are some of the features that makes us a really valuable and useful social network?
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** You can have animated avatars... \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Nice!
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Uuuh, shiny!
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** You can put spoiler warnings on text...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's cool.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** ...in case you're talking about the latest show and don't wanna annoy your followers. You can mark individual pictures -- or rather you can mark individual posts with pictures as "Not safe for work", rather than marking your entire account as not safe for work as it is on Twitter. Let me think... I haven't compiled such a list in my head for quite a while.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** One thing that always comes up in my mind is how do I use this from my phone? Because that's usually where I'm socializing.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** \[45:23\] Oh, yeah, for some reason I get a lot of questions like "Why isn't Mastodon on the app store?" and it's really weird, because there are like a million apps for Mastodon on every app store... They're just not called Mastodon, because they are developed by third-party developers.
+
+Mastodon has a principle - API first, and... Yeah, that's essentially it - API first. \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I like that. Very simple.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I do, too.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** The web interface uses the same API as any other app can use, so it's completely replaceable by the user. If you want a different look, you go and you can have a web client, or you can have a mobile app, and it can do all the same things that a web interface can do.
+
+We don't even try to do an official mobile app, because that sort of tends to allow you to create some kind of proprietary behavior that's only available in one app... So by always having third-party apps, we're like -- you know, we're working together with independent developers. A thing that's available to one is available to all others, so competition is possible.
+
+So yeah, there's Tusky for Android, there's Amaroq for iOS... There's apps in development for iOS; one is called Toot!.app, by Dag Ågren and I think the guy who developed Twitterrific is developing an app for Mastodon, but I don't know what the name of that is yet... So that's in the works.
+
+There's more. There's Subway Tooter, there is Tootdon, and probably more.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Why do you think that the apps available to access - maybe I haven't investigated far enough - are so many? Why isn't there a more collected effort? Is it by design? Obviously you're not doing it because maybe it's easier to spread the developer load across a similar model, a federated model, with many of the people doing and uniting, and that kind of thing... Why do you feel like there's so many? Do you feel like eventually there'll be one or two and there's be a winner, as tech likes to always make a winner?
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** I think that would be a loss if there was only one. Having choice is good. It means that there is room for innovation, for trying to get an edge on your competitors... It's better for the users. Why there are so many right now? I don't know, because Mastodon is young, and there isn't a status quo yet. I mean, most of these apps are...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Fairly new?
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** \[47:55\] Yeah, they're really new, and many of them have been started at the same time, or close to the same time, so it's kind of natural for them to be multiple, rather than one app.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Aside from platform, like Android, iOS, I can see having the need for many, and I'm not saying only one is needed, but I wonder what the differentiators are? What are they adding to? Sure, innovation, opportunities for innovation - that makes sense; free will, free market...
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** Mostly I think it's visuals.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** The things that I've seen is just the way that the user interface is designed. They mostly implement the same features, just because those features are available through the API. There's not a lot of room for just doing weird stuff. But I don't know, some innovations that -- I'm not sure if they're implementing them yet, but that are possible, is like how does the phone's camera interact with Mastodon? Maybe you could build a way to record video into the app.
+
+I've always wished that there would be some app that just took the video recorder from Vine and just -- you know, because Mastodon supports video uploads, so it could just work as Vine, with a different interface... But obviously, that only depends on the app supporting video recording. That's all that's needed.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, that makes more sense, where this application that gives you access to Mastodon instances is more favorited on the general user experience, and maybe this one is focused on like a Vine-like user experience; that to me makes far more sense, and it makes more sense why there's different instances.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's super cool. It makes me think now as I'm -- not a moderator, but as an instance host, can I set up limits on how much bandwidth my instance is hosting and serving? Because if all of a sudden everybody starts doing videos on my instance, maybe it gets expensive for me.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** Right. Currently, all limits are the same for everyone, because we wanted to have sort of a standard user experience. Picking an instance is hard enough just from rules and the topic. You don't wanna have people thinking "Oh, does this server support 10 MB images or 2 MB images?", that sort of thing. We don't want people to have to think about that, so it's the same for everyone. It's 8 MB for image uploads and 40 MB for video uploads at this time.
+
+It downsizes the images, if possible, if they're too big for the web. We're trying to use the storage as efficiently as possible.
+
+**Break:** \[50:55\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Continuing the conversation on just differentiation - obviously, you've got one API, one way things work, you've got standards in which bandwidth can be used, all that good stuff... So everyone's playing by the same rules, theoretically, but yet you have many different types of applications that could be done for different experiences. What else differentiates Mastodon?
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** One thing about Mastodon is what I have mentioned before - the way the federation works is based on a protocol that is recommended by the W3C. Now, what that really means is that when you're using Mastodon, you're not using just Mastodon... Or rather Mastodon isn't the whole thing. Mastodon implements ActivityPub, but literally any other software could also implement the same protocol, and be immediately compatible with Mastodon. As long as you have the concept of users and the concept of subscriptions between users, there's essentially no limits to how these platforms can interact. What this means in practice - there's at least five (maybe more) different software projects that implement ActivityPub that provide a completely different experience.
+
+For example, for people who want something like YouTube, where you upload videos and you subscribe to channels, there's a project called PeerTube, and what really blows the minds of some people who learn about this is that you can follow a PeerTube account from your Mastodon account, and new videos just appear in your home feed, as if they were on the same platform.
+
+There is a project that focuses on image sharing, kind of like Instagram. It's called PixelFed and it's gonna work the same way - you follow a PixelFed user from your Mastodon account and the photos just appear in your feed. And if you reply to them, your reply appears as a comment on that photo. Again, with the videos - you comment on the video and the comment appears under the video on PeerTube.
+
+So when you decide to use Mastodon, you're not really just gambling on the success of Mastodon by itself, you're gambling on this interoperable network that implements this protocol. We actually call it the Fediverse, like Federated Universe... So you would likely hear that term used commonly.
+
+Essentially, it's part of the design that eventually, years later maybe, some developer comes along and develops something that is 1,000 times better than Mastodon, but as long as it uses the same protocol, people can just switch smoothly, and rather than losing all of their social graph, their connections, their friends, they're still in the same network, and it's just like switching to a different account... And I think that's the strength of Mastodon, and its main ideological differentiator.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, that's pretty important too, because if you take what Mastodon is and you wanna create your -- the question rather is like why fracture and have so many apps, and it sounds like that's an advantage, because I can make a Mastodon instance and I can create an application that gives my users or whatever Mastodon at large access to it, but I can also say "Hey, I intend to have a Vine-like experience, for those Vine lovers out there. We want it back, we need it, we want it." It gives you a chance to make your own, essentially, aside from maybe several technical hurdles, I'm sure, for bandwidth reasons and whatnot around video and that kind of stuff...
+
+Essentially, you give them the ability to do that and they can have their own instance, it's federated, all that good stuff, they have their own application, but somebody else could use the same application and connect their own Vine-like Mastodon instance.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[55:58\] Lots of opportunities... Maybe I've hosted too many servers in my day, but I just go back to the instances and the providers of the instances, and that's why, Eugene, I was asking about bandwidth costs and the settings... Because I started thinking like -- I see the incentive, and it sounds like a really great network for users, and I wonder what the incentives are for hosting, the costs of hosting, like what it takes to set up an instance, because ultimately, for a federation to work, you need to have enough instances. You can't have three or four; you're gonna end up with a similar situation.
+
+So you need those options, but over time and the success of the network is gonna cause the hosting costs to go up. I'm just thinking of hosting the Vine instance, and maybe I have that limit of 40 MB per upload, but people are doing thousands of vines a day all of a sudden and I'm just running this as my little side-hobby... So what are some of the incentives for people to host instances, and what are costs, and what does that look like?
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** The incentives are usually ideological... Like, owning your own space, owning your own data, not being dependent on anyone is a pretty good motivator, certainly for communities and families maybe. For organizations it's, again, as I mentioned before, verification; the fact that if it's on your own domain, it pretty much proves that you're who you say you are.
+
+There are no financial motivators for hosting an instance really. We're really more about crowdfunding for sustainability. Most servers would have like a Patreon or some other form of accepting donations, and most people donate if they are happy with the service.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think of it like dues almost; like there's a base cost to run things, and the concept of dues versus donations might be an application there... Because if I'm part of the community and it costs $300 to run the server, and there's 300 users, well, everybody pays a buck, and that's cool. I don't mind paying the due.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** And you could actually do that. I know at least one server that implements a paywall for signing up, and it's fair enough; you're allowed to do that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I was just gonna ask why that's not a motivator. For instance, going back to the email scenario - a lot of people use Gmail and Yahoo! and stuff because they're free, and of course, Google and Yahoo! and Microsoft have their reasons why they want people using their email, but then also you said yourself, you use FastMail. That's a service that you pay for, right?
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** Yeah, I pay for it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, because they provide you a solid hosting scenario and features that you like, and then give you access to email.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** Yeah, now that I'm thinking about it, I'm pretty sure I've seen some servers that have closed registrations, but they have a message that says "If you donate to our Patreon, you can get a sign-up straight away."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Gotcha.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** So that sort of thing already exists. Maybe it's not quite implemented as cleanly as just having a button or something yet, because it's not part of the software that is delivered, but... It's certainly possible, and it's certainly a valid tactic. You can't argue that's not sustainable.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, there's no rules against it. It's not like "Nope, you can't take payment to host an instance." There's no greater Mastodon board of directors that's gonna stop you.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** Hosting Mastodon isn't as expensive as you would think. It's somewhere in between, and it depends a lot on how smart you wanna be about how you host it... Because if you just use Heroku, well, you're gonna be buried under a mountain of bills. And if you use Amazon Web Services, it's certainly not gonna end well either.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** \[59:48\] However, if you use a dedicated box to put it on, it can be quite cheap... And if you're smart about where to store the user uploaded files, it can be cheaper, too. Amazon S3 is the most popular choice, but the problem is it's quite expensive to store data, and it's very expensive to get the data out through bandwidth, as you said. But there is a trick you can do to reduce the storage.
+
+First of all, why would you even use S3 in the first place? Well, if you have more than one machine serving Mastodon, as you would if you're scaling up, or if you just have limited disk-based storage on your box, then you would need something like object storage. But at the same time there's no reason why your load balancer or your NGINX couldn't just serve those files or store a copy of them.
+
+The way I do it, and the way a few people who also use object storage do it to reduce the costs between S3 and the end user is by having an NGINX proxy between them, with proxy caching. Your load balancer fetches the data from S3, and then saves it for a while. And maybe it's 50 gigabytes of cache on the load balancer, but that's okay because those are the only ones that are being accessed through the interface. Every server that runs your Mastodon code can upload to the S3, so it's the perfect way to manage it.
+
+Then if you put Cloudflare on top of that, which provides free bandwidth, then you're bandwidth costs for S3 are almost close to zero.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Is there a best practices out there that breaks this down anywhere, or is this just said here for the first time?
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** No, it's certainly not said for the first time, but I'm actually not sure if that's written down in the documentation.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It'd be interesting to point to that doc for the listeners.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** Yeah, that's be great.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It'd also be a good way to get involved as a contributor - Mastodon open source, a lot of people running the instances... I don't think there's low-hanging fruit, but there's at least fruit hanging out there, wherein optimizations could yield huge gains for all these people who are hosting and who are bearing real costs month by month, in reducing those fees, and you basically make the network a lot better. It'd be a good way to get involved.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** If you wanna know, Mastodon.social has - let me check, just to be sure... It currently has 232,000 users, of which 30,000 were active last week. The total number of registrations doesn't really matter as much in terms of hosting costs, because it's just a little bit of database space, but if they're not active, they don't affect your server.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right. Peak activity is what really matters.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** Yeah. So 30,000 users - that costs me $470 on Hetzner; Hetzner is a German hosting provider. That is, I think, six or seven dedicated servers - not virtual servers, but actual boxes. They're really beefy, and most of the RAM is not used. Mastodon is really more CPU bound than RAM bound, except for like a baseline of RAM requirements, just because it's using Ruby... But it's not as bad as people always talk about Ruby.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What's a good CPU count for it?
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** \[01:03:48.27\] The servers I'm using each have eight cores. It's an i7 something-something, with hyper-threading. That's pretty good. Currently I'm under-capacity (I think that's the right word). There was a wave of new users a few weeks ago. If I look at that, that was 43,000 users, so that's when I acquired the last three new machines to handle the load. But right now I'm over-paying maybe... So in reality you would pay less, perhaps.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You also are hosting one of the larger instances out there, right?
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** Yeah, it's one of the biggest ones out there.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So while we're talking about money, let's mention the fact that often times on the Changelog we talk about sustainability and how this is gonna work and all that, but it seems like you have a pretty good hold on it at this point; you accept sponsorships via Patreon, and you're bringing in what your goal is, $5,000/month, so you're now working full-time on Mastodon. Tell us about that success and how that's given you the freedom you have to build this thing.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** I wasn't expecting to reach that goal.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** A lot of people don't reach that goal, so...
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** Yeah. I've said it, and I thought "Okay, that will just be something that people see that it's there", but I was fine with less money. I've lived on less, let's put it that way.
+
+One point about the last question that I feel was maybe left out is what I was talking about is the raw cost of hosting a server, so the technology, the hardware... But there is obviously a cost to moderating it; your own time obviously is a cost, and if it's a big server, you'll need more readers.
+
+Some people are okay with having volunteer moderators, and people are maybe willing to work for free, but if you wanna be fair - and I wanna be fair - you wanna pay your moderators... So that's a bit of extra costs on top of that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Interesting.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** I think I have five... Yeah, I have five moderators on payroll.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Is that part of like -- would you consider it the gig economy, or...? It's not full-time jobs for these people, is it?
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** It's not really a full-time job. It's more like a small contract.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** I mean, I don't really require them to have set hours or an hourly requirement... I'm just like, "Well, here's privileges to access the moderation UI, and you're gonna get emails about new reports, and when you have time to deal with this, please do... But otherwise just be on standby... Just whenever you're available."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So back to Patreon... Is this unintended goal - like, you put the goal out there, you didn't expect to hit it, obviously you have... Is building and maintaining and all this good stuff around Mastodon your full-time thing?
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** It is. It's been my full-time thing for two years.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Is that because of Patreon?
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** Yeah, it is.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Or are you independently wealthy somehow?
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** No! \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What I mean is, is the community supporting you somehow?
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** Yes, it is all thanks to Patreon... No, I'm not independently wealthy.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You never know, you never know...
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** I'm an immigrant. I moved to Germany from Russia when I was eleven, and my family started here from scratch... So it's kind of lie from zero to this.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, that's awesome.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** But at the same time, I started working at it full-time even before Patreon reached any kind of big number. As I said, I had the freelancing gig at the time when Mastodon started. I eventually quit that, but it provided me with some supplementary income while the Patreon was getting started. Then when it was hitting like $600/month, it was already enough to at least cover the rent, and the food, and then as it grew, it sort of became an actual competitive job, where I no longer get sad looks from other engineers.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:08:10.28\] Any plans to make this some sort of business, like Mastodon as a service? We've asked various questions about running a server, things like that...
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** I have had that thought, certainly... At the same time, at least right now, I don't wanna spread myself too thin, because managing a business of hosting other people's websites is a big responsibility, and it is pretty much a 24/7 thing because at any time something could go wrong... And I'm already hosting my own server where that's the case, so... I don't wanna just have too many responsibilities at once. But it's certainly an avenue for extra income if I ever decide to do that, start a software as a service where I just offer hosting. But right now, while I'm not doing it, there are others who fill that niche, and on the Join Mastodon project website I link to somebody who does that sort of thing, Mastodon hosting under Masto.host. And yeah, while I'm not doing it, somebody else is doing it...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That was my next question - okay, so if you're not doing it, is anybody, or could somebody...? Is there anything that says you can't?
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** No, you can absolutely do it; there's no problem with it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Fully managed Mastodon hosting - this is at masto.host. Interesting, so that's right on your homepage for JoinMastodon.org.
+
+Well, let's get to maybe a more colorful side, which is naming. The naming scheme of things is always kind of fun. Toot is what you call the object, the thing that you put out there. Twitter has tweets, Mastodon has toots. \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** How do you say that with a straight face, that's my question...
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** I do not. \[laughter\] Never with a straight face. The history of toot is such that Mastodon did not start with it. In fact, at the beginning Mastodon did not have any special words for posts; they were just statuses or posts. The button for posting one just used to say Publish. But then a certain demographic came, and at first it was like -- one of the first waves of people were Dutch, and... My memory is already vague on this, but I remember some form of Dutch word for tooting, which was something like toeteren, or something like that... I'm probably mispronouncing it... But it was a suggested term for Mastodon posts.
+
+Then about the third or fourth wave -- I don't remember how exactly it started in the community, but I remember that a specific person requested me, or rather dared me, to change the button to say Toot.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** They dared you...?
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** Yeah, they were like "If you change this button to say Toot, I will pledge to your Patreon $5 forever." \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's awesome.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** So I took it up, and I did it. I didn't really realize that in some parts of America toot is slang for farting, so that really didn't play a role... I mean, it's more like the sound that an elephant makes, or the sound that a trumpet makes, and I still think that's innocent enough, and it's treated light-heartedly, so I don't really mind it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I mean, even so much that the Mastodon source code is under the org TootSuite.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** Yeah, exactly. It's because the organization named Mastodon was taken, so I had to improvise... And I was like "TootSuite..."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha. Okay, TootSuite.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, I'll tell you one thing, Eugene - Adam and I both live in that area of America where a toot is definitely a vernacular for farting, so... That's why we particularly both said "What's with toot?" \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:12:04.02\] And I'm sure you get that a lot. I mean, it's just gonna be the case.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** Yeah... Every so often, somebody joins and posts that picture from the Dr. Doom comic where it says "Dr. Doom toots as he pleases." It's unending fuel for those kinds of jokes, and fair enough...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Well, let's talk about the future of Mastodon. We've talked about how you've gotten here, the fortuitous path and some of the things that sets it apart, as well as how awesome it is that you have a community, and people that support you, and sponsors, and are able to work on this full-time, even pay some moderators... What does the future look like? Do you have big plans? Is the idea formulated and now it's maintenance mode? Do you have huge growth opportunities? Are you taking VC funding? Tell us what's gonna happen.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** There is not gonna be any VC funding. I mean, I've built a lot of protections against this sort of thing from the get-go. The code's license is AGPL. What this essentially means is that if you make any modifications to it, you have to publish those modifications. That means a company cannot take the code and just put something extra in it, make it closed source and then remove the decentralization part from it to sort of conquer the market. That's the sort of thing we wanted to guard against.
+
+What this means is that, well, the Mastodon code is kind of worthless; you can't buy it, you can't acquire it, and you certainly shouldn't invest VC money into it... So that's not happening.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Unless you were in the business of managed hosting.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** That's true. Yes, if I wanted to build a business of that... But that would be distinctly different to Mastodon itself.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Sure.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** As for features, recently Mastodon 2.5 came out; I think it was a week ago or maybe two weeks ago, and there were a lot of good features in that that I've been planning for a long time. That means that there's only a few big things that are still left to be implemented in the future. Other than that, it indeed is entering a sort of maintenance/polishing mode where we care about improving the user experience, and polishing things that are rough or that are not good enough, but at the same time no big new things...
+
+I'm not really interested in going too far away from the focus of the project, because I don't want it to become sort of like a Swiss knife where it's a jack of all trades, but master of none. I want it to be focused on the things that it's good at.
+
+But certainly, if there are good suggestions from the community for new features or for changes, I'm always open to listening to those and evaluating whether that's something that we wanna engage with, or maybe if it's not a very good fit for the upstream project, maybe better fit for some kind of fork.
+
+One feature that we released in this 2.5 episode -- I said episode because I'm thinking of podcasts... Release, is what I'm thinking of... In the release is the federation relay functionality. This ties back to the way Mastodon works with user subscriptions. Servers don't generally subscribe to each other entirely; it's more about "I follow my friend, so my server receives posts from that friend." What this means is that if you have a brand new server, it can feel quite empty, and perhaps like a ghost town.
+
+\[01:15:57.03\] So what does the relay do? The relay, as the name suggests, is kind of like a semi-centralized plumbing system I would say, where servers can subscribe to it and they start exchanging all public posts, regardless of who subscribes to whom. This means that a new server could join a relay and immediately receive lots of fresh content all the time. That's a solution to a problem that we've been hearing about for a while.
+
+The other big thing is account migration. As we've been talking about, it's kind of annoying at the time, but we wanna make it more smooth and more natively supported, so that you don't have to rely on people seeing your "I have moved" message, so that you keep your followers.
+
+I think that's it... Other than that, it's really just improving the user interface and solving bugs etc. As for growth opportunities - well, I can never really predict that sort of thing. It's kind of weird, because I work on a new release for a very long time, I add some exciting new features... Then it comes out and it doesn't make a big splash, but then randomly, a few months later, nothing of note happens but there's a huge wave where 500,000 people join, and it has nothing to do with anything I've been doing. So you know, I can't really predict that... But let's hope for the best.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What about getting started for developers? Anybody who is listening to this and they're like "You know what, I've got a community. I've got a Slack channel I've been kind of PO-d about that has limited search, or it's not my data", or it could be anything else, whatever... And someone's like "I think I should start an instance." Is there a Getting Started document, or a guide that does this? I noticed in your GitHub profile you have a Vagrant instance; I'm assuming that's probably for some local VM development, or something like that... What's a good way for someone to get started on the hacker front of this?
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** Well, if you're familiar with Ruby on Rails, then you'll have a really easy time, because Mastodon is just a Ruby on Rails application. It follows the conventions as much as possible. Perhaps the service pattern that we're using is maybe a bit unconventional, but at the same time also not really new to Ruby developers, and I think it quite elegantly encapsulates complex logic into classes that can be reasonably found if you're looking for them.
+
+If they're not familiar with Rails, then it's perhaps a little bit more complicated, because you know, people say "Well, Rails - there's a lot of magic." It's not really magic, it's more like just convention; you have to know where something is.
+
+How to get started... You just check out the code from the GitHub repository, install the dependencies from Yarn or npm and Bundler, and you're pretty much good to go for development. There is a foreman command for just starting up all the services, there is the web process, there is a Sidekiq process which is the background processing unit, there is the streaming API written in Node.js, and there is Webpack for compiling assets. So in development you'd have those four running, and you have your local running server, and you can start hacking on the code with live reload.
+
+As for running it in production, there is a bit more involvement there. There are a lot of guides for that, but if you're running on Ubuntu, that's really easy because all the guides are oriented towards that system, just because it's easier for us to focus the instructions on something that's pinned down, than be like "Oh, if you're on CentOS, then you need this. If you're on Fedora, you need something different."
+
+\[01:20:17.24\] We're just like "If you use Ubuntu, here are the commands." You can practically just execute all of them in the right order and you're good to go. In production, it involves -- you get the code, just like in development, you install the dependencies just like in development. The extra steps are you need systemd service files for the processes, instead of using foreman. So you'd have a systemd unit for the web process, a unit for Sidekiq and a unit for the streaming API. You will need to install a PostgreSQL database; it could be on a different server, it doesn't matter. You need Redis, and you need NGINX or Apache as a load balancer/reverse proxy in front. And you need to get an SSL certificate from Letsencrypt, and that's it. You're good to go.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It sounds pretty straightforward for most Rails developers out there. And if you're not, I'm sure you've heard of Rails... Get familiar, and hack on this.
+
+Well, it's been fun catching up with you. Jerod, it's kind of interesting because I feel like we're often earlier to a game or to a topic than we have with this topic. I kind of feel like we're delayed, but I almost feel like we're perfectly on time, because you know, there's just been so much progress I feel like we were a little early... Or it would have been a similar conversation, but just not enough for Eugene to walk us through in terms of where the community is at. The direction they have now I feel gives us a better conversation here today.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I thought you were gonna say we're slacking, but now you're saying we're doing perfect. \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I felt we were slacking a little bit, but I kind of feel like it's just perfectness. I like it. I'm excited about it. I just think that this conversation now doesn't feel late to me. At first I was like "Geez, we kind of missed the boat talking about Mastodon forever ago... We really did", but I feel like the runway you and the community have, Eugene, has just been great, so... Good timing, in my opinion.
+
+Any closing thoughts for those listening, thinking about anything we may have gone through - any closing thoughts for you before we let you go?
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** Um, join Mastodon! \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Join Mastodon, there you go.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Join Mastodon!
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** JoinMastodon.org. Go there, check it out. Eugene, thank you.
+
+**Eugen Rochko:** Thanks for having me, it was great being here.
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+**Jerod Santo:** Richard, it's been just past two years since we first had you and Evan on the show to tell us about Elm, and now we're here to catch up, hear what's new, and learn some more... So first of all, welcome back!
+
+**Richard Feldman:** Yeah, great to be back!
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Two years is a long time in internet years. I'm assuming Elm has leaped forward... It's still out there, it's still popular, people still talk about it, I still see people retweeting things that you're saying about Elm. Before we get into the catch-up, why don't you give the elevator pitch - what Elm is, and what you use it for.
+
+**Richard Feldman:** Yeah, sure. Elm is a programming language for building web apps. It compiles to JavaScript. People often consider it an alternative to JavaScript frameworks, because in addition to being a programming language, it also comes with enough tools out the box to build an entire web app... So we don't really have frameworks in Elm. It's sort of like the language provides enough that you don't need a framework.
+
+I work at NoRedInk. We make tools for English teachers, and basically, our entire front-end - or just about; I guess we have some legacy React stuff from back in the day, but pretty much everything is in Elm. It's about 250,000 lines of code. Our first commit was in 2015, so it's been somewhere between 3 and 4 years that we've been doing it in production. Basically, everybody who works on the front-end writes Elm full-time; it's been really great.
+
+Some of the stuff that's cool about Elm - 1) it's really, really reliable and easy to maintain. It has a really amazing, friendly, helpful compiler, with really nice error messages that tell you about problems before they happen to end users. As a consequence of that, I used to be able to say that we'd had zero runtime exceptions in the entire time we'd had Elm deployed.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's right.
+
+**Richard Feldman:** However...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Uh-oh...
+
+**Richard Feldman:** Unfortunately, last year it happened...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Nooooo....
+
+**Richard Feldman:** Yeah... So now I have this graph that I like to show -- because we have a logging system that tells us if anything crashes. So now the chart is like 60,000 JavaScript runtime exceptions, like, from our JS code, and then... Like, it's not zero, but it's zero pixels on the graph...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[04:15\] The blip.
+
+**Richard Feldman:** Right. So it is possible. It can technically happen.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What happened?
+
+**Richard Feldman:** Well, it's actually a funny segue into Elm 0.19. It's a thing that is no longer possible in Elm 0.19, the root cause there...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, okay...
+
+**Richard Feldman:** Basically, there was a function called debug.crash, and it really did what it says on the tin.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It sounds like you shouldn't call that in production... \[laughs\]
+
+**Richard Feldman:** You know, it's funny you should mention that, because yeah, you shouldn't call that in production. But we did, and sure enough, it got run and then it crashed. So in Elm 0.19 when you run an optimize build, there's a new compiler flag called --optimize, which I'm sure we will get into, because that's one of the banner features of the release...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.
+
+**Richard Feldman:** When you run that, one of the things that it does is it says "Hey, you're still using some debug functions. Take those out before building for production." So that would have prevented us from having any runtime exceptions, but unfortunately that option didn't exist back then, so... We blemished our previously unblemished record, but...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, it happens...
+
+**Richard Feldman:** It's funny, because we found out about it and I tweeted about it... That got way more retweets and likes than my previous comments, that "Hey, it's still been this many months and this many years without any runtime exceptions...", and I have this theory that maybe it's more credible if you say it's been like, you know, a very small number, instead of zero... \[laughs\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's right.
+
+**Richard Feldman:** I guess people kind of wonder, "Well, maybe you just don't have your logging set up right." Well, we did. \[laughs\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's like, even Superman has his kryptonite, you know?
+
+**Richard Feldman:** Right.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Zero is almost unbelievable, because it's statistically -- I mean, you're still at a blip, but it shows that even Elm and NoRedInk are humans, as well...
+
+**Richard Feldman:** Oh, absolutely.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** They're not perfect. \[laughter\]
+
+**Richard Feldman:** Yeah, we very much are not.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, let's talk a little bit about the company. I mention NoRedInk often, because there are a handful of businesses who have done what you all have done in hiring Evan and allowing him to work on Elm, and I'd like to just promote that activity. Another one that comes to mind is Shopify, which hires Sean Griffin to work full-time on Rails, and I think they're hiring other such positions to fill out even more of their infrastructure scheme. DockYard hired Chris McCord to work on Phoenix, and it's like, his job is to work on Phoenix, and that's something that they believe in investing in.
+
+I'm just curious from the business end and from your perspective, what it's been like having Evan working there, the push and the pull... Has he been able to dedicate most of his time on Elm proper, or does he get pulled into the business things? Help us understand how that's going.
+
+**Richard Feldman:** It's in Evan's contract that he only works on Elm. We hired him in January 2016, and he's never done anything directly for the product. The product is basically a web application for teachers to help teach those students English, and more specifically writing. Evan basically is really just 100% open source engineer. He just works on Elm.
+
+My boss - full credit to him, it was his idea to see if we could hire Evan. Basically, what he said to Evan was "Hey, the reason we wanna hire you is that Elm has been really great for us and we don't wanna mess with the formula. We want you to keep doing what you're doing, we just wanna be kind of more plugged into it."
+
+He basically has complete autonomy to take Elm in whatever direction he thinks is best, and we trust his judgment, because that's what has led us to embrace it in the first place. I don't know, I guess we're aware that that's not a common thing for a company our size. For context, I think it's 26 engineers now. This is probably a good time to mention that we're hiring, so if you wanna come work with me and Evan...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[08:15\] There you go.
+
+**Richard Feldman:** ...on building stuff for teachers... We're super remote-friendly. I work remotely from Philadelphia, Evan works from Boston... The headquarters are in San Francisco, but we go anywhere from West Coast Pacific to Central European time as far as time zones go. The 26 engineers are pretty widely distributed across that.
+
+The overall company - I think it's 67, something like that... Between 65 and 70 people. For a company our size to hire somebody to 100% work on open source stuff I guess is pretty unusual... But like I said, we really wanted to keep the good thing going, and to not mess with the formula that has brought us so many technical benefits.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, Elm has been much praised for its technical benefits. I'm curious about the community. It's been two years since we've talked, and we like to keep our thumb on the pulse of which direction things are moving, and anytime you have a project or a piece of software which has technical prowess, you always wonder "Will it catch on? Will it have a robust community? Will there be people who adopt it?" So I guess we're here two years later and it's still going, but I'm curious from your perspective how much adoption Elm has gained and how much the community has really built out around Evan and around your work?
+
+**Richard Feldman:** Yeah, it's a great question. First of all, I think the biggest change that we've seen in the past year -- so we started doing The State of Elm Survey, and comparing 2017 to 2018, the biggest change that we saw was actually more people using Elm on teams, at work, rather than as individuals, as hobbyists.
+
+In 2017 it was something like 18% of survey respondents said that they were using Elm at work, and 2018 it was like 40%, so more than double... Which was really fantastic, because one of the concerns with a project like Elm is it's like, hey, this is a new programming language. Obviously, that's a bigger barrier to a lot of teams trying to adopt it than it is to say we're a library, or we're a framework.
+
+So there was always that kind of question, where it's like "Hey, even if this is really great, even if it has all these benefits, is that gonna be something that teams are just unwilling to give a real shot to?" And it turns out the answer seems to be actually they are willing to give it a shot, and that's really changing.
+
+So as far as absolute growth numbers, we don't really have a great way to measure that, in part because around the time of GDPR we were like "You know, we could do a bunch of stuff to make the website compliant with cookies and whatnot, or we could just stop tracking visits", and we just decided to stop tracking visits. So we don't really have even like a bellwether of how many people are--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You could have just blocked all of Europe. We've seen a few companies doing that as well... \[laughs\]
+
+**Richard Feldman:** No, Elm is really big in Europe. The biggest Elm meetup I ever went to was in London, it was like 100 people. And Oslo, Norway, apparently is just like a hotbed of Elm-- there are multiple Elm consulting companies, there's a bunch of companies using Elm to build their products... So I think the idea of just like "Oh, we'll just ignore Europe" would be a complete non-starter for us.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. It's interesting you find so much growth of Elm inside of enterprise and inside of the workplace. It seems like small, new, niche languages start off at least - many that I'm thinking of - in the hobbyist realm... People tinkering, trying it out on their own time, and then maybe it starts to get penetration as they sneak it into their organizations often. What do you think is the selling point for Elm that's getting so many businesses to hop on? Is it that example, the one runtime errors -- I was gonna say "the zero runtime errors." \[laughter\] The very few runtime errors? Is that what gets people to really dive in and try it on work time?
+
+**Richard Feldman:** \[12:10\] That's a great question. I wanna go back a step though and just point out that I think -- we've gotten definitely increasing adoption over time, but I can't say Elm's like a runaway smash success. It's not on the level of like a React or an Angular, something like that. I like to say we've graduated from obscure to niche...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Nice.
+
+**Richard Feldman:** ...where it's something that a good number of people have heard of, but a much smaller number of people have actually tried, and an even smaller number of people are actually using it professionally. That's been a really positive improvement, but I can't say that we're there yet.
+
+Evan gave this talk a couple years ago called "Let's be mainstream." I don't think I can say that Elm is mainstream yet, in terms of adoption. Having said that, Evan also gave a pretty awesome talk about what are Elm's goals, what does success look like, and one of the things he talked about is actually - getting back to your point about community - the conclusion of the talk was basically "Let's try to make a really great community, where everybody wants to help each other build awesome things, and not worry so much about adoption or Hacker News or stars on GitHub, and just kind of let those things fall out of having a really happy, successful, functioning community where people are happy. So that's been kind of the bigger focus.
+
+There are definitely some things we could do that could sacrifice Elm's long-term goals for the sake of driving adoption in the short-term, but we just decided we don't wanna do that. We'd rather just let it grow organically, at whatever pace that is. And so far, we've all been pretty happy with that outcome.
+
+I have to say, it does benefit companies who do adopt Elm for now, because the result of that strategy has been - intentionally or not, which I don't think it has been intentional, since we haven't really talked about it on the core team... But it does mean that there's actually a pretty substantial hiring benefit to companies that adopt it. So we have seen this, and other companies have seen this, that basically there's just more Elm developers out there, people who wanna use Elm at work, than there are companies who have Elm positions, which means that it's actually paradoxically easier to hire high-quality Elm developers right now than it is to hire high-quality JavaScript developers... Because although there are many more JavaScript developers in the world than there are Elm developers, there's an even bigger proportion of JavaScript job openings that they're out there choosing from.
+
+So it's sort of like you get to be a bigger fish in a smaller pond by being one of the few companies that's offering Elm jobs... And that's been one of the biggest benefits to us outside the technical realm, has just been hiring. Honestly, the number one thing that we get on our cover letters for like why the person applied - they all say the word "Elm." It's a selling point for basically everybody who applies for any kind of front-end or full-stack position, to the point where we've actually transitioned...
+
+When I joined the company, which was almost five years ago now, we had a really tough time hiring front-end engineers. We were able to get back-end and some full stack applicants, but front-end - the well was totally dry... Until we started using Elm, and now it's completely reversed, where we now have a much harder time finding back-end people than front-end people, because we just get so many applicants who are interested in using Elm.
+
+We even get some back-end people who are interested in using Elm. They're like "Hey, I'm a back-end engineer, but I'm actually kind of curious about this Elm thing, and that's what got me interested in your job position in the first place. I'd like to do a little bit of Elm stuff, even if I'm mainly on the back-end." It's pretty cool.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's interesting. It makes me think of -- kind of on a different angle of the same idea... Not only is it easier to hire because there's less enterprises that are hiring in Elm, but there's also somewhat of a relationship between a programmer who will learn a new thing on their own, and who's diving into these niches because they see the technical merits of a language, and the quality of that programmer. It reminds me on actually a Paul Graham essay from all the way back in 2004 - have you heard of this one, "The Python Paradox"?
+
+**Richard Feldman:** \[16:17\] The Python Paradox, yeah. Yeah, exactly.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You've gotta put yourself in the time of 2004, but his point was that Python programmers -- well, I just have it pulled up here, let me read a little bit. He says:
+
+"In a recent talk I said something that upset a lot of people: that you could get smarter programmers to work on a Python project than you could to work on a Java project."
+
+Of course, that would have upset a lot of people, right? \[laughter\] He said, "I didn't mean by this that Java programmers are dumb, I meant that Python programmers are smart. It's a lot of work to learn a new programming language, and people don't learn Python because it will get them a job, they learn it because they genuinely like to program and aren't satisfied with the languages they already know."
+
+That Python paradox that he's talking about no longer applies to Python, because it has gone mainstream...
+
+**Richard Feldman:** For sure, yeah...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** ...and you can definitely get a good job learning Python, but it does apply to niche languages, and the kind of programmers that will go out there and teach themselves, or dedicate hobby time... They're usually pretty good programmers, so it kind of works both sides.
+
+**Richard Feldman:** Yeah, I think it definitely correlates with a passion for programming. This is something my wife likes to say - she'll point out that "Your hobby is also your work." When I'm not working on my NoRedInk stuff, my hobby is doing more programming stuff, and running the Philadelphia Elm meetup, and whatnot.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right. It's not fair.
+
+**Richard Feldman:** Yeah, and I think it's important that our industry not have that as a requirement, that people need to do the same thing in their free time that they do in their work time...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Absolutely.
+
+**Richard Feldman:** But of course, it's inescapable that it's an advantage. If you're spending more time engaging with your craft, then you're just on average gonna be better. Otherwise, that would be kind of a waste of time. And as much as I don't want that to become a requirement, I also appreciate the fact that companies benefit from that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, it's fortunate and yet unfortunate, you know? It's one of those things...
+
+**Richard Feldman:** Yeah... As long as it doesn't become a requirement, I think it's okay.
+
+**Break:** \[18:18\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Richard, as you said, Elm is moving from obscure to niche, and its impact has been, I would say, more than niche and more than obscure, because we've well documented it on this show... And one of the things I love about the Changelog and why we try to stay as polyglot as we can, even though that means we dive into things that sometimes we just can't quite swim that deep, is because the proliferation and the moving of ideas across different camps and different languages and different communities is hugely valuable.
+
+\[20:14\] I think two years ago when you and Evan were on, I asked Evan about the feeling he gets when some of his great ideas and some of the things that Elm has really paved the way for - thinking about the Elm architecture, thinking about just the niceties of the compiler, and these ideas have either been borrowed, or from the great artists have been stolen, and taken to other languages, other projects, other frameworks... Really a neat thing that has happened.
+
+That being said, somebody who knows JavaScript today and doesn't know Elm can benefit from a lot of the stuff that Elm brought to the table, but what are still some reasons in 2018 to give it a try, even though a lot of the great ideas have been moved around to other places?
+
+**Richard Feldman:** Yeah, it's funny that you mentioned that, because from my perspective, I've developed sort of a strange relationship with the idea of Elm's ideas proliferating in the world. The big one is the Elm architecture, which essentially is -- Redux is very similar to the Elm architecture in a lot of ways, and that's the biggest way to do application state management in the React ecosystem certainly... And even in Angular and Vue, there's ways you can opt into that, which some people do... Whereas in Elm it's sort of a foundational concept; everything's built on top of that. It's the only way to manage app state, and there's actually no other source of global state, at all.
+
+One of the things that's interesting to me is that if I talk to a JavaScript developer who's never used Elm, it's pretty common that they will say "Yeah, the Elm architecture seems really cool, and I appreciate some of the simplicity that it brings to organizing your app state." And if I talk to Elm developers who have been doing Elm for even a couple of months, nobody mentions that. It's all other stuff. That's just sort of like the table stakes in Elm, because it's this kind of foundational primitive... The stuff that people talk about are things like "I really love the compiler error messages" or "I love how everything in the ecosystem just works well together."
+
+Now with Elm 0.19, two of the things that people commonly mention are, one, "My project builds so fast", because there was a big speed-up in the compiler. Evan basically rewrote the parser, and then he rewrote the exhaustiveness checker and the type checker, and basically, by the time he was done, pretty much all the insides had been rewritten for speed. The result is that -- somebody posted that they had a just shy of 50,000 line of code Elm project, with something over 100 files and so forth, and the entire thing from scratch, building it plus all of its dependencies, on a fresh Git checkout, was under 2 seconds.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Nice.
+
+**Richard Feldman:** That's compiling it, type-checking it, spitting out the compiled JavaScript - everything, start to finish, was under two seconds. And that's not even an incremental compile, which, of course, they're much faster.
+
+I think about, like, how many people's Babel - which is JavaScript to JavaScript - builds at that scale are running in under 2 seconds for a fresh build, let alone for an incremental build. That becomes a selling point, it becomes something that people are excited about.
+
+So I think about it in terms of two things that are really exciting to me about Elm. One is the tools, the compiler and the tooling around it, the package manager, and the other one is the ecosystem, where basically everything is built in terms of Elm and I don't really have to worry about compatibility like I did in the JavaScript world. Basically, whenever I install a new package, I kind of expect it to just work immediately. I'll say "Install it", and then I expect to get the same experience I would get as if I were just using a new core library that shipped with the language. It's that level of smoothness.
+
+\[24:14\] Asset size is, I guess, another thing we should talk about, because that's maybe THE biggest selling point of Elm 0.19. But it's relatively new, so I don't hear a lot of people talking about it yet.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, it was news to me. You announced in the blog post, which is linked in our show notes, August 21st... We're recording this October 10th, so a couple months back... But this one didn't make the headlines as much as some of the other things I've seen from the Elm community, even though it's a pretty big deal, especially nowadays when we're trying so hard to get the time to first paint down to as small as possible for our web apps, so that they can reach as many people, as fast as they can. Elm 0.19 has made huge strides with regard to bundle size. Give us the details.
+
+**Richard Feldman:** Yeah, basically the comparison point that we ended up using was "The real-world app." This is a project that's designed to be a bigger cousin to TodoMVC. The basic idea is they have a really detailed specification for "Here's how to build this-- " it's like a Medium clone, it's called Conduit. You can sign in, sign up, post an article, view a feed of articles, Favorite articles, follow authors, unfollow people, you can edit some settings... So pretty typical web app type stuff. And they basically have a really detailed spec, and they provide all the styles for you, and they have a spec for both the front-end and the back-end. So if you want, you can try out "Hey, what does it look like if I'm running this application on a React front-end and a Django back-end? Or an Angular front-end with a Laravel back-end", and all those different combinations.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's a great idea, by the way. I think I remember seeing that. It's very useful to be able to swap those in and out and just see how it reacts, right?
+
+**Richard Feldman:** Yeah, and it's a really cool project just to be able to compare. If I'm trying to see "Hey, how would this thing be done in this particular technology?", I wanna evaluate that technology, just having a sort of substantial codebase to look at it to say "Okay, so I see how this thing maps to that other familiar thing/technology that I know."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Exactly.
+
+**Richard Feldman:** So we have an Elm implementation of this, and one of the things that's kind of cool about this is that these are all projects where the goal is to show best practices, not to tune to benchmarks, which is always a concern with micro-benchmarks... It's like, "Well, how much of this is actually real-world, versus something that's just been tuned to do the best numbers on the benchmark possible?" And pretty much all of these are like -- people just built the apps to do a good job, showing how to do things right.
+
+So the punch line of the blog post is that the React, Angular and Ember ones have anywhere between 105 -- something a little bit over 100 kb of minified and gzipped assets for this whole application... Which is usually like (I don't know) a couple dozen files, and a bunch of dependencies, and so forth. And I think down to the 70's, depending on which of those more popular frameworks you're using... Whereas the Elm one, the entire compiled asset size, minified/gzipped is 29 kb, which is actually just smaller than React by itself. That was a really cool result because that means that if you're doing a React version of this, even with the most aggressive possible code-splitting, you still couldn't get it down to as small as the entire Elm app with no code-splitting... Which was really surprising.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[27:57\] How much of that 29 kb, if you could break it out, would be application code, and how much of it would be framework, or architecture code? Do you know the percentages?
+
+**Richard Feldman:** That's a good question, and it kind of gets into why it's hard to measure... The reason that Elm got this to be so small is basically that what 0.19 introduces is function-level dead code elimination. The way that works is -- ordinarily, you have your application, you install some packages that you depend on, and by default, in the old world, you would just get absolutely everything that you install with the package; all the code in that package gets compiled into your bundle.
+
+So then you have module-level dead code elimination, aka tree shaking, which is the target in the JavaScript ecosystem... It's like, "Hey, if everybody uses ES6 modules, then we can get tree shaking, and that'll be great." So that's one level of dead code elimination, where if you don't import a module, then it gets excluded, it gets stripped out of your compiled asset bundle... Which is cool, but there's one more level than that, which is function-level dead code elimination, which is essentially saying "I import this module. This module exposes 100 functions. If I'm only actually calling three of those functions, that's all I'm gonna get in my compiled output. The other 97 will just get stripped out." Basically, it doesn't really matter how your modules are organized anymore. You can just put your functions wherever it makes the most sense organizationally, and it also doesn't matter which modules you're importing. It only matters which functions you're actually calling. Those are the only ones that get used.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's super-cool. So it does all the transitive dependencies and stuff to figure out which functions those functions are calling, and so on... So you're not gonna be missing a function at the end of the day.
+
+**Richard Feldman:** Exactly. Now, this is really cool, and it's one of the big reasons that Elm 0.19 was able to get such a small bundle size. However many dependencies we pull in - it doesn't really matter how big they are; all it matters is how big are the things we actually use. And the reason we're able to do this is that Elm has its own totally separate package ecosystem from npm. That whole SPA example doesn't actually use npm at all. It's just only using Elm packages.
+
+As a consequence of that, it means you get the system-wide dead code elimination, which is really great, but it also means that it's kind of hard to measure what percentage of this is X, versus Y, versus Z, because it's kind of like, well, what even is Elm's baseline? And the answer is, well, it kind of depends on how much of it you're using.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Good point.
+
+**Richard Feldman:** That dead code elimination applies to Elm's standard libraries just as much as any package, so it makes it pretty tricky to measure. I guess what you could do is you could kind of like do surgery on the compiled JS, and map things back, categorize all of them, and say "Oh, this came from here and this came from there", but I don't think anybody has ever tried to do that. It sounds like a bunch of work.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah... I was gonna say, one thing you could do from the other direction is say "Okay, how much application code do I have? How much application code have I written?" and assume that you're using all those functions, because why would you write app code for a demo that's unused...?
+
+**Richard Feldman:** Sure.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And then say "How big is that, if I just minify it?", or do whatever... Maybe Elm can't do that. It can't just boil this part of the world without boiling the entire thing, especially with its checking, and stuff...
+
+**Richard Feldman:** \[laughs\] Yeah, I don't think there's a way to directly say "Just compile this application code without its dependencies."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, because it wouldn't compile.
+
+**Richard Feldman:** Exactly. It depends on those. \[laughs\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I'm in the minify world, I'm still thinking just minifying all this down, but... It's actually compiling. Okay.
+
+**Richard Feldman:** Yeah. And what's really cool about that is that it's a benefit that actually gets bigger the bigger your codebase is. If you have an example that's like, let's say, ten times the size of this application, and you've got a bunch more dependencies - because the bigger your project is, naturally, the more dependencies you're gonna end up having - as a general rule, the more you benefit from this, because each of those additional dependencies would otherwise represent all that code coming in... But instead, it's like "No, we're just gonna get what we actually use."
+
+\[32:23\] And the other cool thing is that Elm shares transitive dependencies. So if I install two packages that, let's say, both of them depend on the JSON library, it's gonna find some version of the JSON library that works with both of those packages and only install that once. So it can do the dead code elimination not only across your direct dependencies, but also across your indirect dependencies as well, with just the one shared version between them. So you really end up with kind of the minimal set of dependencies you can get.
+
+There's some other cool stuff that it does, like automatic record renaming, like field renaming... One cool thing about that is it does stuff where if you've got records which are kind of like JavaScript objects, but simpler, they don't have "prototypes are this", or anything like that, and they're immutable... Maybe you'll have a user record that's got fields like username, email, stuff like that... When you run Elm Make with the "optimize" flag, what it'll do is it'll actually compile those down to the smallest JavaScript field names it can come up with. So instead of username and email, it'll compile them down to like A and B... Which is ordinarily not something that's super-safe for a minifier like Uglify to do, because you might be potentially relying on those with dynamic field access, using a string or a variable.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Richard Feldman:** But in Elm we know that that's not gonna happen with these records, because that's just not a feature in Elm. You can't do that. You can only access them with a dot. So because of that, it's safe to rename them. And one of the cool things, which granted, probably doesn't make a big difference in practice, but which I think is really cool, is that it actually goes through your whole program and counts usages, like "how many times this field is used", so that it can use all the single-letter ones for the most used fields, and then when you run out of single-letters, then it can move into two letters, or something like that...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, wow...
+
+**Richard Feldman:** Which is just, you know -- how much does that actually save in practice? Okay, it probably doesn't really matter... But it's a cool example of how much the compiler knows about your whole program.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We need to sit Evan down and tell him about the law of diminishing returns.
+
+**Richard Feldman:** \[laughs\] I honestly think that was one of those things where it was like he had to track it anyway, so it was like "Well, how should I distribute these things?"
+
+**Jerod Santo:** "Why not...?"
+
+**Richard Feldman:** Yeah, "I might as well just count."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's very cool. Function-level dead code elimination. That's the first I've heard of that. The next step is now line-level dead code elimination. Lay that challenge out there. Doing it line by line for the next version.
+
+**Richard Feldman:** You know, speaking of diminishing returns... There are other potential optimizations out there. It could go even further, by eliminating branches of conditionals that can't possibly get run because of like "You're using this library, but we know it's not possible for that branch to get run..."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Exactly.
+
+**Richard Feldman:** However, that's another really big project. It's kind of a whole different level of challenge, and at this point it's like, "Okay..." Basically, Evan put something out there about the design for code-splitting, because right now Elm does not have a first-class code-splitting mechanism... And the goal was "Well, let's see how much the dead code elimination does for us, and then let's see if a) that's something that there's actually demand for, and b) if there is demand, let's see what people's codebases actually look like, so that we can kind of design the feature that is gonna make sense for how their assets end up being in practice", because this is kind of a whole new ball game. We don't really know what it looks like. Maybe it turns out that actually if you try to code-split along these module boundaries that you end up with actually more than you would have before, because you lose out on some of the code-splitting benefits.
+
+So we're gonna have to see how those things look in practice before thinking about even further investments in the asset size.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[36:06\] When you say "code-splitting", you're referring to instead of having a single bundle, you'll have multiple bundles of smaller size, that are kind of loaded dynamically? Is that what you mean by code-splitting, or something else?
+
+**Richard Feldman:** Yeah, exactly. Sorry. I should probably define my terms.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's alright.
+
+**Richard Feldman:** Yeah, code-splitting and lazy loading - the basic idea is let's say you've got a single-page application; you're gonna download one HTML file, and then when the user transitions to different URLs, that's actually all gonna happen on the client side. You're not actually gonna get a page refresh and a flash of white on the screen. All that's gonna happen is that the compiled JavaScript code is gonna go and do HTTP requests to the server, saying "Hey, give me the data I need to render the next page."
+
+The idea behind code-splitting is you're not only gonna say "Give me the data to render the next page", but also you're gonna say "Give me the code to render the next page. That way, you don't have to download -- let's say you end up with like 50 pages on your web app... You don't really want the end user to have to download all of that when they do the first page-load; you'd rather have them download just enough compiled JavaScript to render that first page, and then when they transition to a different page, you can then say "Okay, I'll on the fly load the code for this new page and then execute it."
+
+As applications get bigger, this is something that people commonly have demand for in the JavaScript world. That may very well turn out to be something that there's also demand for in the Elm world, just because why wouldn't there be? But we don't really know what the design constraints would be yet.
+
+One of the things about performance optimization is that the bottlenecks are always where you least expect them. Now that we have this ecosystem-wide function-level dead code elimination, what does that mean for code-splitting? How does it impact it? We don't really know, because no one's really ever had it before.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right. So now that 0.19 is out there and you have this dead code elimination, which sounds like it'd be a straightforward upgrade and then recompile, you could at least test -- I mean, have you guys tried it at NoRedInk and just seen your bundle size decrease from version to version, or is it not that simple?
+
+**Richard Feldman:** It's not that simple, because we are still blocked on some of our dependencies not being updated yet.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You don't have the goodness yet...
+
+**Richard Feldman:** \[laughs\] Not quite yet, and we're jealous of the companies that all of their dependencies have already been upgraded, and they're already gushing about it in Elm's Slack about how awesome it is...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You're like an Android user on three versions back on their OS, man...
+
+**Richard Feldman:** Well, one version back, but... But yeah. No, we're very excited about it. It's something where we actually track what our compile asset size is for each of our different routes, and so we'll be able to do a pretty cool before and after.
+
+For us, honestly, the bigger benefit is the compile time, because now we've got a quarter million lines of Elm code. You multiply really fast compile time savings across a big enough codebase - that adds up to a lot of increased developer productivity.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Absolutely.
+
+**Richard Feldman:** We're looking forward to that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Let's go back to the packages real quick. One of the reasons why this is possible, this function-level dead code elimination, like you said, is because all of the packages are written in Elm, on Elm-lang.org package manager...
+
+**Richard Feldman:** Yup.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So npm isn't even touched. Now, the gift and the curse of npm is there's so much out there, right?
+
+**Richard Feldman:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Every piece of code in the universe is on npm somehow... So when we talk about community and advantages, how much has Elm at a disadvantage in terms of packages that developers need, versus npm? I just think of that because of the limiting factor of you're waiting on some packages, they haven't been updated yet, and I wonder how big is the package ecosystem?
+
+**Richard Feldman:** That's a good question. I don't know the exact number of packages, but I know that npm being the biggest in the world is a lot bigger, there's no doubt.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.
+
+**Richard Feldman:** \[40:00\] I see it in a couple different ways. One is Elm does have JavaScript interop. If worse came to worst, if I was starting a brand new project and there was some package on npm that I was like "I can't live without this package", I would necessarily have to rewrite it in Elm. I could probably just do JavaScript interop and just get by with that. Of course, if I do that, then that chunk of code doesn't get me all of Elm's guarantees, all of its benefits, the function-level dead code elimination is not there...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Richard Feldman:** The only way to get that, that I'm aware of, in JavaScript, is to do it with the Google Clojure compiler. That is like an Uglify alternative that has an advanced mode which, as long as your code abides by certain rules, it can do function-level dead code elimination. However, in practice, it seems like there is a lot of codebase -- there aren't a lot of codebases out there that actually happen to abide by those rules such that they can use it. As far as I know, the only community that really makes good use of that is the ClojureScript community, because ClojureScript was specifically designed to emit JavaScript that could be used with the Clojure compiler on advanced mode
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Smart.
+
+**Richard Feldman:** Yeah. ClojureScript and now Elm are the only two communities that have the function-level dead code elimination... Although I think ClojureScript tends to do more in terms of wrapping JavaScript libraries, as opposed to rebuilding them from scratch, whereas definitely Elm leans a lot more towards "Let's do it in Elm, and then we get all the benefits." So I think in practice we probably get on a percentage basis more benefit from it, but I think they're both capable of it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Hypothetically, the JavaScript ecosystem could get there, but it would require -- it would kind of be on an app-by-app basis; it would require you to abide by specific constraints that a lot of apps aren't doing out there in the wild.
+
+**Richard Feldman:** Yeah, and I think a lot of this comes down to ergonomics. I have a whole series of thoughts I've been fleshing out about just comparing how JavaScript has evolved over the past ten years, since 2008, when it got fast enough to build web apps in, because of the great browser performance wars... And I think in a lot of ways, a lot of the churn people have been seeing and complaining about, with like "Oh my gosh, there's so much stuff coming out all the time, and things are changing so fast" really dates back to that, that performance war that led to JavaScript being really suitable to have rich web apps that are really client-side heavy.
+
+**Break:** \[42:44\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** One question I do remember asking two years ago, and you were teasing that - and I wanted the state of it, because I haven't heard - was Elm on the server. Did anything come of that, or is it still just a pipedream, a sparkle in your eye? What's the situation, is that gonna happen?
+
+**Richard Feldman:** That's a great question. It's not that it did happen, it's more that I think we have a much better understanding of what that looks like now. As was the case two years ago and is still the case now, Elm does not have first-class server-side support, and that's intentional. We want to focus on the browser for now, but we're sort of keeping an eye on the server.
+
+One of the (perhaps) surprising things that has been guiding this design question of "What should Elm on the server look like, if anything?" is actually WebAssembly. One of the things we've been surprised by was WebAssembly came out, and discovering that actually this is a thing that all the browser vendors were on board with and were actually supporting... There became this question at some point of "What does WebAssembly mean for Elm?" and that kind of transitioned to discussions with some folks at Mozilla, and asking about what's the garbage collection story gonna be like, and asking questions about what should Elm's interop look like... And where we ended up was kind of discovering that actually it seems pretty feasible that Elm could someday compile just to WebAssembly, not to JavaScript at all, and actually that all of the existing JavaScript interop would still work.
+
+The reason that's possible is that the way that Elm's JavaScript interop works is essentially through message passing. It's kind of like a pub/sub, maybe EventEmitter system. So your Elm app broadcasts events out to JavaScript and then listens for events coming in from JavaScript... And since that's the whole model, it's like that, and then also you can use some WebComponents stuff if it's just view-specific... Neither here, nor there, but either one of those interop methods work totally fine if Elm was compiling to WebAssembly instead of to JavaScript; they can still talk to JavaScript just as easily as it did before, and nobody on the other side needs to know or care that it's compiling to WebAssembly under the hood... Which could be even bigger for assets, and also even bigger for performance, not just because it gets to have lower overhead, but also because it opens the door to really exciting concurrency stuff.
+
+Right now, Elm is actually very much intentionally designed to be a language that's potentially great at concurrency, but a lot of that potential goes to waste because JavaScript is single-threaded, and web workers are, let's say, not usually great for improving performance of typical web applications in practice, even though in theory they might be able to because of serialization overhead. But a lot of that could potentially change if Elm compiled to WebAssembly.
+
+Now, if Elm compiles to WebAssembly, that kind of opens the door to Elm on the server having a built-in way to get off the ground in an environment where concurrency actually matters a lot more, and you can have a lot more potential benefits from it. Because on the client-side, concurrency is basically a performance optimization, but on the server it can be a pretty fundamental thing as far as throughput, as far as how much the server can handle and what kind of a load it's actually capable of processing.
+
+\[48:18\] So the potential seems to be pretty high there, and I don't know if that actually ends up the way that we end up going with it, but it's been pretty fascinating to realize "Oh hey, this actually seems like not only a plausible path, but actually a likely path at this point." We've actually started basically making design considerations. Anytime we talk about any kind of change that might impact the language or the core libraries, one of the questions that always comes up is "Will this still be fine if we're compiling to WebAssembly instead?" and it's basically become something of a design constraint.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Let me make sure I'm understanding you correctly - are you saying that the work to make Elm compile to WebAssembly is the kind of work that you would have to do to run it on the server and so the rearchitecting will help you, or are you saying that once you've compiled to WebAssembly, then you just magically build around that compiled WASM thing on the server?
+
+**Richard Feldman:** Yeah, so I guess I kind of skipped a step.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay, thank you. \[laughter\]
+
+**Richard Feldman:** Yeah, that was a total leap...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's alright.
+
+**Richard Feldman:** Basically, Evan wrote -- one of the FAQs is "Hey, does Elm run on the server?" and of course, Elm compiles to JavaScript, so literally if you wanted to, you could compile Elm to JavaScript and run that--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It doesn't mean that you should, right?
+
+**Richard Feldman:** Well, more importantly, it doesn't mean you're gonna have a good time if you do that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right, which means you shouldn't do it. \[laughs\]
+
+**Richard Feldman:** Well, so one of the big things that Evan points out is that basically compiling to a particular target is about 5% of the work of getting to a good experience. The ecosystem is a huge deal, so you have all this enormous amounts of design work, and also implementation work, to say "What would a good Elm experience on the server be like?" Elm has different design constraints than -- I don't think there's any other language that has exactly the same design constraints that Elm has.
+
+So there's definitely design work to do to figure out what would a nice experience look like. Actually, Reason ML just ran into this recently... Reason ML is another programming language that compiles to JavaScript, although technically it's a syntax on top of oCaml, so it doesn't have to compile to JavaScript, although that's what its big pitch is, because the syntax looks very JavaScripty.
+
+Anyway, a lot of people were saying "Well, if I can compile Reason ML to JavaScript, and I can also run oCaml on my server, why not use Reason ML on the server?" And what quickly turned out to be the case is that unfortunately that's not enough to get a good experience right out the box. There's still a huge amount of work to do to basically build an ecosystem around that to answer questions like "What should a web server look like? What should database access look like?" There's all these different things - working with queues, working with third-party APIs... All of these questions that sort of have to be addressed before you have something that's an adequate replacement from an ergonomics perspective for something like Rails, or Sinatra, or Express, or any of the other alternatives that people commonly use. So the folks who ended up doing that in the early days were basically doing on Reason - they ended up saying "Well, okay, we're gonna write our business logic in Reason, and then we're actually just gonna end up compiling it to JavaScript and then doing a lot of interop to Express, just to end up basically using Express as our application server."
+
+I guess technically you could do the same thing in Elm if you wanted to - just use Elm for your business logic, and then use a whole ton of interop to talk to Express. But that's not really the Elm experience that people are accustomed to. People are accustomed to things just working, and being reliable, and really only having to use interop in very exceptional cases, not as like a bread and butter type thing.
+
+\[52:17\] I think that's where the big amount of work to do exists - what's the design of a really nice system? And that's what brings me back to WebAssembly - what are the design constraints of that system? If one of the design constraints is we're running in this single-threaded, albeit asynchronous environment because we're compiling to JS and running it on Node, that really constrains the API design space, compared to if we're saying "Yeah, we just have complete control over concurrency, we have first-class threads that we can work with under the hood... We can offer a nicer API at a foundational level, on which that whole ecosystem can be built if we're compiling to something that has a really nice notion of threading."
+
+This also gets into other questions... One of the things that Evan discovered in his research is that -- so Evans is a big admirer of Erlang's supervision tree model, and the way that they handle fault-tolerance and the way that they do servers... Which has a lot of really great benefits. And one of the things that came out of this exploration is that it seems like those ideas are absolutely at their most effective when they are part of the foundational primitives, as opposed to when you try to opt into them using a third-party package, which happens in a lot of languages. So that's also necessarily part of that initial design, and the way that Erlang is able to get really high throughput and really great fault-tolerance is because it has really great concurrency primitives and also supervision built-in from day one.
+
+Philosophically, I think the phrase Evan used was "I built Elm because I wanted to make something that had a credible claim of being the best experience you could get for building front-end applications", and for me as a user of that, I absolutely think he succeeded. But he basically said, "Look, if I'm gonna do all the work to bring into the server, I would want that same goal post. I wouldn't wanna just say 'It's like Elm, but also on the server', but rather saying 'Even if you don't use Elm on the front-end, this has a legitimate claim to being potentially (if you're into the types of things that Elm does) the best choice that you would possibly have out there for servers." And that's a much higher bar to clear, and it requires a lot more--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I was gonna say, that's a longer field goal to kick, yeah. For sure.
+
+**Richard Feldman:** Well, especially because on the front-end it's basically like -- who's your competition?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Exactly.
+
+**Richard Feldman:** It's JavaScript and TypeScript, and then several niche alternatives. On the back-end it's like Python, Ruby, Go, Scala, Java... The list just goes on and on. There's so many different alternatives that have been around for longer than -- in some cases, longer than JavaScript has even existed. And a lot of them have a lot more claims to fame; certainly Erlang in terms of robustness, or Java in terms of sheer scale of some of those deployments... Elm really has a long way to go before it can say "Yeah, we're a serious contender in that space."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So you're on the frontline of Elm community and adoption, you go to the meetups, the conference talks, all this... Surely, you hear a lot of people that are trying Elm or have tried to switch or adopt, and they go back to JavaScript for one reason or the other. I always think of myself, with Sublime Text and VS Code - every month or two I try out VS Code, and there's always just like one or two blockers, and I'm just like "Yeah, I'm going back to SublimeText." So I don't do that.
+
+**Richard Feldman:** Sure.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Surely you've heard some of those people where they say, "Yeah, this just isn't the way I like it" or "That's up to snuff" or "I just can't get over this, that or the other thing." What are some things people have been saying of why they don't adopt Elm?"
+
+**Richard Feldman:** \[56:01\] That's a great question. You're right, I am very plugged into that, and I can rattle off a list... I would say they break down into a couple different categories. A common one is team buy-in. There'll be one person on the team who's really excited about Elm, and everybody else on the team is just kind of like "We don't really care. We don't wanna learn a new language", and the idea just kind of dies on the vine. That said - well, it happens, but at the same time, teams have to work together. I don't think there's really much hope for a success of adoption something (any technology) if only one out of N people actually wants to use it. So that's certainly a barrier.
+
+Another one that comes to mind is basically the learning curve. Elm is a different programming language. That's just an innately higher learning curve than learning a library, learning a framework... I kind of think that's the progression. A library tens to have the lowest learning curve, a framework is more than that, a language is more than that... Especially because sometimes when you get into languages, people end up with roadblocks that are not necessarily matters of "It's too difficult to learn", but rather than people are just not interested in learning because there's some aesthetic turn-off. Elm does have a different syntax than JavaScript.
+
+Quite a lot of people say they like the syntax better, but there's some people who say "Actually, I don't like the syntax as much, and this just bothers me too much. I can't get through the tutorial." That happens. That's another reason that people don't end up using Elm.
+
+From a perspective of actual APIs and libraries, I think the number one thing that people say -- I don't know how many people walk away from Elm because of it, but I have heard at least one person say that they did sort of like a Hack Day project, where they decided they were gonna switch front-end technologies, and they tried Elm, and they tried Vue.js, and they tried React, and they tried... I forget what the other one was. But they ended up not going with Elm because of this, which is JSON decoders.
+
+Basically, in order for Elm to have the level of reliability it does, it needs to not only say -- like, when you get some data from the server, it needs to not only say "I've got this data and now I can work with it", it actually needs to sort of validate and translate it into a format that makes sense for Elm. So if you think about it, in the JavaScript world if I've got a JavaScript object and I try to access a field on it and it's not there, I get back "undefined", and that might very well lead to a runtime exception, the good old-fashioned "undefined is not a function", that type of thing.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Richard Feldman:** But in Elm we don't really have that. That's all sort of checked by the compiler. Now, when you get back data from the server in JavaScript, you can sort of parse that, call json.parse, and it'll just give you back a JavaScript object immediately, or it'll throw an exception, which you can wrap a try-catch around. But assuming it parses, then you've got an object and now you're playing by the same rules as normal, which is to say "Not much in the way of rules."
+
+TypeScript basically does this the same way. It says "Trust me", and you say "Okay, I'm gonna give up type-checking right at the border. I'm not gonna have the compiler's help. I'm just gonna assume that this JSON sort of fit the shape that I expected and we'll just go from there." Whereas Elm is more serious about trying to maintain those guarantees as your program runs, and because the compiler can't possibly check what's coming out of your server because it's just a blob of data, it doesn't exist at compile time, there's nothing to check. Instead, it has this library for JSON decoding that will simultaneously parse the JavaScript, but also validate it against a schema, and say, if that schema doesn't match what we expected, then it will fail and you can do error handling, but you kind of have to specify the error handling upfront.
+
+\[59:53\] So it ends up resulting in a more reliable system, but it does mean that you actually have to write out a schema for all of your JSON endpoints, whereas in JavaScript you just don't. You just say "json.parse" and it's just like "Okay. Good luck." Elm's not really into the whole "Let's just pretend problems won't happen." It's like, "No, we're gonna try and actually handle the problems and do our best to make sure that if there is a bug, we know exactly where it happened and we can gracefully recover from it."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** This annoys some people because they're used to not having to do that, and now this feels cumbersome, or verbose.
+
+**Richard Feldman:** Exactly. And people say it's a bunch of boilerplate. "It's stuff that I don't have to do in JavaScript, and I do have to do in Elm." We're working on this, and in typical Elm design sensibilities, the goal is not so much to say "Well, how can we make this less verbose?" The goal is actually to say "Well, what's the best way to do this? What's the end goal here?" Can we find a system where not only does it improve that, but actually we find something that solves other problems, which actually along the way solves that. That's actually been something I've been doing a lot of research into recently.
+
+The short answer turns out to be that the people who have the best experience with doing client-server data interaction in Elm tend to have a single source of truth for the schema. An example of this would be -- at Google they use protocol buffers for everything. Without going into too much detail, the relevant part here is that they have one schema file that says "Here's what my data on the wire is gonna look like", and then they have a tool that they run that generates both the client-side code that's gonna decode that, and then also the server-side code that's gonna encode that... And vice-versa if you're sending data from client to server.
+
+So by having this single source of truth between the client and the server in this schema file and then using code generation at build time to make sure that the two sides agree, you can actually make sure that you no longer have the problem of "Whoops! I changed what my server is sending, but I forgot to update my client-side code to receive it." If you change the one but not the other, something in your build is gonna break. So that has a separate really nice benefit, even beyond the "Hey, it's a lot of boilerplate that I don't wanna have to deal with."
+
+But as a nice consequence of that, it also addresses that, because now instead of having to define it in multiple places, you only define it in one place. You just say like "Here's my schema file", and then it's gonna generate my code on the server, it's gonna generate my code on the client, and so rather than having to write out "Oh, here's the shape of my stuff on the client" and then also "Here's the separate decoder", you can just generate both of those at the same time for free, from this one schema file, and while you're at it also get better reliability because your build will break if the client and server get out of sync.
+
+\[01:02:52.18\] So we've got something like this; it's not literally protocol buffers, but on one internal service, and so far the people who've been working on that system are like "Yeah, this is great. Everything's better." So that seems likely to be the shape of a solution to that particular thing that turns some people off from the language. It's sort of like a solution to the direct pain point, while also making something else even nicer.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Tell folks who are interested in learning Elm - maybe they're JavaScript developers - and they want to check it out... What's the happiest path to learning Elm?
+
+**Richard Feldman:** The first resource I recommend to everybody is just the official guide. If you go to elm-lang.org, then it's got a nice walkthrough that just gets you start to finish. It's pretty short, so that's a pro and a con. It'll get you up and running, but it's not super in-depth. I'm writing a book - shameless plug - "Elm in Action", which goes into a lot more depth, and it's pretty much designed at people who know JavaScript, at least to some extent; it doesn't expect that you're a JavaScript master by any stretch, but it uses JavaScript as sort of a comparison point. I think if you're coming from JavaScript, that should be a nice introduction.
+
+If you prefer the video thing, I've also got a course on Front-end Masters, which I recently updated for Elm 0.19. I've got two courses on there - one is Intro to Elm, which is basically a day-long course that gets you from zero knowledge of Elm, at the beginning, all the way up through building an application and working on a larger Elm codebase that does single-page application stuff, and HTTP and all that.
+
+Then the advanced course - maybe come back in a couple of months if you've been digging at Elm, and get into some of the really cool, advanced stuff.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very good. Thanks, Richard. This has been a lot of fun. Thanks for coming on the show.
+
+**Richard Feldman:** Alright, thanks.
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+**Adam Stacoviak:** Dan, we're just shy of a year catching back up with you personally. We met you a year ago, and the term cloud native was, to Jerod and I, and maybe even most of the world was still becoming new, and we were still learning about it. I think we actually even opened up the conversation with like "Dan, what's cloud native?" and I think now people tend to know what it is.
+
+Without going too deep, because I wanna cover a lot of the subject, but kind of give us an update of like the last 9-10 months since we last spoke. What's been going on with the CNCF?
+
+**Dan Kohn:** Yeah, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation has been going like gangbusters. I could pull out the exact numbers, but we've grown from something like 8 to 26 projects during that time. We've grown from about 100 members a year ago to we're just about to hit 300 members. Our events are growing like wild, where we had 1,500 people in Berlin a year ago, and then 4,300 in Copenhagen a couple months ago, and we're expecting 7,000 in Seattle in a couple more months...
+
+So on almost any possible metric -- 3,000 unique contributors to the Kubernetes project, and the amount of money, our end-user community has grown from 20-something members to 59 today. There's just a huge level of growth and adoption and engagement.
+
+But on a more technical level, we could actually dive into the cloud native, what it means for a second, because CNCF had a process with our technical oversight committee where we argued about and came up with a definition.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, nice.
+
+**Dan Kohn:** \[04:02\] It's a little dense, but it's only four sentences long, so I would read it to you if you're interested.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's do it!
+
+**Dan Kohn:** Okay. And you can find this by searching for "CNCF Cloud Native definition". It says:
+
+"Cloud native technologies empower organizations to build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments, such as public/private and hybrid clouds. Containers, service meshes, microservices, immutable infrastructure and declarative APIs exemplify this approach. These techniques enable loosely-coupled systems that are resilient, manageable and observable. Combined with robust automation, they allow engineers to make high-impact changes frequently and predictably, with minimal toil. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation seeks to drive adoption of this paradigm by fostering and sustaining an ecosystem of open source, vendor-neutral projects. We democratize state of the art patterns to make these innovations accessible for everyone."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, you were right about being dense, that's for sure.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Is that only four sentences? \[laughs\]
+
+**Dan Kohn:** It is pretty dense, yeah. It was five maybe...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay, five.
+
+**Dan Kohn:** But man, we argued over it for months.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I can see why.
+
+**Dan Kohn:** Yeah... \[laughs\] But the perspective I would give on it is -- and one thing that's interesting about it is, you know, people associate cloud native with Kubernetes, and Kubernetes is the leading platform, it's the biggest project in CNCF, it's one of the highest-velocity projects in the history of open source, right now basically second only to Linux itself... But what is interesting about that definition is that it doesn't say Kubernetes and it doesn't even mention orchestration, where Kubernetes is an orchestrator.
+
+What I like about the definition is that it's saying that over the last ten years, a lot of leading companies have separately run into the same scaling challenges, both scaling their applications on the web, but even more scaling their development teams. And when you look at companies like Twitter, and Yelp, and Google, and many others, they've all needed to come up with a series of solutions that have actually kind of converged together, and now a lot of that learning is getting put into software... And that software, as opposed to having to go pay someone tons of money for it, is available for free to anyone as part of the open source community.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think what's interesting, too - Jerod, when we did the Istio show a few back, just kind of seeing how, Dan, as you laid out, Kubernetes being the most popular, with the highest velocity, second to only Linux, which is really kind of crazy, because just a couple years ago the fight was essentially still "Will it win?" and obviously, since then it has... But going down the cloud native trail map, which was really interesting in that show, which we'll link up to in the show notes... Kind of at each layer, as Kubernetes and CI and orchestration and observability and service mesh - as each of these become more and more standardized, you kind of see the winner, essentially, or the preferred ways to do things, sort of creep in to each of this trail map, which this trail map is really great... It was great for illustration, but also great to talk through, to see how --
+
+**Dan Kohn:** I really appreciate that, and we're pretty pleased with that, as people found our stuff very confusing until we started printing that out. I will mention, if you go to l.cncf.io (Landscape CNCF) there's a link at the top to both the trail map, which is sort of the recommended path of how you can approach cloud native... And we say, look, the very first step is to containerize, and then you wanna do CICD, and only third should you be implementing orchestration and looking at these other more advanced technologies.
+
+\[08:07\] The trail map is the front page, and when you flip it over, if you get our printout, we have this insane cloud native landscape, and that has over 570 different open source projects and closed source products from all of these different vendors around the world. It kind of represents the ferment and the excitement in the space. But without that trail map, the landscape can feel a little overwhelming.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We were kind of joking around before we hopped on with you, Dan, about this being an accidental kind of a cloud native month on the Changelog, because we had the Istio show, then we talked about a segment -- really a conversation around microservices and monorepos, and then last week I had a great conversation with Paul Fremantle about Ballerina, which is kind of a cloud native programming language, culminating with this conversation with you...
+
+So it's been a lot of coverage, and I guess to our listeners out there who aren't that into this stuff, stay tuned, we will diversify yet again, have on fear.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Dan Kohn:** But that is a great line-up, and I hope Paul might have taken credit for the fact that he's actually the person who coined the word "cloud native" about 4-5 years ago.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Did he really?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** He did not take credit, he was too humble.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** He's very humble, yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We did not tease that out of him.
+
+**Dan Kohn:** \[laughs\] Yeah, so among other claims to fame...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, we kid because it wasn't on purpose, we didn't decide to go all cloud native recently; it just kind of happened, so it seems like -- you know, we always joke that if software is eating the world, JavaScript is eating software; it seems like on the backend, operational side, this cloud native idea - I mean, evidenced by 500 projects or entities in your landscape - is really eating a lot of software... So there's just tons of stuff to cover. Is that what you're experiencing? With the massive growth of CNCF, it seems like that's definitely the case.
+
+**Dan Kohn:** Yeah, I would just say a flat yes to that. I will also mention, by the way, that Node.js is a sister project of CNCF and the Linux Foundation... So we're really thrilled to see the growth there. It's also the JS Foundation, which has a lot of other core projects, like jQuery in it. So certainly Kubernetes is a great way of running your JavaScript apps on the server.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** On that note, I would say too stay tuned, because listeners, we will be at -- I think the invite is still open, Dan; you'll have to correct us if we're wrong, but I think we're still invited to KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, and we definitely have representation being planned for Node + JS Interactive, which are the next bigger conferences y'all have here in the fall, which is exciting.
+
+**Dan Kohn:** Oh, that's great. Yeah, I'm really thrilled to hear that. We're gonna be setting up podcasting booths on the floor of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, because there's so much interest here, and we really do wanna facilitate getting this message out to a wider audience.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's exciting. This is news to me, and I'm excited about that. We've done something similar when we've gone to Microsoft Build, or a few different events there, where they've actually given us reserved space to do, and help schedule, and just really plan our content well... So that's awesome to hear.
+
+**Dan Kohn:** And we're gonna be in the Washington State Convention Center, which is where--
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The same place, yeah.
+
+**Dan Kohn:** ...I think back in the end of May or June. So it's wild now to be filling up that kind of space. We actually -- still with too much left, we have 143 different sponsors lined up for that event, and we're not gonna be announcing the schedule for another two weeks, but I can say that based on the slots we have available for three days, and the number of submissions, we had a 13% acceptance rate for the papers...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow.
+
+**Dan Kohn:** So it really just speaks to the level of interest in this community.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[12:05\] The conference alone has got to be several folks' full-time day jobs to just manage - not only the sponsors, but 7,000 people. When I was there in December in Austin, that was around 4,200; the next one was in Copenhagen, you said 4,300, and now you're adding another -- a little shy of 2,000 people or so to the next U.S.-based conference. You're not only scaling your technologies, but also obviously scaling in the community, and that means having a community and a conference that can actually sustain that and entertain it, and make it worthwhile to spend whatever money it is, and the time involved to come there and actually get a benefit.
+
+**Dan Kohn:** Yeah, and we are very cognizant that for the sponsors it's a significant outlay of money... I mean, we do offer great deals for small startups, but companies spend a lot of money on this for those 7,000 people; most of them are flying in, they're taking times away from their families, it's the hotel and such... So there are real expenses there.
+
+So we're really -- but we do see the conference activity of CNCF as being one of the core aspects of community building, that because all these communities mainly exist online, that ability to come together at least once, and for a lot of people, they'll do both North America and Europe, so twice a year... It makes them so much more effective online when they can kind of connect together that email, or what otherwise might seem a mean Slack comment, and could kind of see the right humor behind it.
+
+And I definitely wanna give a big shout-out to the Linux Foundation events team. We're able to leverage that same events team that puts on the open source summit, and Node Interactive, and others.
+
+It is a little crazy that literally just 18 months ago we were in Seattle for our event and we had 1,000 people there... So to go 7x in two years definitely has required staffing up, and just the whole set of different processes and approaches on it.
+
+What's been really nice is that we get to keep iterating. If we just tried to create a new 7,000-person event from scratch, I think that would probably be impossible. But the fact that they are growing, and we can see the things that work, and things we wanna do differently... And I particularly wanna give a shout-out to our two co-chairs. These are leaders in the community who we bring on, and put a significant amount of effort into managing the program committee, and picking keynote speakers, and organizing the submissions into coherent tracks.
+
+For our event in Shanghai and Seattle, that's Liz Rice of Aqua Security and Janet Kuo of Google. They've just been doing fantastic work on organizing all this. It is quite involved, though.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Just because we're on the subject, and not that it's completely pertinent to the conversation, I'm just kind of curious in the moment, since we're there... The last show, Jerod and I did some bag-of-the-napkin stuff where we were talking about memberships, and just kind of trying to really grasp the amount of money being put into the foundation, and the future essentially of Cloud Native... But I'm kind of curious, the conferences, as it relates to being a profit center, and maybe how it helps financially the ebbs and flows - is that a big player in it, or is it sort of a breakeven...? How do you treat conferences? I'm just really curious.
+
+**Dan Kohn:** Sure. We're not trying to run them at a huge profit. You certainly can go to a fancier conference in terms of the quality of the food... We don't want it to feel opulent, because we think that would be wrong for a community conference. But the reality is that, in particular Seattle, has grown so much that it will spin off some meaningful profit this year.
+
+And what's nice is that CNCF as an organization, we're part of the Linux Foundation, we're non-profit, so first of all, we don't have a way of collecting profits. I don't get a bonus or a commission or anything like that...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[16:15\] Right.
+
+**Dan Kohn:** But more to the point, our leaders, our membership, and particularly our governing board, which is primarily the platinum members, don't want us to run a significant profit. So we try and keep like a 5% reserve, just out of some financial conservatism. Then the rest of the money we're investing back into the community.
+
+One example of that - I think people might be aware that we've rolled out this... Actually, now that I think about it, I think we were just planning to do it when we spoke a year ago... So let me give you a quick pitch for the Certified Kubernetes Program...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay.
+
+**Dan Kohn:** Kubernetes is open source, it's available for free; anybody can just download it and run it... But kind of like with Linux, the majority of people who use it are gonna use it via a distribution or via a hosted platform. So there's this concern that as people make changes to it, does it remain Kubernetes? How can you avoid having it fork in an unhelpful way?
+
+CNCF is working very closely with the Kubernetes community and community's leadership, and put together a conformance program. What's neat about it is all of the tests for it are open source and are built into Kubernetes itself, and are the tests that are always being run. But then any company that has a distribution, or an installer, or a hosted platform - like Google Kubernetes Engine, or Elastic Kubernetes Service on Amazon - can run that conformance suite, upload the test logs to a public GitHub site, and then we mark them as conformant. That's both a sort of mark that customers should look for, it also gives them the additional permission of using the term Kubernetes in their product name...
+
+And we've gotten just insane, fantastic participation and engagement in this program, where we launched it literally a year ago in Austin, and now have 67 different companies that have gone through this process. So we've just been able to swoop up the entire industry.
+
+And what's neat about it is that although the vendor itself self-certifies and uploads that, any future user can come along and run that same conformance test suite, and confirm that nothing has changed since they certified. So there's kind of a crowdsource aspect to confirming and validating that certification.
+
+And then in addition, the certification when you do it is good for a year, but it goes away unless you certify a newer version. So we're specifically trying to avoid issues where people jump off the release train and don't keep up with the newer features.
+
+So both of those have really been quite positive aspects of it. One of the challenges is that there's some technical debt built up in the Kubernetes community. All new features that come along include conformance tests to cover them, but some of the initial features, as they were deployed, didn't have conformance tests.
+
+As an example, even though CNCF doesn't normally fund actual engineering and development, we do have the resources right now that we're working with an external test development company, and trying to fill out some of those conformance tests for earlier work. And that's just one of the ways that we can kind of help out the community and help all this work better together.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What's the motivating factor for the 60-something companies to go through this process? Is it to legitimize their products and services in the eyes of potential customers?
+
+**Dan Kohn:** Definitely, yeah. You really don't wanna be out there with a non-certified version of Kubernetes. It would be the most natural thing for a customer to say "Why aren't you certified? Why did you fork it?"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[20:19\] Yeah, because it would almost be as if if they were anti being certified, what are the motivations for that? That might mean they're sort of anti the direction that CNCF and Kubernetes and Prometheus and all these others, the directions you're heading, essentially, for some reason, are against it... Figure out why.
+
+You mentioned also being able to use the Kubernetes brand name in product services, too.
+
+**Dan Kohn:** Yeah, so that's an extra carrot. There's no requirement to do that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Gotcha. So is the conformance simply technical? Is it a test, pass the tests? Or is there also a financial requirement, or agree to do certain things?
+
+**Dan Kohn:** Yeah, the requirement is to be a member of CNCF, and so for a small startup, that's $7,000/year. But there's actually a couple non-profit or community distributions of Kubernetes, the equivalent of Debian in the Linux world, and they have free certifications.
+
+I will mention one other area that we're funding or investing in that's been really pretty neat as its own open source project, and that's called Dev Stats. You can see it at devstats.cncf.io. It's a system for keeping track of contributions and pull requests and issues and aging really trying to just keep up on the project, and particularly where Kubernetes is now split between about 30 special interest groups trying to track which of those things are kind of falling behind, or might need extra help, or need to invest more effort in things. And then also kind of which companies are making contributions, which developers...
+
+How it works is pretty neat, where there's a great free service called GitHub archive, that takes all 80 million or so GitHub repos that are public and every event that's happened to any one of those... And what's amazing is we download that terabyte or so of data, and then we throw out 79.99 million of them and just keep the 80 or so Kubernetes repos plus the 100 or so other repos for the other 25 CNCF projects... And we go through all of those and do a bunch of analysis and put it into a time series database using Postgres, and then have a Grafana frontend to it that allows you to do these queries and visualizations and such.
+
+So that's a project that we built out; a CNCF contractor works full-time on it, named Lukasz Gryglicki, in Poland. But he and I started this about a year ago, and the initial version was perfectly fine, but the real value has been iterating it over the course of the last year with the Kubernetes community, as they've had very specific, detailed requests for understanding different kinds of processes and graphs and such.
+
+So that's just another area where CNCF can invest in development infrastructure, that then hopefully allows the community to function better.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, that's very neat; I was just pulling it up as you were talking about it, and it allows such tracking as hourly activity on GitHub, different stats around the communities, summaries, there's issues ages, all those kinds of metadata around these projects. I can see this being useful in general for any project.
+
+**Dan Kohn:** \[23:55\] Yeah. I would emphasize that it's an open source project on its own, and so for other projects that would like to get these statistics we'd really encourage you -- there's a couple that have started doing it, but we'd encourage you to give it a try, and if you do run into issues, kind of porting it over to your project. You can just file open issues on the repo with us, and we're happy to work with you on it.
+
+But as an example, we have the statistic that across all 26 CNCF projects there have been 40,086 unique contributors to them. It's really pretty amazing; I mean, that's obviously a massive number, but it's also just neat to be able to track all of that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's the first time I'm seeing this. This is really - like you said, Jerod - useful for not just Kubernetes and CNCF, but other projects as well. This is really cool.
+
+**Dan Kohn:** Yeah. It also builds on GitDM, which was originally written by John Corbett of Linux Weekly News, and Greg Kroah-Hartman, the stable kernel maintainer... I mean, we're building on a lot of other work that was done here. We're using Grafana -- I mean, obviously, all this great open source software, like GitHub Archive, and Grafana, Postgres, and such...
+
+I also will give a shout-out to Packet, the bare metal hosting company who contributes free server resources for us to run all this. It's kind of an involved process to go through all of that data, and every now and then we make changes to it and have to rerun everything from scratch... And we can actually do that in just a couple hours on one of these 48 way servers.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, we're big fans of GitHub Archive. We've been using that for years to generate our Changelog Nightly email. There we're only concerned about the most recent 24 hours events, specifically star events... I love seeing other people use the same data set for wildly different ways, and this seems like a very useful way of going about that... So very cool. I'm glad it's open source. I think a lot of people can definitely benefit.
+
+Check it out - devstats.cncf.io (link's in the show notes). Click around, and if it's interesting -- it's kind of like GitHub Pulse on steroids; do you remember that Pulse is, like, trying to get the idea of what's going on with this project lately?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Dan Kohn:** Oh, definitely.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** But this is like for the entire history of these things. It's very neat.
+
+**Dan Kohn:** Well, in particular for something like Kubernetes where it's across many different repos...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right, you can aggregate it. Exactly.
+
+**Dan Kohn:** Every file of all 80,000 files or so are supposed to be owned by a specific SIG, but that mapping isn't transparent, so the fact that we're able to do all that in a more complex project really lets you dive in in a more detailed way.
+
+I guess one other project I might mention - I referred to it before - is CNCF's Interactive Cloud Native Landscape, and that's at l.cncf.io. This was kind of a personal passion project; it partly came from getting so many complaints about that crazy static Landscape document with more than 500 boxes on it... But also, just as I tried to stay familiar with this space, for any given project that I'd hear about, I would always do kind of the same set of searches - look it up on GitHub, how many stars and contributors did it have, then look it up on Crunchbase, and say "Oh, well, the company behind it - how much funding did they get? When were they founded?" that kind of thing.
+
+And so this is, again, a free open source project and service that does all that for you. One of the powerful aspects is just a lot of filtering and sorting that we built into it. For example, if you're looking at it, and over on the left side under Example Filters, if you click Open Source by Age, since you're kind of historians of open source, you've been following this space - it's pretty interesting to see "Oh, here's the project in the cloud native space", and then if you click on Postgres, you can see "Oh, that was founded 22 years ago, and its latest commit was this week", which is really such an extraordinary level of success and engagement.
+
+\[28:09\] And then the next two are MariaDB and MySQL, and of course, they're forks of each other, so they were both founded 18 years ago. And then going forward, you see things like Ceph, that's 17 years ago, and NGINX, and MuleSoft, and Puppet, and others.
+
+So that's one view... But then another one that's kind of fun is click on Open Source by Stars - okay, you can see Kubernetes is number one there, with 40,000, but things like Elastic and Ansible, Redis, Serverless, Grafana... And then another neat one is Offerings from China, so that you can see that we're up to 55 products and projects that we're tracking. We have a total of 18,000 stars, the companies behind them have a market cap of a trillion dollars, and have raised funding of 158 million dollars.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I'm glad you said that, because on the top there I couldn't help but notice it says "You are viewing 578 cards with a total of 1,227,438 stars." That's as of right now, I'm assuming... "With a market cap (get this) of 7,2 trillion dollars, and funding of 19,8 billion."
+
+**Dan Kohn:** Yeah, it's really quite a number.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's good to summarize it, but that's gigantic. You were mentioning just China had a trillion... 7,2 trillion market cap.
+
+**Dan Kohn:** Yeah, and what's fun about it -- so as you look at different views, that's updated, and then what's neat is that we go to Crunchbase and to Yahoo! Finance every night and fetch the updated data...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow.
+
+**Dan Kohn:** So we're essentially doing a lot of scraping, and then this automatically updates every day.
+
+**Break:** \[29:56\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So what I find kind of interesting looking at this Interactive Landscape is that the corporate economies out there, which is in a lot of ways what this represents - sure, it's startups, but it's economies of scale for different businesses, places of employment, new technologies, but the sheer dependence upon open source and the health of those communities, right? You see this gigantic market cap which we've just sort of like glossed over to some degree, and then the investments that went into it to make it happen, but... While it's very informative to what the landscape represents in terms of the companies and the projects and the influences, and the stars, and the start dates and all that stuff, what it really represents in some cases or maybe behind the scenes is the significance of the dependence of open source, and the reliance on the health of those communities, and... CNCF is operating very healthily, but that's what it represents to me. What do you guys think about that?
+
+**Dan Kohn:** I totally agree. I think you will recall that I helped co-found the Core Infrastructure Initiative...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[31:59\] That's right.
+
+**Dan Kohn:** ...four years ago, and you previously had David Wheeler on the show, talking about the Badge app project, and I co-created that with him; that's the way of open source projects talking about their health, and things like the buzz factor, and licensing, and other kinds of stuff. And by the way, for any project to graduate CNCF, they're required to get that passing Best Practices badge. The first two projects this year graduated - Kubernetes and Prometheus.
+
+But I think it is fair to say that I've seen now the entire range of open source projects, from extremely unhealthy ones, like OpenSSL, prior to Heartbleed, when you just had a couple very underpaid developers, and huge (almost universal) reliance on it across the industry, to kind of the most healthiest projects, which Kubernetes basically falls into, where you have dozens and dozens of the biggest companies in the world that are eager to fund it and move it forward.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, the discrepancy between those things... And just thinking about -- you know, OpenSSL was a blind spot, and one that hopefully we all learn from, and a lot of these initiatives came out of Heartbleed; it was kind of an eye-opening moment. And just thinking, you know, 20 billion dollars funding these 578 cards here... Are these repos? I don't know exactly what a card represents necessarily. Does each one have a repository or a grouping of repositories?
+
+**Dan Kohn:** It's a grouping. So it's either an open source project, or a closed source product.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Gotcha. So 500+ of those adding up to a funding of around 20 billion dollars is a lot of money, and there are so many other projects - maybe because they're not infrastructure, but that are struggling to get 100k scratched together to support what they're doing, or heck, $5,000 for some of their needs... So I just see this huge discrepancy between kind of the rich and the poor, even in open source, which makes me a little bit sad, but it's just kind of the state of the world.
+
+**Dan Kohn:** Yeah, I would love to say that whatever that 1%, 99% concept doesn't hold, but I think it really does, in open source... And of course, if you look at 80 million open source projects on GitHub, it's only the 0.01% that would ever really be interested in or qualify for coming into CNCF, or being a Linux Foundation project like Node or such. So I do think there's a lot of interesting efforts out there on crowdfunding and otherwise, to try and support this... But certainly, the Cloud Native community where it's an infrastructure -- fundamentally, it's an infrastructure play, and lots of real companies out there are very comfortable paying for infrastructure. The economics seem more solid.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's just a lot easier to get them on the sale; it doesn't take much, they're used to it, as you said... Whereas others, their reliance on open source is, in a lot of cases, informal, and is done through insider working groups; even CEOs or people in charge are not even that aware... You know, I'm not saying that everyone is like this, but it seems to be some of the cases in non-infrastructure plays, essentially, where you may not really be aware of how much you're depending on open source, and yet your business thrives because of it.
+
+**Dan Kohn:** Yeah, it's my view that's it's essentially -- there was a nice description of transistors 30 years ago that you have to waste them, or your cost structure will kill you, if you waste millions of them to make your TV screen look slightly nicer. It is my view today that if you're -- so every company is becoming a software company, software is definitely eating the world, but if you're not building on top of open source, it's essentially gonna be impossible for you to stay competitive and to keep up.
+
+\[36:09\] So I'm certainly eager to see more solutions that help companies understand all of the open source dependencies, all the library dependencies that they have, both closed source and open source. I think that's absolutely essential from a security standpoint. And then look at helping to have some funding solutions to go with that. The Linux Foundation is definitely actively investigating that space.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It seems like an easier sale as well, in terms of like if I'm upper management at a profitable company and I have a budget for infrastructure costs, and I'm used to paying, historically, licenses, or paying for software, that is now being provided as open source - that just opened up a huge aspect of my budget, and it's because of open source that it opened it up... So maybe I don't put the entire budget into open source, but maybe I divvy it out and say "Okay, because I would be paying for licenses for this stuff, and this is better software than probably the proprietary stuff, because of the wisdom of the crowds, or just the joint efforts across all these different smart people... Well, it's not much of a stretch to then pour back into that, and really support it."
+
+**Dan Kohn:** Yeah, I totally agree.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So you've had massive growth, both on the members side, which - help me with the verbiage... Member are the companies that are putting their money in...?
+
+**Dan Kohn:** Exactly.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And then you have the project side... Is that what you call it? The Kuberneteses, and... The projects.
+
+**Dan Kohn:** Right. But also the Envoys, and Jaeger, and Helm, and NATS... Those are all open source projects licensed under Apache 2.0, that anyone can engage with
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So you've moved from 8 to 26 projects, and from 20 to 59 members, roughly, in those numbers, repeating them back to you...
+
+**Dan Kohn:** That was in user members.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, okay, so there's another party--
+
+**Dan Kohn:** So of our almost 300 members, 59 of them are end-user companies, folks like Bloomerg, and eBay, and JP Morgan and others that are using these technologies internally, but are not vendors.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay. Alright, that makes sense. So 300 members - is that the number then?
+
+**Dan Kohn:** 292 as of today.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, boy...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I rounded it in my...
+
+**Dan Kohn:** We're almost there, yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I was writing down your stats and I must have rounded that one up. Well, the point is that we've talked about the massive growth, but I wanna talk about specifically scaling to the projects and what's provided... So far we've talked about funding; CNCF offers -- these foundations offer kind of a host of services to the projects. You've moved from 8 to 26, so is the foundation itself also scaling with regards to operations, staff, the needs...? Are these projects putting more stress and strain on the foundation in order to support them?
+
+**Dan Kohn:** Oh, definitely. We've needed to hire more people, and then we've just needed to standardize a lot of processes. CNCF started with just Kubernetes, and then it took six months or something for us to get Prometheus. Then I think Fluentd was number three after like eight months. So during those phases, if you needed something, you would just send an email to me or our Chief Operating Officer, Chris Aniszczyk, and say "Hey, can you help us with this event?" "Oh, I need to set up an account for so and so." "Oh, I'm having this issue."
+
+That worked fine at first, but I think almost like any organization or software company, you just have to put processes in place going forward. So we have something we call the Service Desk, and it's just a ticket tracking system... But any of the maintainers of any of those 26 projects can in principle ask for anything -- I mean, conveniently, we've had the budget so far that we haven't needed to turn them down for a lot or for much at all.
+
+\[39:58\] But the specific requests tend to be -- I mean, a lot of them are just like super-minor things, like "Oh, can we have an official Kubernetes slide deck that people can do community presentations without having to use their company's slide decks?" Or for Prometheus, it was "Hey, we wanna run a community event for about 250 people. Can you help us organize that, handle all the money for us for the sponsors that wanna come in, help us sell it, and such?", and so we're very happy to do it.
+
+And then, you know, presenting to our end-user community, engagement there... All of our projects are very eager to be involved in KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, so although we do have this competitive track system, we also have slots, internal deep-dive slots for each of the projects... So they definitely appreciate that opportunity to get in front of the audiences.
+
+We do a lot of work with them on social media, on press relations and analyst relations, on giving them some kind of tracking on how things are going...
+
+I mean, one way of thinking about it is that if you're a big company, like a Red Hat or a Google and you have an open source project that you're trying to promote, for commercial reasons, your company can provide you with a set of services. But what we're suggesting is that for a lot of core cloud native projects, it's much better for it to be hosted by a neutral foundation... But you're still gonna want those services, so we try and provide a lot of those same things.
+
+I mentioned the certification process, and we also offer training courses with it. And then thankfully, it hasn't been that involved yet, but also offer a variety of legal services around trademarks, contributor license agreement if they want that... We generally recommend that projects instead go with a DCO (developer certificate of origin), which as you may know, originated with Linux. So we just work with the projects here...
+
+But the sort of bigger picture is that what a foundation needs to provide has certainly changed significantly in the last 20 years. When Apache started up, it was a huge deal to have a source code repository, to have a web page, to have some basic kind of continuous integration infrastructure... And today, basically any open source project can get that for free from GitHub, from Travis, CircleCI and similar kinds of services... And we actually encourage them to do that. We don't try and move them over to our infrastructure, but we do try and provide a set of services that remain useful.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I saw a headline a few days ago - and I think this question is more so an outsider looking in - about Google kind of handing over some of... Since we're talking about the infrastructure involved in serving -- I think it's Kubernetes at large, not so much CNCF, and I know you kind of get questions of like this that might be not exactly CNCF, they're more Kubernetes... And I saw a headline where they stepped away from the infrastructure and donated a bunch of Google Cloud credits - I think it was nine million dollars in credits, which is huge... But I think more so the question I have is around how the responsibility of maintaining is spread across other big players. Is that kind of what that play was about? Is that happening? Is the responsibility of maintaining Kubernetes on that infrastructure side held well across the board, or is it sort of lopsided?
+
+**Dan Kohn:** Let me dive into that... And you saw both the announcement and also kind of an annoying TechCrunch clickbait headline...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** They got me, they got me.
+
+**Dan Kohn:** Yes, "Google stepping away from Kubernetes", which was not at all correct.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. We almost logged that, I didn't do it.
+
+**Dan Kohn:** \[44:05\] Well, yeah. And for what it's worth, even the content of the article didn't have that as well, but obviously, the headline writer gets compensated by clicks, and that's what -- you know, maybe their A/B testing got more clicks.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It seems like TechCrunch is moving beyond their core competencies in covering these technical things. I'm not gonna go there, but... I see a few articles on there, I'm like "Are they writing about this? This seems like nerdier than they're supposed to be writing about..."
+
+**Dan Kohn:** Yeah. The counter-argument is that the headline writer was completely successful, because you saw that headline and not the other 20 that got written up about it. But the first piece of background is that Kubernetes was originally a Google project, it was founded in Google as a piece of infrastructure to share a lot of the expertise that they'd built up over the previous 15 years with their internal kernel orchestration system called Borg... So I draw this story of saying, well, you know, they came up with Kubernetes, and it was literally just four years ago, the first commit to the repo; so this is not an old piece of software, although the engineering and the ideas behind it were all built on that previous system.
+
+And at that moment, they had kind of four directions they could have gone - they could have kept it as an in-house proprietary offering, which would have been analogous to Amazon's Elastic Container Service, and they realized that that would definitely have limited its adoption. They could have open sourced it and kept it under Google control, which is essentially what they've done with Go... And Go is a fabulously successful language; many CNCF projects are written in it, many other projects... People have a lot of respect and confidence in Rob Pike's architectural choices.
+
+The next level that would have been more open is they could have come to the Linux Foundation and said "Hey, we think this is really an important project. We'd like there to be a Kubernetes Foundation." At the end of the day, the Linux Foundation probably would have said "Sure, fine. We'll do that for you." But they actually chose what I consider the most open path, which is they said "We would like there to be a foundation, we'd like Kubernetes to be the anchor tenant, but we think that it's only a core part of the solution, and we'd like to foster a whole ecosystem of projects around it." That was the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
+
+I think it's fair to say -- I've spoken Craig McLuckie and Sarah Novotny, who were two of the key Google people through that whole process, that CNCF and Kubernetes' growth has far, far exceeded their original expectations or even their hopes from when they did that three years ago. But as part of that, it starting out as a Google project, the Kubernetes community then needed to put together a governance and a process and a leadership structure, and that took them about a year and a half, and they had a lot of arguments and disagreements.
+
+What's interesting is that CNCF doesn't impose that on any of our projects. There is no CNCF way the same way that there's an Apache way. Instead, we ask that each of our projects come up with a governance process. We are willing to help them with it, and we do help them with it if they ask for it, and we ask that they document it. So they should have a governance.md file or the equivalent, and they follow that process that they've laid out.
+
+That governance process was the last step for Kubernetes to graduate in March... And when that happened, there's several Google people on the steering committee, which is ultimately in charge of Kubernetes... But they're not a majority; there's no company that has a majority... So they gave up kind of governance control at that point. But then this was the kind of remaining issue, where to build Kubernetes, the actual software development infrastructure, is a huge undertaking... Unlike Linux, where most kernel developers can try something and recompile it right on their machine and see the effect of it on their own machine.
+
+\[48:17\] To really work with Kubernetes often requires a multi-server cluster of machines... So every pull request that comes in triggers a continuous integration run across many different machines, and that, for historical reasons, had always run on Google Cloud infrastructure. So that meant that, because they were internal Google accounts, that no external person from another company could manage that or be involved in that.
+
+So it was a somewhat involved process, and this is exactly the kind of role that CNCF was happy and eager to take... But Google went back and calculated how many runs that they're doing. And it was a little tricky, because they were conflating together their own service, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) with the Kubernetes project, because they originally hadn't been separated. So they have estimated that they think that nine million dollars in cloud credits will support the Kubernetes development for the next three years.
+
+But the thing to understand is that they essentially have already been spending that money over the last three years as well, they just weren't really getting credit for it. So with this announcement is kind of externalizing a function that they had already been playing. But that said -- I mean, they are real credits; we have an account, and it has a lot of zeroes on the number of credit available. And then the key thing that it allows is that within the Kubernetes community there's a SIG testing group, and within that there'll probably be a new sub-SIG that focuses just on this infrastructure, that non-Google people can also participate in that administration.
+
+But that said, Google in no way is stepping back the Google folks who have been responsible for the infrastructure until now; they continue to actively be involved in it and expect to continue to be indefinitely.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The way you frame it is so much different. \[laughter\] That's why when you read TechCrunch headlines sometimes -- I mean, I've read good articles on there, but then I've also read ones that are like "Uhm... I mean, that kind of seems like you're putting words in somebody's mouth." And in this case, based on your response, it totally was, because it seemed like a slap in the face; almost as if they've been putting so much in, and now it's time for others to step up, which I think was paraphrasing some of the content from the article... It was just like, "That can't be true."
+
+**Dan Kohn:** I will say, if you re-read the article it actually got a lot of the tone right. It was really the headline that just puts you in a certain frame of mind. And you know, we do a lot of press outreach, and we've worked with that reported, and others... The reporters don't write their own headlines, but it's just a challenge of operating in this space.
+
+And obviously, people are busy, so most folks really don't have the time to read the article if that headline did not give a good view on it. But I can confidently say that Google is as engaged as they ever have been. They're thrilled with the growth of the community, the level of adoption and engagement, and this is really answering a call from the community. It's essentially the last piece of the Kubernetes project that was Google-specific, that now Google does not have any more ownership or control than anyone else... Except that Google continues to contribute a huge amount of development and pull requests and fixes and such... And so that's the way that anyone has control in an open source project - by doing the work.
+
+**Break:** \[52:08\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Dan, the CNCF does - as you know, because you're a part of it, a leader of it - a bi-annual survey that sort of surveys the landscape... And some of the insights from that essentially is, you know, serverless is on the rise; we kind of see that, Jerod and I, as part of this show... On JS Party we're covering that, on this show we're covering that... Kubernetes is dominating, which this whole conversation was about the growth, that's clear... But then you also have cloud native production usage exploding, and some of the top challenges not being technically how to deploy containers. What are some of these things you wanna dive into that we can kind of cover from this survey, that are insights for you, that particularly stand out?
+
+**Dan Kohn:** I would love to say that it was just this shocking result, and it really changed my thinking about where CNCF should be focused, and what we should be doing. But I'm kind of pleased to say that it was kind of more of the same. I mean, just the fact that we see so many actual end-users at our conferences... That it's not just vendors talking to each other. All the folks that we're talking to are talking about "Yeah, last year I was really looking at Kubernetes in the lab, or originally Docker, to try and speed up some of my development processes, but now we're beginning to move these into production and we're looking at how to move more and more of our apps over to it."
+
+So I think yeah, the production using growing 200%, evaluation 372%, 40% of the enterprise companies we talk to are running Kubernetes in production - these are all pretty fantastic indicators of the engagement and adoption.
+
+I guess one other piece that I would mention that I'm particularly passionate about is continuous integration and continuous deployment. That was the keynote that I gave in Copenhagen, arguing that continuous integration is actually probably the most important part of the cloud native architecture, that it's the thing that provides the most dramatic value to organizations that are not already doing it... That basic kind of sandy test of "Is my software working? Can I redeploy it? Can I quickly make changes or improvements or fixes and get it out there to customers, where they can benefit from it?"
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What percentage, if you had to hazard a guess, of corporations who are involved in the CNCF, or that are on your purview, are in the category of not having that step, not having CI/CD going on, and can benefit from it? How many aren't doing it today?
+
+**Dan Kohn:** I think zero are not doing any kind of CI/CD. I mean, I think the kind of organizations that are reaching out to CNCF and getting involved are the ones who realize that this is important, and that they need to get engaged and focus on it. We use this crossing the chasm metaphor; you may be familiar with the chart where we talk about our graduated projects as being suitable for the early majority, or which are known as the pragmatists. We really think that 2018 is the year that Kubernetes crossed the chasm.
+
+Then we talk about our incubating projects, or aiding to be ones, as being suitable for early adopters, and our sandbox projects, the more immature being used by innovators or techies. But I'm very cognizant of the fact that at least half of businesses out there, those folks that are called the late majority and the laggards, have really not started down this path at all. And you know, they have a huge amount of benefit in front of them, and then they have a big competitive challenge, that their competitors are gonna be out there with just much faster development velocity.
+
+I mean, it's great to say "Oh, here's the efficiencies of better packing your applications into a fixed number of servers", but we think that the huge change, the huge benefit is just faster update cycles on your software, about being able to respond in a more agile way.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Ship on green is a big deal to teams once they get there, to be able to -- our team is much smaller, but I only have our example, and we do have CI and CD in place here at Changelog, when we deploy, but very small in comparison to some of the other projects that may ship hundreds of times in a week... And what a change that is for velocity, and for instant gratification towards innovation or getting a win that day or that week, rather than like "When's the next deploy?" kind of thing.
+
+**Dan Kohn:** Yeah... And this was my keynote talk in Copenhagen; I'll include a link to the slide deck. It was titled "How good is your code?" So in a world where you are dependent on all of these libraries, and a lot of those libraries do have security bugs, and issues that come up that you do need to fix, it's just absolutely essential that you'd be able to redeploy your software... So I draw the analogy that it's almost like a science, that you have a hypothesis that this change you just made to your code is great, but until you can actually pass your tests and redeploy it, it just isn't a real thing yet.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I was just seeing on Twitter, somebody that we know, Adam - I can't think of their name right now, who it was - talking about deploying on Fridays, and how it's a bad idea deploying on Fridays, and all that kind of stuff... And I was thinking like, "Aren't you deploying like all day, every day? Why is Friday special still?"
+
+**Dan Kohn:** Etsy got a reputation a few years ago for first of all doing more than 50 deploys a day, but one of their ideas is that every new employee, including non-technical ones, would make a commit, a live to production on their first day of work.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Nice.
+
+**Dan Kohn:** You know, of course you have to to have a test process and a Q&A process and other kinds of things, that you have the confidence that that can occur without anything breaking... But I think it really is a great model; not that every company can quite live up to that yet, but at least to try and move towards.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So as we look a little bit towards the future, Dan, one of the questions we asked Jason McGee of Istio was about this landscape, really a lot of the change that's happening, all of these projects coming in, this idea of like different layers of this cloud native stack, and where certain things start to formalize... He mentioned that basically we've come to consensus that containers are a good thing, and that Kubernetes is pretty much winning its layer; then you have service meshes, you have networking things, you have serverless...
+
+There's lots of other stuff that's either patching together lower layers, or sitting on top, and one of the things I asked him and I'll ask you as well, as somebody who's interested in this stuff but does not have like a vested interested in like figuring out provisioning, or figuring out orchestration or service meshes, but would want to eventually -- like, I love the benefits of the cloud native lifestyle; I want to be a cloud native, right? When do you think this is all gonna shake out, or maybe coagulate around a certain happy path... Or maybe choose your own adventure a little bit, but less churn, less friction, less stuff changing all the time?
+
+**Dan Kohn:** Oh, I definitely think so, and I do think there's huge cognitive overhead in this interactive landscape. I mean, I will tell you that the landscape, the 570 projects - it's been described at times as helpful, as overwhelming, and as the hellscape.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** The hellscape. \[laughs\] That's... One way to paint it.
+
+**Dan Kohn:** \[01:01:43.10\] Yeah. \[laughs\] That's by a leader in our community, I might add. But I'll leave him anonymous for now. I think the simplest solution for it is, especially if you're a startup, if you're a small organization, if you're coming in from a greenfield perspective, it's very likely that you're gonna use a vendor for these things, and that vendor might be a hosted cloud provider, it might be an enterprise software company that helps you run things on your own bare metal... And one of the great roles that those vendors take is that they pick the projects and the offerings that they think are ideal for their customers, and it's very likely, as you get started in this space, that whatever the vendor puts together for you - maybe your favorite cloud provider - is gonna be perfectly fine... That to get up to speed on it, to get your logging working, and monitoring, and these other kinds of things, that you can dive in and work with almost any of them.
+
+And then, if you just find that your monitoring solution - maybe it's a proprietary monitoring solution that you're paying too much money for, or maybe it's the vendor's proprietary monitoring solution on their cloud, and you don't feel like it gives you enough flexibility, or doesn't let you hook into all of your services the way you'd like it to, then it's a relatively natural step to look at that CNCF trail map and say "Oh, I guess I could be looking at Prometheus." And maybe your vendor is already just offering a hosted version of Prometheus, and you're either using it or it's easy to switch to it. But I really want to avoid this implication that you have to be familiar with all 570 options.
+
+There is this concept by actually a former professor of mine at Swarthmore named Barry Schwartz, "the tyranny of choice", that having more options does not necessarily make you happier, and it certainly makes it just overwhelming to try and make any kinds of decisions.
+
+So the CNCF projects in general somewhat represent a happy path, where we can confidently say, hey, if you choose our graduated incubating projects, we know they all work, we know that there's real end-users adopting them, we know that there's vendors out there who are eager to support them, your issues are gonna get responded to; you know, maybe not that your pull requests will get accepted - we can't go that far - but that it's a pretty safe bet to engage and get invested in those communities.
+
+And then that's the other way to look at it, which is, okay, if you wanna just go entirely open source -- one of my favorite examples here is the company Bloomberg here in New York, who they just don't like working with vendors. They wanna have all their expertise internally, they download 100% open source, and they make it work for themselves... So CNCF represents a great spotlight and indicator for them of a set of projects that they can have confidence in the communities behind them.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's one thing I see that you do very well, especially with this interactive landscape, and just several other things we've gone through, like the dev stats - you're doing a great job of bubbling up the right information to make good choices... And you're not making the choices for the community, you're making aware of who's getting involved in cloud native and all that it is at all levels of the game... And to me it's like, you're just doing a great job of sharing the right information, so that folks like us can say "This is the direction for us to go" or "This is a project that makes sense for us", or areas where we can get involved, or just like you said, have confidence in our choices, rather than feeling like the CNCF is just saying "Here's the best. Go use these."
+
+**Dan Kohn:** Yeah, forcing you to use it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Dan Kohn:** So thank you for that... I mean, I think it probably comes somewhat from my own perspective of having been the chef technology officer of a couple startups, and co-founder of a couple others, where it's hard to make these choices. I've made them in the past, and to some degree, I've made them incorrectly. So there's also some humility built in here, that I don't have the confidence that I can guarantee that every project involved with CNCF will be perfect for every end-user out there.
+
+\[01:06:07.21\] One of the kind of nice aspects of our philosophy is that we specifically don't have the approach that there can only be one project per box. An example right now is Linkerd and Envoy are both very capable service meshes, but essentially, you're only gonna choose one or the other.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+
+**Dan Kohn:** Or another one is Containerd and Rocket. And when we see that there's multiple offerings out there, we've been very willing - or the Technical Oversight Committee has been willing to adopt multiple ones.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I think, to rewind a little bit, that's kind of how it began - the question was "Will Kubernetes win?" versus the other options, and eventually, I believe the reason why you can probably stand firm in that is that you know the community will eventually choose a winner, or select their own that makes sense for them... And maybe there's one or two or three winners, so to speak, but you don't need to choose, you know?
+
+**Dan Kohn:** Sure. And another way of looking at it is, you know, Mesos kind of had been the winner before Kubernetes came along, and I think Kubernetes just largely supplanted it... But the reality is that there are still real very substantial companies out there with massive Mesos implementations. And interestingly, if you're like a legacy brownfield enterprise and you're thinking "Oh, well I need to containerize and I wanna go with Kubernetes", there's a huge advantage to you doing that; you're gonna see big efficiency gains in your servers, and development velocity and such... But if you've already invested all of this effort to get Mesos up and running, and it runs perfectly well on your data center today and you've trained your teams on it and everything, the marginal value of you switching is really low. You'll probably do that eventually, maybe you'll start with a small Kubernetes cluster for a few of your apps, and then maybe over time you'll move more and more...
+
+Stripe had an interesting story where Mesos was working for them, but the cron functionality that they needed wasn't getting the attention and love it needed in Mesos, so they switched over to Kubernetes. Julia Evans has a great blog post about that, that I'll post in here. They have invested in it, and that's worked out well for them.
+
+But what's nice with the CNCF projects is that even in that scenario, you still can and should evaluate our other offerings. So Prometheus is also the leading monitoring application not just for Kubernetes, but also for Mesos... Fluentd for logging works great with Mesos.
+
+So we definitely are not trying to lock you into certain technology choices. The metaphor we use for that - for the landscape and for the trailmap - is that it's a kind of preferred path, or like a particularly well trodden, well lit path, but that all of us are trying to reach the same goal of getting to cloud native; that's the destination, but there's many different paths that you can take to get there.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What's upcoming for you or for CNCF, or any of the projects involved? What's maybe something that's either not well know, or something you can tease that's coming up in the near horizon? This is barely September, we're just a few days into it - what's upcoming that you can tease on our show as we close.
+
+**Dan Kohn:** \[01:09:30.14\] Sure. So I think the biggest thing that I would say and that we didn't have a chance to chat about so far is the level of engagement and interest from China. That has been somewhat of a surprise to CNCF and to me. Huawei was a founding platinum member, but since then we've added two others - Alibaba and jd.com, the two biggest e-commerce retailers in China. And then we've added Baidu and Tencent and ZTE as gold members. Then dozens of silver and smaller companies.
+
+So partly as a result from that huge level of engagement, we're launching our first ever KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Shanghai, November 13th to 15th. So if you're in China or really anywhere in Asia or Australia and you haven't yet been willing to come to Europe or the U.S., I'd love to see you in Shanghai. We're gonna have 100% of the talks - the keynotes and the sessions will have simultaneous interpretation into English and Chinese.
+
+It's really just a neat process to see -- we also just had our first two projects that originated from China (where the majority of the development was by Chinese people) that were adopted into CNCF. That was Harbor, a container registry, contributed by VMware, and then a really impressive key-value store called TiKV, that was built by a company in Beijing called PingCAP. So on really all the different levels of engagement with China - training, our service providers, our certified Kubernetes, we're seeing that level of interest from China just skyrocket.
+
+And then, as I mentioned before, we would love to have people attend our KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Seattle. That's the flagship event. It's probably gonna be 7,000 people. We have very good likelihood of selling out. So if it is something you're thinking about, if your organization is investing in these technologies or seriously considering it, we would love to see you there and definitely would recommend signing up. It's KubeCon.io.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Good. We'll be there as well. That's December 10th to 13th, in Seattle, at Washington State Convention Center, which - we've been there; it's great, it's easy to get to, it's certainly great to be in... So if you can, make it out.
+
+Dan, thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure catching back up with you. Congrats on all the progress, to you and the rest of the team. I know it's a massive team behind you; you're not the only person doing this work, because if so, then you'd have some issues...
+
+**Dan Kohn:** \[laughs\] Definitely the case.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** But you definitely can see the right directions for everything, and we love playing a part with you in terms of catching up and being able to update the community on new things happening and where this is heading.
+
+**Dan Kohn:** Awesome. Thanks for the chat.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Thank you, Dan.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Thanks, Dan.
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+**Jerod Santo:** Suz, we would like to learn the ins and outs of open source live streaming, and who else to go to that Suz Hinton, who's been doing it for a very long time and written some very nice Medium posts and lengthy tutorials all about the ins and outs of Twitch... Suz, where do we start with you and Twitch?
+
+**Suz Hinton:** Yeah, this could be a good direction for the Changelog, I think... What if you had like a video that shows you actually recording it, and things like that?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We actually were discussing that pre-call... I'm just trying to think -- when a new up and coming platform (and we realize Twitch is not new; it's kind of new for open source and live coding) comes out and people are using it, there's lots of interesting, new use cases for media production. Adam and I are always talking about, "Yeah, what would the Changelog look like on this platform?" We were kind of discussing what might be interesting; one thought that you had, Adam, was maybe you could live stream while you're doing the edits and talk through the decision-making process, but... We don't know. We don't know what's compelling on Twitch.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** I think that would actually be really interesting. Most people want a behind-the-scenes of what you're actually doing, and I think that's what the main appeal has been for especially open source live coding.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, especially I think -- I don't wanna take the limelight here, but on the audio editing portion of it, a lot of people think it's hard, and what I've learned over years of experience is that it is hard until you simplify it, and there's like three or four main effects or plugins I might use that pretty much help us get to production audio... And they're not hard to use. Just with a little instruction and some experience of like "Here's what you should listen for", they're pretty easy for pretty much anybody to implement.
+
+So it's not like -- I didn't go to school for an audio degree, I just winged it really hard for several years and I got bloody knuckles, and here we are. I learned by doing very much. I started out with a garage band, and just graduated through different digital audio workstations called DAWs... And now we use Adobe Audition and, you know, life is grand. But yeah, I think that's a really interesting perspective, of like a behind-the-scenes, and not feeling like you have to over-produce it. Because that's the thing that trips most people up - feeling like it has to be overly produced, or intro and outros, and it's just like, "Just give me the real deal. Be real with me, be personal."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[04:20\] So thinking about the inner process versus kind of the end product - we're all used to delivering an end product, whether it's an MP3, or it's a piece of software, or a video... And that's very mysterious to people who aren't good at delivering those things, but to people that do that a lot - like you said, Adam, to you there's nothing special about editing anymore - there's not any magic there... And the thing about a magician is once you know his tricks, the tricks aren't very impressive anymore. So I feel like a lot of the -- and Suz, you can speak to this, because you've been live streaming your open source work for over a year and some now... Is there a losing of that mystere potentially, or does it actually perhaps work in the other direction?
+
+**Suz Hinton:** I feel like it works in the other direction. Obviously, I didn't go to Twitch college or live streaming college... \[laughter\] There's not really like an open source school; there are people in the community that are very happy to help you get started with this kind of stuff, but I think that for me if you have trouble with the deliverables, with something like live streaming if you just show up - it's like maybe giving a quick performance, or giving a presentation at work or something - and you do it, the deliverable is actually happening while you're producing it, if that makes sense, which is different to what you're doing with the Changelog podcast, for example.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah... We used to do -- we've done a couple of these shows live, and in those cases the live version and the produced version was very close, except for maybe a slight bit of edit just to sort of make it more listenable after the fact... Like, when you listen live, you forgive; when you listen recorded, you're like "Well, you could have edited that", you know, where we might tweak a little bit. So that's the difference; we have done this show live. We actually have a couple shows that are live, and then get produced and some people show up and they like the live version better because they feel like they're there.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Raw and uncut.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Raw and uncut... Whereas produced, the edited version, it's like "Yeah, well... You could have made that better, so I'm glad you did."
+
+**Suz Hinton:** \[laughs\] Yeah, I've tried to edit -- I think I did the first four of my live streams... I did treat them like that kind of scenario, where I thought "Well, I've put all this effort into it, going through that entire process... I should really just spend another couple of hours on top of that exporting it as a heavily edited video, so that people can get some real use out of it", and then I quickly stopped... Because as we all know, editing is the longest part of actually producing these things, not the actual recording part. So yeah, I learned my lesson very quickly there to just let it be transient.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, the edits - if you have an hour's worth of content, it could take you three times as long as the content itself, just listening, editing, playing it back, listening, editing, playing it back, and then making any sort of editorial decisions, if that's what you're trying to do, it can get infinitely more complex as you add more and more production value to it. But at a minimum, you're looking at least real-time. You're gonna wanna listen to it, so it's gonna take at least the length of the content.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** Exactly.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Some of these live streams are very long as well, so I think a lot of that decision-making process, like "Do I polish this up and produce a beautiful object, or is the process part of the product?", like you were saying with Twitch... It goes back to your goals. So a part of what I'm curious about, Suz, is first of all, how you got interested in Twitch and live streaming your coding, and then what were your goals back then and whether they've changed over time with doing it every week?
+
+**Suz Hinton:** \[08:01\] Yeah, that's a great question. I think what it started for with me was that I worked on a lot of open source hardware-related libraries, that were also JavaScript, so it was a little bit of a weird niche. Then on top of that, the general JavaScript community tends to feel kind of intimidated by working on hardware-related things. So it was a fairly lonely experience for me... I was completely okay with the fact that I was one of the only collaborators on most of my libraries, but I also just felt that there was no need for people to feel intimidated like that, and it was hard for me to learn from other open source maintainers, given that I didn't really have any other collaborators to work with as well.
+
+So I ended up watching Nolan Lawson's live stream that he did on YouTube about maybe almost two years ago now, and he was just showing an entire process of what it's like to be a maintainer of something super-duper popular. I think he was going through his PouchDB repo, he was triaging tickets, he was pulling down branches and trying to reproduce bugs and things like that... And he went for three whole hours and it kind of showed that, even in three hours of time, you don't necessarily get a lot of code written, you don't necessarily become super-productive, but you just sort of start wading through the thicker of open source things that you have to do on a regular basis.
+
+So I found it really insightful, and I wondered where the people would get the same benefit from seeing how different my open source little world was, compared to someone who maintains really popular stuff... And I was hoping that that would make open source more approachable for people, where it doesn't matter if you don't have 100,000 people using your stuff; you can still get a lot of enjoyment out of doing that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think people forget the point of open source isn't exactly to be the most popular project. \[laughter\]
+
+**Suz Hinton:** That's the worst case...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The point of open source is to be a useful utility to society.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right, and often times just for yourself, right? That's where a lot of it starts - scratch my itch, and then...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...share it, so others can as well.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** ...it grows from there. But yeah, definitely in this day and age I think popularity is a metric that we all - yeah, all the time, but in open source now more than ever it's been...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's definitely changed quite a bit over the last several years, just the way that open source is, and the way the industry treats open source... It's significantly changed in its perception to like the reasons why people do it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** Yeah, so I wanted to sort of give people a fly on the wall view of what it's actually like, so that they can make the decision about whether or not it would be a cool thing that they would wanna do.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Please do, because I'm thinking that myself.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** Yeah, so that's sort of why I started doing it, was to give people that little fly on the wall view. But then it evolved beyond that. What I didn't expect was that I would have this regular super positive community coming back every single week, and then they would start pull-requesting me, and helping me think of different ways to solve problems, and just overall becoming a super positive influence in my open source life, I guess. That was really surprising to me. That's definitely made my work much more motivating for me to work on.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I watched a recent stream of yours - I should think it was just last Sunday, perhaps - and you now have a huge community around you; a bunch of people in the chat room, and subscribers... There's like a thriving little ecosystem around your channel. Can you tell us how that's grown and some of your keys to building that up over the last couple of years?
+
+**Suz Hinton:** Totally. I think when I first started streaming I had like four people, and then the next week I had nine people, and then it stayed pretty low for a while; people were kind of shy to ask questions... But I think that at least for the first six months to a year, I was trying to choose things that were engaging for people, that they'd never seen before, and that's sort of where I started watching the growth, because people really loved watching somebody work on something other than what they do in their regular day jobs.
+
+\[12:18\] Of course, that hardware, the Arduino stuff was obviously very appealing to people, so that's sort of where I started growing my audience, because it was a really good way for them to learn how to get started, but also just watch somebody do something really fun; there's something I guess vicarious about doing that. Then I'm not sure how, but -- because I'm still puzzled as to why people watch me specifically - that's just grown and grown and grown.
+
+I think when I wrote a blog post about my experience of doing it for a year, I released that in July - I actually went back and read that post just yesterday, and it says "Oh yeah, I have about 1,000 followers now, and it's great." I now have 6,000 and it's only been about seven months since then, so it's just gobsmacking how that actually happened so quickly over the last six months, I'd say.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** The snowball effect.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** Yeah, I think so. I think there's been a few retweets from people like Scott Hanselman, and SwiftOnSecurity, and that tends to drive a lot of audiences, and then I do tend to retain a small percentage of them once they've checked out my stream.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, I'd say that that post I think was also instrumental, because as I said, Twitch as a platform for open source live streaming is a newer thing, and like you said, Nolan Lawson was a bit of inspiration to you. And this post, I've seen multiple people - we'll link it up in our show notes... As Suz says, it's called "Lessons from my first year of live coding on Twitch", which she published on freeCodeCamp's Medium last July.
+
+It has been cited -- I've seen it cited multiple places (I know we've put it in our newsletter back then) and people are using that as kind of their Twitch live streaming bible, so to speak, the starting place... To either inspire them to do it, or to even just see the technical bits and bobs you've gotta piece together in order to have a good live stream. So you've probably got a bunch of people watching you, to see how you do it, because maybe they wanna emulate that success
+
+**Suz Hinton:** Yeah, I think so. I definitely wasn't the first to live stream code at all. I started streaming maybe at least a couple years after the first round of people started doing it, but I think the difference with me was I sort of came out for air and reached out to people and broke through that fort wall of "Oh, that's actually been my experience with it and here's how to actually get started if you wanna do it", rather than just being one of the select few that starts doing it and keeps doing it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Where does this fit in in terms of -- because I don't know you that well, I've just met you today; I'm a fan of what you've done over the years, but do you have a full-time job? Is this something that you're pursuing doing full-time? How does that fit into your motivation for doing this?
+
+**Suz Hinton:** That's a really great question. When I first started streaming, I was a full-time front-end developer at Kickstarter, which is the crowdfunding platform... And I was doing quite a bit of open source and also public speaking and just side projects outside of that. Obviously I had pursuits that were different to just what I wanted to do in my day job, and so this literally just started as another silly hobby that you just sort of try out and you see if it sticks.
+
+What's interesting about that is I always kept it extremely separate. I have my streams held every Sunday; that's not a work day for me, so... I'm very strict about trying to keep just personal projects for Sunday to set a good example to people to not work on the weekend, if possible... Or at least on your day job material.
+
+\[15:56\] From there, it actually caught the attention of Microsoft, which is where I work now. My stream definitely made me stand out from a lot of other prominent programmers in the community, and especially within roles such as dev relations, dev advocacy... So that's what I'm doing at Microsoft now, and it was a big reason why they noticed me and they reached out to me saying "Hey, you can keep your stream on Sunday, it's totally chill, but we can see that you're quite skilled at reaching other developers, so would you consider moving into dev relations as a full-time job, given that we can see already from your Twitch stream that you're great at talking to other people?"
+
+So they didn't make it a requirement for me to stream Microsoft-related streams, but it was great that that's what got me noticed in the first place.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's interesting that that's a pathway to future employment... Anything you do like that that helps you stand out is certainly gonna have an effect on future employment or future opportunities, and that's just interesting that they directly -- it's not even just part of your resume that they liked, it was like THE thing that got you noticed to stand out.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** Yeah, I actually think it's quite hilarious that it happened that way, because the biggest fear I had about getting started with streaming was okay, well everyone kind of barrels through something they don't know how to do, and they tend to do that in privacy; most people only push out their very polished commit even in the workplace. And a lot of people are quite intimidated about pairing with most senior developers, because they're worried about their reputation, and being found out to be impostors, and all that kind of self-esteem stuff.
+
+You know, it's very hard to separate yourself from your code, right? So I thought that if I stream myself, which I always joke that you are at most 50% of the programmer you actually are when you're not under pressure, having a couple hundred people watching you code... So I even feel like on Twitch I'm not actually representing the best programmer that I can actually be; I'm actually representing a much worse programmer than I am. And so I actually thought that if I start streaming and people find out and they assume that this is the best that I can do, maybe this will actually make me unhireable instead...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, boy..
+
+**Suz Hinton:** ...so I think it's really funny that Microsoft reached out, because I was like "Are you sure? Because there's a lot of crap that I've written on this show."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right... That's hilarious.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It is hilarious. To show some similarities, an inner tagline for this show is that "We face our impostor syndrome so you don't have to", and the 'you' is the audience listening. And so rewind, less than five minutes ago, I'm like "I don't really know you well." I could have easily looked at your bio and said "Hey, she works at Microsoft." I could have looked that up, but I hadn't done that yet... \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] You outed yourself.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, well we own the fact that -- I'm being real; I wanted to ask her "What do you do? How does this affect your employment?" I could have looked that up, but I didn't.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You're never gonna get a job in podcasting again, Adam. You've just ruined it. \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** There you go. I was so close... So close to being a pro.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** \[laughs\] No, I'm really glad you asked, because I really did think that this would affect my job prospects by doing this. It's had the opposite effect, which is really cool. In my current job, that basically said that if you wanted to do some streams, to do it with Azure, which is what I do a lot of dev relations around. I'm trying to make it easier for the developer community's Azure services, particularly IoT, and I have actually run some streams during work hours, which feels so weird to me, because I'm like "This seems like I'm having too much fun during work hours", you know what I mean?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[19:56\] Yeah. That's really cool, though. It's really interesting too to take a hobby and mesh it with I guess legit work, so to speak... To not just be fun things, but also to be something that you do. And I find that the world we live in today - I was just telling this to somebody who's newer into... Somebody who's 21, basically, and I was like "You know what, I'm 38..." - so I had some years on this person, and I was saying that in my... It feels so weird even saying this, Jerod, I'm sorry, but in my day...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, no...! \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** In my day, we didn't have permission to just publish our ideas. We had to get a printing thing, or something like that... We didn't have the internet like it is so ubiquitous today. And I was just telling this person, the internet, if you don't understand this like this - it's a free printing press. Without any hesitation, you can liberally just publish your ideas, where that's been never done before in history; now it's there. We didn't have that when I was younger; you had to ask permission. Now you don't have to ask permission anymore; you have permission.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Unless you publish your ideas on other people's platforms, and then you can definitely be censored, as we're finding out issues around that stuff; it's happening.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, of course.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** But yeah, absolutely.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** I have a funny story about that. When I first entered the Node.js ecosystem and saw npm the package manager, I actually asked "Oh, who do you ask for permission to publish a library? How do you get somebody to review your library to see if it's good enough to be on npm?" and people just laughed at me. They're like "You just publish it, you just push it", and I was like "What does that even mean?" Because I'm so -- even though I grew up basically having access to the internet maybe shortly after I was a teenager, I still felt that there were just certain parts where you had to prove yourself first, or you had to be good enough in order to be able to publish.
+
+**Break:** \[22:09\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Suz, we were talking about impostor syndrome and how we face it on this show, usually talking to people we look up to, like yourself, so other people can just wait in the wings and watch... And very much, Adam, I think live streaming might be ultimate punch in your impostor syndrome, right in the face, because it's like "I'm just gonna code right in front of anybody who wants to watch."
+I'm wondering if there was any leaps you had to take to get going, or maybe even anything you could say to somebody who's considering it but they're just feeling like - maybe like we do sometimes - "I'm not interesting, my coding sucks", what have you. Did you have to convince yourself to it, and do you like to convince other people that it's worth a try?
+
+**Suz Hinton:** Yeah, I definitely deliberated for more weeks than I should have, and I find that that's what people tell me when they say it. They're like "Yeah, I bought the microphone, I set up OBS and I have the project I wanna work on, and then I just keep saying, hm, maybe tomorrow I'll feel ready to do it." You're never gonna feel ready. It's exactly the same as when you're getting up to give a talk in front of an audience. You can't just say "Oh, can I just do it tomorrow instead?" It's like, "No, everyone's actually here, so you should just do it."
+
+So given that I have public speaking experience, I try to think of it that way, as in like once you get into it, once you hit record and you get over those first terrifying five minutes, you'll get into a groove. But I still felt that, similar to public speaking, I had to over-prepare beforehand. For the first four streams I actually did end up practicing the feature I was gonna develop, or just seeing whether I was gonna hit any gotchas or whether I was gonna have to look up anything in documentation, and I basically rehearsed it and then saved that code into a different branch in my repo, and then sort of studied it in the morning before turning the stream on.
+
+So I would say that that's kind of the cheaty way to do it, because sometimes that can come out as very forced... But you know, you're still gonna forget a few things, even if you think you know how to actually do it. So it should come out pretty natural...
+
+Once you've done that a couple of times, you'll realize that "Oh, this is way too much work for me to prepare beforehand, and I sort of feel much more comfortable just winging it", and that's when you'll really start coming into your own with streaming.
+
+So that's been my personal experience. I'm not actively discouraging people from rehearsing for the first few, because that absolutely helped me build that confidence to finally hit that Start Streaming button.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Good advice. So if you need to practice or prepare as a crutch to get started, there's nothing wrong with that, but ultimately, as you get comfortable, just like it is with public speaking, the more you do it, the more comfortable you get; or with podcasting, or what have you - you need less and less of those things... But if that's what you need to get started, then that's what you've gotta do.
+
+\[28:00\] I'm just curious, one of the thoughts I have around live streaming, especially with my style of coding, is very much me either pacing around the room thinking, or like just googling the crap out of stuff, or changing my mind over and over... Is that the kind of stuff that is totally normal, and people live stream in their open source? Or is that something that you do? Or you're just like going down the road, and you throw it away, and that's all a-okay on live stream?
+
+**Suz Hinton:** Yeah, that's certainly normal, and I think that normalizing that is really important, because I think we all secretly have habits like this and we all think that we're the only ones who do it, and that as a result we are the ones that are not the good programmer, and that everyone else around us are the good programmers, right? So I definitely feel that that's why this medium has been so important and refreshing for people, and that's why being authentic on your stream is really important.
+
+Just to give you an example, I started something that's actually still scary for me on a live stream recently. I picked a really large project that I've been putting off for a long time. It's gonna involve refactoring three different libraries that were written by three different programmers who have kind of handed the keys over to me to keep maintaining, and I was gonna have to to a degree refactor some of my own code as well, just to release what seems like a really basic feature. And I always told myself "I'll find time for it eventually", but then it became pretty apparent that the most time that I have these days is when I actually sit down to stream the work.
+
+So there was a lot of planning involved, there was a lot of brainstorming, so I pretty much just started letting people into that. I would open up just my scratch pad where I keep notes, and I started a new page in front of everyone, and I said "Okay, here are all of the events that we wanna surface through, so that people can kick off basically a process with this library, and then they can receive progress events on how that task is actually going and how close that task is to completion." I basically just gave them a look into how I plan out a feature, and how I end up brainstorming what I need to research first, and even just dumping something on a page that's not that great, but you can kind of go from there was probably the most important thing I could have showed them, much more than code.
+
+As I've gone through that feature, and you probably saw that in Munich - I was incredibly jet-lagged, and I was trying to get something done... But you see me go back and forth. I'll say "Oh, I think that the object signature should look like this", and then two seconds later I'll say "Oh, but actually what if you were in this case, or what about this edge case?" Then you see my kind of freeze for a second, and then I realize that to keep moving, you just have to make a decision and make something that you can change later on.
+
+So it's definitely made me a better programmer in the sense that when the heat is on you, when everyone is watching, when you wanna stay productive, you actually become much more accepting of "Just get something down, and you will then discover what needs to change afterwards." That's been really scary for me, to show a really big long-term project where I'm not actually 100% sure how to solve it from beginning to end, and I think that's been really positive for people to see.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very cool.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That makes me think about a theory I've been kind of mulling over recently, which is that the -- I think people undervalue iteration. You see this with companies who are successful, and you're like "Wow, they came out of nowhere", and it took like ten years to get there. The sort of overnight success that took ten years to take place. It's similar, in the sense that you're talking about code - well, that code had to evolve from you walking around the room, thinking about it, to your first stab at it... I think we undervalue the concept of iteration and the time it takes; you can't just microwave something into existence and immediately get there. It actually takes thinking through the problem, failing a couple times and getting to success. Iteration is a process you go through, not get to.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** \[32:11\] It's so true, and this feature is the perfect example of that. It was an issue raised on a GitHub repo, and it was something I wanted to actually work on before somebody asked for it. It seems so simple; it was just when this Arduino is having code uploaded to it with your tool, I wanna see a progress bar. That seems so simple, but what was cool is I got to take the audience through "Okay, well when we talk about Arduino, we're talking about three completely different protocols, and depending on the board you're flashing, you're gonna be using one of three protocols." That means these three separate libraries need to be emitting events, and they all kind of work in their own way and they all have to basically emit events based on literally opening and loading pages of memory in the registers of the chip, and every time they write a page, we have to bubble that up and somehow compute the percentage based on that.
+
+So what starts off as "Oh yeah, there should just be a progress bar, no worries" becomes literally triple the work that somebody probably initially thought it was, and also just like diving deeper and deeper, closer to the metal, in order for that to happen.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very cool. How much of that context do you feel like you need to reiterate as you start your next stream, for the people who are either new, or are you -- do you have a core audience that's just there every single time, so the context is implied...? How much time do you spend regrouping each time that you start a new session?
+
+**Suz Hinton:** That's such a great question. It's something that I definitely try and do every single time, but the amount that you do is definitely subjective. A lot of the time I am working on -- so the library I've been talking about for this podcast has been avrgirl-arduino, and I work on that a lot. So I have a couple of chat macros where if someone wants more information, I can actually just drop a little command in and it prints out a whole section, and it links to the GitHub repo and explains briefly what it is... But I usually at least start every single stream with something like "Oh, here's the library that I'm working on today. It does X, Y and Z, and today's we're looking at this issue on GitHub here", and then I'll paste the GitHub link in the chat.
+
+So I sort of try and set up the scene, so that if someone comes in later and says "Oh, what are you doing?", my community can immediately say "Oh, she's working on this issue. This library flashes boards. Read the readme and let us know if you've got any other questions." So it's sort of like prepping the preppers, or teaching the teachers. It helps them to then bring other new people in the community, and that means I can focus on the code.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I imagine that it's probably people who are even so involved that maybe they come up with better ideas - or different ideas - with you or for you, while you're actually trying to decide perhaps an architecture or a route to take with certain issues... Have you ever found out that's the case, that the chat room or certain contributors are actually, like live coding -- I'm just trying to think of it like, can it actually feel like pair programming?
+
+**Suz Hinton:** Yeah, so I think in my Medium article I joked that -- I call it 'massively online pair-programming'. So like a game, but instead everyone's sort of mob-programming with each other. It's definitely that. I get everything from people putting out typos, which is pretty high-level, to someone sending me a paste bin saying "Here is the code that I think will be slightly better, and here's the code that--" sometimes I'll talk back and forth with people in chat, and because I've got my mind on 100 different parts of the stream and also the code, I don't quite get what they're saying, so they're patient and they'll send me a GitHub gist or something that explains what they were thinking. That's actually really super helpful.
+
+\[36:02\] There have been times where I've sort of felt myself going on a tangent, so I've just immediately crossed over, opened a GitHub issues, said "You're all free to take it if you really want it", and by the time I've ended the stream, someone's actually done that work for me. So it's also been this kind of weird thing where I can fork off that work, so that I can keep away from the yak shaves and that's been a really great way for people to collaborate with me beyond just chatting with me live.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So it sounds like your style is collaborative, whereas... Is it normal for people using Twitch to live stream - is it always the case where you feel like you have to interact with those watching, or is there someone who broadcasts, and someone like you who interacts?
+
+**Suz Hinton:** I think it really depends. There are a lot of people who are just doing their homework, they're going through college and they're doing their homework. They don't have their webcam up, they just literally have their screen, and they use it as a motivation.
+
+There are other people who stream every single day, because they're working on, let's say, their own business or their own open source library full-time, so they're not necessarily always going to address everyone in the chat because they wanna stay productive, and things like that.
+
+So I think there are no rules when it comes to that, but I know from experience that if you're going to stream yourself doing things, you're not going to be doing it for eight hours a day; it's in your best interest to build that community and to constantly interact with them, because that's where the actual benefit is - it's doing those things together, not just having a very static stream where people may as well be watching a YouTube video.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So the point you're doing it for is the interaction, is the community, not just to say "Here's me working, now watch me work."
+
+**Suz Hinton:** Right. I mean, I know that people aren't just coming to my stream every Sunday for me, they're also coming there for each other, to chat with each other. We have this tradition where I will turn my stream on around 11 AM; I will just put it in like a little stand-by screen, saying that I'm coming on soon, and people get a notification that I'm streaming, and they'll just -- everyone comes in and asks each other about their week; they're like "Oh, what are you working on right now? Do you have any side projects going? What did you do at work this week? Are there any cool things you're excited about?" and so there's this really cute tradition, and then when I come in with my coffee and turn the actual real stream on, I have all these different things where I can say "Oh, that sounds really cool. This is what I've been up to."
+
+So there's so much more than just "Oh, I'm sitting down and writing code in front of people." It becomes a family, and it becomes something extremely unique that you just don't see elsewhere.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's an interesting Twitch act, too. I haven't investigated this further, if that's a Suz-only thing or not, but starting your stream before you actually start your stream because you leverage the platform of notifications that they have built in, and you sort of like pre-stream, so to speak... I don't know how to describe it, but that's really interesting to do it like that. That was way you sort of have like a -- you're pre-filling the queue, so to speak, with like interactions in the community. They get their five minutes prior to the stream starting, or whatever the timeframe is. That's an interesting hack. Is that something you've learned, or is that something that --
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Or everybody does that maybe?
+
+**Suz Hinton:** It's definitely something I've learned. It gives people the opportunity to come in, get settled before I start explaining what I'm doing, so it also helps me, because then I don't have to keep repeating myself.
+
+So if everyone who's probably gonna join is there within the first ten minutes, then that's like kind of the critical mass that I'm speaking to. And then as more stragglers come in, that's where the community is helping tell them what I'm actually working on. But I think it's kind of like when you have a user group meetup and you say "Turn up at seven", but the talk starts at 7:30; it just gives everyone a chance to talk to each other, figure out what's going on, get settled, maybe just run to the bathroom real quick... You know, it just gives people a chance to do that.
+
+\[40:04\] I totally discovered that accidentally, and now it's at the point where... This is actually quite funny - I started my stream this Sunday and I accidentally left this little query parameter on my streaming URL that I have to stream to in order for it to show up; it's a little test query that allows you to see whether or not your stream is stable or not, so you know that you have a good quality stream... And there were crickets in the chat; no one was there, no one was talking to each other. I came back from making my coffee and it was just completely silent, and it was so noticeable and jarring for me that I really took for granted the fact that there were people already in there and being super-welcoming and saying "Hi." So sure enough, I checked out my streaming URL and it was the wrong URL. I swapped it over, and then people just immediately joined the chat. It was just really strange to think that I rely on that now to know that people are ready to go.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So you've probably had like a moment of complete self-doubt, or maybe you thought the gig was up, and nobody likes you anymore.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** They found out that you're an impostor and they left.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] She's like "Oh, nooooo...!"
+
+**Suz Hinton:** That was exactly true! It was so true. I was like "Oh, that's it. I guess people just don't really care about it anymore. It happened very suddenly, but I guess that's okay." And I actually then teased myself, so when people came online, I said "You know what, when you all didn't show up, I actually felt kind of sad. I thought that everyone just didn't find it interesting anymore", and people were super nice to me. I was like, "No, you should be teasing me about that moment that I had."
+
+**Break:** \[41:50\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So Suz, when we look at the idea of live streaming, obviously, it fits great for gaming, because that's what Twitch has been built upon, and we'll touch more on whether or not Twitch is the only way you can do this, but I'm curious how this affects let's say the sustainability side of open source.
+
+We talk a lot about sustainable open source, different funding models for whether you're gonna fund a project, or a person, or all these things happening in today's world of open source, and I'm curious how -- specifically open source, how does this fit into like let's say funding? I know you have the options to subscribe the people... You may not do this in particular, but how does this work, and is this an alternative to, say, Patreon, or getting paid to do full-time open source? How much have you thought about doing this with Twitch? How do you think about this?
+
+**Suz Hinton:** I'm really glad you brought this up, because I think that we're sort of reaching that point in open source now where we realize that yes, open source won, but it definitely came at a huge cost - it came to a cost of people's time, and labor, and things like that.
+
+\[44:04\] So on Patreon there are a lot of open source developers, and I do actually support quite a few of them for stuff that I do use, but also stuff that I just think is good that it's out in the world, even if I don't use their code... And I know that open source developers are constantly looking for other ways to kind of supplement their income so that they can continue doing this. I know that Patreon is a big one, because it's a subscription model, so it's a set and forget source of income, which is great for people to be able to do that.
+
+I know that with YouTube some people try to create video tutorials on the side that generate a lot of views, so they can get ad revenue from that... And I definitely feel that Twitch falls into a very similar vein to those two sort of money-generating avenues.
+
+I think with Twitch it's particularly good, because it sort of rolls everything together. Let's say somebody supports you on Patreon - there are actually webhooks you can use that announce that on the stream. So if someone subscribes to you on Twitch, for example, or if they donate money on Paypal to you, or if they sign up for your Patreon, or if they support your Kickstarter, for example, there's webhooks that allow you to be able to announce and celebrate that on the screen. So people get a much bigger reward than just knowing they did a nice thing; they actually get acknowledged on air, which is a big part of the appeal of Twitch, where you actually get to live-interact with somebody... So I think it could be a really effective way of doing it.
+
+I think with open source it can be really helpful not just to bring in money, but just to find people to help you do that work as well, as we've discussed before. So I think that if you show the work you're doing, if you show people just how involved it can be to maintain just one library, it can really help people understand people the value of what you're providing; it can make you much more human, much more relatable, and people will obviously have a lot more empathy for what you're actually trying to achieve. I think that Patreon does that to a degree, where you can write personal posts to people and send them certain rewards for supporting you, and I think that Twitch is an excellent supplement for that, rather than just a drop-in replacement.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, it's like -- I don't really feel like you have to choose one or the other. I was just curious, like -- because I don't think subscribes are visible to the public. I think they're only to you as the publisher, right? If we can maybe break down some of the mechanics, so to speak - you've got follows, which is like any social platform, it's free. Then you have the option to subscribe to somebody, which I believe you can give somebody a free subscribe, which I'm not really clear what that means, but then you can also choose to subscribe at a base rate, or these higher rates... There's like three different tiers, but I think they all do the same thing.
+
+Then you have this concept of a Bit, which seems to be either custom art or purchased art that I think just jumps into the stream as like somebody gives you essentially money as an artistic object that shows up in your stream. Did I break those down well? Is that a good assumption of how those things work?
+
+**Suz Hinton:** Yeah, that's pretty spot on. The follow is just really showing that you want to know when that person streaming again, and it's just showing that you like their stream. With subscribing there's three tiers, like you said, and a lot of creators on Twitch will set certain tiers where the higher you subscribe, the more perks you get; so it can be very similar to Patreon in that model, where maybe every six months you send people who pledge to the high tier on Twitch, you might send them a personalized postcard, or a thank you. There's a concept know as custom emotes as well where you get to use this special emote that's only for the mid-tier or the higher tier pledging, for example. So there's definitely little perks you can offer.
+
+\[48:09\] The Bits are actually like no-strings-attached, so you don't necessarily have to offer anything in return, but they're a currency, I guess, on Twitch. I think one Bit is worth one penny, and most people cheer like a couple hundred Bits at a time, which ends up being a couple of dollars. It's just an easy way for them to donate to you, but also because Twitch integrates so well with Bits, because it's their own currency, you get a very obvious acknowledgement that you've actually supported that person, too. So it's almost like a gamification of supporting somebody... There's something in it for you, as well.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I saw a recent stream you did, you got - I think it was 10,000 Bits and you were extremely surprised; you were like "Wow, somebody gave me -- Thank you!" You were just thanking them, like that's a lot of Bits to get. I'm still learning the terminology, but you were really excited about 10,000, which I think based on your numbers there it seems like $100.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** That's right. I'm just not used to somebody being that excited about me coding. You know, we've talked about how Twitch is for games, and they think that that's definitely still their model, and I've gone to TwitchCon, I've gone to their developer day, I've spoken to their developer advocates and their VP of developer platform, and I've said "I know that I'm not your main target, but there is a very unique ecosystem and a very amazing community happening right under your noses."
+
+A lot of these income avenues are supposed to be much more sustainable for people who play games, because you have a very insatiable audience in gamers. They're a very intense community, so they bring a lot of monetary support and fandom to that. I'm not quite sure we've hit that point with open source fandom, so when somebody donated 10,000 Bits it was such a huge deal to me, because it's not really in the same vein as gaming, where 10,000 Bits might actually be much less of a deal. So it just blew my mind that someone appreciated the stream so much that they wanted to donate that sum of money.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** They must have some, like you said, captive and very enthusiastic fandom. Also, a lot of disposable income, I suppose... Because you're just throwing around $100 bills like it's no big deal. I mean, for you it's a big deal, but like you said, with the gamers that seems to be more commonplace. That's really cool; I didn't realize that there was that level of finance coming into the system. I know that people were making livings on YouTube, and I've heard that there's certain gamers who live-stream professionally... But do you imagine a world where certain open source live streamers could potentially hang up their shoes - is that what you say, hang up your shoes? I don't know, quit your full-time job and just be a professional live streamer?
+
+**Suz Hinton:** I think that depends on your circumstances. I know in the U.S. that can be quite hard, because you require a larger sum of subscription in order to make that happen. There are gamers that have 20,000 subscribers, and even at the base-level of $2,50 that they get from every subscriber, that's a lot of money, right?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's monthly?
+
+**Suz Hinton:** That's monthly, which is a lot.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** From what I understand -- so I think the base level is roughly $5 (USD) and I think if I understand the mechanics too, that's a split, even split with Twitch the platform and you the publisher... Is that right, Suz?
+
+**Suz Hinton:** \[51:48\] That's right. Out of every $2,50 sum comes your share of taxes that you pay back, and also health insurance and all of those things that you actually need to provide for yourself, given that you're now self-employed. So I guess my comment is that in other countries where you have universal healthcare, you have really good public services, you could probably start doing this full-time with a lower number of subscribers and with less risk, if that makes sense. So it's definitely feasible in some cases, but I would say that most people wouldn't quit their jobs unless they were making at least $2,000-$4,000/month in subscriptions, and even then that's a pretty risky endeavor at that amount.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. Well, at a 50/50 split we know who's really making all the money off this - it's Jeff Bezos and Amazon. It's the platform that's making all the money. \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** A trillion dollars...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, boy...
+
+**Suz Hinton:** Yeah, to be honest, I mostly turned on subscriptions on mine, so you have to kind of reach a certain bar with Twitch, as well. You have to prove that you stream consistently and you stream for X amount of hours per month. There's a bar to pass, so that you are definitely giving your audience what they wanna see, right?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That was my next question, because YouTube has a similar threshold. You have to have a certain amount of viewed hours -- some sort of bar or consistency that says you're a viable person to essentially allow into the pay models of this platform.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** That's right. Twitch has two levels, where you become either an affiliate, which is the base level, which they only introduced last year, and then you become a partner, which used to be an invite-only and it was mostly just gamers and some people who stream creatively, such as cosplay producers and things like that. So that's definitely something that you have to pass first.
+
+I've been streaming for just over a year and a half, and I hit those numbers a very long time ago, but I didn't turn it on because I have a full-time job. The main reason why I turned it on was because people really wanted to show their appreciation, and it was basically outside pressure, where they said "Oh, I can't always join the stream but I'm so happy that you're doing this that I would just love to set and forget just a small contribution every month.
+
+So to people, that can be really meaningful for them to contribute that, even if you didn't necessarily need it yourself. Then you can actually donate that to charity, or you can put it aside to reinvest back into your stream... But it does actually strengthen the relationship with your audience to a degree, even if you didn't necessarily think that you needed to do it in the first place.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It would be cool to take some of those funds maybe to buy yourself lunch or something special while you stream. Here in Texas we have this really awesome sparkling water called Topo Chico; it's actually Mexican water, it's pretty cool. It's good. If you come to Texas, have it, please. But if I drank a Topo Chico while I did that, I could be like "This Topo Chico is sponsored by you, the community", that kind of thing. \[laughter\]
+
+**Suz Hinton:** That's a really good idea. There have been cases where people have donated to me when I've said something like "Oh, I should really pick up this board, so that I can make it compatible with avrgirl-arduino", and then someone will literally send me like an Adafruit.com (a microcontroller vendor) voucher, so that I can actually order it, which is so nice...
+
+So usually on the next stream I'll say, "Hey, so-and-so actually enabled this to happen", which is really cool. So that's definitely something where people are also very happy to have like a very specific thing that they would like to enable for you, or make it happen, which is really sweet. I think that can be a bit better than just "Here is X amount of dollars."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So just to be clear on this one point before we move on to some other things... You do have the option to turn on or turn off this funding portion, so it's an opt-in on your part, the publisher, or the streamer, so to speak? Streamer is probably the more correct terminology.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** \[56:05\] That's right, yeah. So you don't necessarily have to do that... You can also become part of the affiliate community or part of the partner community without actually having that subscribe button as well. It's a perk of passing one of those bars, but it's not necessarily required.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You work from anywhere, you're a remote worker, right?
+
+**Suz Hinton:** Yes.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You don't have to go into an office...
+
+**Suz Hinton:** No.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I wrote a post recently just about the loneliness that potentially comes into those who work from home... Do you feel like this is an outlet for you to hang out with people where normally you would just be hanging out by yourself on a Sunday, rather than with a community of several thousand people? Is this like human touch to you, so to speak?
+
+**Suz Hinton:** It's funny you say that, because even though my job is really public, and even though I do a Twitch stream, and I do a lot of public speaking, I think people get the impression that I'm really extroverted, and I'm just actually not.
+
+I think I care more about helping others than I do about my own introverted comfort, if that makes sense. I've found that streaming on Twitch has been a much less over-stimulating way for me to meet new people, to help other people also become better programmers, or just help them make new friends, and things like that. It's actually been better for me to do that, because I still get that social hit and those social interactions, but it's usually not as intense as being in person. So I definitely think that that's been a really nice thing that I've had where I can catch up with a bunch of people who are quite literally regulars now on my stream, but I don't even have to leave the comfort of my own home.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Would you say, now that you've done this for a while, that you look forward to it? That without this interaction you would sort of like be missing out or be depleted of some satisfaction in life?
+
+**Suz Hinton:** I definitely feel that my open source work is not -- it wouldn't be the same without them for sure... And like I said before, when I turned on my stream and I had the wrong URL and no one came, I felt so sad, and I think that definitely was proof to me that I look forward to seeing them just as much as they look forward to seeing me. I do tend to say that a lot on my stream, I'm like "I'm just so excited that you all are so positive and that you all helped me, and I just want to thank you for joining me." That's something that I'm always gushing about just before I turn off the stream.
+
+So I definitely think that -- I don't think that my open source life and my Sundays would ever be the same if I lost that community.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I feel you, because when we do these shows, like this show we're on right now - I look forward to this; I look forward to spending time with Jerod... We don't rehearse these shows, I don't know what his perspective is, in many cases I'm surprised; having done this show so much with him, I do kind of understand him and I kind of anticipate how we'll both sit on certain issues or certain stances or what not, but I look forward --
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You get my jokes...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I get your jokes... Some of them. \[laughter\] But I look forward to the time, I look forward to this. We don't have a live audience here with us, but... In my case, I'm a remote worker, I work from home, so I don't have a lot of reason to go out and hang out with "real people" all the time. I have my wife and my son and my daughter and friends and different stuff I do, but nothing forces me to actually hang out with other humans, other than my immediate family.
+
+So in a lot of cases, for you live streaming in this case, and me and Jerod - or me in particular - this is an outlet for me to hang out with other humans, and I look forward to it. So I was just curious how that plays into your life.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** \[01:00:02.08\] Yeah, I really don't like it when people say things like "Your friends on the internet are not real friends" or "That's not a real community" - I totally disagree. I think that when you feel that you're in a certain niche or you're only interested in things that not everyone is interested in, it can be really difficult to find those friends in real life. If you wanna talk about things -- like, if you wanna have a LAN party for example, back in the day you'd be dragging a bunch of computers to somebody's house... And that can be really fun, but it can be really tedious and it's really hard to expand your group. But now when you're playing games online with each other and you're talking to each other via Discord, for example - that is just so much more scalable and it's just as real as if you were sitting in the room with those people. I totally discount anyone that says "Your online friends are not a real community", because it's just not true anymore.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I agree with that. I think there's degrees of disagreement, but pretty much I agree. \[laughter\] I've actually had a thought about this, and I'll say this just for the sake of not really trying to disagree with you, but more of like a thought I've had recently, that I've still been meshing on, so to speak, and it's that I wonder if people that in the scenarios if because there's -- you may have the online attachment to them and this community aspect, but I just wondered if it's easier to disconnect from those kind of people that you don't see face to face? Because for example arguing with somebody face to face versus in Slack is two completely different scenarios, and it's easier to disconnect from people that are digitally connected, than face to face connected. That's the thing I've been mulling over...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Disconnect good or disconnect bad?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, just... Maybe the easiest way to say it is like "drop it like a bad habit." \[laughter\] That's something I say for funnies, but I think that, like, "Could you drop me like a bad habit because we have a digital connection, versus a face to face or live connection?" That's my varying degree of disagreement. I'm still thinking about that one.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, bad habits are actually the hardest thing to break... But \[unintelligible 01:02:14.03\] so I'll just stop there.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What's that? Say that again...?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Bad habits are actually really hard to break, that's why I don't understand your statement... A bad habit is very difficult to break, that's why it's a habit, and it's bad. Anyways. \[unintelligible 01:02:30.18\] You knew I was gonna do that, you get me now.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Come on... Take it back, Suz. Bring us back into "How do we get started on Twitch?" That's what I wanna know. We wanna do this, we wanna check this out... What's our first step?
+
+**Suz Hinton:** Yeah, that's a good point. So I would definitely recommend - get started with what you have. If you have an old pair of Apple iPhone headphones with a little microphone on it, go with that. If you have a laptop without an external monitor, it doesn't matter. For me, don't feel like you have to have this super professional setup to get started, which is what I'm sure that you tell a lot of people who ask "How do I start a podcast?"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Get the best mic...
+
+**Suz Hinton:** Get your stuff going, and then if you know that this is something you wanna commit to, that's when you can start investing from there. People make the mistake of -- they also procrastinate by ordering stuff, right? They're like "Oh, well if I ordered this stuff, then I have to set it up, and that means I don't have to start today", and things like that. So I usually just say, go as low-fi as you can, download something that doesn't cost any money, such as OBS (Open Broadcaster Software). It's an open source cross-platform piece of software that a lot of streamers use.
+
+\[01:03:51.22\] You're already going to find things that plug really well into it, you're gonna be able to find a lot of YouTube tutorials on how to use OBS, and a lot of blog posts as well. So definitely go with what everyone else is using, and go with equipment you already have, and then basically just work yourself up from there.
+
+Most people just want to see your desktop, so that they can actually see what you're working on, and they wanna see your webcam. So don't go overboard with all the widgets and things like that... Just kind of like watch a bunch of streams, find what you think would work for you and just sort of start experimenting from there, and just begin with the basics.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What about hiding things? Is there anything you do to prep yourself, to say "I've got some secrets on my computer"? How do you make sure that no one sees those things? Is that an issue for you?
+
+**Suz Hinton:** Yeah, everyone always asks about this, I love it... Because to me, I just saw that as like "Oh yeah, I'm gonna have stuff that I need to hide, so I'll think about this..." A lot of the time I'm working with APIs, especially when I'm doing my Azure streams - a lot of things have secrets where I don't want people to see that. So if possible, ahead of time I'll start a new directory and I'll just say to people "Hey, here's this .env file (which is what we tend to use in Node.js), here's a sample file where it doesn't have the values in it. This is what I've got stored here, so if you see me referring to any of these variables, it's because of this." That tends to be really helpful for people.
+
+Then I have a couple of Chrome extensions that will hide private data in some if the different management consoles that I use. In Azure, for example, which I'm in a lot, it will blur all of my keys, and even just like my email address at the top, it will neutralize that... I try to be as careful as possible.
+
+There are definitely times where something has just not worked, or I need to refresh an API key or something and I have a really cute little cartoon picture of me with a little padlock, and it's a secret, and I just have it so that I can hit a key on a keyboard and it will sort of cover just the desktop part of my screen. So everything else on my Twitch feed is still visible, and you can see my webcam, but I'm just sort of like arranging things without people seeing, and then I can just toggle it back off again.
+So if you have multiple strategies, you tend to be okay. I have literally popped open a local storage console in the dev tools before, and I've accidentally left a prior API key in there, and I've just said it laughing, and then I've navigated to the website, clicked to cycle the token, and then I've moved on.
+
+So it will happen, you've just gotta mitigate the risk of "Is this going to be the end of the world if I accidentally show it?" and maybe just decide whether or not you're actually going to show that project that day. It really is about mitigating risk. But most of the time, you're just rotating a key, because you accidentally showed it. It's actually not too much of a drama.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm always worried about things like that... Like Jerod shared before the show, like "What if they see my password?" You've got all these little fears... And there's YouTube videos out there of extreme Twitch fails, which can go really extreme, or just really benign, like whatever... Because being live, things happen. That's the easiest way to say.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Have you ever had an embarrassing moment, Suz, throughout your year-and-a-half?
+
+**Suz Hinton:** Yes. One of my favorite things was I was trying to test out my library with an Arduino, and I'm running the code and it kept coming out with the error that I wrote myself, right? It kept saying "No Arduino board found, No Arduino board found." And at that moment, especially when live streaming and you don't know what's wrong, you don't just get up and make a cup of tea, you're just frozen. You're just completely paralyzed and you're like "This is boring for them to watch; I can't figure it out. Oh my goodness, what am I gonna do?" I'm just completely stuck, I don't have anything to go with. This code worked literally five minutes ago... And the problem was that I had two Arduinos on my desk and I picked up the one where -- so an Arduino board is basically an AVR chip and it's put into a socket, and then from there they break it out into these really easy-to-use pins.
+
+\[01:08:15.25\] So the Arduino is made up of those two pieces, and I just happened to have popped off one of the microchips on an Arduino board because I was using it in another project, and I just picked up that board; there was no chip on it. The chip's not gonna answer back when I talk to it if it's not actually present... So one of my Twitch viewers - and he's actually very knowledgeable about hardware. He lives in Hong Kong and he commutes to Shenzen a lot; he was just like "Suz, the chip is not on the board." \[laughter\] I looked at the chat message and I'm like "Don't be silly." And then I picked up the board and I was like "Oh my god, you're right." I actually have a YouTube video of this in my blog post where I'm just like "I cannot believe I was trying to talk to a chip that literally wasn't there..."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Wow...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's hilarious.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** They're the little moments that everyone really likes, and that's why you should live stream. It shows that you're human, and also people get that little hit of dopamine because they're like "I helped" or "I was right." It's like playing a game show from home.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's awesome.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's really interesting. I mean, especially the humanizing part of it; it's like "Even Suz messes up."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** Yeah, which I find hilarious, because I just don't see myself in that way, so when people are like "Even Suz messes up", I'm like "I mess up all the time, what are you talking about?"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** There is proof!
+
+**Suz Hinton:** There's no perfect Suz that you're thinking of. She literally does not exist.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Maybe let's close with this, Jerod, unless you've got something else you wanted to cover...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, I have a thing, but we'll see what you say. Maybe it's the same thing.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, let's see if it's the same thing then. What advice could you share? We've covered different parts of your life - you work at Microsoft, dev rel... There's probably lots of facets you can give advice back to, but if you have the ear of the developer community to share some crucial advice, what's one piece of crucial advice you would share back to the open source community and the developer community to say "This is how you get started with something, this is how you take your first step..."? What is some good advice that you may wanna share on this show?
+
+**Suz Hinton:** I think my biggest advice is to always stay curious. I know that one of my friends online who runs Fun Fun Function, Mattias, he always has that at the end of his videos, he says "Until next time, stay curious." I think that if people continually ask questions and ask them with good intentions, I think that that lowers the barrier for more junior developers to be able to ask questions too, and then it just stops this kind of weird thing where we're always trying to seem smart for appearances. I just feel that everyone is a beginner at something once, even if they become an expert at it later on.
+
+You always have to start somewhere, and all you have to do is have that curiosity to just start something. It's the same with Twitch - you just have to be curious about "Hm, I wonder if people would actually be interested in what I'm doing. I wonder if I could make this into a thing that I can commit to every single time." You just have to be curious about what your capabilities are, and just assume that you can have a go at something.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Alright. Jerod, what about you, man? Was it the same?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** No, it's different, but...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's different, I like it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** But we'll close on this one... So speaking of being curious, I'm curious about other people live streaming on Twitch. We have Twitch.tv/noopkat - that's Suz; we've been talking about your channel and your community. What about some other people? When I go to Twitch and search for open source or search for programming, I find a bunch of gaming channels that are named like they might be programming channels... And I'm wondering if there's like a group of live streamers like yourself, if there's a list somewhere... Other channels that people could follow, that are open source, or even just hacking in general.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** \[01:12:08.12\] Yeah, that's a great question. It takes a long time to find the people who you want to watch and who have a very similar personality where they interact with the chat a lot. My biggest recommendation is to check out my friend Tierney's Awesome Developer Streams repo on GitHub.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** He has a bunch of people listed, and every single person has their own page that has their Twitter, whether they stream on Twitch, Mixer, YouTube... You know, wherever they actually are, and how often they stream, which is really cool. I think he's been able to curate a really good list, and I can also give you any extras that aren't already on there... But there is a bunch of us that have found each other and we all sort of send our community to each other's accounts and things like that, because we all have a collective goal to create really nice, inclusive and informative streams. So that's definitely what I'd recommend checking out first.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very cool. Is that...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You're at the top of this list.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** ...bnb/awesome-developer-streams?
+
+**Suz Hinton:** That is it. I think it stands for bit and bash or something or bit and bang
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, you're number one on this list, so now I know why you're using this one. Just kidding.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And there's a lot more, too.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** There's a whole bunch of them.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** There's at least 30 or 40, I would say... Just a quick guess.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, that's a great starting place.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** Yeah, it's really heavily curated. I've actually met some of these people at TwitchCon and we've discussed tips and tricks for coding streams, and things like that... Because we're also a niche community, so it's been really difficult for us to find each other. So I'd say that Tierney has done a really good job at connecting ourselves, so we can kind of watch each other's streams, and learn from each other, but also share our community.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Interesting. I like this. This is -- it's similar to podcasts; the most often way you find out about new and interesting things or things you should be paying attention to is usually word of mouth, because the directories are just so massive, or have so much to offer... It's hard to sort of slice it down into "These are the ones you can focus on" or "This is what I can recommend."
+
+I mean, obviously, you've got iTunes and whatnot and other areas, but we're recommended on Twitter a lot, and I find that's the best way for me to even find podcasts - personal recommendations. Usually Jerod, usually.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Usually me, yeah. I'm kind of a podcast junkie.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** Yeah. What's cool is that Twitch has this thing called raids... I don't know if you've heard of raids.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** No.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** What you do is when you're finishing your stream, you send -- like it's kind of used as -- it's sometimes used as a trolling technique, but you send or you sic all of your community onto someone who's just started streaming at the same time as you; you're like "Go to this person, go say hi!" So sometimes you'll get an influx of like 50 people coming in and saying hi all at once, and it can get very overwhelming. So you can turn off that feature, but it started as an unofficial thing, and Twitch actually integrated it fully into the system. So that can be a really good way of kind of like passing people along, so that they can discover new things, and I find that that's extremely unique to the live streaming community, especially in gaming.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's very cool. I've never heard of that. That's a great idea. I can see how it could definitely back-fire for people who are just getting started, that suddenly you have an influx of viewers.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** Yeah, absolutely.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, absolutely. We'll definitely link up this repo too, because sharing lists - we have an awesome topic (literally, an awesome topic) on Changelog News, where if you go to changelog.com right now and you follow, we... If you haven't been there in a while - this is speaking to you, Suz, as well as the listening audience - let's say if you haven't been there this year, go there, check it out. The news we ship out every single week in our weekly email called Changelog Weekly is now a real-time (as much as it can be real time) news feed on our frontpage, so... We're gonna go there and share this Awesome Developer Streams this week in news. We like doing that, we like to share that.
+
+\[01:16:12.28\] We also have a topic, which is technically a tag, to some degree, that's called "awesome", and it's all the awesome lists out there... So this will join that--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** ...that awesome topic.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[laughs\] Full of awesomes.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Before we go, I wanna give a shout-out to another live streamer, one that we know quite well... At least we know him by his handle, which is joebew42 on Twitch. He's been live streaming while he contributes to open source, and lately he's actually been contributing to our website, which has been very cool.
+
+Changelog.com is an open source Elixir app, and Joe has lovingly crafted a few features for us, including a JSON feed, which he just recently added... So it's been very fun to watch him live stream as picks through mostly my code, and second-guesses all the things that I do. It's very fun kind of meta, but he's a great live streamer, so maybe I should open up a pull request on this list and get him added. Joe, thanks for streaming and thanks for contributing to our open source projects.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Absolutely. I think it's interesting too, because it's - as well as Suz - a source of inspiration. I didn't think anybody would grab our repo and start setting it up live on Twitch, and showing off all the areas where maybe it is or is not easy to set up, like the first time you're on a project, and what goes into getting an Elixir app running and whatnot. That's what he did first, and that was really cool. It's inspiring, that's the long story short.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yup.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, Suz, anything else you wanted to cover before we go? I know we've taken up quite a bit of your time, but I'm sure you've got lots to share. Anything else you wanna cover before we close out the show?
+
+**Suz Hinton:** No, I think that's it. If anyone hasn't checked out live coding streams before and they're just not sure whether or not it would help them learn things as a developer, not necessarily streaming themselves, definitely check people out, because I think that it's something that is very, very different from anything else, and you don't have to be this hardcore gamer to watch people live streaming. I just want people to sort of see whether or not it's a medium that is really helpful to them.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So Twitch is cool for software developers, that's what you're saying...
+
+**Suz Hinton:** Yes. Or YouTube Live, or Mixer, or a bunch of other different avenues, yes.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Awesome. Well, thank you, Suz, for your time today, thank you for all you're doing in open source. We really appreciate your time today. Thank you so much for coming on.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** Thanks for having me, this was super fun!
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+**Jerod Santo:** So Todd, we've got Moore's Law a little bit wrong in our episode with Eric Normand; that was episode \#267, about functional programming... We were talking about Moore's Law, and I might have even mentioned on the show how lots of people get Moore's Law wrong, and then I got it wrong... \[laughs\] So embarrass phase - it's happening. But you were gracious enough to hop into our Slack, which is a place that we hang out and talk about our shows, and programming topics and random things, blockchain mostly...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** A lot of blockchain.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** A lot of blockchain in there... And hop in our Slack community and straighten us out a bit about it and the particulars, and so we thought, well, if we need schooling, perhaps more people than just us need a little bit of schooling. So first of all, thanks for coming on the Changelog, and secondly, straighten us out on Moore's Law and what it actually is.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** I don't necessarily think that it was completely wrong on the show, but the gist of what you guys said was fine...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yes...!
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** ...that chips are -- there's no more free lunch, you don't get free performance out of your chips anymore like you used to when the clock speed was going up rapidly...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** But Moore's Law is not dead. It's fair to be confused, because there's been a lot of articles written about this. There was an article on MIT review that said "Moore's Law is dead. Now what?", but it predicted the death of Moore's Law I think out in the 2020's. The Intel CEO says Moore's Law is fine, the chips are gonna continue to improve. I think it's kind of hard to see what's really happening in the processor landscape.
+
+What Moore's Law actually says is that the number of transistors that you can cram on a chip doubles every 18 to 24 months. That's the part that is still relatively true, although it's slowing down. The interesting thing, and the thing that people typically get confused with this is -- so there's something else called Dennard's scaling, that broke down around 2006. I think that's what has led to us having all these multi-core chips now, where you got a lot of performance out of your single-core chips before.
+
+\[04:25\] What Dennard's scaling says is that as your transistors get smaller, the voltage and current stay proportionate to that, so effectively your power density is the same for a smaller transistor as it is for a larger one. What that means is that you can basically jack up the frequency or the voltage on the chip as you scale the number of transistors, so you get clock speed for free over time.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Just by increasing the power.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Yeah, just by increasing the frequency as you scale it down. So the chips have effectively the same power for that area that you're putting all those transistors in, right? You wanna keep the power envelope relatively constant, because you're putting it in a device - these days like a phone or a desktop computer - and you don't want someone to have a really high power desktop machine that ramps up their power bill, right?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** So you've got a fixed power envelope, you're increasing the number of transistors, and it used to be that you could also increase the clock speed... But because of the breakdown of Dennard's scaling, you see that in 2006 (or around there) the chips are kind of kept out of it... Like 2.5 GHz now. They're all sort of hovering around there; they get up to 3 sometimes, and you can find like 4 GHz monsters in like some of the bigger IBM Z systems... But effectively, it's kind of capped out there. I don't know if you remember, I had 100 MHz computers back in the day, or even -- I think my Apple 2GS was like maybe kHz, I'm not even remembering.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I don't think I go back quite that far. You might go back a little farther than Adam and I in that regard.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I've always been in the MHz.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I know that I was in the MHz; I think it was like -- maybe my first was 750 MHz, or somewhere around there.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Oh wow, so you guys are picking up late '90s.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That would have been like late '90s, yup. Exactly.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I do recall having a 4-gig drive, it was my first computer, and then the second one I had a 20-gig drive.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Okay.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So I don't relate so much back to the chip, but mostly like how much space that I had to put stuff on...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Sure.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...which sort of like relates to the chip era, because it kind of goes in a similar scale.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, they go hand in hand, yeah. So you have a little bit of seniority on us there, Todd, but nonetheless, we've definitely seen the topping out. I'm on a -- what is this, a 2016 MacBook Pro, and I've got a 3.1 GHz, so that's like... Yeah, 2.5-3 -- like you said, in the more server products you might have 4 GHz, but that's what definitely has stopped.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Yeah, and the reason that that's broken down is that -- so Dennard's scaling ignores current leakage, so as people packed all these transistors on the chip, you get something of a thermal runway where you can't pack them that close without having a whole lot of power on the dye. So you basically are capped how much clock speed you can have.
+
+But what they do - you can still get these multi-core chips now, right? The number of core on your chips has definitely been increasing, so that's what they're using the transistors for... Where they used to pack more transistors into things like out of order execution and other stuff on the dye; now you're just building out and replicating chips of effectively the same size on the same -- well, cores of effectively the same size on the chip. So that's what your multi-core CPU's are doing, they're becoming their own little massively parallel machines.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[08:20\] So even back in that show, even then we were talking about the proliferation of cores at least at a consumer level hasn't gone crazy in terms of you're still talking about two-core, four-core, eight-core.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Sure.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Probably from your purview inside of the supercomputer labs - you can tell us about what machinery looks like inside there, but... Is that something that has also hit a threshold, or it's just slowed to where it doesn't make sense, maybe like you said, inside the same thermal envelope to have 32 cores on a laptop, for instance?
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** So I actually am not 100% clear on why they haven't jacked up the number of cores on a laptop... I mean, I would assume it's because people don't need that many cores that much, and also because most of the parallelism that you're gonna wanna do on a desktop machine is gonna be on the GPU; on the phones they have a lot of specialized hardware for things like video processing, and they call these AI units and things like that, which is interesting, and it has a lot to do with the eventual death of Moore's Law, too...
+
+But yeah, on the supercomputers - I mean, we buy effectively the same chips, at least for some of the machines, as your desktop machine. So our commodity clusters, as we call them - they're Linux boxes with Intel and maybe AMD chips, and we're seeing a large increase in on-node parallelism. We might not have more cores per chip than what your desktop would have... We have a lot of sockets in the machines, and so the amount of on-node parallelism that's there is pretty high, and we try to use all that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So where do you see this all going in terms of Moore's Law? You said that it was said that it would be dying in the 2020's... We're getting near that range...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So close.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Prognosticate out for us. What does it look like in the next five years?
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** In the next five years I think you'll see the rate of transistors that are getting packed on the chips start to slow down; currently, the number of transistors on the chip is doubling (2x) every three years instead of every one and a half, so this is slowing. Once that goes away, you're gonna have to figure out how to increase your speed other ways. What that means in the hardware universe is I think you'll start to see a lot more specialized hardware. You're kind of already seeing that, right? Like we were talking about, on the mobiles you've got -- the iPhone X has this bionic processor, or whatever it is, you've got custom GPU's and things... I mean, a lot of the processing that happens on your phone is just off-loaded, and most of that is for power consumption, because you can do it a lot more efficiently in hardware.
+
+I think you're gonna see the HPC side start to shift towards different architectures they can make use of the same number of transistors more effectively for their particular workload, so you'll see a lot more specialization, but you're not gonna -- basically, if the number of transistors that you can fit on a chip becomes constant, then the only way that you can get more speed is to make more effective use of them; you can't continue getting performance either in terms of more parallelism or in terms of higher clock speed...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right... Because physics.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Maybe for those out there that are like catching up and maybe just trying to follow along, to some degree, if they're not schooled in transistors and chips, can you break down what a chip is and what the components of it are, and the thresholds we have kind of gone over the years and we're at today? Is that possible?
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** \[12:12\] Sure. Yeah, we could talk about that some. At the lowest level, people talk about transistors. What a transistor is - it's a thing that if you apply current to it, it changes the conductivity of the material. What that means -- think of it as a wire, with another wire coming into it; if you put some current on that thing, then the first wire either conducts or it doesn't. All that means is that now you have a switch, so you can build out more complex logic from that switch. That's the fundamental thing that enables us to build computers. They can build that now by etching it on silicon. So they oxidize silicon - that's what all these fabs and big chip plants are doing - they etch lots of transistors onto silicon with chemical reactions, and there's different processes for doing that.
+
+Those processes are what enable us to cram more transistors on the chip over time. It's improvements to them, and -- I mean, I'm not a process scientist, so I don't know a whole lot about that, but effectively Moore's Law originated when Gordon Moore in 1965 observed that that process had resulted in the effective doubling of transistors every 18 months or two years back in 1965. He was looking at the range from 1958 to 1965. So that's where that comes from.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So it was a general comment that turned into a law...
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** It's an observation, I wouldn't say that it's a law... You can't go to jail for violating Moore's Law.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** They call it Moore's Law...
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Yeah, that's right... We call a lot of things--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Don't cross Moore, you'll go to jail.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We call them laws until they get broken, and then they're like "Well..."
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Event the way that it's usually stated, 18-24 months, is fairly vague, right? It's just an observation of the cadence with which they can double the number of transistors on a chip.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** And it held pretty true. Moore thought it would hold for I think 10 years, and it's actually held since 1965 pretty well, so it's somewhat remarkable in that sense. So you know, it's more than just an observation when it holds for many, many more years than you thought it would.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** But it's somewhat been co-opted and transformed into meaning general compute power doubling, and that's kind of the way that we are using it... In fact, when I was looking it up a little bit here, an Intel executive in the '90s said that chip performance would double every 18 months, as opposed to transistor density, and that's the general context in which programmers and technologists talk about Moore's Law - so generally, it's computing power, and not this specific thing that Moore was talking about.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Well, because the computing power is what enables you to do more and more with your computer. You can do many more computations, the thing gets faster, it's good. I mean, I think the main consequence of the breakdown there is that you don't get as much single-thread performance as you used to. That's kind of kept out. So if you're using Microsoft Word, you're typing, or something that has to execute sequentially, it's not going to go any faster. But if you can get parallelism out of your workload, then you can actually harness all the power that's on your chip.
+
+The difference is that if you increase this clock frequency, that just means that everything on your chip is happening faster, so that's effectively free. If you had a program that ran on an older chip, it would run just the same on a newer chip, just faster, whereas with parallelism, if you wanna harness that performance, you actually have to rework your program.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Divvy it up.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** \[16:04\] Yeah, you have to divide it up into smaller chunks, or figure out a way to do it; it might involve changing your whole algorithm, and that's a lot harder. And not all workloads can do that, and not all consumer workloads can do that, so it's interesting to see how this will pan out on consumer chips... Although I think with all this machine learning stuff going on now -- it's not like there's a shortage of numerically-intensive things to do on your desktop machine or on your phone... Or games, they have always taken advantage of things.
+
+We can talk about GPUs some. GPUs are an interesting design point. I think in the functional programming podcast you were mentioning earlier, you guys mentioned that "Oh, people told me I was gonna have thousands of cores. Where are my thousands of cores?" and the answer is "They're in your GPU", because that's a very different workload from what your desktop CPU is doing; it's data parallel. It's easy to divide up the work that you have to do for graphics rendering.
+
+The GPUs are basically these large parallel (they call them) vector processors, because they do lots of the same type of instruction at once. In a GV100 Volta I think there's like 5,000 cores on that thing, if you count CUDA cores. People debate whether or not you should count a CUDA core as a real core, because it's definitely not the same thing as the CPU in your system... But it's 5,000-way parallel, that's true. You can do that many operations at once.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** But a very specific use case, not general purpose.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, you brought in that new terminology though too, in this conversation. You've got chip, you've got -- so I'm still trying to paint the picture of what this thing is, but you've brought in a new term called core. You mentioned it earlier too, but you've got the chip made of silicon, and you've got transistors on that. Where do cores come into play? What are cores?
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Okay, so what people used to just a chip - because you only had one core - is a core. A core is basically a microprocessor, although even that term is kind of fuzzy these days, because you can say that a microprocessor has multiple cores. You're right, there's a lot of ambiguity. Okay, so let's go back to the transistors and build it up from there.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And then we can go to GPUs, because that's where I wanna go.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Yeah, okay. I think that's the interesting direction. So you've got transistors on the chip; you can use those to do switching. That enables you to build what they call logic gates, and you can do things like "and", "or", "not"... Basically, you're taking two signals and you're producing a result. So one and one is one, one and zero is zero, and so on. That's basic logic. You can take that, and it turns out you can build anything with that. If you have a NAND gate, basically (NOT AND gate), then you can build whatever you want. So there's lots of ways to do that, but effectively they've built this whole chip out of that, and they're putting that logic on the dye, and that implements what people recognize as a modern CPU.
+
+So if we're coming to this from a high-level language... I think most of the listeners here are familiar with JavaScript, or Ruby, Python, or even C - those either get interpreted or compiled into machine instructions, and effectively you're taking all these logic gates and you're building something that fetches instructions from memory, it fetches data from memory, the instructions tell the processor to do something with that data, and then they write it back to memory. That's pretty much how your chip works.
+
+So if you have that pipeline where you can pull instructions from memory, you can do stuff to numbers and write it back to memory, then that's effectively what a modern core (I guess) looks like. That's a processor. You can run programs on that.
+
+\[20:08\] It used to be that you had one core on the chip, and that was what you did; you had one thread of execution, you would fetch an instruction, you'd do what it said, you'd write the result back to memory and you would go on and fetch the next one, and do what it said. And there's just a whole lot of optimizations that have happened over the course of processor history that led to what we have today.
+
+Spectre and Meltdown have been the news recently. The chips do things like speculative execution; they can say "Hey, I'm not gonna know whether I wanna execute this stream of instructions for a little while, but while I'm waiting to figure it out, can I go and try that?" Then, as we found out, you can get bugs from that... But it's also a huge performance increase.
+
+There's things like regular out-of-order execution, where effectively your chip has logic on it that looks at the instructions coming in, it figures out the dependencies between them, and it figures out which one don't have any dependencies right now in terms of data that they need to read or results of other calculations in the instruction stream. It will pull those and it will execute those instructions concurrently, with other ones that don't have any dependencies. That's called an out-of-order processor; sometimes people call it a superscalar processor, because it can execute more than one instruction at once.
+
+There's vectorization. Most chips have some types of instructions that will do multiple things at once. If you know that you have four numbers lined up in memory and you wanna multiply them all by two, you can pool them all at once and do those operations all at once if they're the same.
+
+There's lots of these different sequential optimizations that people have done, and that's what goes into your one chip. So now that you have all of these extra transistors, because you can increase the clock speed on the one chip or on the one core, people are building out the number of cores that they have on a chip. So they have the same core, they're not trying to cram too much into that one core and increasing the power density to the point that it would cause problems, but they're just scaling that out with a number of transistors. Does that make sense?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Totally.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** When you sit back and think about it, it's still mind-numbingly awesome what we can actually build out of those core primitives... Just where we've gotten from where it starts; you know, you take it for granted, you don't think about it much, but when you do, you sit back and think about it, all the ones and zeroes, and logic gates at the bottom of it all - what we actually can create out of that has been amazing.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's true.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Oh, there's tons of layers. If you think about it, that people started out just programming to the chip... If you got a new machine back in the founding days of this laboratory (1952), you would read the manual, the instructions -- the programmer manual had assembly code and it said "Here's the instructions you can execute on this chip. This is what it can do", and you have to actually think about memory, how you're managing it, what you're pulling into the core, how much memory you have... Things like that. And now, you don't even think about that. You can instantiate things dynamically, you don't have to think very much about memory in most of the modern languages, and it's a pretty nice ecosystem.
+
+The reason that the multicore stuff doesn't change your perception of what's going on on the computer quite as much, or at least from a programming perspective - one reason is that there are a lot of multi-threaded programs, and even your operating system is... You know, even before you had multi-core chips, your operating system was executing multiple things at the same time; it was just doing it by time-sharing. So you know what a context switch is - it's when you're executing one program and then the OS says "Well, there's this other thing that's running at the same time; I'm gonna swap that in, execute it for a little bit, then I'm gonna preempt it and switch back to the other thing that you were doing."
+
+\[24:16\] And effectively, that's how your OS did multitasking before you had multi-core chips, is by just switching back and forth between different tasks really rapidly. And now, on your chip you really can have things executing actually in parallel, so to some extent it's kind of a natural transition, because you can just execute different threads on different cores, and the operating system has to manage that... But you still have context-switching too, so you can still execute many more tasks on your chip than you had cores.
+
+**Break:** \[24:52\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, Moore's Law is not dead, but dying... Murphy's Law, however - eternally true.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Still true, yes.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It will always be true. Adam, do you know that one?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Yeah, that's a real law.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yes. Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Eternally true.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** If we wanna get back to Moore's Law dying aspect, I think GPUs are a good example of one way that you can take more effective advantage of some transistors and sort of combat that power law, or the Dennard's scaling problem. The GPUs, in terms of number of operations you can do on them, you get a lot more performance per watt if you can exploit them than you do out of a CPU. If you have a workload that's data-parallel, you compose it that way, then you can execute it more efficiently on a GPU than you can on the CPU... And you have like 5,000 cores on there; it's a big scale-up machine, it's doing vector stuff, it's very power efficient. That's one way to use the transistors more effectively for certain workloads than for the CPU. I think that's where you're going. You're gonna see other types of technologies take over that are better at certain tasks.
+
+In our community, the other places that people are looking - so there's quantum computing, and people talk about that a lot.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[27:59\] Oh, I wanna talk about that.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Yeah... Okay.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Put that on the sidelines.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** I can't say too much about it, I'm not an expert, but there's a whole beyond Moore's Law thrust in DOE and I think in the broader CS research funding agencies.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What's the DOE?
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Department of Energy.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. Just to be clear for those not in the US and hearing acronyms, to know what we're talking about.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Yeah, we could do the origin story thing at the beginning...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** In RFC I think there's some in that show to some degree about where you work and what you do. I'm pretty sure that's how Nadia opened it up.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Yeah, that's true; so we could talk about the DOE later. DOE is where I work; I work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and we care about high-performance computing. So yeah, quantum computing is one way that you can use a different type of technology to do computation. So far people haven't really -- they've shown that it's useful for certain problems.
+
+There's a D-Wave system... Los Alamos has a D-Wave system that they're looking at. It's a type of quantum computer that can do something called quantum annealing, which allows you to solve certain optimization problems very fast. But again, that's a different model of computation; it's not like a script, it's another type of thing. So if you have to do optimization problems, that's a good thing to use, and you can do it really fast.
+
+There's something called cognitive computing, that we're looking at. At Livermore we have a partnership with IBM where we're looking at their TrueNorth architecture. They call it a cognitive computer - effectively what it is is it's a chip that you can basically put a neural network on and you can evaluate it very quickly, so it's good for machine learning workloads. If you need to do some machine learning evaluation along with your workload, where I'm distinguishing between training and evaluation, then you could potentially do it faster with a TrueNorth chip. Then to some extent there are limitations to how you can do that; you have to discretize the neural net a certain way, so that it fits on the chip, and you can only do certain types of neural nets... But you can pose a lot of neural net problems that way, so we think it could be useful for helping to accelerate some of the simulations that we're doing, or help to solve problems that are really hard for humans to optimize at runtime. So that's another model.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Are there private sector equivalents, Todd, to these things that you're speaking of, or are these the kinds of things that you only find in the public sector, in terms of the cognitive learning machines?
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** I believe TrueNorth is available, and you could buy it if you were in the private sector. It's an IBM product. I'm not 100% clear on whether it's just a research prototype that we're dealing with, or whether you can actually buy these and play with them in industry.
+I think some industry players have D-Wave machines, so they're playing with those... So you can get to play around with them. I definitely think that it's still in the research phases in terms of what you would actually do with it.
+
+The TrueNorth chip is interesting because it's a little closer in terms of actually deploying those, because people do have machine learning workloads, right? And if they wanna accelerate them, they can use something like this to do that. What it doesn't accelerate is the training, so you would still have these giant batch jobs to go and analyze data sets to build the neural net that you use to either classify or to analyze the data once you're done training that thing.
+
+But I think the theme across all these different areas is that it's more specialization that --
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Special purpose.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[31:54\] Tell us real quick -- you mentioned you work at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and you said "We care about high-performance computing." Maybe explain the specific use cases as much as is public knowledge (not top secret stuff that you guys do and you're applying these technologies to).
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Okay, so I work for the Department of Energy; I think the Department of Energy has been in the news as Trump has picked his cabinet lately... We deal with a couple of different things. I think the DOE is the biggest funder of science research in the US, alongside the NSF, and that involves funding universities, it involves funding the national laboratories, and we're also in charge of managing the US nuclear stockpile and making sure that it stays safe and reliable.
+
+So across all of those different scientific domains, there's a whole lot of physics simulation that needs to get done, and effectively we are using simulation to look at things that you either can design and experiment for, or that it's too expensive to design and experiment for, or that it would just be unsafe to design and experiment for... Or that you shouldn't design and experiment for. And I guess on the NNSA side - Lawrence Livermore is part of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which is under the DOE - the unsafe thing that we're looking at is "How do nuclear weapons work?" That's a lot of the simulation workload that takes place here.
+
+We also do other types of simulation, like climate science; we have a lot of people working on that. We look at fundamental material science... All of these big either computational fluid dynamics, or astrophysical simulations, geological simulations, earthquake simulations - all this physical phenomena, we have simulations at various degrees of resolution that we can look at to figure out what would happen if...
+
+We have some guys who have done predictions about earthquakes in the Bay Area, what would the damage be. We look at "Will this weapon continue to work?" We also do things like detection... If you had something like this type of device and someone was trying to ship it in a container, how might you figure out that it was there without opening every container? There are lots of things like that that the DOE looks into, and high-performance computing drives all sorts of different aspects of that.
+
+And I guess the other interesting facility here that's in the news frequently is the National Ignition Facility, which is a nuclear fusion experiment. We're trying to make a little star in a big building the size of three football fields, where we've got like 192 lasers that fire at this little target. So simulating how the lasers interact with the target, how they deposit energy there is one of the things that we can simulate on the machines here.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You're building a star inside of a big building...
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** A little tiny star.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, to me every star is big, I guess, so a tiny star relative to other stars, but a big building...
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Well, let me be clear... It's a star in the sense that we're trying to get fusion burn to happen.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I was gonna ask you, what exactly is a star...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I was just waiting for Adam to hop in, because this is like where he gets super excited -- his ears are perking up.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I was still stuck back at the size of this TrueNorth, and I was thinking about the size of this thing... I was actually thinking about at what point does -- because these things are really, really small... At what point does a chip - or microchip, or however you wanna term this - get so small that it gets to the very, very small, which if you study physics and things like that, you know life like we see it, then you see the very, very big, which is planet sizes, and universe sizes, then you get the very, very small, which is like atom sizes... Like, how small do these things get? But then this star conversation is far more interesting to me... I like that.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** \[36:13\] So there's lots of physics that goes on in the Department of Energy, so I guess -- shameless plug (I can endorse the Department of Energy) it's a good place to work, because you get to find out about stuff like this.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, sounds interesting.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Yeah. The interesting thing about the National Ignition Facility (NIF) is that you're simulating a star, it's very small... The target is a few millimeters in diameter, but you're trying to cause the same kind of fusion burn that would happen in the sun.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So it's all these lasers colliding, the light from these lasers colliding, that creates the fusion burn...
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Yeah, that's right. The lasers come in, they hit this cylindrical thing called a hohlraum, that's made of gold; that gets really hot, X-rays come out of it and implode the target in the middle. That's the idea.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Are you doing that a lot, or are you simulating on computers and then doing it very few times?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I can see how they can do it physically in this big building, but then on these chips that he's talking about, they can do it simulated.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** We're doing it physically. This is a good example of the type work we do. NIF is where we're trying to do it physically, we're trying to get fusion burn there, but to understand how this thing is working, we have to do simulation to prototype the designs, and I think we do about 400 real shots in a year over at NIF, where we actually turn the lasers on, point them at a target...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, that's not too many...
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Well, we're ramping that up. It's a scientific facility, so you can do research for lots of different groups. In conjunction with that, we do simulation to see if what we're simulating matches what really happened, and that's an iterative process. So you do more simulations, you say "Okay, it matches. How do I change the design to do better, to get more energy out?" and then you go simulate that; it says it's gonna do better, you try it, maybe it doesn't, and then you iterate on that until the two match. That's the process that we use for designing these things.
+
+So that's where the HPC comes in. Simulating something like that takes an awful lot of compute cycles. I work in Livermore Computing, which is a compute center, kind of like a data center, but we have machines that are dedicated to doing computation instead of persistent services like a data center would have... And we have I think over two million cores just in this building for all of our computing needs, and we have some of the largest machines in the world here that people run these parallel applications on.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So many cores, huh? That's a lot of cores.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Yeah, we have one machine with 1,5 million, which is number four I think in the world now... So that's Sequoia, and we're installing the new machine right now, it's called Sierra; it's a big IBM system with POWER9 processors and NVIDIA GPUs.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** This is highly specialized equipment for highly specialized tasks...
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Yeah, that's true.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It seems so.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** I'd say that you buy a different kind of machine for HPC than you do for the cloud, but some aspects of running a data center and a compute center are very similar - managing power, temperature, stuff like that...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Security...
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Security - yeah, exactly, that's important. We've been rolling out Meltdown patches all across the facility.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I was just gonna ask that, yeah.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Yeah... And we see performance hits from that, so we try to optimize that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** How big of a performance hit is it that you're seeing? There are some reports it would be up to 30%, but it doesn't sound like that's necessarily the case...
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** \[39:58\] Yeah, I think that's in line, depending on the workload. It really depends on what application you're running, because it's that system call overhead that you're paying for. So we have an interest in high-performance computing because there's basically never an end to the computing capacity that we need to simulate the stuff that we're looking into. Most of the place where we get into architecture around here is in optimizing the performance of applications... So we have people who work with the application teams and they say "Okay, your simulation does this... How can I make that execute more efficiently on the hardware?"
+
+Then we also look at procurement. So we have this workload, we know that we need to run these things, so what's the next machine that we're gonna buy? I was talking about Sequoia - Sequoia is the 16th realized 20 peak petaflop machine that we have on the floor right now. Our next machine is gonna be a 125 petaflop machine... So the whole procurement process - people get together and they look at the architectures from different vendors and they say "How is our workload gonna execute on this?"
+I think in the future you're gonna have to think more and more about matching the applications to the architecture... And we had to think about that, because our next machine is a big GPU system.
+
+Here's an example that probably gets to the heart of this Moore's Law stuff. Sequoia is the previous generation machine; it's about 100,000 nodes, each node has a multi-core chip on it, and they're all PowerPC chips, so our workloads could execute pretty effectively on that, and it was fairly easy to scale things out to a large number of processors.
+
+The GPUs have kind of won in terms of that's the thing that hasn't a market out there for games and for other applications, so we have to ride along with the much bigger market for commodity computing... So our current machine is only 4,000 nodes, it's got POWER9 processors on it, it's got 4 GPUs per node. So in terms of number of nodes, it's a much smaller machine than Sequoia, but it's way faster. It's 125 petaflops versus 20, and so that's where the GPUs will win. But for us, that's a big shift because we haven't used GPUs as extensive before, so now we have to take our applications, import them so they can actually use the 4 GPUs per node, and that's a challenge.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Give us an idea of what range we're looking at here, in US dollars?
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** For the big machines?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, the big machines. Are we talking like hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions of dollars, tens of millions? What's the order of magnitude?
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** So for most of the big machines, if you're gonna get a number one on the top 500 list, which is like the place where they have the list of the top supercomputers, it has been probably like around 200 million dollars, at least in the DOE, for this system. That's procured over the course of like five years; we start five years out, we talk to vendors and we get them to pitch. They write a proposal that says "Here's how we could meet your specs." Then we have a big meeting where we go and we look at how they project this will work on our workloads, they do experiments with some of our applications, and we also look at the other specs on the machine and different parameters - how much memory is it gonna have, how much memory per node, how many nodes? Are we gonna have to use GPUs, are we gonna have to use Intel Xeon Phi chips, or other things? Then we pick the one that we think will best meet our needs going forward.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** How would like to close that deal, Adam? 200 million...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's a lot of money.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Be the salesman on the front-end of that thing...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's a long sales process.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You've got the dinner after you make that sale...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah... \[laughter\]
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** \[44:13\] But if you want the details on our current machine, there's a nice article at The Next Platform by our CTO, who is in charge of that procurement process.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Awesome. Well, we'll make sure we link it up in the show notes.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Alright Todd, I have a suggested project for you for the NIF folks after you guys finish that star you're working on...
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** I'm sure they'll listen to you. \[laughs\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yes... Sharks with laser beams on their heads.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** I feel like people have come up with that idea before.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Just for your consideration... Simulate that a few times.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Are you sure no one else is working on it?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, I think you'd be bleeding edge.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Alright... \[laughter\] With simulation we can make it better. We can more effecive sharks with laser beams. That sounds scary, though; I think we should think about the consequences in doing that.
+
+**Break:** \[45:08\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So I guess the question I have is like if you've got this 200-million-dollar computer, it's gotta be something that's pretty demanding, right? People are gonna wanna use this thing, because you're not gonna wanna not get the return on investment for that thing... So what's it like scheduling, managing a project -- how do you schedule time for it? Do you have to predict how long the project will take, the compute time...? Give us a day-to-day operation of using one of these computers.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** I can't speak necessarily to what the actual application guys would do, because I'm a performance guy, so I work with them to help speed things up. But the usage model is basically you have to write a proposal to get time on these things. For the bulk of our workload - and this is the case for other Department of Energy laboratories, too - you have to write something up that says "I have this scientific problem. It really needs a lot of CPU cycles, it's not possible without that, and here is what it would enable; this is why it's worth the time on the machines."
+
+\[48:08\] Those go through here, and at Argonne, and at Oak Ridge, all these other labs... A competitive process where reviewers look at the proposals, they evaluate "Does it have merit?" and then once that's done, you get assigned hours according to what you asked for on the machine. So you get CPU hours. That's millions of CPU hours or more, depending on what the project is.
+
+A CPU hour is measured in terms -- I think we may be doing node hours now; I'm not sure if it's CPU hours or node hours, but basically it's just a measure of how much compute power you're allowed to use. So that's how we justify it, and the machines stay busy all the time, because we have science projects that need them for their workloads. We have more work than the computers could ever possibly do, but they are doing it fast, so it enables new science.
+
+I think in a given day at the lab there's a bunch of users... We have 3,000 users for the facility; some here, some are collaborators, some are at universities that we collaborate with. They're running jobs, applications -- it's like a big batch system; you log into it, you say "Here's the job I wanna run, here's how many CPUs it needs or how many nodes it needs, and here's how much time it needs to do that approximately." Then we have a scheduler that just goes and farms those jobs out of the system.
+
+The people at the compute center - we look at what's going on, we try to manage the schedulers, that it has a good policy for all these different users, and we have performance teams who help the application teams actually optimize their code to run on the machine. And that's an iterative process, right? So for a machine like the new Sierra machine I was talking about, we'll typically have a smaller machine in advance of that that's similar; we have a POWER8 GPU system instead of a POWER9 GPU system that we've been testing on... And they'll get their code running on that in preparation for the new system.
+
+In that process we'll run profilers on the code, we will look at traces to see if it's communicating effectively between all the nodes, and we'll help out the application teams by saying "You should modify this" or "We need to change this algorithm."
+I think one of the things that we've been helping people with a lot lately - and especially with the GPUs and also with other centers using more exotic chips like Xeon Phi, which is like an Intel many-core chip (a 64-core Intel chip), we need the same code to execute well on all these different architectures, and that's not an easy process. If you have a numerically-intensive code, you write it one way. It might execute well on the CPU, but not on the GPU, and we'd ideally like to have one code that the application developers maintain, and have essentially some other layer handle the mapping of that down to the architecture.
+
+One of the things we've developed is -- we call them performance portability frameworks; we have this thing called RAJA... It's a C++ library where you can write a loop -- instead of a for loop you write a for all, or you pass a lambda to it, and you pass that for all a template parameter that says "Hey, I want you to execute on the GPU" or "I want you to execute on the CPU." That allows them to tune effectively for different architectures; they can kind of swap out the parallelism model under there. So tuning that, getting the compilers to optimize it well for different machines - that's the kind of things the performance folks have been working on.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[51:59\] So you answered the one question that I was thinking when you talked about scheduling, "Do these things ever sit idle?" Because that would be the worst use of a huge, massively powerful, expensive computer - idle time. I guess it's heartening to find out that there's so much work to do, that that's not a problem whatsoever; in fact, the problem is the opposite - you need to start procuring some more to continue more and more research.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Yeah...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The other side too, it sounds like you do a dashboard, or something like that... Do you ever see the computer, do you actually get next to it, or do you just operate whatever you need to do through some sort of like portal, or something like that?
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** We have people who get next to the machine and we give tours of the facility to folks who visit the lab sometimes.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** But you don't have to put your USB stick into it to put your program on it and run it, right?
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** No, no... Punch cards.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Basically, these things look like servers, like you'd be used to. You have a desktop machine, you SSH into the computer, and then there's a resource manager running on it. Slurm is the open source resource manager that we use; it's developed here, and now it's got a company, SchedMD around it. And the users would say, you know, "sbatch command line", and then they would take that command line, put in the queue, and then eventually run it on however many nodes they ask for. Or "srun" if they wanna do it interactively and wait for some nodes to be available. The wait times can get pretty big if the queues are deep.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So you get assigned hours, but you don't get assigned like 9 in the morning to 10 in the morning... You get just hours and you're in a queue; whenever your queue comes up, you execute.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Right. You get a bank that comes with your project; we call it a bank - that's how many total CPU hours you have. If you submit a job, when you submit it you have to say "Here's how long I expect it to run for" and the scheduler will kill it after that much time. Then you submit the number of nodes you want and then it runs for that long; the length of time it runs, times the number of nodes that you use, times the number of CPUs per node is how much they subtract from your bank at the end of that. So if you get a few multi-million CPU hour allocation, you can run that out pretty quickly if you run giant jobs that run for a long time.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So Todd, I first met you at the Sustain event last spring (almost summertime, I suppose) at the GitHub headquarters; you were very involved in that, and in fact that's when you hopped into our Slack for the first time and helped bring some people from the lab to that event... So you have interest in and passion around sustaining open source, because that's why you were there and involved, and we appreciated your help... But tell us and the audience the intersection of where open source comes in with the work you're doing with the supercomputers in the lab work.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Sure. It's at two places, and they're big places. For our computer center, the folks who run it, we prefer open source for nearly everything: for the resource manager, for the file systems... We have big parallel file systems like Lustre for even the compilers that we use; we're investing in Clang, or in LLVM, to create a new Flang to do Fortran for some of our code.
+
+So I would say that the majority of what we do at the compute center is open source in terms of the infrastructure that we're using. Our machines run Linux, and we have a team downstairs that manages a distribution for HPC, we call it TOSS, which is a Tri-Lab Open Source Stack. That's basically Linux distribution with our custom packages on top of it, and that's how we manage our deployment for the machines. So that's one way...
+
+\[56:10\] Then we have people working on -- the people who work on those projects... ZFS is used in Lustre; we have a guy who actually did the ZFS on Linux port and manages that community... I think we get a lot out of that; it's Brian Behlendorf at Livermore. Not the Brian Behlendorf who's doing blockchain stuff, but actually another Brian Behlendorf...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I was gonna ask that.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** The same name. Yeah, there's two Brian Behlendorfs in open source.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Same spelling, and everything?
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Everything, yeah. He said that they met once and talked to each other.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That is confusing. We just had the other Brian Behlendorf on the show, we interviewed him at OSCON last year about Hyperledger.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Yes, I listened to that. So this is ZFS... So there's the ZFS Brian Behlendorf, and there's the Hyperledger Brian Behlendorf.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** One of them is in the building with me... Yup. We were talking about how we procure these big machines, and there's a contract associated with that; in that we allocate some time for the vendor to contribute to open source software. We require that as part of the contract. So they work with us and they make sure that our software and other software that we care about (from the DOE and elsewhere) actually works on the machines. So that's another way we interface with the open source community.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** On that note then, it sounds like you're pretty involved in the process or what's on these machines... Do you have good relationships with those who sysadmin these machines? Do you as a collective -- are you able to say "Well, we prefer this flavor of Linux..."? It seems like since you choose open source, you have some sort of feedback loop into preferences that everyone can put on this machine and do all these fun things you do.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Yeah, so at this center there's a software development group, there's a system administration group - they're all in the building that I'm in, which is attached to the compute center. There's a lot of cross-talk between those different areas, and then we also talk to the researchers who run applications on the machines.
+
+I would say that Livermore computing at least, on the infrastructure side, is definitely involved in choosing what open source we wanna run on the machines, and when we maybe don't wanna go open source. We run proprietary compilers because they're fast, for example... But we also do things like invest in the open source compilers to try to say "We want an open source alternative so that we have something that we can run on the machine that will work, and work well."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The reason I ask that is because it seems like the application process is very protected to manage the load on those machines at a time, so I just wondered if the involvement of what's on the machines and who manages them and all that stuff is just as protective. It seems like one side is a little more loose, but to get the time - it's a big ceremony, a big process, and it could be gate-kept, to some degree.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Yeah, I mean, it's a research computing field, right? It's mostly researchers who need this much compute power, and so the calls for proposals are not unlike the calls for funding that people put out for Academia. There are open ones, so the Office of Science labs have the inside program where you can apply for time on Oak Ridge and Argonne's machines, which are similarly large, if not -- Oak Ridge has a larger machine than ours right now... And for us, our customers are slightly different, because we work with Los Alamos National Lab and Sandia National Lab, and so our proposal processes - at least on the classified side - are mostly between those labs, because they're about the weapons program, and stuff like that.
+
+\[01:00:05.08\] But then there are other places where you can get time for basic science runs. So when we get a new machine like Sierra, we put it out there and we let early code teams, the guys who maybe have an important science application that isn't as complicated as maybe some of our production code, who can get on there early and show off the machine... There's a few months at the beginning where we let them use the time with allocations there.
+
+So I guess I'd say there are a lot of different ways to get time on the machines. It's pretty low overhead. It's not quite like writing a full academic proposal. It's pretty open.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, and we're on this open source gig, I was just curious how that flavored in, because as you're describing your choices, and I guess the primary choice of choosing open source, and that's your preference, it seems like while there's a lot of process around the proposal flow, maybe there's a little bit more cross-talk as you mentioned at involvement with other teams that have access to these super expensive machines... That's a huge privilege, because I don't have access to a 200-million dollar machine; I can barely afford one that costs seven, and I've gotta borrow money from grandma, or something like that... \[laughs\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Seven what? Seven million?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** K. Thousand.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh... \[laughs\] You said "200 million" and then you said you could barely afford one that costs seven...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I assumed everyone thought I was in the thousands...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I assumed the denominator was staying the same.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Grandma ain't got millions, man... \[laughter\] You can quote me on that.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** I had the same question. \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I guess what we're trying to say, Todd, is how can we get some time on this computer, possibly out of this ? \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. We've got some research...
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Yeah, so I guess if I had to boil it down to something, you have to have justification for getting on the machine. You have to be able to show that you can make scientific progress with your hours. That's what the process is about.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Sharks and lasers, man...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Sharks with clicking laser beams on their heads... I told you our justification already.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Ill-tempered sea bass.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, boy... \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I guess the other elephant in the room, Todd, for justifications - and you addressed this to us in the break, but please, for the audience sake, because I know that we probably have a fair amount of Bitcoin miners listening... So I think that is the other thing that has people putting their pinky up to their mouth...
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Yeah, CPU time...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, what about Bitcoin mining on these rigs?
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** We're not allowed to mine Bitcoin on these machines; it's not legal to use government machines to mine for Bitcoins, but even if you did, it wouldn't be worth it. If you look at what people are using for Bitcoin mining, a lot of that is custom chips; they're very low power and only do hashing... So you'll do way better investing in that than you will in one of our machines. I think at some other compute centers people have been fired for trying to mine Bitcoin on the machines.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Really?
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Yeah... You can google for news stories about that. But I wanna be a little clear on the openness front. The application for time is separate from the software that you actually run on the machine, right? We have a lot of open source projects that live for much longer than any allocation or any machine, really... And there are a lot of people who work on those, and those are open. Some of them you can even run on your laptop, and scientists do, so a lot of development for these machines does happen on people's laptops, and then they scale the program up to run on the big machine.
+
+So there's a lot of open source software development that happens, even if the process for getting access to a big machine isn't open... And you can run that open source software on the machine that you do have, for 7k... Or less.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[01:03:54.18\] For a measly 7k. \[laughs\]
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Yes.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Your grandma could run that, Adam.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right. Grandmas can run that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So what about the open source community? It seems like anytime when I think of a government operation, you think especially with the security constraints and a lot of the "red tape", it seems like actually a deep involvement with a community that's built on openness and freedom and all these things that are kind of opposite of secrecy and closed - is there any give or take there? Is there red tape, are there issues around that, or has it all been pretty easy in terms of integrating your open source work into the greater open source community?
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** I'd say that historically Livermore is pretty good about open source. I mean, we started using Linux clusters in the late '90s, and we've been working on the operating system for that, we've developed Slurm - the resource manager has been open source for a long time... So putting stuff out there has not been such a problem.
+
+There is a release process that you have to go through that's kind of cumbersome, but once you do it - like we did for Spack, the package manager I work on - you can work out in the open on that, as long as you stay within a certain project scope. So yeah, I mean, there is some red tape around that; obviously, we don't wanna release some of the things that we develop, but then again, we use a lot of open source internally and benefit from the broader open source community... So I would say that the DOE has a pretty active open source development ecosystem, and we leverage things that are developed by other labs, and other labs leverage things that are developed by us, and I think there's a lot of back and forth.
+
+I would say that the interaction model on the projects is maybe not quite the same as like a large infrastructure project, like Kubernetes or Docker or something like that, just because -- I mean, it's scientific computing, so people get funded to solve a particular problem, not to develop software. So there are sustainability issues around how much software development time can we actually put on this project.
+
+On the production side though, the facilities - their job is to keep the center running and to do it efficiently, and I think that's why you see a lot of open source coming out of there. But then again, there are long-lived research projects that are very widely used. One good example of that is in the Math Library community, so for large-scale parallel solvers. The different labs have teams working on that stuff and there are some solver libraries; Livermore has Hyper, Sandia has Trilinos and Berkeley Lab has some solvers... And also things like finite element frameworks, things for meshing and for building these big models of physical systems... Livermore has a library called MFEM that has a big open source community around it -- well, not big by JavaScript standards, but big by scientific computing standards.
+
+So some of them operate like communities, I would say, and then others tend to stay within a particular group, or they maybe don't have a cross-lab community... It just depends on the software and what the funding and the interaction model has been historically. I do think more community could help a lot of projects, if people started thinking more in terms of like "How do I sustain this over time? How do I get more contributors?" I don't necessarily think that we build research software with growing contributors in mind.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think it's interesting that you've got the three I took note of earlier - the one you obviously talked about on Request For Commits, Spack, that's the project you work on primarily...
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Yes...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Then you've got Slurm, which I think is a workload manager, if I got you correctly; that's actually what you interface with to put your projects onto a supercomputer, is that right?
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Yeah, it runs the jobs, it does the scheduling.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:07:55.04\] Then you've got Lustre, which I was just noticing down on the trademark is a Seagate technology trademark; so that means that that's the file system... These things are important enough for you to have open source projects alongside them that I guess are more specific to, say, a super-computer scenario, versus, say, a laptop scenario.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Yeah, for sure. I mean, we have to pay for open source development for like a parallel file system that will run fast on our machine; we have to keep the computers working, so yeah, a lot of the infrastructure projects are aimed at that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It seems like some of this stuff should come with a 200-million-dollar computer... \[laughter\] I mean, I'm just thinking like...
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Well it does, to some extent...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Did you get a T-shirt, or anything? \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** "Bring your own file system, okay?"
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Haven't ever got a T-shirt but you do get a mural painted on the side of the machine. If you look at like the Norsk machines they have a picture of a grasshopper painted on the side of their machine.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's cool.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** So there is a lot of software that comes from the vendor. Cray provides a whole programming environment with their system; it's not necessarily open in the same sense. If you buy an IBM system, they will bundle their file system, which is GPFS; it's a competitor for Lustre, it's proprietary. And you know, which one you go with depends on what value do you get out of the procurement, which one do you think is gonna perform better. I'd say performance drives a lot of the decisions at the procurement level, but openness is also a big factor.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Does it come with hard drives?
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Yeah, so the system would come with -- I mean, a parallel file system, right? So it's not just hard drives, it's like racks and racks and racks of hard drives...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right... I was gonna make a joke to say like, when you get it, do you just wet the drives and put your own stuff on it, like you'd do in the old -- do you do at scale, essentially? When I get a machine, even a Mac, I sometimes will just wipe it and put my brand new version of OS 10 on there - or MacOS now - because I just like it; I just do that, you know? My own way...
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Yeah, we do that effectively with our Linux clusters. We build our own distribution, like I was saying, so we have a TOSS image that we run across those. For the bigger machines, for what we call our advanced technology machines that are in these large procurement packages - it's much more vendor-driven because it's bleeding edge, so we rely more on the vendor to provide the software stack... Although -- I mean, the next machine is gonna be Linux, so the machines, for the OS at least, run Linux.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Which flavor of Linux?
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Across the center here we run RHEL; that's the distro that typically is -- it's a debase of our TOSS distribution, and then some machines run SUSE, but not at Livermore. The Cray machines I think use SUSE as their base distro.
+
+\[01:11:00.11\] They also build their own kind of custom lightweight versions of Linux for the actual compute nodes. They wanna reduce system noise, so they don't want a lot of context switching going on that would slow down the application.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's RHEL, right?
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Red Hat Enterprise Linux, yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha. Cool. This is pretty interesting, to kind of peel back the layers of a supercomputing research laboratory like this, see how open source fits in, see what 200 million dollars buy, how you procure time, how you propose time, how you interface with other teams that manage open source software, how you determine preferences... This is an interesting conversation that's not exactly the typical episode of the Changelog, so hopefully, listeners, you really enjoyed this. And if you did, there's a way you can tell us... You can either hop in GitHub (github.com/changelog/ping) or join the community, go to changelog.com/community. Go there, which is what Todd did one day, and he was like "Hey, y'all are doing this conference called Sustain; I'm gonna go and I wanna bring some friends... Wow, this is an awesome community", so... Todd, to close this out, what can you say about hanging out in Slack?
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Hanging out in Slack...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** With us.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Slacking with us.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** I do that because it's nice to be in touch with (I guess) a different open source community. I think the Changelog is kind of heavy on web development. I used to be a web developer before I came to DOE, so I like to keep up with that stuff and see what's going on out in the cloud, as well as over here in the DOE... So it's been a nice time.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well Todd, thank you for coming on the show today, man... We're huge fans of yours, and thanks so much for schooling us on Moore's Law; I appreciate it.
+
+**Todd Gamblin:** Cool.
diff --git a/Open sourcing the DEV community (Interview)_transcript.txt b/Open sourcing the DEV community (Interview)_transcript.txt
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@@ -0,0 +1,327 @@
+**Jerod Santo:** Ben, it's a big day for you. Tell us what's going on.
+
+**Ben Halpern:** Yeah, so today at 1 PM Eastern we open sourced the dev.to codebase for the whole community, and we are really hoping folks get as excited to take part in this project as they've sort of indicated to us every step of the journey... But today is the big day.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Today is the big day... So as we're recording this, it's August 8th, and it's about 3:15 PM Eastern Time, so it's been open source for a couple of hours; by the time you listeners are listening to this, it's a week later... But today is the big day, so I guess we should just start by saying congratulations!
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Definitely.
+
+**Ben Halpern:** Yeah, it's been a real journey. I kind of wish I'd thought to even open source on day one; it just didn't even cross my mind when this was just still a little side project... But we took a lot of time in the past few months and weeks to really put this on our roadmap, and we finally made it happen.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very cool. Well, let's back up a moment and let's get the full story. For those coming to this show, not familiar with dev.to and the dev community that you're building over there, you said it started as a little side-project - can you give us a little bit of the back-story of the website and how it came to be?
+
+**Ben Halpern:** \[03:47\] Yeah, so the whole thing started as a project I wanted to solve developer issues in one way or another, but it was kind of vague, it was just an idea... I started with a Twitter account I called The Practical Dev, and I kind of started growing it little by little, I start by just actually posting programming links and things I found throughout the web, and things I thought people would be interested in... I quickly realized that the more I injected my own voice and my opinions in my tutorial, and my humor and my jokes, the more it caught on, and it really started taking off at that point.
+
+The most notable jokes I was telling was the O'Reilly Parody Covers, the book covers... That was the first major chapter in the whole story; everything else was just kind of futzing around. But that wasn't really the end goal per se; I really wanted to create valuable resources, sort of solve some of the problems I was actually making fun of with the O'Reilly covers along the way... The chaos, the bizarre, windy path that is a software development career, the lack of consistency in some of the resources, and frankly the lack of tooling and actual community environments, and stuff like that.
+
+As much as programmers always find a way to solve their problems, I just didn't think that this was being done in any special way, and I really thought we could do a little better if we kept at it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So you said you were doing this as a side-project. This has since turned into not just yourself, but a team of people and a burgeoning business... So tell us that transition and where it became -- you mentioned the Twitter account The Practical Dev, and then you have the website dev.to... Tell us what the website started out as - I know it's been through many iterations - where it's come to, and we'll get back around to the open sourcing of it all after we kind of understand it in holistic fashion.
+
+**Ben Halpern:** Yeah, so the website really started out as just whatever I thought would be most valuable based on my resources at the time, my thoughts about the future... The thing about a platform where people share software knowledge and have discussions and all that stuff; it's obviously a huge chicken/egg problem, so at no point did I really try to get ahead of myself in terms of what the project could be.
+
+The first thing that ever happened on the website was I did an interview with DHH, and I just sort of knew that if I emailed him and I asked nicely and made it pretty easy for him to say yes, then he would share some knowledge; Rails 5 was about to come out... So that was the first dev.to thing. Then I did a few other interviews with some open source folks, and it was kind of the first step to really make this happen... But I also had a different idea at the time; I thought it might be a little more high touch, like these interviews, and stuff like that... But then based on feedback, based on noticing what was going on, what people were most interested in, it really kind of more quickly became what it is today, which is a platform for anyone to write anything about software, and have a community really interact with it... One that's really backed by a code of conduct that we really care about and enforce... And really just kind of be a place that actually feels like a community, but it's also actually quite large right now.
+
+So yeah, that's kind of like the journey on the product itself, the software... But really when it was just me, I was working on another startup that I'd been doing for a while; it was called texts.com, a student textbook exchange. I was sort of the hired technical person to really make that happen.
+
+We had growth, and stuff like that, but it had issues as a business, and that's kind of when I started getting a little distracted. I was still working at that project, but finding a little bit more interest in this other thing from time to time. That's when I happened to meet Jess Lee, who is the first co-founder in this organization.
+
+\[08:16\] She came to me through a friend, after she had recently graduated from a bootcamp, and she had a really interesting professional background, but was really brand new to coding... She just needed some mentorship, some advice, and I knew her through a childhood friend that she was a mutual friend with, and it really clicked right away; I felt like we got along, she was really easy to work with, and as we kind of started talking about dev.to a little bit more, she really clung to some of the visions, because herself was kind of a newer programmer and also a woman of color who is not necessarily part of some of the in-crowds that I think a lot of software developers really don't notice, because they... You know, they're part of the in-crowd, so they take it for granted that, like, some of these things are pretty straightforward... Even just simple things, like -- there's a lot of insidership in the whole thing. It's very cliquey, and a lot of things happen extremely organically, when really perhaps it should be a little bit more organized... Because the organicness is fun and natural, but it also leads to a lot of unhealthy situations, where a lot of really valuable software developers get alienated or left out, and it's really just a shame.
+
+Her involvement as a friend early on really turned into more like "Okay, this is kind of a real thing." And it was really great, because she's so different from me. I'm extremely abstract, chaotic and disorganized, and she's totally the opposite, and really helped bring order and discipline to the whole thing... Traits I really appreciate in the process and in others, but is really not what I bring to the table.
+
+She and I worked on it for a little while, while I still worked really hard on my other company at the same time... But ultimately, we were just getting so much momentum, while the other thing was actually kind of like -- we were trying to pull it off, but it wasn't necessarily working so much at the time... And what we wound up doing was I took the company back to the other company, because I thought I'd been working hard, but pretty distracted on the side project; I thought it was the fairest thing to do - to kind of fold it into the other company, which quickly just turned into this new company, which is Dev Community Inc. We've been working on it ever since. It's been about a year and a half since we became a real company.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You mentioned earlier in your relationship with Jess the discussions around vision, and Jerod mentioned burgeoning business, and I'm thinking "What were some of the vision things you shared that got her excited?" and then what were some of the indicators that made you think "Well, this can go from my thing I do on the side, because I'm kind of bored with my stuff and I wanna play", essentially, to "Hey, this could be a business and I should..." -- what were some of the vision things you shared to say "Hey, this could be a business and we should put a lot more effort into this"?
+
+**Ben Halpern:** You know, I always treated it like as a -- you know, worked my butt off, trying to make the project grow, but wasn't so completely certain about all the directions... Like, it seems easy for me to think back linearly at the time, but thinking back to some of my conversations I had, it's very clear I had a lot of vision for the purpose of the project, but not necessarily how it would be organized, and stuff like that.
+
+\[12:11\] Jess and I just kind of hung out and talked a lot; it really was just like a mentorship role at first, and naturally we just started talking more about dev.to and things we were doing with that... And I kind of tried to downplay things at the time, because I really was super loyal to the people I was working with, and stuff, so I always made sure people knew it was just a side project; that's really how I felt through and through, but it was really impossible to ignore how much momentum the project had. It's hard enough to get your friends and family to use something you're really trying to make succeed...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Yes.
+
+**Ben Halpern:** Seriously... As soon as I made the Login feature a thing on dev.to, and it was hidden in the footer, basically, I started getting people logging in; that was just a really remarkable thing. I've launched things that we've sat around, and like "Oh, where are all the people...?" I thought we were making something really valuable, that's way better than the alternative, but where are all the people?
+
+But this was such a passion project... It was really clear that we didn't have to get things perfect, because we were really great at having people understand our purpose, our vision, our values. That was really something we sort of really put out there from day one. So it was something I put out there from day one, and then we, and then we always just kind of like put that front and center... Then things just kind of happened.
+
+I remember I had a conversation with Saron from CodeNewbie when she lived in New York, and I recall that she was telling me how she ran her business, and that kind of clicked into me the idea that this really could be a business; I knew that was a possibility. I wasn't naive, but it really gave me a bit of courage.
+
+She had just recently left her job to do CodeNewbie full-time when I sat down to just kind of pick her brain... That was a moment really early on, but it just sort of helps give a sense of like "Okay, this is possible. This is like a grounding moment." And not that I was afraid of entrepreneurship; I'd been doing that sort of my whole life.
+
+So I'd put my heart into this project so much that the last thing I wanted to do was ruin it by making it a business... Because I knew this would succeed no matter what, like if it just existed as some kind of project, like something where the scope was smaller, where the expectations were smaller... So even though I'd been an entrepreneur in some way since I was 12 in one way or another, the notion that this could be an actual business was something I was really protective of, because I thought it was such a magnificent project, and if it was gonna be a business, I wanted that to be because that's actually the best thing for the project, and not -- we didn't wanna extract value; that's just something you can do with this kind of projects, and everything had to be additive.
+
+We really have been extremely thoughtful at each step of the way, and I think that's our special super-power - we've given ourselves enough rope to be thoughtful with everything. It's easy once you start a business to be really sprinting the whole time, just trying to pay every bill, to pay all the expenses and stuff, but... Just due to the nature of how this started, the community took so well to everything, at every stage... It really was a reflection of my personal values at every step of the way. It just happened. It reflected on the skills of everyone I was involved with professionally, everyone who was able to come together and help out... Yeah, just timing, and the people involved - really great.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[16:14\] If you ask me, something I've always appreciated and noticed has been this Ben Halperism kind of thing in there... This sort of like -- I don't wanna say weird, but just different type of humor that's very clear when you hear it and you see it; your humor is very you, so to speak... I don't know if that's clear to you, Jerod, but that's super-clear to me.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I agree with you. I would say it's a lot like a good author will inject their voice into their writing, and dev.to very much (from my perspective) has reflected Ben's personality, for a long time. Obviously, then that has other problems, like "Okay, how do we scale this and make it a brand that's equitable and not just Ben Halpern?" and I think you've been doing that along the way... But yeah, I would say that there's a reflection of Ben's personality or humor or geekiness, and that's why people like the Twitter account kind of embedded in the website. Is that something was intentional, or it just happened, or do you even disagree with that sentiment?
+
+**Ben Halpern:** No, I think that's really -- I think that's definitely what's going on. Some stuff's intentional, some stuff just happens... I have a very multi-disciplinary background, a few sort of different types of attempted careers, and all in the sort of creative space... So when we talk voice, we know how to talk about that stuff within our organization, even though I'm a software developer; we have documents about what the dev.to voice is... It's all super-vague; it's like my random rant. I can read from the document... It's just like "Say this, not this" kind of things, and... I still myself do most of the communication, but any time -- there's a lot of stuff we do, and any time we have to take care of a thing, we really treat it like our... Yeah, we're really careful about that stuff. It comes through, and it's like -- we didn't just like take that on as a business initiative; it was very natural. We recognized what people cared about and what programmers cared about in general, the good and the bad of certain types of ways of engaging people, and little things like that...
+
+Yeah, it's all an effort in like just being careful and nuanced, and not sprinting too fast that you kind of lose track of these things... Because that's what happens. We don't wanna be boring, we don't wanna lose our sense of values... The whole project works because we remain thoughtful about these things as we scale and as we grow. We try to get ahead of it when we think what we're doing might not scale, and stuff like that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's also clear to me too that the thoughtfulness, not just on what you say and how you say it, or not being boring, as you said, but also what you said before was making sure this should be a business, which I think is a wise move, because sometimes a side project is just fun... And sure, maybe it has some entrepreneurial parts to is, there is maybe some money to be made, but it doesn't have to be a full-fledged everybody-in business. I think that's kind of an interesting line to toe. Can you speak to that a bit, the on either side of that line of like when it was a side project to now it being a business and how that ended up playing out for you?
+
+**Ben Halpern:** \[20:03\] Oh yeah, I mean... The whole thing was really a lot of clarity for me; I was just better at this than other things I'd done before, but from the get-go, even before I even knew what it was gonna be, I committed to giving this ten years to work...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's a long time.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It is a long time...
+
+**Ben Halpern:** Yeah, I mean I thought like "Well, I'm still gonna like programming in ten years." I thought that was pretty obvious. And the biggest issue I had with some other projects is like, I don't know, I didn't have such a fundamental care about them that if they didn't sort of take off quickly that I'd keep being excited about, and stuff. I love this stuff, and I can only do it if it's exciting to me.
+
+Early on when it's just a project and you have ten years to do it, your job is to have long walks with an audiobook in to really sort of think about the purpose of something, or random little things... And I sometimes took like two weeks to make a decision, where like in a business you're kind of like "This has to be done by the end of the day" kind of stuff.
+
+We've also instilled that kind of values since we have been in business; sometimes we have to hurry, but sometimes we just take our time to get something right, because a lot of the time the answer comes -- if you guys didn't ship this in two weeks, if nobody had the effort to ship this feature, maybe we shouldn't ship this feature in; stuff like that.
+
+We really try to lean into how we feel about certain parts of the project. Obviously, we need to fix bugs, fix vulnerabilities, fix user experience issues, but in terms of the project, we try to instill that kind of project values, and that really only happens if it's really happening early on.
+
+But then when it came to be a business, there's still that area where I myself am too scattered to make a lot of this stuff work. We have lawyers, and we have all sorts of stuff, so Jess was critical there. But then the third co-founder in the business, who isn't as front and center sometimes, but if you're part of the community, you know him... It's Peter Frank, who was my partner in the other business.
+
+He really brings a lot of the need-to-know sort of experience and effort in certain areas; he actually loves some of the stuff that I don't find I have any patience for, and Jess is kind of the middle person in terms of like she writes code, but she also has a handle on some of the finer details in terms of -- like, I've never spoken to our lawyers, even though I founded this company... Because that's Peter's domain, or Jess', depending on the context.
+
+You've gotta do what works for you, and stuff like that... I'm very thoughtful and careful about the actual business direction, the way we make money, the way we do this and that... But there's a lot of heavy lifting in terms of running a business that thank goodness I have people who are excited about doing that kind of stuff, because that's never been my thing.
+
+**Break:** \[23:45\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Ben, we're now at a point where it's a business, it's legit... Obviously, you're open sourcing it today, that's a big deal... But, I mean, Jerod and I have been paying attention to what you've been doing for a long time; we've talked years ago, and have been to some degree involved in what you're doing, but not directly, just more so as a community, not so much as one of the co-founders of course... But now that it's here, I mean, you've culminated quite a community, lots of traffic, lots of fresh articles, we link to you often through our newsletter and our newsfeed and stuff like that, so we're very familiar with what you're doing here. You've done a great job on the community front. What do you think is the secret sauce to building this particular community? Not community in general, but this particular community.
+
+**Ben Halpern:** I would say merging fundamental human community needs with practical software development needs... And not really giving either one of those things more attention than the other one.
+
+There's so much humanity in software development, but there's also so much like "This is exactly how we do things and it's not gonna change" in terms of sharing, in terms of how we code... Like, we search for the answers, we search for opinions, we get consensus on what the right framework is to use... There's no going off and doing your own thing without really having to know exactly why you're doing that.
+
+There's so much need for community, but a fundamental thing just for motivation, and things like that... One of our members just recently made a post talking about how he shut down the language he was writing, and the community gave him a lot of support in that; shutting down a project you've been working on for a few years is a pretty big moment, and he wasn't teaching anyone anything in that moment, but people who had been following him were just kind of there for him...
+
+We try to deliver the space for people to find answers to things that are a little bit more nuanced, to discuss topics which are interesting to them, and maybe interesting to some people. We try to send the types of traffic to all sorts of different places and not just the lowest common denominator software stuff. We try to just be careful about the user experience, but also not too opinionated on it, because everyone kind of makes their own user experience.
+
+The platform is really just a generic place where people can write blog posts and engage in a certain type of Reddit discussion, but we as administrators try to really make that happen in just the way software developers need it. Because some of the core insights early on was, like, these things happen, but in really generic ways, and there's no reason we can't do it with a lot of care for the software developer experience.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[28:00\] If you were forced to liken it to something else in terms of describing to somebody who may not know about it, even non-software things, what do you liken dev.to? Is it kind of like Medium, but different because of this...? Is it kind of like Stack Overflow without the rules? What is the best comparison for people who don't know about it?
+
+**Ben Halpern:** The most straight up model (I think) for engaging right away is it's Medium, but more specific for developers. And everything that's different from the platform is really like that, except then we kind of take it in the direction that we give people the opportunity to really build their portfolio out a little bit, show off their GitHub projects... So in that sense it's a bit like LinkedIn, if LinkedIn wasn't full of recruitment spam and just friends from college who added you and you don't really care about their finance links, and stuff like that.
+
+It's a little bit like a professional platform more devoted to software developers, but we're not too prescriptive, that like everyone in the world needs this right now. Hopefully, it will be so valuable someday that everyone will be on board, and everything like that... But the fact that it's really centered around the content and we don't log in while any of that stuff.
+
+It's a place where a lot of people get to contribute back to the greater software development community no matter what... So the greater software development community probably lands on dev.to through Google searches, your newsletter, things like that... It's just kind of like part of the ecosystem, and in form factor, it kind of happens the same way -- Medium established this idea that you can sort of post your stuff on a different platform... We make it really easy for people to host on their own blogs, but then kind of cross-post to dev.to, because I think that's a really valuable -- we try to have a shared ownership of everything that's going on, if possible, and just be really thoughtful about it... Like, "This is your space, and it's our space." It's a shared kind of environment.
+
+There's a lot of deep-down human things going on with those ideas. It's not so much an economic exchange as much as like a really complicated human exchange.
+
+So yeah, Medium for software developers, in a way, but with a lot of little things that just make it different.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So as you have had success, you started to come up against other problems and things that I start to think of, where I think "I'm glad I'm not in Ben's shoes" as dev.to grows; and your team's shoes, of course... I just thought of this because you've mentioned the recruiters on LinkedIn... Well, eventually there's gonna be recruiters coming to dev.to, there's going to be spammers coming to dev.to, there will be trolls, which usually pop up first... As all of these little social networks and forums and things become larger - I mean, Twitter is having a huge problem right now; of course, it's massive, mainstream, but... If you're software mainstream, you're still gonna have a lot of people using it... Are these things you're starting to deal with, or is it too small yet - I mean big, but not big enough - where you're hitting a lot of trolls, you're hitting a lot of spammers, people who are generally there to create terrible content or do mean things?
+
+**Ben Halpern:** Our sort of core differentiator -- as I said, we got really big on Twitter at first. We really know the Twitter universe, and our main differentiator is that there is any kind of moderation compared to Twitter; that whole kind of platform, as massive as it is, it really seems like a place that didn't even consider harassment and trolling and stuff as like a problem until the rest of the world called them out on it...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, Reddit took a hard stance for freedom of speech against moderation early on.
+
+**Ben Halpern:** \[32:15\] Yeah, so we are certainly pro free speech in every way that's practical, but I think some of these other platforms are a little bit naive in terms of human behavior, and especially just how certain classes of people are a little bit more vulnerable - or a lot more vulnerable - than others. This is a shared space and a community effort, but -- so of course we have our code of conduct and our value we sort of profess, but we also really took a serious technical approach to dealing with moderation in what we think is a pretty scalable way, more so than I think a lot of other people are doing it...
+
+In terms of like when people first sign up, there's a -- we purposefully make Sign Up only available to folks with existing social accounts; you don't really need to link anything so deeply to your Twitter or GitHub once you're on, but you actually need to come from one of those places to engage in the first place... Which is a pretty low barrier; I think between Twitter and GitHub most software developers are engaged, and anyone who for any good reason doesn't have either of those accounts, we work with them...
+
+But when you sign up with an existing social profile, we have a lot of information on you. We know you didn't create this Twitter account today, because if you did, we might flag you for potential spam or potential harassment, because we've banned your other one... Little things like that.
+
+It's not so complicated, but we really thought about it early on, and every time we've had an influx of more spam, we've had to kind of solve new problems, but we've also tried to get ahead of them as much as we can...
+
+But also, it's very difficult, and we change our feature set subtly from time to time as we grow, and that's why we sort of evolved... I didn't really get into it too much, but we have a whole area for private messaging, and small chat rooms, and things like that, which are actually kind of a really great area to have like "This is a smaller area for conversation and help and things like that", and it's like a break-out room from some of the big, wide-open threaded conversations that might happen elsewhere on the site.
+
+I think even just folks on the team... There's six total people, including the three founders, and not everybody -- somebody will start building something just because it's kind of how everyone else does it, and I'll kind of have to make a big fuss about how I think we don't wanna do it just how everyone does it, because that's where it leads to these terrible harassing situations.
+
+So it's a lot of little things, but we have a technical solution; we have a form of sort of crowdsource moderation, which also kind of has a system which quickly can elevate things to the admins, and it hasn't been so massive -- like, scale isn't so big that we can't deal with that pretty well with the current system.
+
+It's always a real shame though when we deal with any kind of harassment; it's almost always like something gets shared to Hacker News or Reddit and there's a big influx of jerks... It's a real shame; it happens from time to time, and we don't try to create a situation where that could never happen, because that's impossible... But we deal with it pretty quickly and we try to ensure that the dialog doesn't get toxic.
+
+\[36:02\] We really try to be diplomatic with community members who are good, constructive community members most of the time, but then we hear they really weren't respectful, and things like that... We try not to make people feel like they're being policed, but of course, it's getting harder and harder and I do kind of freak out sometimes.
+
+It saddens me if anyone ever has a bad experience, but at our scale, sometimes people do. The core people really understand that at the very least we're trying harder than the other platforms, and we always have, and that's what's -- \[Alexa voice in the background\] Oh, I'm being--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Someone wants to talk to you.
+
+**Ben Halpern:** \[Alexa voice in the background\] Alexa, stop! The office is calling me. Wait, hold on. I maybe should... Can I actually maybe answer that?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Sure, go ahead and answer.
+
+**Ben Halpern:** Now I'm thinking there might be something on fire. Alright... Alexa, call HQ. \[Alexa: "Calling HQ"; HQ answers\]. Yeah, is there anything I need to do? Alright, I'll try to do that right now. Alright, bye. Alexa, stop.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Alright, bear with us here a second while Ben hacks on some funs stuff... Here's a little interlude from BMC. You're gonna love it.
+
+**Break:** \[37:27\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And we are back. We forgot what we were talking about, because... Reasons. This is what happens when people who run websites hop on Skype and talk for a while - things happen. Right, Ben?
+
+**Ben Halpern:** Yeah... It's happening less these days in general, but today was a big announcement day, we moved the repo over... Little things were expected to go wrong, and it's just one of those things...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Just one of those days...
+
+**Ben Halpern:** And you know, it's a small team. I don't have a VP of engineering who deals with these things.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You are the VP of engineering.
+
+**Ben Halpern:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's right. Well, when Changelog.com goes down, I'm the VP of engineering as well, so we are very well aware of such situations... I shouldn't say -- dev.to is not down, it's just... There were issues. Alexa was having some problems.
+
+Let's continue talking... Let's turn towards the open source, because we'd keyed off the conversation around that, and we haven't quite made our way back to it yet... So let's get started on that.
+
+One thing I wanted to talk to you about - and you mentioned in the opening that as it started as a side project, you just didn't think about it, and you had wished that you had just done it from the very beginning, because you probably would have done a lot of things subtly, or maybe even majorly differently.
+
+One thing that you did do was pre-announce open sourcing it - I'm not sure how long back - and then went about getting ready for it... So maybe tell us your strategy there and why there was a pre-announcement, and then time passed, and then finally today, August 8th, the final open sourcing. Give us that story.
+
+**Ben Halpern:** Yeah, so the pre-announcement was really a matter of letting people know where we stood on the issue and how excited we were about it. As soon as things kind of started falling in place, it got more and more exciting.
+
+I really felt like at every stage, any time, we gave people the opportunity to have more creative control over the project that weren't like directly from my voice, and that kind of thing. It always led to exciting outcomes, in every way.
+
+We started talking about it because we were just excited about it, and we're pretty transparent about everything we want to be doing... So if we haven't really talked about it, it's because we're not totally sure what our plan is.
+
+\[40:04\] But that was a while ago, many months ago, and we didn't really ever create a deadline; we just kept having new things come up, new features we had to build, new things we had to do for the current scale of the project... But we were still just dying to do this, because it just seemed like such an exciting thing to do with the community.
+
+We finally just kind of like realized we were actually getting closer and closer to feeling like we had the capacity to manage that part of the project, which is this whole new thing... There's a lot of benefits to not having to manage a bunch of people, taking part in different ways and stuff like that.
+
+But we finally felt like we were kind of getting ready for that, and we put a date on it... We picked August 8th because it's 08.08, and it's a lucky number.
+
+We worked hard, we worked with some outsiders to kind of audit the code for possible security vulnerabilities... We expect little things to possibly come up, but you can't really rely on obfuscation when all the code's out there... But we know that in the long run, when we are fully open, the long-term security story is really promising.
+
+At our core, it became such a strong part of our values, and I just didn't think that this project was important enough to warrant open sourcing at the time, and just... You know, in the future I wouldn't really care that much about the importance of a project, but honestly, early on it was just a Rails website I'd made over the holiday break one year when I wasn't doing anything else...
+
+But when things started to turn, I started to kind of get my co-founders really pumped about the idea that the community is more valuable than the code, and we can really put ourselves out there and we don't have to worry that other people can now build a clone if they wanted to, with our exact... But it's really not the code that's so special, it's the community; the community is really what's gonna help make the code special. We really think that the future is strong, because we're gonna have a lot of really talented and really enthusiastic developers in our ear and in our codebase.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The security aspect is an interesting -- that's something that's come up recently with other things, but super-recent was Homebrew. There was somebody who gained access to Homebrew in 30 minutes, like commit access to it, via supply chain attacks... Basically, package maintainers having issues.
+
+What made you decide to do a security audit? I don't think we did that, Jerod. Did we do that? You probably did it, but we didn't have a third-party do it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, and we also open sourced at an earlier stage in our software's history. Ben probably had multiple years of development going back, whereas we had maybe six months.
+
+We did not open source from the very beginning, from the relaunch, but we had had that in mind from the very beginning... So there's a huge difference just in your mindset, even just like subconsciously, I believe, when you know that that's eventually going to happen... So yeah, our security audit was probably just me thinking through everything, and then double-checking and making sure there was nothing super-stupid.
+
+\[44:05\] And then of course, we've had plenty of people report situations publicly... And publicly meaning through the GitHub issues, and then even privately, stuff they'd found. So our security has improved from it, but like you said, Adam, there's definitely other security holes that it can open up as well.
+
+Yeah, that's an interesting move, bringing in an outsider to do audits. Ben, can you tell us more about that?
+
+**Ben Halpern:** Exactly to your point - we had obviously valued security; we had offered a modest bug bounty and we have uncovered a lot of things that way... Little exploits in terms of our -- you know, just in every little way, like how we host images maybe, in certain contexts, or little things... And thankfully, we've never had any major leaks or any major vulnerabilities, but little things along the way have been brought to our attention. The process is just to kind of deal with those as good as we can...
+
+But when the entire codebase is open, we actually get much, much better at finding those vulnerabilities more quickly; the code gets way more eyes before it gets into the codebase... But the existing code becomes possibly a little more vulnerable in case there's just any kind of endpoints which expose an entire database model perhaps, instead of just a few columns, or anything like that... The user doesn't realize this, but any JSON endpoint that tells you one extra thing that maybe is not public information.
+
+That process is just an ongoing battle. We thought that if there's anywhere we have blind spots too, it's security vulnerabilities we've already written ourselves and didn't notice, or anything like that... But I think we really paid attention to all the major hot spots.
+
+Rails has a lot of convention that we follow pretty well, and we know not to run arbitrary code. We use whitelists and not blacklists... We take it all really seriously, but there's always just the unknown unknown. We have a lot of friends in the community though, and several people who were very helpful, and I think any possible vulnerabilities we find in this process I think are not gonna be severe, and we will deal with them as they come.
+
+It's just a matter of programming, and had we been open source from the get-go - yeah, this is not a process we would have had to spend so much time on, and that's really my big, like "Damn, I wish we were open source right away", because we would have been much cleaner the whole way. You can't really get away with things just in passing, but overall, we got here and I'm always amazed at how successful this whole project has been and how much it impacts people, so... No major regrets, but definitely -- I don't think I would ever closed source in the future something that didn't have a very good reason for being closed source.
+
+**Break:** \[48:02\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Ben, one of the reasons why I asked about that time span, the pre-announcement versus the open sourcing - I was curious, and my intuition was maybe there was a little bit of accountability there... Like, once you announce a thing, you kind of have to do it, and open sourcing, since it's not like a feature - although it can be considered one - on your product roadmap, it's the kind of thing that would just continue like "Yes, we're gonna eventually do it", but once you write a blog post and make an announcement, there's this expectation of "It's going to happen." So maybe there was a little bit of that in there, as well.
+
+I'm curious also about the timespan and bringing in the third-parties for helping... Security is one aspect of being not prepared for open source. The other aspect, which is way more personal for me, and I'm curious if it's the same for you, and perhaps inappropriately prideful... Now it's like that dream where you're at school with your clothes off, and everybody's laughing at you... It's that fear of "Oh no, everyone's gonna see my code." Was there any of that involved?
+
+**Ben Halpern:** That has been with me, and the whole thing... You're totally right on this is why we pre-announced it; we needed to give ourselves a deadline. But also, we pre-announced it so that we could kind of like benefit from the additional mojo that would come along. We got a month of being able to really keep people updated about something that was happening soon, so it gave us -- we get to really justify this as a feature more if we get to talk about it. If it's just a private thing, then we can't get people excited about anything that we don't talk about.
+
+Yeah, it was about ripping off that Band-Aid, giving a deadline, forcing us to really make it happen, and then... Yeah, you're absolutely right about just the exposure to how terrible a programmer we all are. \[laughter\] It's a really terrifying feeling, and I really personally felt like I've been able to cross a barrier... I just feel like I've made myself the class clown enough as a programmer, enough times that I just can acknowledge that coding is hard and I don't know what I'm doing half the time.
+
+But at the same time, we have the proof that we make good stuff. We have a lot of really good ideas, we know what we're doing -- we don't have all the answers, but we have a lot of good ones. That positioning, to be ready to just go do it, is totally what helps us happen.
+
+\[52:19\] And also, with Rails -- like, I know different programming languages, I've done different kinds of development, different types of web frameworks, or other kinds of programming along the way, but Rails is something I'm pretty comfortable with. I feel like I get it and I know it, and it's also very boring and old, and that's a real feature as far as I'm concerned.
+
+Before this project, I was working with a lot of newer technologies, which was kind of exciting, but you find this GitHub issue which is just like the only answer to how you can build this thing, is like hope that this feature ships at some point this year... So yeah, just happy to be using some pretty boring technology.
+
+Jeff Atwood has a post about why they chose Rails for Discourse, and it's for a lot of the same reasons. It's -- yeah, just a lot of things went into it, but... I'm just pretty comfortable about that part; people get to see me with my pants down, but it's part of the spectacle now. I don't feel like I'm in my private space; it's a public spectacle and I get to put on a little song and dance.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Do you feel like -- you know, you mentioned that you wish you'd maybe done it earlier... Do you feel like it would have changed the direction? ...not so much of your mission as a platform or company or community, but more so maybe the speed at which you can deliver features, or the distraction, or the focus... Do you feel like given that it's been just the necessary eyes on the codebase has allowed you some level of focus, whereas had it been open source sooner, you may have had more shiny objects and more attraction and more just distraction, so to speak, around getting to where you're at now?
+
+**Ben Halpern:** Yeah... It's hard to say that, given how much momentum we've built up and how much we've really been able to solve our own problems, as opposed to listening to all the random voices in the world... Yeah, it's hard to say that the alternate would have been better.
+
+The interesting thing is that now that we have done this project - and I can't imagine leaving this project anytime soon to do something that has nothing to do with this community that we've been a part of... So I'm really in this for the long haul, so when I think about the future in terms of open sourcing from day one on things, I really put myself in the mindset of like "Wow, we already have these thousands of friends out in the world, committed to our vision, working towards our ideals", and things like that. So it probably was pretty okay that things went the way they did, but we're excited for the future projects, which we'll just kind of develop out in the open.
+
+And really, I think open source is so magical, and I don't think people work towards the most ambitious things all the time; I think what we're doing is pretty ambitious, and doing it through open source is just remarkably cool. I don't think the world understands all the time just how amazing it is when many software developers get to have a say or contribute their expertise.
+
+\[56:15\] We're also siloed solving the same problems without talking to one another very much, and the whole thing is just gonna be, at the very least, a fantastic project. And really, when we were justifying open source to ourselves, it's like "If the open source thing doesn't work out for some reason, it will be because we crashed and burned spectacularly, trying something pretty fun", as opposed to being overly concerned about the possible downsides of being out in the open, and with our pants down, and stuff like that.
+
+We don't want to expose our user base to any danger or anything like that, but as far as the business goes, if we put ourselves out there as maintainers of a really cool, big open source project, our worst-case scenario is a spectacular failure, as opposed to petering off and not amounting to anything really notable or awesome. It's easy to justify even the worst-case scenario that way.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Let's talk about the tech for a real quick minute, because I know you're down-playing Rails as boring, and all that... I still think Rails is super cool myself, but I realize that the hype cycle has moved on. That being said, you've written and you've talked a lot about the way that you're going about using Rails, and one thing that you've done with dev.to which is awesome, and it's something that we strive towards - you've made it super-fast. And Rails is not known for being super-fast; I'm talking about load time, performance in terms of time to first paint, and all that kind of stuff. Is there interesting tidbits in the code, ways you've gone about using Rails, or things that you've written that we can link to in the notes, or points in the code that we can point people to, to show how you're going about doing things that might be a little bit different than normal, or are allowing you to achieve the speed that you have on page load?
+
+**Ben Halpern:** Yeah, so because this was a side project, so much of it was like scratching my own itch, and I'm a very impatient internet user. In terms of people's blog posts, if it's not loading quickly when all I need to do is read texts on a page, like the most basic thing that ships with HTML version 1... You know, it's a frustrating thing. So from the technical perspective, this project was built around performance ideas, in a lot of ways, and also delivering performance around the whole world. Americans don't realize how slow the internet can be in other parts of the world because of latency...
+
+But yeah, despite that, we chose Rails, which is not built for speed as the primary use case. But what we do is -- Rails doesn't do a lot of the work on most page loads, so 90% of traffic is handled exclusively on the CDN layer... So we deliver pages which don't have the users' sort of personal identified information on that first page load, but the additional stuff is a quick asynchronous call, so worst-case-scenario you're waiting longer for your image to show up... But even that is actually cached locally, in local storage.
+
+Basically, you're getting the edge-cached version of pages on the site, and I have written about this and I actually did a talk at Rails Conf on the same subject, so we can put the links to all that stuff...
+
+And yeah, it's just like a few new tricks, but also understanding -- as a team, you have to know you have these constraints; you can't use the current user method in the view, like in most cases, because we don't send over a server-rendered view; we send over an edge cache view.
+
+\[01:00:14.11\] There's a few ways to do that with edge, with VLC and stuff like that on the edge... That's Varnish Caching Language - VCL, sorry... And there's a few different ways people do that, and we're taking kind of the less standard way to even do that, because most edge caching still kind of makes round trips home for certain information in certain cases... But we just said like "If 1,000 people are reading the same article, we don't want to recompute it 1,000 times." You're getting it once, and when the page changes, you get the new page. This is possible because of the services we use.
+
+Fastly, our CDN, has basically -- they have instant purge, so if we have caching issues, it's a bug on our end, their API is really just virtually instant; 100-200 millisecond cache clear... So when a user updates an article, we serve a fresh one once, and then the rest of them are cached version.
+
+That's just the architecture that makes sense for website content-driven stuff. I'm sure all the podcasts that are doing anything right are also coming from some kind of CDN... And really, people's location, the place things are getting served from, the way they're being cached - it's all kind of like fundamentals of computing, but I think some of this stuff gets abstracted away and then programmers forget it's part of the problem... But that was never my mindset. If anything, it's a very typical Rails app, with one differentiating feature, which would be the same kind of approach you would take with any framework. The big difference here is the speed of light is constant; you can't change that, so you need to bring the code closer to the people, and people are used to doing that with purely static content... But Fastly has always been trying to push people to do more stuff this way, from themselves, and I didn't coordinate with them, but I read their blog posts, and it was a great idea, so I ran with it.
+
+It's funny - people themselves really know the best use cases for their own software, and sometimes you just have to listen. There's some really cool stuff out there, and we have the same concept with some of our other services. We use Algolia, which is a distributed search index; so we don't host our own search, because we actually have nodes distributed all over the world. So if you're in Tokyo, you're gonna get a search response and a site response both from the edge, within milliseconds.
+
+I do live in the U.S., so this really wouldn't be a problem for me, but at some point in my life I became very interested in not being exclusive to the rest of the world, and from a business perspective it just made sense to do that right away... Trying to \[01:03:22.05\] that kind of optimization at the end, when you already have all your -- so if open sourcing was tough because we had already kind of just been writing code without that in mind right away, optimizing edge caching like that would be ten times tougher if that wasn't initially your use case... Because you'd have to really start tearing things out, and it would be really frustrating and possibly not worth it.
+
+\[01:03:44.25\] And the wonderful thing about being the coder, the founder, the project manager or whatever - I didn't have to convince anyone else that this is a good idea; I just had to really know in my heart that this was a good thing to try to do, and see if it worked... And it really did, and over time we've found things that are like "Damn, I wish we would have not gone so hard on this part, because it made everything else harder...", but things kind of work themselves out over time and we get to like a happy medium.
+
+It's just really exciting, and I liken it to being a painter... If you're trying to found a project and you don't know how to code or do the thing that needs to get done, I feel like it's kind of like being a painter but you can't paint; trying to tell someone else live what you want the canvas to be, but you need to describe it instead of just doing it.
+
+Early on in a project, a software developer has so many super-powers in terms of just being able to take that paintbrush and do whatever they want... Like, translate what it's their head to what's on the canvas.
+
+I just felt like early on in the project, as a business, and as a project, just the fact that I could kind of work that all in myself, without too much pressure, and without too many external obligations... I really chose a technical project that was really on my alley; I didn't try to learn 100 new things to do this. It was like, "Okay, what do I actually know better than anything, and what's the most optimized thing I can do with what I know?"
+
+A lot of this was really growing up for me. I've made mistakes in the past where I chose cool technology I didn't really have a good grip on, even if it was an interesting project, and then I didn't even really have cared too much about the project material, and stuff like that... So this really was just a coming together of a lot of different spaces and interests, and the tech really met with the human side, and the team was great... That's why it worked out to this point.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very cool. Well, definitely give us those resources and we will link both of those up. Ben, one thing that you can do now which you could do previously, which I've found to be very fun, is when you are describing something that you're doing in software, or you're doing a talk, or you're trying to get somebody to add a feature - whatever it is, you can actually link to the line of code or the file on GitHub and say "This is exactly what I'm talking about."
+
+You no longer have to talk in the abstract about your software now that it's open source. You can actually just send them the source, and it's super cool.
+
+**Ben Halpern:** Yeah, and it's much easier to just do certain kinds of support in general when you always have that at your disposal, even if you're not talking to the person who might need it all the time... But the fact that so many things can just be described that way, just like "This is exactly what the problem is..." And with the project we expect there'll be flies on the wall, who anytime we describe something they might fix it, but even just being able to talk about it is, of course, half the battle.
+
+We already have some folks who just go around refactoring all the time \[01:07:14.16\] because we invited some folks in early on, in addition to kind of the explicit auditing, just to kind of start working on stuff... It's just been so cool.
+
+What we really have to get a little bit better at now is describing the path and the vision, because that really is not a strength of mine... Now I have to kind of have a different role, where I actually am trying to describe what we're supposed to be painting a lot more, and that's gonna be a challenge I think I'm up for. Mostly, I just need to take a liking to it more so than any new skill, or anything... Because it sometimes feels like time away from the code. But I like to have fun with it. I really love hanging around the website itself. I spend so much time on dev.to.
+
+\[01:08:08.02\] The more we can make the future of dev.to jive with how we like to use dev.to ourselves, and this whole meta-concept of hanging out on the thing you're working on... It's all really fun. I just can't say enough about how exciting some of these new things we're doing are.
+
+And I don't really have any sort of strong open source ties in my life. I've contributed a little bit, I've been a big fan of open source for a long time, but never had the urge to strongly become a part of any one project, because it's not really in my personality, the same way I see it with so many community members, and... Yeah, I'm just really excited to see it all happen and to be able to do it full-time. I'm not very good at splitting my time in that sense. It's just... Exciting things ahead.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I'd say now that we've got the understanding of why open sourcing matters to you, to your team, to the business, to the direction - that makes sense, but what about the community itself? What are you hoping for the community to contribute back? Part of the reason why you open source is not just to "Hey, here's my code. Take a peek." Maybe there's some reasons for the community to get involved. What are some of your visions or aspirations there?
+
+**Ben Halpern:** Yeah, so we really think of it as like, you know, not really one killer reason it has to happen... Lots of people have just been really excited to kind of like build the things they had been complaining are missing, and little things like that. That's one part of the puzzle... But I've really been driven by certain successful open source projects, namely Linux, which I think just really has a fascinating idea of how to develop software, where people can contribute in sort of greedy ways... You know, potential partnerships or platform concepts... People can really -- like, if they want something to happen and we agree that it should happen in theory, we just don't have the resources for it, they can kind of help code it up.
+
+So we have partnerships with our -- our current sustaining business model is a few different things, including some sponsors and some partners, and we run some community contests, and things like that... And all of these things sometimes just need that extra special bit of effort to really make happen... But our core vision doesn't really work with that; we can't just take our minds and put them towards building all the little features that a contest needs, but we find these people we work with have a lot of willing contributors who, you know, their job is to kind of make this work... So like, "How can I make this work by finding folks within my team to kind of work with your team on the code, to make it happen?" That's just super-duper exciting.
+
+Then the big, magical unicorn use case is people will develop ways for this application to be sort of a little bit more generic and possibly stand up their own communities... Not necessarily in tech, but maybe... We don't really feel like there's just room for one, but also dev.to for music, for activism, for just like news and media, and stuff like that... We have a sort of path that's kind of like a media organization kind of story, and we eventually settled on this platform.
+
+\[01:12:10.22\] Our app right now is a pretty simple Rails app we've hacked together as best we can, but there's a lot of use cases that we can build on this, and the community really actually can make this better, so what we hope is that -- you know, today this is the dev.to codebase; you can't really actually use it as a different app, but we wanna support that use case in the long run, and we hope that there's a number of contributors who really contribute THAT goal, because that's the place where it's not for us, it's for the world...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. You're not hoping that people build features for dev.to itself, but maybe take what dev.to's platform is to maybe greater heights, outside of dev.to, potentially.
+
+**Ben Halpern:** Yeah, and the features to make these things work - it's like, if one other group of people, like anyone who's a part of our platform, wants to build dev.to for their activist cause or music or anything else that interests them in their lives, they immediately then have to start caring about the quality of everything, working with us on missing features, arguing about whether something should exist or not in the concept of the codebase... And that's really cool.
+
+I've seen that out there - there's a lot of these sort of "make your own social network" platforms, but none of them are meaningfully open sourced, or if they are open sourced, they're missing the whole caretaking (I think) we've done with this whole project in terms of molding the user experience, and the code, and stuff like that.
+
+When I look out there, I see a void in the universe a little bit, but I think our goal will be to run the dev community. We are a dev platform for developers, but if there's future instances, we will be super-supportive of that, because that makes this whole thing an ecosystem. And we're not gonna build necessarily an abstract framework; we don't want this to be like a spin-your-own whatchamacallit, like Wordpress, or anything like that... But all these things are really good guideposts for how to make software that's much bigger than yourself and much bigger than the initial problem, and just more amazing.
+
+If we could take on the Facebooks and the Twitters of the world with a number of individual sort of decentralized but compatible social networks, so be it; it's kind of grandiose, and that's why we don't really worry too much about that, but it's a use case we really wanna support.
+
+The thing about open source is it's magical. Linux really bit a huge chunk out of what Microsoft wanted to be, and Microsoft, in order to survive, had to completely adopt and become sort of the biggest proponents in the world of open source.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's true.
+
+**Ben Halpern:** Yeah, I'm like a practical idealist; I don't want us to be in the business of toppling Facebook, but if a side use case is that somebody is trying, we'll say "Go get it!", and we'll support this as much as we can, as long as it also helps the dev community.
+
+\[01:15:50.29\] So it's all just cool stuff, it's the magic of networks and people, and all these things that my team is interested in, I'm interested in... It's just fascinating. But ultimately, it happens by people fixing bugs, and coming up with new ideas, and refactoring some code here and there... It's just a process, and it's hopefully boring, and we don't need to innovate at every angle, we just need to be very craftsman-like and do a good job with our work... And who knows how big something can be when you really put in those sort of caring moments...?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, let me be the first to say it, if not the second - at least in this show - congrats on this launch! It's obviously a big deal, I think we said it first off, but... I mean, I'm excited about it, that it's open source. You promised a long time ago and finally it's here; you've put a lot of thoughtfulness into not only the user experience of dev.to, but also the fact that it's open source. I'm just stoked for you guys.
+
+I know Jess was supposed to be on this call; we're bummed she couldn't make it, but make sure you say hi to her for us, and let her know we missed her.
+
+**Ben Halpern:** Yeah, absolutely. It's been awesome hanging out with you two, and I hope to run into you again. We met at OSCON two years ago...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Two years ago, yeah.
+
+**Ben Halpern:** Yeah, a lot has happened since then. I think Changelog has been really humming along, and we wanna work with you as much as possible, if there's anything we can do... I think that now that we're open source, those kind of chats can happen a little bit more smoothly. It's all just a benefit...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, absolutely.
+
+**Ben Halpern:** There's so many great open source projects, and we already feel like we're -- it's a few hours into our adventure, but we're so much more steeped in the whole community, in the whole software world, and it's... Yeah, it's so exciting!
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, cool. Ben, thank you so much for your time today, congrats on open sourcing, and more importantly, thanks for coming on this show and sharing your story. It was a lot of fun going through that. Thank you.
+
+**Ben Halpern:** Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
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+**Jerod Santo:** So Johannes, we last spoke with you about a year ago all about GraphQL, why it's so cool and why everybody is getting excited about it, yourself especially - super stoked about GraphQL... And that was a great intro to the technology, and to its possibilities, and so if listeners want a full deep dive into GraphQL, go back and listen to episode 255, which is in the show notes. But for those who didn't hear that episode, why don't you give us the high-level explanation again of what GraphQL is, why it's taking the industry by storm, and then we'll move into Prisma after that.
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** Awesome, that sounds good. Yeah, it's great to be back on the show; fantastic shows over the last couple of weeks, so I'm super excited to be back. A quick recap of what GraphQL is... Even though we are living in our GraphQL bubble, and it's growing, the majority of the people still don't know what GraphQL is.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Definitely.
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** GraphQL is mostly -- typically, front-end developers get excited about GraphQL first, because it really solves one big problem for them, which is basically how they get data into their client applications from an API. Still the status quo today is that you'd be using REST APIs, and with REST APIs you'll sort of have like this fixed structure of the kind of data you can get back. So you have typically this REST endpoint where you have like a get endpoint where you say "Hey, give me all of these posts", or "Give me all of these comments for these posts", and you just get back a fixed structure and you have to know about all of these endpoints.
+
+GraphQL turns the entire thing a bit around, where the front-end can basically tell the back-end exactly what sort of data it needs. Within an application, you can tell the database what sort of data you need back; with a SQL query, think about the same concept for your front-end application, that your front-end application can say "Hey, I'm interested in this sort of data", and the back-end gives you exactly that kind of data back that you need, and that solves all sorts of problems. For example, you do just one HTTP request to your back-end and you get all the data that you need, and also, you don't need to do N+1 queries on the front-end where you say "Give me all the posts." It's right on the front-end, over the posts, and you get then back all the comments... So all of that just happens in one. That's sort of the biggest win that you typically get from GraphQL.
+
+\[04:19\] But the thing that I'm actually most excited about is the tooling that GraphQL enables... Whether that's being a GraphQL background, or that GraphQL maps to typed programming languages. There is so much awesome tooling that gets enabled for GraphQL, which is I think overall what gets people more and more drawn into GraphQL.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yes, and I think GraphQL, like you said, makes immediate sense, and it excites front-end developers quite a bit, because it really puts the power back into their hands, to craft the exact data that they need, when they need it, and not have to deal with (I guess) somebody else's idea of what server responses should look like.
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** Exactly. The point that you just mentioned, that it puts back the power into the hands of front-end developers - that's actually one of the biggest reasons why not just one developer decides "I wanna use GraphQL"; it's like the newest technology, but it's also why you would decide on a company level, why an executive team would decide "We're using GraphQL", because it just makes your development team so much faster by giving that power into the hands of front-end developers, and the front-end developers are more decoupled from the requirements of a back-end development team. And on a company level, that's the biggest win that you could get.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What does it take to get GraphQL in place? Is it an API? Is it a server? Front-enders typically don't have access to the infrastructure, so how do they get access to this tooling?
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** I'll give you two answers to that... One is a more classical setup would look like this - you have your GraphQL client in your React application, or whatever you have; your client could also be a native application. Then you have a GraphQL server. So you have these two parts, basically.
+
+The point of a GraphQL is that you have a more native GraphQL integration into whatever client-side framework you're using. For React, that's really nice, because you can basically map the data requirements of the React components directly to a part of the GraphQL query... And the GraphQL clients then - for example Apollo client or Relay - then takes care of merging all of your data requirements of your current view together in one big GraphQL query, and sends that back to the server.
+
+The server is typically implemented with a concept that's called resolvers. Think about it like a collection of functions, and each function maps to a certain field or piece of your data structure that you expose. For example, you have a user entity, and the user entity has a field called "Friends" - then you'll get a function that's called "Friends", that gets automatically called whenever the client is requesting the Friends. So on the back-end your job is to implemented these resolver functions and make your GraphQL server work. That's the most traditional setup.
+
+\[07:48\] What we've actually found is - like you mentioned, it's quite big of an investment for a company to establish new infrastructure, especially for front-end developers; they typically don't have maybe the abilities, or they don't have the permissions to spin up new infrastructure. So what we've seen - a little trick to get GraphQL adopted in your company is basically that front-end developers would implement this GraphQL server not as its own infrastructure component, but sort of like as a little thing that also lives in the client.
+
+So they basically implement these resolvers in the client, and in the client you would then map to another REST API or wherever you get your data from, and this way basically in the client you have these two layers... One, you have this virtual GraphQL server, and then you can basically use GraphQL as it would be implemented as an actual server, and you get all of the benefits in the client.
+
+So what we've seen from companies is that they maybe don't get direct permission to say "We do GraphQL." The front-end developers want it so bad anyway, that they just jump through this extra hoop, then go to the management team and say "Hey, we told you we could get rid of all of our Redux boilerplate. We're so much faster... Please tell the back-end team that we finally want this", because if you make its own infrastructure component, you get still a lot of performance benefits. Obviously, your API server should be as close to the database as possible etc., but you could still prove your points through this... And this is a pattern that we see in a lot of big companies.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Wow. Two thoughts on that. The first one is some people must be desperate for getting some GraphQL, because that is a lot of extra effort, I think, to implement a GraphQL proxy inside the browser, so that you can speak to that and convince your boss.
+
+And secondly, when you finally convince management or your server-side team or whoever it is to implement it on the server, that has to be like the most epic code deletion day of all time... Like, wouldn't you just throw a party? Like, "We get to rip all of this code out of our client now, because it all just exists server-side."
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** Yup, for sure... But the exciting thing about that is since GraphQL -- most of the early GraphQL adoption happened in JavaScript, even though GraphQL is not widely spread in any language community... But when these front-end developers want GraphQL so badly that they build their own server, they use the JavaScript implementation of GraphQL, and very often you would then also build this actual GraphQL server later on also in JavaScript.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Code re-use...
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** So it's actually not that much of a rebuild, but -- yeah, like you say...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Like a move...
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** You just take the server, you move it into a different folder or repository, wrap a little HTTP server around that, and you're good.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I would feel even better, because on one side you're deleting a bunch of code, and on the other side you're getting a bunch of free code because you already wrote it, and it just needs to be tweaked for that environment.
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** Exactly.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's certainly a forced hand, because you're doing it in the prior, and then you succeed by getting people to realize that you do need this, and you just have to move it into its proper place. It's a true hacker way, for sure.
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** Exactly. And it already gets you in this right mindset that you can basically build your back-end in such a layered way. You can think about "Okay, this GraphQL layer - I can put it wherever I want, and wherever it makes sense in terms of like responsibilities and ownership inside of a company..." Should that be owned by the front-end team, should that be owned by the back-end team? Also - we sort of mentioned - with performance in mind...
+
+For example, it's also with things like Cloudflare -- what is it called, Cloudflare Functions or Lambda@Edge -- it will be possible to run basically API servers at the edge. So there are a lot of exciting opportunities where you would put actually your GraphQL server.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[12:21\] This is such in the spirit of open source... Don't ask for permission, right? You get your job done, and you bring these tools in... This is how open source has spread into corporations for years; it's not top-down, some management person saying "We're gonna use this open source technology", it's some engineer using the best tool to solve their problem, and then later on the team finds out "Oh, you've been using Perl to write all these automation routines for all these years...", or whatever it happens to be. hat's awesome, that people are wanting it so bad that they just go out and show its value.
+
+Johannes, as you said earlier, you're kind of inside the GraphQL bubble. Adam and I are staying outside the bubble; we poke it every once in a while... But you have access to that community, so tell us - since last year, when you first talked, what's new in GraphQL? What does the ecosystem look like? What has changed? And I'd also like to know what are some public playboxes or sandboxes people can use - aside from GitHub, which is the big one that I think everybody knows about - where they can go and use a GraphQL API.
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** Sure, so I hope that the next time we are speaking you're part of the bubble, and the bubble is no longer perceived as a bubble.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We hope so as well.
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We're trying to get into the bubble... We're trying to get in.
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** So I guess you're mostly in the Elixir spheres, which actually has quite good GraphQL support... But regardless of which language you are using, there's pretty decent GraphQL support for that right now, on the server and on the client, so that shouldn't be a problem.
+
+So what has happened in the GraphQL ecosystem - what gets me super excited is the community has just like exploded, and pretty much any company that we are talking to, we don't need to ask them anymore whether they have heard about GraphQL; we'll rather directly ask them how far they are with their GraphQL adoption.
+
+It's now a rather rare case that we talk to a company and they don't start adopting GraphQL yet. You've seen it with recent announcements of Medium, for example, to moving over to GraphQL; you mentioned GitHub - GitHub is actually investing a lot into GraphQL right now, and they wanna help more people to learn about GraphQL, they really invest a lot into evolving their GraphQL API, to build tooling around that... All of that, all of the ecosystem and the adoption has been just awesome.
+
+Another indicator for that is, for example, the GraphQL Europe and the GraphQL Summit conference - the GraphQL conferences have doubled in size over the last year. We see tons and tons of meetups all around the world, helping people to get into GraphQL.
+
+What we really see is that this is just like the natural companion for React... So whoever builds a new React app, for them it's almost natural to build a GraphQL server for that. That's super exciting.
+
+\[15:58\] On a more technical level, I think the last time we spoke GraphQL Subscriptions was fairly new. On a technical level there are a couple of exciting new things in GraphQL since then... For example the concept of live queries, which is another real-time way of accessing data; it's seeing more and more traction in GraphQL.
+
+Also, a pretty big topic is the idea of schema stitching. Schema stitching is such a broadly applicable topic around GraphQL that really fulfills one promise of how APIs can talk to each other. The idea behind schema stitching is basically that you can 1) split up your back-ends into multiple parts, and then join them together. Since every GraphQL server - for those of you who don't know GraphQL, what's special about the GraphQL API is that it has a schema, and therefore it's typed. Similar to maybe, as you know, in Swagger or OpenAPI you have a Json shema you can define -- GraphQL provides something like that, but a lot simpler and a lot more intuitive, in my opinion. Basically, each of your GraphQL API is typed, and that means -- it's similar to how you have a programming language and you have a library, and that library has type definitions and you can join things together; you can now do the same thing for your APIs.
+
+Let's say you have a microservice setup and you've split up your back-end into different microservices - maybe a microservice for users, and messages, and posts... You can basically now have a gateway layer in front of that that joins all of that together in one GraphQL API. So you have a GraphQL API for your users and your posts, and the gateway basically just says like "Okay, every user has posts", and it just joins the schemas together. You can compose GraphQL APIs and they snap together like LEGO bricks. That's such a powerful concept that GraphQL provides you there, since it allows you to split up things, it allows you to reuse APIs...
+
+You can, for example, take the GitHub GraphQL API and simply put that into your own GraphQL server and just delegate to that other part. It really allows you to reuse APIs at a level that was not possible before, and it also sets the foundation for service-to-service communication...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I was just gonna ask that. It seems like the next move then. Since so many of these services speak over HTTP and REST, it makes sense that if you're exposing these GraphQL APIs and you're maybe even stitching them together, that all of a sudden maybe this is even a better way to have our microservices or our services - depending on the size of the service - talk to each other.
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** Exactly, and this is where the ideas of GraphQL bindings come into play. With schema stitching and GraphQL being such an approachable language... And the best example really for why it's so approachable is that even front-end developers start building GraphQL servers. That means now something like that service-to-service communication where typically you think about expert developers who know how to deal with protobuf - you can now basically do the same thing with GraphQL, with the same type safety, with the same efficiency, since you can actually under the hood map from GraphQL to a more efficient format, not just HTTP and JSON; you can map that to protobuf or to msgpack, but you can still apply the same simple and fantastic tooling from GraphQL for any sort of communication.
+
+\[20:16\] For the people who are particularly interested in GraphQL or who wanna push a certain part of GraphQL forward, since about half a year ago there is this thing called the GraphQL Working Group, where basically people from Facebook, from us, from Apollo, from different companies who are driving GraphQL forward, and also who are just GraphQL adopters... So you have people from Atlassian, Twitter, and tons of different companies coming together in bi-monthly meetings where we just discuss certain in-depth questions around GraphQL, around its type system, which features to add etc. This is something that really has driven GraphQL significantly forward, and making sure that it stays a healthy language and can be adopted from every different angle. If some of the listeners are interested in getting more deeply involved there, that's certainly a great place to get involved.
+
+**Break:** \[21:36\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So let's talk about Prisma now, which is very much on the server side or the implementation, the provider side of the GraphQL conversation, providing tooling around that... Johannes, you describe it as a performant open source GraphQL ORM layer, doing the heavy lifting in your GraphQL server. This is your baby, Prisma, and it's open source. Tell us all about it.
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** Alright. So just a couple minutes ago we heard about how it works on a high level to build a GraphQL server, and it's basically all about implementing these resolver functions. What you do in these resolver functions is basically mapping from some sort of data source to the abstraction that your GraphQL API gives you. If you think about what implementing an API typically is, it's exactly that - typically mapping from a database to your API; mapping the data from the shape of how it's stored in your database, typically in a normalized way, or if you're using Mongo, mapping from some sort of document representation to what you wanna return with your API, and doing that mapping. This is what we've seen like what takes up 80% of the code of a typical GraphQL server implementation, and also that's typically the part, as you evolve your application, that's the most error-prone to evolve and to change.
+
+\[24:21\] So what we've basically done with Prisma is we wanted to simplify that part, of how you map from a database to your own GraphQL server. The way we do that with Prisma is actually leveraging the idea of schema stitching. The way we do that is we actually turn your database - any kind of database - into a GraphQL API, and now we can use the idea of schema stitching to basically reuse these parts that abstract away your database to implement your own GraphQL server.
+
+So you get like little GraphQL building blocks for your database that you can now use to implement your own GraphQL server. In other terms, Prisma is sort of like this glue between your GraphQL server and your database. That's the high-level idea of Prisma, and therefore you could call it like a GraphQL database gateway or proxy, or like this data access layer.
+
+How we've thought about that is that whenever you're looking at any sort of bigger project, you either have an ORM layer, or if that's not a typically an ORM layer, it's limited in some capacity... So it either works fairly well as you get started with development, but then as you roll it out into production and you hit a certain scale, the performance just sucks, because ORMs typically -- yeah, it just gives you an API to express your data requirements, and that turns then into a typically unoptimized SQL query, which works well throughout development, but then breaks down in production.
+
+The second problem is that typically these ORMs are like a leaky abstraction, so they don't really provide you all of the capabilities of a database, and you have to drop back to raw SQL. So if you don't use an ORM, what you typically do in bigger projects, in bigger companies, is that you create this notion of like a data access layer, or a data access object, where in this abstraction you start implementing your database access and you implement little functions that return to like "Here, give me a post" or "Give me the entire object graph that I typically need for a post."
+
+All of this logic we've basically taken away and made its own infrastructure component as a data access layer, and with the power of GraphQL schema stitching, you can basically now use that and split up your GraphQL server into layers and access your database through GraphQL or through the ideas of GraphQL bindings, which basically maps a GraphQL API directly into your programming language.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[27:45\] Well, Prisma has very good timing I believe, for us, because as you alluded to earlier, Johannes, we've been toying around with the idea of a public Changelog GraphQL API around our news and around our podcasts, and we are running Postgres on our back-end... My first step towards that was to try a tool called PostGraphQL, which I believe has been renamed to PostGraphile... Which is a very interesting project that will introspect your database schema, and then basically immediately provide for you a PostGraphQL API based specifically on that current schema... Which I got up and running very quickly, and it was very cool to just poke around at our own database via PostGraphQL.
+
+Where that project seemed to stop - and I could be wrong, because maybe I didn't dig deep enough... It was basically done. It seemed like if I wanted to change the responses and the schema structure of what I'm exposing, I was supposed to change my database to reflect correctly... And I know there's some tooling around limiting certain aspects, but... It sounds like Prisma is kind of that, where you're providing that layer, but then, like you said, it's the glue, so then you're writing also a data model or something, you're basically molding it to look the way you want. Am I following you? Is that right?
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** Right. A couple of points here to unpack... Maybe to quickly also compare PostGraphile and the approach we're taking with Prisma... In general, these projects are fairly similar, but the ultimate goal is a bit different. For PostGraphile - this is really just built around Postgres, and the idea is whatever you wanna change, you have to do natively in Postgres. So if you wanna change something, you have to use your current migrations that you would already do on Postgres, and that would then reflect back in your GraphQL API.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Exactly, yes.
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** With Prisma we have a bit of a different perspective on all of that. What we for example see is that today you would no longer just have one database in bigger projects, but you would actually -- one of the last shows was about Elastic, and we spoke about the differences, when you would use Postgres, when you would use Elastic... There are so many specialized databases which really shine at one particular task. For Elastic, that might be aggregation or full-text search; for MySQL, Postgres - this is like the more relational model, but you also have Cassandra, which is really highly transactional and scales horizontally...
+
+They're specialized databases for certain scenarios, for certain types of tasks, and what typically happens then is you would actually combine multiple databases in one project. So you would store maybe the bulk of the information in Postgres, but also some information in Elastic, and some information in Cassandra or on Redis.
+
+Our goal with Prisma is really having this universal GraphQL API in front of all of the databases that you use for a project, and you get one GraphQL API for that... Your data model joins across your different data stores. That's rather like how we see things a bit differently with Prisma. There's a whole rabbit hole to go into just around that topic, since we've put a lot of thought into surfacing the specifics of a certain database type into its GraphQL API. We'll have basically multiple categories of GraphQL APIs mapping to the different categories of databases you have.
+
+\[32:13\] For example, a relational database will have a different GraphQL API exposed, compared to a graph database or compared to a key-value store. So all of that is actually represented in its own open source specification called OpenCRUD. You can find that on opencrud.org. This is like an open source project that's just concerned about how you would expose a specific kind of database most efficiently in a GraphQL API. That is one part of it. There are two more thoughts on this.
+
+The other is with Prisma we don't just expose your database through GraphQL, but we also use GraphQL for the second part, which is GraphQL also gives you this beautiful language called GraphQL SDL (Schema Definition Language) which is a very concise way to express a type system... So to express enums, type definition, interfaces, unions and all of that. That's a super nice syntax, maybe comparable to how you do type definitions in TypeScript, or Swift, or Go.
+
+You can basically now use that to describe your data model, and you can then use Prisma to either map to an existing database, like in your case, where you have an existing Postgres database, or if you're starting out from scratch, you can use this GrapQL SDL and you use Prisma -- Prisma actually lets you migrate your database just giving your data model representation. So Prisma actually does the heavy lifting of migrating your database, and creating joint tables, and all of that. So Prisma leverages GraphQL 1) to let you read and write your database through GraphQL, but also it lets you use GraphQL SDL to describe your data model and to help you with database migrations.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Wow.
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** Yeah, these are basically the ways how we think about Prisma. And coming back to your previous point about that you can basically mold your schema in such a way that you want - again, there are two ways how you could use the GraphQL API that Prisma generates for you. So in simple cases, or as you might be just toying around and you build a prototype, this is where you could actually just use the GraphQL API that Prisma gives you directly, and directly start using it from your front-end... But as you add more business logic to your application, this is what you would want to have in a separate layer; this is where you would build your own GraphQL server and you would use the GraphQL API that Prisma gives you as building blocks to build your own GraphQL server.
+
+In your resolvers, you can basically get rid of your giant\] SQL queries or whatever you have in there, and use a so-called GraphQL binding that allows you to delegate to the underlying Prisma layer.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You may have lost me on that last point - use a GraphQL binding to delegate to the underlying Prisma layer... Can you unpack that?
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** \[35:56\] Oh, for sure. Imagine you have a -- and all of that is fairly theoretical right now, and the best way to really look at that is by looking at code; then it gets immediately clear.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, true.
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** Let's get back to the point where you need to implement your resolver. Let's say you need to implement a resolver on the root level, that returns the feeds of your posts. Let's say you build an Instagram, and you need to return a feed that returns you an array of posts. In that function, you would basically now need to return all -- without Prisma, you would now need to go to a database, get all of the data that you need there, and then also conditionally, on what the client's query is, you need to also say... Maybe for the feed, for each post, they also want to have the comments, and the author information. Now you need to implement basically resolver functions for all of these different possibilities.
+
+If you're using a GraphQL binding and you use Prisma under the hood, this is basically where you just provide the entry point to say like "Hey, let's return these posts here", and you then just delegate to this next GraphQL layer, and if the client happens to also query information about the author, or information about the comments, the Prisma layer takes care of all of that resolving, and you just need to implement this entry point, this sort of delegation part that forwards the query to the database layer.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What if I could just think about my server the way that I want it to work, and then Prisma could just do the rest from there? Because it sounds like you're taking care of most of the work already; why not just go the extra mile, and I could just tell you how I would like it to look?
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** To a certain extent, that's exactly how it works... Basically, Prisma takes care of all of your data resolving and data mapping. The same way as an ORM is supposed to, through GraphQL we can leverage more information about -- we know what a client would query, we know exactly the type of information, so we can implement that very efficiently. But all the business logic that you want to implement - you would still handle that in your own GraphQL server... Such as authentication, authorization, actual business logic, like sending an email or processing an order - this is still what you take care of, but we make the data access extremely simple.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You mentioned that some tools around these things can create sub-optimal fetching or querying, or whatever happens to be... The generator has a generic abstraction, and so the specific scenario of this particular use case cannot be optimized... So with Prisma, is it hands-off so far as, like, can I tweak things when I know more than Prisma can now with regard to performance, or how a certain data structure should be fetched? Or is it all too far away to touch.
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** Sure. So there is a way to also drop back to the raw database access under the hood if you really want that, but in most cases this already gives you -- there are two things to consider here. One - is it the kind of data that you want to get back? That is one scenario, and Prisma already gives you the abstraction that you want there. The second point is about implementing things more efficiently, and this is exactly one of the core things that Prisma does for you that wouldn't be possible with a traditional ORM.
+
+\[40:05\] A traditional ORM is like a stateless function that gives you a DSL to express your data requirements; as you collect your data requirements, at some point you say "Execute", so it builds up a SQL query, it compiles your data requirements from your DSL into constructing an unoptimized query, it sends that query to your database, and the database now has to deal with your crazy query...
+
+Whereas with Prisma, you would basically construct all of your data requirements through your GraphQL resolver system and just forward into the Prisma layer, and the Prisma layer has then a query engine that can most efficiently talk to your database or to different databases... And also, since it knows about how data is changing, actually has a caching layer built in. So it's a way more performant way to access your data.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** When you and I were discussing these possibilities earlier on, you said "Well, if we supported Postgres, you could use Prisma..." It sounds like I've procrastinated myself into support now, because you've listed MySQL, Postgres and MongoDB currently supported, and then coming soon, ElasticSearch, Neo4j, Cassandra, and an icon that I'm not familiar with; maybe that's Cassandra's icon. Is that the current state of affairs, and can I use this with my Postgres database today?
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** Exactly. So for the Postgres database we are supporting -- we distinguish between an active connector and a passive connector. The active connector is where you would use GraphQL SDL and allow Prisma to migrate your database, whereas a passive connector would be that you map to your existing database and you would still migrate your database on its own. So for MySQL and Postgres, we both support an active and passive connector, and for MongoDB we're about to roll out a beta version of I guess both an active and a passive connector.
+
+Over the coming months, depending on user feedback, we are planning to add support for any kind of database, really.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So did I hear you correctly - regardless of how you use the active or the passive adaptor, I am still going to need to migrate my database to a new format?
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** No. So for the active connector there you would let Prisma migrate your database. For a passive connector, the way you would set that up - concretely in your case, you would basically connect Prisma to your database, Prisma would for the first time introspect your current database schema, from that it would generate a data model expressed in GraphQL SDL that maps to your existing database schema, and from there on you can either let Prisma take care of migrations in the future, or still migrate yourself, and you would then still adjust the data model expressed in GraphQL SDL.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What about concerns with authentication and authorization? We often think about authentication, but authorization turns out to be a much hairier issue, business logic-wise. How are those things handled?
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** \[43:57\] The way we think about that is that authorization is very much -- of course, there are common cases, but very much that's very specific to your product that you're building, to your company... So the best abstraction to really express that is code, especially if you have already built libraries around that... So that's just the best abstraction. We want to embrace that. So the way we allow you to do that is that you would implement that authorization system in your own GraphQL server.
+
+So you would still use Prisma to resolve your data, but you would check who's allowed to access which kind of data in your own GraphQL resolver layer. The same goes for authentication - you would implement your authentication system using JWT, or whatever you wanna use, in your own GraphQL server, that sits in front of Prisma. Then Prisma doesn't need to know about authentication or authorization.
+
+Of course, Prisma on its own has also a simple authentication system, but that's rather meant for that the service cannot be accessed in an authenticated way... So more to secure the service-to-service communication.
+
+**Break:** \[45:29\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Johannes, we've been talking around obviously the tech behind this, Prisma, where it's going, but it seems like there's an enterprise being propped up behind this. You've got some news you're coming out with very soon, and a company, it sounds like... Going from just simply open source to a company behind this called Prisma as well. Is that fair to say?
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** Yeah, I guess so. We have quite a bit of history, and I think adding up to where we left off with the last episode, we've been super fortunate to build a really big community around us and what we've been doing over the last few years, building up GraphCool as a GraphQL back-end as a service... And that has really led us where we are today.
+
+To kind of like give you the quick version of how all of these things have evolved, basically we've built GraphCool to really make the barrier to entry for developers - especially front-end developers - to get their own GraphQL back-end as low as possible. Over the last few years we've basically seen a lot of big companies and a lot of more experienced developers also adopt GraphQL and adopt GraphCool, and push GraphCool really to its limits.
+
+\[48:06\] We added more and more features, we added more and more abstractions to make it more powerful for people to build bigger applications with GraphCool, and what we've seen is the experienced people are more and more looking for like how could they bring their own code to implement the business logic that they wanted.
+
+On the other side, what we've also seen is the more serious a company was, the more of a problem it was for them to have data living anywhere but inside of their cloud or on their premises. We got requests like, "Hey, could we run GraphCool on our own? Could we just use the database part of GraphCool for our project?" and that has really been the foundation for Prisma...
+
+We've seen that, okay, GraphCool consists of multiple pieces, and the core part of it is really this data mapping unit that maps database to a GraphQL API. That has really pushed us to say, okay, let's actually invest in that particular part of the GraphCool framework, which is Prisma as the core query engine. That sort of like resulted in this shift of focus for us, even going so far that similar to how other companies have done in the past, like 10gen for example changing to MongoDB, with the core product being MongoDB... We took this big step and rebranded the company and all of the community and everything around that from GraphCool to Prisma to really show our commitment and show our focus for Prisma.
+
+And there are various angles to that too, to explain it, but that's sort of the quick version. Like you teased, we actually have some quite exciting news for us as a company, as we've been very fortunate to have raised a pretty substantial seed round. We've just raised a 4.5 million dollar seed round from some of the best investors out of Silicon Valley, where we are just about to open a second office... And that just allows us to really grow the team, grow the back-end development force behind that, and it allows us to also grow the new San Francisco office. So if any of the listeners are looking for a job and are interested in GraphQL, definitely go to our Jobs page.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So Prisma is an evolution of what you've learned or what the community has asked for around GraphCool, and is also a company... So not only open source, but also a company. You've got cloud coming, you've got an enterprise coming, and you just mentioned you've got a seed round, so clearly you're heading in the right direction in terms of -- what I think is kind of interesting around open source and combining that with business is that some will offer support, or services... In your case, you're adding cloud infrastructure and potentially software as a service as the for-profit business model on top of your open source. Is that right?
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** That's almost right. For us, the focus on the monetization front is really where we see the biggest demand, and where we also see that we can build a substantial business, which is more on the enterprise side, since what we are building with Prisma as an infrastructure component is very similar to patterns that are already present in enterprise software systems.
+
+\[52:13\] So if you think about it, Prisma and what Prisma enables - it really enables GraphQL as a universal query language. That's very similar to what you had a decade ago with ODBC, so that idea is not new at all, and fits really well into an enterprise context, where additionally, through the data mapping part, you also have additional requirements, mostly around security and audit logging, various features around that. There are also many opportunities to just implement more efficient data-logging mechanisms, caching... So this is really what we are seeing a lot of demand for, where we're working with bigger companies on an enterprise version of Prisma, and that's really what we focus on from a monetization product perspective.
+
+You've also mentioned Prisma Cloud, and what we see with Prisma Cloud is mostly sort of empowering developers with better workflows around databases, on the foundation that Prisma provides.
+
+So you can think about Prisma Cloud kind of like as a database workflow platform. Over time, we'll build various integrations with different cloud providers, where you actually host your Prisma server, where you host your database, so you could for example with Prisma Cloud connect to your AWS account where you run your database - let's say an AWS Aurora - and you're running your Prisma server on ECS or on Fargate, and you get all of the instrumentation inside Prisma Cloud... But more importantly, you get a lot of workflows around that.
+
+We for example have a feature that's called Data Browser. Think about that like -- maybe you've seen Sequel Pro, PopSQL or think back to PHPMyAdmin...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, no...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Don't go that far. \[laughter\]
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** Sorry about that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** PopSQL, let's stay there.
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** Yeah, that's a good one. So think about that, and for your data across any kind of database - one for developers, but also for non-developers, for more business users. We see a lot of companies using Prisma Cloud basically to roll out access to their entire customers support team, to the entire marketing team, to the entire sales team, that they get access to the actual application data without the development team needing to build a lot of admin back-end interfaces, or these admin panels. So that's certainly a workflow that we see a lot, but also workflows around typical development processes.
+
+\[55:40\] Thinking about continuous deployment, we actually will roll out an integration with GitHub, that you can simply push your changes to your GitHub repository and Prisma Cloud will deploy the database changes on your behalf. So if you're familiar with Netlify for example, how you can simply push your changes to GitHub and Netlify automatically deploys your new website. Think about the same thing, but actually for your database and your database migrations, where changes that are non-destructive - they can be configured in such a way that it's just like rolled out.
+
+And if there are database changes that might actually introduce some breaking changes, that's sort of batched up and you can manually decide to roll it out into production. So various workflows around that, and this is what we're offering for free with Prisma Cloud, that people can just get better workflows. And if people want the same sort of workflows, but more in a company setting, where all of that lives in your own cloud, or where all of that lives on premises, this is where you can get the same features as part of the enterprise edition.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So it's actually gonna be an on-premise product for enterprise.
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** There's two different products. There's Prisma Cloud, and Prisma Enterprise, and both of them offer this Prisma platform, this value-add, these additional workflows around Prisma. Prisma Cloud offers that in a hosted way that you can use as a free SaaS product right away, that integrates with GitHub or with your AWS account. We're actually also working with the guys at ZEIT to also implement integration there... And if you wanna use all of that on premises, you can force your data privacy rules etc. This is where we can deploy the Prisma platform in your own cloud or on your on-premise servers.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** First of all, congratulations... We've breezed over your 4.5 million round, but that's a lot of money, and probably a lot of work, so congratulations on that. Feel free to name names - you said you've convinced some of the smartest people in the Valley. Well, name names, by all means; let us know who's getting behind you.
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** This round was led by Kleiner Perkins... At Kleiner Perkins by Mamoon and Bucky. Mamoon, for example, has been involved with Slack, Intercom, Box... Very well-known companies. We really feel that we have a great home there, as part of like a new generation of development tools, that they really invest a lot into.
+
+We've also worked with various other smaller investors, and also got a lot of great angels on board, like for example Guillermo Rauch from ZEIT actually, or one of the creators of GraphQL came in as an angel investor, we have the CEO of Cockroach, we have the CEO of Kong... Various experts in the industry who really can help us a lot with strategic advice, and just like building a great partnership there. We also have the founder of Algolia... So various people; we are super-grateful for having them on board.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** One of the questions I was gonna ask is was the sales pitch tougher in terms of getting them to invest because of the open source nature? But the names that you're naming - it sounds like these people understand open source businesses natively.
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** \[59:55\] Oh yeah, for sure. It's actually funny you mentioned that, since it was almost like a filter for us to see who are we talking to or who we are not talking to as part of this fundraising process. We really wanted to make sure that we work with people who understand open source. A lot of people - it can go as far as like... Nowadays, if you're building software for developers, also especially the enterprise grade, and it's not open source, then that sort of doesn't make sense.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Really?
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** Open source is really like the entry ticket for you to even be considered in a new enterprise environment.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Such a counter way of thinking than years ago, right Jerod?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's how it's playing out, but to hear someone say it out loud is sort of like "Wow, it's different."
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** Yeah, for sure. The world is completely changing in that regard... But it makes sense. If you think back 10-20 years ago, most enterprise software has been so top-down, and everyone made the decision of like "Okay, we're gonna adopt this software, and then roll it out in the entire company and it has either been adopted or gone on the shelf, but nowadays, like we've talked about at the beginning of the show, we have now front-end developers who really want to start adopting a technology, and whether they're allowed or not, they start doing so... So bottom-up adoption is really the new default, and it's almost impossible to have bottom-up adoption that's not based on open source... So that's pretty obvious for us.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's an interesting perspective too... You know, not that developers are the bottom-up, or the doers, the implementers... So it's the bare metal up, maybe might be... Bottom has sort of a negative connotation, but I'm feeling you. And I get to say that often to our sponsors; it's like "Listen, we talk to the influencers out there, so this is a great platform for you to share your message." And hearing you say that is music to my ears, because I say that so often.
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** Oh yeah, for sure. This is how you sort of like get a foothold in a company... And that ties in very well with how we think about our adoption strategy. Prisma on its own is completely open source and completely free to use, and the developers who start using it, they don't even think yet about these kind of enterprise features that they have... But once it reaches a certain level in the company, then the compliance features, security features and so on kick in, and then it sort of turns it around... The entire open source angle - that allows for bottom-up movement, but once it reaches such a level, then they're looking at it as a company, like "Okay, but do they provide us an enterprise version of that? Does that come with premium grade support? What about SLAs? What about different certifications?" and this is where an enterprise version comes in... Which, that on its own not necessarily has to be open source; more and more companies actually also have the enterprise version open source.
+
+I think you just spoke about exactly that in regards to Elastic on one of the previous shows... But open source is really the key for this bottom-up movement.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, on that note, maybe you can more clearly define the line between open source Prism and Prism Enterprise...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** PrismA.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:04:03.09\] Geez... I've said that in the break, y'all; I'm sorry. I keep saying Prism, and it's my bad. Prisma. Prisma open source and Prisma Enterprise... Thank you, Jerod, for correcting me, by the way. It's so embarrassing. How do you define the difference? How do you put features into open source and how do you define what doesn't go back into open source?
+
+If for example a pull request comes in for a contribution that collides with your vision for Enterprise, how do you discern whether or not to enable that? That's some of the often asked questions out there in open source, around business being built around open source.
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** Right, so the good news there is that it's typically fairly straightforward. A lot of the features that we wanna put into the enterprise version - the bottom-up movement doesn't really ask for that. So no front-end React developer would ask about this sort of like compliance, or certain audit logging; what they ask about, a) Does this support Postgres? Does this support Mongo? Does this support this GraphQL feature?
+
+Our philosophy around that is very much like you should be able to run Prisma completely in production, without any caveat, from a functionality point of view. We don't wanna restrict you running Prisma in production. But then there's like a fairly clear line towards enterprise-grade features, which is then available in the Enterprise version. So again, things around security are part of that, audit logging, but also certain compliance features, certain authentication mechanisms... For example, for the Prisma platform you get a SAML, single sign-on mechanism, you get various logging mechanisms, you get better ways to collaborate in certain workflows that you need in a bigger company... So this is sort of where we draw the line.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I guess the reason why I asked that question too is I saw two there - 1) query accelerator, and then performance metrics. So anytime you talk about speed or any advancements in, say, an Enterprise or a pro-only version, when you talk about open core or whatever model you wanna call this, how that may... I guess, in that case, maybe general open source developers using it don't care, but maybe some might be like "Hey, it's accelerated in the premium version for enterprises, on-premise, but not for me... Can I contribute that back, or why?"
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** Exactly, and a lot of these things are basically things that we build for you, so you don't have to build them yourself. For example this performance monitoring - once you roll out a certain system, you'll also think about "How can I monitor it?" These are things that you would build yourself, or you get out of the box, as part of a premium (enterprise) version. So that's a fairly common play.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** In the first part of the conversation we talked quite a bit about how we haven't talked to you in basically a year, so we're catching up... And I believe in the last conversation we had we talked about the GraphQL conference. And Jerod, if I remember correctly, I think we were talking to him right around the same time the conference was taking place again, and this next one is happening in June, so maybe there's some...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I think that's right. It was June(ish) when we published the last episode.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, so it's been basically a year, and here comes the next conference. Tell us more about how the community has changed, and what's going on with this conference?
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** \[01:08:11.20\] That's funny, that's great timing. Yeah, we have the GraphQL Europe Conference 2018 just coming up in mid-June. That's actually June 18th... Sorry. Sorry about that, June 15th.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** June 15th.
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** \[laughs\] June 15th...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Did we get the date right?
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** ...back in Berlin. This year we'll have twice as many attendees, and just a couple of days ago we've been together with a couple of other people in the GraphQL ecosystem, like Lee Byron, one of the creators of GraphQL, who is always helping us to select the speakers... So we've just finalized the speakers schedule, which we'll announce over the next couple of weeks... But we have some really, really top notch speakers in there, and it was crazy difficult for us to select all of these talks; we got multiple hundreds of really fantastic talk submissions, so it was really tough for us to decide there... But I think we've got a really fantastic line-up of very diverse speakers, and super interesting talks. I'm super excited for that.
+
+Actually, as part of this show we've prepared a discount code which gives you 15% off, which is called "changelog".
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Nice, I like that.
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** So for some of your listeners who are looking for an excuse to come out to Berlin on June 15th, hopefully that makes it a bit easier for them.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, one of your speakers is Peggy Rayzis, engineer at Apollo. She is actually on an upcoming episode of the React podcast, which is also in our podcast network... So stay tuned to that.
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** That's awesome.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Great, that's interesting - so you've got the evolution of GraphCool to Prisma, and then you've got a company formed around it, you've got a seed round which is substantial (4.5 million), great investors, people who clearly understand the landscape of developers tooling, and not only that, but the importance of it being open source as it pertains to growth, and enterprise, and all the for-profit models you need to have to actually have developers working on some of this tooling. You've got your hands full. Then this conference, and then GraphQL Radio Podcast... You've got lots of things happening; how do you manage your time? It's crazy.
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** \[01:11:00.05\] Well, the answer for that question constantly changes.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Very little sleep?
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** \[laughs\] That's definitely one of the tradeoffs that I have to take into account. But the most important answer for that is really having a fantastic team that we're working with and that we are growing. It's been so incredible to see our team just taking on more and more responsibilities, and just driving that... This is where I'm surprised sometimes myself with all of the amazing things we're doing. It's not just me behind all of these anymore, so that's super-awesome.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm curious what size is your team these days?
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** As we speak, today we're still just nine people, but we're expecting to almost double that towards the end of this year, most around the engineering capacity - both in the front-end, around the product, but also around our open source projects... Also, as I mentioned, we're opening a small office in San Francisco, mostly around just being closer with the local community there. I'm starting a sales team over there, and investing a bit more into marketing. So if any of these things sound interesting to some of the listeners, please feel free to either get in touch with me personally via Twitter or email, or just go to our jobs page - that's prisma.io/jobs. I guess we'll also put that into the show notes.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** 100% we'll put that in the show notes for sure. That's awesome... Definitely seeing lots of change for you all in the right direction, the San Francisco office you just mentioned - that's amazing; building a marketing team, sales team seems totally the time for that right now. Anything else you wanna say in closing for the listeners before we tail off?
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** No, but it's been fantastic to have been on the show again. Let's see what happens until the next year.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We'll see you next June, right?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, exactly.
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** Alright, I'll put it into the calendar.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, we'll mark the day right now. Well, actually it's May right now, so it's barely May...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, but we're excited.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We're a month early this year, so we'll see. Maybe it's 10 months from now instead of 11. Whatever. Johannes, thank you so much for your time and thanks for all you do in the open source community. You just do so much - you've got a great team you're growing there, a great business you're growing there, you do awesome stuff for open source... Thank you so much for taking your time to join us here on the show. Thank you.
+
+**Johannes Schickling:** For sure. Thanks so much.
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+**Jerod Santo:** Alright Kurt, so you're with Fly, previously with MongoHQ, which was renamed Compose, and before even that was Ars Technica, way back in the day. Take me back to Ars Technica, what you were up to there, because that's a publication that I really admire and respect, and then tell us how you got to be co-founder of Fly.io, from journalist at Ars Technica.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** I actually was always a wannabe writer. In college (1999-2000) I started writing what I could for Ars Technica, and it was just a hobby; it was a really ugly site, we were just kind of doing it for fun. The hot article at the time was like "How to overclock your dual Celeron for maximum performance in-- one of them was Alien vs. Predator." Anyway, old-school game stuff, it was cool.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Nice.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** So I wrote a little bit for the site. I remember reviewing the first version of Mozilla with tabs, and I'm very proud of myself for in the review being like "I don't know why anyone would bother to use tabs. I think this is just a fad, it's not gonna happen in browsers..."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, no... \[laughter\]
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** So I was spot on with that one, as far as I can tell.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[04:06\] That reminds me of the guy from Slashdot - his initial take on the iPod was how lame it was.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** Yeah, exactly.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** He never lived that one down. Now, you've managed to escape the history of saying tabs were useless... Until now; you've just brought right back up.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** I did. I think I hedged a little bit, because at the time Windows had just released the -- they collapsed the taskbar buttons, so I was like "The OS has tabs" was kind of my general back-off... Anyway, it was funny. I'm very proud of that one. But anyway, I'm not as good a writer in terms of like actually regularly producing content as I wanted to be, so I started just working on the technical portions of Ars, like writing code for them; I did image hosting for subscribers at one point, and it was just a fun way to work on really interesting projects.
+
+Then ultimately I ended up writing a lot of content management stuff. I tried to start a company to build the content management system, but Ars was the only customer, and that didn't work. But I just continued working for them, and it actually became a real gig when Condé Nast acquired the company in 2008. Then I worked there as an actual employee for three years, and it was a very interesting experience. Actually, a lot of what I'm working on now is from problems and frustrations I had even 10-11 years ago at Ars. It's kind of a fun full-circle story there.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Your last couple articles here, the Recent Stories by Kurt Mackey, as according to your author page, still on Ars Technica: "IE9 preview 6 was available now as a secret Beta UI."
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** I think I was at WWDC when I was writing that one. There's probably a picture of a scanwich - a scan sandwich. It's my author picture, too. Is it still there?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yes! Yes, it is.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** \[laughs\] Scanwich.com was a fantastic blog.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's spectacular! Link in the show notes for people who wanna check out the scanwich. And then "Phone in Motion: messaging on Windows Phone 7." I guess this was eight years ago, but it feels like even further, because of how fast things move in our industry.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** Right, yeah. Windows Phone 7, wow. \[laughs\] I don't remember what phone I was using at the time. I probably had a Palm Treo; that was my favorite. I don't know if I've ever reviewed that one.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So you were an early adopter on the smartphone.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** Sorry, I was way off. The Palm Pre, the one with the sliding keyboard and with the magnetic charger thing.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Did that have Web OS on it?
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** That's the one, yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh yeah. I never had that. I was straight from flip phone to iPhone, and I didn't get the original iPhone, I had the second one (iPhone 3G) and I've never even tried anything else... But I know a lot of people were huge on Web OS.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** It was very cool. I think you can actually see a piece of it everywhere now, if you look close enough... Either because people copied them, or just they made really smart decisions that everyone else kind of got to at some point.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So you left Ars and you started - according to your Ars bio - a MongoDB hosting, which we now know as Compose. It was MongoHQ for years. Is that the right name, Mongo?
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** MongoHQ, yeah. Actually, MongoHQ existed; I was a very early customer, and then joined up with Ben and Jason at Y Combinator. So I quit to go do MongoHQ with them. That was the next five years of my life, I think. It was a lot of fun.
+
+We basically started as a MongoDB hosting company at a very interesting time, because all these people were trying out this hot new database that helped them ship stuff faster. One of the things I learned about devs is it's actually really frustrating to be able to write something locally and to not be able to show it to people, so like "mini production." I made air quotes when I said that. \[laughter\]
+
+I think we ended up just capturing this wave of people who wanted to publish applications that were using MongoDB on the back-end, and no developer wants to run a database, so it was a very natural thing to try out. We ran, at one point, like 150k free databases for people. We ultimately killed the free databases, because we learned that free database users were never gonna pay us money for anything.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** There was no upgrade path from those people? They just stayed there?
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** \[08:13\] Yeah, not only was there not a path... What we learned from databases specifically was the people who will pay you money will pay you at the beginning, if it's cheap enough. Because $15/month just isn't that big a deal. And the people who refuse to pay you money are probably never gonna change their minds.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, that's kind of the downfall of the freemium model - the free people who you think are growing those opportunities for upgrades are a) rarely gonna upgrade, if ever, like you found out, and b) they tend to be the most needy customers in terms of support. That's not my experience, I've never ran a SaaS, but that's what I've heard.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** No, they are, definitely. They are the loudest on Twitter... One other problem we ended up having is we'd basically send everyone to try out MongoHQ, the free database, and the reality of it was it wasn't even our best experience; we were better off giving people a free month on the actual paid product, because it represented all of the things we'd be doing for them, instead of them having to imagine and get a subpar product.
+
+I learned a lot about freemium there. I'm mildly cynical about it now. I have strong opinions on how I would like to do freemium because of it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Interesting. We might get to that, but let's talk about this next move... So you left MongoHQ/Compose and now you're co-founder of Fly.io. Tell us about that decision in your life, and then the opportunity that you had with Fly.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** We sold Compose to IBM in 2015, and I made it eight months at IBM. I learned I'm not a big corporate guy... And quit, and had just this giant list of stuff that I kind of wanted to try. Essentially, I quit that job and didn't really have a thing to focus on, and I ended up trying out a lot of other stuff. I started taking impro classes, which I still do. It was great.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, really?
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** Yeah, yeah. But I needed something to work on. It wasn't even necessarily a money -- I mean, obviously, we need income. But what I really needed emotionally was like a project, so a friend of mine named Jerome (who had worked at Compose) and I were just going through ideas... At that point I had sworn off infrastructure, I was like "I'm not gonna do it again. I want to do something entirely different."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Like improv.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** Yeah, exactly.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Did you try anything else? Was there any other random things that you did that maybe didn't stick?
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** I tried racing cars, because I had always wanted to, and I had time... And that was fun, but it didn't scratch any creative itch. It's a very mechanical -- like, to go faster on the track you have to do the same thing right every time, and not a lot of creativity there.
+
+I did like rally cars, because off-road is a lot more unpredictable and you slide around and stuff, but still, it wasn't fulfilling in the way that I think I was looking for. The improv helped, because that was creative.
+
+I also tried being a full-time parent. I have four kids, so I spent three months as a full-time father, and that was plenty for me. I was fully content after three months.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] You don't really get out of the house after that.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** I really enjoyed, I'm glad I did it, but I'm not a full-time parent forever.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What about financially? Full-time parent, obviously, is part of a household, but in terms of things that bring in finances - the rally car thing, the improv thing... These were hobbies or creative endeavors, but was Fly your next effort at financial success, or were there things in there, false starts before that?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We didn't really have any other stars; we had a lot of ideas, for things like helping parents control springtime, and other things that it would probably be really hard to make money with... But I think the farthest we got on any of that stuff was mainly writing out the idea, trying to determine if it'd be useful.
+
+\[11:54\] One of the reasons we did Fly is I decided it'd be a good idea to go talk to our previous investors just to keep the relationships warm, just in case we ever wanted to raise money, and a lot of them actually -- I was just talking through ideas, and we actually had several people offer to invest purely on the basis of Fly, basically, the one infrastructure idea we had... I was like, "That's interesting..." That's a big shortcut to save a lot of money fundraising and just be able to do something.
+
+I feel like that was fortunate, and we probably won't ever get that experience again, but we basically got an easy round of money out of it, which is never something that happens as far as I can tell.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Were there any question marks, like it's almost too easy? Sometimes if it's too easy, if something's too good to be true, it probably is. Were there ever doubts that maybe -- like, how is this going so well? Because so many people struggle to get there at all.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** Yeah, so I'd gotten pretty -- I think I have a relatively healthy take on fundraising... I didn't really have doubts about it being too easy, because fundraising isn't actually a sign of anything; it's like a thing you can use to do good stuff. But it was like "Well, we've raised money. Now we've gotta actually get to work" That was my mindset.
+
+But it has been a really fascinating learning experience to deliberately build a product from scratch underneath a round of money and get it launched. Everything else I've ever worked on has been honestly accidentally successful, but what's really been a hobby I spent a lot of time on, that then became a business because people wanted it to be... And it was a lot less intentional, I guess I should say. So it's been really fascinating to learn how to build a company from scratch without already having a product, basically. It's been a lot of fun. So that all the doubts from that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Gotcha. So what did the pitch look like back then, around Fly? What were you telling people you were solving, what was the problem space?
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** A lot of this actually came out of Condé Nast. Basically, the way I was explaining this to people was there was a layer of the internet that developers don't have API's for, which is kind of the load balancing/proxy layer; CDNs work at that layer, but you don't really have the ability to control your CDN. Load balancers work at that layer, but other than setting up a load balancer, maybe a REST API on Amazon, you can't change how it behaves. So the way I was pitching this was like "All internet infrastructure will ultimately be a programmable environment, because you need that level of control to apply business metrics to your infrastructure."
+
+We were right about how we were pitching this. I didn't know the exact metric at the time, but one of the things we've learned is companies used to track time to first byte religiously, so when they were setting up a new service, they'd track time to first byte for any request that was made to their application, and try and optimize that. That was a very technical metric, but it didn't really mean anything to businesspeople or salespeople, or execs at a lot of these companies.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** Then what we found is that there's like Lighthouse scores, which is the Chrome app performance tool.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, it's meaningful now.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** Yeah, it's very meaningful. They buy that like a good Lighthouse score equals money, and one of the really interesting things we've come across is like "Cool! Well, you can actually program at this layer to improve the Lighthouse score." It's weird, because it matches the very broad thing we were pitching, but it's not exactly how I expected to end up making a business happen.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's a bit crazy... I just think about that and I think the reason why they are convinced that that is meaningful now - even though it's always been meaningful in terms of end users, it foresaw performance and all those things...
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** Right.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** ...a) we have metrics, and we have the articles and probably case studies written by Amazon, talking about how much money they lose with every second or millisecond. Then we also have the other big player, which is Google, with the stick of Google search results. So as soon as they say "Now speed matters in your SRE or your pagerank", now it changes everything.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** \[16:07\] It does. It really does. And we were using those ten years ago at Condé Nast; we were beating the speed drum using those same quotes from Amazon, those same quotes from Google. So yeah, Google has basically put that stake in the ground, of "Speed matters. We're gonna apply it to speed rankings", but they've also simultaneously given people this score that is indicative of what they expect the user experience to look like.
+
+Previously, we've used lots of tools to track stuff over time, and it's that leap between what this tool is telling us and what we actually think users' experience has always been too big. Now it's very easy to -- if you go to any Gatsby-generated site, it's scoring a Lighthouse 100 and you click on a link on that site and everyone's like "Oh yeah, that was really fast. That actually matches what I'm seeing."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Exactly. So now it's more apparent to the business side of businesses that this is something worth investing in, but back when you were giving the pitch, it probably was still somewhat of a hard sell. But you weren't selling necessarily the speed; I guess you were selling the malleability of CDNs, or the programmability of infrastructure.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** Yeah, speed is actually a really good thing to solve at this layer... But yeah, what we've ended up building now is kind of a global application platform, and ideas like "People should write JavaScript once, and they should deploy it, and they shouldn't worry about where in the world it's running." It's really well-suited for proxy-level problems, it's really well-suited for people who wanna build CDNs, it's really helpful for speeding things up. We're hoping it's actually just an interesting take on application architecture and deployment, and what we think the future of building apps is gonna look like.
+
+**Break:** \[17:50\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So you had a pitch to investors that was convincing, and then you had to go out and actually build the thing... Give us the timeline here. So it's 2018 June, you have a product out there... How long did it take, where was the actual fundraising, versus building a company and getting to a place where you are now?
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** We "finished" fundraising right at the beginning of 2017. At that point it was finished, like "We need to stop this. This is not something we should spend time on anymore. It's time to get to work." It only took about a month really, because like I said, it wasn't intentional. We obviously didn't need the money, because I wasn't asking for it. I've learned the best way to pitch investors is ask them for advice, and mean it; just, all you want from them is advice, and sometimes the money comes. It was a very interesting thing to see.
+
+\[19:47\] So we raised money really quickly, and then we sat down to start building. We had some ideas for the very smallest thing we could give to customers. I get really anxious without building things in stealth. There's so many startups that are in stealth mode that never ship anything, or they make good promises but never get customers... And I really, really like the feedback from customers or users or people seeing your stuff. It's nerve-wrecking to put things out there, but it's less comfortable for me to not have something out there, because I just don't -- it's hard to wake up every morning and be like "I'm just gonna work on this thing, but nobody can see." It was very important to me that -- which kind of goes back to the MongoHQ thing a little bit... It was important for me that we could put an app or database up really fast.
+
+It was at the end of April 2017 we actually launched our first service, and all it really was was a way for people to combine applications on the same hostname. We actually have onehostname.com with like a Lord of the Rings-inspired cartoon, but the idea was while you have your app and you have your blog and you have your marketing site, and it's actually really kind of a pain to put all those things under Fly.io, instead of blog.fly.io...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's a fact. So instead of sub-domaining, which is what you end up doing to have completely disparate applications hosted on the same domain, you're providing a way that you can use subdirectories, basically, or paths, instead of that, all combined together, but have completely separate infrastructure for each one. There's no coupling at all between the implementations.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** Correct. And a lot of the paths could just be third-party hosting services. Your Ghost(Pro) blog could be on /articles, which is exactly how ours is. Your GitHub Pages site could be on the root, and your Rails app could be on the root if you're logged in. That was the extent of the service at the time.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's useful.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** It was useful. Startups have a myth, and when we go back until our founding myth, what it'll be was like we needed to launch this service so we could build the platform underneath it... Which was never quite that clear in our minds that's what we were doing, but that's how it kind of worked out. So we got a lot of people using that... We ultimately expanded it to let people add a whole bunch of custom hostnames to their app, and that was useful for people running like a blogging service, or anything else; it was very difficult to issue 1,000 SSL certificates for your customers, and customers have started demanding it. Even GitHub Pages at the time didn't do SSL, when everybody wanted it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** So we ended up running about several thousand domains on that platform, on that service, and serving several hundred million requests per month on top of it, and never charged for it. We actually launched with pricing, but hadn't built billing yet... And as we looked at it, we thought "Well, this is a cool thing to give people, but it's not really the product we want them to pay for." It wasn't a good enough product, we didn't think. That was at the end of April.
+
+Then in April of 2018 we actually launched the application runtime. So it took a year, basically, of running this for people and then building what turns out to be a custom JavaScript runtime from scratch, and then getting that deployed, actually launching that for customers.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's pretty fast, I think. Things probably felt slower for you as you're the one toiling away...
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** They did...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** But it was pretty quick moving. We were joking before we started hitting Record that things move very fast in this industry, and just to give a little bit of the inside baseball on this particular show, we first started talking in late March, and now it's almost late June... And a lot has changed, even with your website... Even while I was talking with Christina, getting this how set up, I was at your website, and she's like "Actually, hit Refresh, because there's a whole new version of it. The branding is different..." So things move very fast, and I actually even noticed since then on your homepage there's a big button now that says "JavaScript at the Edge" and right next to it, in this orange pill which I actually didn't catch at first (which is strange) it says "Open Source", which to me is new...
+
+\[24:08\] So let's talk about what Fly is today, and how you guys describe it, because it's a bit nebulous; I think a lot of these infrastructure platformy startups are nebulous, you're not sure... But the tagline right now is "JavaScript at the Edge", and then there's your open source tag, and then it says "Fly is a global JavaScript runtime that makes apps faster. You can optimize images, pre-render, cache partials, and more." So I get a little bit of that, I understand what I can do with it, but how do you describe it to folks who are like "What's Fly?" What do you tell them?
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** There's two stories, and one of the things I learned doing this is like we have this story for what I would call the investor class, but it doesn't always mean investors; it really just means people who think about the world and care about where technology is going. One of those stories is we're building a global application runtime, because we don't think that people should have to worry about where things are deployed; we think people would be better off if they just write code and run it, and it does what they want. And it's resilient, and it's fast for people wherever in the world they are, because nobody builds a startup targeting just people in Chicago anymore. You're almost global by default when you launch software now.
+
+So that's the big vision, that's the pitch to investors, and that's this really aspirational thing that if we look like that in ten years, then we've built kind of what we expected to. One of the things I learned even at the last couple of companies was like customers don't care about the big vision; they really wanna know how to apply this to their problems right now...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Right.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** And it's fair... Partially because it's easy to sell a big vision, but it's hard to know when to use new technology even. This is extra-interesting, because at the last successful company we were hosting databases that people already knew about. There was no point when someone would go "I don't understand what you do." They'd go "I don't know what Mongo is" and we'd say "Then you probably shouldn't even be looking at us." But if they knew what Mongo was, they understood what the product was and it scratched an itch they had right then.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** Building a platform like this is interesting, because you end up having to build the platform -- it's a little bit like building an operating system, I think. It can do a lot of different things, and we think it's a good way to do a lot of different things, but what we end up having to focus on for customers, just by necessity of how much time we can spend and the story we can tell - there's one or two things that are very valuable to them.
+So right now, the most valuable thing we can help people with is improving our performance. It just means speed, it means Lighthouse scores... So that's the story we've sort of iterated to on the website. People like the word Edge. Devs like hot, new technology.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] That's kind of funny, because I actually have a negative reaction to the word "Edge."
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** Because of the browser?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** No, it's not because of the browser; it's definitely in there... But just because everybody is using it now. We were just recently at Microsoft Build, and Microsoft is talking about the Intelligent Edge... A lot of the AWS's, the Azures -- everything's Edge all of a sudden. So I get negative buzzword reactions. If I start hearing a word too much, even if it's a fine word, I don't have any problem with the word, it just starts to be like, "Yeah... Another Edge? Come on, guys. Come up with something fresh." \[laughs\]
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** I have the exact same feeling, and what's funny is -- at one point our site said The Serverless Edge, which probably would have just made your head explode...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yes, for sure.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** What's really fascinating to me is like for you that's true, for me that's true, because we're immersed in this stuff. I think a lot of people, especially devs at some of the larger companies we're talking to - they're actually really drawn to serverless, because they feel like it's this interesting thing. They're really drawn to Edge, because they feel like it's this interesting thing, and it's one of the few places where the language works for customers and for--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And for investors. Yeah, that makes sense.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** \[28:08\] Yeah. So we'll keep changing that, just depending on who's doing what, and at some point we'll know what people respond the best to, but... That's the other fun thing about devs - 10 of them will like something, and 90 won't, or another 7 will like something else. Until we can get the site to say exactly what people are thinking all the time, we'll just keep changing.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right, exactly. Until the machines just know, customized based on what I've responded to previously... Or the GDPR might stop us from getting that done, but anyways, heading upstream there. You said something very interesting, that resonated with me, coming from somebody who's -- you know, you're providing/building a platform, a runtime, a thing where I use it and I don't have to worry about any of the other stuff, besides what my code does, hit a button and the world gets it. As a customer, buying hosting or buying infrastructure - either as a service, or going out and buying hardware - is a very big decision for us, and you never know what's gonna happen.
+
+A lot of startups disappear, and the worst thing that could happen is that my infrastructure disappears. Or maybe I'm not this way; maybe I definitely hate IBM and I love MongoHQ, but then IBM buys MongoHQ and now my database is with the company that I'd been despising privately... Especially with devs, we get very emotional about certain things, and it seems like it'd be a really hard sell, because to get me to either move or to try something new in a serious way, that's not like a throw-away application, that's a really hard sell... So what are your thoughts on that?
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** It is. That's actually part of the reason we open sourced the runtime. There's a lot there. I think devs expect what they're building on top of to be open source at this point. Node is open source, the browsers are open source... It's rare for individual devs to pick something that's not open source to use, and that actually makes a lot of sense, because like you said, I'm investing in a tool; it would make no sense to learn how to -- even carpenters would not learn this non-standard tool if they could help it, and open source is the closest thing I think we have to standard tools.
+
+So we made that open source partially because we thought people expected that, partially because we're devs and that's how we expect things to be... And a lot to kind of give people some comfort that if we vanish or you just don't like us or you wanna go a different way than we're going, you can take those and run it yourself. It's not easy to spin up servers all over the world and get this going, but it's doable; it's there if all else goes to heck... It can be done, and you're relatively safe in that respect.
+
+One of the interesting things that I've come across is I expected that to be a lot bigger part of the story to bigger customers, and it's really not. When we talk to bigger companies, they're primarily concerned about SLAs and data, and who owns data, and support agreements, and all of these things. There's a little bit of like they have to sort of check the box; open source checks a box for them, and I think maybe defaults into a different mindset... But for the most part, they really just want something that solves a problem for them that they don't have to think about. So this is when it comes back to we improve Lighthouse scores; what they want is to improve their Lighthouse scores, and if we can do that, and we can prove it (which we can), they -- they're not really worried about where this is gonna go, because they just want better Lighthouse scores. It's a problem they need to solve. \[laughter\]
+
+We got a little lucky, because I think just selling infrastructure to companies is really hard, but selling business improvement takes a lot of those questions and it doesn't matter anymore.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Interesting.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** Yeah. So a lot of the work we need to do is to get developer mindshare underneath, but the actual selling of the product is going incredibly well, shockingly.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[32:09\] Awesome. So tell us about the open source side. You say it's open core, so tell me exactly from your perspective what that means, and the nitty-gritty of what is open source, what's not, what have you.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** Open core for us means you can run -- basically, you can run the app in one place as if it were running on our service. The parts of the service that are open source are the parts that are easy to distribute, so the way you get started with Fly is you npm install @fly/fly and off you go. So everything that it takes to do that is open source.
+
+What's not open source is managing things like thousands of certificates. That's not really for a business reason, as much as it's like just not easy to extract into a package like that for us at this point. I think at some point we'll do it. We have a distributed caching mechanism that is, again, difficult to extract in open source.
+
+What we've found is that -- I think the bar for open sourcing stuff is actually a little bit higher than it is to just build it and run it. You can build a dirty service by patching the good stuff together and keep it running and no one ever cares... But there's a certain -- and this might be pride talking... There's a certain level of quality and portability and installability that we want to have in the open source bits. So we find that what is open source and what isn't is more a function of what we can package up nicely for people than any kind of business decision.
+
+Basically, distributed cache isn't open source, but they're local and it works just fine. We have distributed data storage coming at some point; that's not open source, but it works fine locally. And then you can't do SSL locally, and that, I expect, would come some day. Local and open source are kind of the same in our particular world.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Gotcha. So I'm looking at the open source repo here - which is also in the notes for you all listening out there - and I'm excited to find your own avatar here with 36,000 lines of code, or 19,000 deletes, 118 commits... You're in the thick of it here.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** Yes. I would much rather build stuff than sell stuff, usually. Jerome and I could easily just build things and never have a functional company if we weren't careful about the decisions we were making... \[laughter\] My happy weeks are the weeks that I'm talking to devs on Slack and not talking to big companies, and doing pull requests and shipping features. That's when I feel the best. It's quite fun.
+
+And I've even gotten to do talks about embedding JavaScript at various JavaScript meetups, and that's great fun. I'd much rather do deeply technical stuff than write a whitepaper for a VP of something at some big company to read. So yeah, I don't know if I've done anything this week, but next week I will.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Well, I see the only person that you're behind on the contributors list is Jerome, so it's a bit of a battle that you're losing, but how do you balance that? How do you know when to put the code editor down and say "I've gotta go take this investor meeting" or "I have to go sell something"?
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** You know, that's a good question. I don't actually have a good system for this. It's a lot of gut feeling. Like every startup, depending on the day, I'm either super excited about what's happening, or I'm worried that we're not gonna get over the next hump. And there's always a next hump. Our next hump is to build a sustainable company out of what looks like a really good start. So if I'm obsessing over the hump, I will go come up with ways to try and get more customers. And if I'm really happy with -- like, if we just landed a big customer, I might go back and reward myself with writing code.
+
+One of my happy balances I've found is I can spend a lot of time writing just Fly apps and then showing them to people, and then it's a little bit of double purpose, because I'm both user number one, and it's helping people learn what they can do with the platform. So that's my airplane time. When I have to fly somewhere, I end up writing a bunch of example apps.
+
+I think my last commits were actually three example apps on an airplane ride where I didn't have any Wi-Fi. That was my fun bit.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[36:11\] Awesome. Yeah, I did find one example that I thought looked pretty cool, which was FlyGit, which is RawGit on top of Fly. Did you have your hand on that one, or was that somebody else?
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** I did, I did. Actually, we ended up consuming a lot of files from a repository and injecting them in other places. So if you go to our Docs site, which is fly.io/docs/apps, it's just our readme, and what we do is we pull that markdown down and render it and put it into our normal-looking site. So we do a lot with mixing and matching content from Git. FlyGit is the basis for a lot of that, and we've taken bits and pieces of that and used them elsewhere.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very cool. While I'm staring at the repo, I have one last question down here. 70% TypeScript...
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** Yes.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Do you have opinions on TypeScript you'd like to share?
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** Oh yeah, it's 70% and trending up.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Is it?
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** Yeah, it's more and more TypeScript. I really like TypeScript; I've always really liked types, and I used to be a pretty heavy Windows dev. I did a lot of F\#, which if you've ever done F\#, you have to like types, or you don't do F\#. And there's a lot of that stuff that's trickled into TypeScript. We both really like TypeScript, because it's easy; it's much easier to reason about. One of the things we had to implement for this runtime was a -- so we were basically implementing browser APIs, because they work really well for our use case, and browser APIs tend to be really well-designed, the modern ones... So like Fetch and Request and Response are just a really nice API to give to people. Request and Response both have bodies that can be streams or array buffers...
+
+There's a whole bunch of different things that those bodies could be, and one of the body mixins I implemented was first in JavaScript, and it just got overwhelming because I couldn't reason about what was actually happening throughout that big, messy JavaScript, and TypeScript made it about 1,000 easier to understand what we were dealing with and how.
+
+The only thing that we've found -- and there's nothing TypeScript can do about this I don't think... But since we do write a library, and a lot of our customers use JavaScript, you can still send untyped garbage into TypeScript and you don't have any guarantees that what the compiler just said is happening is actually what's coming through... And it's not so bad; it's just a thing that's sort of always in the back of our minds when we're making APIs. If we expect an object in a certain format, we still have to validate that at runtime, or it's not gonna go well.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I see.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** I love TypeScript.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Since you're consuming somebody else's code...
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** They're data, they're data structures... Yeah, exactly. TypeScript's great. We're huge fans. You've probably seen Ryan Dahl's Deno...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yes, in fact we had -- so another show on our network is called JS Party, which is all about JavaScript... We had a TypeScript Party a couple weeks back on that show, and then we also record live on Thursday and we had a section (it's kind of a three-segment show) that was all about his talk at JSConf EU, kind of just reacting to the ten regrets he has about Node, and then his new thing...
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** What's interesting watching him do that is we're sort of converging on similar ideas; TypeScript was one of them. Things like the browser APIs making it so your code runs in a jail and it can't do anything except one specific Fetch function... It's all very fascinating. I like that Deno is natively TypeScript, and we've thought about how to make Fly natively TypeScript for developers instead of just ourselves, too.
+
+**Break:** \[39:55\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So we discussed the big picture of what Fly does today, what you're trying to do eventually, how you talk about it with investors, how you talk about it with potential customers or current customers, developers... Where do you put it in the landscape? A lot of listeners, and myself included, understand there's other products out there doing similar things, some of them are nebulous what they do, some are very obvious... You have your Netlifies, you ZEIT Nows, your kind of last generation platforms like Heroku, but then you also mentioned serverless, you've got your Lambdas... There's just lots of different options out there; where does Fly fit in, and if you do ever have the question of like "How does it compete? What differentiates it?", how do address those other people out there building similar things?
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** Netlify - we're actually pretty decent friends with them. Netlify is a company that if we'd reverse to started when I think you would have built Netlify on top of Fly. Fly I think is a good platform for building a Netlify type service. There's definitely overlap, just because if you're targeting developers, you end up doing 5%-10% the same things that everyone else is doing... But Netlify is a really good possible customer.
+
+ZEIT is really fascinating. They made some genius code. I feel like ZEIT is a better Heroku... And I should say a more modern Heroku, because it's actually still really difficult to make something better than -- Heroku is still really good. The developer experience just works; it's all kind of still amazing. I think if Salesforce hadn't bought them, it could be a really interesting alternative to, and asuming it had stayed alive and gotten bigger, Amazon, Google Cloud and Azure part of the world.
+The people we get most often asked about and compared to is Cloudflare, because they have service workers, and Cloudflare service workers look a lot like Fly apps. I think it's a natural API to implement for the types of stuff we're doing.
+
+The big difference we have with Cloudflare, and investors asked this one a few times, is AWS is like a fully programmable data center; you don't ever call a salesperson to turn on a server or something else for you at AWS. Previously, there were less programmable data centers, places like Savvis, places like Verizon, AT&T, all these guys, Equinix sold space and power to people. Cloudflare I feel like is a slightly older generation of a similar problem we have. Whereas we have an API for creating a WebP image out of any other image to serve it up to the right kind of browser, they have a button you check to turn on the WebP. They've put these service workers in the middle, so you can script some stuff and there's a fairly decent set of things you can solve with Cloudflare that you could potentially solve with Fly too, or vice-versa... But we're like developer-first all the time. There's not part of anything we do that we want to hide from an API effectively, instead of this being a smaller bit of a much larger stack.
+
+\[44:18\] So you can see that because we're open source. We also have local testing, so you can write and run and test apps locally, which means it works on like a continuous deployment process... Which is an interesting thing, because one of the people we initially thought we were competing with was Fastly, because Fastly is a great company that builds really cool stuff and is kind of the pinnacle of what a CDN should do... And one of the complaints we kept hearing from customers of Fastly - and there weren't many complaints; everyone's generally pretty happy with them - was "I'm terrified that I'm gonna change something and break my whole site. I'm a developer, I'm used to this whole development process, I'm used to writing tests, I'm used to having some level of comfort when I make changes", that they didn't give them.
+
+Compared to those guys, I think we're much more like the application-level developer-first, developer-all-the-way thing. I think more broadly we're probably competing with anyone who wants you to write new code on top of them, like Firebase or any of those people. But it's such a broad thing... The people we're talking to customer-wise aren't gonna compare us to Firebase usually. It's just like -- we're kind of all trying to go the same direction.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Gotcha. So you mentioned you're open source; another thing that you're doing which is super cool and I want to hear more about is that you are giving equity somehow to open source authors, people who are providing (I assume) specifically the tools that you're using to build Fly. Tell me about that. First of all, who thought of that? How's it going? Or just tell me all about it. I actually haven't heard that before, and I think it's a super-interesting way to support the people who you're building your platform on top of.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** The genesis of this is I have very complicated feelings about open source in large companies. I think a lot of times large companies produce open source for somewhat good reasons, but it's somewhat anti-competitive, too. Facebook creates React, open sources it, everybody builds React, and everyone basically learns Facebook's platform, so Facebook can now hire more devs. It also incidentally has killed any ability for a company to build a front-end framework from scratch and make any money off of it. It's a very interesting dynamic, I think.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** There's like an echo in here, because just a couple of shows back we had Zed Shaw on the show.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** Oh, yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That show, if you wanna listen to it, is called "Corporate interests in open source and dev culture."
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** I've probably read everything he's written about that, so I wouldn't be surprised if it sounds very similar...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You wouldn't be surprised, but he's very covinced - and I think rightly so - with the specific thing he says, which is that corporations are using open source to commoditize their complements, which is really what you've just said there. It would be very difficult for somebody to build a front-end UI framework and make a business on top of it, because React is free and open source.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** Exactly. That's like monopoly 101 if you take economics. It's what you do. Anyway...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Anyways, so I'm just hearing very similar things... Continue.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** One other interesting thing we noticed - and we saw this at Compose, because we host at Redis... There's a fair amount of hypocrisy here, because we were basically running open source databases and making money doing it. But when we were raising money - we were trying to have a B round and then we sold the company instead - we kept coming across Redis Labs, who were pitching themselves as like the home of Redis... Which I always thought was kind of interesting, because they took this open source project, they forked it, and then they were claiming commercial -- it wasn't "the home of Redis", they called themselves "the commercial stewards of Redis", and I was like "That's really odd." A guy wrote Redis, it's really a great software; it's interesting that all of the money to be made from Redis is going to VMWare, Compose, to Redis Labs, to now Google; Google has done their Redis software, and Microsoft.
+
+\[48:10\] So he's basically built this software that is ultimately worth in the billions of dollars, I would bet; if you were able to put a dollar value on Redis, it wouldn't be surprising to find out it's worth more than a billion dollars. So I've always been a little bit wary of exploiting people who build things like Redis just to build something cool for people and give it away. It's like the most pure open source there is.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Didn't Redis Labs hire him thought? I mean, they gave him --
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** They did.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's something.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** It's a job, yeah. It is, but if you were to do the math, they're getting a deal, basically. I know what startups give the technical superheroes they try and hire for that, and I don't think it's even close to its worth.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's never commensurate with what value they're bringing, you don't believe it is...
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** Correct, yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We don't know the details of Salvatore's deal with Redis Labs, but we know he did go there on his own volition, so it's not like --
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** Well, after VMWare were hiring him for the same reason.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, he worked for VMWare for a while, and then he went and worked for Redis Labs, and he might still be at Redis Labs, I don't know.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** He is, yeah. And I have no reason to think he's unhappy with it. I just think structurally it looks like an unfair portion of the world to me, that these people built these things that are so amazing, and people like me would swoop in and create a company out of it, because that's what we're kind of wired to do, is create companies instead of just create really great open source.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So do you feel bad about how MongoHQ went down then, or...?
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** No, actually... I'm not sure I'm supposed to say this, but I don't care. We weren't making very much money off of Redis. It was a cool thing to host, and we did it because we liked it, but it never was a very commercially successful thing for Compose. But we also launched it right before we sold to IBM too, which was like "This is cool! We just launched it!" So I don't, for that reason... I don't particularly feel bad about making money off MongoDB, because they made money off MongoDB as well.
+
+We actually tried to make RethinkDB -- RethinkDB I think we were helpful for, because they kind of needed the story of "Someone will run this for you", and they weren't gonna build it themselves. But like I said, it does sound mildly hypocritical, because I think most of the good stuff that happened to me has happened on the backs of open source.
+
+Anyway, that's the long-winded way of saying for this company we basically just had this idea, and at one point it was like "We should give equity grants to open source authors of tools that we really get value out of." And it's interesting, because startups give equity grants to people all the time; if you're a startup and you go hire an executive recruiter to hire you a VP of marketing, that recruiter is gonna get some fractional personal ownership of your company, because that's just the way that basically businesspeople negotiate this stuff. A lot of startups have advisors who literally are just answering emails and doing nothing else of value for the company, that have equity grants.
+
+So we basically just looked at it and it was like, you know, the open source authors are every bit as advisory as these advisors, so we started to use just the normal advisor paperwork to create an advisor agreement. We took out a lot of non-compete stuff, because it wasn't that kind of relationship, but it was a standard advisor agreement, with just the same kind of shares that I have, just a smaller percentage. We've offered it to four people at this point.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Are you able to share what the projects are, or is that like private?
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** That's relatively private only because I don't know -- I haven't really asked them if we can tell people who they are or not... But you might be able to guess one or two. \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Go look at your package.json and we can probably figure it out.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** \[laughs\] Yeah. Or listen to this.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So is this a deal where you just contact them and you're like "Hey, I'm using your stuff. I'd love to just give you some equity."
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** \[52:09\] Yeah, it weirds them out at first. We actually have to send two emails to one person, because I think it sounded like spam, because it's just so far out of any email they're expecting to get. And they're all super-excited about the idea... We had one turn us down, because they thought it might be kind of a conflict of interest for them based on what else they're doing, but they were generally like "This is great! I'm really glad you did this." It feels pretty good, I think it's a nice thing to do, and if Fly is super-successful, it's never gonna matter in terms of how much we've given up. And if Fly fails, it still doesn't matter, so it's a relatively easy thing once you get over that mental jump.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So here's another radical idea... Maybe you thought of this one. It sounds actually less radical when I say it out loud, but... You raised a whole bunch of money and it was really super-easy; giving them equity - I think it's a cool idea, and I think it's way better than zero, which is what most people out there are doing, which is why we have this problem that we're in, this sustainability problem... But Zed would say "Just give me the cash, man..." Why don't you just give them some money? You have funding; this is development that you would otherwise have to build yourself, right? You could give them a percent of what it cost you in labor to build, or time wasted building out these dependencies. Did you consider just throwing them a bone?
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** We did. We actually tried. I think Zed might be -- I don't know if he's unique, or just not everybody is like that... But we have found the open source developers we talked to either don't need money, they're just not wired that way; one of them I know is actually really comfy, so money is just not gonna change anything for that person... But the other flipside of that is a lot of them value their independence in a way that I think just getting paid for -- like, it'd be interesting to just structure it as a no-strings-attached grant if you're gonna try and do that, but generally it seems like there's strings attached, even if there's not, so we're actually very clear with the open source grants; it's like "This is for what you've already done, we don't expect you to do anything as a result of this."
+
+But money is an interesting thing... Sometimes people aren't motivated by it. I would actually take the money if I were a successful open source developer; I'd be very Zed about this. Sort of zen, but money... \[laughs\] But for the ones we've talked to -- I guess it's not surprising, but the equity is a more interesting thing to them. And it sort of makes sense. If the money is not gonna change your life right then, the equity - at least there's the hope it might, at some point. I don't know.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I think it's definitely a case by case basis. I've been doing contract work for years, software for hire, and when you're in that circumstance, you have a lot of people that wanna offer you equity instead of cash... So it's like "Be my technical co-founder", blah-blah-blah, and my answer to them is like "I'm running a business here, and I've got a family to feed. I would love to help you build your idea, but I don't wanna take on all the risks that you're taking. I will take the cash now for the work done, and then you can have all the upside later. If it's amazingly awesome, I made a bad decision, but I need the cash to put food on the table."
+
+And there's other people who may be like -- if I was just independently wealthy, or like you said, comfy enough, and I'd believe in the project, then I might say "You know what, I'll work for equity." So it's super case-by-case.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** It is, it is. And you know, talking about this, I realize I don't think we've offered anyone a money grant with the same "This is absolutely no strings attached. We don't expect you to do anything", like we have for the equity. I'm actually curious what someone would say, but my other knee-jerk is like it's actually mildly difficult to do that without tax consequences. \[56:16\] Equity is actually a really simple thing to give somebody at this stage. The company, according to IRS income things, is basically not worth anything. So you pay 12 cents for shares, or whatever, and it's just a relatively simple -- anyway, it's a very interesting discussion, the money vs. equity thing...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** For sure.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** ...and it's mildly surprising how different people are.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, absolutely. And especially on the receiving side for them, which is why organizations like Open Collective exist. Some people aren't set up to receive money as donations. They'd be like "Neah, it's way too much of a headache for me to even accept whatever it is you're offering", because of their governmental situation. So there are organizations like Open Collective that will act as a non-profit on the behalf of other individuals, so then you can filter it through Open Collective, making things easier. But it's definitely not a utopian situation. We're not there yet in terms of like making this an easy transaction for people.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** Right, exactly.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So I guess it hasn't played out yet, we haven't seen that Fly is a huge success and can eventually sell those off for some decent cash, but... In terms of how far you've taken it so far, is this a model that you think you'd love to see other startups do? It sounds like they've been pretty well received by the people that you've contacted, except for the one who has a conflict of interest. I guess my question is "Is this a model to follow, or not?"
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** I think it is. One of the things I like about it for us is I think it's a good thing to be thoughtful about. So just the act of doing it I feel like makes you think pretty hard about where you're getting value. I feel more comfortable with my life when I can reckon with like how privileged I am to be doing what I'm doing, and how lucky -- like, we could just go raise a round of money; not a lot of people can do that.
+
+I think it's probably just a really good mental exercise, but I also think if you're at all worried about the concentration of tech power and you're worried about the commoditization of open source, if every startup that went through Y Combinator and raised a round of money was giving open source authors a little chunk of their money, I think it'd be creating a lot of wealth over time for the people that are building the backbone of what we're all doing.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[58:51\] Yeah, I agree 100%. And I started to think about it, and then I'm like "You know what, I feel sorry for those startups", especially the Y Combinators, because that's like 20k and some training... I know they're gonna raise after that, but even that... The number one reason why startups die is because they run out of money. Of course, maybe they run out of money for different reasons; maybe it's not viable, maybe they can't manage it, or whatever the reason happens to be (competitive pressures), but there's lots of companies who aren't running out of money, they're printing money. If they were involved even at a very small percentage... I think we asked Zed Shaw, like, what percentage would make sense, that you'd be happy and you'd sleep well at night...? He was talking specifically about the huge tech companies would give to their dependencies - it would take much as a percentage to really raise the level of a lot of people's lives who are out there writing software in the open source space.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** No, it wouldn't. And like I said, it feels free; the actual cost for us to do this is mostly an imaginary cost. If we're huge and successful, it will cost us some money, but at that point we don't care... \[laughs\] And like every startup, there's a very good chance that it won't cost anyone anything, because we won't actually be able to succeed, so also don't care.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Alright. Anything else, Kurt, before I let you go? It's been a very fun conversation. Anything else you wanna chat about?
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** No, I think we covered it all. It was a fun talk. I love talking about JavaScript and open source, so this was a good diversion from work today... If you're not working on JavaScript and open source. \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Happy to divert you, and we thank you so much for your time. I love sharing that bit about what you're trying to do, giving these authors some equity, and hoping that works out to their benefit, as you benefit from them. That's a very cool idea, and I'm interested to hear how that goes over time.
+
+Listeners out there, if you know anybody else who is doing that as a startup or as a small business - or heck, as a large business - providing funding or support for the software creators that they rely upon to get that money, let us know; we love to hear about these situations, we like to promote companies that we think are doing good in the space.
+
+Thank you for Fly and all you're doing there, and let us know, listeners, who else out there is supporting the open source community. Alright, Kurt, thank so much! This has been lots of fun.
+
+**Kurt Mackey:** Yeah, thanks a lot!
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+**Daniel Whitenack:** Welcome to Mat and David from MachineBox. It's great to have you here on Practical AI. I know that Chris and I, when we started thinking about guests for Practical AI, and I was thinking about our slogan or our mantra at Practical AI, which is "Making artificial intelligence practical, productive, and accessible to everyone", I know the first people that came to my mind were Mat and David from MachineBox. Welcome, guys.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Thank you very much. It's great to be here.
+
+**David Hernandez:** Yeah, thank you.
+
+**Daniel Whitenack:** Let's start out maybe with just a brief personal intro from both of you guys. David, why don't you start by giving us a little personal intro?
+
+**David Hernandez:** Yeah, I'm David Hernandez. My background is in computer science and engineering. I was studying back more than ten years ago in the uni machine learning and artificial intelligence. Mostly I never used it until recently, the last three years; machine learning was booming and I started to get through and implement -- first, my knowledge, and then I started to implement things. Probably, that's how we started MachineBox in some way.
+
+Professionally, I've been developing since I finished my degree. It's almost ten years doing distributed systems, websites. My highlight is probably that I worked at BBC in 2012 for the Olympics. We were delivering the real-time system to all the stats and all the video player data for the Olympics, basically. It was a really nice project. So yeah, that's it.
+
+**Daniel Whitenack:** Sounds great. Mat, why don't you give us a little bit of an idea of where you're coming from?
+
+**Mat Ryer:** \[03:58\] Sure. Hi, my name is Mat Ryer. I've been doing computer science all my career, in various forms. I've spent a lot of time in the Go community at the moment. I fell in love with Go as a language before it was released as version one. There's a little experimental tag in Google App Engine and I wanted to build something on App Engine... Anything that's got a little experimental tag is going to grab my attention; it always has. So I jumped into the language quite early, and I've just been using Go since then really, wherever I can, and it turns out you can use it everywhere.
+
+I speak at conferences about Go mainly, and also I have a book, Go Programming Blueprints, which is nice because you build real projects in that book. It's not a book where you learn the language or you just learn theory, you actually build real things. It's very practical and very pragmatic. That's why I quite like the way you guys are approaching this podcast, because complicated things can be extremely powerful, but they're very difficult for people to marshal and get into a shape that they can put into production. That's really our philosophy at MachineBox, is to give people a head start on that and get them into production much quicker.
+
+**Chris Benson:** And Mat, while we're at it, what's the name of your book before we go on?
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Thank you. It's called Go Programming Blueprints: Second Edition.
+
+**Chris Benson:** Okay, thank you very much.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** You don't have you say it in that accent, but it helps.
+
+**Chris Benson:** It sounds much better.
+
+**Daniel Whitenack:** I think it does help. So how did you guys originally meet and how did you start thinking about forming a company together that's focusing on AI?
+
+**David Hernandez:** That's an interesting story. Back a few years ago, I was one of the organizers of Golang UK, the first one - now GopherCon UK, or just GopherCon, I don't know.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** GopherCon UK.
+
+**David Hernandez:** GopherCon UK. Mat was one of the speakers, so I met actually Mat in that conference. He was in another company before, and I was looking for a job. I was a contractor at that time, so I joined the same company that Mat was, and we met there basically. We worked there for a few years.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, David has a really unique ability to think very clearly about big problems that are otherwise very complicated, and that's a key skill for any team to have. If you can bring somebody in that can look at these big, broad problems, like massive scale, planet-scale sort of problems... Like David mentioned earlier, he was part of the team that delivered the software that ran the Olympics. There's no dry runs of that. You can't say to everyone, "Guys, like a week before, can we just have another Olympics just so we can test out all the software?" They'll probably say no.
+
+So having somebody like that on a team is invaluable and it was very natural when it came to looking at machine learning and David's expertise in it. It was kind of his eureka moment where he said, "You know, we could actually containerize this and deliver it in a way that makes it very trivial for everybody to use machine learning capabilities, rather than having to learn TensorFlow and work in these abstract mathematical models. We could tell some stories differently, we could give people an API that just makes it very clear, and it sort of changes the way you think about the problem a little bit." It focuses really on the problem that you're trying to solve, rather than technical low-level machine learning components that you might use to solve it.
+
+**Daniel Whitenack:** \[08:06\] That's great. I've been a MachineBox user for quite a while... Very soon after you guys launched I was super excited about it, just because of the practicality of the projects. In terms of what MachineBox is actually - as a developer, if I was wanting to use MachineBox to do something, what might that something be and what would be the interface to doing that?
+
+**David Hernandez:** MachineBox is basically -- we deliver machine learning models in Docker containers. What you basically need is Docker installed on your computer; that is available in any major platform - Windows, Mac and Linux. You just Docker pull one of our images, you have a nice API in our images so you only need to know about HTTP APIs to get it started and do, for example, face recognition. That is one of our most famous boxes. You can add face recognition to your stack in just minutes. So that's basic tools; Docker, a little knowledge to do HTTP APIs as a programmer - probably every programmer should learn that skill nowadays - and that's basically it. You don't need any other knowledge.
+
+**Daniel Whitenack:** Just to clarify, if I was a data scientist or a developer, or whatever I am, there's a lot of APIs out there, both from the cloud platforms, like with machine learning, but also other things... Like, if I want to send an email programmatically, there's a REST API for that, which uses HTTP and JSON... So you're saying one of your goals is to really make the interface to doing something complicated - maybe like facial recognition or something - as easy as it is to send an email via one of those APIs. Is that kind of a good summary?
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yes, that's exactly right. Essentially, the machine learning that's going on inside the boxes is very complicated. Sometimes we mix different kinds of technologies in different ways. If we try to explain how to do that, it would be very complex and I think the deployment would be difficult. Even just managing the dependencies would be a bit of a nightmare. So we take on all that pain and provide APIs that tell different stories.
+
+For example, you mentioned facial recognition. Facebox is a Docker container. You download it, you run it, you then have HTTP access. The operations you can do are things like, "Here's an image. Tell me all the faces in that image, and give me the coordinates of the faces." Not only that, - "If you recognize these people and who the face belongs to, tell me who that person is as well." And then there's another API call to teach, and we support one-shot teaching, which is also pretty kind of rare still. It just means that with one image -- so, Daniel, I could take an image of your face and teach Facebox with one example image, and then if we took a big photograph of a conference and you were in it, Facebox would be able to find you and identify you. So you get that facial recognition capability, and it's only a couple of API endpoints you have to learn. It's basically "Teach this face, and here's an image - who do you see in there?"
+
+\[12:02\] And then, yeah, it's all JSON, because we wanted to just feel really familiar and just fit into what people already had, and HTTP and JSON APIs still dominate. They're the simplest to use. They're nice, because you can just use them in the browser, and when you run one of our boxes, we actually host inside the box a little private website, which you access through local host 8080, and that website contains all the API documentation, but it also lets you interact with the box without even writing any code... Because it's very important on our mission to, first of all, communicate what's possible in a very simple way, and then make that easy to play with and get to use so that people can see the power of it. And then once they're sold on that, then it's just a question of making the integration easy in operations. So we're really focusing on that whole flow end-to-end. In particular, we care about people without any kind of machine learning experience being able to use these powerful technologies.
+
+**Chris Benson:** It sounds you've taken the machine learning part and abstracted that and put it in a little black box for your end users. Who specifically are you targeting as your customer for this?
+
+**Mat Ryer:** We have already paying customers. I say "already" because Daniel started playing with MachineBox way before we really launched anything, and one of the nice things about the way we approach our developer community is we give them the technology for free early, and let them just play with it. In that process what happens is, first of all, any bugs are immediately found and squashed. Luckily, it doesn't happen very often. We do a lot of testing and test-driven development and other techniques which help us when it comes to code quality.
+
+But beyond that, we get to validate the way we've told a story and also if the APIs really make sense for the particular way in which their system expects to use a technology like this.
+
+We see customers of all kinds. It's a developer tool, so this is for developers to integrate into their platform, so by and large, all of our audience are developers. But the people that really have so far found it to be useful are people who understand machine learning in broad terms (some of them), but they know that it's a lot of effort to go to to build your own things yourself... And then if you care about the data not leaving your own network, whether that's on-prem or your own cloud, because we're just Docker containers, you can spin them up anywhere and scale them anywhere. You keep control of all that data.
+
+So it's people who have already a need, which is great - they've got a problem that they want to use machine learning to solve, and then they use our APIs to solve that problem. They're basically developers of all levels. Some of them are just JavaScript developers, some of them are Ruby... We do have a Go SDK, so we have a lot of gophers, we have a lot of Go people that are using it. It's really that. That's who we target. Basically, anyone is a potential target, but specifically we've seen traction in developers who don't want to have to do all of the heavy lifting of machine learning, they just want to get something and get going.
+
+**David Hernandez:** \[15:44\] My favorite users - it's a personal opinion; it doesn't necessary mean that it's right... So my favorite users are people doing DevOps, basically... Because they basically love it because they usually don't have time or are willing to learn any kind of data science. They want to solve specific problems, and they find MachineBox and our APIs really good and really productive for that. So we get a lot of love from DevOps. The best comments that we hear are from people doing DevOps, like "I have this problem. I want to solve it quickly. I want to deploy it quickly", and it's just the perfect tool for that kind of people, pretty much.
+
+**Daniel Whitenack:** Yeah, that's great. Personally, I can attest to the quality of the models. I actually got into a little bit of trouble at a conference, because I was showing Facebox and kind of a one-shot updating of the model, and people didn't believe me that it actually worked that well.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** That happened to us, as well. In a demo, we've had it where people just think we've spoofed it. \[laughs\] I know, it's surprising, because we're told again and again, "For machine learning to be any good, you need massive amounts of training data", so that's why. And really, the solution -- it's a big secret of what we do, but it's just a clever use of technology inside the box, which allows us to provide that. But the thing is we don't want people to have to worry about how it works, we just want them to know that it works and integrate it and get to MVP really quickly. That's really another one of our goals.
+
+**Chris Benson:** A few weeks ago, I was in San Jose at NVIDIA'S annual GPU technology conference, and through my employer, I was in a small group meeting with the NVIDIA CEO, Jensen Huang, and he noted something that I see you guys going towards - that we're really at a junction where software developers are becoming the targets of machine learning, rather than just data scientists. It will continue to be both, but he noted that that was a big strategic initiative on them - to target the software development community, which is somewhat new to these technologies, and it seems that you guys have really centered your strategy around that approach.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yes, that's right. Really what happened - and if I'm being completely honest, we just built something that we needed to use. We wanted to use some of these technologies, and it's hard, and we had the constraints... Some of them at scale. Some of the prices of the machine learning APIs at scale really -- it really becomes prohibitive. It's still quite expensive and it's quite valuable, I guess, so that's why, but we weren't really too strategic about it in the beginning. We just thought, "Let's build it how we think it should be built and how we would want to use it." From there, we've then started to see traction and some great feedback on our developer experience.
+
+**Daniel Whitenack:** Yeah, definitely. I want to follow up a little bit on that idea that we mentioned around the conference talks - you used this MachineBox to do something and it's doing something complicated under the hood, and it's giving you great results, but to some degree even though you might know generally what's happening in the box, it's still is a black box and there's a lot of back and forth in the industry right now, at least in the circles that I frequent around - is treating machine learning in AI models as a black box a good thing or a bad thing?
+
+\[20:02\] I can download pre-trained models and that sort of thing that I don't really understand, from the TensorFlow repo and other things, and often I don't get the results that are either the published results or the quality that's promised from these pre-trained models. Now, the models that you're putting out are definitely really good quality, but I still don't really know all of what's going on the inside. So in this case, we're treating machine learning in AI models like a black box. Why do you think that, at least in certain cases treating models like this, like a black box, can be a really good thing, or maybe what are some downsides or cases in which maybe you wouldn't want to treat them like that?
+
+**David Hernandez:** Yeah, all the MachineBox models are kind of a black box. In that case, we don't have any explainability for any of the models. But also, most of the models are based in neural networks, so nobody has that answer yet in the research. Some people have research about it, but nobody knows what is happening inside.
+
+**Daniel Whitenack:** So you just mean in terms of the complexity of the models...
+
+**David Hernandez:** Yeah, but also for use cases. For example, if you are going to deny or accept a credit or an insurance, it's quite important to understand what a model is predicting. Saying, "If my income is less than this quantity, the model is going to say, ‘You're not going to get the insurance,' or ‘You're not going to get the credit." But for example with facial recognition, you care less about why the model is predicting that this is matching a face rather than not matching these other identities. You are more worried about the value that you can extract for that matching, rather than the value that you can get explaining what the model is doing.
+
+It's quite a balance, and it really depends on the use cases. Mostly in our use cases it don't really matter the explainability. In most of the boxes -- we have for example a classification box that allows you to build any kind of classifier, giving text, or images, so it may matter most for that kind of model. But in a general sense, we are more focused on getting value for the models rather than to explain what the models do.
+
+**Daniel Whitenack:** Yeah, that's a great point, and to your guys' point, I think if you're not able to put your model into production and get any value out of it via a useful interface, then really what we're talking about is just AI research that isn't really applicable in a business setting. So you have to be able to get things into production, and I think that's where this sort of black box treatment, in my opinion, is a really good thing in terms of providing a unified interface for developers and DevOps people and infrastructure people to interact with a model.
+
+**David Hernandez:** Yeah. But anyway, I believe that the research is going to come through, and someday we can explain how our neural network does the reasoning and why a prediction is that prediction. We'll probably try to keep up with the research, and if that comes through, there's a possibility to add it to the boxes.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** \[23:54\] Yeah, but those sorts of things and a lot of the arguments against black boxing are -- I think people who are deep in machine learning, they know about it. They want to invest time and resources into building expertise, and things like that. Lots of people aren't in the position where they can do that. We give them a capability as a solution. There are models inside; sometimes, there are multiple ones inside each box, but there's also other things going on in there, so it really is a solution. The only reason really that MachineBox isn't just completely an open source project is that it's just so complicated. It's not like it's just a trivial little package that would be sensible to open source and everyone can get use out of. To be able to contribute to the MachineBox code base I think it would be more difficult than other projects. That's one of the reservations I have against open sourcing.
+
+But yeah, it's really an audience question, I think. If people care deeply and know a lot about machine learning, then maybe they're going to want to pickup TensorFlow and tackle it themselves. If you're an app developer and you want to quickly make your software smarter, slotting MachineBox in is just the quickest way to do that.
+
+**Daniel Whitenack:** Yeah, and I think it's not inconsistent with other trends we're seeing, like TensorFlow estimators and that sort of thing, which is intending to give these modules to people that will let them practically integrate things.
+
+**David Hernandez:** Yeah, exactly. It's kind of overlapping. They are catching up with MachineBox.
+
+**Chris Benson:** That was a great transition, when you're talking about the tooling... Under the hood, I assume you're talking about TensorFlow there... What other tool are you using? Where are you using Go, if any? I'd love to know how you guys are putting the pieces together.
+
+**David Hernandez:** The basic stack is in Go. Probably more than 80 percent of the code is Go, because more than 80 percent of the Go is just APIs, network calls, and these kinds of things. The machine learning models - the training is done in Python, and our favorite frameworks are Keras and TensorFlow. That's mostly what we use for deep learning. We use other ones, like more traditional machine learning, things like Vowpal Wabbit which is a really old C library that I quite like... But basically that's it. It's not so much machine learning code. We serve all the models in Go, and train all the models in Python, and even the scripts.
+
+**Chris Benson:** And just out of curiosity and maybe for the audience, why Go for 80 percent of the stack? What is it about Go? Because so many people in the AI space are doing Python, they're doing C++... You don't hear Go as often, so I'd love to know why that for your selection.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Go has a deliberately limited language feature set. I once was speaking to a group and I said, "You can't do that many things with Go", and it got a laugh because I realized how it sounds... But what I meant was the actual language itself doesn't have that many features, which forces the code to therefore be simpler.
+
+In some of the more modern languages with the OO you have big type inheritance, you've got all of these language features that allow you to build really quite complicated, very clever and complicated things.
+
+\[27:57\] The Go philosophy is around simplicity, which mirrors exactly what we're doing at MachineBox, so it fits brilliantly. Essentially, Go code all kind of looks the same, so it's all familiar, and you get such benefits at development time, but actually more as you maintain the projects. So that's why Go wins, I think, from our point of view. Plus we're fanboys of Go; there's no denying that. We met at a Go conference.
+
+**David Hernandez:** Pretty much, yeah. But also, some people are really surprised when they ask, and they may have heard about MachineBox being a black box, or at a conference... They contact us and say, "Oh yeah, I like your product. Just out of curiosity, how many people are you?" "Well, it's just Mat and me developing. We have some business side with Aaron, but it's just pretty much a three-people company right now." The people get quite surprised like, "Oh, you did so much. You have so many boxes, so many products, and like two people developing and one business development."
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, and the answer isn't that we're awesome, although David is... The answer is that we are very selective about what we do. We deliberately don't do as much as you could do. There's loads of possible things we could push into Facebox, for example, and some of them tell you where the eyebrows are. I haven't yet seen a good use case for why you need to know in an image where the eyebrows are, but maybe there is one. But until then, we're not going to invest all our time and effort, and also add that kind of complexity to the API.
+
+So yeah, it's because we pick. We're very selective about what we do. We pick the things that we think that are just the gold from all this potential complexity, and we just focus around telling that story and solving that problem. So that's how we are able to do so much it seems, I think.
+
+**David Hernandez:** Go is the perfect tool for our philosophy. It fits really well into that mantra, into that mindset. So it's the perfect tool for us.
+
+**Daniel Whitenack:** I think both of you guys are awesome, just to set the record straight.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Thank you, I was fishing for that. That's why I said it. I'm glad you picked up on that. \[laughs\]
+
+**Daniel Whitenack:** I figured you were. Not only that, but you've given me my next blog post idea, which is around eyebrow-based analysis.
+
+**Chris Benson:** Very important stuff.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** You can detect sarcasm with it. That's the only use case, I think.
+
+**Daniel Whitenack:** Or maybe anger.
+
+**Chris Benson:** Mat, with you, if you had that sarcasm detector, wouldn't it be pegged most of the time?
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, it would -- well, you can basically just return true, as a shortcut.
+
+**David Hernandez:** Yeah, that could be 99.9% accuracy.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** There was one time where I said something serious and I wasn't being sarcastic, but I forget what it was now. \[laughter\]
+
+**Daniel Whitenack:** So you've talked a lot about your technology stack, why you've chosen Go... One thing I'm curious about -- I think everybody should use MachineBox in one way or another, but there's a lot of people out there maybe that are working on data science teams or data engineering teams or whatever it is, and are maybe using TensorFlow to develop and train models that are getting deployed internally into their own sorts of services and products.
+
+I'm curious... Because you consistently produce such high-value models that are integrated into your products, do you have any advice around that progression from training your model to getting it deployed within some type of service, whether that be -- you mentioned testing? Testing might look differently from machine learning models or AI models than in other cases, but do you have any advice and insights around that process, from training your model to actually integrating it into a service, whether that's integrating MachineBox into your service or maybe that's integrating your own model into your own internal service?
+
+**David Hernandez:** \[32:17\] I don't really know. Most of the problems are just technology. Usually with technology, you just get it solved in one way or another. There are a lot of tools coming up these days that solve the problem, including MachineBox, but also in TensorFlow deployment is getting better. But I think the most important is people, so how this machine learning thing is transforming the way that people see software, especially talking with customers. In machine learning, we have a lot of false-positive/false-negatives... Once you have something in production, they come up with questions.
+
+Sometimes, the question that most of the customers ask, "So, we have this problem." Well, that's not actually a problem. It's just a false-positive, and there are ways to deal with false-positives and false-negatives. Changing the mindset to accept that a thing is not a bug is a false-positive in a machine learning model... It changes the way that you interact with people. It's like, "Oh, you're not going to have a machine learning that is 100 percent accurate, so you have to deal with these situations" and that situation is just the way that we are mostly struggling or just trying to get the right conversations with people, and I think that is going to come up in software development in the next couple of years.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Yes, definitely. One of our big challenges is communicating what's actually going on. We thought we're just gonna deliver face recognition APIs and that's it, or image recognition/image classification, or personalization APIs... And we found that, quite quickly, we did actually have to get into the conversation a bit more about, "Look, we don't expect this to get everything right 100 percent of the time. We expect it to do a much better job automatically than you're doing." Hopefully, you can get it to the point where the exceptions that you have to deal with, if there are any in the workflow, get smaller and smaller.
+
+But yeah, that's definitely been something we've had to focus on - communicating that this is unlike other software where you do something and you get a result you don't like, that's a bug. And we've had some bugs opened where it says, "I put this image in and it didn't find the face." And, of course, the face is turned to the side or its got a weird shadow on it or just something is weird about it. Then we get into that conversation, "Well, it isn't really a bug. It's part of the expected workflow." The question is "How do we then tackle that going forward?"
+
+From a data scientist's point of view, someone did actually ask if they could put their models into our boxes, because they knew the building the models bit, they were good at that, but they had no idea about getting things into production... And running them at scale, one of the very early rules that we gave ourselves - and this is common sense now, I think, a little bit, but it comes from David's experience building at massive scale for the Olympics in particular... It was that we had to be able to horizontally scale the boxes just by adding more of them, because scale is fine if you get this awesome technology and it works nice and slow on one machine, but to really get the value from it, in most cases you want to run this thing at scale so that it can really get through the work that it needs to get through.
+
+\[36:04\] And so we've spent a lot of time also, which you don't really see apart from the fact that it just works, but we've spent a lot of time in making sure that these boxes could horizontally scale in a kind of Kubernetes environment where it was just elastic, up and down, as you need it. And of course, you have to think about what's the state inside the box, how does that work, and various of that sort of -- will just load balancing across the boxes be enough to get what you want, or is there more that we need to do and where does that happen, and all those kinds of things. So yeah, it's been a great experience building it, and it's more fun when people start integrating it and paying for it. That's when you really feel like you've created something valuable.
+
+**Daniel Whitenack:** Yeah, that's great. I can definitely resonate with some of the things you said around exceptions in models and that sort of thing. I think people too often, in my personal opinion, think about an end-to-end machine learning or AI model that does everything all the time correctly, and I think that's to some degree, the wrong thought in a lot of cases, because when machine learning models fail, we have an opportunity to refactor them, which is in the end a good thing.
+
+So getting close to the end here, I was wondering -- again, what you guys are doing is setting some standards as far as interacting with machine learning models, so I'd love to get more advice from you guys... In terms of the skills that data engineers or just developers who don't really consider themselves data scientists or AI researchers, what skills would you recommend them looking into, or what kind of skills do they need to start integrating machine learning into their applications?
+
+**Mat Ryer:** I don't think you need that many. It depends how deep you want to go into it. The trajectory that I would recommend to somebody who didn't have any kind of idea about it would be to start by consuming APIs. If that's good enough, if that works for your case, then you don't have to do anything more, and that's what we found so far. A lot of our customers have said, "We're just going to try this because then we can build MVP quickly and then later we might change it." And then that later never happens, because the box is doing just such a good job that they don't need to then change it. So definitely any kind of API skill around consuming APIs... Most people already have those already.
+
+And then I think beyond that, it's really just a question of understanding a little bit more about just the high-level concepts I would say would be useful. With the classification box you can create your own classifier with a training set. Now, with classification box, you do need a good amount of examples for each class. When some people start using it, they have just a couple of images, a couple of examples, and you can't really get a model that's useful from that.
+
+So learning things -- there are sort of softer skills around machine learning, I guess, which is the kinds of data, the kinds of problems that machine learning is good at, first of all, then what kind of training data you're going to have... Because machine learning is only as bad as its training data. So I think those sorts of things would be useful for everyone to have. And then if you're getting into more machine learning technical stuff, then I don't know.
+
+**David Hernandez:** \[39:54\] In my opinion, you should focus on one type of problem. Machine learning is quite broad. If you want to get started, there are many different subfields. Probably just focus on a problem that you have or you want to solve, like sentiment analysis, or classifying text, or something more or less straightforward, or in machine learning more or less easy, and learning by doing it, instead of focusing on maths or things like that. You can get easily lost in that sense. So try to learn by doing - solve a problem that you have and see how it goes. Once you have that working, you have that boost of energy, like "Oh, I have something that is more or less working. Maybe it's not state of the art, it's not very accurate, but it's better than random." The machine is actually learning, and that is a good feeling. Probably just that is good to get you started and get more curiosity and learn more things.
+
+**Chris Benson:** That sounds great. So let me ask one last question for you as we wind up... So many of the listeners that we have are trying to figure out how to get into machine learning themselves, and they might be software developers, they might be business people who are intrigued by what's possible here... So as two entrepreneurs who have gone down this road and you have created a business based on making AI technologies available, and recognizing there are so many people that may want to either supplement their own business that they have or create a new business... What advice do you have for other entrepreneurs that might be interested in taking the same adventure that you guys are now a couple of years down? What would you say to them?
+
+**Mat Ryer:** I would always say solve a specific problem. Make sure you're solving a real problem. This goes for any kind of software actually, but especially machine learning because it's all cool and sexy and hard. Machine learning is hard. Like David said, if you make some ground, you get really big rewards for doing that, like just the emotional rewards you get. So yeah, it's difficult to make sure that you're building something that has some true value, because if you're just building cool tech, then there's no guarantee that's ever going to be anything.
+
+Often, you end up building something that technically is brilliant, but actually doesn't quite fit the problem, and then you have to basically move or change what you're doing so that it does solve a real problem, and that can be quite a painful transition. It usually involves adding loads of complexity because you weren't really thinking about those things from the beginning. So of course you want to be able to evolve and learn and move a project along, but I would say start with a real problem that you understand, and the problem shouldn't be anything to do with machine learning, but machine learning might be part of the solution.
+
+**Daniel Whitenack:** Great, that's a wonderful advice. We'll include links, of course, to MachineBox and other things that we've talked about - TensorFlow and Keras, and Docker and Kubernetes... If you're not familiar with those technologies, we'll include some good links to getting started with those and learning more.
+
+I just want to thank David and Mat one more time for joining us. It's been great to have you here, and really excited about what's going on with MachineBox.
+
+**Mat Ryer:** Thank you very much, and good luck with the podcast. I think it's awesome. I can't wait for future episodes. I'm sorry to everyone who had to listen to our voices for this episode, but future ones, I'm sure, will be even more interesting.
+
+**David Hernandez:** Thank you very much.
+
+**Chris Benson:** Thank you.
+
+**Daniel Whitenack:** Thank you. I appreciate it very much.
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+**Jerod Santo:** I'm joined by Dan Taylor and Steve Dower. These guys are doing Python at Microsoft... Who knew...? I didn't even know there was Python at Microsoft, and it sounds like there's not just Python at Microsoft, there's like a long legacy of this. Dan, Steve, first of all, welcome to the show.
+
+**Dan Taylor:** Thank you. Thank you for having us.
+
+**Steve Dower:** Yeah, happy to be here.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Let's go back to the beginning a little bit. You guys have been at Microsoft for a while... Tell us about Python and its roots in this company.
+
+**Steve Dower:** Yeah, Python at Microsoft has such an interesting history. I've been there for about six years, coming up on six years now, and it was going before my time. I don't remember the details; I've heard the stories and the rumors. There was some part of like Windows Server 2003 or something that shipped in native Python, so we briefly shipped Python in Windows for some database server -- I don't even remember what it was now at this point. That went away at some point, someone upgraded and went to a different language.
+
+We briefly flirted with the idea of "Let's implement Python on top of the CLR, and that became IronPython, along with IronRuby, which ultimately became the dynamic features of C\# that came out of that... So it wasn't a complete bust of a project...
+
+**Dan Taylor:** And I heard some of the features in the debugging area also came out of that. We reused some of the APIs for the PyDev Debugger, and things like that.
+
+**Steve Dower:** Certainly, yeah. There's a lot that came out of that project. After that, it was kind of wrapped up on the Microsoft side and pushed out and taken over by the community, by the way. There's people still pushing IronPython along, still making releases, they're getting their Python 3 support together.
+
+After that was when we kind of turned around and said "Hey, this thing that we do better than anyone else right now is tooling, and Visual Studio is far and away one of the best editors on the planet. This is like 2008, 2009, 2010 kind of era, "Let's invest in Python support there."
+
+\[04:03\] So there was this tiny little team, totally under the radar, building Python support for Visual Studio, and shipping an extension, which was known as Python Tools for Visual Studio. From there, Dan can probably pick up on how we've grown since then.
+
+**Dan Taylor:** Yeah, so I've also been at Microsoft for going on seven years now, and most of the time I've worked on Visual Studio in various areas, and only in the past year did I join the Python team. The reason I came over is because Python is growing so quickly at Microsoft, and there's a lot of momentum behind it. Now we've got these great tools in Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code for Python developers; we have this very fully-featured rich set of tools, and as a team, we're all bound together by this mission to make Python developers more productive, make the Python language itself more successful, and contribute back to the community.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Going back to this idea of a small team, flying under the radar, getting Python into the system, so to speak... This is something that we hear a lot about and we see with open source tooling, or languages, or whatever it is, where rarely is it a top-down decree "We're going to do Python." It's usually a grassroots effort, maybe somebody did something and didn't ask permission, but they were gonna ask forgiveness later... Is that something that happens frequently at Microsoft? Is this like a rare occasion? How does it usually work when new open source comes in? I know it's different now than it used to be.
+
+**Steve Dower:** Oh yeah, it's a totally different place than it used to be. I mean, easier to ask forgiveness than permission is one of the core Python design principles, so it's no big surprise that we went that way, and started just releasing this product and telling people that "Yeah, you can do Python before your upper management even heard about it." But it's not really that common, and even now I don't think it's that common, because the decree has come down, and it took a long time to get there.
+
+Certainly in the early days we had fights with lawyers, and many discussions, and working lunches with lawyers to try and teach them about this open source thing that was going on, encouraging them "Hey, go read this Apache license, go read this MIT license, see what you think about them, figure out how Microsoft can release code under these", instead of going off and inventing our own brand new licenses, which some people may remember we also did for a period.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, really?
+
+**Dan Taylor:** I think it's also -- as you said, a lot of it is about education and helping people understand... You know, I think a lot of people were scared about open source - a lot of companies, not just Microsoft - as it started to gain in popularity. And as Steve says, it's helping people understand why is this a good thing, why is this beneficial, and as they learn more, they become more supportive and helpful towards what we've been doing.
+
+**Steve Dower:** And we're at this awesome point now where we have automatic systems for releasing open source projects, all of the kind of governance and tracking of licenses and dependencies, it's all kind of automated throughout the company. We can self-provision GitHub repositories these days, with MIT-licensed code, provided we're meeting the guidelines that are set around that... And there's still some restrictions, but employees get to make that decision. We aren't running everything through some central location that gets to approve or disprove anything; it's a totally different company, it feels like, in so many ways, than it was back when I started, and certainly people that have been around longer have even -- they're even more impressed at how different it is.
+
+**Dan Taylor:** There's a lot of systems set up to support and help open source projects flourish at the company. There's systems if you wanna create a new open source project, how to do that, and they're really there to support all the teams.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very cool. Let's talk about Python itself, and exactly what Microsoft is doing with Python, for Python, and who is using Python, in what aspects... You guys see your customers.
+
+**Dan Taylor:** \[08:04\] Yeah, let's go ahead and talk about that. So Python has been growing very rapidly over the past few years, and if you read the Stack Overflow blogs and surveys, it's the fastest-growing mainstream language. I think as of this year, 38% of respondents indicated they're using the Python language, and that's been growing rapidly over the past few years... So it's got a lot of people, and it's still growing fast.
+
+I like to talk about three different main types of apps or developers that are using Python. One of them is the data science and machine learning that's driven a ton of growth with Python recently. The other one is web development. A lot of large companies, a lot of big websites are built on top of Python, and that continues to be a very popular, very productive language.
+
+Then the other one is just automation, scripting, tests, IT operations, system management... Python is a very productive language to work with, so a lot of people find when they need to automate some of their workflow that Python is the right tool for them.
+
+I also need to mention that with people learning to program these days, Python is actually one of the best places to start if you want to learn to program. A lot of people in school, a lot of students come out of school knowing Python, and a lot of people who are in their professional career and wanna learn a new programming language are coming to Python.
+
+At Microsoft we really wanna enable all of that, so we have our tools in Visual Studio Code - especially if you're doing some lightweight scripting, that's a great place to start. Then we've got tools in Visual Studio, which for the large, more "hardcore" uses of Visual Studio... Especially if you're already a Visual Studio developer using C++ or C\#, for example, and you wanna mix Python in with that together in the same project, Visual Studio is a great place for that because we can do cross-language debugging and other features like that.
+
+And then we're also working to enable people in the cloud who are, for example, doing machine learning projects, to be able to run their Python code in the cloud, we do batch training to be able to do all that stuff.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Thinking about education a little bit - what do you think it is about the language itself that lends itself well to first-timers and even children learning it, and a lot of the bootcamp schools, and a lot of the getting kids into code will be focused on JavaScript because of its ubiquity, or maybe Ruby because a lot of the syntax melts away and it can look kind of like English...? But Python, like you said, is very popular for that as well. What do you think it is about Python that makes it good for teaching?
+
+**Steve Dower:** I always like to position Python as having this very shallow learning curve, that then quickly jumps up to a point where you can do all kinds of magic, amazing stuff. I compare it to C++ in that respect, as well. When you get into C++ template and metaprogramming, you can do absolute magic, and it's amazing, and I love it. But C++ still has that sharp learning curve to be able to use any of that, because there's like angle brackets everywhere. Python doesn't have that. You can write really simple English-looking code, that reads nicely, in Python. I've certainly seen papers that have taken Python code and renamed it pseudo-code and not actually changed any of it at all, because it reads just like pseudo-code that most people would wanna use. But as a library developer or as a framework developer, you can make objects and classes that do really amazing things, but look very natural and read very natural, and it's not quite the same as -- like, Ruby gets used a lot for DSLs, and it's amazing for that; you never actually change the semantics of Python. You have this consistent language, that always behaves the same - equality is equality, less than is less than... It doesn't do weird things.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[12:12\] Like the operator overriding, and stuff...
+
+**Steve Dower:** Yeah, which you can totally do.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's just not in the -- community doesn't do it.
+
+**Steve Dower:** Exactly.
+
+**Dan Taylor:** There's a saying in the community about things being pythonic. The community always strives for things that look pythonic. It's got a very good set of idioms and ways that people use it, and it feels very natural. There's this joke that Python is pseudo-code that runs, you know? Personally, I don't know what pythonic means, but I know it when I see it, and everyone else seems to have that same impression there.
+
+**Steve Dower:** It does just mean that you know it when you see it. We probably shouldn't share this, in case people apply for jobs with our team, but one of the interview questions I like to use with people who will be Python developers is "Here's a sample of code. Tell me what's not pythonic about it", and it's amazing to see the range or responses. Some people who haven't experienced a lot of good Python code look at it and go "It looks mostly fine." Some people look at it and go "I can't -- take this away, I'm about to vomit" because it's such an artistic thing, that when you learn it and you feel it, then the code feels right and it looks right and it smells right... But you only learn it through experience, and by seeing good code...
+
+We make a big effort to make sure that all the code coming out of Microsoft is Pythonic in a way, because we know that people will see our code and go "Microsoft did it. They have good people there, it must be good code", so we try and make sure that it is actually good code.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Isn't there documentation around -- I'm thinking of like PEP 8, or are there specific documents that say "This is the Python way"?
+
+**Steve Dower:** PEP 8 strictly describes if you're checking in changes through Python itself. It often gets picked up, and Python developers say "It must be done this way", which is true if you're working on Python itself. You don't have to use those guidelines to be pythonic, and in particular the 79 character line limit is totally relaxed for everyone else.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** But if you're working on Python proper, that's what it applies to.
+
+**Steve Dower:** If you work on Python proper, then we still -- there are people who work on it using 80-character widescreens, and if you extend too far beyond that, then they're going to have a harder time reading the code. So we still have that restriction on the project itself, but yeah, PEP 8 is a generally good set of guidelines for things that are gonna look right, but... It's not like Go has that really strict formatting, that you must get the formatting right; other languages have really well-defined defaults for what looks good... Pythonic is about so much more than you can describe. It's not just "You put a space before this, and a space after this." It really is -- you know, don't use a class there when a function will do. It goes so much deeper.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It goes deeper. Well, I was gonna ask - you mentioned Go, and they have a tool, go fmt, that will actually reformat your code. So you can write it however you like, and then it'll put it into format. Unfortunately, it uses tabs, so I can't -- the dude cannot abide... But that's just one man's opinion. Elixir is adopting a similar thing; there's a tool (I think) in Elixir 1.6 which adds a formatter. Is there anything similar in Python? Could you even have that, or is that against the grain in the Python community?
+
+**Steve Dower:** You can, and there's actually a tool that's come out recently that's suddenly shot up in popularity; it's called Black. It's actually written by one of the core developers, who I believe has just written it for himself and his own team at work... But that is a very strongly opinionated formatter that has basically no configuration, and the idea is that you run it on the code and it will make your code at least consistent, so that everyone's code looks the same going in. So it's the same kind of theory as go fmt.
+
+**Dan Taylor:** \[16:10\] We actually have integration with Black coming up in the upcoming release of Python Extension for VS Code. The developer of that Black extension actually contributed a lot of the integration.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Would that be something you guys would consider adopting internally at Microsoft, or does it go against Microsoft's culture? Because to me, the advantage of a tool like that is if everybody adopts it, right? The fact that in Go pretty much you can expect people to have that format - that makes it very useful, even if you don't like the style very much, because everywhere you go it's the exact same code style. So tools like Black - well, interesting in the small; really, their value shines if the entire Python community - I realize that's a huge statement... But maybe the majority would actually get involved and say "Okay, let's use Black style."
+
+**Dan Taylor:** Well, certainly, as Steve said, it's been this huge rise in popularity for that Black tool. I don't think prescribe in particular what developers at Microsoft that use Python use. The nice thing about Black as a team is fully empowered to say "Hey, we want all our code to look like this. We're gonna choose Black." With our tools, we say "Go ahead, you can choose to use that, and we'll make it easy for you to integrate that into your coding experience."
+
+**Steve Dower:** Yeah, and the reality is teams are doing so many different things that it's really hard to enforce any kind of style. As kind of an extreme example, we have teams that are building and releasing samples and publishing them on the documentation site, and we'd really like those to be formatted nicely. We've also got a huge number of data scientists who are writing Python code that's gonna be run once and never seen again...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, scrappled together.
+
+**Steve Dower:** ...and if anyone comes out and says "You must always run your code through Black" and that becomes like some edict from above, now the data scientists are going "How do we do that?" and it doesn't even really matter.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, it doesn't matter...
+
+**Dan Taylor:** We have tools like... Pylint, for example, is another popular tool for at least detecting -- there's a lot of style errors and warnings in Pylint, so one of the big things is we let you customize exactly which set of rules your team is gonna use. I think if you turn Pylint on, it strictly follows that PEP 8 syntax, but a lot of people will say "We like this rule, we don't like that rule."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You can configure it, yeah.
+
+**Dan Taylor:** Yeah, and so teams will use that.
+
+**Steve Dower:** We'll say we don't like a lot of the rules too, and recommend... We have a file that we suggest the teams to say "If you follow these, then it will be acceptably good. There might be more rules that you wanna turn on, but this is the bare minimum." "Please stop using CamelCase" is a basic example. \[laughter\]
+
+**Dan Taylor:** I love CamelCase, but when I joined the team, Brett Cannon, who's our dev lead for VS Code, and Steve as well, have slowly started to beat the CamelCase out of me.
+
+**Steve Dower:** We're winning him over.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Dan Taylor:** Well, so many libraries use snake\_case, and it starts to look weird if you're not.
+
+**Break:** \[19:12\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's interesting how our tastes change over time. I was very snake\_case for a long time, and I despised CamelCase. I was that far on the side. And now I'm like "Meh, CamelCase - not so bad." I look at it and I'm like "It looks alright." That's why I feel like top-down style guides, like forced styles just feel so constraining; I can't even internally keep my internal Jerod Santo style guide over the course of five years because my tastes change... It's just an interesting phenomenon.
+
+Anyways, Steve, you've been a contributor to Python itself. You mentioned PEP 8 - you must be following that, at least when you do your work on Python. Is it Python core, or...? Tell us your involvement with the project.
+
+**Steve Dower:** Yeah, so I along with four other engineers that we have working at Microsoft am one of the volunteers - although I guess I'm party paid by Microsoft in order to do this - who work on the CPython project itself. So that's the core interpreter, all of the core libraries, everything you get in the standard library... We have a team of - I think on paper we're like 80 or more people, and at any one time there's probably 20-30 active developers who are contributing in some way to Python. But this is entirely CPython, outside of Microsoft; it's a volunteer gig. It's myself, Brett Cannon, Barry Warsaw , Eric Snow, Dino Viehland - all paid employees at Microsoft, and we have our jobs to do there, but we also get time to volunteer on this project as well, and we're supported in doing that, for a variety of different things. But overall, it's such an important project that to leave it in the hands of either volunteer donations - there's a donation drive going on now for the Python Software Foundation to keep that running... I mean, Python is too important to leave in the hands of donations like that, so having Microsoft say "Yes, we'll employ people who are working on this and keep them working on it" is a great thing to see.
+
+**Dan Taylor:** It's actually exciting because it's also one of the few languages that is kind of purely driven out of community roots. Most of the other languages were created by a company, and I think Python grew out of the community more or less, and it's very popular these days.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Absolutely. How is that managed, in a practical sense? We know some companies allow open source Fridays, or there's like 20% time... Where do you draw the lines between Steve the do-gooder Python community member working on Python and Steve the Microsoft employee working on Python? How does that all play out?
+
+**Steve Dower:** I have strongly considered getting multiple baseball caps - one with the Microsoft logo on, and one with the Python logo on...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] And which one are you wearing right now?
+
+**Steve Dower:** I have so many conversations with people where I need to be explicit about which hat am I wearing right now.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, it's a hard problem, right?
+
+**Steve Dower:** \[24:03\] Yeah, and in particular for me. My kind of main role with the CPython team is maintaining a lot of the Windows support, and so I do a lot of the builds, I work with a couple of other guys who are focused on that as well, to keep Python running well on Windows, which means I will talk to other teams at Microsoft about you know, the CPython installer is doing something weird; I mention installer, and they look at me and go "The Visual Studio installer?" I go, "No, no, no, the CPython installer. Different hat. Let me change the hat for this."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Steve Dower:** So I don't actually have that hard a line between my contributions. It really is as needed for me. Other people do. Brett, for example - and I think he's talked about this publicly, so I won't get in trouble - has a very clear "This is the time that I spend each week on CPython work."
+
+**Dan Taylor:** I think it's every Friday.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Is it every Friday? Because that's a very clear line, right?
+
+**Steve Dower:** Yeah, and "If you email me about Microsoft work on that day, you're not gonna get a response on that day because I'm not doing that work." It's very individually-managed; it comes down to how your manager feels about it, and what value is coming back out of that for either the community as a whole, or Microsoft and how that's valued.
+
+**Dan Taylor:** Yeah, I don't think anyone's really breathing over your shoulder at Microsoft anyways, and watching what you do every day... But yeah, with Brett, I've definitely tried to meet with him on Friday and he goes "No, not talking..."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** "No, I'm doing my Python work on Friday."
+
+**Dan Taylor:** Yeah. Slippery slope.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's pretty cool. We track a lot of the sustainable side of open source, and like you said, Python is way too important to be just donations-based, especially when -- when you see the donations coming in, you're thinking "How many corporations are doing very well because of this completely free to them programming language...?" We've seen some companies pick up and actually hire or pay full-time salary people whose entire purpose is to work on a specific open source project. Is there anybody doing that inside of Microsoft? Are there conversations being had, like "Wow, maybe this does make sense", in cases where it makes sense? Hypothetically, Steve, if it made sense for you to just pour all your time into CPython, would that be a conversation that would be had inside of Microsoft, or not?
+
+**Steve Dower:** Yeah, that would certainly be a conversation to have... At various points in time maybe more or less feasible. Certainly when I started contributing, that was never gonna happen. At this point, who knows...? The more that Microsoft comes to depend on Python, the easier it is to say "This is important to us. We should have someone on it full-time, who's not even doing Microsoft work anymore, because indirectly this is." We don't currently have any of those. I don't know that that's a policy to do it or not do it...
+
+**Dan Taylor:** Right now, as I mentioned, our team is growing quickly, so I think we do wanna get to that critical mass where we can have people who are dedicated to contributing directly as their full-time gig. A part of that is we need to have a large enough team that we can sustain that well, keeping the team moving forward.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, and productive.
+
+**Dan Taylor:** We wanna make sure that we're able to deliver the tools to Python developers, and keep those sustainably growing, and then meanwhile giving back to the community... But absolutely, it would be something that we would love to do.
+
+**Steve Dower:** And ultimately, when you have however many hundreds of thousands of users we have for our tools, there's enough feature requests to keep us busy until the end of time... So saying "We're gonna do less features for these things that we own and work on this thing that a lot of people own..."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's a non-starter, right?
+
+**Steve Dower:** It's not so much a non-starter, but...
+
+**Dan Taylor:** It's a hard balance, right?
+
+**Steve Dower:** Yeah, it's a tough balance, and it can be hard to explain to people why we think this is more important than the feature that you're asking for from Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code.
+
+**Dan Taylor:** \[28:05\] Because the editor is the one people first directly interact with when they're writing Python... And as I mentioned, it's about helping them be as productive as possible, so the editor is kind of like that top line thing where if we can help them get their code written, give them the right IntelliSense, give them the right warnings... That has a direct top of the funnel impact to people.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right. So let's look to the future a little bit. Dan, maybe you can tell us about the future of Python at Microsoft, and with regard to the tooling, and Steve, maybe the future of the language, where it's headed, and the community.
+
+**Dan Taylor:** Yeah, so as I mentioned, we've got two... Three -- well, four main products.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Two, three, four... Do you wanna do a five? \[laughs\]
+
+**Dan Taylor:** Well, there's a lot of different teams and I could probably pick a fifth one out there...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yes, I'm sure you'd have no trouble on that. \[laughs\]
+
+**Dan Taylor:** We actually do consult with a lot of teams across Microsoft who are doing stuff in Python, so there's many more than four or five... It's just really how I choose to bucket them in my head in terms of products. We've got our Python extension for Visual Studio Code, we've got our Python workload in Visual Studio - those are similar.
+
+The Visual Studio Code extension originally started as a community-developed extension; it was created by a developer in the community, Don Jayamanne, and we actually hired him and brought him onto the team at Microsoft and republished the extension as Microsoft. That came from the community, and now we're giving back to the community, making the team around that bigger. But the big thing we're doing with Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code - we're actually consolidating a lot of the core IntelliSense and debugging engines that are powering the two products. We wanna make IntelliSense much richer, much more feature-complete, much faster, make sure you get all those warnings and errors as you type... So that's been our big priority right now in the immediate term for those two products.
+
+There's some other things that people want. Once we get through that stuff, a lot of people have been asking for remote development; "Let me target Python in a Docker container, running in the cloud, so I can access the petabytes of data I have without having to pull it all down on my laptop."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, exactly.
+
+**Dan Taylor:** That's very next on the horizon for us, to look at stuff like that. Actually, if you look at our GitHub page for VS Code, our Python extension for VS Code, that's the top up-voted thing, with over 200 up-votes... So we have people screaming for that kind of stuff, and we want to get past that.
+
+We've also got our Azure Notebooks, hosted Jupyter notebooks. Right now that's a free offering, where you can go and run your Jupyter notebooks in the cloud without having to download and install all that stuff.
+
+**Steve Dower:** Where do I go for that, Dan?
+
+**Dan Taylor:** That's on notebooks.azure.com. Thanks, Steve. \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I'm supposed to team up for those; I wasn't doing my job over here. \[laughter\]
+
+**Dan Taylor:** So right now that's a free offering, but you know, a lot of people of course wanna be able to put more powerful machines behind that, be able to do more powerful things, so we're looking at "How do we enable to do more workloads in Azure?"
+The fourth product was just Azure itself. We wanna help people get their code running, Azure functions, Python on Linux, a lot of the machine learning workloads, and stuff like that.
+
+So those are kind of the key areas that we're really trying to move forward.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very good.
+
+**Steve Dower:** And if I can bring that up to six products, like you asked for...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I don't know -- did I ask for them, or did I just enumerate them...? Go ahead.
+
+**Steve Dower:** SQL server embedded Python, recently. 2016 and 2017 releases of SQL server come with an install of Anaconda in them. You can write stored procedures in Python and run those queries, and they'll all run on the server. You have access to NumPy, Pandas, Skicit-learn on the same server as where your data actually is. So if you do wanna do a lot of that pre-processing and it's in SQL database, then that option is already there. That was really exciting.
+
+**Dan Taylor:** \[32:06\] Yeah, I forgot to mention that the actual really cool thing about that is they actually Git-compiled the Python code down to the SQL engine... So you can actually get really good performance out of that if you're running inside of SQL server. And you can kind of copy and paste code from your local Python project and move it over to the SQL database side.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Interesting.
+
+**Steve Dower:** Yeah, and the other one that I'm really excited about is Visual Studio Team Services right now, which is -- you know, it took a bit of time to convince them, but they've now gone "Hey, Python is really cool, isn't it? Why aren't people building and testing their Python apps on our continuous integration stuff?" We got in touch, and basically said "Here's why", and they said "Okay, we'll fix it!" And they fixed it, so now you can spin up, build definitions on Visual Studio Team Services... Windows, Mac, Linux, whatever version of Python you want. Be building wheels, running tests with pytest, whatever you want to do. It integrates with GitHub, it has its own set of private repositories if you wanna use those; there are more and more exciting things coming for that that I can't talk about yet, but I am really excited about VSTS.
+
+**Dan Taylor:** I bucketed all those together in one product in my head - it was Azure. \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So you go from four to six as you unpack that bundle...
+
+**Dan Taylor:** Yeah, yeah... There's a lot of good support for Python in Azure, and as Steve mentions, there's a lot more coming. Teams are increasingly coming to us, rather than us having to go to them.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So you guys are off to PyCon here... Actually, you're gonna run out of here and pack your bag.
+
+**Steve Dower:** I am going straight home after this, unpacking and flying out at like Oh-God-thirty tomorrow morning.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So real quickly, tell me what's going on in the Python community, Python language... What's fresh there?
+
+**Steve Dower:** So Python 3.7 is basically just completely locked down. The fourth beta is out, we're gonna have a release candidate soon, and then the final release of that will be out within two months, I think, or thereabouts; I don't have the schedule in front of me. That has got -- I don't know that it's the most dramatic and exciting release we've ever had, but it's looking really solid. There's certainly a lot of improvements in initialization, which a few people are interested in... But it's really significant there.
+
+Data classes is one of the big ones. So when you're writing, if you just want a simple class to hold a couple of values, just like a few fields, you find yourself writing you know a def init and default values and getters, setters, you know, a hash function, comparison functions... We've now got a type in there on a module that you can basically inherit from, and specify just the names in the class, and you don't have to write any code, and you'll end up with like a fully defined class that may have default values for those, it'll do comparisons, it'll do hashing, and just generate all of that boilerplate code for you.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's cool, for sure.
+
+**Steve Dower:** \[35:07\] So that's coming in 3.7 shortly. We're already discussing stuff with 3.8. There's been a lot of robust discussion on the mailing lists recently, a lot of exciting potential coming... I have no idea what's in and what's out at this point. It's so early in the cycle that people are throwing ideas around, and we're discussing them... Some of them have kind of gone to votes, and ultimately, Guido van Rossum, our benevolent dictator for life (BDFL) is gonna decide on those and say "I think this is good for Python" or "I don't think this is good." It's just exciting to see what he likes the sound of, and that'll be what's going towards 3.8 in about 18 months.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very cool. Well, Dan and Steve, thanks so much for sitting down with us, and thanks for coming on the show.
+
+**Steve Dower:** Yeah, thanks for having us.
+
+**Dan Taylor:** Thank you.
diff --git a/REST easy, GraphQL is here (Interview)_transcript.txt b/REST easy, GraphQL is here (Interview)_transcript.txt
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@@ -0,0 +1,309 @@
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh yes, the sound of those beats means it's time once again for JS Party. Now, if you watched The Office, you already know that the first rule in roadside beet sales is that you put the most attractive beets on top; the ones that make you pull the car over and go "Wow, I need this beet right now." Those are the money beets. Special thanks to BMC (Breakmaster Cylinder) for helping us put the money beets right up top.
+
+My name is Jerod Santo and I'm happy to be here today. We have Suz with us. Suz Hinton, say hi.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** Hello! Coming to you from sunny Hawaii.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Suz, you're in Hawaii... I just got all jealous. Please tell us why.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** I'm very excited. This is the first day of my vacation, so I'm gonna have a JavaScript party with you all, and then I'm gonna go and have a party on the beach.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That sounds better than what I'm going to do next, for sure...
+
+**Suz Hinton:** \[laughs\] I'm very excited. I haven't gone on a big sort of travel vacation since 2011, so I'm so freakin' excited.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very cool. We appreciate you joining us from Hawaii, and waking up extra early to kick off this party with us... But you had to be here for John Resig, so... Special guest today - John Resig. You all know who he is. He's here to talk about GraphQL, why he's excited about it, why he thinks it's the new REST... John, thanks so much for joining us.
+
+**John Resig:** Thank you so much for having me.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So let's just get a little bit of a catch-up with you and what you're up to these days. We know you've been working at Khan Academy for a while now... Is that still your day job? And what have you been up to?
+
+**John Resig:** Yeah, so I've been at Khan Academy now for a little over seven years; I'm still working there. These days, my role is as a front-end architect, so thinking a lot about the systems that we're building, thinking about the hard problems like what sort of things do we need to have in place to ensure that we can write stuff quickly and be scalable, but then additionally working on things like our design system, and stuff like that.
+
+So it's pretty wide-ranging, but it's all very front-end focused. I really enjoy it. I think being there seven years is probably a testament to that. I really, really like it.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** It must be so cool to see how Khan Academy has changed as well, in both product and technically over the last seven years. I think that's really a wonderful opportunity to have, when you're so happy somewhere that you actually get to really be there to influence it to evolve, but also just watch the audience change over time, too.
+
+**John Resig:** Absolutely. When I started, there was I think three -- I was the third engineer, and the whole team was incredibly small. I forget how many users we had at that point, but at this point now we have tens of millions of users every month, from all over the world, so the challenges of scaling up from those tiny beginnings up to where we are now - it's been very monumental.
+
+I really enjoy, at least for myself, the technical challenge of working on these problems, but also I really appreciate the impact that we're having... Being able to bring educational materials to people all over the world for free - that's something that I feel very good about.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** A little bit of insight into some of that impact, at least anecdotally, with myself and my family - we're homeschoolers, and we use Khan Academy extensively, so we're very grateful for it. It's been instrumental in teaching our children, so thank you very much for all your work there.
+
+**John Resig:** Fantastic, I'm glad to hear it. You're very welcome.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Seven years is a long time in internet years; that's eternity. It must be very satisfying to keep you there that long.
+
+**John Resig:** \[06:42\] Yeah, it definitely is. I think it's nice because as Khan Academy has grown, I certainly feel like I've grown a lot, too. I think one of the reasons why I decided to work at Khan Academy in the first place - and this might come up later, but when I joined Khan Academy, I stepped down from jQuery; I left the project. I left it in good hands, but I deliberately wanted to move on, to be able to work on a product, actually getting to ship something and get it out to users, and have that sort of flow and that process... So that's something I've been really just enjoying and really relishing.
+
+We have excellent teams, really good designers, engineers, front-end and back-end, QA people, and being able to ship really high-quality stuff is -- I don't know, it's a lot of fun... So that's something that -- I feel like we haven't always been able to do that; certainly back in the beginning it was much more loose, and everyone had to do everything, but now we're larger(ish); we're still less than 200 people, but we're certainly a lot more professional and we're hitting things that at least I'm very proud of.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** That's the dream.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So John, we have you here today not to talk about jQuery, but to talk about GraphQL. Khan Academy was an early adopted of React, and now you dove head-deep into GraphQL and you're so excited about it that you have a GraphQL Guide which seems to be in progress, but has some meat there book that you're writing with Loren Sands-Ramshaw. Tell us the back-story and the introduction, which we'll link up in the show notes the Introducing the GraphQL Guide post... You give kind of the insights into how GraphQL was exposed to your team there at Khan Academy, and then some of the transition of getting into it. Can you tell us that story?
+
+**John Resig:** Sure. At Khan Academy I guess we take a very different approach to architectural decisions than maybe most organizations. My role - I'm a front-end architect; I'm THE front-end architect, but I don't dictate anything about what we do or what we should be doing, what technologies we should be choosing. I sort of see my role as a facilitator.
+
+If people are interested and excited about things, my job is to help them define it and refine it, and get it to the point where we can start using it. For GraphQL, that was a thing that had come up in a number of our front-end guild meetings. We have these bi-weekly discussions with all the front-end folk there and we get to talk about things we're working on, or interested in, and GraphQL had come up a number of times. People had gone and seen different talks on GraphQL, or read blog posts, and started to experiment with it in side projects... It was at that point that we were like, "Hey, this is pretty interesting."
+
+I think early on we were looking at a number of different technologies and GraphQL seemed interesting. Relay and then Apollo came later on, and all these different things... And it's like, okay, how do these play in together, how are these interacting, and how is this compared to what we're doing right now with our REST APIs?
+
+At least for us - we have a lot of REST APIs, both public and private, and maintaining them was a real project, and it was really hard for us to kind of understand the data requirements that we had and that existed across all these different APIs.
+
+So we knew we were kind of interested in GraphQL, but we needed to kind of understand whether or not this was going to work for us... So what we ended up doing was a number of experiments. We hold hackathons and Khan Academy, so during the hackathons we did some experimentation with trying out GraphQL on parts of our website. This was not intended to ship; obviously, it's a hackathon, you're just doing something to see if it works... But in that process, we were like "Hey, this is pretty cool."
+
+\[11:08\] So the next phase of that was I was on the classroom team last year... The classroom is all developing products for teachers and students, in a classroom setting. And in there, we were gonna be redesigning and redeveloping a number of our products, and I realized "This is actually a really good opportunity to experiment with using GraphQL, because since it's a greenfield opportunity, we don't need to be relying upon existing REST APIs necessarily (we would be writing new ones anyway), so let's use this as a chance to define a GraphQL architecture, implement it, and start using it for these new products."
+
+In doing so, it ended up working really well. As we were using this, we were just like "Hey, this is amazing. It is so much easier to use." Then we in the classroom team started talking to other teams, and we were like "Okay, this is actually really legitimate", and we started to get other teams to kind of like start experimenting with their architectures.
+
+Then eventually, after a few months of this, we all kind of decided that this is actually what we wanna be doing... That GraphQL is just fundamentally so much better than what REST has provided for us. So we were willing to put in the hard work of moving over, rewriting a lot of our APIs, and all that. This is still very much an ongoing process; we sort of have a mandate now in place where we're using GraphQL for all new things that we're writing, and we're starting to convert existing things over to use GraphQL... But it's gonna be a lot of work... So we'll see. I don't know when the day is gonna arrive that 100% of our RESTful APIs are gone and we're using GraphQL for everything.
+
+I mean, frankly, we're not even to that point yet with React. We still have some pages lingering somewhere on our website that we're using jQuery, and stuff... the process of cleaning up technical debt is a long one, but yeah...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** About how many REST APIs are you talking about here? Give us an order of magnitude - hundreds, thousands, dozens...?
+
+**John Resig:** I think maybe a hundred(ish) would be my guess, in stuff that is both public and private.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** So it feels like the GraphQL guide is aimed to be that missing manual that you didn't have when you went through this with Khan Academy... Which is awesome, because now other people can learn from this journey that you've been on, and I think it's also really refreshing for you to say that "Well, this is an ongoing journey..." You know, because a lot of people feel that they have to do everything all at once, and that can be really scary.
+
+I really appreciate that you wanted to go back and actually then create this missing manual. Is that sort of the thought process you had?
+
+**John Resig:** Yeah... I think it's a couple things. One is having a missing manual -- and then there's a couple of things, which is that I think when we started using GraphQL versus now, there is just a lot more documentation and tool now than a year and a half ago... Which is the reality of pretty much any new technology. But additionally, I was very interested in getting people excited about this technology... I was, and am.
+
+\[14:59\] I wanted to not only have there be a good resource for people to use, but also just that -- I feel like there's some work to be done to even convince people that GraphQL is interesting in the first place. I'm convinced, but yeah... So I think part of the book is explaining and looking at REST APIs, looking at GraphQL, and looking at the benefits that GraphQL provides. So yeah, that's where my heart and mind is at.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's always interesting seeing large software companies adopt these new technologies... Especially when Facebook came out and announced GraphQL and released it, they had already had a successful track record with React, but then they also had Relay, and they wanted everybody to use Relay; that hasn't panned out quite as well, but with GraphQL I think you had early signs of success when GitHub decided that GraphQL was worth them investing in, and now we see Khan Academy - especially yourself, John - writing a book about GraphQL. That's going to, I think, sway a lot of people, if they were just saying "Yeah, no big deal", to take a look at it. Is that some of your intention, and then why would you necessarily want that to be the case - so that it has a brighter future?
+
+**John Resig:** I think one of the things that has been most changing for me - and again, I will say that I just have an extremely heavy front-end bias in everything I do... \[laughter\] I mean, perhaps understandably so... But to me, GraphQL is the most front-end friendly API mechanic you can have.
+
+So at least for me, the more GraphQL that's out there, the easier it's gonna be for developers - front-end developers, especially - to interact and use different APIs.
+
+When we use GraphQL and we're developing new products, the rate at which we can iterate and prototype is so much faster than with REST API... At least with how we had our REST APIs designed. You would specify your data requirements on the server side and say "Okay, we need to get these fields from these models, and pass them up into a JSON object and send it up to the client..." Whereas with GraphQL, you're defining your schema; you're saying, okay, this is your model and what properties exist on it, and then on the client you've specified, and it completely changes everything.
+
+Now, instead of having to do some server-side -- if you want a property that's missing, you have to change some server-side code with the REST API, then go to the client, and change the fields you're getting... Whereas now with GraphQL you can just do all on the client. Since everything's been specified in the schema, you can just say "Hey, I need the username here. I wasn't getting it before, but now I want it." You just add it in, and there it is. In that way, your ability to iterate is so dramatically improved, and you can just get stuff out very fast... And that's great for us - we're working with designers and we're doing a lot of testing in schools, and we can just try stuff out, get it out there, experiment, get the results back and just keep iterating again and again. So yeah, I think that's something that's worked out very well for us.
+
+Break: \[19:00\]
+
+**Suz Hinton:** So as you've been doing these iterations, has there been anything that's popped up that you didn't expect to run into with GraphQL? ...such as the way you write schemas, or even just how those queries end up connecting on the back-end... Or is there any sort of little polls that came out of it that you could share with us today?
+
+**John Resig:** I will mention that at least at Khan Academy we -- I think we're probably different from most shops that would be using GraphQL, which is that our back-end is on Google App Engine, and we use Python for our back-end. I suspect that probably a lot of people who are using (or would end up using GraphQL) are gonna be probably with a Node.js back-end of some sort... I don't know what platform they were running on.
+
+So yeah, I think some of the things that we learned were sort of about the differences in server-side implementation... And I think there may be some things that we are maybe a little envious now of. I've been seeing the exciting news and stuff coming out about Apollo server, for example, and all sorts of really interesting hashing mechanisms, and things like that that are there... But you have to be using Apollo server and kind of have it integrated in your stack, whereas for us, that would be challenging to do.
+
+So yeah, I don't have a good answer to this at this point, other than to say that if -- I suspect that if you're sticking in Node.js land, you're gonna have a really good time. \[laughter\] And if you're kind of skirting out the edges like we are with Python and Graphene, and things like that. You can definitely make things work, and we are... It's just that it's gonna be a little bit different.
+
+At Khan Academy we're also starting to experiment with Kotlin as a server-side language, and I'm not sure what their GraphQL store is like, but it can't be better than what's happening in Python, I can almost guarantee that.
+
+So yeah, anyway, that's something that we've been actively learning. At least in my side projects where I've been using GraphQL, it's been very smooth sailing and I've enjoyed that.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** That's great. Is this something that you're covering a little bit more in your guide, as well?
+
+**John Resig:** Yes, absolutely. We're covering many of the different client-side implementations, and many of the different server-side implementations. We do have a bias towards sort of the primary stack, I wanna say, with a Node.js back-end and a front-end that's using React, because I think that's something that a lot of people are probably gonna be using who use GraphQL... But we do cover a lot of the other options as well, because that's the nice thing about GraphQL - it's relatively generic; nothing about GraphQL dictates that you have to be using React, or using Node.js.
+
+What's interesting is that -- like, we're using Python on our back-end, and on our front-end we're actually going through old pages of our site and replacing REST API calls or GraphQL calls... And some of those pages are older; they aren't using the latest Apollo and all these wonderful frameworks... But we've kind of created little shims where we can stick these GraphQL calls.
+
+\[24:10\] So yeah, you can really make it work wherever you want it to run, no matter what technology stack you have. So yeah, I think that's something that's nice, and I think people don't necessarily always realize that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I can speak a little bit to the back-end ecosystem, because just as part of my work at Changelog and Changelog News, we obviously keep our thumb on the pulse of what's going around, in as much of a polyglot way as we can... And I would say in the last 18 months or so, across many of the different ecosystems - Node was very early and often in terms of tooling and support for GraphQL back-ends, but I've seen a lot of advancements in the Elixir ecosystem, in Ruby, as well as Python... So there's just a lot going on, and a lot of the different back-end technologies are racing to get their tooling and support for building GraphQL APIs as solid and quality as they can. So you've definitely seen a groundswell support across different ecosystems.
+
+So John, what else from the front-end? This is obviously where you focus. You said GraphQL was just so much better than REST from your guys' perspective, so I guess just -- I know you've mentioned a few pieces of it, but maybe a chance to sing its praises and enumerate all the ways... You know, let me count the ways that GraphQL has won you over on the front-end. What's the biggest wins and how many are there?
+
+**John Resig:** So I've mentioned rapid prototyping, but I think one of the things that so shocked me about GraphQL is that when you have your queries defined on the client or in your JavaScript code, you can statically analyze the queries. The benefit of this is that -- we have a linting rule set up where if there are any changes to a GraphQL schema or something like that and it's gonna cause one of our queries to break, it'll produce an error about that.
+
+Now, the cool thing about this is that it allows us to refactor our APIs, our GraphQL, in ways that were never possible with our REST APIs... Because with a REST API - at least the ones we had - it was just like, okay, here's a JSON blob; we don't know what data is being accessed or how it's being used or where it's being used, so therefore we don't know if it's ever safe to remove any data.
+
+So if we wanna rework our API and be like, "Can we delete this data? Can we work this schema?" etc. it's a huge, very frustrating project... Whereas with GraphQL you can do that static analysis and just be like -- and we've done this, where you're like, "Oh, I wanna rename this property to be more descriptive." So you rename it, you run the linter, and you get a nice little list there of every file that's breaking now; you go through and change those names, and you're done.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** Oh, my God...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Suz likes that.
+
+**John Resig:** Yeah... So the refactoring process takes minutes, as opposed to hours and things just breaking in weird ways that you can't quantify. So this is something that is -- for me, when I saw that, I was just like "Okay, that makes all this worth it." \[laughs\] It's the sort of thing that is truly important.
+
+\[28:03\] I think one of the technologies we've been using a lot at Khan Academy additionally is Flow, with Flow types. The nice part is that if you have this GraphQL data come in, you can define the Flow types for the GraphQL data structure, and then you can sort of trace a whole path through your applications. So again, if we change the name of one of these props, I can just go change that in the Flow type definition and now I can see every single place in my application that's breaking as a result of that.
+
+This sort of stuff - again, it's making refactoring possible in ways that really just weren't feasible before... So this is something that really, really excites me.
+
+Other things that have excited me from a front-end perspective about GraphQL - I think I've really enjoyed the Apollo client-side implementation. We've been using it with React, and it makes it really nice to really understand things about like loading states, error states - all this sort of stuff. A good side effect of this is that it encourages you to write React components in a way that are very robust to changes... Because your data could be in a loading state or an error state, but you have to account for that, and I feel like in a REST world it's very easy to write something where you're just like "Oh, when I get some data" and then like never handle the data failing. In the Apollo world I feel like you kind of have to do it. It's defined explicitly, and especially if you're using things like Flow types; you can verify -- you have to make your code more robust... Which is good; it's better coding practices, frankly.
+
+That's something that I've also really enjoyed - I feel like the quality of the components that we're building that use GraphQL are just better than what we were building in REST land, because we're able to enforce these really good practices from the start.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** Speaking of enforcing things from the start, I had a question just about back-end data and setting up databases, and things like that... You're obviously on a journey where you're taking existing data structures on the back-end and you're getting it to work with GraphQL. Is there anything that people should do differently if, let's say, they know immediately from the get-go that they're gonna be using GraphQL? Do you have any advice on how back-end developers could set up their databases and their data structures in the first place on the back-end in order for it to be as easy as possible to work the GraphQL?
+
+I know that it's obviously a very generic technology, but are there any sort of nuances in there that you can share?
+
+**John Resig:** That's a good question. It's not something I've had a ton of experience with, honestly... But as I've played around with GraphQL and experimented with it, I guess it really felt like it is able to handle lots of different cases and lots of different database styles or querying mechanics. I think generally it does work better or it's a little bit better-suited to document-centric databases.
+
+\[31:55\] When I've gone through and implemented GraphQL on top of MongoDB or something like that, it's really simple; it couldn't possibly be much simpler. It's a little more work if you're doing a SQL database, or something... But again, it's not insurmountable at all.
+
+Unfortunately, I don't feel like I have very good advice here to give specifically, and I wouldn't be surprised -- this is something I haven't done much research into at this point, but it wouldn't surprise me if there are people building just like databases design for GraphQL at this point, or kind of all-in-one type of deals, that are designed for performance in caching and all these sorts of things from the get-go, so you don't have to weld them on your own... But that's something that unfortunately I haven't done a lot of research into at this point.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** Yeah, I think there's a certain -- I think you're very lucky if you are actually entering now and you're starting something from scratch, which generally isn't always the very common case, right? Unless you're a startup that just exploded onto the scene right now, you're going to be dealing with transitions and things like that, which is very similar to what you're going through at Khan Academy... But it's good to know that there are some sort of cases or situations where it is a lot easier to get started immediately. That's cool to know.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So from the front-end perspective, I've had a few of these conversations - we can link up a few old Changelog episodes... And not even that old; we had a Prisma and GraphQL episode just this spring even... About GraphQL, and I talked about it with a lot of people and it seems like from the front-end it is demonstrably - and I'll maybe even say objectively - better in terms of, like you said, prototyping, speed of development... I didn't realize at this point about refactoring, which is really cool... But it seems like on the back-end, building the back-end, dealing with caching, dealing with perhaps inappropriate or poorly-crafted queries - that's kind of where the "there be dragons" are.
+
+I know you've been very much on the front-end of the Khan Academy team, but has that been a real issue? Put differently, is the back-end team - or the people who are doing both - as excited as you are, or is it like the front-end is driving this and the back-end is just like along for the ride?
+
+**John Resig:** Yeah, so it's interesting... I think a couple things that I wanna caveat the work that we've been dealing with is that so far we have not exposed our GraphQL stuff public. We have not replaced our public REST APIs with GraphQL yet. That's gonna be a process in and of itself. But we are not letting people write arbitrary GraphQL against our servers.
+
+GitHub allows people to do that, and I'm very curious to hear about how they do that in a way that they feel is safe. But at least so far, that has not been a priority for us.
+
+Now, additionally, another thing that we do is we have lots of monitoring and logging for all of our GraphQL queries... So we track the performance of every query, we track this performance over time, and then we have alerts for when queries are being especially slow. That way, we can look at them and be like, "Hey, this query is taking five seconds. That seems excessive. What can we do to make this faster?" With this data, we can delegate this to the teams to work on and improve.
+
+\[35:56\] But at least so far, what's interesting is that initially the front-end team - we were champing at this, we were like "We really want this. It's gonna make our lives easier", but I think an interesting part about the GraphQL switch here is that the back-end team now is very excited about this change, too... And one of the reasons for this is that it dramatically simplifies the back-end.
+
+Previously, we would have a REST endpoint, and we would get some information about a teacher and their students, or something like that... And within that single REST endpoint is many different queries, data being transformed and mutated and all this sort of stuff, and then it gets mushed back into a JSON blob and put out.
+
+This code ends up being pretty complicated... Like, it's hard to look at and reason about, and especially when you have a number of endpoints that are doing very similar things, but just pulling the data in slightly different ways. But in GraphQL land, since you define a schema, just a generic schema - this is the sort of thing that pretty much anyone can do... You know, front-end engineer, back-end engineer - it's relatively easy to write these schemas. Then once you have that, you don't really have to worry about the logic of mutating this data into a good form. GraphQL takes care of that for you.
+
+So in a lot of ways, it's made a lot of our data structures much easier to understand, and the back-end team has been excited about that because it's reducing the surface area of the application. Now they can just look at one place and be like "Well, the only place where this data model is being used is in this one GraphQL schema, and that's it." They can just look at that one place and understand how it's being used entirely... As opposed to trying to hunt around the application through all the different REST APIs that could be using this thing; it's just very complicated.
+
+So yeah, this is something that they're seeing as a way to reduce the amount of code that we have, and the amount of service area, and just simplify things overall.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's interesting. I find myself often -- I often do small teams, or sometimes team of one style projects, so very often I'm the consumer of my own REST APIs, so I only have to nag myself for slightly different data or a new endpoint... But I still have that mental back and forth of like "Oh, I guess I need the data this way." I'm going to go add an endpoint or adjust an endpoint to massage it to be better, and I have worked in a situation where I was contracting to build a back-end API for a startup that had multiple devices. An iOS app as well as a web app for the first two; they weren't quite successful enough to make it to their eventual Android app situation... But in that circumstance it was me, a contractor working on the API, and then a completely different company building the iOS app... So if you look at the bottleneck of development speed there, it is the integration point between those two actors, and the slowdown when they are waiting on me or vice-versa was troublesome.
+
+I could see where if it was a GraphQL API with a well-defined schema that a lot of the stuff that they were waiting on me for, waiting on back-end for, they wouldn't have to wait; they would just change the way the query worked, and as long as the schema supported that, then they would have been off to the races.
+
+Have you felt less communication lag or maybe tension between -- I don't know how big your teams are, if you have walls and whatnot between them... I know some companies have very strong walls between teams. What are your thoughts on that?
+
+**John Resig:** \[40:03\] Yeah, so one thing I'll mention briefly is that we do have a front-end team and back-end team, and we do have people who are full-stack... But additionally, we're pretty porous; front-end people are making back-end changes, back-end people are doing front-end changes.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, that's the way it should be, right? ...I think.
+
+**John Resig:** \[laughs\] So we aren't one of those super-strict organizations. I think some people just may have preferences of just doing front-end or back-end, and as a result they do less... But yeah, I think one of the things that's been interesting is that even in cases where a front-end engineer has had to go in and add in an additional field to the scheme, I would say that it's just easier to do in general, even compared with how we had things previously... So even in the worst case, where a front-end engineer has to make back-end changes, frankly, any of our engineers escape all that, from our most junior to senior.
+
+I think that's something that feels empowering. You don't have to wait and rely upon getting a more senior engineer or back-end engineer in to go work on this... But I think the thing is that there's far more common cases just like "Oh, we're just missing this field, but it already exists in the schema, so we just add it in and now we're done." That's the sort of thing that is -- yeah, the velocity impact is tremendous. And of course, that's helping the individual engineers so we don't have to go into the back-end, or we find someone else to finish it... Whatever the case might be. So yeah, it's been pretty great.
+
+Break: \[41:47\]
+
+**Suz Hinton:** John, we have some really cool community questions from our JS Party/Changelog community for you... We're gonna read some of them out to you on this segment.
+
+**John Resig:** Okay.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** The first question is from Dan McKlein. He says "Without subscriptions, what's the benefit of GraphQL over REST? With HTTP too you get maxing of connections, so the limit of open connections is higher, somewhat negating the benefit of grouping queries. And the pain point comes when one of those queries is slow in that group, causing your whole payload to be delayed until your slowest query returns, which is arguably worse than firing off ten REST requests."
+
+I think the first part was the question, which is like "What is the benefit of it over REST if you don't have the HTTP bottlenecks?" So this less probably about the user experience, I guess, on the surface layer.
+
+**John Resig:** \[43:42\] Yeah... So there's a couple things. One, GraphQL queries don't necessarily have to wait until everything is done before returning. I know that Apollo and with a compile server you can start to return data in batches. You can get some of the initial layers of requests and return those, and keep returning more as you're getting deeper and deeper.
+
+So it isn't necessarily the case that it's an all-or-nothing proposition with GraphQL. Certainly, the simple implementation would be all or nothing, but I'm looking at a lot of the different tech stacks that exist now, like Apollo server... They're much more robust, and can handle incremental data.
+
+I guess the question about performance... I think one of the things that is certainly a little bit tricky, and one thing that's trickier with GraphQL than with traditional REST APIs is that -- I guess typically the traditional REST APIs, especially the ones that aren't authenticated, it's a lot easier to do browser-based caching, or caching at an edge cache or stuff like that... Whereas with GraphQL, since typically you have a single endpoint, it's hard to do caching at that level.
+
+So usually, what you end up having to do is either having a different sort of client-side cache, like in browser... We use Apollo, and in that case it caches the data that we've requested, and if it looks like we're going to try re-requesting data that we already have, it just pulls from that cached data, so we don't have to send off another request.
+
+Then additionally, you can do caching on the server-side, but it's lower-level at like the software level, so you can see that you have certain queries coming in, and if you know that certain data is always gonna come back, you can just return that cash response.
+
+Yeah, so I think there are definitely ways of improving the performance, improving the caching of GraphQL... One of the things is that it's just gonna work in a different way than what typically happens with the normal REST API.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So I guess as a side question or follow-up for that - I guess it's more of a side question... Dan says without subscriptions, but he's now assuming that we all know what subscriptions are in the context of GraphQL... Can you explain what subscriptions are?
+
+**John Resig:** I'm gonna try and explain... I mean, essentially, you can subscribe to a data source and get periodic updates; as more and more data comes in, it gets updated with that additional data. Now, subscriptions are a little bit different from what I was describing before with the Apollo server, which is like a single query, but then the data that you're returning is complex, it's coming from multiple different queries, subqueries, and stuff like that. In that case, it could potentially come back incrementally, as the data is ready... Whereas a subscription is more like -- you would use a subscription to implement a chat room, or something like that... Or an ad where there's lots of updates coming in, or a stock ticker feed...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right. So it's more like a real-time connection that gets pushed data from the GraphQL server?
+
+**John Resig:** Yeah. That's more what the subscription is, rather than the other thing I was describing.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Gotcha. Very good. Okay, next question from the community... This one comes from Dylan Schiemann, who listeners may remember from the Dojo episode back on JS Party \#25... Dylan says "So jQuery... That's like a query language for GraphQL, right...?"
+
+**John Resig:** \[48:06\] \[laughs\] Yeah, it's funny, because Dylan and I go way back... He was working at Dojo, I was working at jQuery... All this, at this point, old-timer JavaScript framework folk... \[laughs\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yup. In our chat room, he mentioned that you guys have been trolling each other for years, so he thought that would be appropriate...
+
+**John Resig:** \[laughs\] But I think it's funny... It's like one of those things where we -- at the time, the competition felt intense, or at least it did for me... It was just like, "Oh man, we're trying to change things and get recognition, and all this sort of stuff...", but then as things have changed and as the world has changed, and everything, now we just look back at those times... We're like, "Oh yeah, that was a thing that was happening..." \[laughs\]
+
+He's jokingly saying is jQuery a thing for creating GraphQL databases, but like, back when I named jQuery, my first name was jSelect, just for like JavaScriptSelect... But I couldn't, because the domain was taken, so I didn't choose that... And I saw that jQuery was available, but there was an open source project called jQuery, and it was like a Java library for doing SQL queries, or something like that. It looked like it hadn't been updated in a while, so I was like "Okay, it's probably fine. I can just use this name." If the domain is available, I'll get the domain and I can use it.
+
+I remember at some point in the future the person running the open source project got in touch with me and was like "Hey, you're kind of using my name." I'm like, "Oh, sorry... I thought the project was dead. I didn't realize that it was still going on..." \[laughter\] But the thing is that yeah, obviously, I feel pretty certain that web-based jQuery is far more popular than the jQuery Java SQL querying thing... \[laughs\] But yeah, I did feel a little bit bad about that.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** This is such a classic naming problem, you know what I mean? Like, "Is the domain available? Is there already a project called this?" These days it's like "Is the name taken on npm?"
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right. The age-old programming problem is naming things, and cache invalidation, and off by one errors.
+
+Okay, so Dylan does actually have a serious question following up on his troll, which actually plays into some of the stuff you're talking about there, John, about jQuery... He says he's curious to find out what you think of jQuery's place in JS history now. "Do you have regrets with the project? Would you go back and focus more on architecture-type problems with jQuery before things got out of hand for people trying to build large apps, or do you see it as a good bridge for people from the days of old to the v-dom-based dev?"
+
+**John Resig:** I do see it as a relatively good bridge. It's certainly of its time, where jQuery was so DOM-centric... Like, you are querying DOM elements, manipulating those elements directly... Certainly whenever I do stuff like that these days, it feels very antiquated. \[laughs\]
+
+\[51:41\] Personally, I don't have regrets about not doing architectural things, and it's not because I feel like I missed out... At the time, I made very deliberate decisions not to work on that. We knew that jQuery was opinionated in some ways, in that "These are the ways of querying DOM elements", and things, but it was not opinionated about how you built your application. You can build it in any way you want it, you can use jQuery in that context, but we weren't dictating how that should work... So I'm okay with this.
+
+If you look at React -- I was mentioning earlier that we were early adopters of React at Khan Academy, but we were (I believe) the first organization outside of Facebook to adopt React... And React is so dramatically different from the jQuery way of doing things. I don't think we could ever have iterated on jQuery to the point at which we arrived at React. It's a fundamentally different branch of the evolutionary tree, and frankly, I feel like React is a lot better for the kind of things that it's trying to do.
+
+These days, as a front-end dev, I feel like I'm much, much happier trying to build the complex things that I'm trying to build, than I was a long time ago... And it isn't necessarily because of jQuery, it's just because that we as an industry have dramatically changed how we're doing things and what we're willing to consider to be acceptable. Essentially, the industry is growing up, and a part of that is having a lot of these frameworks that take care of things for you.
+
+So yeah, I don't know; I don't have regrets about it. I think jQuery was great, it did a very good thing for a lot of people... I certainly enjoyed using it, and really when I first created it, that's all I wanted - I just wanted a framework that would solve my problems. Yeah, I'm okay. I sleep fine at night. \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** As you should.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** Our next question comes from Louis Montez; it relates a little bit to Dan's question earlier - it's about REST vs. HTTP, and the advantages outside of that. They ask "Since we've had things like JSON-RPC over WebSockets for years, how much of the GraphQL as "the new REST" comes from REST being typically tied to HTTP, while GraphQL is transport-agnostic?" I think that's a great point. They're asking "Is the query language itself the killer feature?"
+
+**John Resig:** Yeah, I think so. I think the query language is really good, because a lot of the features that I describe are benefitting directly from that... Being able to specify the query on the client side, being able to do static analysis, and all this sort of things. So that's certainly a benefit.
+
+I think additionally, having a schema defined on the back-end - like, you have the schema on the back-end and then queries on the front-end - those two together really make GraphQL what it is. So yeah, I don't think the transport layer -- as I'm developing in using GraphQL, I don't think about how it's getting to the client necessarily. That's not my primary concern; my primary concern is more about "Okay, what data am I requesting as the data that I need?" And I feel pretty good about that.
+
+\[55:59\] So I guess to answer the question - yeah, I would agree that probably the query language itself, but then combined with the schema definitions is really what makes GraphQL special.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** That makes a lot of sense.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** The next question comes from Chris, a.k.a. CanadaUni in our JS Party chat room; Chris was just talking about an ArrowPress project to learn Apollo stack with GraphQL; we were talking about coffee during the break, so Chris was much into that conversation... Chris has a thought, a question, and a concern; I'll kind of give them to you in that order.
+
+The thought is "It was really easy to set up a Node server with the new Apollo server" - good to hear that. The question is "When should someone not use GraphQL?"
+
+**John Resig:** Personally - this is my opinion - I'm not convinced yet about using GraphQL for a project where you are the only developer working on it. If you're just building a thing for yourself, and you're doing the front-end and the back-end and everything, you can probably get some benefit from GraphQL, but I think there's gonna be diminishing returns.
+
+I think you're gonna get the most benefit from GraphQL when you're on a team of engineers, and you're trying to all share and use the same API. Additionally, I'm also not sold about using GraphQL for a public-facing API. I know there are people who do it, and more power to them; it just seems like an unnecessarily complicated thing to implement, especially since you're letting people run semi-arbitrary queries against your data. That's the sort of thing you need to be very, very vigilant about.
+
+Those are two things that (at least to me) I still have questions about. But at least the more common case of having a team of engineers, working against a single GraphQL endpoint - it's amazing. It couldn't be better. In that way, REST looks a bit inferior.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Finally, Chris shares a concern, which maybe you can just react to or not... They say "Sometimes it feels like there's too much magic, making it challenging to troubleshoot, sometimes. Maybe that's just with Apollo, but that has been my experience."
+
+**John Resig:** Interesting. I'm trying to think of issues that we've had as we've used Apollo... And we have had some. I think the issues that we've had have been more when we were upgrading, like moving from one version to another, and things start breaking in ways that we don't understand... This has only happened maybe once or twice so far, and it just requires a little bit of debugging and trying to figure out how different state is moving around in different ways...
+
+I think usually issues like that are happening - if they happen at all - in the very complicated parts of our application... So maybe that also kind of speaks to us, that our applications should be simpler, and then therefore be easier to reason about. But yeah, I'm not sure.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** Our last question is from Rasmus Hanson, and they ask "What are some common mistakes people make when working with or implementing GraphQL?"
+
+**John Resig:** \[59:53\] I feel like I don't have enough data looking at people at large, what mistakes they've made... I feel like there are mistakes that we made... \[laughs\]
+
+**Suz Hinton:** Yeah, we'd love to hear that. Personal anecdotes would be amazing.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Absolutely.
+
+**John Resig:** I've mentioned earlier about how we have tracking set up now for the GraphQL queries, to know how long they're taking, and that isn't something that we had initially, nor was it something that came out of the box... And that's a thing that's helped us a lot, because we were having a hard time figuring out which queries were taking a long time, and why, or even understanding which queries might get slower, given the different parameters that get passed in them.
+
+So that's the sort of thing that is -- and I'm not sure it's a mistake that we made, other than that as we were using GraphQL, we were kind of realizing that we just didn't have the information that we needed to write good queries, so we had to build an additional layer on top to do this analysis.
+
+I'm trying to think of other mistakes that we made... One mistake that I feel like we didn't make, but we could have, is that we didn't adopt GraphQL too early. I think now is probably the best time to be adopting GraphQL. We adopted it a year and a half ago; it was certainly rougher. I think if we had tried to adopt GraphQL when it first started coming out and being all buzzworthy and all that, we would have had a real hard go with it...
+
+So I think from a mistake perspective, my takeaway from this is that if I'm starting a new project today, I'm just gonna go straight to the latest and greatest things. I'm gonna use Apollo both on the front-end and back-end personally, because their full stack takes into account a lot of the edge cases that exist.
+
+I think it would definitely be a mistake today to kind of like roll your own thing from scratch. There's really no reason to do that. There's a lot of good frameworks to take care of this for you. I think that's probably my main takeaway right now.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** That's great advice.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, that rounds out our community question & answers; thanks to all the awesome community members who submitted those questions, thanks John for hearing them.
+
+Final thoughts from you, parting words, John, before we let you go?
+
+**John Resig:** Thank you so much for having me. It's been nice getting to chat about this, and I guess a message to anyone who's listening is definitely check out GraphQL. I think it's pretty great, I think it's at the very least worth some time investigating. I think that's about it. Thank you.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** Also, if people want to check out your GraphQL guide that you're currently in the works with, they can actually get the beta right now, right? So if they go to graphql.guide - is that the best place for them to start?
+
+**John Resig:** Yeah, you can go there and you can pre-order and get access to the full beta book as we're working on it. There are both online and eBooks, as well.
+
+**Suz Hinton:** Yeah, I'm excited. I see that it's compatible with Kindle, and because I travel so much, my Kindle is my best friend. That's where I get all my reading done, so that's great.
+
+**John Resig:** Excellent.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very cool. Well, that is our show. Suz, thanks so much for joining me all the way from Hawaii... And hey, go hit the beach and enjoy your vacation!
+
+**Suz Hinton:** Will do. It looks like no one is there right now, because it's so early, so I'm very excited to get out there. Thanks for having me.
+
+**John Resig:** Yes, please enjoy.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And one last word before we let you all go - we will be at JS Conf, so look for the JS Party T-shirts, look for many of our panelists... Suz, will you be there?
+
+**Suz Hinton:** Yeah, I'll still be in vacation mode, so if you see me wearing lots of tropical-looking attire, it's because I've just come back from Hawaii. But I will definitely be there and I'm very excited.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Awesome, very good. Suz will be there, Kball will be there, I believe Nick and I think Feross as well. We plan on having stickers, we plan on having T-shirts; it might be first come, first served on those. And then also, there will be a live JS Party from the JS Conf stage I think on the first day, so stay tuned for that. If you're going to JS Conf, hit us up; we would love to connect with you.
+
+That is our show for this week, so thanks so much for everybody, and we'll see you next time.
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+**Adam Stacoviak:** Katrina, it's been a journey; you've been on the show several times, you've been on Spotlight, you've been on GoTime, you've been on The Changelog... Exercism is your thing, but it's not your full-time thing... But it takes so much of your life up, and now you're here at version 2.0, with some big, big stuff happening. Catch us up, what's been going on?
+
+**Katrina Owen:** That's a really complicated question.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Of course it is!
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We have an hour, so just go ahead... [laughs]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, we're listening...
+
+**Katrina Owen:** So I started Exercism five years ago, and talked to you right after that. For the past five years, I've been switching jobs up a little bit, trying things out, mostly trying to keep Exercism running as a background process, but sometimes it does take over...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Background job...
+
+**Katrina Owen:** Yeah... It does tend to take over at nights and weekends, a lot. Sometimes I'll take vacations and then work on Exercism, which is, I've heard, a bad idea, because it turns out you need vacations... So I'm trying to fix that to where I actually get to take vacations.
+
+But yeah, I work a full-time job at GitHub on the API team there, and then Exercism is my second gig.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It seems like truly a second gig too, because you've got a gigantic staff of mentors, you've got volunteers, you've got tons of things happening. I mean, 48 different tracks/languages... A lot. This is clearly not a one-person operation.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** \[04:03\] No, thank goodness I'm not alone on this anymore. 48 active tracks. Each of those tracks has their own maintainers, so people who are familiar with the language, comfortable with the language, who care about the language and who help ensure that the track is solid, that we have exercises that cover the broad range of language features, and the broad range of the standard library to give people something to sink their teeth into...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** And then we have a bunch of people who kind of contribute to Exercism in general... Not necessarily to one track in particular, but who will jump in and help out either on GitHub on the Exercism Org, answering issues, fixing little things across the board, or also jumping into some of the chat channels that have sprung up around Exercism and helping people get unstuck and started there.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So the individual Slack -- I'm assuming Slack, or other Slack-type things, where teams are happening, or communities are happening around Exercism...?
+
+**Katrina Owen:** Yeah, so we have a Gitter channel that I don't personally go to, because you can't turn off emoji in Gitter, so I just can't handle it very well... But people do hang out in the Gitter chat, and a bunch of volunteers are there constantly, helping people get their environments set up, or debug the command line client issues, or just even with programming questions. Some wonderful people there who hang out.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Maybe just to catch everyone up, what is Exercism?
+
+**Katrina Owen:** That's an excellent question. [laughter] Exercism is a platform for practicing programming. In particular the key place where Exercism shines is where you know how to program, or kind of know how to program in one language or several languages, and you need to ramp up quickly in a separate language... So that gives you a quick path or a solid path between that awkward Hello, World where really everything -- you can write code that will compile, that will work, but it's a struggle. You have to keep looking up; you don't remember the syntax, the data structures; you're not familiar with the standard library.
+
+Then it gives you a bunch of little exercises that you can run through, which give you an excuse to use the language in really trivial settings, and then at the end of it you should be familiar with it, you should have that sense of fluency where you're no longer feeling like you're trying to communicate with your hands tied behind your back.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** At the risk of just completely side-tracking this conversation, did you say that you can't go into Gitter because it won't let you disable emoji?
+
+**Katrina Owen:** Yeah, I can't stand emoji.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Are you just like allergic to emoji, or something?
+
+**Katrina Owen:** First of all, I find them kind of obnoxious, and then second of all, they add a layer of translation to communication that I find really difficult to process. So it'll be some sort of face, that has some sort of emotion painted on it, and I can't tell what that emotion is, so I'm always forever looking up what the emoji actually corresponds to... And it'll be like "Thinking" or "Worried" or "Grinning", and if I just see the emoji itself, I can't tell what it's supposed to mean.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So you're probably having a difficult time in an ever-changing world where emoji usage is just kind of sky-rocketing at the moment.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** Yeah, try working at GitHub... [laughter] They literally will write out sentences that consist of emoiji, and assume that you'll know what it means. "Ice-cream bike blow cloud" - it's like, "I have no idea what this means." "It means I'm going to lunch", or whatever... I have no idea.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[07:58\] Just say I'm going to lunch.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** I know, right?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So you must have a tough time on the internet then, basically. There's really nowhere you can go that has solitude, a sanctuary for you.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** Well, you know, I just don't go there very often.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** There you go. Well, good thing you're building things for GitHub's API and a web property like Exercism.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** See, in the API we don't really deal with emoji, except for accepting emoji as parts of comments or labels... So I don't have to look at them all too much in my day-to-day work.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You just prefer to look at the Unicode code points, you know?
+
+**Katrina Owen:** There you go.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** [laugh] Just translate those... So that's interesting. I haven't heard of anybody; I know there's people that do not prefer to use emoji or don't like emoji... But people that are actively disengaging a specific community because of emojis just caught my ear.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** So in Slack they let you turn them off, which is really great. And they even fix the reactions. It used to be that you could turn them off, but it would only turn off in the actual discussions, in the threads, not in the reactions... But now the reactions will also show you :thinking: or :party: or :pizza: or whatever it is.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I see. So it just leaves the underlying text.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** Yeah, which is much more helpful.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I can see that being a good compromise for someone who wants to not see the image. Just give me the text version that translates it, and I'll deal with that.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** To digress even further, I actually find emoji really useful for statuses, like predefined labels that mean something. You have an agreed-upon convention that the green checkmark means that this is done, the eyes mean it needs someone to review it - stuff like that I find really useful. But then it's a very small set, and well-defined.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. I like to use them in labels, for instance... Like, in my notes I'll have different categories of notes, like "Changelog, house, ideas", all these things... And at the beginning of each one I'll put -- like, for "ideas" there's a lightbulb emoji, and for "house" there's like the house emoji... So since that's first, I can identify that faster than I could actually identify the words, as I'm scrolling to get to the right folder. I find that very valuable.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** Yeah, with a well-defined taxonomy, I think that emoji are really great... And I totally understand that for other people it makes things playful and it helps them communicate better... It's just my personal thing - I find them kind of challenging. Shall we bring it back to--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** End digression, yes. Let's go back to the stack, pop that off, and start where we were, which was Exercism. Adam mentioned that we had you on -- it was like five years ago, and you said that was briefly after Exercism had launched. I remember at the time I think you had gotten featured in Wired, and usage just went through the roof. Was that the right train of events? There was a big feature, and all of a sudden, Exercism was blowing up.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** Yeah, it was blowing up not just because of the Wired thing, but it also hit the top of Hacker News and the front-page of -- I can't remember what it was... Slashdot, at the time... So it got a ton of attention, which I was completely unprepared for.
+
+Then another thing that made that particularly difficult was we didn't really know what Exercism was at that time; now it's very clearly the path between the awkward Hello, World and the basic fluency, where you're not very proficient in the language, but you are fluent in the idioms and the basic usage. And at the start, we had no idea... People were complaining because Exercism wasn't teaching them how to program.
+
+The title on the Wired Article was actually "The site that will teach you how to program well enough to get a job", or something like that, which I had never claimed at all... And which Exercism didn't do. So we got a lot of people who tried to use it who were definitely not well-equipped at the time to get started by trying to download a binary and stick it in their path; of course, they'd never heard of path before...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[11:58\] Right.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I remember talking about rewriting the CLI from Ruby to Go, and that was a bleeding edge at the time.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That was influential.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** It was pretty early on. That was Mike Gehard from Pivotal Labs, at the time. I don't know where he is right now... But he was the one who suggested Go as a solution to our problem where -- so the problem was that when Exercism launched, we only had exercises in Ruby, because I was just doing this as a workflow thing at work. Then someone added Haskell, and then the Haskell people were like "Why do I need a whole Ruby environment just to do exercises in Haskell?" That's a really good question.
+
+So Mike did the first reimplementation of the CLI, and then I've had a couple people help maintain it over the years, and we've done a complete rewrite again, still using Go for the v2 launch.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, which we're gonna dive into all of the details of v2... Which, like you said, was a ground-up rewrite or rebuild, according to the launch announcement. You really revisited, it seems, every aspect of the platform. So here it is, five years later... Now it feels like you know what Exercism is now, so maybe that's part of like this rebrand, you can tell us a little bit about that journey... But I guess even more foundationally, Adam and I were wondering before we hopped on the phone with you about your motivations and desires with this, and where they were when you started it, and then just to put it very frankly, why are you still working on this today? Why have a second job, which is just a passion project? Tell us your motivations.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** Early on, at the beginning, I didn't really have a reason to do it, other than that it scratched an itch that I had, and I thought it would be fun... And I was kind of right about that; it was a lot more work than I expected, but for a while there, I was doing it out of a sense of obligation, where I felt like I could let the community down. There were thousands of people using it, and I got emails and tweets and things from people who were telling me how much it really helped them get past a barrier, or get their first job as a junior developer, or land a gig using a new language. So I felt this huge sense of obligation to not just drop it or let it die.
+
+Over time, I've found that as long as I get help, that it's not just all on me, I actually care really hard about this problem of fluency. There's something that's really challenging about learning how to program in a new language, especially if the language is in an unfamiliar paradigm. And what I find is that there are very many tutorials that are like "This is how the syntax works, or this is what you've confined in a standard library", and then you have a ton of tutorials about "This is how you write a reverse proxy in this language", or sort of the bigger problems, and there's a gap between where you are just getting started with a language and where you are actually ready to go write a reverse proxy. And what makes it really hard to write a reverse proxy is that not only are you trying to figure out how a reverse proxy is supposed to work if you don't know how to do that, but you're also trying to remember where to place the braces, and do string templating, or whatever it is, in the language.
+
+So I think that it's really important to be able to address that gap, to help bring a lot more people into a lot more languages in a way that's really comfortable, and challenges you just at the right level, and gives you lots of feelings of success - lots of successes, lots of small wins, so that you're not feeling dumb and stupid and overwhelmed, and feeling like "Maybe Rust is just too hard for me, or maybe Haskell is just too hard for me. Maybe I'm not smart enough."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[16:04\] So it started as a scratching of an itch and perhaps an exploration in fun, as a lot of side-projects do, and at a certain point, because it was so useful and successful, it became, like you said, somewhat of an obligation, like yo had to keep it going for people.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** But then you started to speak a little bit more of, I guess, some of the -- I don't know, maybe you're seeing the benefits more, so there's some sort of intrinsic motivation beyond the obligation that you're hitting that now... Am I sensing what you're trying to say?
+
+**Katrina Owen:** Yeah, definitely. I care a lot about this type of solution for its own sake, rather than just like "This needs to exist, and therefore I will write it." You also asked about why I have a second job, or why Exercism is my second job... Well, that's because I haven't actually put a business model around Exercism; everything is free, and all the work is volunteer. I need to pay my bills, so I have a second job.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Did you try that? Did you think about that? Are you thinking about that? I know you say "Exercism is 100% free forever", in bold, so... That doesn't mean you can't monetize in other ways, but that's a principle that you've laid out. That being said, everything else about the new website, to me and to Adam as well, feels very professional, very business... The team of five, the core team, the hundreds of mentors, thousands of people using it... I'm thinking, "This seems like better than a lot of startup websites that we see out there."
+
+**Katrina Owen:** Yeah, so when I started working with the Thalamus team, the four others that are on that team page - that was almost two years ago now, or a little over a year and a half ago - we talked about what it might look like to turn it into a proper product. The key interesting thing about it was I was feeling overwhelmed, I was feeling burnt out, I was feeling absolutely over all of it, really, and still feeling that burden of like "I just have to do it, and I'm kind of on my own..." Even though we have thousands of people who are contributing to the open source side of things, there are a lot of types of work that don't get done within the framework of open source, so I was really feeling the burden of it.
+
+I was talking to Jeremy Walker, who's on the team page there, and I was telling him -- I was whining, basically... I was complaining about how there was so much to do, and I didn't really understand how to fix any of it, and the product was terrible, and the user experience was terrible, and I had 200,000 users... And he was like "You have what?!"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right... [laughter]
+
+**Katrina Owen:** And he's run a number of businesses. He's created and sold a startup, and runs several startups, so he was like "Wait a second... Stop there." And I can't remember what the number was; it was some big number. "Stop right there..." So he explained the thing that should have been obvious, which is I had found something that worked. The core idea worked, and all of the stuff that was missing was just the design, the user experience, the marketing, the business model, all of that... Whereas what he was saying was a lot of startups start with an idea, and they do the design and they do the product work, and they might not actually have something that jells, that fits.
+
+So he said, "This is totally solvable", and then he offered to help solve it. So he and this team worked with me over the course of 18 months, and they did phenomenal work. For the first 8 months we only asked questions, basically. We started digging into "Well, who uses Exercism? What are they using it for? At what points, when you're learning the language, are you feeling vulnerable? What are the negative emotions that are associated with using Exercism? How could we avoid that or mitigate that? What does it mean to be done with a language track? What does it mean to be done with an exercise?"
+
+\[20:09\] All of these questions led us to really go to the fundamental meaning of what is Exercism and how does it need to be structured in order to properly support people's learning, to cover just this bridge?
+
+It turned out there were so many things where -- we were optimizing previously for three groups of people: people who were learning to program for the first time, or who are learning their first programming language, professional programmers who are ramping up in a second language because they need it out of curiosity or for a project or a new job, and then the third group was what we like to call the artisans, the people who really care about the idioms and readability, and how do you best use Ruby to make it feel and smell and taste like Ruby...
+
+What we found is those artisan conversations are super-interesting; they go so deep. They will spend dozens of comments going back and forth to explore the nuances in some super-arcane part of the language... And that's fun, but it's not actually what Exercism is about. And same with the people who are new to programming - in order to successfully use Exercism right now, you have to have already installed a programming language on your computer; you have to know how to assign a variable and write a function. So we're not gonna be teaching you to program from 0 to 1, which helped us narrow in what the feature set needs to be, and then how to optimize that path, from Hello, World to basic fluency.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, it's pretty incredible to have product market fit, as you call it, out of the box... But at the same time, as you've mentioned, the examination of actually who you are, the ability to get to the next step successfully - that resonates with us, a lot. As she was saying that, I was thinking "That's what we did." We had to figure out who we were, to actually be who we thought we were, you know what I mean? We couldn't be successful without doing a retrospective on who we actually thought we could be or should be, and who we actually thought was benefitting from what we do.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** Yeah. And the ultimate goal is actually to earn some money, so that we can hire people to do a lot of the work that doesn't happen naturally through just the normal, day-to-day open source contributions, and that sort of thing... But it was really important to get the website out and launched, and the design finalized, or at least to the point where we could launch, before starting to talk about -- or at least talk to the partners that we hope to connect with in order to generate some revenue.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So the plan is to potentially revenue, or for sure...?
+
+**Katrina Owen:** For sure, but not by charging individuals who use the website.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** Yeah. So we have two ideas right now around what we think might make sense for Exercism. The first is to look at community sponsorships, in particular for individual language tracks. We have a Rust track; it's really popular, it's one of the top three tracks on Exercism, adn I have reached out to the Rust team to work with them to make sure that Exercism is the best possible funnel into their community; that we cover the language features that make sense to cover for Rust.
+
+And especially with Rust - there are some language features that are really different from what a lot of people are used to, so we need to make sure that we cover that well. Also, all the parts of the standard library that they feel is important to cover, as well as working with them to make sure that the mentorship in the Rust track really reflects how the community feels about the language, and helps people fall in love with Rust.
+
+So if we do that well, it could make sense for Mozilla to be a track sponsor on the Exercism Rust track, for example.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[24:07\] Yeah, if it's such a great on-ramp for languages in particular, obviously... I guess potentially even some frameworks, too; that remains to be seen. But if you're that much of an on-ramp, it would make sense... You're a first stop, so to speak, on a path, for a newcomer or someone just getting started, or whatever. It's a clear stopping point for somebody.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** Yeah. So that might make sense. We want to have the site out for a while first, so that we can see what the numbers look like and make sure that we have the features to support the mentorship and the new user experience before we start reaching out to potential partners or sponsors. But that's one way.
+
+Another thing that we have been considering is partnerships who are in publishing. Someone who creates a lot of great content for Python - it might make sense to have sponsors in the Python track to say "Hey, you've completed the Python track. Here's some great next steps for you."
+
+**Break:** \[25:12\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Katrina, I think the next stop in this conversation would make sense to sense to say -- since revenue is on the table, but you're not gonna charge users, what are some ideas you have for legitimizing this thing into something you can not just be a side project, but be a profit center for you?
+
+**Katrina Owen:** Yeah, so there are a number of things that I think we can do and that I've talked about with Jeremy and the others at Thalamus... The first thing is track-specific sponsors, which we talked a little bit about.
+
+The second thing is potentially partnering with publishers to have relevant content for the users, and then we've also talked about a number of spin-off products, especially as we narrow down the feature-set of the core experience. There are things that people use Exercism for that we don't currently explicitly support, and it might make sense to add either other subdomains, or other sub-sites that we would charge for, that provide just the add-on features that are relevant to business, who are either helping their teams level up... Or a different possibility is people use Exercism a lot when they're recruiting, in the hiring process, to have people do exercises, see how they approach problems, have some sort of trivial problem to talk about without making them go deep into their own codebases...
+
+And a lot of people also - which I think is interesting - they use it to ask someone to give someone feedback. So they would send people to Exercism and say "Do three exercises and then go give other people feedback, and then send us the link to that" and then discuss sort of "What does good feedback mean", "What does this mean in the context of team communication, or team leadership (if that's that type of position you're looking for)."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[28:05\] That's definitely an interesting use case that I wouldn't have thought of. So you mentioned that you worked with Thalamus, these other four people on your core team now, and you spent 18 months roughly doing a ground-up rewrite, those first eight months or so you said you were just asking questions and really just diving deep into what Exercism is and what you want it to be... So share with us some of those answers, and some of that focus that you gained and how that turned into - maybe not the technical bits necessarily; we'll definitely dive into the rewrite... But maybe even the rebrand and some of the changes around that. What were the outputs and result of that process?
+
+**Katrina Owen:** I wanna say that there are probably three really key changes. The first one is the brand itself, where Exercism was just a name I came up with, using Wordoid.com, because I thought it was funny... Like, there was no reason to call it Exercism other than that the Ruby community likes puns, and it was a pun.
+
+And then the logo kind of fell out of that, as a reflection of "Oh, this is so close to Exorcism, so we should have a logo that's an E with horns on it", and I was like "Yeah, why not?" It was still just in sort of "This is all just for fun" sort of domain, I guess...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right. Playful, and silly.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** Yeah, and that works for a lot of people, and a lot of people miss that now that we've changed it... But there were a couple of things that I've realized in the past few years. The first is that there are people who are religious in the Catholic tradition, and some people find that kind of offensive, that we're playing on the concept of exorcism, which is a serious concept in their belief system... So I find it completely unacceptable to be offensive to people based on their beliefs, so I wanted to remove that as a possibility.
+
+And the origin of the name wasn't really a pun on exorcism, it was a pun on exercise; I just thought it was funny that it had the similarity in the word... So it wasn't really intended to be--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It wasn't the point...
+
+**Katrina Owen:** Yeah, it wasn't the point, and then the original tagline is the devil is in the details, but that's because it's amazing what you can learn from 20 lines of code... Like from really going deep into every detail on 20 lines of code, you can learn really fascinating things about your assumptions about programming, about how you communicate, about how a language works. So that was much more -- it was all part of that whole playful thing, but it played far too heavily on the idea of the devil... So that was something that we wanted to move away from.
+
+And likewise, the color was very sort of aggressive and pink, and it's kind of like we -- when you're learning how to program, we really don't want to have this sort of aggressive feeling; we want to make it so that you feel like this is a place where you can be supported in the journey as you learn a new language, and the really overwhelming, aggressive pink didn't really do that.
+
+And then the third thing was that every once in a while, someone would see the logo and they'd be like, "Oh, is this an emotional support group for people who don't like Internet Explorer?"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** [laughs] That's funny.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** And once you see it, you can't really unseee it, and that's also not the point, so... Yeah, we moved away from that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's really funny. Did you get a lot of those?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Enough...
+
+**Katrina Owen:** I mean, more than once, yeah...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Too many?
+
+**Katrina Owen:** I thought it was -- I mean, I didn't mind so much, but it's definitely not... Like, again, I don't want to link this to some particular technology that already exists, or if people have bad feelings about it, that's definitely not what I want them to associate with it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What did you learn about the learner type? What do you call the learner in your taxonomy?
+
+**Katrina Owen:** \[32:00\] Sometimes I call them learner, sometimes I call them author... Like, just the author of a submission, as opposed to mentor; so that's usually in context of author versus mentor.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** But yeah, I prefer learner over student, because we're not teaching anything; we're helping you learn something.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So the learner then - you'd mentioned doing some introspection on what their focus was; you said you optimize for three different types. Did you whittle that down to one? What was the change there?
+
+**Katrina Owen:** Yeah... So it used to be we supported people who were new to programming, or we were trying to support people who were new to programming, people who are professional programmers ramping up in a new language, and people who are artisans who are doing a deep dive in one of their favorite languages or their main languages... And we completely have removed any features that are optimizing for the artisans who are doing a deep dive in their primary languages, as that's really -- it doesn't cover the awkward Hello, World to basic fluency pathway... Though we will be adding back team features, which will let them set up their own space to go do those deep dives together. It's just we're not optimizing the core experience for that.
+
+And in terms of new programmers, you can be fairly new to programming when starting to use Exercism, but you can't be brand new. We really don't cover those very first steps, and I don't know if we will. I was talking a little bit with the Rust team earlier today, and they had some suggestions on how we might help bridge the gap for those who are not so familiar with some of the basic programming concepts in themselves, but overall, we're aiming at people who at least have some basic knowledge in programming. So they might be learning their first language and they might have done a couple of months' worth of the weekend meetups, or workshops, or some of the online tutorials and some of those things, and be ready to actually get started using the language... And they often -- people will say "Oh, you just need to write a lot of code", and it's like "Yeah, well... What do I write? How do I do that? I don't really know even what problems to tackle", so this gives people sort of an easier ramp into just ideas of things to use the language for, to help that early practice.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** One piece of advice that I give to people who are trying to get into the industry is to find something real, that they want to exist in the world, that doesn't exist... Especially if it's like, they wanna get into web development; it's like have a tangible, real goal in mind, and then use the tools, the languages, the frameworks, all the stuff that you're learning as simply means to come to that end, and you'll find your way through the road bumps and the tough stuff, because the driving motivation isn't just to learn... Which often times, if we just want to learn a thing, it's very easy to stop when the going gets tough, because that motivation isn't super strong; but if it's like "I'm trying to build a thing", that thing that you want to build sometimes will pull you through that.
+
+With Exercism, it's all pre-created, small -- I love the scope of a lot of these tasks or challenges... Do you feel like there's a missing piece there, or do you feel like it's different strokes for different folks? What are your thoughts on challenges vs. real-world things?
+
+**Katrina Owen:** \[35:45\] I completely agree that having a real-world goal makes it much easier to stick with it; however, a lot of people aren't even sure how to make a real-world goal... For some people it's like "I want to make an iOS app and it has to do this... It's a way of exploring shoe design, or whatever..." and they don't know exactly where they wanna go... They will be able to just go after that.
+
+Other people are like, "Yeah, I find that programming is fun" and they might have some ideas around what they might wanna make, but it can be really hard to actually come up with something that is concrete enough and within reach enough...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Within reach is definitely the hard part, yeah.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** Yeah, so I think that Exercism can fill the gap for the people who aren't able to just run with it. There are people -- I saw a talk at the second GopherCon, I think, by Audrey Lim, who was a lawyer in Singapore, I think, who was like "I'm going to learn programming."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, she stole the show for that GopherCon... That was a big deal.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** She was amazing. That talk was so good... And she was totally able to just pick up things that she wanted to explore and then run with it, and that helped her get through all the early parts of learning the language... Whereas I've found other people on Reddit who are complaining about how they've been doing web development for years, and they're trying to get into Go, and they're finding it very difficult, because a lot of the recommendations were like "Just write a thing. Just write code. Just write a real project", and they were like "But how do I get to where I even know what the project is?"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's like saying "Learn by doing." Well, do what? What should I do? Give me some guidance. Where should I go with this thing?
+
+**Katrina Owen:** So for people who do know, I think that learning by having a project is incredibly powerful. And for people who don't, I think that these types of challenges can be a way to help you get to the next step, where you are in a better place to choose real-world challenges.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, absolutely. I think for your second case, the people who maybe know one language and they're wanting to pick up a second one... I think specifically the person that wants to learn their second or maybe third programming language - this is perfect for that use case.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** Yeah, it's really good.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Once you get to a certain proficiency of polyglotness, like picking up the next language, at a certain skill set, it just becomes easier and easier to do that, if you're just trying to learn... Unless it's a brand new paradigm. But for that second or third language, this should be spectacular. And actually, if I was going to hop in and say "I just wanna write some Lua and just find out about it", I think even as somebody who knows three or four languages, Exercism would be a great way to do that, because you get that mentor feedback right away. You have these pre-defined scopes; I don't have to come up with stuff... So it seems really good for that, too.
+
+What's the mentor motivation? We talked about your motivations, we talked about potentially having some income eventually... There's lots of people mentoring now; I was just looking at the Elixir track and there was... I just lost it. I'm all over your website, and I can't keep my tabs straight; anyways, there was a bunch of mentors on the Elixir track, and I'm curious, where do they come from? Is there a demographic of these people? What are they getting out of it? Is it all warm fuzzies? Is there more to it? What are your thoughts on the mentor side of it?
+
+**Katrina Owen:** So the mentorship is completely new in the new design. It used to be very ad-hoc; anyone could give feedback to anyone, which led to a lot of varying in the quality of the feedback, and a lot of people not getting feedback. So with this, we wanted to do two things - we wanted to have a community of mentors who we can work with specifically to ensure that they have what they need and they're getting what they need, that we can make tooling to make sure that everyone gets feedback, and the quality of the feedback is good; we can start adding in features to help optimize the process of giving feedback, of noticing things to give feedback about...
+
+So the whole mentor thing is very new, and as part of that, we are asking people to literally sign up to be mentors.
+
+\[40:05\] They get added to a Slack workspace, they sign our code of conduct, and as part of that, we ask them "Why would you do this? Why do you care? What do you want to get out of it?" and the answers were fascinating; they were all over the place. There were a few common threads. The first one is they get a kick out of helping other people learn, for a number of reasons. Sometimes it's warm fuzzies, but more often, they find that they are challenged in ways that are really interesting when they are helping other people learn. So they learn a lot by helping other people learn.
+
+Some people were very much in the "You know, other people mentored me, and now I wanna give back", and I don't actually know if they'll stick around; I don't know if that is as strong.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** How long it will last with that motivation, yeah...
+
+**Katrina Owen:** Yeah... Now, it might turn out that they actually get a kick out of doing it once they get started and they might stick around, but as a motivation, I'm not convinced that "I wanna pay it forward" is a really strong once. And then you have--
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's a good ambition.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** Yeah... Yeah, I like it. I mean, it's admirable, but I don't know how lasting that is. The really interesting one, I find, is the people who are looking to move up in their careers and are realizing that a lot of the engineering leadership skills have to do with teamwork, communication, a better ability to receive feedback and to give feedback, and who are using this as a way to sort of practice those types of skills.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think of it too -- like, especially with your focus on languages, and as you talked about the revenue options and just how this fits into the overall ecosystem of individual languages and getting involved in them, to me it makes sense that a mentor would be somebody who 1) cares about the community, but then 2) is somebody who's a leader in the community, and to be seen as someone to come and reach out to to get started, or to get involved, or invited, or introduced, whatever. That's the kind of person I see fitting that role. Is that what you see?
+
+**Katrina Owen:** I would say that I would love to have a few people who are considered leaders in the language communities that we cover, but I think that most of the mentors will probably be much more at a sort of "in progress" part of their career, rather than in sort of a leadership position within a community, because to give good feedback in a language, you don't have to be that expert. You do have to have familiarity with the language, with the tooling, with the idioms, with the community, but you don't have to be one of the driving forces of that community or one of the known, famous names, or whatever... Because a lot of the basic feedback to get someone into the community is really, really fundamental things, like "Hey, if you're doing Go, you should use go fmt, and you should know how to write proper doc comments", and you don't have to be famous in order to give that feedback.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, I was thinking, from Adam's perspective, more the idea - and maybe this is just me interpreting what you're saying, Adam - not that these people are necessarily already experts or leaders in their camp or their language, but that this is an opportunity for somebody to establish themself, over time, as somebody.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right, yes.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Like you said, maybe they're one step above a learner, which is all you have to be to be a great teacher.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** They might be somebody who's like "I write blog posts often, or as often as I like to, I released the course, but I'm not really anybody. I need to get more well-known, or I'd like to be more well-known. I'd like to help more people", and this is one more way that they can take 5%-10% of their week and give it back, because they're already trying to level up themselves.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** \[44:11\] It might work, I have no idea...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, similar to the motivation of people who help other people in Stack Overflow, and a lot of them are -- I mean, it's gamified; I don't know if you're doing any gamification with the Exercism mentorship, but you know, it gives them the street cred over time... So they think that all that helping will eventually come back to them, and I think in certain cases it does.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, and if I can masquerade around -- and I guess use that word in a good term around Exercism.io as a mentor, then for one... I mean, sure, I'm helping people, but I also get to have some notoriety, some clout, some abilities, some sort of super-powers... I don't know. I'm somebody there to help.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You're just there to masquerade.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** [laughs] I'm there to masquerade...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, the other thing about it, which I've mentored or I've taught web development to people, so I've learned this very much first-hand - and you learn this as you begin to mentor other people - is that actually it's like a lifehack, because you're the one that's learning more than the learner...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Absolutely.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It solidifies, it questions things that you'd never questioned, because you have fresh eyes asking you things that you wouldn't have thought of in the first place... And then like you said, Katrina, is that you are honing your ability to communicate, empathize, and help other people, and that's useful in every walk of life.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I see that. So what about the need for more mentors? Is there always a "Always hiring, always more mentors" kind of situation? Is there a term of service? What are they signing up for? How do they sign up? What's the process?
+
+**Katrina Owen:** So there's a website that starts the process... It's mentoring.exercism.io. You are not committing to anything in particular when you sign up as a mentor. We hope to have enough mentors that everyone -- nobody should have to do more than an hour a week, say; we're still trying to figure out how many mentors does that mean.
+
+We think that to handle the current load we need about 1,000 mentors. I think we currently have about 800. So we're falling down in certain tracks; we're falling down on giving feedback to some of the optional exercises, we're focusing on making sure that people get feedback on the core 15 or 20 exercises that we have used to define each track...
+
+But yeah, we always need more people, and we want people to be able to go on vacation, or go on parental leave and not have to worry about giving feedback on Exercism during that time.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So we have a polyglot audience around here, so if you have specific tracks that you need mentors in... Like, if you're gonna say -- like, go ahead and name them out... Where do you need the most help, where somebody could have the biggest impact?
+
+**Katrina Owen:** I'm gonna say Python is our most active track, by far. Not quite an order of magnitude, but it is probably 40% more active than the second most active tracks. Rust and Go and JavaScript and Java are probably the other tracks where we are always desperate for more people.
+
+An interesting thing is the niche tracks - if you know PL/SQL, boy, do I have work for you... [laughter] It's so hard to find people who have enough fluency with some of these more niche languages to actually step in and mentor... Some of those can be -- if you know a niche language and we have it on Exercism, you can bet that your help would be greatly appreciated.
+
+**Break:** \[47:51\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So Katrina, this rethink, this redo, this take two - we've talked about the new branding, we've talked about this new mentorship model and how you're making them official sign-up mentors, and then you also have the tracks themselves, which you've redesigned a little bit from the ground up... Tell us about what's new with the individual tracks, and then we'll get into how you went ahead and technically accomplished this.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** So in some ways, the tracks are what have changed the least if you just look at them. The description inside the repo on GitHub - it;ll have the same exercises, it'll mostly have the same documentation... But we have fundamentally changed how we structure the track and how we lead you through it.
+
+It used to be you would sign up to C# and we would give you one exercise, and then the next one, and then the next one, and after about 110 exercises, you're done. And if we add more exercises, you're no longer done, which is kind of frustrating.
+
+It's frustrating for a number of reasons. The first is this moving goal post, where if we add more exercises and if you are feeling completionist, suddenly we've kind of ruined your day. The second thing is that there are a lot of exercises that go down little rabbit holes, or side explorations, or are all about a thing that you don't really need to learn about, or that you don't care about... And when we put everything linear, you kind of -- if you were one of these completionist types of people, you often felt like you had to do all of the exercises in order to get through the track, and that's not really helpful and also not really true.
+
+When are you done with an Exercism track? Well, it's kind of when you are feeling fluent, you have that basic fluency and that ease in the language. So if you are done after 20 exercises, there's no real reason for you at that point to do 100 more.
+
+One of the big learnings there came from role-playing games, where in a role-playing game there's this core track through the game, where you complete certain challenges and you participate in certain activities, and you can finish the game just by doing that core track... But along the way, as you complete challenges, you unlock all of these side-challenges that you can then go and explore, if you want to. So some people might do the entire game straight through, and other people might spend four, five, or eight times as much time going through all the little side explorations as well, and also finish the game... And there's not someone who didn't finish and someone who finished - no, everyone finished, just some people took a more scenic route, or went more deeply.
+
+So we wanted to replicate that with Exercism, and chose to have -- for every track we choose a certain number, usually between 15 and 25 core exercises that are required in order to complete the track, and all of the other exercises come in as optional exercises that get unlocked as you progress through the core exercises. And each core exercise, if you're in the mentored mode, you need to get the core exercise approved -- you need to work with a mentor and get it approved by a mentor before you can move on, which is one of the reasons why it's so crucial that we have enough mentors, so we're not blocking people as they go. And then you always have a handful of optional exercises as well that you can play with as you're waiting for feedback, or to explore.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I love the idea of this path process, because there's times when I felt like the loser who didn't finish.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** You don't want that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** No, I don't wanna be the loser.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Tell us more, Adam. For instance...?
+
+**Katrina Owen:** None of us want to be the loser... [laughs]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's a whole different show, Jerod. [laughter] But yeah, I like that; the scenic route sounds really cool, I like that.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** \[53:44\] Yeah. One of the discoveries that I had as I was talking to the Rust team recently was that -- so they use Exercism when teaching their Rust Bridge workshops, and the math exercise... There are a bunch of little exercises that are mostly inspired by Project Euler exercises, so they're very math-heavy, and a lot of the people who go through the Rust Bridge find that incredibly intimidating... So one of my next tasks is to go through all of the tracks on all of Exercism and script PR's to make sure that a) their tag does math, so that you can just filter them away and not have to worry about them, but also that they're never on the core track; that they're always optional.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Another thing that we haven't talked about and think it's probably what we need to talk about next is the technical side of the rewrite. Now, anytime somebody wants to start a big rewrite, Joel Spolsky comes out of the closet and slaps you across the face before you do it... No. People pull out that old blog post of Joel's, "Things you should never do", which is a ground-up rewrite is like anathema.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** Yeah, and he's right; and we did it anyway.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** [laughs] Tell me more.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** This is the same thing as with refactoring - you should almost always refactor, rather than do a rewrite, just because there's so much that has been encoded into the existing codebase, into the existing features, and that you're going to lose. In our case, we wanted to lose all of those accidental things. We really wanted to start from scratch. We had a much clearer idea once we had done those 8 months of exploration; we knew where we were going, and it had nothing to do with the existing site, which could be termed a prototype, but it did last for five years, so maybe not.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So yeah, you're excited to lose a lot of stuff... That being said, was it still a larger undertaking than you expected, or was it about what you were thinking?
+
+**Katrina Owen:** It was about what I was thinking, actually. The initial rewrite to get the basic features that we had actually sat down and thought, "Gee, this would be a good feature to have", rather than just kind of accidentally slapping together, like the old site. That didn't take very long; the basic work was done in about six weeks. And then you have the other 90%. [laughter]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Exactly.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** And so that turned out to be -- the biggest problem wasn't actually writing the features, it was that we all have day jobs and other businesses that we're running, and all of that... And there were family crises, people ended up in hospitals... I mean, for a number of reasons, there were six months there where we got nearly nothing done.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** People ended up in hospitals due to this rewrite?
+
+**Katrina Owen:** No, thank goodness... No.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** [laughs] That's how it sounded.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm like, "Geez, we're really pulling into mentors here."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You have to take breaks...
+
+**Katrina Owen:** Yeah, totally... Vacations. Yeah, so the rewrite was about as much work as we expected, but it took much longer because we had unexpected life things happen.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Maybe a recap on the tech itself of like "What's the architecture?" So the site's in Ruby, you've got a CLI that's written in Go, that's been rewritten in Go... There are some other aspects... What's the breakdown of the architecture?
+
+**Katrina Owen:** Yeah, so the site itself - it used to be some cobbled together Sinatra apps, multiple Sinatra apps. Some of them were all mounted inside the same app, some of them were running separately, along with a Ruby gem that I updated more or less every day to get all the changes to the tracks in... It was a complete mess, and it was also nearly impossible to contribute to, because it was all custom. Nothing followed any sort of conventions, and Sinatra is fairly well-documented, but it's really flexible... So there was not good jumping in point, even if you were familiar with Ruby, to help out with the website.
+
+\[57:55\] So for the rewrite we chose Rails, which is still Ruby, but it's a framework that is much more widely used than Sinatra, very well documented, and it's something that everyone on the core team is familiar with... So it was a really rapid -- it was something that we could do very quickly, the rewrite, whereas if we had chosen a different technology, if we had chosen to go with, say, Clojure or Python with Django, or something like that, we would have had to ramp up a lot... So even if maybe Django is more common or more familiar than Rails is in general, it would not necessarily have been a great choice for us.
+
+One of the really interesting pieces was figuring out how to get all of the changes from 45 different language tracks into the site, without having to make individuals deploy every day. One of the problems I ran into was I was the only person deploying the old site, and people would be like "Hey, so I've made this change to the Elixir track, and I'm not seeing it on the site." I'm like, "Yeah, that's because I forgot to deploy." [laughter] Or if I got sick -- I got surgery last year, and for a few days there I was not deploying Exercism.
+
+So there were all of these things where I was a bottleneck, and we needed to not have me be a bottleneck, or not have anyone be a bottleneck. So we did quite a lot of work to figure out how do we architect this into the site, where we have webhooks that are -- so we're listening for webhooks from GitHub to know when there are changes, and then we schedule an update so that the server's pulling all the new changes... That happens usually within moments of the new change going into master on the various tracks. And also, for the website copy, and that sort of thing.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That sounds like us. We have our transcripts and our show notes as two separate repos on GitHub, and we listen for webhooks on specifically pushes to master, that then our CMS goes and grabs the updates and makes sure that the website itself is updated immediately... And it even surprises me how fast it happens. By the time I can write the little thank you note in the comment, it's already live.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** That's awesome.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It is cool.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I like how you say "It's probably already live, because by the time I comment, the webhook has already been caught, and--"
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I always add a "probably" in there, because there's that outside chance that something failed this time and it's not live...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's your insurance.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's how I hedge.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** And we have been known at GitHub to drop the occasional webhook... I'm just saying.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** [laughs] I didn't say it. You said it, not me.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** I said it. I'm on the API team; it's my fault when it happens, you can blame me.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's your fault. I'm gonna look you up next time. You got the webhook...!"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Correct me if I'm wrong... I know we're still here in the technical details, but I'm kind of hearing some insights into what you seem to be doing - you in particular, Katrina - is like, you've been excited about this, it's been a long road, you received and achieved product market fit early on, you had to kind of work back from brand, and stuff like that... But it sounds like what you're in the motions of now is like incrementally removing the mundane burdens that take away the joy, to give you the joy back so you can lead.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** Yeah, that's the biggest challenge right now... Now that the design -- it feels like we're in the direction with the usability of the site, the user interactions, the design, all of that... We need to make sure that the drudgery, the janitorial work is not something that someone is stuck with, because as soon as someone is, then it falls over, it falls apart. So that's definitely one of the -- automation is one of the big key pieces that I want to get better at, both in Exercism and the product itself. Like, how can we automate giving mentors hints about what would be useful to talk about in this particular exercise? We can do a lot of static analysis, because we have five years' worth of data about how people make mistakes in this particular exercise, so we can give hints there.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** [01:02:09.27] Is that something you spend a lot of time on yourself though, that thing in particular? Giving hints to mentors?
+
+**Katrina Owen:** No, not at all.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What areas are you trying to automate that would remove burden from humans to deal with janitorial work, as you mentioned?
+
+**Katrina Owen:** So linters and automatic fixes to the various tracks. One of the things -- each of the tracks needs to adhere to certain conventions, otherwise it won't work on the site, so we're adding a huge number of various types of linters, and auto-formatting in config files, and making sure that -- so when you merge a mentor bio, we have CI that checks that if you wrote "GitHub profile", you spelled GitHub correctly...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, boy...
+
+**Katrina Owen:** If you have a link to a website, it has a protocol on it. So lots of little details that keep tripping people up and making people do work over again, or... We find people who are manually reviewing and keep asking for the same fixes every time; we're adding linters to that. We're adding GitHub apps, specifically using the GitHub API to help make it easier to add more maintainers to different tracks.
+
+Right now, the people who are maintaining the JavaScript track have a new contributor who's been around consistently, they're enthusiastic, they give great feedback, they do good code reviews, they contribute consistently over time and are really great to work with - we want to add them as a maintainer on the JavaScript track. Right now, the only person who can do that is me, because I'm the only org admin on the Exercism work on GitHub, and I don't actually wanna give other people -- well, aside from Jeremy at Thalamus; he's also work admin... But I don't want to be giving individual maintainers access to the admin parts of the Exercism org... So having an app that can let maintainers add other maintainers to their own tracks, but nothing else, is something that would reduce a significant burden.
+
+Another thing is we have a core set of problem specifications... So it's a description of an exercise, but without a language-specific implementation... And then various tracks take this specification and turn it into an implementation by adding a test suite and making sure that the readme has what it needs for that language.
+
+When we add a new problem specification, it would be really nice to have an issue open on every track that doesn't have that exercise yet, to let them know... So things like that.
+
+Or when an exercise changes in some way, to have an app that will open issues everywhere where it is implemented, in all the language tracks where we do have the exercise, to say "Hey, take a look at this change, see if you need to do anything to update."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I can tell you that automation on that - we've done a lot around here - a CI is important. If we had to wait for Jerod to be around - he's around a lot, but if we had to only rely upon Jerod to deploy, it would be a pain in the butt. So you've got a CI in place, you've got other automations in place to remove yourself as the barrier to allowing others to the progress...
+
+**Katrina Owen:** Yeah, I think that's crucial in any open source work as soon as there's any sort of volume.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.And even, like you mentioned, issue automation, and stuff like that - that's key too, because you would forget the checklist - "Oh, I should go and let these other tracks know this change." If you can automate the things that make sense, the things you've done 17 times, you should probably automate that.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** Yeah. I still have to automate the release process on the CLI. That's one thing where I keep -- I keep doing it, and I keep telling myself "I just have to write the script that will upload all the binaries and everything together", and I keep not doing it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** [01:06:06.25] Well, there's always something to do, that's for sure; it's just a matter of "Is it something I should do today?", it's not so much "Should I do it at all?"
+
+What about the future? It's been five years, we've been on this journey with you, obviously we care deeply about you and the mission you're on, and everyone involved... What's the future? You've got good branding behind you, you've got good design behind you, you've got clear, measurable goals to reach towards? What's the future for you?
+
+**Katrina Owen:** I'm hoping that in the beginning of 2019 we'll be able to get some amount of revenue, and the first thing I wanna do with that revenue is hire someone to help [01:06:45.24] mentors, help work with the mentor community, figure out what tools are necessary, figure out what features are missing for mentors on the site, help with code of conduct violations, help mediate when people are unhappy, all of those sorts of things, and I think having a specific person whose job it is to be the mentor manager I think is the most critical thing that we're missing right now.
+
+And then it would be lovely if Exercism over time could start paying the bills for some of the people who are putting in very large amounts... Especially in the areas where open source usually doesn't cover it... Product design work, user experience design, any of the business stuff - figuring out how to reach out to partners and sponsors, or doing accounting stuff (it turns out you have to do that).
+
+So being able to pay people to do a lot of those pieces would be lovely. It would be amazing if we could hire people on short-term contracts to solve specific problems that aren't being addressed quickly enough in just the day-to-day open source things.
+
+And then I would love to see a way of really rewarding the people who are part of the Exercism community and who have given a lot to Exercism... I don't know what that looks like, whether it's custom swag, or do we invite people to a summit, or regional summits and have them share experiences or what, but I'd love to find a way if we start getting some sort of revenue or funding to really acknowledge all of the work that people have put into it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm asking a question that might be a little off-color, to some degree... We'll see how you receive it... But what happens if at the end of 2019, if you don't hit to a point where you have sustainably income, revenue coming in... You know, revenue is one thing, but sustainable revenue... So you're still kind of proving -- you're in that space where you have some runway to generate something that creates revenue.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So if over the next year it seems like the future of Exercism requires some level of revenue - I'm not sure if it needs to be large amounts, but enough to sustain it... Like, what happens if you don't get there?
+
+**Katrina Owen:** I don't actually know. I have thoughts about it, but if we do end up in that situation, I might completely change my mind about how I feel about everything.
+
+But my current thinking is it is absolutely possible to tie off Exercism at some point and keep it running with minimal maintenance, as long as we have enough mentors. That's kind of the key piece. If we can get all of these tracks into a reasonable state, and it's a basic feature set, but it does what it needs, and we have enough mentors on a rolling basis, then I think we could let Exercism do its thing without a huge amount of day-to-day effort.
+
+The thing that makes us want to look for revenue is that we think that there are so many other opportunities to grow Exercism beyond what it is right now, and that would require revenue.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** [01:10:22.02] Yeah. Well, let me just say that I asked that as a devil's advocate approach, and less like I actually think it's gonna happen... More like I wanted to know what you would do if it did. I like to prevent it, you know? I think the listeners of this show, the people listening to this can say "Hey, this is obviously cool enough and needed enough that if you work somewhere, you can see some benefit for your company to Exercism, or whatever, then reach out and talk about different ways to work together... Or get on some sort of mailing list where it's like, "Hey, if you're interested at all about the future of Exercism, here's how you can help out", whether it's sponsorship, or some sort of products you'll have in the future, whatever. I just wanna raise that awareness to people listening now, that if this is interesting to you, I'm assuming, just reach out, right?
+
+**Katrina Owen:** Oh yes, please. My email address is on my GitHub profile, so I'm always easy to find.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, we're tailing off here... What else can we cover before we say goodbye? What else have you got? What's on the horizon? Anything that people are not aware of? Something fresh and brand new that no one knows about.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** Fresh and brand new... It's coming so soon that you might blink and it's already there.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right. If it was here next week, it'd be cool.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** It would be cool. Teams features. So the old site had some sort of notion of teams, where you could kind of group people into a team and you would get a custom activity stream for everyone who was in that team. We had to remove that for the new site just to be able to launch, because we were under a bit of pressure to actually get the code out the door... And we've been working on redesigning, and actually thinking through how teams should work.
+
+We've completely rethought a very basic Teams functionality, which we will be launching very soon under teams.exercism.io, I believe... I thought it was gonna be out by now, so literally, it might be out in the next couple of weeks.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh...! Go hit refresh.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** There you go.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, Katrina, it was great catching up with you. Like I said, we're certainly big fans of yours, and we'll always be here for you and love to hear your journey. I'm bummed that it's been somewhat that long since we've talked, so maybe let's shorten the runtime between next time.
+
+**Katrina Owen:** Let's do that. This has been great. Thanks so much.
diff --git a/Scaling all the things at Slack (Interview)_transcript.txt b/Scaling all the things at Slack (Interview)_transcript.txt
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+**Adam Stacoviak:** So we're here on the leadership frontlines - I love that line in your summary for your session at Velocity, Julia.
+
+**Julia Grace:** Thank you.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We're here on the \*leadership\* frontlines, and I think one thing we talk about a lot in engineering and software development is scaling... But you often think about scaling software, not so much scaling teams. From my point of view - and I'm sure Jerod will agree - Slack has been in this constant scale motion. You've never been able to just kind of like chill out in some sort of infrastructure setup; you've always been scaling...
+
+**Julia Grace:** It is true...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...so this conversation is essentially about scaling all the things. What do you think?
+
+**Julia Grace:** When I interviewed at Slack two and a half years ago - in a few months it will be three years - I was told by Cal Henderson, our CTO, he said "We don't have anyone for you to manage, but we're gonna hire some people and we'll figure it out." And by the time that had elapsed between when I interviewed and when I started, I think we had hired five more people, and so my first day I was managing a team of about seven engineers, I think, at that time... Seven incredible front-end engineers, because we needed someone to manage front-end engineers, and I would never characterize myself as a front-end engineer; I'm much more of a back-end engineer, which means I have huge respect for folks who do front-end work.
+
+So I come on board, I'm really forced into a fascinating situation where I was not the subject matter expert, as I had said earlier. I'm definitely a back-end person, so I really had to focus on becoming a great manager, because when I would for example look at pull requests, I didn't know if some of the code that was being written - if those were the right architectural decisions... So I really had to defer to the team, and I really had to get really good at asking a lot of questions.
+
+\[04:26\] I actually did read a lot of code. I learned a lot about JavaScript in that initial period. And then if you fast-forward from the seven front-end engineers two and a half years ago, I now run an organization that didn't even exist 18 months ago (infrastructure), that has 75 people. That's 10x growth in two-and-a-half years, and over that time, every six months, my job would totally change - from managing front-end engineers, to managing both front-end and back-end, to managing a junior manager, to leading the infrastructure organization, which was small at the time, which then grew from 12, to 50, to now 75, and so... I look back two-and-a-half years ago and I barely recognize the job I used to have, because we've grown so much.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We have a very small team here, Julia, and I've always been on small teams; I've never even been on a team of 70, let alone managed one... So I hear that number and I'm just immediately overwhelmed, I start sweating, my hands are getting a little sweaty just thinking about the responsibility -- and when you first started, two-and-a-half or three years ago, it wasn't very long, and you had a team of seven. Do you sleep well at night? Do you feel like you have the weight of the world on your shoulders? That's just a lot of people...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I agree with that.
+
+**Julia Grace:** So I have learned a lot over that time. I feel as a leader that the only way that I can be successful is by having an incredible - and having the privilege of having an incredible - team. With that comes hiring amazing people, so that I can sleep well at night. When you think about the number 75, you think about 75 humans - that's a lot of folks, but the organization is divided in different ways, and I have incredible leaders, that again, I have the privilege of working with, who lead some of those sub-organizations.
+
+Part of growing fast is learning how to delegate and give things away really rapidly. There were so many things I worked on in the early days. An example would be hiring processes, and how we hire (especially at the time) front-end engineers, because that was my jam. Now I've given that away to somebody who did additional iterations, made it even better, and then they grew and scaled in their role, and they gave it away to someone else. And I say that in a wonderful way, where we're always iterating and growing and changing and evolving on everything that we do.
+
+The really big challenge that I've found is you have to learn how to do that for yourself, because growing -- in a hypergrowth company, you have to grow and evolve with the company, and that is one of the hardest things, and having the mindset of like every day I go to work and I do things I don't know how to do, that I've never done before, and then I get reasonably good at them and then I hand them off to someone else who they've never done it before, but they can pick up where I left off and make it even better. The hiring process is one example of that sort of thing.
+
+\[08:12\] Also, how do we communicate as a 75% organization, how do we propagate knowledge, how do we propagate decisions - and that means both top-down, like from myself and my boss, but also bottoms-up, from the engineering frontlines, the critical decisions that we're making, propagating that up to myself and then my boss.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's interesting to hear how -- you know, in hypergrowth companies, to take on the role(s) over time, you really have to accept that... Or maybe you would learn in the book Who Moved My Cheese the idea of change. You cannot be a fearful person of change, because it's inevitable; I think it's probably the case in most lives anyways, but even more so in a hypergrowth company where you've got to accept change. And if you're the kind of person that can't deal with change that rapidly, maybe it's not for you.
+
+**Julia Grace:** Absolutely. I mean, I do think that just like every company isn't for everyone, there's folks who are attracted to that high velocity of change, and then there are also individuals for very legitimate and understandable reasons where it may not be the right environment.
+
+One of the things I always say with my team, especially given we've just moved to a new office building, I was running around, trying to find all the conference rooms on the various floors... The thing we say now is the only thing constant at Slack is change. But that doesn't necessarily mean volatility. It doesn't mean things are hectic and scary. Instead, it means that we're always trying to learn and iterate and grow and learn how to do things better, and I myself as a leader am always trying to figure out what are the things that I'm dropping on the floor, what are the areas that I need to improve, and a big part of being able to do that is creating a safe and inclusive culture so that people can provide you with feedback, because the only way that you'll be able to learn and grow really rapidly is with really excellent high bandwidth feedback from the people below you, my peers in my case, and from upper management.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I think it's so true, that point about the only constant is change at Slack as a software company, and I think it can be applied to anybody who's writing software or running businesses on software. That's the only thing that we know is gonna happen, is that things are going to change, and that we don't know as much right now as we're gonna know later... So we build our systems and we design things in order that they can change - malleable, as opposed to rigid - and we do as little as we can now, because we're gonna be smarter later and we can make wiser decisions later.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So you're in a senior role now, right?
+
+**Julia Grace:** I am. I mean, it depends on how you define senior.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Do you have it in your title? \[laughter\]
+
+**Julia Grace:** I do have it in my title, thus it must be true.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The point I'm getting at is so if you're a senior now, were you always senior? Is this new for you? And maybe share some points along your path of like scaling you from someone who wasn't senior, the things you've learned and the things you've had to endure to get to a senior role and some of the responsibilities you hold day to day.
+
+**Julia Grace:** Absolutely. So I have definitely not always been in a senior role, and let me tell you, it has been a long and fantastic journey to get here, that was never always up and to the right. My career has taken many different twists and turns, and I've tried out product management, and I've tried founding a company... So I've done all kinds of things and learned so many things along the way.
+
+At Slack - it's funny, when I joined I was a senior engineering manager, so maybe it comes full circle. Then I transitioned into an engineering director when I started running infrastructure, and I'm now a senior director, so I got that senior back.
+
+\[12:25\] In the beginning, when I was managing that team of seven front-end engineers, I was -- and again, not hands-on from an "I was writing code", because as we've talked about, I wasn't the right person to be making the technical decisions, although I can understand the technology quite well and quite quickly... But I knew what the team was working on, I knew the challenges, I knew with a very high degree what was coming next for them. Engineering was much smaller then at Slack, it was less than 100 people. The group that I was in had about 25 engineers, so I knew what our larger plan was for all those 25 engineers.
+
+I would often sit in meetings that were talking about -- and again, as a manager, I do attend a lot of meetings. The goal of opt-in attending a lot of those meetings is to gather information, and to also see when people are blocked and how I can help them, and how I can also help transmit information throughout the organization.
+
+So I would sit in meetings that would be talking about things at the feature level, and as I transitioned to lead infrastructure, one of the things that happened was -- this was a brand new engineering organization. When engineering teams get big enough, you have to subdivide them in some sort of logical way, but always knowing that org structures and how you divide - that's a very hard problem.
+
+We had had a logical division there of how we would divide it, and now I was running this new organization... So I had this really exciting, unique opportunity to figure out "Well, what is the mission and what is the vision and what is the strategy for infrastructure?" So instead of thinking necessarily about the feature level that I had before, and the vision and the larger plan being set by the senior directors and VPs in that previous engineering organization, I was thus in those shoes.
+
+So I had to figure out what are the current challenges with our infrastructure, how are we scaling right now, what's breaking, and how are we gonna scale through the next huge jump and growth in our user base? What are things that are important for us to work on, but not urgent? What are the fires that are burning? So I really had to deeply understand from this infrastructure perspective what was going on, and I had to create a compelling vision that resonated not only with the engineers, but with the senior executives - the CTO, the VP of engineering, even the CEO, Stewart Butterfield; I presented this vision to him, as well. So it moved from feature level, again, to all of infrastructure.
+
+Now, as a senior director, as my boss likes to tell me - my boss is Michael Lopp, who many of you may know him on the internet as Rands - my role is not only to stay involved in infrastructure... I mean, I love this team; I feel like it is such an incredible, incredible organization... But to think about all of engineering, and the company as well.
+
+\[15:53\] When I joined, around two-and-a-half years ago, engineering was around 100 people, and now I think we're at around 350 people. So thinking at that larger scale, thinking about how we make decisions that impact across all of the organizations and impact other places of the company... So it's all about leveling up the scale at which you're thinking about, and when you do that, you can then have even greater impact. But one of the hardest challenges with that is that now you need to influence -- and again, I deeply think... One of the most profound lessons that I learned in my career was when I became a product manager and I had to learn how to influence people (people being the engineers) when I was not their manager and I did not have explicit authority to tell them what to do.
+
+The higher up that you go in management, your job is all about influence. Ultimately, the engineers in my organization and other organizations - they decide what code they're going to write that day and what code they're not going to write that day. They make all of the decisions. Now, I try to influence those decisions by giving them additional context, by giving them background, by talking about why what they're working on is so important... But at the end of the day, they decide their destiny, and I am there to help support and guide them. And the higher you go up in an organization, you have to be able to influence even more people in the organization, and that's incredibly difficult to do.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That last part about the dream part is something that resonates with me. I've played the role of product manager for a bit, and that's such a truth - to be able to influence someone, you have to be able to share with them a dream to strive for. And when you don't have that explicit control over their day-to-day code they can write, or even manage them to guide them that way every step of the way, you have to be able to kind of cast some sort of vision or dream for them to follow, because otherwise they're just gonna do what they have to do to ship code and keep it simple.
+
+**Julia Grace:** Absolutely. You have to inspire and compel folks to be aligned with where you think the organization should go, with the exciting challenges... You need to be able to craft a message that really resonates with the team.
+
+**Break:** \[18:36\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So Julia, as I listen to you talk and I'm trying to have takeaways of like what makes a great leader, and I'm always thinking in the context of a developer, and like "What makes a great developer/leader?" or "What turns a great developer into a great leader?" and I'm thinking about your points about a) communication - I think that's an obvious one, and definitely the most paramount thing. If I think about the best developers I've met, and we've interviewed a lot of them on the show, like "What makes them stand out?" a) their ability to communicate, absolutely. Communicate their thoughts.
+
+So let's set that one aside, and say aside from communication, the next thing that I think of with great developers is their ability to kind of inhabit an entire system. Like, the more of a system you can keep in your head, the whole thing, holistically, the better you are as a developer, I believe, and I've found.
+
+So what you were talking about was really even transitioning from developer to leader, or holding both roles, is the ability to speak about that system at different levels, to communicate about it, to speak up to people either above you in the organization, or to speak down to people below you or in your employ... And that to me sounds like you have to be able to inhabit the system maybe even at different levels, like conceptually, in big picture, small picture. Is that the case?
+
+**Julia Grace:** Yes.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay, and is that a learned skill, or is that just a natural thing? How do you get to be able to do that?
+
+**Julia Grace:** I love it, great question. I am very much a systems thinker. Before the ship sailed on my coding career three years ago when I stopped writing code day to day, I am always thinking about systems and how systems interact with other systems.
+
+Now, the way that I employ that systems thinking now is I'm thinking about systems of people, and how other people communicate with other people. So just like different systems have API contracts and they have different protocols with which they talk to each other, humans are the same way - they have different preferences for how people talk with them, the vocabulary that they use, that maps really nicely to the different protocols... And I absolutely feel like these are learned skills.
+
+In the -- oh my goodness... Without revealing my age, in the many, many years, like over 15 years that I've been a post-graduate - I did my graduate work in computer science, and that was a long time ago, and in the time that I've been a professional software developer, and now a manager, I have learned these skills. I also really deeply believe that anyone can learn anything, and that if given the right environment and the right teachers, people can absolutely rise to the occasion.
+
+And we can talk a little bit more about that, but I think this goes to the -- you had started the question around "How do I employ those skills now?" So as I think about the systems of people, and I think about the different relationships, I'm also thinking about "How can I communicate in a way to those different audiences?" The analogy is software is then like "What language do I need to speak to this system?" or "What vocabulary do I need to use to this human?" If I speak too fast, I might need to get rate-limited, so... There's so many analogies of how humans interact with some of the systems, and I don't mean to say that in a robotic way, but we all have preferences, and if you can understand someone's preferences - and that's I think a really important part of leadership, is building that rapport and that connection with people, so you can understand their preferences. Because if I start sending requests to a system in the wrong language or malformed requests, they're gonna be throw away or I'm gonna get error codes. So in this world, I need to deeply understand the people, just like I need to deeply understand the systems.
+
+\[24:20\] So that goes back to what makes, I think, not only great developers, but also great leaders, and I think it's important to note that the skills that make really senior developers great are often the same skills that make really senior managers great. You can be a leader in an organization if you're a manager - or if you're not a manager; if you're an individual contributor. Leadership comes from everywhere. But really great leaders, whether it be managers or individual contributors - they're really fantastic, as you highlighted, communicators. They know the protocols, the vocabularies, the error codes, the exit statuses - they know all these things, but they then can level up the people around them; they can grow them by being able to teach them new things, so they can help the (let's say) next generation, the more junior developers, the more junior managers.
+
+The more senior folks teach them about the systems, the mental models that they've developed about how the humans interact or how the systems interact... And as those junior folks learn and grow and they tackle problems, they then can refine and grow their own mental model about how these systems and humans interact with one another.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's interesting... I mean, I agree with you specifically on the overall in skills between a great developer or a great leader, or perhaps manager, if that's the same person... We do have this idea of the Peter principle in management where people tend to get - and I'll just summarize it; not the exact principle, but the way I think of it is people often get promoted to their level of incompetency, right? They're very good at this thing, so therefore a promotion comes and moves them into a role that they're not good at, and that's unfortunate at the time, because they were really good at the other thing, but they need this new position in order to achieve a salary raise, or something like that.
+
+This happens a lot with developers, like you're a great developer, and all of a sudden now you're a manager of developers, and even though there's overlap in those skills, that doesn't mean you immediately recognize or can apply -- arguably, software systems are easier to understand than people are, right? Like, we're way more complicated in many ways.
+
+**Julia Grace:** People are non-deterministic...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah! So do you have tips and tricks, or thoughts on developers who find themselves in the position of manager or a leader, and all of a sudden they feel like they don't have the chops to thrive in that position?
+
+**Julia Grace:** Well, I would say -- I have so many different thoughts... I think first if you're -- I do view management as a different job. Not a better job, not a worse job, but a different job. So the challenge is, as a developer, do you want to change your job? And if the answer is no, you love your job, you love what you do, and you want to continue growing, then hopefully you can, whether that be through promotion or through projects.
+
+Assume a role where you're able to teach a larger number of people, lead them through like a tech lead position, something along those lines. I think it's very important that companies have a track where very senior technologists do not have to become managers. Because again, I do very deeply feel like it is a different job. Sometimes, when I talk about what I do every day, which if you want to know the one-sentence version, it is "I read and write English documents", that is what I do all day... \[laughter\] You know, a lot of developers would say, "Well, I don't wanna do that. I wanna continue to program."
+
+\[28:09\] I do read code occasionally, but those times are fewer and farther between. So if you want to enter a world where you're spending more time in Google Docs than in Emacs or VI, then potentially management is for you. But in order to make that transition, it's so important that your organization can support you with training, with mentorship, with people who can give you feedback so you can learn and grow, because you're doing a totally new and different job.
+
+At Slack, I've managed many people who tried out management, managing a small team. Very senior technologists; technologists who had been programming professionally for 15-20 years, they wanted to try management. And I do think that it is important if people do want to try it, and their intentions are pure, meaning their intention is not because they want more power, but they want to really foster and grow and help others... We tried it out, and some of those individuals have been exceptional managers. And some of those folks have realized that this is not their calling... And huge hats off to them, because it can be so hard once you embark down a different path to realize that it's not for you.
+
+So some of those individuals have transitioned back to individual contributor roles, and I really wanna highlight, it's not a demotion, it's a transition back to a different job, to a job where they're fantastic. So in large part, some of the folks on my management team used to be very senior engineers, and some of them transitioned to IC roles, and others have been managers for a decade or more. So I think it's important at a company to also be able to provide the no-penalty, so to speak, for transitioning back to the role if you realize that it's not for you.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Just as a point of clarification, when you say IC roles, what are you referring to?
+
+**Julia Grace:** Oh, I'm sorry, individual contributor roles... So roles where you're not managing people.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So it's very important to emphasize what you said there when you go back to an IC role, that this isn't like a demotion, or this isn't a step backwards in your career, because management is a different job, but not necessarily a higher calling, so to speak. Is that what you're trying to say?
+
+**Julia Grace:** Yes. It is not a better job, it is not a more powerful job, it is not a more prestigious job, it's only--
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Just different.
+
+**Julia Grace:** Yes.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm sitting here thinking about this and I'm like, I'm that kind of person where I naturally by my talents just gravitate towards management type roles, because I can be in an individual contributor role, and I will just naturally wanna lead. It's just something that comes out, it's not something I'm like "I've gotta..." It's just my DNA. And if you put me in an individual contributor role, I'm probably depressed, or aloof, or not that invested... But if you give me an opportunity to influence and change, and determine vision and where we're gonna go - that's where I thrive.
+
+I imagine there's a lot of developers out there who are like that as well, so how do you keep being a programmer, but then also leverage those skills, too?
+
+**Julia Grace:** \[31:50\] I completely understand. To give you a quick story, I have a daughter and she's three, and we go to music class every Saturday, and there's -- at times, my daughter is very aware of who's following the rules and who's not... So I was very self-conscious about this, because she likes to correct other people and she likes to stand up there and be in charge - I say that in a positive way - and the teacher said "There's always a supervisor in every class."
+
+And I think, good for you to acknowledge that this is where you can be most successful and where you're deriving the most value for yourself and for others. It can be often difficult to know... Especially early in my career, I didn't know what were the environments and the situations and the ways where I really was able to thrive, so good for you for knowing that.
+
+This goes back to the notion of even though management and individual contributor (development, programmer) roles - even though those are different jobs, the higher up that you go in both of them, the skills to some degree converge, where instead of you building the features, you're leading, communicating, growing, teaching others.
+
+So instead of me communicating vision and strategy through written English words and presentations and PowerPoint decks, some of the very senior principal engineers and architects in my organization - they don't manage people. They do write a lot of English documents about how we're gonna build a super complex, difficult feature, but then they'll also lead discussions around different approaches.
+
+One of the things that we do here at Slack is we have what's called the Software Design Workshop, and any engineer in the organization - junior or senior - can write up a technical document about how they're going to approach a feature. Then they bring it to the workshop, and people opt in if it's a topic they're interested in, because again, our engineering organization is quite large... But people can come, and then we have a discussion - spirited, and I think fantastic discussion about how should we build this? Are there any interesting edge cases? And those discussions - I think actually this is really important - are led by other engineers, and not led by managers. I don't actually know that much anymore about what the edge cases are... But let me tell you, some of the very senior engineers in our organization - you bet they do, because they've been around for a while, and they've probably seen the different patterns and they've seen systems fail, and they have really great mental models for our systems.
+
+So they then help facilitate the discussion, which leads to the why communication is so important... They facilitate discussion, ask questions, but ensure that the engineers presenting - who might be senior or might be junior - have a safe space to present their ideas and walk away feeling like they've learned something.
+
+So I think that's the -- there's still such a huge need for very senior developers and programmers in organizations, because let's face it, sometimes those developers and programmers, especially in senior roles, have more credibility than the managers do, because they're in the trenches, on the front lines sometimes with the other engineers, and I'm no longer in the trenches. So I ask questions, but I'm not there debugging if we have some sort of incident... The engineers are doing that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So Julie, you said "In the trenches" - now you're really speaking our language. These are common idioms and phrases that Adam and I often use. So as a manager, as a leader on the management side, as you said, you don't have that day-to-day in the trenches -- you're day-to-day, but you're not in the debugger; how do you keep your street cred with your teams? How do you stay relevant and not become the Pointy-haired Boss that is so laughed at in the Dilbert comics?
+
+**Julia Grace:** \[36:11\] I ask a lot of questions. Early in my management career - and I see this with a lot of more junior managers... They think their job is to have all the answers, and they think that their job, like a la Dilbert, is to tell people what to do. I very much believe that is not my job. I ask a lot of questions because I don't have all the answers.
+
+Ideally, there are very few hard decisions honestly that I'm making, because I've created an environment with my team where they have the context, they know what we're building, they know why we're building it, they know why it's important, and then they decide how they're going to approach actually building things.
+
+I try very hard not to be prescriptive. My job is not to tell people how to do things, but to again, set the contexts and let them run free... Because let me tell you, they're gonna come up with much more innovative, interesting, creative solutions to things than I'm going to come up with. As a manager, I manage "What is outcome? What do we want to achieve by building this? How do we build it - that is up to you all! Run free!" My engineers are in the debugger, and I am not.
+
+So again, coming back to your question, all I do all day is ask questions. Let's say that someone comes to me and they're stuck; this happens -- not regularly, but with like a somewhat normal cadence, where maybe we're deadlocked on a decision, we don't know what to do, so when the team comes to me and they've decided "We want Julia to weigh in, because we don't know what to do." So the first thing that I do in all of those discussions is I start asking a lot of questions, because I probably don't have all the context.
+
+Most of the time -- and it's almost like I'm rubber duck debugging the team. They come, and I just start asking questions. And usually through all the questions that I ask - and I'm not being prescriptive, I'm not telling them what to do - they come to a logical conclusion, and the team has decided how to effectively fix something themselves. I think that's fantastic, because in an ideal world, the team is able to function and make decisions, and I manage myself out of a job, meaning they don't need me, because they understand what they're doing, and they understand the business requirements, and they deeply know the purpose of what we're building.
+
+Now, there's also a lot of situations where maybe I ask a lot of questions and it's a hard call, and I have to make a decision, and part of what I do as a now senior leader is when I do have to make a decision, I can ask questions rapidly and then be able to make the decision quickly... Because the last thing I would want to do is to block a team from being able to do something.
+
+So the credibility comes through asking people and getting them to volunteer what they think the solution should be, versus coming in and being that boss who doesn't know what's going on, but is telling people to do things that those developers are actually diametrically opposed to.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[40:05\] It's getting people to talk, really, right? In a lot of cases, unless you do that, the silence will come in and you'll pontificate, rather than say "Hey, where should this go? Here are the problems I'm seeing from this meeting" or "I'm information gathering here, I see this problem there. Here's the collective problem - how does this impact you and how can we solve that?" Is that what you mean by that?
+
+**Julia Grace:** Absolutely. The last thing people wanna hear me do is get up on a pedestal and give a speech about how they should solve a problem, or the implementation details of a problem. It is all about (exactly) asking question, getting them to talk, getting them at times to see things from a different perspective.
+
+**Break:** \[40:52\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So Julia, you've been scaling up the team at the speed of the business, which as we mentioned earlier in the conversation, has been very rapid, and you're from 7(ish) to up to a 70-person team; I'm sure there's plenty of other teams... But your major goal is to keep the infrastructure up with the demand on the platform and the business. Give us some insights into exactly the infrastructure of Slack, some of the technical hurdles you all have been dealing with, maybe some success stories, maybe some bad days.
+
+**Julia Grace:** For sure. From a technical perspective, the founders of Slack previously had started Flickr, which was a photo sharing site that they then sold to Yahoo! many years ago. So Cal Henderson, who I work with very closely - he's our CTO - during the Flickr days him and co-founder Serguei, who is actually a part of the infrastructure organization; I directly managed Serguei for some time - brilliant technologist... They learned how to scale PHP.
+
+Cal even wrote a book about scaling PHP and how Flickr, the first consumer web startup of tremendous scale, how they went through that period. So when Cal and Serguei and Stewart Butterfield (our CEO), when they went to start Slack, they knew how to scale PHP. We have a large PHP monolith with many services that we've split out right now.
+
+We recently hired -- or actually, you know, all the years blend together now, but we have a chief architect, Keith Adams, and he came from Facebook; Facebook was also a really large PHP shop, and they then created the Hack language, and use HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine)... So we are now transitioning to using Hack and HHVM. Fantastic, fantastic performance improvements there, as well as typing, as well as many of the affordances of modern languages.
+
+\[44:19\] We tend to, at Slack, use boring technology, and part of the reason for that - and I say boring with so much love - is because we have to know how to operate the technologies that we use at incredible, incredible scale, and so we don't want to be on the bleeding edge, because we have to have incredibly high uptime, because we have so many companies, from the NASAs of the world, to Capital One, to IBM, to eBay - all of these companies run the backbone of their business on Slack, and we can never ever go down.
+
+So in scaling infrastructure, we build a lot of the services that connect to the monolith. Some of those services are written in Java, some of them are written in Go... And so I now manage a fantastic team of machine learning and search engineers. We have that office based out of New York, and so they're also experimenting with some Java and Go services to connect to the monolith, and we're slowly -- we do not have a microservices model, but when it makes sense, we split things off the monolith and potentially turn them into external services.
+
+In the early days of having services, that we've either split off or that were always separate, we didn't deeply understand SLAs around those services, and so as we've grown, one of the ways in which we've matured is understanding and having performance targets and also SLAs for all the services that we're building... And these are not external SLAs, these are SLAs for ourselves, because infrastructure is a horizontal organization, meaning we build, of course, common infrastructure that's used by 300-350 engineers that are in product engineering, like building on top of what we've built.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It reminds me of a conversation we had a long time ago now... Man, time flies. In 2014 we had Sara Goleman - who worked at Facebook at the time; I believe she still does, but perhaps not - come on the show and talk all about the PHP language spec, making PHP awesome, the work they were doing with HHVM and Hack... And there's been a whole bunch of engineering efforts by many companies now; I'm happy to hear Slack is contributing and using PHP and helping make it an awesome language of today.
+
+So we use Slack every day, almost all day, every day, and you mentioned it always has to be up... Like, I can't think of a time -- I think there was one time when Slack was down... I'm just trying to think if you had any real bad days.
+
+Another one of our often used services is Twitter, and they historically have had many bad days, and we even lovingly think of the Fail Whale of years past...
+
+**Julia Grace:** Oh, yes...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Actually, Twitter had some downtime maybe last week, and I noticed the Fail Whale was gone. It's like a weird Octocat looking thing instead. I was like, "That's not endearing, give us the Fail Whale." But Slack really hasn't had... I mean, Adam, can you think of a time where it was just like, "Well, Slack's down... I guess we'll just email each other"?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** No, I don't. The only thing I would really ever notice - and this isn't a dig - is just maybe slower service, not down service... Which could be - but isn't - as bad.
+
+**Julia Grace:** Service degradation.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[47:54\] Yeah. You know, we're starting up the app, and it takes ten seconds versus instant or closer to instant... Those kinds of things. Or slow notifications. When you rely on notifications, iOS notifications, and you've already had the conversation and then finally on your iOS device you get a notification or two of the conversation you've already had... Those kinds of things. I'm sure that they're not quite down, but they're like -- it's sort of not relevant anymore, so how do you deal with non-relevant, distributed notifications that should have been closer to real-time, that are now just not important anymore?
+
+**Julia Grace:** See, I think you're highlighting on a really interesting question, which I see the parallels, and sometimes no internet is better than slow internet... Where you want a service to be really quick, you want to ensure that your notifications show up instantaneously... Imagine if you get a DM from your boss and you wanna know, you wanna be able to respond, if that's your relationship with your boss... So we think about this a lot, and we think about it especially with respect to we've grown so fast, and now that over half the messages in Slack are sent outside of the U.S., we have to have an infrastructure that allows Slack to boot instantly everywhere around the world, meaning Houston, Omaha - since Adam, Jerod, I know you're out there - but also in Japan, in Asia-Pacific.
+
+So we run Slack in the cloud, and we've been cloud from day one, and as part of the infrastructure organization, we've had to build a lot of tooling to understand what our performance is around the world... And also, you were talking about notifications, and especially on mobile, we use the infrastructure - I believe it's APNs, which is the infrastructure provided by Apple, to send notifications on iOS; there's also an analogous system on Android. So one of the most difficult things is providing a service that is used 24 hours/day, 7 days/week, around the globe, that people need to do their jobs, that has to almost be more reliable than the internet backbone.
+
+What I mean by that is there are parts of the world where the internet backbone is less reliable, especially in Asia-Pacific. Let's say that you get a DM and it doesn't come in fast enough. It seems delayed; Slack seems slow. You don't care that there's DNS issues that are happening in your part of the world; you need Slack to be fast, and that's what you expect. So one of the awesome challenges here is figuring out how to provide that level of service when we don't control the racked machines; we don't have our own data centers, so how do we do that when we don't have that low, low, low level of control? And the way that we do it and the way that we're figuring it out - because again, the scale is just tremendous - is by building software. And that makes me incredibly excited. We are figuring out how to work with different vendors to build really resilient fault-tolerance software that can provide you that level of experience, when fundamentally the underlying infrastructure - the cloud providers that we run on, and then the internet backbone lines that they run on - do not provide the level of uptime that we need.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[51:57\] It's an interesting perspective to think about that too, because - I'll also say this - we're not paying you. So we're obviously not complaining...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Do you mean that in terms of "We're on the free version of Slack"?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right, exactly. I think of this as an interesting problem, because you have such a unique type of software, where you have a lot of people using for free, and a lot of people -- you know, in your own terms; we're not ripping you off, it's the way things work. \[laughter\]
+
+**Julia Grace:** Oh yeah, of course!
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** But the point is--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** If we were, that'd be a really bad confession right there. "By the way, we're not paying you..." \[laughter\] "Surprise!"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm not beating down your door and demanding it from you, but you know, we talked about uptime or downtime reliability - you know, I've never really seen Slack down, but I've seen it be slow, or I've seen it be delayed... And you're right, I don't think like "Hey, DNS isn't working properly here in Houston, Texas", I just think "Slack is not working right." I blame you, not the DNS, or the other problems in the internet backbone.
+
+**Julia Grace:** Or when S3 went down.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, or S3 went down, or something changed to make things not work right.
+
+**Julia Grace:** So we definitely have had -- so we run our business on Slack; we're Slack on Slack all day, and when we do have service interruptions or things are slow, it really heavily impacts our ability to do work. And when you build software, we do everything we can to ensure we have unit testing, and load testing, and we have linting, and we have tooling... But we're all engineers here, we make mistakes. We all wish that we could write perfect code and never deploy bugs, but of course we do! So the challenge becomes -- so we absolutely have had situations where Slack has gone down for periods of time, so what we've done is ensure that when things happen (because they do), that we're able to recover and detect those problems instantaneously.
+
+So in an ideal world, we accidentally break something, or S3 goes down, or a huge storm in Northern Virginia impacts U.S. East, the Amazon facility out there, and we're able to detect that and we route the traffic or revert the bug and do that without you ever noticing. That's the world that we're moving towards - being able to detect and recover really rapidly, so that you all will never know that anything happened.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And you're doing that through relationships -- you mentioned talking to vendors...
+
+**Julia Grace:** So we talk with our vendors very regularly. We also build software that can handle network flakiness, in case something does happen with the underlying network... And I feel like that's such a fascinating engineering challenge, because it's like trying to understand ways in which something will fail. When you build software, there's often obvious edge cases, and then there's things that happen where you're like "I never could have imagine that that ever would have happened", and now we have another if/else clause, and how to handle that... \[laughs\]
+
+As someone who runs an infrastructure organization, I think a lot about the challenges at scale that involve vendors, that involve us building and baking in resiliency into our software. Another fascinating thing, at least to me, about Slack is we open -- most people have Slack open for ten hours a day on the desktop; they're probably not sending messages for ten hours a day, but they have it passively open, and we open a WebSocket connection and we're sending incremental diffs, if you will, across that WebSocket.
+
+\[56:13\] The reason that at times - and we're very heavily working on this - that startup time might be low is because we need to send you a whole lot of data across the WebSocket. Now, remember, WebSockets are a bidirectional communication, so we are sending like "Is Jerod in new channels? Has Adam gotten some new DMs? Has someone mentioned Jerod or Adam?" We're sending all of this information, the state of the world since you last connected, across the WebSocket. And then once you're connected, we're able to send you smaller bits of information about things that have changed.
+
+Now, one of the things that happens that's particularly precarious is if we see millions of users - or tens of millions - get knocked offline... Like, let's say there's a storm; let's say we deploy a bug. Let's say the internet backbone in Singapore has a blip, and suddenly all those users are knocked offline, they all immediately hit Refresh, or they wait, and suddenly we've got millions, tens of millions of users trying to reconnect. And those are the things that are really difficult.
+
+Building systems that can handle those - what we call "reconnection storms", that's really interesting and has been really hard, because you really have to build infrastructure that can handle so much greater than your current load... But that's not just sending the data; it's querying for the data, it is packaging it, getting it to clients, ensuring the clients can parse it efficiently... All of these things. And I think that's such an exciting challenge.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm sure we can go much, much deeper on these challenges, and I think these are probably never-ending, and probably not even the most -- maybe fun for you to talk about, but not always fun to reveal.
+
+Maybe before -- we wanna ask you one or two questions about your upcoming talk here at Velocity, but I think maybe... Share what you can, just to give listeners kind of a scale of like how many users? Is there any public information around paid or unpaying users, so you can help the audience and listeners understand what the scale you're actually operating at when it comes to a concurrent user base, or something like that?
+
+**Julia Grace:** Yeah, absolutely. So we have over nine million weekly active users and over six million daily active users. There's over two million paid users. What I think is super-cool... So of those paid users, the two million paid, 43% of Fortune 100 companies use Slack. So a lot of the companies that you think about - credit cards, Capital One - they're running their business on Slack. Super-cool. TicketMaster, if you're buying tickets on Slack. But also a lot of fascinating and exciting, like NASA - I have talked about that before - doing really cool stuff on top of Slack. And of course, there's a lot of technology companies - the Paypals, the LinkedIns, Spotify, Pinterest... They're all running their businesses on Slack.
+
+\[59:46\] And not only do we have rapidly growing numbers of users, but I think the demands on the service in terms of "We can never go down" are really high. If you think about consumer internet businesses, for example Twitter (we talked about them earlier), or Facebook - when those services go down, of course that really sucks, and there's clearly a loss for those companies in ad revenue. When Slack goes down, the people at Capital One can't do their work, and that's terrible. If TicketMaster goes down, then potentially they can't process orders. So the reliability and scalability constraints are real, and I think that's really exciting, because I think it means that we've built an incredible product, that people love and that people rely on every day to do their job, and ideally, we're in the background... Like, we just work.
+
+Segueing into -- you had asked a few other numbers... When I first started using Slack, before I ever thought about working at the company, I had started a company and I installed all the engineering integrations on top of Slack. So I did GitHub, continuous integration, PagerDuty, we also use Zendesk for our customer support tickets... So we have a really active and vibrant developer community that builds on top of the APIs, so we've got something like 1,000 apps in our app directory. The app directory was actually the first big launch that I was part of at Slack, which was super cool, because you had to go search for apps, and that's how in my early Slack days I found apps - I would do a google search; now you can search in the app directory.
+
+This is just so cool, because I've built apps before I even joined the company; I built integrations, so I could send data, pipe data from our systems into Slack, so that if something was going wrong, I hooked up our error servers to Slack so that I could see the channel light up, versus waiting for the email or waiting for the page, because I was in Slack all the time...
+
+There's something like 155,000 of these weekly active developers building on Slack. So that's a lot of people building on Slack, and I think that's so cool, because they are building things that we never could have imagined, in a wonderful way.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think what's interesting is that you've got - I think you said two million(ish) paying users, but roughly nine million in a week, right?
+
+**Julia Grace:** Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** To me, that's just crazy because of what you're doing for your uptime, that the large majority of your users aren't paying you.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You're feeling guilty, aren't you, Adam?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** No, I'm just feeling like -- you know, it's just the world we live in, but it's just like... You know, you kind of understand why services charge a higher premium for what they do, because it takes a lot to run them, but you've got a large majority using a service for free, but they get -- maybe not the same, but a very similar service. We probably get a very similar service that one of these companies gets that pays you.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I mean, I think they've done a good job setting forth what seems to be a solid business model with free versus paid, and it seems like everybody's happy that way, at least so far... Right, Julia?
+
+**Julia Grace:** So what I love is that all of the changes that we make to ensure that the service is better for big customers, every single small customer and free team benefits, too. That's really exciting, because not only can the people who use Slack for work hopefully have a better experience, but then in the communities that you run, you're also able to benefit from all of those things as well.
+
+\[01:03:50.29\] I think another -- active user numbers vary, and as an enterprise software company, we see there's periods of time when... You know, Mondays are really big days for us, for example, because everybody comes back online, because they spent the weekend hopefully chilling out... So those numbers fluctuate based on the calendar year, the -- I think what's super interesting from my perspective was, you know, in the early days of Slack usage would dip over the holidays, because people weren't working. They'd take a week off, or two weeks off for winter holidays and New Year's, but as we've grown, we see that less because there are more companies using Slack that don't have that dip in the holidays. The companies that don't are the ones like credit card processors, for example, or anyone in e-commerce.
+
+So as we start to see more and more folks -- the "nice break" we used to get for the holidays, that doesn't exist anymore. It's been really cool to watch... We used to be able to say "Only one person is triaging bugs", but that's not the case anymore. So that's been wonderful, the challenges of success and the challenges of growth.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, Julia, I wanna plug your talk here at Velocity here in a bit. We work closely with O'Reilly, especially around Velocity, Fluent and OSCON conferences they put on, and we're always happy to talk with speakers like yourself, speaking at this conference. So you're giving a talk called "Scaling yourself during hypergrowth", and I think we're actually gonna title this podcast "Scale all the things" or "Scaling all the things" - one of the two.
+
+I'm excited about this talk. We have some team members who are gonna be there. Listeners, if you're checking this out and you're gonna go to that conference or you'd like to, we can give you 20% off either a gold, silver or bronze pass. Use the code "changelog", check the show notes for a link. We'll also include a link to Julia's talk there as well; maybe you can catch it. If not, maybe it'll be on YouTube, who knows...?
+
+Anything you wanna share with us in closing to some of the things either in your talk, or things we haven't covered that you wanna say as we tail out?
+
+**Julia Grace:** Thank you both so much for having me. If any of these challenges - of scale, of growth - resonate with any of you listeners out there and you're interested in learning more and working on some of these things, you can find me easily on Twitter; I would love to--
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I love the Twitter handle, by the way.
+
+**Julia Grace:** Oh, thank you.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Jewelia. \[laughs\]
+
+**Julia Grace:** You know, a last final story... When I was 18 years old and I went to college, I had to choose my email address and it had to be more than five characters... So Julia, how I spell my name, is five characters and it wouldn't work, so immediately (as an 18-year-old) I had to come up with this handle, and you know what? Many decades later, it's still around, so... Any 18-year-olds out there? \[laughs\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Nice...
+
+**Julia Grace:** The decisions live with you.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's a big decision.
+
+**Julia Grace:** And now, of course, you can have five characters or less; the world is a different place. If only... So find me on Twitter, come to the talk - Velocity is such a great conference... Huge shout-out to the O'Reilly folks, who do an incredible, incredible job. I feel so honored to be able to talk about these things both in a keynote and a session, so we can dig deep there... And then it should be on YouTube later, so come find me, I'd love to talk more. I hope that you are having a wonderful, delightful experience on all of your Slacks.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** There you go. All your Slacks. I'm on many Slacks. Julia, thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure talking to you, and I appreciate you coming on the show.
+
+**Julia Grace:** Thank you both so much.
diff --git a/Segment's transition back to a monorepo (Interview)_transcript.txt b/Segment's transition back to a monorepo (Interview)_transcript.txt
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+**Adam Stacoviak:** So we're here to tell the story of Segment going from monorepo to microservices, and back again. We've got Alexandra Noonan here, and we've got Calvin, CTO and co-founder here. Maybe let's open up, since we have -- normally we have one or two people, or only one person on the show... Let's open it up with who you are a bit. Alex, let's start with you.
+
+**Alexandra Noonan:** Yeah, sure. I'm Alex and I am a software engineer for Segment. I joined the engineering team about a year ago, and before that I was actually working on Segment's customer success team, kind of solving tickets and teaching myself how to code, so I could eventually move to engineering; before that, I was in school, studying math. That pretty much brings us to where I am now.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[04:02\] Awesome. And Calvin, you're the co-founder and CTO, is that right?
+
+**Calvin French-Owen:** Yeah, that's correct. Originally, we started Segment about a little over seven years ago now, and at the time we started in a really different place - we were building different types of software. After about a year and a half of trying to find product-market fit, we ended up on this analytics idea, and we have kind of been building out that infrastructure and that product ever since.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And as I mentioned, we're here to share this story - quite of a journey. Alex, this is penned by you, and from what I understand from behind the scenes, there's several people who led this effort. It was quite a bit of an effort to do so. Maybe let's open up with kind of the timeframe. I saw this -- I think I logged this to our news feed the day of, when I saw it, which was just last month, July 11th... Is that around the timeframe of this blog timeframe, or does it kind of go further back than that? Did it take you several weeks to write this? Give us some timeframe of when this occurred.
+
+**Alexandra Noonan:** Yeah, it actually took me six months to write this post. Rick Branson - it was actually kind of his idea for the post, because I was one of the engineers that was maintaining and trying to build these microservices, and then I helped transition, and then I was also maintaining the monolith after for a bit, and he kind of came on and helped with the transition a bit... So he thought it would be a really interesting post to write, and since I was one of the main engineers that kind of went through the entire experience, he asked if I'd be interested in writing it in January.
+
+Then I worked on it on weekends, nights, and then got it to about 60% done, but wasn't totally happy with it, and then Calvin hosted an engineering blog week where all people did for a week was write a blog post... So I took that week to get it over the line, which was probably the last week of June. I finished it then, and I was sick of reading it, so we released it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So this post made quite a splash. We saw it covered on InfoQ, as Adam said, Changelog News logged it... It was shared broadly probably on Hacker News -- I'm not sure if it made Hacker News, but I'm sure it probably did... Before we get into the actual move -- I mean, the reason why I think this made a big splash is because anytime you see a trend in software engineering, and then you see kind of the first, or maybe a couple counter-trends... Like, "This was going a certain direction, and now we are moving away from the trend" - that's interesting to us. So as you start off the post saying that microservices are the architecture du jour, and this is a circumstance wherein the architecture was not working out for Segment... Calvin, maybe you can first give everybody kind of the big picture of what segment is and does, and why it was a good fit? You guys started moving to microservices early on, and only recently - maybe six months ago, or maybe more, found out that it wasn't quite a fit for you guys' team... So tell us what Segment is in terms of what technically it does, and then why it was a good fit, at least at the time, for trying microservices.
+
+**Calvin French-Owen:** Sure. Segment, at its core, is a single API to collect data about your users and your customers, and take that data, whether it's from your website, if you're monitoring things like pageviews, or recording users adding items to their cart, or app interactions... Basically, adding some code to send that data once into our API, and then letting us help to handle the fan out and federation of all that data into over 200 different analytics email and marketing tools that you might be using.
+
+Actually, Segment was kind of born out of our need, as developers, in the very beginning, where we were trying to decide between these three analytics tools - Google Analytics, Kissmetrics and Mixpanel... And we couldn't really figure out what the differences were between them, or why would we want to use one versus another.
+
+\[08:11\] So what we did is we took kind of the lazy engineer's way out and we built this layer of abstraction that sits in front, where you just send the data once, in a common format, and say "Here's who my users are, here's what they're doing", and then we help take care of all of the transformations and mapping that are particular to each API.
+
+Looking back on the history of the company, actually we started with a very monolithic pattern ourselves. There was one service which wasn't Node, which basically packaged up our API, our CDN - we used to serve JavaScript our web app, and it all used the same set of modules, the same single process, and they were just running across multiple EC2 instances. As started growing the team and growing the number of developers, we quickly realized that that single service wasn't going to hold up as we basically added more and more people to it, where there are now more and more PRs happening against the repos, there are more and more deploys happening every day, and we just started running into a bunch of reliability problems.
+
+So to counter that - and I think this was the heyday of when Node.js was all about these really tiny modules, the kind of like left-pad sort of really just very small bits of code that could be reused in many places... That's when we started splitting up our repositories into different repos, and our services, going from this monolith service to a bunch of different microservices.
+
+I think even today -- well, at that point we had about 15 engineers, and we started ending up with hundreds of different microservices, and even today we're probably pretty far on the spectrum of having too many services per engineer, but we're starting to dial it back in a number of these key areas which Alex can talk about.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** One move I've read a few teams make, kind of between the monolith and the microservice, is introducing kind of a code-only -- I don't know if they call it service-oriented architecture, or if that's something else, because I'm not up on the lingo... But this idea of like "We're going to introduce services into our architecture, but not necessarily separate them at the network layer." Was that something that was tried or considered along the way, or was it like "Let's just use HTTP everywhere and have these microservices right off the bat"?
+
+**Calvin French-Owen:** It's interesting for us, because Segment is actually a little bit different than, let's say, your traditional web app, like an Instagram or a Facebook... Because we're this API, most of our what we call services could actually be more like workers, where typically each one will ingest some data that it's reading off of a queue, either Kafka or NSQ. It will do some set of light transformations or enrichment on that data, or maybe pull some extra data from another database, and then it will typically republish that data, either to a queue, or make outbound HTTP requests to a third-party API.
+
+When you think about data pipelines in that way, it actually makes sense that you'd have many different steps, each with different hops in between them, and if you wanna change one hop or one service, you would do that independently of the rest of the pipeline.
+
+So I think that's more what pushed us to have these different services, which like you said, were actually running via separate codebases, because they all did something a little bit different... But we also would run them in the same infrastructure and on the same network.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** The cool thing about Segment, from my perspective, just from a nerdy engineer thought life, is it's basically the adapter pattern for third-party services...
+
+**Calvin French-Owen:** \[12:08\] Yeah, exactly.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** ...just like you would do for your database, right? Abstract a layer, and that layer is Segment, and now you only write to Segment, and then it's going to front Google Analytics, Optimizely, Mixpanel, Kissmetrics - all of them, probably hundreds of them at this point... And because of that, it does have a unique architecture where basically at a service level it's implementing the adapter pattern, and so it does break out, I think, mentally, very well, because you have your analytics queue -- you have one big queue, I'm assuming, and then you probably split that out and have kind of service-level queues... So mentally, I think that would make sense for microservices. Was that the thought process then?
+
+**Calvin French-Owen:** Yeah, that's a great way of phrasing it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So Alex, you have in your post kind of a drawing of this queue and a description, and it sounds like there was some coupling and some performance problems that were happening. Can you tell us more about that?
+
+**Alexandra Noonan:** Yeah, so when Segment was originally in a monolith for these destinations, one of the benefits of Segment is that we retry events; for example, say we get 500's from a partner, because they're experiencing a temporary issue, we wanna send that event again... But with our old setup, everything was in one queue, and that included these retry events, as well as live traffic. So if one destination was going down for whatever reason, now that one single cue would be flooded with tons of retry events, as well as live traffic, and we weren't set up at the time to scale quick enough to be able to handle this increase in load... So one destination having issues would affect every single destination, which was not ideal. So that was the original motivation for breaking them all up, so we can have this fault isolation between them all.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So instead of having one queue and multiple destinations, you would have a queue per destination... So these individuals queues became individual repos, individual services...
+
+**Alexandra Noonan:** Exactly. So now if whatever destination is experiencing an issue, only its specific queue would back up, and everyone else would be unaffected.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** To me that sounds like rainbows and unicorns. It sounds like you guys solved it. That's where the plot thickens, right? Because that was working for a while...
+
+**Alexandra Noonan:** Exactly...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** ...and maybe we need a bigger picture again. We understand what Segment is... Somebody gives us maybe the team size, the company size, maybe the growth metrics of like the engineers, and help us understand -- because microservices, these architecture decisions, they're wildly subjective. Even in our last show we were talking about Istio, and we talked about microservices a little bit, and I was asking the question of like "How do you know when to microservice and when not to microservice?" and that's like the ultimate "It depends", which is basically mostly of software development, is "It depends..."
+
+These case studies are so interesting, because they give us data points by which we can all make decisions better, kind of as an industry, individually, but you can only actually apply the data if you are a subject, if you're a comparable - it's like real estate sales, we need to find comparable houses... Well, we need to find comparable technical stacks, technical situations in order to say "Okay, this might not work for us..." So help us understand Segment at a macro level - the team, the company size etc.
+
+**Calvin French-Owen:** \[15:40\] Segment today - there's about 80 members of the engineering team, and overall the company size is close to 300 people. When you asked the question about whether to adopt microservices or not, and it being there on a case-by-case basis, or a decision that's made very particularly to your company, the way that I like to think about it is about whether you're ready to take on more operational overhead that comes from running in many different services, where maybe each one has its own codebase, it has its own set of monitoring and alerting that you have to be keeping track of, it has its own new deploy process, its own way of managing those services etc...
+
+And honestly, it's a lot of upfront work to run those sorts of microservices, that I think if we'd started there from day one, honestly the company wouldn't have gotten off the ground, and we would have just spent all our time in terms of tooling and infrastructure and we wouldn't have made any progress on the actual product... But that said, there are a lot of benefits to having microservices if you have those systems in place.
+
+For us, we run everything on top of AWS, and we use Amazon's Elastic Container Service (ECS) to run all of our services and orchestrate them, running in Docker containers. For us, we've invested pretty significantly in building out the tooling around ECS, around spinning up a new service that automatically gives you a load balancer, it gives you auto-scaling, it gives you the ability to run this Docker image as long as you've built it via CI, which we've also invested a lot of tooling in.
+
+And I think given that we have that set of primitives, it's made it so that we have kind of this proliferation of services, because it's just so easy to do, and it means that if you want to add a little piece to the pipeline, you don't have to make a change which could potentially break the pipeline for everyone; you don't have to worry about adding a single slow component, which now might buffer in kind of this critical path, which is dealing with hundreds of thousands of requests per second... Instead, you can think about your little compartmentalized piece and how that should peform and behave.
+
+So for us, I think that drove a lot of the decision towards moving towards these really tiny services, where the surface area was small and compartmentalized and well maintained, where if you had a single service that was acting up for some reason... Like, let's say it's connecting to a database which starts timing out and starts sending back connection errors, it doesn't then stall the rest of the pipeline in terms of delivering data.
+
+So like I said, we first adopted this when we were maybe 10 or 15 people, which looking back on it now, I'd say it was definitely on the early side... And we had to build a lot of operational excellence in terms of running these services... I think we were some of the earliest ECS users; today I think we're some of their heaviest users, running about 16,000 containers total across all of our infrastructure... We basically had to build that muscle separately, and put in more upfront cost there, which then allowed us to scale a little bit more easily when it came to building out the pipeline.
+
+That said, it's not without cost. At this point, we built so many of these little services in so many different code paths that it's actually difficult for individual developers to keep track of how they connect... If you make a change to one part of the pipeline, how it affects the rest - that sort of thing. So there's definitely other downsides that I think are maybe not as talked about as much, especially if you adopt microservices really early.
+
+**Break:** \[19:59\] to \[21:06\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So Alex, one of the things that you say in this post is that the touted benefits of microservices are improved modularity, reducing test burden, better functional composition, environmental isolation, and development team autonomy. These are the ones that many of us have heard, talked about and kind of analyzed, and definitely true. The opposite, you say, is a monolithic architecture, where a large amount of functionality lives in a single service, which is tested, deployed and scaled as a single unit.
+
+Now, we know monoliths can be majestic, they can also be monsters, but you had switched to microservices for this part of Segment, and then you said in 2017 you started reaching a tipping point with this core piece of the product, which is the one that we're talking about... And I love this statement - you seemed as if you were falling from the microservices tree, hitting every branch on the way down... \[laughter\] Which sounds painful to me. So tell us about that.
+
+As I said before, it seems like rainbows and unicorns, or it seems like a very good fit because of the infrastructure that you all have, but it didn't quite work out, so that's kind of where the plot thickens. Tell us what those branches on the microservices tree felt like and what happened there.
+
+**Alexandra Noonan:** When I joined the team, I actually joined at the peak of when it was getting to be a little bit unbearable, and one of the first issues that we were running into was all these separate codebases were becoming extremely difficult to maintain. So we'd written some shared libraries to help us with some basic HTTP request formatting, error message parsing that all of them used, but at some point in time we made a major version update to that library and we didn't have a good way to test and deploy these hundreds of services, so we just -- one service or one repo we updated to its newest version, and now everybody else is behind... And that kept happening over time with our other shared libraries as well, so now me going into a codebase, I had to be like "Okay, which version of the shared library is it on? What does this version do versus some of the newer versions, and having to keep track of that was incredibly time-consuming and very confusing." And it also caused -- we wouldn't make big updates that we often needed in these shared libraries because we were like "There's no way we're gonna test and deploy all these microservices." That would take the entire team and usually up to a week to just do that. So that was one of the big issues with it.
+
+Another was we were actually seeing some serious performance issues, so now even though all the destinations were broken up into their own queue, so if one went down, it didn't affect the others, the issue was they all had radically different load patterns... So one of these destinations would be processing hundreds of thousands of events per second, while others would only process a handful per day. We always tried to reduce customization across these services, to make them easier to maintain. So we applied blanket autoscaling rules to all of them, but that didn't help with some of the smaller guys, because nothing can really handle -- there's no set of autoscaling rules that can handle a sharp increase in load.
+
+So for the little guys that were handling a handful over a day, and then all of a sudden a customer turns them on and now they're handling hundreds of events per second, they can't scale up, so we're constantly getting paged to manually go in and scale up these little guys... And the blanket autoscaling rules also didn't work because they each had a pretty distinct load pattern in terms of CPU and memory; some were much more CPU-intensive, others were more memory-intensive, and so that also didn't help, which again, caused us to have to go in and manually be scaling these services up. So we were constantly getting paged, because queues were backing up... Tough to scale these guys up, which was pretty frustrating, and I guess that we were literally losing sleep over it. It was very frustrating.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[25:14\] It sounds like it. So you mentioned that you had three full-time engineers pretty much spending their time keeping the system alive. Is that what you're referring to, like having to go in and scale things up and down when certain services wouldn't keep up with the load?
+
+**Alexandra Noonan:** Exactly, exactly. So it was difficult for us to add any new destinations, because we were spending so much time maintaining the old ones, and then we had a backlog of bugs building up on the old ones, and we just couldn't make any headway at all, because the performance issues and the maintenance burden was so painful, with all these repos and services and queues. It was getting to be too much.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Calvin, tell us about this from your perspective, from the CTO side, when this is going on and you have a lot of bugs happening, and you have a lot of manual intervention by your engineers, probably not what you want them spending their time doing... Was this something that kind of like came on all at once? Was it kind of a slow trickle that eventually broke the dam? What did it look like from your angle?
+
+**Calvin French-Owen:** From my perspective, honestly, I was working on a lot of these same systems along with Alex here, so it's definitely not something that snuck up on us or felt like it was just a sudden deluge of paging, and alerts, and problems that happen, that sort of grew in intensity over time fairly slowly.
+
+I think at a certain point we started having a few large customers who would consistently be batching data in ways that were actually disrupting the quality of service for other customers.
+
+You might imagine customer A is sending thousands of requests per second, customer B is sending tens, and maybe customer C is sending one request per second. If we're being rate-limited by a destination that we're sending data to, and we're just reading off of a queue, if we let those thousand messages in first and just sort of due like a first in, first out kind of approach - then we're effectively limiting the amount of data we can deliver for customers B and C, even though they didn't do anything wrong.
+
+So we actually took a step back and said "Hey, maybe we should rethink both all of these individual services, which are scaling poorly, and we should rethink our entire queuing architecture for this problem of a high failure scenario, where approximately 10% of messages that are going out will fail for one reason or another, whether that's an API outage, a rate limit issue, or maybe just an ephemeral network connection.
+
+At that point, we introduced this new set of architecture that we called Centrifuge, which was this kind of revolving set of databases and services whose sole purpose was to absorb this traffic load in the case of failures happening.
+
+We said, okay, this project that we wanna kick off to make sure that our customers are being treated fairly would actually be much easier if we had a single service that we're working with, so why don't we kind of do both projects in sort of lockstep, where we transition these integrations to a single service, which should help a bunch of these different problems that Alex just talked through, as well as help the end customer make sure that their data is getting where it needs to go quickly and reliably.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[28:50\] How were you managing time in this? I'm thinking startup, customers, you need to move efficiently, and Alex, you mentioned that this post took you six months to write... This is probably -- you've been on board for a year, and a lot of this takes a lot of time; how do you manage, maybe from a CTO level and maybe from your perspective, Alex, as an engineer, how do you dictate architecture and initiate the team to move forward and still please people and get things right?
+
+**Calvin French-Owen:** Yeah, maybe I can start off first from sort of the more global perspective, and then transition to Alex for her perspective as well. When we think about Segment's core value proposition, maybe two or three things that we do with customers' data first is that we help them collect and organize that data... So we wanna make sure that our ingestion endpoint is always up, that we're never dropping data, that we're giving them libraries with a good experience to send that data into our system.
+
+Then the second core tenant is that we are taking that data and making sure it gets to whatever tools it needs to be delivered to in a fast and timely manner. Fast would be something like under 10 seconds.
+
+And when we were looking at the current system, we'd kind of juiced it in one way or another, and made all these tweaks to it, and it was still just not working, and when we would see these long delays, we were effectively violating that second value proposition of Segment - if we're not getting your data where it needs to go, and it's taking 20-30 minutes to get there, we're not doing our core job for all of our customers.
+
+So for us it actually felt fairly well-aligned to kick off this set of projects to deliver really what our customers wanted more than new features, what they wanted more than any sort of other new products we could launch. They just wanted our core product to work amazingly well.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Alex, what about your perspective on the engineering side? How do you be on a team where you have to implement this, but you're making choices, you're scaling your libraries out, you've got different versions of them, you're scaling your repos and it seems like things are okay at first, and then things start to fall down; Jerod mentioned hitting the branches... Maybe you can go a little further into what it looks like and how that feels.
+
+**Alexandra Noonan:** It's actually a little bit interesting... So when I joined the team - like I said, we were at kind of the peak of "Something has to change", and I was brand new to engineering then, so I kind of thought at that time that this was just how it was, and I didn't totally see anything wrong with it until after we moved to the monolith and I helped the team transition to everything, and then looking back on it I kind of realized how crazy and how much time we were spending scaling this and just maintaining them, and how we couldn't make any headway... But in the moment, I didn't see anything wrong with it, just because I was so brand new to engineering and I had no experience before. I was like "Oh, this is kind of annoying, but this seems pretty normal."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's an interesting analysis coming from a perspective -- you mentioned that you had previously taught yourself, are a self-taught developer... Is that what you said in the opening?
+
+**Alexandra Noonan:** Yes.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Tell us how that feels. So one thing that's happened, kind of the metagame on this blog post, which has made such a splash, is you've gotten a lot of attention... Like I said, InfoQ, us, you were on the Changelog, you were gonna be speaking at conferences about this... As a self-taught developer - I know that it's probably an obvious kind of yes answer, so maybe this is a dumb question... But there's so much intimidation out there; I'm also self-taught... I've been doing it for a very long time now, so I feel like I've gotten past a lot of that stuff... Self-taught in software development. I did go to school for general computery stuff, but... You mentioned you were in school for math, so related fields, but definitely a bigger transition than I made... How does it feel to put yourself out there and make this post, which is somewhat counter-culture right now, counter-trend? By the way, you mentioned six months - very well thought out, very well reasoned, and not flamebaity or clickbaity at all in its content, so congratulations on that...
+
+**Alexandra Noonan:** Thank you, thank you.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[33:07\] But just tell us, I guess in the meta game sense, your feels with regards to the public awareness of who you are, and what you're doing, and all that, being self-taught.
+
+**Alexandra Noonan:** When Rick first came to me with the idea for the post, we had no idea it was gonna be this crazy. We knew we were gonna stir the pot a little bit, but we had no idea the impact it was actually gonna have. I'd always wanted to write a post, so I thought this would be a cool one... I was just gonna write about my experience, kind of as an engineer at Segment. Then it got a crazy amount of attention, and I probably had I think the worst impostor syndrome I've ever had on engineering... But it's been pretty cool.
+
+When I first started engineering too, I wasn't super-involved in kind of Hacker News or the community, so I really didn't have an understanding of the impact it was gonna have, though Rick tried to warn me... But now, actually with this post, it's kind of helped me get into the community a little bit more... So I've been doing more reading on Hacker News, and listening to podcasts, and it's been pretty cool.
+
+I think I understand now why it was such a big deal to people... Because for me it was just like "Oh, I'm just writing about my experience, what happened at Segment and why we did certain things", but it's been really fun. Definitely a little scary, lots of impostor syndrome, but it's been really cool to see it make such an impact in the tech world.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. Well, as we say, the best thing to do with impostor syndrome is just to punch it in the face. You've just gotta face it. Otherwise... \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I love that one.
+
+**Alexandra Noonan:** I like that, I'll remember that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** There you go. So I'm curious, besides us, what's been the overarching response from the community? Has it been a lot of pushback, has there been negativity, people saying "Y'all at Segment are crazy, you don't know what you're doing"? Or has it been "Wow, this is really interesting. Maybe we'll consider it"? Because there's just a lot of tension around the whole monolith versus microservices debate...
+
+**Alexandra Noonan:** Totally.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** ...and microservices have been around long enough now that we're starting to see people who have run them for a couple of years or a year... So you can't really tell if a thing is scalable long-term, net good, or if it's just like a series of tradeoffs, until you have some real-world experiences; maybe we're starting to see that... But I'm curious what has the overall response been? Positive? Negative? Meh?
+
+**Alexandra Noonan:** I actually didn't read a single Hacker News comment, because...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Good for you!
+
+**Alexandra Noonan:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's how you do it.
+
+**Alexandra Noonan:** Exactly. \[laughs\] Well, I also thought when I released it there was only gonna be 50, and then I checked later in the day and there was over 700, so I was like "Okay..."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, wow...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's awesome!
+
+**Jerod Santo:** 700 comments...
+
+**Alexandra Noonan:** Yeah, it was crazy. But the general feedback I feel, after talking to other media, and kind of some of my friends that are in the industry that saw the post, has actually been relatively positive, and people were just super-curious as to like why we did that, why we made this change... Because again, as you mentioned, the microservice boom happened a few years ago, so some people are starting to kind of realize that this may have not been the right setup for them...
+
+So it's been, I would say, pretty positive, and more people are just really curious about why we did it, and wanna know more... It's been really cool to see people wanting to be more educated and understand the details about why we did it... But I don't know what happened on Hacker News. I heard it was relatively good, but I didn't read a single one... \[laughs\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's a good tactic for Hacker News. Have a friend read it for you and then just kind of summarize... "Meh, pretty good..."
+
+**Alexandra Noonan:** \[36:54\] Exactly. That's basically what I did. Some people sent me screenshots of really nice comments. I heard there was some negative feedback, but I've heard that's also pretty typical with Hacker News, so I wasn't too worried about it... And that didn't seem like the overall feedback.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So The Changelog's experience - our show's experience - with Hacker News over the years, until recently, has been whenever somebody posts us and we happen to make on the homepage one of our episodes, undoubtedly, without a miss, somebody would say "This is lame... Where is the transcript? I just wanna read it." Like, every single time. Isn't that right, Adam? \[laughter\] Somebody would say that, and I'm just like "Can you give us a break? We're just doing a podcast." Now we have transcripts, so they can't say that anymore...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, they don't say that anymore.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You know, we do it for accessibility, but we also kind of do it to shut up Hacker News people, so... \[laughter\] It makes the transcripts worth it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Here's what I'm kind of curious of, especially Jerod you mentioned earlier our conversation, which was yesterday, and these episodes will come out in different timeframes... So the Istio episode should already be out; if you're listening to this, that episode should be out, because this one's coming after that... But in light of that, I mean, clearly there's something happening in the service mesh and microservices area; this is definitely subjective, and then in terms of like your engineering and your culture... So it works in places, and I'm curious because in the pre-call, Alex, you mentioned - and Calvin, I don't think you were on the call yet when we were kind of having some pre-call conversation - that you're a collocated team, you have two engineering offices, and maybe it makes sense where teams are completely... Like, I can't see Jerod -- we're on the same team, but he and I have no conversation with one another; maybe that makes sense where microservices make sense, and they don't make sense here because you have collocated offices, and your teams can maybe interact more fluidly, and that kind of thing. Where do you think the breakdown really happened with this? Was it purely technical, or was it because of the way your product and teams operate?
+
+**Alexandra Noonan:** At the time we actually didn't have the Vancouver office...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, so one office then.
+
+**Alexandra Noonan:** Exactly. All the engineers were in San Francisco, and I think it was -- I mean, a mix of both... Not a great answer, but part of it was the burden on the team, and our productivity was down, and another part of it was these performance issues that we wanted to get rid of for customers... So a combination. Calvin, you can probably add a bit more color, since you kind of were here for more of the microservice setup than I was.
+
+**Calvin French-Owen:** I'd say for us that it's definitely a combination... And I should also be clear - by no means are we abandoning microservices across Segment. There are actually a lot of good reasons to use them across many pieces of our infrastructure. Within this one particular case we found we had better luck moving over to a single service. So I'd say we're continuing to make the same tradeoff instead of balances.
+
+When you talk about service mesh, I think that is definitely something that we are following fairly closely and are super-interested in... And actually Alex has started a project working to incorporate Envoy as part of this new future of service mesh within Segment, which we're monitoring going forward with.
+
+I think in our case it's probably a bit of a combination of both... We had this team of engineers who were trying to wrangle 100+ codebases across 100+ services, and when all of them do a similar thing, that's really just hard to manage and you have to build a lot of tooling around it... And we figured, well, we'd rather take the relatively slow rate of changes being made to a single place, versus having to manage this many codebases and this many services.
+
+\[40:43\] I think the one other thing that changed here as well - originally, we had anticipated that third-parties would be adding a lot of their own code into these integrations, so you might imagine we support Amplitude, and Mixpanel as places that we send data... We were kind of expecting that we would have engineers from those teams actually making pull requests, contributing whenever they pushed updates to their APIs, and in practice that really didn't turn out to be true. It ended up being a team here who was working on it... So we said "Well, we thought we'd get these supposed benefits. We're not seeing those, let's move over."
+
+**Break:** \[41:31\] to \[42:39\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Calvin, you had mentioned Centrifuge as a core piece of engineering infrastructure that you did as part of this transition. Can both of you help us understand, from the point that you decided and very well noted that this is not all of Segment that has moved, this is a specific section of Segment, Alex's team has moved from microservice back to a single service... Take a step-by-step through that; once the decision was made, "Okay, we're going to do this..." I know Centrifuge is involved somehow, but please help us all understand very clearly, step by step, what took to get to where you are today, and to where you could write your post saying goodbye to microservices.
+
+**Calvin French-Owen:** Back in April of 2017 we kept hitting these delays with various parts of the pipeline, where customers would see their data being delayed for 20-30 minutes, while either our current queuing setup would block up with a single customer's data, or particular destinations wouldn't scale appropriately, as Alex was just talking about.
+
+At that point, we said, okay, we need a bigger overhaul to the way that we actually deliver data outbound, which should rethink a bunch of the primitives that we built these individual queues per destination over the past two years, and should hopefully help us scale for the upcoming 3-5 years, as we 10x or 100x our volume.
+
+And once we kind of acknowledged this was a problem, Rick Branson, who Alex has talked about a bunch, spearheaded the effort to actually architect the system that he called Centrifuge. Centrifuge effectively replaces the single queues that we have - one queue for Google Analytics, with one queue for Mixpanel, with one queue for Intercom, with what you can think of as almost being virtualized queues, or individual sets of queues on a per customer, per destination basis.
+
+So we might have one queue for Google Analytics, which has all of Instacart's data, but another one with all of New Relic's data, and maybe another one with Fender's data. This system - honestly, we hadn't seen any really good prior art for.
+
+\[45:04\] I think network flows are about the closest that you'd get to it, but those give you back pressure in terms of being able to say "Hey, there's too much data here. Stop sending from the very TCP source that you have", which is something that we can't exactly enforce on our customers.
+
+So with this design in hand for Centrifuge, we started out on what actually turned into about a nine-month journey where we decided to roll Centrifuge out into production, and Centrifuge was responsible for all of the message delivery, the retries, and archiving of any data which wasn't delivered, and then separately, Centrifuge would make requests into this new integration's monoservice, which you could think of as being this intelligent proxy which would take this raw data in, and depending on where it's going, make multiple requests to a third-party endpoint.
+
+And for the rollout process there, like I said, we spent maybe a month or so designing it, then we began to actually consolidate the repo and move it in to be a single monoservice. We started building out the bones of Centrifuge for another three or four months or so, and we started cutting over our first traffic after about a five-month period.
+
+Now, when we started cutting over traffic, we had this interesting problem, where if we're sending traffic via two pipelines, and we have to test it end-to-end in whatever destination tool, if we both just mirror traffic and let them both go, we'll end up with double counts in Google Analytics or double counts in Mixpanel. So we actually added a kind of serialization point in the middle, that both set of microservices would talk to, as well as the monolith, and effectively we'd do kind of a first-write wins type of scenario, where it creates some locks in Redis, and then only one of the messages would succeed through either pipeline.
+
+We basically slowly ramped traffic in that manner, always checking the end-to-end metrics on it, always making sure that no matter which pipeline we were using, the delivery rates looked perfectly good. I'm sure actually Alex can talk to more of that rollout period, because it was definitely a little bit rocky in terms of how we rolled out the system... But about 2-3 months after that, we had fully tested all the scaling, cut over 100%, and we were feeling much better about the system's stability. Looking at it today, it's actually a very rock-solid and well-utilized piece of infrastructure.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Alex, anything to add there?
+
+**Alexandra Noonan:** As he mentioned, the process to get to 100% was I think a little bit longer than we anticipated. I remember we'd be in planning meetings at the beginning of the week, and Calvin would be like "Okay, what do we need to cut traffic over 100% in two weeks?" and we'd always be like "Oh, we just need to fix this one performance issue and then we're good to starting cutting over..." Then we'd try and cut some over, and quickly realized that there was a lot more performance stuff we needed to tackle... But now that it's all done, as Calvin mentioned, it's a rock-solid system and it's really cool and complex, so it was definitely worth a little bit of that migration pain, but now the system is very stable and can scale much better... And we've been able to build cool products on top of it, which we couldn't have done before with our microservices architecture, which has also been really exciting to see.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What do you mean by that?
+
+**Alexandra Noonan:** So everyone's biggest pain point in this segment - or one of the biggest - is that they don't get a lot of visibility into what happens when they send data to Segment, and then when we send it on to a destination. So a product that I built with one of my other teammates at the time was we built something on top of Centrifuge to basically collect the responses and counts of metrics, whether an event they said was successful to Google, or got rejected, and why, and then display that in the UI to users...
+
+\[49:27\] But with the microservice queue set up, there wouldn't have been a good way for us to pass that information back and somehow store it, so that we could show that info to users. But with Centrifuge, since Centrifuge kind of is keeping track of all of this, it knows everything already, and we just kind of have to flush that data out to a queue, and then store it from there, and now we have it in the UI, and I think we've had a radically positive feedback on that feature.
+
+Now customers can see, "Okay, I sent an event to Segment, I see it in Segment, and now I see Segment sent it to Google Analytics and it was either successful or it failed for whatever reason", which they'd never had that insight before. They can only see that the event made it to Segment, and then they'd have to go check Google, and when their event is not there, they have no idea what happened. So that was a cool product that Centrifuge allowed us to build
+
+**Calvin French-Owen:** This is one of my favorite products that we've launched all year and maybe ever... It just provides essentially a status page for these hundreds of different downstream tools in a way that many of them do not do natively... Where you can see exactly what is happening with your data, and whether it's being rejected or accepted by each API, and how long it takes to get there. It's just an unparalleled level of insight.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** There was a great post on your blog, written by you, Calvin, about all about Centrifuge for people who are interested - "Centrifuge, a reliable system for delivering billions of events per day." Is this laying out the infrastructure and architecture? Is this an announcement of some sort of open source project? What's the status of Centrifuge? Is it public use, is it private to Segment?
+
+**Calvin French-Owen:** Currently it is private to Segment, though this post goes into a lot of depth about the architecture, the choices that we've made, and how it's been to operate it in production. At some point, I would actually have loved to open source Centrifuge, or at least the bones of it itself, because it seems really useful for anyone who's running a large online web service, particularly if they need to make webhooks out from some data that's inside that service, or they need to send a bunch of data out to many different endpoints, which might be flaky, might fail at any given time.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That would be very cool, to see that open sourced. So this sounds like the project that took nine months, but it sounds like you thought it was 90% done maybe a few months in, and then it just stayed at 90%, as engineering problems tend to do. What do you say, Alex -- that weekly meeting, when you're like "Yeah, it's pretty much finished. A couple more weeks..."
+
+**Alexandra Noonan:** I'd say so. I transitioned onto that Centrifuge team as they already kind of had an initial prototype; I was still helping maintain some of our microservices... But when I joined, every week I felt like "We're this close, we're a month away", and it dragged on for a few months, but... As you've mentioned, that's pretty natural for every big migration and engineering undertaking.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So what does this imply or inform with other parts of Segment, Calvin? Is this switch back to a single service something that's very specific to this part of Segment? Is this something you're not considering for other parts of your product or engineering teams that are still working in the microservices world, or is this a one-off that fit this use case, but probably not your other ones?
+
+**Calvin French-Owen:** There are a few other places where we're considering consolidating services, and I think there's a couple of reasons for that. One is within the pipeline there's sort of this natural entropy over time, where systems will split up and break apart as people add and tack on new features to them.
+
+\[53:00\] In terms of the pipeline itself, I think we wanna make sure that we're making sure that's easy to reason about, it's easy to find what you're looking for, and you can kind of go to a couple of key places that need to be independent services, and understand everything that it's doing.
+
+I think the second piece that we're interested in consolidating around is actually cost. Obviously, every time you copy data over the network, or republished a Kafka, or have a system which is deserializing JSON and then reserializing back up, it's much more expensive... So in order to keep costs low for all of our customers, we're interested in consolidating some there as well.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm kind of curious if you can inform other CTOs that listen to this show, or engineering teams, or engineering managers on maybe the process... Because you mentioned Centrifuge is not a public service yet, or is not open source, or whatever your plans are with it, and Alex, you mentioned it took you six months to write this post. I'm curious from a content perspective, your motivations for these two posts in particular... Was it customer acquisition? Was it just telling the world how you do things? Was it idea sharing? Was it to attract the right kind of talent? What are the motivations for being so thorough and so well-done with your engineering blog?
+
+**Calvin French-Owen:** I'd say that the blog is actually a deeply cultural part of Segment, that kind of goes back to our founding days. Initially, the four of us - we're just all engineers, we had no users, and we said "Oh, how do we get developers to try out our tool? How do we get people interested in this? How do we actually just start getting our name out there?" and I think the blog was the first thing that we turned to as something where -- we figured out how to write interesting content, that was effectively stuff that we were already doing, that we just wanted to share with the world.
+
+Actually, if you go back through even to some of the very early blog posts, they're constantly documenting either things that we learned, or new ideas that we've had, or kind of sets of best practices that we've learned from what we've built... And as that's grown over time, we've really seen it be impactful on a number of dimensions. One of those is around customers and brand; obviously, Segment is kind of a developer tool. I think in order to have engineers and developers trust you, I know at least I'm reading other companies' blogs all the time, following folks on Twitter to understand what's coming next in terms of tech, and sharing what we're doing internally already out there I think helps build a lot of that trust, particularly when it comes to onboarding and setting up Segment for the first time... Something you're a little bit already familiar with.
+
+Then there's definite benefits, as you've mentioned, on hiring, as well. A number of teammates who end up joining the team all say "Hey, I first saw you through the blog. That was the place where I first found out about Segment, and then I was able to dig in more and understand what was really going on at the company, and it gave me more of a window than I would have had really any other way." So I think there's that too, in addition to just being an amazing way to share when we learn things, either about new parts of architecture, or about switching between monoliths and microservices, as Alex has talked about as well.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What about you, Alex, from a first-time blogger on the Segment blog, a home run out the box...? What's your experience, with other team members even? What's your experience with getting a chance to share some deep interests, and obviously, quite a bit of passion? Six months to write it, and you're on the team, you're obviously doing great work, you're passionate about what you're doing... What is it for you to share this through the blog?
+
+**Alexandra Noonan:** \[57:15\] It was a really cool experience. I know a lot of people at Segment were kind of curious why we'd moved to Centrifuge and invested so much time in this.... So I had some engineers that had joined post-Centrifuge ask me about it, and they were super-excited for the post to read about it, so that was really cool.
+
+And I've always wanted to get more into writing and writing blog posts, and this was the first post I've ever written about anything, so it was really cool to get to just share my experience and have it kind of take off, and knowing that a lot of people have read the post, and I think a lot of people have actually found value in it, which has been the coolest part, that we've had so many people reach out, interested and curious to learn more... It has been really exciting and eye-opening... And to just inspire. I know a lot of women came up to me after and were really inspired by the fact that I had such a post that went so crazy on the internet, because you don't see a lot of posts from women in engineering, because there aren't many... But that part also made me really happy.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's interesting. So one part to inform your counterparts inside of Segment, because you've got 65 engineers; some of them may be in the know, some of them may not, so this was a way to inform internally... One way to also inspire, and then another way to potentially hire.
+
+We often interface a lot with different engineering teams through just what we do, and I'm always curious why some of them don't put enough intention into their engineering blog. Since you do such a great job, I wanted to make sure I ask that question before we close out, because you do a phenomenal job at it - one with the writing, and two, just with the design of it. It's easy to read, it's easy to browse, and if you're listening to this, you get my stamp of approval to say "This is a blog you should look at to mirror or to mimic when you're trying to do if for your organization."
+
+**Alexandra Noonan:** Thank you!
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Did you do that rhyme on purpose, "to inform, inspire and to hire"? Did you plan that out, Adam?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I did, sorry. Yeah...
+
+**Calvin French-Owen:** \[laughs\] It's a nice touch.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's a nice turn of phrase.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And with that, that's the show. My rhymes end the show, I love that... So there you go. \[laughter\]
+
+**Alexandra Noonan:** Amusing... \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** But any closing thoughts from either of you? Any closing advice for those looking to your post saying "This is the bible of information", whether we should go there and back again and then there again. Any closing advice for those listening to this show, anything to share as we close out?
+
+**Alexandra Noonan:** I think my one piece would be that it's really all about finding the right fit for your infrastructure and your team. A lot of people have reached out and been kind of nervous that they're gonna make mistakes with their microservice setup, and were curious to get my opinion on what I thought... And I think it's all about what is the best for your team at the time. We're a perfect example of that - as Calvin mentioned, we started a monolith, because if we'd started with microservices, there would have been no way for us to get off the ground... And then we moved to microservices, and that was the perfect solution for the time, but then after a couple years it turned out not to be anymore... So I would say don't be afraid to make changes. It's about finding the right solution for your team and your infrastructure.
+
+**Calvin French-Owen:** \[01:00:36.04\] I echo that 100%. Definitely just don't outsource your thinking. It's just important to talk about tradeoffs on both sides really (I'd say) for any engineering decision you make... Because if you don't explicitly acknowledge them, chances are there's some con or something that you're giving up that you might notice later.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, Alex and Calvin, thank you so much for taking the time to walk us through some of the pros, cons, ins and outs of your journey. We appreciate your time.
+
+**Calvin French-Owen:** Yeah, thank you.
+
+**Alexandra Noonan:** Of course, thank you.
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+**Adam Stacoviak:** Alright, welcome to "State of the 'log." We were actually debating whether that's a cool name or not, and we kind of went through it being "The Changelog" or "Changelog", and...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Now we're just "the 'log."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** "The 'log", yeah. State of the 'log. We'll hopefully do this once a year at the end of the year for a good end cap to a year... Essentially, looking back on where we've been. Jerod, you know I'm a huge fan of retrospectives, right? I love retrospectives.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's right... But isn't the agile Scrum retro stand-up -- isn't that a weekly thing? Shouldn't we be doing this once a week?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think there's probably a place for annual retrospectives as well, although it's not an agile thing, because obviously agile is usually a weekly or bi-weekly basis, depending upon your team, but...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Kind of a sprint.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think if you think of it in an agile way, maybe not THE agile way, Agile Manifesto and all, we can embrace the yearly look-backs. I would actually put it back to the audience, honestly... If the audience says "Hey, that would actually be pretty cool - could you do this once a quarter, or something like that?", I'd consider doing a more frequent State of the 'log.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** On the other hand, if they say "This is dumb. Why do you guys do this?", then we could just never do it again.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I think our audience knows that we're definitely not navel-gazers. We often don't even get to share much about who we are and what we do... It's definitely about featuring projects, people, perspectives, points of interests, thoughts, larger topics, and certainly a lot less about you and I as individuals and what we contribute... But I think this is kind of a chance to look back at what we've done, particularly from -- a first point of view is this show, the Changelog, and then zooming out a little further to the macro level of Changelog at large, what's happening there, whether it's the news feed, or who's joining the team, or new shows being spun down or spun up, and different stuff like that... So let's kick off the Changelog happenings, so to speak. We will ship in this calendar year, 2018, 47 episodes.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We should stop there and maybe pat ourselves on the back, because--
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, do it!
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay... It's a silent back-pat.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Silent back-pat, I like that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** One thing that you always said and that I've ascribed to when it comes to putting out good stuff for people over time, is that you have to take care of the three C's. The funny thing about that is the first one starts with Q, I don't know why... But a quality content - so Content is the first C, but you throw Quality in front of that. So Content, Consistency and Community.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[04:04\] And of those three, I think Consistency historically has been our problem. We've not always been all that consistent with shipping shows. We've had long breaks, we almost podfaded at one point... And we've had streaks where we shipped three shows in a day and then not ship for a couple of weeks.
+
+I think probably the best thing that happened to us at the Changelog in 2018 - 47 episodes... You know, we shoot for 50, roughly, plus or minus?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, 50 is what we're shooting for. Two weeks off a year is our basic boilerplate.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. So we hit 47... That feels pretty good. We're not quite perfect, but something to work towards and something to celebrate, so... Lots of episodes put out this year.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. I definitely agree on the consistency side of things. I just had a conversation with a fellow podcaster, and they were asking "What are some of the things that you do that help bring success?" and I was just like "I just think we stick to the three C's" and I explain what you've just explained, which is quality content - and that is very subjective; whatever YOU think quality content is is very different from what WE think quality content might be... So that can be a never-ending layered onion for you.
+
+Then obviously consistency... You mentioned we've had some ups and downs on that - that's probably the case for most content creators, the ebb and flow of frequency. And then the last one, by far my favorite, is community. I think when you look at some of the things we pay attention to on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis, or even yearly basis in the case of "State of the 'log", for example, we're always focused on something that amplifies and resonates with a community... And that's really the key. If you can do quality content on a consistent basis, to a community who actually cares, that's a recipe in my opinion for not failing.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Absolutely.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think 47 episodes later - yeah, I'm pretty stoked about that. Three shy of our actual goal... I'm curious, what do you think made us miss that goal? Was it maybe our more frequent traveling? I think we've actually traveled a little less this year than we did last year, 2017. You had a \[06:19\] in 2017.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I would have to look back and see which actual weeks we missed, and then correlate what happened, but... We're talking about the Changelog; that's 47 episodes of the Changelog. We've shipped a lot more episodes than that throughout our entire catalog, so it's not that we haven't always been shipping, it's just that for some reason the Changelog itself -- sometimes guests cancel, sometimes we've got things that come up, other times we take a trip... We went to OSCON and we got a bunch of content there, but while we're there, we may not ship a show that week, for instance. So things come up...
+
+Let's talk about the episodes themselves, because we've had a lot of great episodes. Looking back over the last 47, there's a lot of good stuff in there, and I pulled out a few that were fan favorites, just based purely on downloads for the year... I thought we would highlight them, for folks who maybe missed them, or for you and I to even discuss what we thought about those shows.
+
+The first one that I highlight is Winamp2 JS, which is right up there on my personal favorites episodes, because it was just nerdy and geeky to the core, and it's not the kind of project that's gonna, you know, disrupt the industry and become a commercial OSS project... But if was just a super-rad thing, and I love that we got to just nerd out about it for almost two hours.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, he went deep on that, too. I mean, got a job from it, got a job interview at Facebook on the React team, if I recall correctly... Was it \[unintelligible 00:07:40.07\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's interesting.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Some interesting sub-facts about Jordan Eldredge, the creator of that projects... He went to the N-th degree around the creation, and kind of tie back to the original Winamp... He was very specific with how he did it, and I think it was one of those labor of love projects that just had a lot of good fruits to come from it. One, an appearance on the show here, and then, you know, Facebook, getting hired there, working on Nuclide.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[08:16\] Yeah, and I think one of the reasons why maybe that show was so popular in terms of downloads is because Jordan was very fun and forward to work with us and try interesting things... Back in the spring and early summer I was Twitch-streaming stuff, and just experimenting, and he would hop on there and we were hacking on Winamp2, trying to get a Winamp version of our on-site player at Changelog.com to work... And then he actually took the episode and he put it in the playlist of the Winamp2 JS homepage.
+
+There's a specific URL that if you go directly to it I think it's just like his homepage .changelog... Or /changelog, excuse me; it's not a file extension, it's a sub-directory. Something like that, and it would automatically play his episode of the Changelog in Winamp2 JS, in the browser. That was super rad, and I think that probably got him some extra downloads on his episode.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, fun fact about this - I'm not sure if you've been there in a while, but it's now officially Webamp, not Winamp2 JS.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, he renamed it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, it's webamp.org. If you're listening, webamp.org, or check the show notes, of course... I was just on his project's page and noticed that he's actually officially moved on from Winamp2 JS to Webamp, which is a reimplementation of Webamp 2.9 in HTML5 and JavaScript.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, very cool stuff.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You mentioned Twitch streaming though...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yes!
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And what I love about this next one we've got listed here, which is "Live coding open source on Twitch, with Suz Hinton." My favorite, Jerod -- I don't know about you, but I love it when shows turn into friendships...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yes, and Suz turned into a panelist on JS Party.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So we didn't just keep in touch with Suz, we invited her on one of our other shows, and she's been a great contributor and a great panelist, and she would even MC JS Party, so I got to have lots of chats with her throughout the year... But yeah, it all kicked off with that -- you know, Suz is a prolific and an epic Twitch streamer every Sunday morning, and she went through an interesting situation recently where she moved from the East Coast to the West Coast in America, United States, and her time zones changed, but she had this very specific time -- talk about consistency, right? Well, on Twitch consistency is everything, because people wanna watch live, they wanna participate live, so they want you to start your Twitch stream pretty much the same time, or a reliable schedule all the time, so that they can organize their lives around it.
+
+Well, she moved from one side of the country to the other, and she talks about this in a JS Party episode recently... And that's like three hours earlier, right? So it was noon previously, or 11 AM her time she was Twitch-streaming, and now it's like 8 AM... So it's changed the milieu of that stream, so I think she's had to move times around, but... Time zones, right? Anyways...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Dedication!
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yes, dedication. She's still doing it, and we brought her on -- this was episode \#288 back in March, where she told us all about how she live-codes on Twitch... And she even inspired me to do a little bit of live-stream myself, for about maybe 6-8 weeks... And then I Twitch-faded.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Give a quick aside, maybe two minutes on why you think the fade happened for you.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, I don't have any premonitions; I know exactly why it faded - it's because Monday afternoons need to be productive... \[laughs\] And it was fun, and it was experimental, but I was such a bad programmer when I'm streaming, that I wouldn't be producing. It took me like four streams to put out a feature that I'm sure I could have put together in an afternoon or two, non-streaming.
+
+So add that, plus the fact that I'm time-constrained, as you well know; I'm not a full-time changelogger. We hope to change that soon, at which point maybe I will be streaming on Twitch again, but... Just time-constraints and productivity, basically. It was fun, people were involved, it had some traction... It just wasn't really -- in terms of ROI for a business it just wasn't there.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[12:21\] It's interesting, because I think in that show -- we actually left that show with Suz very bullish on the idea, and I think there's a lot of people who look at someone like Suz, for example her dedication and commitment to it, "Oh, I can do that." You probably can, but then you get into it and you realize "Wow, this actually is really hard" six months in, or x weeks in, or whatever it is, and that's just credit to someone like Suz, who's just got such -- I mean, she travels tons, she does a great work at Microsoft, she's always involved in JS Party now...
+
+I mentioned one of my favorite things is when a show turns into a friendship, and she's been a great friend to us in many different ways, and a great contributor to a lot of the content we're producing here... I just love it when the community comes full circle. Suz is out there in the world, doing her awesome stuff, we cross paths on a podcast, and now we're friends forever, and we found ways to work together, too. To me, that's what I think makes this game worth playing for.
+
+Sure, we mentioned earlier the three C's, but that's just the boilerplate, it's not gospel. It's one way to do things, but it's not the reason for it. The reason for it is really relationships.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Absolutely. Moving down the list of popular episodes from 2018, episode \#295, "Scaling all the things at Slack, with Julia Grace." Adam, this was a show that you put together. You invited Julia on, you got it all lined up... I just kind of showed up and chit-chatted, so why don't you unpack that one? First of all, why do you think it was so popular, and then secondly, how did it all come together?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think the reason why it was so popular was because 1) it was just a great topic. Slack is super-popular, most everyone in our industry knows it, uses it, hates it, loves it, they've got some clear defining opinion about Slack and some personal involvement with it in some way, shape or form... And I think that we've said on that show that Slack has been doing nothing but scaling since day one. They never really had a time to slow down and not scale, they've always been scaling... And I think that's probably the case for most startups - you just start out at 100 and you never really stop. You don't get to ramp from 0 to 60, and 60 to 80, and 80 to 100 in terms of speed or miles per hour, for example. You just, boom! Gas pedal down kind of thing.
+
+I think another thing that sticks out for me is that it was sort of a different style of show for us.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Absolutely. I was gonna say that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think we just sort of like stepped back and said "What are some other conversations we wanna have that aren't exactly open source per se or project per se, with that kind of underpinning? What's a good story that we need to tell, that really makes sense and resonates?"
+
+I think one is just the managing and being a leader within a developer organization, and in particular Julia's perspective on that and how she's helped grow that team... So that was a scaling show not just about tech scaling, but also people scaling, relationship scaling, and how you deal with the ins and outs, and things like that. So I think it had a lot of really unique, humanistic perspectives that for me I just walked away really enjoying it, and I think that's probably what the audience felt, as well.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, it's difficult when we plan out shows, because we're trying to serve a breadth of experience in terms of our audience. We know we have the super-hardcore hackers, and then we have the people who are just learning, and then we have people who are tangential to the actual code, but maybe not necessarily writing code day-to-day...
+
+\[16:06\] Some of our shows -- I mean, one that I was thinking of that I didn't expect would do as well as it has in terms of just listenership was our "Keeping up with Elm" episode that I did back in October with Richard Feldman... Super straight scope, small scope - talking about Elm. It's a catch-up show, which means you kind of have to know Elm in the first place, or at least know what it is... And we're talking about new features, and speed, and the way things are architectured... Just very nerdy, very technical, and it still over the last couple months was one of the most popular episodes. But a show like that one with Julia is just more approachable for a bigger audience, where you don't necessarily have to have the technical expertise to get something out of it... And she has, like you said, so much wisdom and experience in leadership that there were just tons of takeaways.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It was definitely one of my favorites, because we did kind of get away from just simply the technical sides of things... And you know, actually on today's frontpage of Changelog.com - this is sort of an aside here real quick, off the beaten path of our plan here, but "Is code enough?" That was a talk by Henry Zhu at All Things Open, and I think it just goes similar to that, not so much "Is code enough?", but is it only about code? And I think our obvious answer is no, it's not only about code. I mean, at the other end of every function is what? More data. Just kidding... HUMANS! Humans, right? Humans are there...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] I was gonna say, "A unit test?" \[laughs\] Oh, okay...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Exactly... See, we know our perspectives here then. You know, it's all about humans, man. It's all about relationships, and in the end, code is a medium to enable better life for people. I think that really resonates with people, especially when you give someone like Julia a chance to share her bloody knuckles stuff that happened at Slack - the growth, and the scale challenges, scaling engineering teams, the responsibilities, the different challenges of being a manager... A lot of people really lean into that, because either they're a junior wanting to be senior, eventually gonna be manager, or really enjoying management, or love product management, love product direction, and they need to have representation to feel invited or feel like they can actually accomplish that -- which, I've been there before, I've needed personal representation somewhere for me to feel like "I can actually do this!" and I think shows like that give people that feeling.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Absolutely.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** This one is -- I'm actually surprised this is on the list. Is it on the list because it was just listener-popular? This is listener-popular, right?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** This is listener-popular, yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. So I'm not exactly surprised, and I'm actually delighted... I'll take the surprised back and give delighted instead, and I would say because another fan-favorite, Julia White, in the case of being a corporate vice-president at Microsoft, 17-year veteran, no less... We met at Microsoft Build, and \[unintelligible 00:19:05.01\] we worked with closely at Microsoft to sort of get the right people onto the show, and get interviews with the right people at Microsoft Build, which is actually kind of hard... But we really pushed to speak with Julia, because we just really wanted to talk through this back-story of Microsoft Azure.
+
+Sure, most everybody just thinks "Oh, it's Microsoft's cloud" or whatever, but I think this is such an interesting story on how we even began this show, and back to the beginnings of Office... She told this whole story of how Azure actually began with -- what was that presentation? What was the insider thing they have at Microsoft...? I can't remember what it's called now. The server they have... Not IIS server, but the...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[19:53\] SharePoint?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** SharePoint, yeah. I think it was some sort of cloud-based SharePoint idea \[unintelligible 00:19:56.04\] if I'm remembering correctly... I could probably scan the transcript and find this out.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You should go read the transcript and find out.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I should do that... But there was just an interesting story there that I didn't even know went as deep as it did, but there was so much more there... And that kind of show, to me, personally - I love it a lot, and I'm really glad it's one of the fan-favorites, because I love that show... And I'm kind of surprised that -- because Microsoft hasn't had the best name, they're definitely getting a better name, a more respected name, but... When you just say "The beginnings of Microsoft Azure", it's like "Yeah... Do I really care?" I think the answer was yes.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, and that show in terms of reaching listeners was a slow burn; it didn't come out of the gates as super-popular. I think that makes sense, because "The beginnings of Microsoft Azure" is the title of the show... And you know, if I'm being honest, I wouldn't probably listen to that show if I just saw the title myself... Episode \#298, of course, in the show notes, if you wanna go back and listen... But the fact is that Julia was just a captivating and just smart as a whip guest.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Gosh, yes...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** She was so much fun, she's so charismatic... I felt like we had a good rapport with her, and she was just ready for anything that we'd throw at her.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** She was!
+
+**Jerod Santo:** She was just snapping back answers, and it makes for a very enjoyable conversation, maybe one of those most enjoyable conversations that we had all year with a guest. She's just spectacular. I think it started slow, and then because of just the guest being great and the conversation being enjoyable, over time it's continued to be downloaded.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Resurfacing stuff.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And even now, months later, it's still getting a couple hundred downloads in any given day. I think it's a testament of the fact that it's just a really good conversation.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** She actually -- I found this in the transcript... It was Terry Myerson, and she said "Finally, Terry Myerson - I give him tons of credit. He was like "We're going to the cloud. We're putting this stuff on the cloud. We're doing it!" and everyone thought he was crazy. They literally thought he was crazy!" I can hear her voice resonating as I read this... And she goes on to say "So he actually did it in secret." So the reason Microsoft Azure is what it is was because somebody on the inside, that wasn't even like -- like anybody else, a quality person doing awesome stuff, but it wasn't this big, grand plan; it was done in secret, "We need to do this..."
+
+She goes on to say "He did this thing called Exchange Labs, where he launched it as an educational program for universities, as an excuse to be able to ship things in the cloud that wasn't gonna affect businesses, so he stayed out of the line of fire from the sales teams and other things...", so he essentially figured out how to fly under the radar. She goes on to say "So we started this secretly, out of the back closet, creating this cloud service for our email system under Exchange Labs."
+
+She shares this really interesting, definitely not expected story of the beginnings of Microsoft Azure. As someone in the conversation I loved it, but as a listener I would love it ten times more, because it's just not maybe one of our normal styles of shows; you and I were in-person, face-to-face with her, we got to have, as you mentioned, that great rapport, and as you mentioned also, she was really easy to speak with, and just a naturally great speaker.
+
+I've seen her since then speak on stage. That wasn't her first time to the rodeo, let's just say... She's definitely a seasoned relationist (if that's even a word) to just have a good rapport with, and audience - she's really good at it. She's just an amazing guest, and a great story, obviously.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. One last -- this isn't a single episode. I did not put it in our outline, so if I'm wondering what I'm talking about, I just am looking at the stats here as we talk, and one other -- I guess I'll call this a trend... Two episodes that both fared pretty well, and were both on the same topic, is GraphQL. If we think about what developers are interested in, things that are burgeoning and becoming more popular, episode \#297 with Johannes Schickling, "Prisma and the GraphQL data layer" did very well with our listeners, and then of course, John Resig \[unintelligible 00:24:02.23\] this is actually a cross-post from JS Party; this was a JP Party episode that we did with -- Suz and I interviewed John Resig, all about GraphQL, because he's quite bullish on it... And that was a JS Party episode, but we put it in the Changelog feed, because it was so good. That one also was very popular... So GraphQL is hitting on all cylinders at this point in 2018.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[24:29\] I really enjoyed the 101 too, that we got recently, on just Graph databases, the laying that out to me, in that episode -- what was the episode for that, since you're on the GraphQL kick...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That was Dgraph, and Manish Jain talking about Dgraph. We were actually focused on licensing in that episode, because Dgraph went through that licensing switcheroo, and Commons Clause, and all that... But he definitely gave a good 101 on graph databases. I actually pulled that out and made a little post of it from the transcript, because it was such a good explanation, and people enjoyed reading that one... So yeah, that was a good episode, as well.
+
+Let's turn to a little controversy... From most popular to most controversial. Can anybody guess what it is? What was the episode that got us the most feedback in terms of positive/negative, agree/disagree? What do you think, Adam?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I thought you were asking the audience, and I was hoping they would chime in somehow... I was like "How are they gonna do that? I can't wait to hear."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, they can't answer... I'll ask you, but you already know, because you were there...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And by reading from our script here, this list? Or have you come up with a brand new one?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** No, you can just go ahead and read it, come on...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[laughs\] Okay...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Gotta play along, man...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I would say in that case then "Corporate interests in open source and dev culture." Zed Shaw - he can't come on anything, or make an appearance, in my opinion, without ruffling some feathers, let's just say... In good ways and bad ways.
+
+What I like about Zed is he makes us think. He makes us really think about the different perspectives... He might be a little jaded, but that's cool, whatever; I get that. He's been down the road, and he's had some things happen to him. I think he operates in this unique world of somewhat trauma, and he's -- there was something I actually watched recently on YouTube, and it assumed that everyone has good intentions... I don't think that Zed particularly does that. I could be wrong, but... There you go.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, that was definitely an interesting conversation. Episode \#300 - we did not celebrate \#300 in any sort of navel-gazing way, like we're navel-gazing right now, but we definitely had a very interesting conversation, and one that brought, like I said, the most feedback that we've received all year long... And we appreciate feedback. We like the emails, we like the tweets, we love people who open up issues in ping and let us know what you're thinking... Because when we don't have that, we're really just doing what we think is good, and doing shows that we want to do. Sometimes that works out, and sometimes that doesn't work out, so we wanna know when we're missing the mark.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'd also say that this is another one of those shows that began differently than other shows typically do. This actually was spawned from a Twitter rant that he had done, essentially around corporate involvement in open source, and I'm like "Clearly, Zed's got something to say about this."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yes.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I passed it over to you, I'm like "Hey, what do you think?" You're like, "Yes, it sounds great", sort of lining it up... And for the listeners' sake, this show sort of camped out around his thoughts on open source, and making money in open source, corporate interests and involvement in open source, dev culture, and really a ton more. I mean, it's Zed, but... You know, if this is a true retrospective, I think that what I'm seeing here is when we go off of our beaten path, so to speak, is when we've somehow arrived at listener favorite shows.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Or listener most controversial shows.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Or -- yeah, I guess in this case. How does this one fare in terms of listens, from the others?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's definitely up there. It's top 15 for the year, so... It did well, it was listened to.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[28:17\] Right. So it wasn't not a listener favorite, it just wasn't THE most favorite.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** No. Well, controversy of course brings listens, because people wanna hear what's going on, so... Lots of engagement, I guess, if we're gonna use the internet marketing speak.
+
+One thing that I've said - maybe on the air, maybe not - is that for me, my favorite episodes, or the ones that I end up being the most proud of over the years, are usually the ones where either you, or I, or both of us are nervous going into the call. Not necessarily nervous because the person is intimidating, although sometimes that is the case... I remember with Matz in particular, I was nervous...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** ...because it's like meeting a hero. But where we're like "This could go south" or "This might be a really bad idea." The show that we did a couple years back, with Pieter Hintjens, as he was terminally ill, was like a huge risk, and admittedly, we were both like "This could be a really bad idea" before the call, right? And it was an amazing conversation. I could name a few other ones... But yeah, definitely when we go outside of our comfort zone and try something new, I think it tends to bear fruit. Sometimes that fruit is sweet and tasty, and other times it might be a little sour, but...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right. You don't know it until you try though...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's right.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You've gotta be willing to take the risks, and I think that's probably some advice to others out there - if you're listening to this and you are a fellow podcaster, or thinking "Man, I think I can do that", like Suz, for example, maybe try it. Take some of that advice, take some risks, and do something different.
+
+Man, I'm glad you mentioned the Pieter show, and even Matz show, because... I remember telling Matz in direct message on Twitter, because English is not Matz's first language, it took a lot of selling; I had to reassure Matz... I was just trying to say whatever I could to help him understand that we really cared about his presence and sounding on the show, because we knew that English wasn't his first language... And I was like, "We'll talk slower, we'll repeat ourselves if we need to, we'll do a great job editing, we'll take a lot of time to make sure that you don't sound silly", or anything that he may have been concerned about with English not being his first language... And he actually has really good English for Japanese being his primary language, but it really took several months... And it turns out too that Matz was a listener. In the pre-call he was like, "Oh yeah, I'm a listener of the show." I couldn't believe that... That's always awesome.
+
+And then Pieter - I was telling somebody about this show recently; Pieter Hintjens, episode \#205, "A protocol for dying." One, a very tough show to title, and I would say ten times harder actually to be a part of... In the last two minutes -- I actually can't go back and listen to this episode. I think I would actually emotionally distraught because of it.
+
+This story and this person just mean so much to me afterwards. As you'd mentioned, the uncomfortability... I was super-uncomfortable even inviting him onto the show, because I knew the situation, but then he said he was doing some sort of meetup, and I'm like "Okay, this person is definitely okay with --", you know, they may not be happy with their circumstance, but they're okay with sharing what they can learn from the circumstance. So I was like "Hey, this might sound weird, but would you be interested in talking through some of these details with the developer world on our show?" and he was like "Totally."
+
+We did that show, and I think it was 117 minutes long, so almost two hours. Good luck with the ride if you do listen to this show, and... Maybe skip the last two minutes, because I know I almost teared up in the last two minutes, personally.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[32:21\] Well, speaking of favorites, real quick, because we've got other stuff to get to - let's real quick each of us pick a favorite episode of the year; personal favorite, not necessarily the one that did the best, or resonated the most, or was the most controversial.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So this is staff favorites...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I love that, staff favorites.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay, so you can go first.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Staff favorites.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Stack favorites.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Stack favorites... Episode \#321, "Drupal is a pretty big deal." I think I'm choosing this one because of 1) I've just seen so much on Twitter, as a surprise, to have had Angela - Angie, as she says; she says "If you're my friend, you call me Angie", but her name is Angela Byron... I just did not expect such a beautiful spirit to join us on the show. I don't know why I didn't; maybe I'm a negative person, I don't know why...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Were you feeling frumpy coming into that? Were you just expecting bad?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I don't know why I would -- I mean, I always try to think about people having the best intentions, as I said before, but she was just such a delight... She had all this history in the Drupal community; this was something we hadn't talked about... I think this is why it's one of my favorites - it's like, we hadn't covered Drupal literally ever, since 2009. That's basically a sin; we should be slapped - publically slapped - for that.
+
+And here's Angie coming on, core contributor, staple of the community in Drupal, and she just lays it down. She's such a joy to talk to, and there were so many people that were inspired by what's going on in the community... And if you're not excited about PHP or Drupal per se, you can certainly be very excited about the way they're operating their community and the way they're treating people.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** For me, there was a lot of technical love in that show, but more so community love in that show, and I loved that they're doing something so right... And I said it in our intro, I sad we were happy to celebrate with them as they march along to their framlication beat of their own drum. I thought it was pretty cool, because she said framlication, and we were both like "What? What's that?" So that's why it's my favorite.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, mine is not too far before that. It is \#318, which we did in October... Actually, kind of an answer to the Zed Shaw conversation...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** ...or maybe inspired by it. Sprung out of that, from listener feedback. That episode is called "A call for kindness in open source" with Brett Cannon. And why did I love it? It was probably just the most fun conversation that we had of the year; not to knock on Angie, that was a good one as well, but for me -- I mean, you said you love it when a show turns into a friendship. Well, I just felt like at the end of that show Brett and us were just bonded. We got each other... We talked for almost four hours. The show is not four hours, so don't be intimidated; it's a 90-minute show.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** "No, you hang up." "No, you hang up." No, YOU hang up."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's basically what it was at the end.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It was, it was all loves. It was all loves. And the funny part, if you listen to the very end of that show - there's a little Easter Egg at the end that Tim put in, which is an excerpt of our post-call conversation about Star Wars... I mean, we just went deep into nerd culture, and movies... And I had to go to the bathroom so bad, but I was just holding it, because we were having so much fun...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Four hours later and you didn't go to the bathroom?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, it wasn't the entire time...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, boy...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[35:52\] But by the end of the call -- I remember having to run to the bathroom at the end... But just a blast. Brett is such a nice guy... What a great message; again, more on the community side. Of course, he has deep roots in Python, Python core contributor for many years... He's been through it all, and he's stuck through thick and thin, a lot of the problems in open source, and a lot of the victories, and just has a really positive and solid message... And I felt like by the end of that show and by the end of that four-hour conversation that we had a friend, so that was a great episode.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm trying to get to the episode to see what the time was. So if we were on the call for four hours...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It was a 90-minute duration.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. So of the four hours, 90 minutes was tape... Which I think leans into the idea of the fact that we have breaks during the show; we take typically two breaks... And in this case we took breaks, but we just nerded out. The first break I think was 45 minutes, and I think we were actually like "Are we getting back into this show any time soon...?" We were deep into like Keanu Reeves, and the Matrix, and whether or not he was or was not Canadian...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] That's right.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** When you end up on Wikipedia in a break, you know you've gone wrong... We were in movie trivia, we found out a lot about different things he liked or not... It was really interesting, I like that a lot. I'm glad that was one of your favorites, because we needed that show, in my opinion, for the entire community. I know that not everybody listens to our podcasts, and that's okay...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Whaaat...?!
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I mean... You didn't know that?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What's wrong with them?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** But I think this is one of those that if you're gonna recommend a podcast that's 90 minutes long, and it's talking about the open source community and ways to treat one another and operate, this is the one, I think... This is the one I will point to forever to say "We need kindness, and go back and listen to this episode and find out why." As you mentioned too, Brett is such a leader in that front. The human side of code is strong here, man...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Strong with this one.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You mentioned the breaks... Let's give a little inside scoop here on the breaks, because you say that we have two breaks during the show... And the truth of the matter is often times - not even just sometimes, but often times, the breaks are the best part of the conversation. Sometimes they're short, and they're just like "Hey, get a drink of water and we'll start again", but often times we go way off tangent, into deep things, in the breaks. I think with Johannes Schickling we did like an hour on website design, and looking at different things during the break, and then we had to get back to the show.
+
+We've thought about in the past, we thought about actually releasing the breaks - not all of them; maybe just the ones that actually turn into good conversations - as a separate show, maybe a sub-show, I don't know... We've talked about the breaks, and we've never done anything with it. If that's something that you're super-interested in, kind of conversations like this one we're having here, hit us up, let us know.
+
+We do have a show that maybe y'all don't know about called Backstage, and it's kind of like the breaks... It's inside the Changelog; it's Adam and I, and Tim, and people that are involved in the production of the shows, and Changelog News and all of that, getting together and talking about things that aren't necessarily the show proper... And that podcast, Backstage, is subscribable only in Master. So we have a Master feed; if you like the Changelog, you will probably like JS Party, you will probably like Practical AI, you will probably like Away From Keyboard etc. And if you don't like a certain episode, just delete it... But go subscribe to the Master feed, and then you get all of our shows in one feed... You don't have to have a bunch of feeds; delete the ones you don't wanna listen to... And Backstage - which is not like a weekly show, but we do it every once in a while - is only in that Master feed. So if you wanna listen to those conversations, just go ahead and unsubscribe from the Changelog, and then really quickly go subscribe to Master and you'll get Backstage as well.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Really fast...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Like, two seconds later.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Make sure we don't notice, because we'll start to \[unintelligible 00:39:52.23\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's reverse that... Don't delete your Changelog feed until you subscribe to Master.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Good point.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Subscribe to Master first, and then go back and remove Changelog as a feed for you.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's right. That's the battle-hardened way to do it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[40:07\] I've done that. I actually personally subscribed to our Master feed. I used to track -- because you always pay attention to what you do, to some degree at least, how things work and stuff, QA... I listen to shows I'm not on, I love it... That's how I do it - I actually subscribed to the Master feed, because it's just easier.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's just less feeds.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right, less feeds. I go to Master, get all the shows... It's so easy. It's so easy.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, so how do you do that? In your podcast app you can search for Changelog Master, and you'll find it. If you're on the web, changelog.com/master, and you can get all the subscribe links from there... So that's how you do that.
+
+If you're interested, Changelog.com/backstage - you can listen on the web, but you can only get it into a podcast app in the Master feed, so there you go.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right. And I would say, while we're on that front too, considering there's only two episodes in the Backstage feed, one thing we're trying to do is at least -- I would say it'd be nice to get to maybe a bi-weekly basis of those, or at least one a month...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I think we could use Backstage to do some breaks episodes. Maybe just wait a month and see what's been the best breaks from the Changelog during that month, and then have Tim splice them together and create a Backstage episode... But yeah, we have more stuff that we wanna do, we just kind of got started on it. I think we'll do at least an episode a month, and probably once I become full-time, we'll be able to do maybe two a month, but that's a little bit down the road.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** If you have any feedback on that show, audience, let us know. If there's something you wanna hear about, that sparks your interest, that isn't like any other show content-related, Backstage-fitting, say hello.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** There you go. So let's change gears now... We're talking about new stuff; Backstage is a new thing that we're doing. Let's talk about what's new in 2018, because we've done a lot, and we've made some moves, we've got some new podcasts, and we thought we would talk about that a little bit. Do you wanna take the reins, Adam?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes. JS Party began in 2017, right? And we started Go Time in 2015... So we've always had a few shows. Then my podcast, Founders Talk, which was on hiatus for literally five years - I began that show in 2010 on Dan Benjamin's 5by5 podcast network; then once we went with this more than one show idea, a lot of the new site that's how we've done, and the CMS, and stuff like that that we've been working on for the last couple years... It finally made sense to have time to resume a few things, and start new shows, and stuff like that.
+
+Now we actually have six active podcasts. Right now Go Time is on hiatus, but coming back soon. We've got the Changelog that you're listening to, JS Party, Founders Talk, Away From Keyboard, Practical AI, Go Time, and as we mentioned, Backstage... And one other unmentioned show so far is called Spotlight, which we use for big announcements, conferences and the hallway track. It's sort of like this flexible show, I guess, to some degree. We did the Apple Mac event recently on that; we all got on there and talked about the developers' perspective to the iPad Pro, the new MacBook Air, and the new Mac Mini...
+
+Those were fun to do, but we've got some plans around our podcasts, and that's why we say, subscribe to the Master feed. There's more than just the Changelog. So if you're listening to this and you're thinking like "I had no idea about the other shows... This is amazing!", well, today is basically Christmas for you, or something like that, because... You know, we've got more shows, the Master feed is for you, and there's lots that you've been missing out on.
+
+\[43:54\] I'm pretty excited about that, because we mentioned Suz earlier, and different relationships... We've added on more of a team to JS Party; the panelists grew from three - we hiatused it for a little bit, brought it back with a larger panelist perspective, to give Mikeal, Alex and Rachel kind of a break, because they were kind of getting burned on being able to travel, and be there, and the show was, you know, a little off and on in its frequency because of that... And going back to the three C's, it makes sense... But Suz Hinton, Feross Aboukhadijeh, Kevin Ball, you, Jerod, Nick Nisi, Safia Abdalla, Christopher Hiller, Mikeal Rogers, Alex Sexton and Rachel White are all current panelists of this awesome show we call JS Party. I love that show.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, talk about consistent... Ever since we rebooted it - I think it was back in June, with this new expanded panel, and a new time, which is Thursdays at noon Central, 1 PM Eastern (I guess that's 10 AM Pacific Time), we've shipped an episode every week ever since. So we've been very consistent. It's been a blast having a rotating panel. I look at it like cheers; you wanna go somewhere where everybody knows your name... And of course, it's a JS Party, so we really have a fun atmosphere. And even though I'm not the JavaScript guy, I have felt very welcome there, I've had lots of fun... I still feel like I have things to say, because I write plenty of JavaScript... And it's been fun to just be a part of that panel of people. So many smart people, so much fun.
+
+If you are at all in -- it's not just JavaScript-focused. Of course, we do talk about the language, we talk about Node.js, but there's a lot of front-end conversation, we sneak in some CSS and some styling and design... That's why we say "It's a celebration of JavaScript AND the web", because it's really about the web platform. Anything that touches space, if that touches your life, then JS Party is something worth checking out.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, and I'd even say there's desires to round out, as you'd mentioned, sneaking in CSS and styles in different places, for less than just simply JavaScript-focused conversations, too... So as a listener, if you wanna hear more stuff like that, pitch ideas to us; share your feedback and what you'd like to hear, because we're essentially reaching in our pockets and saying "Hey, what have we put in here recently to pull out later?" and that's what we do - we organize shows around the panelists available, and who's around, which is great... A great reason and a great recipe for having so many panelists is, one, I like your idea of cheers; you know everybody's name, and you get different perspectives, and reappearing cast members, so to speak... And it also takes that burden off of everybody to show up every single week. It gives us a chance to round out the diversity in terms of points of view and perspectives.
+
+My most favorite thing about JS Party is, I would say, the respect level everyone has for one another, to always feel open to bring up things and even disagree. It's not an "Oh, Suz, you're amazing" or "Oh, Kevin, you're amazing." It's kind of like "Why did you do that?" sometimes. And I like that. We need that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, there's lively debates. There's lots of laughing. It's a blast, and it's been a joy to work on and to put out each and every week this year. Let's talk about Away From Keyboard a little bit, because we've mentioned it off-hand... We've mentioned Tim, so maybe you should give the full story on Tim as our newest addition to the team... It was 2018, right? He wasn't with us in 2017. So a huge change, and a huge advance, and one of the reasons why we've been able to accomplish the consistency side is because of Tim, and Away From Keyboard is his show... So Adam, why don't you tell the folks about Tim Smith?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[47:57\] Yeah, let's start with Tim Smith first, and then go on with Away From Keyboard. I've known Tim for -- geez, let's just say years. The blog post I wrote introducing him to our community, the new senior producer here, says that I've known him since 2012... \[background noise\] That's my family in the background; they're coming in as a cameo. They just got back from school.
+
+So Tim joins us as the newest member, senior producer... I've known Tim for many years, and he has always been the kind of person that focused on the details. That's what I love -- it's probably one of my most favorite qualities of Tim... Not my favorite thing of Tim, but my favorite quality of his - his focus and attention to detail; he sweats those things, and I think he holds us accountable to the details, which I really love in a person... Because I will sometimes shave off an edge because I can be lazy, and Tim doesn't let me, basically. Neither you do, Jerod, but you know, that's what I love about Tim.
+
+I've known Tim as a podcaster. He has created many podcasts over the years. I've been on his shows, he's been on my shows, I've listened to his shows... And we were just in need of someone to really round out the production team -- without trying to toot my own horn, I would say a similar perspective on those things as I did. Because I would spend a lot of time editing our stuff. I was our primary editor for a long time, mastering all the shows, producing all the different things, and it's a lot, a lot of work, and we needed to be able to scale. There was no way we could do that many shows that we just talked about unless we had someone like Tim on our team. So if it weren't for Tim, we wouldn't be as consistent as we are, we wouldn't be shipping the amount of shows we are... I might be in a fetal position, crying, on occasional days...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That doesn't mean I still don't do that, but I'm less likely--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Different reasons now.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I'm less likely to do it. And Tim, as someone who's done some really awesome shows over the years, like The East Wing, For The Record, The Radio Column... He came wanting to do his own show, not knowing that he would be allowed -- I don't know why he wouldn't be allowed to work at a "podcast company" per se (in air quotes; I did air quotes there) and not produce a podcast.
+
+So when he joined the team, I was like "I wanna support you in your creative work. I want you to be able to do something..." No pun intended, but he has this show called "Away From Keyboard", exploring the human side of creative work. So he was really excited to be able to do his own show... He named that show, Away From Keyboard. I don't think I had any involvement in the naming; did you, Jerod? I know we gave feedback, but that was his name, right?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, he came up with it, and he asked if we liked it. I loved it immediately, I was like "Yeah."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We knew kind of where he wanted to camp out at, but we weren't really sure what to call it and how to describe it. So Away From Keyboard, exploring the human side of creative work; new episodes every other Wednesday. You can go to Changelog.com/afk, the coolest URL I think we have; one of the coolest, at least, aside from RFC, which we'll get to here in just a second, because we hiatused that... Or I guess we actually retired that.
+
+Yeah, that's all I have to say about Away From Keyboard. I love the show. I love the perspective of it... Speaking to Suz Hinton - she was actually one of the guests on episode \#7... I'm waiting to hear you on there, Jerod.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, that would be fun. Yeah, Away From Keyboard is awesome. It's about 30 minutes, it's highly produced, and I would say low frequency, but high-quality. If you want one to listen to, of course the one with Suz would be good, if you are a Suz Hinton fan. Episode \#4, if you want a recommendation - Jeff Robbins is an actual rock star. I freakin' love that episode, and I think you will, too... So check that one out, subscribe to AFK, and if Tim's editing this - Tim, if you wanna go above and beyond, splice a little preview of AFK right in here.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[52:09\] Boom! Drop it.
+
+**Tim Smith:** Hey. Yeah, thank you. So in this episode that Jerod was just talking about, I asked Jeff Robbins about the decision -- when his band was offered a record deal, he had to stop his business. Was that a difficult decision?
+
+**Jeff Robbins:** I got offered a record deal, Tim! In 1994! It was like “Rock ’n roll!” No, it was not a difficult decision. \[laughter\]
+
+**Tim Smith:** I figured that'd be the answer, but I wanted to ask, just in case. Anyway, thanks guys. Back to you.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I will mention too that the shows are actually on the shorter side... So if you're looking for something a little shorter, maybe even more in the commuter-friendly, or drive to the grocery store, or doing dishes friendly... The shows tend to range in the 15, 20, maybe as much as 30-ish minutes, but never an hour or so. And that's the way I believe Tim plans to keep it, although I don't think he treats himself like a time schedule, but he tends to err on the side of like 15 minutes to 30 minutes, I think 15 being the absolute shortest I've seen. So it's definitely a shorter form factor.
+
+And back to Tim real quick - great addition to the team. He does so much more than just editing and mastering, and I'm really excited to have someone like him on our team, that helps us think through a lot of the details... And as we've said before, we really sweat the details; and if you can't tell as a listener or a frequent visitor to Changelog.com, let me just tell you that we try to. We try to sweat the details, every single day. Why don't you mention retiring RFC?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, well, we retired RFC. \[laughs\] It was a bittersweet day... Of course, our much-beloved but often hiatused, or I guess seasonal, meaning lots of breaks in-between episodes and seasons, Request For Commits, with Nadia Eghbal and Mikeal Rogers... It feels like it's been retired for longer than a year, but it definitely was the beginning of this year that that happened.
+
+You know, it was a show that ran its course. It's something that we're super-proud of, and you probably listened to the retired episode, which made both feeds, so it definitely shipped in the Changelog feed, where we talked all about RFC, its history, why we did it, why it's being retired... So if that's something that you're interested in, definitely check it out.
+
+Those episodes - a lot of them are evergreen, so it's a great back-catalog. Of course, when we retire a show we don't yank its back-catalog, or anything like that, so you can definitely go back and listen to it... But yes, Request For Commits - the feed is retired, but many of the conversations that they have and we'll continue to have happen on the Changelog. So really nobody is missing anything, but yeah, the RFC feed has been retired, and that's -- you know, sometimes you've gotta get moving on.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I like how you say it ran its course, because I think one thing that came out in the finale episode was just -- I think Nadia actually opened up this conversation like that... She said that they'd accomplished what they wanted to accomplish with the show. They talked to the different people, they brought the different perspectives to sustainability in open source, which I think was its core tenet, and obviously the different perspectives of driving and delivering and maintaining and leading open source, all the different nuances - not simply just the code, it was the human side, as they said... The human side of open source, the human side of code.
+
+I think what's also interesting is that you can still subscribe to the show in Apple iTunes, or in Overcast, or on Android, or wherever you're at. There's still the RSS feed there. So it's not like -- like you said, it's archived on the site and we call it retired, but it's no different than, say, when you go to Netflix and you watch a season and they're already done, like, they're just not doing any more. That's all... That's the difference. You can still listen the same way you listen to every other podcast, it's just that that's the end; when you get to episode 20, there won't be anymore, there won't be episode 21.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[56:17\] Which is kind of nice for us completionists, because you can actually accomplish something, you can finish, which I always appreciate finishing.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We mentioned this as one of our favorites in a recent episode, which was (from what I can tell) a beloved episode; this is kind of going back a little bit to the Changelog... It was our recent conversation about Brave and BAT, but in particular with Request For Commits; if you're a fan of Brendan Eich (who isn't...?), founder of Brave and creator of JavaScript - he talked quite heavily behind the history of the web, how it had been funded, the back-story on the earlier browser wars and the emerging different monetization models they were all coming up with... It was a very different world. The web was becoming the web, and the browsers were becoming the browsers, and the wars were becoming the wars all the same time.
+
+He also talked about the big problems that we have, that are hard to solve for the internet, and the different trade-offs we've had to do over centralization and distribution over the years, and stuff like that. So if you want serious wisdom, which I would say this entire podcast, RFC, was all about - serious wisdom from a lot of really interesting movers and shakers in the open source landscape, this one in particular was my favorite. So I don't know if you have a favorite, Jerod, but I wanted to mention it real quick, because that was one of my -- I mean, I have a couple others I love, but this one in particular I really enjoyed, because I was a back-seat producer to this show, so I was at every episode and listened to the conversations in real-time, and I'm sitting there thinking like "Holy crap, I'm listening to Brendan Eich share literally the history of the web, right here."
+
+He speaks in a way that -- he's got all this experience, he's been there... He was in the trench, you know what I mean? It was just really enjoyable.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** He dug the trench.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Or he dug the trench, I like that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You like that?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I do like that. He's not just in it, he dug it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's right. He was there and he was digging it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Alright. Well, we're getting towards the end here. Parting thoughts, final things... We should talk about Changelog News a little bit, because we've been putting a lot of effort into that, and unlike many news outlets, or writers, and bloggers, who have taken comments off of their websites, we're actually putting comments onto our website. We're plowing our own path, and we've added commenting to Changelog News. We've also expanded the number of editors, so it's not just Adam and I writing these days. We have - gosh, I think this week alone we have five or six other people writing and logging news with us.
+
+We wanna create lively discussions around the news, because most of the feedback that we get with Changelog News is email replies, or verbal - people telling us about it - or Twitter... But it's all just kind of all over the place, and we thought "Let's have an actual place where we can discuss the news", so we've just recently launched comments. In fact, it's been a soft launch; we haven't really announced it, or anything.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** This will probably be the actual announcement of some sort. We haven't really even said it publicly really...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Here it is, public. Come discuss the news, the goings on of the open source and software development communities with us on Changelog.com. We would really love everybody's involvement, and your perspective and your insights, in our comments.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right. And you mentioned the expanding editorial panel, and one other interesting fact is that we have submissions. So not only can you come on there and discuss, you can share links with us; you can actually submit news, and when you do that, you'll be able to share a URL, a title, and maybe -- this is an optional piece, but potentially what you find interesting about it, that way we just understand some context of what struck you. But just hop in there, worst-case scenario just share a URL and a title, and if you feel like it, what's interesting, hit Submit, and you're gold.
+
+\[01:00:23.14\] There's some submission guidelines, kind of guiding of what we're looking for, just to give you more of a confidence that it'll get through the process... But we definitely have an editorial team, we look at every submission that comes through. Not everything makes it into Changelog News. Some things get cut, some things don't, but... I love News.
+
+This goes back to -- I wanna say like 2014(ish), when we first launched our email list, and Changelog News began as an email, really... And we were on a weekly basis just sort of like archiving things to log at the end of the week. One day somebody got this bright idea to real-time log the things, rather than doing it just once a week, and so this is a manifestation of that long-time goal.
+
+At the end of the week, on Sunday - so if you subscribe to the email list, which is clearly present when you go to changelog.com, you can't miss it, you will get a once-a-week email summary of the best that came from this week's coverage. So if you're looking for one of the best emails to listen to or subscribe to, it's definitely one of them; it ships on Sunday in the morning. Otherwise you can track Changelog.com, and as you mentioned, discuss, submit, and join a thriving community. It's freely available to you, of no charge. The only charge is your attention, and we will love you if you give us a little bit of your attention, which would be great. News is a big deal, man. I love News.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Amen to that. Anything else, before we call it a year?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's call it a year. One quick mention of News is actually this front-end of news began at the beginning of this year, so this is actually year one of it. We probably could have gone deeper on it... It's just because it's been such a 180 in some cases, or a redo in some cases, because it led to a new design for the site, which -- maybe that's a Backstage; maybe we can do that on the Backstage, going into that kind of detail...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I think it is.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...because to me, that's a really interesting story, that no one's really heard yet, or got to hear. I'm not even sure if we've had like a retrospective personally on that. There's been a massive design change this year, and it really began with News as the underpinning of all the UI changes - search in place now, new way to listen to podcasts... I mean, so much has changed because of news. It's not simply just a place you can go read, comment, discuss or submit; it's actually been quite a paradigm shift in terms of design for us too, this year. I think it's been deeply successful.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yes. That's all good fodder for an upcoming episode of Backstage... But for now, happy 2018!
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Happy 2018, y'all! Thank you for listening.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** See you next year!
diff --git a/That's it. This is the finale! (Interview)_transcript.txt b/That's it. This is the finale! (Interview)_transcript.txt
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+**Adam Stacoviak:** So we're here for the finale episode -- and it's just a bummer to say that, but it is the real thing...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Bittersweet... Bittersweet.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, bittersweet... Of this great show. This show began -- I don't even know the date, Jerod, but the very first time we talked to Nadia, which you found one of her first articles around open source and sustainability, and just this problem, so to speak...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** How Nadia stumbled upon the internet's biggest blind spot - is that what it was called, Nadia?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's what it was.
+
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, something like that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That one caused a splash, and caught my eye, and we had you come on the show... For the long-time listeners of RFC, y'all probably remember some of this history. After we had Nadia on the Changelog, we had a great time, it was a very good show, we kind of kept the door open for you to do your own thing and focus on that conversation around the blind spot and open source infrastructure.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think we even said at the end of that show too, "You know, Nadia, we'd love to hear you on the podcast, having conversations, that you're probably having to do these long-form essays on Medium... We'd love to hear the behind-the-scenes of this." That's essentially the rough recipe we began with.
+
+Then you went away for several months. We released the show, it was great, all that good stuff; you continued on your path, and then I think around four or so months later you came back and like "Hey, I've evolved this idea, I've talked to my buddy, Mikeal (which was also a friend of ours as well)" and then it became this idea for this podcast we're talking about right now.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So here we are, this will be episode 20 of Request for Commits... A couple of years later, Nadia and Mikeal, we are winding down here and calling this not just the season's finale, as we've done before, but the series finale of RFC. Tell us about that decision, and maybe even the path that the show went down and also that you two have gone down in the last couple of years to bring us to today.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I'll let Nadia start, because I'm gonna end up showering Nadia with compliments about her stuff, so why don't we... \[laughter\]
+
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Lols...
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I think it'll work better if you go first.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Alright, Nadia, you go first.
+
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Alright. Yeah, I think the decision came kind of in a good way in just talking to Mikeal, and both of us realizing that when we started this show a few years ago - yeah, I originally talked to you folks at Changelog - no one was really thinking or talking about this very much on a broader scale... There were sort of like one-off conversations and blog posts and things from open source maintainers, just talking a little bit about the issue of like "How do we keep a project going?", but there wasn't really a much more sustained focus or attention on it.
+
+A couple of years down the line, as we were thinking about what would a season three look like, or who else do we wanna bring onto the show, I'm kind of feeling like a lot of these stories are out there now - not just on RFC, but just all over the place... We're kind of at a point where sustainability is a little bit more of a given, that it's something really important in open source and it's something people should be paying attention to.
+
+\[04:36\] I often have this -- I just think back to early 2016 and how we still had to make a case back then that this stuff was important. I remember having so many conversations with people that were just like "Yeah, open source is great, and everything is going really well. People like working on this stuff without any sort of recognition or sustained attention on their work", and now I feel like I never have those conversations anymore, because we've kind of moved past it and now it's a little bit more of people that are really excited about creating solutions, and bringing more conversations around this stuff, and... Yeah, there's just like multiple people working on different aspects of the problem. I think from that perspective RFC did its job and we got a lot of those interesting conversations going on the show, and now we're sort of like letting it dissolve back into the broader conversation.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay, Mikeal, shower with praise.
+
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Don't...! \[laughter\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So I've been in open source for a really, really long time, and I've been trying to talk about the GitHub generation open source for quite a while; I've written about it, I've given talks about it, and still, the moment I got in front of anybody from an older generation of open source, or anybody who can write checks from a company around open source, or any of the kind of institutional support, I was always starting from point zero... And you can't get five minutes into one of those conversations without somebody talking about free software, software freedom, we're going into Apache model stuff, or the word 'meritocracy' will get thrown around a lot, and it's just... It was just like a constant sort of drag to try to -- not even re-educate somebody, because they think that they already know everything, but literally try to recontextualize what they're trying to talk about in terms of sustainability with what sustainability looks like in a completely new open source model like what we're seeing already happen.
+
+After Nadia's work came out -- and really, this started to become really obvious as we were sort of recording season two... So we kind of planned season two before this was really kind of taken for granted... But all of that changed. Everyone that I talked to about sustainability now, not only are we like on the same page and they're looking at it the same way, but we even have like a new vocabulary that we can talk about this kind of stuff in. People didn't use the words 'software infrastructure' before; they just didn't speak about it that way, and all of that was really solidified in the work that Nadia did in her paper, Roads and Bridges. And then everybody who sort of added things to that and wanted to continue the sustainability story in new open source would link back to that and quote it and all that kind of stuff.
+
+Now I feel like there's been a very, very big shift in what we look at for open source sustainability and how we talk about it. The making the case stuff, which really felt like part of what we were doing with the show, was like talking to people and getting a lot of their stuff out there, and we're exploring what sustainability looks like with these people, but we're also just trying to educate the general public that this is just like much more complicated than what we've talked about before, and there's gonna be a lot of models and there's a lot of different kinds of people that have different needs... And I feel like we don't really need to do that anymore. I don't know if Nadia feels the same way. I think Nadia already fixed this, so... \[laughs\]
+
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I did not fix it, but yeah, I think it's stuff like this -- I think the focus early on was just exposing as many stories as possible... Especially for me, coming into this space and being new to it, and not having a long background... My start was basically just like point to all these stories I was collecting, around like "If you don't believe me, then believe this person who's maintaining the software that you're using right now, every day, at work."
+
+Yeah, I think that was a big part of making the case, being like "Here are all the stories", and at some point you can't really deny that it's a problem, when you're hearing it from lots of ecosystems and lots of different types of people in all these different ways.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[08:51\] It's interesting too, because your perspective was from a venture-backed scenario; I don't know the full story, but you came from a different angle, you weren't really in software day-to-day, but you saw this larger problem and you're like "How is no one talking about this? How is this not on the forefront of people's concerns?", because you've got -- I don't know if Heartbleed happened after or before us discovering you and the work you've done and all that good stuff... Does anybody know when Heartbleed happened, can you recall the timeframe?
+
+**Nadia Eghbal:** It might have been right before we talked...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It was after your initial article, though.
+
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Because your initial article was 13th January, 2016, and I'm gonna fastly --
+
+**Jerod Santo:** April 2014 was Heartbleed, but...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, so a couple years before then. So the Core Infrastructure Initiative may have been in place from the Linux Foundation around then. I think that was just before your timeframe of that post... But you know, these things were happening, you were just pointing to case studies, essentially; these scenarios where there have been issues of unsupported - and when you say unsupported, it doesn't exactly mean like money, right? We've learned through this series that money isn't the problem.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** It's a lot of things.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right?
+
+**Nadia Eghbal:** It's more complicated than that, I guess.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. People think "If I just had money...", but we've found from some people that they were like "Well, I'm glad I've got money. Now I don't know what to do with it. Now I've got another problem, now I've got money to deal with."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Money problems.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. Well, I think in the very initial article that you first wrote, it was framed a little bit more financially... And I remember the first time that we spoke - you had already spoken to a lot of open source maintainers, but I was also very adamant that like "It's not a money thing." If the government is messed up and you can't make decisions and you dump money on that structure, it's just gonna make everything worse.
+
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah. Our conversations, more than anything else, I think your perspective, Mikeal, really helped shape my view on that. At first I think it was really just about funding specifically, and then how it got kind of brought in more into sustainability, which is partly about money, partly about community, partly about governance... Lots of different things. But yeah, I feel like you broadened that really, especially from everything with Node, of just how important the governance aspect is, of thinking about how to structure projects.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Can you take us back to maybe some of the topics you covered, or maybe some of the a-ha moments for you, Nadia, with the first few conversations you had with Mike? I know it was sort of over coffee or lunch, or something like that, like "Hey, I've been thinking about this", and obviously, the conversations you had...
+
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah. Man, that was so long ago. The structure around -- I remember you had this one post, Mikeal, "Healthy open source", is that right?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah.
+
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, I send that to everyone all the time, because there's like a really great diagram in there that's comparing the imbalance of maintainers and specifically the technical council, which was I think more specific to Node, but the idea of just having some core governance structure; then you have your broader subset of contributors, and a broader subset of users, and just like thinking about how those things work with each other, what does it get out of balance when you have only a few maintainers but tons and tons of users, who are all sort of like asking something back from you, and then how do you bring that into the balance of having more and more people contributing or supporting, so that all that burden doesn't fall on just a couple of people. That was a really important framing the Mikeal brought in.
+
+That, and then we talked about the role of contribution policies and theories, and I think that was also another really big moment for me... Because I think from talking to the maintainers, I got this one perspective of single maintainers saying "I'm really overburdened and I don't know how to manage all my issues", and that's a very immediate pain point of saying "I don't know how to handle all this as one person."
+
+I think in my conversations with Mikeal helped me understand this aspirational of "Well, maybe it doesn't all need to fall on one person." That's a really great thing about open source - 1) you can always walk away, you don't have to carry all that burden, and 2) just thinking about how much can you push off to other people and not take on all that stuff yourself.
+
+\[13:23\] I think we do have slightly different philosophies on some of this stuff, and that's also why I think we're very complementary when we talk about this stuff. I think I'm still really interested in single-maintainer projects as something markedly different from -- most of the open source projects that make it into very public conversations are the really big ones, like Linux-sized, or Apache-sized, or whatever, and I think a huge thing that's been missing from the conversation, and it's still not talked about enough, is the situation of more single-maintainer projects.
+
+I went really back and forth on this. At first I was like really like "Champion the maintainer!" and then I was like "Well, maybe there's a way to broaden it and bring in more contributors, so it's not so much work just for the maintainer, and you're off-loading some of that." I think I've come back to the maintainer side of things of - in the end, there are gonna be a smaller subset of people who are doing the bulk of the work, and I'm mostly interested in figuring out how to allow those people to do it in a more focused manner. That's different from "How do we get every contributor to get compensated or paid on an open source project?", which is actually not something I'm particularly interested in.
+
+I don't think every open source contribution deserves compensation, but it's more about like for the people that are really carrying the burden on the projects and how we support them.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** This is kind of interesting... I'm actually kind of identifying this now, but when Node.js moved to this liberal contribution policy, the only projects that had done it were much, much smaller; the kinds of projects that would have just been kind of single maintainer before then... And it worked really well with them and there was this really big open question of like "Would it work well for a big project?" And if I look back now at all the smaller projects that had done it and look at Node, it's clear that it actually works best for a big project. A liberal contribution policy with a lot of people at different tiers contributing works really well for a big project.
+
+For smaller projects, all those that had these liberal contribution policies, they had a lot of people during initial development, but now they're kind of held together by one or two people. They look a lot closer to a single maintainer project. Like Nadia just mentioned, the people that we talk about, the projects that we talk about are these big, notable projects, and we don't talk about the vast majority of open source projects that are smaller libraries, that are maintained by basically a person, and should kind of be maintainable by a single person if they maintain that scope... But it's still just a huge burden to maintain them.
+
+I've dealt with this with some of my projects, and I've gone towards this really aggressive tooling model where all of the releases are automated, and there's 100% test coverage... All of these things that just make it really automatic for anybody that contributes, so that I don't have to involve myself everytime that there's a pull request.
+
+So there's some interesting stuff happening around single-maintainer projects, and a lot of the tooling that we might see helping out those maintainers is probably more important for like the next round of sustainability work, which is all of the smaller projects, that basically glue everything together in the entire ecosystem.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** We didn't really talk enough about tooling on this show, I think. But that's something I think about a lot at work all the time... For GitHub as a platform, how can we take -- like, there's some work that just no human should be doing, period, and it's not about off-loading that to contributors, it's just about improving how your project is structured, and yeah, I think that's a really big part of the conversation.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[17:10\] I remember talking to you, Mikeal, about -- everytime we connect, you're like "I've got a new project, I'm working on this fun thing", and it's always bleeding edge, and then you're talking about the different tooling you have to automate this stuff... Can you share a bit -- does it make sense in this format to share maybe some of the key findings you found to automate, like what particular areas?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** So Gregor, from the Hoodie project, has really been pushing this model for a while. A lot of people in the Hoodie project actually have been creating a bunch of tooling around this. The big one is called Semantic Release, which basically is complete release automation. So if all your tests pass, every time that you accept a PR, every time that you push, you just get a new release... And the version number is determined by this commit metadata that says "Is there a new feature, or a fix, or a breaking change?" that kind of stuff, and it's just a much better model for -- not having to manual-release, for one, is amazing... But also getting everybody in that kind of habit. And then if you move to 100% code coverage, which in Node there's a lot of great tools to help you with this. Tap already has code coverage integrated; I have some code on top of Puppeteer, which is like a headless Chrome testing utility... My tooling is called Cappadonna, and that basically adds the coverage into the browser sections. But there's new work that I just saw Ben Coe push up a PR for to get code coverage directly into Puppeteer.
+
+But anyway, once you have 100% code coverage, you're just much more confident when PRs come in with tests, that they're actually testing everything. And the coverage itself becomes a test at some point. When you have these kinds of intermittent tests that may actually gloss over a section, but still show us passed - those end up showing up. There's just a lot of really nice things that 100% code coverage gets you... And it's also one of those things where when you have a small library that you just started, it takes maybe like an hour to get to 100% code coverage... But if you have a big project, like I have Request, that's been there for years, it's basically impossible to go and get 100% code coverage. It's one of those things that's really easy to keep up with once you establish, but really hard to get to if you don't start with it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's why you do it out the gate, which is what I think a lot of the conversation we had was around like "I know this is a lot of work, but I'm doing this upfront, so that I have sort of a framework or best practices I follow I start a new project, so that if I need to hand it off or I wanna come back six months later, it's a little easier to jump back in because there's a way I've done things."
+
+Going back, Nadia, to that article you've mentioned of Mikeal's, which was called "Healthy open source" (we'll link this up), I'm just scrolling it as you and Mikeal were talking and I just see highlight after highlight, and they all say Nadia. \[laughter\] That was kind of funny. Then there was one other one that wasn't you, and that was Dan Abramov, so... Good company.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, that's based on people that you follow.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, is it? Okay, so it's not all highlights... Okay. \[laughter\]
+
+**Nadia Eghbal:** That's still totally creepy; I think I highlighted like this in that article.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I don't follow many people on Medium; maybe there's more highlights. I was just like "She's the only one highlighting, this is awesome! \[laughter\] Now I can read just her highlights and get what I need to get from it and that's it."
+
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah... I highlighted a lot in there.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** There's at least 25.
+
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Thanks for counting!
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I definitely recommend following Nadia on Medium, so that you can see her highlights. That's definitely something you should do.
+
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Oh, man... Now people are creeping on my highlights on Medium. \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That would make me self-conscious about highlighting stuff, if I knew that--
+
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I know! Well sometimes when I highlight weird...\[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's like a red herring... To lead us off your trail, you highlight something worthless...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Misinformation, yes.
+
+**Nadia Eghbal:** That's right. Now that I know people are looking, yeah...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Head games.
+
+Break: \[21:02\] to \[22:31\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[22:37\] Let's talk about the state of sustainability in terms of open source.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** On this show I know we've talked about several ways of funding it, very diverse ways of funding, whether it's a grant, or a platform, or direct contributions, whether it's a project you're funding, or a person you're funding... I think, Nadia, you've changed your tone in terms of focusing on the individual maintainers, you said, to help them focus better; maybe that's something you can dive into... But can we kind of talk about the various facets maybe we have covered on the show in its past, and maybe some of the ones we haven't covered and maybe where things are at in terms of like how sustainability is happening.
+
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, I think there's like a couple big areas that come to mind for me, or just things that other people will suggest. One is around community dynamics and governance stuff, and contribution policies and how do you structure your project in a way that's really easy for someone to come in... And that leads to another related area, which is stuff like documentation and tooling and automation, and sort of like what are the required things that you should have in your projects, or what's a good standard way of setting up your projects and make it easy for people to come in, and just create as little work as possible for you. I think all that stuff is a big, important part of the sustainability conversation.
+
+Diving more into funding models or things that have worked money-wise, I think there's a lot of experimentation happening there right now. I think I get a new email about someone trying to tackle something in this space at least once a week right now, which I guess is not super high volume, but it compared to before, it's a lot more.
+
+I think there's a lot of interesting debate in that space, just because of this tension between "Are you supporting maintainers? Are you supporting contributors? Any old contributor, paying them out...? What's the volume of money you're trying to pay here?" I think that's the hardest part about introducing money to open source. There are a lot of smaller -- you know, if you pay out a couple dollars to anyone who commits a certain number of lines of code, is that actually a great incentive or not? It could make things worse...
+
+If you're talking about paying someone tens of thousands of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars, then that's a very different game. I still find all those dynamics very interesting, and thinking about whether funding models are actually viable or not. The question is certainly like "Well, what are people paying for? What's worth paying for?" and I see it break down into people that are sponsoring your projects as kind of like more of an open sponsorship/visibility kind of thing... So like a company might want their logo on a project, or something like that - that's one area of experimentation.
+
+One is around licenses - I think that conversation will probably go on forever... About like "Can you use a license to encourage someone to pay?" It's just kind of interesting... I wanna be like "Meh, who knows...?", but it's very persistent, so who knows what will happen in that space.
+
+Then the other big area I see is support and services, of "Yeah, can we guarantee some level of quality or responsiveness, or have your issues prioritized", or something like that... And you'd have that kind of like be the third area of something worth paying for. So yeah, those are the areas I'm seeing a lot of experimentation in.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. I think that that's a good way to categorize them. I will say that I've been very surprised by both the success and failure cases that we've seen, and also what the reaction of older open source people has been to these experiments... It's been almost universally negative. I have a hard time trying to figure out why they've been so negative about it. It tends to be that they are adamant that big companies not have formal relationships in these projects, whether that's through sponsorship or putting their logo up or anything. They want some kind of like plausible deniability between the contributor and the company.
+
+\[26:55\] The odd thing is that almost universally these people are employed by these big companies, so they have the most -- all of the unofficial relationships and all the background influence is really prevalent in all of these older projects and older open source people, and they are really adamant that that not be formalized in any way, which is suspect to me... Really suspect.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Because whether it's implicit or explicit, the influence is still there, either way.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Right, right. And I also think -- we interviewed a couple people that did Open Collective stuff, and we interviewed Evan You, who did Patreon, right? And what we heard from these people was the opposite of what I thought that we would hear. So you would have people that are funding the project, and then you'd have people that are funding individuals, like through Patreon... And I thought that if you had people funding individuals, there wouldn't be as much of an incentive to bring on new contributors, because you're already funding this one person... But what we saw what that that was actually kind of the worst when you were funding the project, because then people were fighting over kind of control of the project, because that's where the funding is coming in, or they're fighting over how to dole out that money and which kind of person gets it.
+
+Whereas when you fund the individual, like when you fund Evan You on Patreon, you're not funding Vue.js, you're funding Evan. There's an expectation already from everybody that put in money that this goes to Evan. And then Evan is -- part of it I think that it's just his personality; he wants to bring in new people and create a really big community, but also, he's stable enough with his relationship to that sustainability... The check that is feeding his family is coming directly to him, so he doesn't have to hold his project hostage. He can always do what's best for his project and bring in a lot of new people.
+
+I'm actually using Vue now for a couple things, and I think it's one of the most interesting -- and as popular as it is right now, and as much as people are talking about it, I think it's one of the most understudied open source projects out there in terms of sustainability. If we were still doing the show, I would probably dig in a lot more into that project, because it's really interesting.
+
+**Nadia Eghbal:** That interview totally blew my mind. That was actually probably one of the biggest insights I got from this entire show - the idea of "Do you fund projects or do you fund people?" I think that's one of the biggest cultural shifts maybe, defining whatever this newer generation of open source is, and it's also the source of a lot of tension and difference in values maybe in the conversations I have with people.
+
+I guess if that one tension is "Do you support maintainers or contributors?" and the other tension is "Are you funding a project or are you funding the people to work on a project?" - yeah, that completely change my view of... I'm much more in favor now of funding people over projects, based on what we've seen.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, that was a really big shift.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm curious how that one might play out though, because funding a person doesn't prevent them from burning out. Just because you give me enough money to keep doing what I'm doing doesn't mean that I'm not gonna get burnout. Does it even matter, I guess? I mean, obviously it matters, but from the sense of funding or supporting - does supporting somebody as an individual, does that inhibit your or does that stop you from concerning yourself that you're gonna burn out, or you're just like "They'll do what they want"?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** \[30:15\] Look, I think that people burn out outside of open source; they burn out in tech in general. I think that open source -- we tend to talk about it in the open source community because 1) we actually have a community of people to talk about it in, whereas when you're just like a person at a desk in a company, you don't have a community of people to talk about the issue of burnout with.
+
+So we end up talking about it more in open source, and I think that because of that, we think that open source is causing burnout in some manner... And I don't know that it is. I think that it's really easy when you take your passion and you allow other people to add responsibilities to it and add things to it. If you don't manage that well and you don't manage your time and your mental state well, then you are likely to burn out.
+
+But I tend to think that when we see negativity in open source, we need to talk about why people are being negative; what are the things that are making people more negative in this project or this community than another? Because those are things that we can actually fix. And we need to think about how do maintainers deal with that negativity? One, how do they make their project not such a source of or target for that negativity, but two, just how to brush it off? It's okay to ban people when they're dicks, just go and do it... \[laughs\] Stuff like that. But I do feel like it's one of these topics where -- I mean, I burned out before I was really involved in open source, just working in tech and being young and not having enough of a life outside of work... So yeah.
+
+I don't know if the sustainability story and the burnout story are as connected as we tend to think that they are. I don't know. Nadia might not agree.
+
+**Nadia Eghbal:** No, I totally agree. If you were getting paid for something -- I mean, I think it's the same as any other job, where you might just kind of at some point be like "Eh, I wanna move on from this." Within the area of community dynamics, that's the other really big focus in sustainability conversations - just having people feel comfortable saying no to things or closing issues. The idea of closing issues is still emotionally horrifying to a lot of maintainers, I've learned, because they're just really worried about like "What is the reaction gonna be if I close someone's issue?" versus thinking about like "Well, if it's not gonna get worked on, it's not gonna get worked on, and it'll make my life better just to close it out."
+
+But yeah, that sense of like being able to advocate for yourself and say "I'm gonna do what I'm capable of doing", versus feeling like you have to bend over backwards to everyone else. And yeah, those are kind of like human problems, and I think they get exaggerated in open source... But yeah, we're only human, we're gonna have a finite level of interest in things sometimes, and I don't think it's realistic saying that someone's gonna work on something for the next 80 years, or something.
+
+I think the one dynamic that will get interesting if we focus on funding people versus projects will be "What happens if someone does walk away?" and because it's open source, they can sort of -- you know, we see this in a lot of projects now where the original author might not be the person maintaining it actively, but if that original author gets all the glamour or is most closely associated with the project and they walk away and they're not actively maintaining it, but if they're able to raise a bunch of money based on the work that they did, then is your money going towards the person who's actually doing most of the work? If they walk away from the project do they shut down their Patreon? That's sort of an open question of "How do you manage when someone does leave? How do you actually transition?"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I mean, you can always stop funding it, right? You can discontinue...
+
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Right, in theory, but if people don't know about it...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+
+**Nadia Eghbal:** If that original author or maintainer is not transparent about how much work they're actually doing, then... Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, I see. Makes sense.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** I feel like in general a topic that I'd like to see a lot more conference talks about and a lot more discussion about is how to leave, how to walk away from something responsibly. It's actually better for the project for you to be less involved, most of the time; the more you kind of hover around, the less that other people can take on that responsibility from you... And it's not good for you, and it's not good for them.
+
+\[34:38\] It's actually better just to have a cleaner break a lot of the time, but people feel this kind of nagging responsibility to hover around, and things like that. I've been getting this a lot over the last seven or eight months. Since leaving the Foundation, people are like "Oh, are you going to the Foundation conference? Are you gonna be in this meeting, or that?" and I'm like "No. No, absolutely not."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's funny.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** No, like, why am I gonna be there and just like -- just being there sort of undermines the people trying to take on the work that I was doing, right? It gives a channel for everybody who's dissatisfied with any decision to just go like "Well, I'm gonna go talk to Mikeal and do what he thinks." Nobody wants that, and it really makes it hard for people to take over those leadership roles and to keep the project healthy.
+
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I agree, we don't see enough conversation on that stuff. Andrey Petrov, who maintained a project called Urllib3, has done several transitions and he recently published a blog post about this, and I was like "Wow, I never see content about how to strategically practical tips on how to hand off a project", so I was really happy to see that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, at some point the end happens - this show, for one, and then projects, people's term. The term is serviced, so to speak. If you're involved in something, I don't think you should have to commit for life; you can commit for a term - one year, six months, two years, or whatever makes sense for you and your life. I think that we should all go into something knowing that. Jerod and I, when we think about spinning up new podcasts, we don't think "Well, these people have to commit their lives to this show." No, maybe they've got three months they can give us, or whatever. So you have to come in there and think about that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I was thinking about that sense of dread that Nadia was mentioning with maintainers, and the closing of the issue, and then the analog to the podcaster and the ending of a show, you know? "What will people think when this show...?" You know, that's why so many of them fade out slowly, quietly into the night, because we refuse to admit--
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's too difficult to actually end it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** To actually end it well, yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, let's Seinfeld this. People ask us "How did this show do?" I think this show was really successful. I think this show did really well for not being in our main feed; it brought its own audience, and over time it did really well. I think that's kind of how we're ending it. I also say that we're not ending it; sure, this is a finale episode to sort of give a nice end cap to this series, so when you go to Changelog.com/rfc or to the feed in any sort of podcast app, you see a welcome message saying "Hey, we're gracefully closing down what we have here" and the conversation is gonna continue... So maybe this is a good opportunity to share where those conversations are happening, and maybe set some expectations that while this may be a finale to RFC, the conversation does continue on our main show, the Changelog.
+
+So you can go to changelog.com/podcast to pick that up, or just search in any podcast app for the Changelog and you'll find it. We have this conversation on that show, too; that's where this original conversation with Nadia happened. This was a focused channel for exploring different perspectives in open source sustainability, so it doesn't mean that it's ending, but -- maybe somebody takes the floor... Where else is this conversation happening, aside from this podcast was or the Changelog? Where else is this conversation taking place?
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** We should plug the Sustain OSS conference. The Open Collective folks put that on together, and the last one was one of the best events that I've been to in terms of -- I mean, it was like an 8-hour version of RFC, with a lot of people in the room that you would wanna have as guests... It was a really, really good group of people and we got to talk about a lot of really good stuff.
+
+\[38:28\] My worry with it was always that it was gonna be too prescriptive, but it really wasn't. It was about everybody talking about the things that had worked for them and why. That's a way to learn and to create a lot of new leaders in open source.
+
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, definitely Sustain OSS. GitHub also does an event series called Maintainerati, which is maintainers getting together to talk about their shared challenges and things that they're facing... So that's another good channel if you're a maintainer.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Also Nadia's Medium highlights is another place that this is conversation continues... \[laughter\]
+
+**Nadia Eghbal:** ...plus some weird stuff thrown in there, but yeah. \[laughter\]
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** And I guess me and Nadia might come back on the Changelog to interview people from time to time, so... There's a couple people that we didn't get to that I would like to have on. If we don't at some point interview Sean Larkin I think I'll be upset.
+
+**Nadia Eghbal:** Well, he got interviewed on the Changelog, right?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right, but that was a couple years ago now, and he's definitely --
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Things have changed.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We did talk about -- I think they had just launched Open Collective and it was getting steam, but it's the kind of... I mean, Webpack is a stand-out project in many ways, and different than other projects in many ways as well, and perhaps exemplary in certain ways, and in my opinion in certain ways it misleads other projects into thinking that they can be just like Webpack... But point being, there's tons to talk about there, and Sean's a great guest, so absolutely having him back and having you two interviewing him on the Changelog would be awesome.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We don't just do-- we have several guests back several times. I think Mike Perham was the first fourth time guest...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yup.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...but we've had guests back, and it's great. We'll talk to them a year later, we'll catch back up, we'll see them on the next release or the next major release, or something that's pinnacle and the projects change, whether it's new maintainers or a new direction, or a conference finally, or something... Who knows. But we welcome the revisits. Those are actually sometimes a lot more fun.
+
+This Friday we're gonna release a show with David Heinemeier Hansson on Stimulus, and we've talked to him before about 10+ years of Rails, but that doesn't mean we couldn't have him back on. The second time around I know I was a bit more comfortable, because I felt like David's a buddy now, versus like "Oh, DHH..." Anyways.
+
+Let's end by saying thanks... I mean, I know personally -- I've personally benefitted from knowing both of you, and then playing the behind-the-scenes role I personally have in this show's creating and execution and production, so it's been a lot of fun to coordinate things with you all, but at the same time take a back-seat to the content, and you two totally drove this thing. Mikeal, I know you'll compliment Nadia, and you'll back me up at least on this - your prior show notes are amazing; they should be published on their own, although I know they're not exactly public stuff. Not that they're bad or good, just that it's not a cohesive end-to-end document. For people like us, it really makes a lot of sense. So those are really appreciated.
+
+\[41:38\] I learned a lot of stuff from both of you, but all that to say thank you so much for working with us and caring about the community so much to put your time and effort into it, and then obviously to come back on as a finale to give a nice ending to a show like this, so thank you very much.
+
+**Mikeal Rogers:** Thanks.
+
+**Nadia Eghbal:** I feel really grateful also, so thanks to all of you. Having a space to talk things out - I feel like from the first conversation with Mikeal we just really hit it off and had just enough shared and different views that just having a dedicated time and space to talk about this stuff just helped us go a lot deeper and solidify our theories.
+
+I think I told you guys this - I think Changelog was the first podcast interview I ever did. I also never listened to podcasts ever, and now coming out of RFC, not only did I actually listen to a couple RFC episodes myself, but I'm actually really into podcasts...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yay...!
+
+**Nadia Eghbal:** So the experience of even like recording a podcast was just a really great meta experience of being like "Wow, this is a really great format for hearing people's stories, exploring with someone else..." Yeah, you've totally converted me to podcasts, which is pretty great.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's awesome. Anything from you, Jerod?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I will just echo whatever you're saying, so I will say no, nothing for me; thanks for everybody, this was an awesome show, and I'm looking forward to these kinds of conversations continuing on the Changelog.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. This is not the end, this is just the beginning of something else. To the listeners out there who have listened to this since the beginning, thank you so much for your kind thoughts. Your time and your attention mean the world to us, so we really thank you for that, and... Go maintainers! Thank you.
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+**Jerod Santo:** Jason, in May some news announced Gatsby.js raised a 3.8 million dollar seed round and is now a startup. Gatsby.js is a static site generator, so the question that leaps out of my tongue is how is a static site generator raising almost four million dollars and gonna be a big business? Just amazing... Can you tell us how that went down?
+
+**Jason Lengstorf:** Yeah, so I don't have the specifics, because I wasn't in on the fundraising, but what I think the difference is -- this is something we're struggling with at Gatsby right now... Static site generator - the word "static" is kind of ingrained in everybody's mind that it just takes something and it spits out HTML, and that's it. And the reason that I think Gatsby was able to grow into a company that got venture funding is that most static site generators - you take some data, you process it, you spit out some files. What Gatsby is doing is a little bit beyond that, on a couple fronts.
+
+The biggest one is we're very performance-focused. When you build a site through Gatsby, we're going to automatically handle your code splitting, your minification, all of the optimizations that need to happen - pre-loading in the background, image processing, so on and so forth, so that the site that you build, without any type of manual performance tuning, is already gonna perform better than most, as soon as you ship it. That's even more important -- I don't know if you saw here a couple weeks ago, I guess it was not that long ago, there was an announcement from Google that they're gonna start using mobile page performance as an indicator in your search engine rankings... That's gonna be a big deal, so that's something that Gatsby is very well suited to handle.
+
+\[04:14\] The other thing that we do that I think is one of the reasons people are very excited about it - Gatsby is able to act as a universal data consumer. We can take data from pretty much anything that can expose a JSON object. We can take a database, we can take markdown files, we can take any REST API endpoint, we can even take an Excel sheet, like Google Sheets, and we can consume that and we put it into a central data endpoint, like a GraphQL endpoint. That means that developers, when they're working on a Gatsby site, they always have a really uniform surface to work on; they're working in React and they're grabbing data from GraphQL.
+
+But what that means for content editors - this is where we think the big change is - the content team is working in WordPress, the sales team is working in Salesforce, the developers are writing docs in markdown, and nobody has to change their workflow because Gatsby can consume all of that and make it so that the front-end team is just able to build this amazing site that's very uniform and a completely cohesive experience, despite the fact that data is coming from all over the place.
+
+I think those are our two key competitive advantages, and I think the reason that people are interested. And the other reason is just I think our long-term vision, which is maybe a bit bigger of a discussion... But just the ecosystem that we want to build around Gatsby as an open source project.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So about a year ago we had the Netlify team on the show, talking about JAMstack, and they're trying to get this term into the Zeitgeist in order to have people move past the idea of static site generators, which I agree has kind of stuck in my mind at least as like a very specific thing... That being said, GatsbyJs.org does show a blazing fast static site generator. Is JAMstack something that you all are trying to align yourself with?
+
+**Jason Lengstorf:** It absolutely is. Kurt Kemple is one of our developers, and he is famous for making silly stickers; at one point he made socks with Ken Wheeler from FormidableLabs, his face on the socks... Just silly things like that. But he's currently working on a sticker that is just a jar of jam and it just says "Gatsby is my JAM." \[laughter\] That led us to having this conversation about "Can we make actual fruit preserves and make that a part of our swag?" \[laughter\] Because it just seems like such a fun thing to do, especially because there's so many pun opportunities. We absolutely need to make the jam stack, so a box of like three jars stacked on top of each other, and then one of them is 100% gonna be called The Grape Gatsby. Come on... \[laughter\] All of my dad jokes can be funneled through swag at this point, which is about the best thing that I could have hoped for in a career, I think.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's interesting.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Now you're stealing my episode name ideas, so I'm gonna have to come up with something else for this episode...
+
+**Jason Lengstorf:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The Grape Gatsby... Certainly it's helpful considering all that, which may be where it stems from, but the color purple was your brand color, so... It's the perfect brand.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's so on brand.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I mean...
+
+**Jason Lengstorf:** Actually, that had nothing to do with our decision-making. We actually chose that particular shade of purple -- that's Rebecca Purple, which was named after Eric Meyer's daughter... So it's kind of a little homage to the stuff that he's done for the web. We were playing with brand colors, and somebody came up with purple and we were like, "Well, we should use Rebecca Purple", and we've kind of adopted that as like the core of our pallet.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[08:02\] So you have big ambitions - static site generators, open source projects... Things like these don't usually start with the big ambitions. Some people start with a huge ambition. Adam, who's the fella who's doing Redox OS? Someone who's like "I'm gonna write an operating system in Rust." That is a huge ambition. But somebody who's going to take some things and process them and spit them out in an HTML - many of us have kind of done that; we've ran our own little site generators, so there's lots of these things... And maybe you weren't there for the genesis of Gatsby, but do you know -- what was the initial ambition...? I'm assuming it was because React was cool, but what got Gatsby started and got it down this path to where now it's able to have this big ambition of more than just an open source project?
+
+**Jason Lengstorf:** Sure, yeah. Gatsby was created by Kyle Mathews; I think it's three years old now, and it was right when React and GraphQL were starting to be recognized. I think this pre-dated Apollo. It was on the Relay/GraphQL approach... So we've got all the Graph terminology, the jargon, like edges and nodes and things like that. And then it was also because React created this really easy development experience... And Kyle at the time was working at another startup and was just trying to find something that let him have the good React development workflow that he liked without giving up all the control that a CMS would give him.
+
+So he started just kind of scratching his own itch, and over time it expanded and expanded, and there suddenly there was a plugin ecosystem, and people were getting excited... And I think he was very fortunate to have just backed two technologies at the right time to have a good influx of early adopters to help push the project forward, and we had amazing input from people all over... The Facebook team has contributed, the GraphQL core team has been involved in discussions... It was a really good intersection of -- like, Kyle is a very good developer, the timing was great for the technologies that he chose, and the community was ready for something that could move beyond the limitations of something like Wordpress.
+
+This was about the same time - I think; I might have my timelines mixed up here, but this was about the same time that headless CMS started to become something that people were really interested in. So it was just a lot of good timing, mixed with a solution that was flexible enough to adapt as people were coming up with newer and better ideas. Now it's grown into -- I think about the time v1 hit, there was just this amazing core group. We had hundreds of developers at that point contributing to the Gatsby core... And that's about the same time that Kyle started thinking "Hey, maybe this is like a business."
+
+I can't remember when v1 was released, but in 2017 was when Kyle and Sam Bhagwat, who is the co-founder, they started really talking about this in earnest and chopping it around and talking to people about their broader vision to get Gatsby funded into a company.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** When you think about that - sure, okay, it's got great uses... But then you've gotta think about who's gonna buy it. So a business is something that actually earns money from sales of some sort, so what is the sales for Gatsby, the dot-com version, the business version?
+
+**Jason Lengstorf:** \[11:38\] Yeah, so what we're trying to do with Gatsby -- Gatsby as an open source product is not really gonna change; it's gonna stay open source. Where the limitations of static site generators come in though is that you're moving from this model where the user requests a page from a server, and that server builds a page and sends it back... And you're changing to this model where now you have to pre-compile everything ahead of time. And when you're dealing with a small site, that's not a big deal, but when you start dealing with tens of thousands of pages or hundreds of thousands of pages, suddenly you're looking at these build times of five minutes, ten minutes... In extreme cases we've seen like an hour to build a static site.
+
+That's totally fine if you're pushing to master and then you get to walk away and the changes go live when CI completes, but if you're somebody who's editing content, like if you're not a developer and you're editing this content and you need to push an article live, waiting an hour for your article to go live, to realize that you made a typo and then wait another hour for that change to go live - that's not really a feasible workflow.
+
+So what we're trying to do is we're bringing in some back-end ecosystems, things that require server resources and things like that, to make sure that people have a ready-made system to build static sites extremely quickly, and that's the part that we're selling. We've got standard things like enterprise support contracts, so if you're building a Gatsby site, you can hire us; we'll come in and consult on architecture etc.
+
+In the future, we're getting ready to launch an alpha... We are doing cloud-based preview, where effectively somebody who's non-technical will be able to edit a Gatsby site that's in develop mode. So when they make a change, they'll be able to see those changes live, as they make them, rather than having to install it locally and build the site. Then we also want to build an infrastructure that would allow for extremely fast rebuilds, so that an enterprise client, somebody who's got a Wikipedia size page, will be able to make a change and see that change go live near instantly. We're trying to create the infrastructure that works around the limitations of statically building sites.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So that puts you in competition with a Netlify then, or not?
+
+**Jason Lengstorf:** I don't think so, because Netlify is solving a different use case. Netlify is an excellent platform for the vast majority of people who use Gatsby. We're going kind of further along to very specialized use cases where you've got a huge team, and you've got a lot of people on the team who are non-technical, who need to be able to edit content and see that content live... So that's moving outside of what Netlify even does. Now you're running a server to the side of Netlify, and when they publish, you could still publish to Netlify using this system.
+
+Then if your site grows to where you need extremely fast turnaround -- one of the problems that you run into with Netlify is with a big site they have a timeout, and memory caps. So if you've got a huge site, you'll hit their memory limit or you'll hit the timeout, which I think is around 15 minutes, where Netlify is like "Hey, this exceeds what we're willing to deal with" and they just kill the container. Then your build fails, and now you have to start it again, you have to eliminate things and figure out what went wrong, and that just makes it a little more hostile to a large team development workflow, where you don't necessarily want to have somebody who has to just babysit the build all day.
+
+So we're kind of looking to provide a way to step beyond -- like, Netlify is an excellent base use case, and then if you push it too far to one end, we want to have the "enterprise-grade build a Gatsby site" solution. It's gonna be highly tailored to us, highly tailored to using Gatsby. It's not something that we think Netlify is really gonna be interested in doing, because it's extraordinarily coupled to our particular platform.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That makes sense. There's a lot of these generators out there, as I've mentioned before, and then many of us cut our teeth on Jekyll; plenty of people are still using Jekyll today. If you're publishing to GitHub Pages or even to your own site... I know for myself personally, my blog is still on Jekyll, which is why I don't write for it anymore. \[laughs\] Because over time as I got enough markdown files in my repo - it just took too long to compile, so the writing process became painful, and that's my excuse for not writing quite so often.
+
+\[16:12\] But when it came to speed, Hugo came around - I'm not sure exactly when Hugo came out - which is a Go-based static site generator, which is blazing fast as well. I'm just trying to think of comparisons, and what makes Gatsby stand out... So there are other blazing fast static site generators, so to me it seems like the big differentiator beyond that is the React and the GraphQL as kind of these core components that are burgeoning and people are excited about.
+
+The blazing fast is nice to have, and is definitely a feature, but do you think people are coming for blazing fast or are they coming for React and GraphQL?
+
+**Jason Lengstorf:** The answer to both is yes, but I think there's a distinction that should be drawn. Hugo is an extremely fast build, but Gatsby is a blazing fast product. The build process for Gatsby is actually slow. That's something that we're actively working on, but compared to competition like React Static, Hugo, we're actually one of the slower build processes. The blazing fast in Gatsby's case is that we've got such a finely-tuned build pipeline... The stuff that we're doing with Webpack, and code-splitting and pre-loading and all these things - the site that comes out the other end is basically gonna ace that Lighthouse audit right out of the box... Whereas a Hugo site absolutely can; I used Hugo before I switched to Gatsby a while ago, and my Hugo site did pass the Lighthouse audits, but I had to manually do that.
+
+My Gatsby site - I didn't have to do any of that manual tuning; it just did the stuff right away, because that's what Gatsby is optimized to do.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What's the stuff?
+
+**Jason Lengstorf:** There are a few things that you're gonna be expected to do to pass the Lighthouse audit. The first one is you don't want any blocking scripts. You wanna make sure that you're only sending rendered critical stuff down to the viewport, so basically not rendering anything off-screen. You're lazy-loading your images, you've got the proper code-splitting so that you're not loading CSS that's not being rendered on the page, you're not loading JS that's not being rendered right now... And all of this is possible to do with Webpack and various JavaScript modules.
+
+What Gatsby is doing is it's pre-configuring these things. We look at your routes based on your individual pages, and then we can tell (because it's React) when we do the static rendering, we know what's on the page, what's actually visible, and we can split the code accordingly so that you only receive -- like, even if your full page bundle would be 2 or 3 megabytes, we can send down 300 kb total of HTML, CSS and JavaScript that gets that initial page rendered, and then in the background we'll load everything for your About page, or your footer that's not visible right now, the images that are off-screen... All of that stuff happens after you get to your initial paint, which means that on 3G -- the guideline that is put forward by Google is that if your site doesn't load in three seconds, you're gonna lose 50% of your visitors.
+
+On 3G I think the last average that I saw was that sites were taking between 12 and 15 seconds on 3G on average. A Gatsby site, on the other end, is gonna take like 1 to 5 seconds, depending on how much stuff you're putting on the page. That's just what we've baked into the core. Obviously, you can make decisions that will make your site slow. We've seen some Gatsby sites that are scoring like 0 on the Lighthouse audit and we've reached out to the authors to try to help them figure out what went wrong, but by default, if you follow our recommendations and use the tooling that we've built - our image handling and that sort of stuff - your site is going to probably score in the high 90s on Lighthouse by default.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[20:08\] That's a nice bonus.
+
+**Jason Lengstorf:** Yeah, so that's the differentiation with--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's a heck of a distinction, because when I see a blazing fast generator, I think the generation is fast, I don't think the end product is fast.
+
+**Jason Lengstorf:** When we took the funding, we realized that our messaging -- like, our messaging was written for an open source project. We've put no time or effort into it. We're trying to figure out how to explain this in a way that doesn't -- we don't wanna get hypey, but we also wanna make sure that we're being clear about what we're saying... And "blazing fast" is true, but we wanna make sure that people know how it's true.
+
+There's a very common misconception that when Hugo is fast and Gatsby is fast, it's fast the same way, and that's actually a very different way of being fast.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm just looking through some of the things you're saying here; you're saying future-proof, at least on the .org... So you've got dot-org and dot-com. For listeners, you can see both gatsbyjs.org and gatsbyjs.com. Dot-com is the business, dot-org is the open source. You've got future-proof, progressive... I'm just looking at some of the adjectives you're using here. "Scale to the entire internet", talking about scaling your servers... Speeding past competition...
+
+**Jason Lengstorf:** Well, not scaling servers; it's actually removing the need for servers. One of the things that we really wanna do is -- because of the way that static sites work, you don't need a server. You can actually take an enterprise-level application that's run through Gatsby, put it into an S3 bucket and use CloudFront, or put it on Netlify, or put it on whatever, any kind of CDN, and host the whole thing with no servers.
+
+We just ran a case study on a company called (I think) Escalade Sports; they were paying $5,000/month in hosting. They reconfigured to use Gatsby with (I believe) Contentful as their back-end and some Lambda functions to handle any back-end processing that needed to be done async, and they went to $5/month hosting bill.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** $5,000 to $5? That's crazy.
+
+**Jason Lengstorf:** It was big enough that it surprised me, too. I was like "Come on, that sounds made up." It turns out that was -- they were paying for these big, bare metal servers to handle the server loads for like sale day launches, and when you go to a CDN, the CDN is paying for those big, bare metal servers to handle traffic surges. So you're basically already paying in your CDN fees for that kind of traffic, and typically, most of us never use it. So basically, we're all amortizing the cost of big sale day launches for other people on the same CDN... So yeah, it was extraordinarily cheap for them once they cut out the need for those traffic resistant servers.
+
+**Break:** \[23:05\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Jason, let's talk about some of these moving pieces... I did go through the tutorial today and I npm-installed Gatsby CLI. 211 packages from 105 contributors, so good old-fashioned JavaScript open source; staying on the shoulders of many giants... The three I would name would be React, GraphQL and Webpack. Are there any other huge moving parts that I don't know about that are dependencies?
+
+**Jason Lengstorf:** I feel like that's a better question to ask Kyle or Mike Allanson, or Michał I'm going to murder his last name Piechowiak I think it is. They're the three core OSS maintainers. But yeah, React, GraphQL and Webpack I would say are the three that are most notable.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, and it's a huge thing to make it standalone, in many regards, to some of the other offerings out there... So let's zoom in on the GraphQL a bit, because as I went through some of the tutorials I think this is the thing that stuck out the most to me as being like "Oh, this is novel and different." And you mentioned it earlier in the call, kind of in passing, where it's kind of this normalization of data access from disparate sources in the file system; a CMS with a JSON endpoint... All these different places, but inside Gatsby, when you're actually building your stuff out, it's like this uniform GraphQL thing. Can you tell us, a) is that a correct assessment, and b) can you tell us more about it?
+
+**Jason Lengstorf:** That's absolutely a correct assessment, and I think if I had to take a guess on what gets people most excited about Gatsby and why they stay, it's this. Prior to coming to Gatsby, I was a front-end architect at IBM, and I guess the big project that I did there was I rolled out a GraphQL layer to one of IBM's products, and it was amazing to watch the shift in velocity for teams that went from using traditional multiple REST endpoints to load data for UI's, to using a centralized GraphQL service as the way to get data. It just fundamentally shifts the way that you build front-ends, because there's this context switch when you go from writing a bunch of async calls to load data, and then you're doing data munging, and then you're getting it somewhere where you can actually access it. That's a whole different set of critical thinking that breaks your flow when you're just trying to get data onto the screen.
+
+So when we rolled out GraphQL as a service on these teams in IBM, we saw things that were taking six months or more than six months to build - suddenly, these timelines compressed to like six weeks, and a lot of it was because the developers were no longer switching context. They were looking at GraphQL, they would define the -- I mean, GraphQL... The way that it's easy to describe, but it isn't technically accurate... But you basically write an empty JSON object, and what comes back is just that JSON object with values attached. There's more to it than that, there's a little more nuance in there, but fundamentally, as a conceptual model, that's how you're working.
+
+The developers who are working on the front-end, they just say "Oh, okay, so I'm building this UI. I need this data." They describe that data in a GraphQL query, and then it's available. They can test this in a user interface - it's called GraphiQL - or they can use... The Prisma team has something called GraphQL Explorer, I believe, which is a great tool. You do this right in the browser, and then you drop that into your code and it just works.
+
+\[28:00\] You're no longer writing async requests, you're not dealing with any of the AJAX stuff that usually trips people up... It's a really, really powerful thing to do. Gatsby takes that and kind of moves it to the next level, which is now instead of having to do all of that work of building a GraphQL layer in-house, you're able to do that through your build tool.
+
+I think the Gatsby ecosystem is now over 300 plugins. Many of those are source plugins, so you can get -- I think there's a Contentful plugin, and a GraphCMS plugin, and a Wordpress plugin, and a Drupal plugin... So that you can, at build time, pull in those endpoints and say "Hey, I want all my Wordpress data" or "I want all my Drupal data." That comes in and then shows up in a GraphQL endpoint, and as a developer, you didn't have to do anything. You just went and found your API token for whatever service and dropped that into our plugin, and now you've got it.
+
+The documentation on how to create source plugins is pretty straightforward. I've just had to create one for Shopify's Buy SDK that was compatible with version 2. I think it took me like a couple hours, because the documentation is like "Okay, get an object, drop in the object, and alright, you're done." There's nuance to that as well, but overall, it just eliminates this whole category of what effectively feels like busy work when you're trying to build the UI.
+
+I think once you've worked that way -- recently, after using Gatsby for a while, I went back and maintained one of the other sites that I've built just for fun, and it's got this kind of like async fetching layer that's pulling data from all these different places, and I was like "Oh, this is a nightmare. I should just convert this whole thing to Gatsby so that I don't have to do this anymore." I feel like it really spoils you once you get in and just see how much nicer it is to work with.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So in the case of something like Shopify or something like that, you're saying that Wordpress - or pick your CMS or source of data - you can build a Gatsby site on your own, but use Shopify data and essentially build your own storefront with Gatsby?
+
+**Jason Lengstorf:** Yes, we actually just did this. One of my most recent projects was to build a swag store. I just got the boxes today, got some T-shirts and everything... We got custom T-shirts, custom socks, and we needed a way to get these out to contributors. So one of the things that we're trying to do is whenever somebody contributes to Gatsby - we're now a funded company; we want to make sure that people know we really appreciate that, and the open source part of Gatsby is still super dependent on the open source community... Because we're never gonna keep up with demand for open source.
+
+We wanted to come up with a way to give back, so I built a store using Auth0, Shopify, GitHub, MailChimp (I think that was it), and we made it so that anybody who contributes to Gatsby gets automatically invited to be a maintainer on the org, so you can review and merge pull requests and stuff, because we wanna give the power to the community. Then we also automatically qualify you to get a discount code to claim for a T-shirt or socks.
+
+Through the Shopify store - we built the store with Shopify, but then we pulled in that data to Gatsby, and then I built just kind of like a really, really simple API that creates a Shopify customer to whitelist you. So you log in with Auth0... Once you get into the authenticated part, it's just a React app. Gatsby doesn't do anything there. It's basically identifying "Oh, once you get to /account, it's a React app. Let it be just a React app."
+
+\[32:06\] Then on the front-end we're loading in the Shopify products, displaying those, and you can add them to your cart, checkout all the same way that you would through a Shopify store, but it's all being done through a Gatsby/React-based website.
+
+That's exactly our intention - to make it so that literally anything that exposes an API where we can get at the data, we can then consume and put into Gatsby so that you can build a static site out of that data.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What happens at product modification time? Say you have this exact setup, and maybe each product, each T-shirt has its own page on your site... So at build time, Gatsby would basically do the GraphQL query or whatever that middle layer is in order for you to write your GraphQL query, and get the product information looper over those and generate a page. What happens when somebody goes into the CMS, into the Shopify side and says "This is no longer for sale." Doesn't Gatsby have to rebuild in order to reflect that in the static site?
+
+**Jason Lengstorf:** It does, and Shopify has webhooks... So the Gatsby store right now is built on Netlify. So I went into Shopify and hooked up webhooks so that whenever somebody edits the Shopify store it triggers a rebuild for Netlify. So at the speed of rebuilding the Gatsby site - that one takes a couple minutes because it's pretty small - then the interface will update with whatever changes.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** If it's incremental builds though and it's just content, you could probably skip over a lot of the other stuff that's like minification, munging, things that typically take CI processes, which you mentioned earlier, a long time if you have larger content sites... Like, why rebuild the whole thing when you can just rebuild that fragment or that portion?
+
+**Jason Lengstorf:** That is exactly what we're working on right now. It's something that we've wanted to do for a long time, but we didn't have the space to do it. Funding gives us the ability to dedicate people full-time to it, and we have a great team of open source people who are working -- we basically have a combination of open source contributors, full-time people at Gatsby and a couple contractors to solve specific problems.
+
+We hired Tobias from Webpack to help us solve some key Webpack problems, and we're trying to use the funding from Gatsby to give back to the open source community... Like, we have a problem? Cool, hire the person from that project and pay them to solve a problem that makes their product better and helps us solve an issue that we're overcoming.
+
+To answer your question in a single sentence, incremental building is ideal and we're working toward it, but we're not there yet.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Who's competition for you? For one thing, it's a business now, right? You graduated from open source to funded, proving out a business model. You're a business, but from what I can tell, you're not quite selling yet, so you're sort of proving the model of what to sell, so you're still in that "Will we survive" stage, potentially... And you can answer yes or no to that, but... Once you get past that, do you have competition? Who competes with you? Are you in a blue ocean?
+
+**Jason Lengstorf:** I mean, I guess it depends on what we ultimately end up offering for sale. It feels very blue ocean in a sense, because Gatsby has some maturity that a lot of other projects in the ecosystem -- they just haven't been around this long. That being said though, there's some really exciting stuff happening in the Vue space; we're seeing things come up there where we're like "Oh man, we should build that."
+
+\[35:47\] So I think that we're gonna see some stuff... I think VuePress is one of them, there's a -- I can't remember the name of it right now, but there's like an e-commerce Vue platform that's offering a really similar kind of solution to what Gatsby does... We were like, "Oh man, that's also a really good idea."
+
+I think there's not a ton of competition now, but we're seeing things coming out. React Static is an excellent tool. We're seeing just some really, really fast builds; the stuff that Tanner is working on is really exciting... So there's competition, but there's no formal competition. I don't think there are businesses that are specifically pursuing like "Can we auto-generate massively performant sites and do this at scale?" I think that that is a very, very limited window though, because I think it's coming.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Jerod, maybe this is more of a question for you than it is for Jason, but have you seen anything out there like Gatsby where it's like "Hey, we'll be the one way to build front-ends and one way to build websites and you can get your data from anywhere"? Is there anything else out there like this?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I don't know...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Everybody seems to be like "Come into our camp", whereas Gatsby is like "Play in whatever sandbox you want to, we'll just be your front-end and the way you build your site, and we'll be partners with anybody pretty much out there, rather than competition.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, it might be unique, it might be things that we don't know about.
+
+**Jason Lengstorf:** There's some companies that I think are doing similar things, but... So Apollo or Prisma are interesting models in the same way, where they're like "Yeah, we don't care where your data comes from. We just wanna make it easy to use." What I think is unique about Gatsby is that Gatsby is kind of spanning all the way in the back, like "How do we get data?", all the way to the front, like "Here's how you display data", and I think most people are either doing one or the other.
+
+We're not unique, I think we just are in kind of a very niche space. We do the same thing as some companies and the same thing as other companies, but I don't think there are any companies that do everything that we do.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Same, but different. Let's go back to this idea of the webhooks and retriggering builds. Of course, when you get your incremental builds out there, then everything will be faster and maybe you can even just have your site rebuilt once every five minutes, come what may... But what about when you're trying to integrate with a CMS that doesn't have the hooks that Shopify has, or GitHub has? I don't know if Google Sheets has the ability to trigger a thing when you update spreadsheet data... Are there situations where you're kind of hamstrung because you can't ping Gatsby and say "Hey, rebuild"?
+
+**Jason Lengstorf:** Yeah, and we tend to just solve that problem with a hammer... You know, we just set up cron jobs. We're finding it's not as common as we had feared to have sites that just don't play well with webhooks.
+
+The thing that's really nice about the modern web - I feel like companies are much more open to the idea of being part of an ecosystem, instead of being the ecosystem. Back in the day, before Wordpress made the decision to become a headless CMS in addition to being just a CMS, it was kind of like "Hey, if you're gonna use Wordpress, you've gotta go all Wordpress." And Magento was kind of like that; if you're gonna use Magento, your data is in Magento, your front-end is in Magento, and I don't even think they -- they might have plans, but I haven't seen a Magento API, so that you can get data out.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Let's face it, if you're on Magento, you're probably never gonna get off Magento... \[laughter\] That's where you are, and that's where you'll live for the rest of your days.
+
+**Jason Lengstorf:** But then in contrast, you've got companies like Shopify... Shopify is like "We don't care. We're gonna handle your products and inventory and we'll process orders for you. If you wanna display it through Shopify - great, here's some tools. If you don't - great, here's an API." Contentful, GraphCMS - they're all doing the same thing, these open CMS's.
+
+\[40:04\] And then on the back-end you've got things like Netlify, where Netlify is like "Yeah, we wanna host your stuff, but we don't care where it comes from, as long as it's like files." And I think that's really exciting, that companies are starting to realize that specialization and collaboration is really the trick, because then we can all deliver one piece of a fantastic experience without having to also deliver every other piece of that experience... Because you know, we've seen it happen over and over again - you've got a thing that does one thing really well, and then you try to make it do all of the things so that you can be competitive in the market, and inevitably, all of these others things suck. Or your main thing starts to suffer, because you're diverting too many resources to the other things. I'm really happy that that's no longer like a default business model.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It seems like the ultimate "sample it wherever you want" mentality, where like if this is the way you build your site but you can get your data and things from anywhere else, when Shopify tanks - which it never will, of course, because it's awesome and it's ran by a phenomenal team... But let's say it changes its business model to something you don't agree with and you wanna move to something else, well you could probably do that so long as you're willing to do all the product movement, stuff like that, but just point your site to a different place for your data and you can easily move to something new, or sample the most modern way to do things. It seems really logical, but it took a long time for somebody to come up with this idea of Gatsby.
+
+**Jason Lengstorf:** Yeah, I think it's one of those things - it fit a need at the time when that need was capable of being met... But it opened such exciting possibilities. For example, if you had a Wordpress site and you just had years and years and years of Wordpress content but you wanted to migrate over to a new CMS, traditionally you would have to find a way to do that migration. You'd have to get a dump of your Wordpress database and shape it to whatever the new CMS's thing was... And of course, a lot of CMS's are gonna offer that Wordpress import, but with Gatsby you don't even have to do that. You could just import the Wordpress stuff and build it into your blog, and then import the new CMS stuff, and like New Post from that blog get built in the exact same place, and time goes on, and that's it.
+
+So it just opens these amazing possibilities where you don't have to throw away parts of your tech stack to do other things. You can have a consistent web experience and completely change the underlying pieces, without the introduction of tremendous tech debt. I mean, obviously, there are ways you could create tremendous tech debt, but if well considered, you can shave off a lot of migration paths in huge projects to move old content that's not really important (but is too important to throw away) to a new stack just so that it can be archived there.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You've got some examples on your site... Are there any outliers or anybody that's maybe known to our audience (a very developer audience) that is already using Gatsby to do some really cool stuff? Like you'd mentioned, the $5,000 hosting bill to $5 - anything that's similar to that, where they've been able to prove a lot of what you're saying?
+
+**Jason Lengstorf:** Yeah, a couple cool example... One that I love is the React Docs are using Gatsby. They're doing things like using different Netlify branches or deploy previews as a way to show different versions of the content. So rather than having to build like a full separate instance of the site, they just grab a commit, and that commit becomes the frozen in time version of like the React version 15 docs.
+
+\[43:50\] Another really cool example is - I hope I'm getting the name right - Escalade Sports. They built a site called CajunBowfishing.com, which uses -- I don't know if it's Salesify or Salsify, but it's like a product coordination thing... It sounded very powerful, and it was clearly something that I didn't quite grasp how they did it, but it coordinates product data from all over the place... So they're pulling this archive of data from all over the place and updating their site without having to rewrite a bunch of their back-end.
+
+Or even like kind of a silly example... Ryan Florence of React Router fame has recently started this business called Workshop.me. He didn't really want to deal with a CMS, so he has people submit workshops to him through a Google Form. That Google Form puts the workshop data into Google Sheets; he does minor edits and then rebuilds his Gatsby site using Google Sheets as the data source. So he doesn't actually ever have to transfer data anywhere. People write down what they wanna do, he makes sure that he's cool with that being on the website, and he hits a button and it goes live for him.
+
+It's kind of like, you know, use data the way that it fits into your workflow. You don't have to jump through hoops, you're not doing copy-paste anything; you just keep it where it lives and put it on the internet the way that it suits you.
+
+**Break:** \[45:28\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So Jason, with all things surely it's not all rainbows and unicorns... I know we've been talking about the stuff that gets us excited, and I'm excited about Gatsby - it seems like there's tons of potential here - but being so close to it, I'm sure you know some of the warts, some of the drawbacks, some of the cons... I'm gonna provide a little bit of a balanced perspective here, because we've been getting hyped up, or at least I am personally listening to all this stuff that you can do - especially the GraphQL layer is really awesome - but what are some of the places where Gatsby lacks, or there's holes or headaches in using this technology?
+
+**Jason Lengstorf:** Sure. I think the places where we've been seeing the most struggles are what we were talking about with build times... That's probably the biggest, most obvious pain. As your site grows, and as you see more and more content coming into it, you just see the build times start to grow, and sometimes we've been seeing them grow non-linearly, which we're trying to figure out why.
+
+We've got a PR open right now where Kyle -- he's calling it his Hulk Smash PR, and he's just been working on a ton of different build time optimizations... A lot of improvement is coming, but for the time being, builds are still not as fast as we want them to be.
+
+\[48:01\] It can be difficult to use Gatsby on a mixed team. So if not everybody on the team is a developer, it can be challenging to work through some of the initial setup, so that people who are doing content are able to see what's happening when they edit that content. That's something that we're aiming to fix in the future, and that's gonna be one of the Gatsby Inc. commercial products - you get an account to preview things live, without having to use any code.
+
+Another one that we're struggling with is some of the more advanced use cases... We don't have a good internationalization story. You can do it, but basically you're rolling your own solution when you start doing internationalization in Gatsby. So we're trying to figure out, is that something that Gatsby itself should have an opinion on? Should we have an official Gatsby internationalization plugin that solves that problem for you? And then, you know, when you get in the depths of our really low-level things, the documentation just isn't quite finished... But that's a big focus of ours, and we've got multiple people who are working really hard on docs. Shannon Soper is managing an information architecture overhaul of our documentation, she's finding the gaps in it and making sure that it's actually meeting the needs of the people who show up on the site. But in the meantime, you'll find some gaps, and if you get down into the low-level APIs, you're gonna be like "I have literally no idea how this works", and you're gonna find yourself reading source code to figure it out.
+
+A lot of it is edges that we haven't run into yet... You cross that edge of the map and now you're building it yourself, you're back on your own. That's pretty standard for any sufficiently advanced use case, but some of them feel like they shouldn't be advanced use cases. Internationalization should not be an advanced use case.
+
+We don't have a great accessibility story. We do the basics. We run the JSX Accessibility plugin in our ESLint config, and we're trying to do things like that, but we're also trying to figure out -- like, we were in talks with Leonie Watson about how can we make it so that when you navigate between pages, screen readers will actually announce a page change. That's a pretty classic problem with single-page apps - when you navigate between pages using React Router, there's no indication to the person who's using a screen reader that the navigation is complete; they just have to guess, and that's a problem. We haven't solved that problem either, but it's something that we're working toward, and it looks like Ryan Florence, I believe, is working on something called Reach Router, which I believe solves that problem, so we're gonna try to migrate over to that to have a better accessibility story inside of Gatsby as well.
+
+Standard use cases - you'll probably be fine. When you start getting to the edges, you'll start to see where we just haven't had the time to work through a standard approach, or we just haven't had a chance to document things yet.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I think the accessibility bit would be huge, to bake that kind of stuff in, especially now that we have the Firefox DevTools added an inspector, we'll have better auditing for these things... And accessibility is really hard to get -- I mean, performance is accessibility in certain ways, but it's a hard thing to do well and often, so the more tools gives us the ability to be winners and not losers, you're gonna empower a lot more people to have much better experiences... So that would be something that I think would definitely differentiate it.
+
+**Jason Lengstorf:** \[51:58\] Yeah, and I think we need to make that part of like the core technical offerings that we have, because we have amazing people out there... you know like Leonie Watson that I've mentioned before, we've got Marcy Sutton... There's this whole group of people doing amazing work in evangelizing accessibility, but the vast majority of us have probably not seen their talks. Those of us who have seen their talks, the vast majority of us probably don't have time to implement all of those solutions. So if we can bake that right into the technology that we're shipping -- it's not hard to do, it's just time-consuming, so we should make sure that we're making it as easy as possible for people to do this. That's our entire goal with Gatsby - we wanna make the right thing the easy thing, and we've started by doing that with performance, and we wanna kind of expand that to cover additional stories, like internationalization and accessibility.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, now you've got some runway, now you have some money to spend on these particular things... Tell us about that, ever since the raise happened and the team has been expanding. What's the money being spent on, how are you expanding the team...? Tell us about that side of things.
+
+**Jason Lengstorf:** Sure. We raised -- I think we officially closed the funding in late 2017. I joined up in March, or maybe February, and we've only scaled so far to ten people. We've got a few contractors that we've hired to help us solve very specific problems... So we're trying to overcome a few different things. There's the initial challenge of "How do you take an open source project and inject funding into it without alienating the open source community?" That's one of the reasons why I'm putting such a big focus on -- like, I want to make sure that the people who are part of the Gatsby community and the open source community in general are just taken really good care of. The swag store is one of the ways we're doing that.
+
+We've just started a program where me, Kyle Matthews, Mike Allanson, Michał Piechowiak, Kurt Kemple - we're all gonna do community pairing hours, where anybody in the community can just basically say "Hey, I'd like to pair up with you for an hour." We'll get on a video call with you, and ostensibly, we're gonna work on something Gatsby-related, but honestly, we just wanna help people in the community... So what can we help with? Let's debug something, let's get started on your first Gatsby project, let's build something together... So just try to pay it forward into the community and give back, because open source is the reason that we're able to do what we're currently doing, and we wanna make sure that that goes back into the community and that we are spreading as much of that love and appreciation as we can back into the community, as opposed to becoming a place where it's soaked up. We want the value to stay distributed.
+
+Then we're also trying to figure out how do we scale properly. We started out by hiring people directly from the open source community, but that has advantages; we've got people who are extremely familiar with how Gatsby works technologically, but it has disadvantages - people who work on GitHub are predominantly white males, so we have a disproportionately white male team right now... So now we're trying to figure out, okay, how do we work with under-represented communities, how do we make sure that we're reaching out to the right people...
+
+We've been in talks with a lot of developers in Nigeria to try to figure out how to get into that community; can we get contractors out of the Nigerian community? We're in talks with a group in Portland, where I live, called Women Who Code, and we're attempting to put together some workshops to try to train -- so I'm gonna run one workshop, but I'm gonna have somebody from this group work with me as like a TA, and then the next time they'll lead the workshop and I'll work as a TA, and the third time I'm not gonna be there at all; they'll be able to just run that workshop.
+
+\[56:08\] So we're trying to train up people in the community to be able to take value out of Gatsby on their own, and hopefully, we'll be able to hire those people and grow our team in that way. And how do we do that in a way that is sustainable, that's gonna help us grow and make sure that we're not tripping over our own feet?
+
+There are a lot of really, really interesting and really not related to code questions that we're trying to figure out as we scale, which is like both extremely fun, because we get to look at -- like, okay, we've always worked at companies, and I don't know if you've had this experience, but every company I've ever worked at (except the one that I owned), I sit down and I look at the company and I go "Oh, I could run this better. Here are all the reasons my boss is an idiot." \[laughter\] And now we're in this situation where we are that idiot boss, so we get to put up or shut up, like "How are we gonna make the company that we always wanted to work at, and what are we gonna do to make sure that this is a company that not just I wanna work at, but that everybody wants to work at?"
+
+How can we make sure that when we open a job opening, we get flooded with resumes from literally everyone? Every corner of the internet, every different group... We want to be that company, so we're trying to solve that puzzle. How do we make amazing technology that people are really excited to use? What do we do to incentivize the internet at large to use Gatsby as their technology of choice? And beyond that, how do we make Gatsby into a company that is a model company for the tech world, for companies in general, that is a place that people are excited to work at, that if you say "Hey, I work at Gatsby", people say "Oh man, I'm so jealous that you get to work there. That sounds so awesome."
+
+This is the most terrifying and most exciting challenge that I've ever had, and I think that everybody in Gatsby right now shares that excitement and terror, that we really wanna get this right on all fronts. I've been just ravenously reading books on team culture, how do you make communities welcoming, how do you make people feel safe... I was on Twitter like "Hey, send me books so that I can be less of a jerk to my team and make people comfortable giving me feedback." I don't know man, I'm terrified, but I'm also having a lot of fun.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Where does community live at for you? Is there a central place where you do community? Is it in Slack? Is it in issues, is it spread around? Where does it typically happen and how do you get that feedback from the community to know if you're doing right or not?
+
+**Jason Lengstorf:** It's largely happening in GitHub issues or Twitter right now. We haven't really had the chance to think through how to centralize that, because we wanna have a way for people to do this well, and maybe that's GitHub issues, but then GitHub issues can be a problem because not everybody who can contribute is necessarily gonna be a GitHub user.
+
+We could potentially use something like Discourse... You know, one of those types of community services, but we're not sure. If you've got ideas, I'm all ears, because we aren't quite sure how to scale properly.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, the one idea I'd give - and Jerod, you've heard me give this advice every single time when we ask this kind of question, when we have this conversation on community... It's like, you've gotta put a community link in your main navigation. If people gotta find it, search it or ask the question like me, "Where is it at?", then your first step is shooting yourself in the foot... Because if there's no community button that says "Hey, here's where you come to find out where it begins." Really, that's your first step there, identifying that.
+
+**Jason Lengstorf:** \[01:00:11.07\] Don't mind me, I'm just taking notes in the background... \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I mean, I do see Discourse as an icon over to the right in the dot-org's main navigation, but to me, I feel like when you put a community link in your navigation, it's like an invitation. Then you say "Everyone's welcome here." We get this right because I thought through this, and we do have community in our main navigation and we do say "Hey, everyone's welcome here." This is where you can hang your hat, this is where you can hang out with fellow developers, ask questions, whatever. You're welcome here. I feel like that's a core step to getting it right. If that's so important to you, that could be a first step for you.
+
+**Jason Lengstorf:** I love that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** But getting it right though, I don't think there's any sort of perfect recipe to say "Hey, here's how we get community focus right" or "Here's how we welcome people" or "Here's how we build a company that people are jealous of and they wanna work at when they hear that you work there", but the pair programming thing is pretty interesting; it gets people on board faster. You kind of knocked your docs a little bit; maybe your docs are not as fully featured as you'd want them to be, but they're so easy to navigate. I think you've done a really great job on that front there.
+
+And in terms of scaling your team - jeez, that's every startup's hardest part... It's scaling, right?
+
+**Jason Lengstorf:** Yeah, I definitely agree with you. I think when I hear this from probably any other startup, I'm like "Yeah, that sounds hard", and now that it's me, I'm like "Oh my god, we're gonna get this so wrong..." \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I like how you said that's the most exciting and most terrifying, because that lets you know you're in the right place. I feel like that's the perfect combination of doing what you do, what you love, because you're a little terrified of your day, you're a little excited about your day, and you're like "I can get it wrong, and I can get it right." That's the fun part.
+
+**Jason Lengstorf:** Yeah, I think that's where I wanna live in the Venn diagram. The overlap between excitement and terror is probably the best place to be in a startup... And it certainly suits my personality best. One of the reasons I left IBM was because it felt like all the decisions had been made... So being in a startup where almost none of the decisions have been made is significantly more stressful, but if feels like good stress. I don't wake up dreading my life, I don't wake up in cold sweats or anything, but I am absolutely every day thinking, okay, well, we get to make decisions today that will echo through the rest of our company, because we're small enough now and we're making decisions now that if we don't get this right, if we build bad habits and hire people while we still have bad habits, this culture is going to implode in the future...
+
+So we need to be thinking, "How do we make sure that everybody in the company is thinking about the company in a way that helps us grow together? How do we become a culture, rather than a collection of people who work at the same place?" And then once we've become a culture, how do we make sure that we're a culture that is headed in the right direction and has the right values?
+
+I feel like there's a long philosophical discussion about how to define a company's values and what those values should be, so I probably won't get into that... But it's a really interesting and fascinating place to be, and it gives me an excuse to read a lot of books that I've been putting off for a long time... So if nothing else, I at least get to do some great reading.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's always fun too, whenever you step into a job... Not that you haven't done this before, but you step into a job to have the feelings that we've just talked about, but then also be like "I've gotta read..." Because I've been in positions like that, where I'm like clamoring for new books to read and consume to do my job day-to-day better, or the future job I'm trying to grow into as whatever I'm doing.
+
+\[01:04:07.28\] That's an interesting place to be at too, whenever you're just like "What book can I read to learn the next thing I need to know to do the next leapfrog, or the next lily pad to get to in my journey of what I'm doing?" That's interesting.
+
+There was a recent blog post that you all had... We kind of covered a little bit of the learning process, but I thought it was kind of interesting that you had this teacher who kind of covered learning Gatsby in a really interesting way for people who were kind of like from a graphical background. I guess the question, maybe to tie off on for the end of the show, may be how to get started...? For these people it was really easy, because it was very intuitive in a lot of ways; it was speed, a lot of fun stuff in terms of the commands and whatnot... The hot reloading was, you know, let them do something and then automatically see some feedback... When you say "Hey, go learn Gatsby", what do you point people to and what do you link them up to? What gets people to that first step to say "A-ha!"?
+
+**Jason Lengstorf:** So our tutorial gets a lot of props for getting people to that a-ha moment. I think what we're trying to do is we wanna get you up and running with something that's actually a website... And I feel like where I really struggled with computer science and where I've seen a lot of people struggle with it is that the beginning stages don't feel like doing anything; it feels like memorizing stuff... You're back in high school doing math, and you're just kind of wondering "When am I ever gonna use this?" So Gatsby -- we have really tried to focus on making it so that you immediately start building real things, and the stuff that you're building is designed to be visual.
+
+We took away a lot of the initial boilerplate in the configuration, so you can just install a starter and run Gatsby Develop and you're just looking at a real website; if you go in and change one of the files, you see that website update in real time. So it's a little easier to start to feel the repercussions of what happens when you change code, as opposed to in a JavaScript exercise where maybe you're just trying to edit an array and get a value out of that array. That's very useful information, and it's something that you will eventually need to know as a developer, but it's not particularly exciting and it doesn't feel like you're doing anything until later, when you understand why it's important. We're trying to flip that on its head.
+
+We want you to be able to create something now, and when you get to the point where you need to know why something's important, then you get pointed to the relevant computer science that will help you do that. Did that actually answer your question? I feel like I went on a little bit of a tangent.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It was a good answer... \[laughter\] I mean, what URL do you start to? Is there a /getstarted?
+
+**Jason Lengstorf:** Yeah, yeah... At gatsbyjs.org/tutorial - it starts from absolute zero. We'll link you out to what is the command line, if you need that... And if you don't, then you just kind of skip ahead to the part where you feel comfortable, and we'll walk you through the process of building a site, loading in data, doing styles, doing everything that you would need to build a functional, production-ready website with Gatsby.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We'll make sure we link that up. It looks like it's about seven different steps, or seven different sections with lots of different sections to dive into, everything from components in CSS to building a page with GraphQL queries, transferring your plugins, all that good stuff.
+
+**Jason Lengstorf:** Yeah, and there's a really cool pull request in progress right now with Shannon Soper and Florian Kissling. Shannon is doing our UX and information architecture research, and then Florian is our lead designer... And they are kind of overhauling the way that the docs are set up. So if you're interested in seeing such things, there's a pull request on the Gatsby repo that has the new -- there's a preview to see the Netlify branch that has the new docs information architecture. It's pretty cool, and there are some design updates and that makes it look really nice.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:08:06.27\] Nice. Well, since you mentioned "up next", what else is upcoming that we're not aware of, that could be like -- you know, whoever's listening to this like "I've really gotta try this now", you hear this and it's like "I've REALLY gotta try it!" What's coming up?
+
+**Jason Lengstorf:** We are trying to get version 2 to stable. Version 2 is in beta right now; you can use it, it's significantly faster than version one. We added some things that make it less -- there's no more magic in Gatsby; we're using the standard React way of doing things now, so there's a changelog that you can look at to see that...
+
+But I think the things that I'm really most excited about - we have someone working on putting schema stitching into our GraphQL schema, so that you don't have to build a plugin if you already have a GraphQL endpoint. For example, GitHub already has a GraphQL API, so you can just stitch that right into Gatsby and use it right away. There's no need to put together a source plugin for it anymore. That's super exciting.
+
+We're working on some new stuff with images where you can lazy-load your images but generate SVG low-poly versions, which basically means it starts to look like impressionist art... It turns your photo into 12 triangles and rectangles that roughly resemble the image, and then your high-res image fades on top of it. It looks amazing.
+
+The store is probably the other thing that I'm most excited about. We're rolling out a lot of automations inside of the Gatsby Organization on GitHub, so that we can give people -- anybody who contributes to the repo, we're gonna have swag available for you as a thank you... And anybody who contributes a merge PR is gonna automatically be invited to become a maintainer, which means you'll have the ability to review pull requests and merge pull requests.
+
+We wanna really make sure that Gatsby is in control of the open source community. We always wanna emphasize that it is an open source community-driven project; it's not a commercial project that uses predatory open source practice, and that's a big thing for us.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Jason, thanks for coming on the show. It's been a blast learning about Gatsby. You're certainly passionate about it, and great product to put out there... Excited to see how it's turned into a business; I'm looking forward to seeing how you sustain the business long-term. You've got great ambitions towards it, and I can't wait to see what you guys execute on.
+
+**Jason Lengstorf:** Yeah, thanks so much for having me. This was a blast, and I'm looking forward to doing all that stuff myself.
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+**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's start by going back a little further, maybe to the beginning of the cloud and what seems like a story of the begining.
+
+**Julia White:** Oh, wow.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It was...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** The day you were born! \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...an awesome day in 2014.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I'm just kidding. \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It was Satya's first CEO appearance, roughly, unveiling what I think -- so I'm hoping you can share more of the story... It seems like maybe that was the beginning of what is now Microsoft's cloud. Office was the first thing rolling out in terms of a cloud-based application to different devices, you were his co-presenter...
+
+**Julia White:** Oh, that day, yes.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You're jacked, you've got a lot of press, as much as you did... Take us back to those days, take us back to that story, those days in the cloud.
+
+**Julia White:** Yeah, so that day was big, for a lot of reasons. We had already been in the cloud, but I think people kind of woke up and really realized we were serious.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** The messaging started...
+
+**Julia White:** Yeah, I think it started sinking in... But we'd put a lot of the groundwork down, which was important, so that when people started paying attention, we were ready. But as much as anything, I think that when Satya came to the helm - and starting with that day, but it's continued on since then - it was a real clear pivot of what mattered. The choice to at that moment launch the Office apps on iPad, which was what blew everyone's mind...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Like, "Whaat...?!"
+
+**Julia White:** ...it was an important thing, right, but it was just a symbol...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, crossing over...
+
+**Julia White:** ...of "Hey, all those things you thought we'd never do - it's gone. It's the new norm, break all the rules." Just shortly after that I think he stood up and had that "Microsoft loves Linux" moment - similarly, just really trying to set down clear guidelines of like "This is where we're going. We're gonna go where our customers are, and we wanna make them successful whatever they choose to use", which is obviously a big shift.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[03:58\] I wanna pin one thing down too, because in this keynote -- I think it was Scott Guthrie's keynote, where he said "Microsoft loves open source." So you've got the Linux moment there, but I think what's interesting is that, you know, this is the beginning of the cloud for you, but you've been with Microsoft for a long time, so I wanna share that story because you've got such a history, and you've seen Microsoft maybe in a day where developers didn't -- maybe open source developers, any developers had less love, or maybe there was a different... What did Julia Liuson say, how did she frame it? "A different lens" I think is what she said for the way Microsoft's perspective was.
+
+**Julia White:** Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You've been here for a while, so that was that turning moment... How has maybe the vision/perspective of Microsoft, changed since the beginning for you? You've been here for a while.
+
+**Julia White:** I know, 17 years... It makes me wince a little bit when I say that. \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, 2001 was the year I got out of the military, so...
+
+**Julia White:** Oh, okay, so there we go, right?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Long time ago.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It was a long time ago.
+
+**Julia White:** So you feel it, too. \[laughter\] It feels like yesterday, but it wasn't at all.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It was not yesterday.
+
+**Julia White:** No, no. Well, back when I started 17 years ago I remember we had the anti-Linux campaign. It was one of the big -- I remember the guy leading it, and it was like "Linux is free like a puppy", all those crazy campaigns. And it's so funny now, I remember I did the Red Hat keynote three years ago now, and I remember thinking "God, that's different." Like, "Here I am, talking about our great partnership" and "This is amazing!" and "We love Linux!", and 17 years from now it was a very different thing... Just a big shift.
+
+I think there was always energy there, but it was just a strong mantra of like, ya know, "Windows or bust. Windows or bust.", and now we recognize that's just not reality, and we don't need to do that. We wanna be wherever our customers are.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Do you have any insight into the "Windows or bust" mentality now? Like, what the perspective is on Windows in comparison to, say, "The world is a computer." Windows is a part of that "World is a computer", but not THE computer. It seems like Azure, which you run, is the computer.
+
+**Julia White:** It's the open platform. You can run anything you want on it. You can use whatever tools, whatever language or database... So it's a very different -- yeah, we still have a point of view, like, gosh, we think Azure is very differentiated, this growing computer for the world, but it runs anything, everything, it welcomes all developers, versus having an operating system or a toolkit perspective on top of it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The reason why I ask these questions is because I feel like our audience, very "any developer", very open source focused... We pretty much cover open source - the languages, the technologies, the people - and I feel like maybe they need to kind of keep getting reminded that Microsoft is changing, and someone like you can help them evolve their perspective of Microsoft.
+
+**Julia White:** Yeah, you know, I always talk about "Perception lags reality by 3-5 years", and I think we're in that place with the open source community, where what we're doing is actually... I mean, this ironic moment - we were working with GitHub recently and looked at the contributions on what Microsoft's doing, and it exceeds all these other companies that are know at their core to be --
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Did you try that? Was that purposeful?
+
+**Julia White:** We tried what?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The contributions to GitHub...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** To get that stat, like "We're gonna be the number one!"
+
+**Julia White:** We didn't. We didn't say "Hey, we're gonna be number one!" We really didn't. I mean, to me, it's one of those moments where you're like "Well, it's not something we're faking, or trying to make it in. It just happened. It literally just happened. In terms of hey everyone (thousands of developers), go forth and do what makes you successful internally", and this is where we got to in terms of the contributions. It's amazing -- to me, that's like a true indicator of change. Satya set out to do it a few years back, and it actually happened, when you see that kind of stat.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** One of the things that I've been thinking about with regards to Microsoft's (we'll just call it) success in open source is that open source, the mindset - and it's an idealistic mindset that we realized doesn't exist in reality, but there's this meritocracy to it, where it's like "May the best code win" or "Let the cream rise to the top", and on our best days you can't market, or you can't shove, or you can't do anything except for like show up with your software, to get the respect that people earn through open source efforts.
+
+**Julia White:** Right.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[08:14\] And it seems like - specifically with VS Code, but there's many other efforts as well... It's like, maybe the 3-5 year lag is because you guys have been earning it through shipping awesome open source software that has really contributed so much to the whole ecosystem. It's like "Wow." What's kind of cool is like even Microsoft has to earn it, and then you guys have.
+
+**Julia White:** Totally. People are like, "I don't understand this community and how it works", and I always start with exactly your point of "It's absolutely earned. You can't buy your way into it, you can't relationship your way in..." You just earn it, which I love; at some level it's just so true, and authentic... But yeah, it is absolutely earned. And it takes time. It's taken a long time, but that's okay... We're in, we're doing this thing. We're committed.
+
+I mean what I love absolutely is of course we look at other clouds out there, and I actually think we're in a weird, crazy and ironic way being more open source friendly than the alternatives... Which is like "How did we become the best in class?" \[laughs\] ...someone who's been around this long; it's interesting. But I love it, I'm like "Let's go forward and just blow everyone's minds."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Anything unexpected coming up for open source? Like, anything that's Windows, or anything that's like-- \[laughter\]
+
+**Julia White:** Someone asked me yesterday "When are you open sourcing Windows?"
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's gonna be \[unintelligible 00:09:29.29\]
+
+**Julia White:** Let's see... I mean, I think we are considering things that might surprise you. I don't know exactly when and how they'll come to light, but I think... I mean, honestly, everything's on the table - what's right for the future of the company, and... And again, Azure brings a different perspective to everything, of like what helps Azure grow, and what we need to use for that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Let's go back to the beginning of Azure a little bit, and that any platform, anything runs on Azure; old Microsoft would be Windows, right? Windows runs on Azure, and it's gonna be Windows...
+
+**Julia White:** Yup.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Was that decision hotly debated? What was the conversation around "Are we gonna go this way or that?" Because that was really like a fork in the road for you guys.
+
+**Julia White:** It was. I mean, we started -- it was called Windows Azure when we launched it, if you remember...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I do not remember that, but that makes a lot of sense.
+
+**Julia White:** Yeah, when we first launched it, it was called Windows Azure, and then it was -- I can't remember how many years later, under Satya, that it became Microsoft Azure, and we welcomed all.
+
+Interestingly though, in the pivot of like "How much do we support Linux? What does it look like? How serious are we?" - it was one of those things where there was a little bit of pressure, a little bit of pressure, but then as soon as Satya came forward, it was like "Of course!" It was just this fast, absolute decision to move forward. And now actually Azure is half Linux, half Windows \[unintelligible 00:10:43.28\] the VM is running. So it's perfectly even.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What's perspective along Satya's maybe earning it, too? Like, new CEO, new direction - how did he set the tone, how did he gain trust from the rest of Microsoft to move in those directions? Was it easy for him? What are some clear things he's done that helped enable this new Microsoft?
+
+**Julia White:** You mean from an internal perspective?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Anything you can share, your perspective. You've been a co-presenter with him, you've been here for a very long time, corporate vice-president...
+
+**Julia White:** I made him improve his style. I want to make sure I get some points for that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, the jacket... Did you end up getting a Twitter handle for the jacket?
+
+**Julia White:** We never did launch a Twitter handle for the jacket.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What does that jacket mean?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, tell them about the jacket.
+
+**Julia White:** Yeah, the jacket... So it was Satya's first press appearance after becoming CEO, and I was his co-presenter, and I wore this leather jacket that I didn't think was a big deal; it was just a leather jacket, like many of my leather jackets... And the internet blew up over this thing.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Because... It was so stylish?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** She looked cool!
+
+**Julia White:** Because they loved it. They thought it was awesome.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay.
+
+**Julia White:** Apparently, it was awesome.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It was awesome.
+
+**Julia White:** I know, I had no idea it was --
+
+**Jerod Santo:** This could be like the best purchase ever. I did not think that you will buy a nice jacket.
+
+**Julia White:** Right?! Someone was like "You need to put that thing in the Microsoft museum. You made Microsoft history with your jacket!" So literally for like two years after that wonderful presentation, everyone's like "I don't know who you are, but I know you've got a good jacket! I know you and your jacket."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[12:03\] I know you're trying to -- oh, there it is...
+
+**Julia White:** Oh, he is pulling it up, so you can see it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I'm now seeing a picture of that.
+
+**Julia White:** Yeah. See, and ever since then, every keynote, people are like "Well, I've gotta look good, I've gotta look cool. There's this new bar." I even had our CFO, Amy Hood, who was not known for dressing up - she dressed like a 16-year old coder for most days, and she did a presentation, and she was like "I was getting ready in the morning, and I just thought What would Julia wear? What would Julia wear? That's what I've gotta do..." \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I feel like maybe I should start asking myself that, because... I could use some help over here.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, the jacket is super cool. We'll include a link in the show notes for anybody chomping at the bit to wanna see this, but...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That is a cool jacket.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** A very cool jacket. I could see why. So you helped him get a better style.
+
+**Julia White:** Yeah, I take credit for a little bit of image improvement of the company, with that moment, and then raising the bar in all of the executives to look a little better. \[laughter\] So... Keeping at it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Playing your part.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So aside from style, how did Satya change the direction for the company? What are some milestones for him that you can see that he's done that earned trust internally, as a company?
+
+**Julia White:** I think nothing of this size of change happens overnight. Honestly, I think some of his magic in driving the change is just being super consistent, day in, day out. As a new conversation rises, like "Oh, should we do this, or should we do this? Should we open source, should we not? Should we contribute back or not?" Yes, lots and lots of decisions every day, very consistent on the execution. And Scott Guthrie too, it's not just Satya.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Sure, of course. It's a team.
+
+**Julia White:** Yeah, it takes a whole lot of us.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Why I asked that is because you had a different direction under the previous management, let's just say... And not naming names, we all know them, but you know, it's a bit shift, it's a new Microsoft, and everybody keeps saying that. I think we've had conversations with different executives, different vice-presidents at Microsoft, and we keep kind of wheeling back to "Where did it begin?" and "How did it happen?" And that's kind of where we're getting at.
+
+**Julia White:** Got it. I mean, it sounds so simple, but it begins with starting with what makes our customers successful. And if you start from that point of view, versus starting with the point of view of like "Hey, here's my agenda, and I'm gonna shove it on our customers..." Versus "Hey, what is our customers' agenda and how do we fulfill that?" It seems really simple, but it actually just comes down to that, of like "Hey, we wanna make sure our customers are super successful. Let's make sure we work that direction, versus the other way."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Do you remember the first conversations around open source?
+
+**Julia White:** Well, an interesting thing, just from where I was - I was in the Office 365 team for like eight years, and then it was three years I moved over to Azure, so we'd already pivoted on the Azure side to embracing open source fully by the time I arrived into the Azure side of things. So in my Office life, all those conversations were "Do we support Android? Do we support iOS? How do we do that?" So that was why the Office on iPad was so pivotal for that moment... But I think it's less about being open source, but about being cross-platform.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Sure.
+
+**Julia White:** It was super symbolic of "This is a new direction." Then when I came over to Azure - we'd made the decision, we had been embracing it, we were supporting it, and I worked on this partnership with Red Hat... But we'd go out into the world and people had no idea that we were doing it, or if they had heard about us doing anything open source, they were super skeptical, and they assumed it was because of the "Embrace and extinguish." I got told that a lot. "You're really just gonna embrace and extinguish, I understand."
+
+So the conspiracy theory - so high... Which is fine, I understand. You have to earn your way out of that, which I think we have. So getting more serious... And then just kind of executing it consistently.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I never wanna keep bringing you back to the fire, so to speak, to keep saying how you earned it, but...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** But I'm about to.
+
+**Julia White:** "Now I want something more specific."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm gonna just go back to explaining why, just so -- you know, our audience is very developer, very open source, very indie, and I think there's just been this... As Julia said, this different lens, this different perspective of Microsoft that is changing, and I wanna give them a reason to see why they can begin to evolve that perspective.
+
+**Julia White:** \[15:58\] What makes it credible?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Well, I don't want you to keep going on about it... I'm just explaining our perspective, why we're asking these questions.
+
+**Julia White:** It's helpful to understand the lens of people listening to this, and what are they looking for. In a business sense, Azure is not gonna be successful unless we're super successful with open source. My CFO cares, because Azure can't grow if we're only a Windows platform. That is a very limited growth. We can have a much, much bigger growth opportunity, so just dollars and cents-wise, we have to do it. We need to do it, we want to do it, on that front.
+
+And then the other thing -- we're so developer-oriented internally; we're super dev culture, and they're out there like "I wanna build fast, I wanna build efficient, I wanna contribute..." Gosh, open source is a super efficient way to do that, and it just happened. When you said "Go for it, use whatever you want. Innovate however you want", it just happened, because the developers went there, and saw the efficiency of it and how useful it was to use all this different open source code and bring it into our products.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** In my perspective, Microsoft has for a very long time - I would say "always", but I don't know the entire history of the company... But it has for a very long time been developer-centric, but it was always the developers on the Windows platform. So there's like this huge swathe of developers outside of the sphere, and so there was no developer-centric for them. But now, because of this shift to services, with Azure at the forefront of that, well now it's everywhere, all developers.
+
+**Julia White:** Right, that's the thing - we used to be about our Windows platform, and getting developer engagement on our Windows platform; we had a very specific point of view, kind of to Julia Liuson's point of view - it was a lens about Windows developers and how we get them. And then when suddenly you say "Hey, it's not about a Windows platform, it's about this Azure cloud platform", then you're like "Oh." All the rules change. You're like, "Oh, okay. I can think about things completely differently." So yeah, it is the same developer centricity, but a totally different business lens.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** A completely different business model, which allows that, and it's interesting just the broad sweeping implications of that primary -- I mean, it's a big decision, but away from Windows platform and towards cloud platform or Azure... It just completely changes the opportunities for the business decision-making. Everything is a whole new ball game.
+
+**Break:** \[18:14\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Let's talk about Azure...
+
+**Julia White:** Yes, near and dear to my heart.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, near and dear to your heart. You know your competition better than we do; there's lots of big players in this space...
+
+**Julia White:** Sure.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** How does Azure stack up, and what -- you said it's differentiated. Give us some of the highlights of why Azure is differentiated.
+
+**Julia White:** I love that. I've never gotten that question before, just so you're clear... \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Really? \[laughter\]
+
+**Julia White:** I've never thought about that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[unintelligible 00:19:43.29\] \[laughter\] "I wasn't ready for the differentiation question..."
+
+**Julia White:** "Hang on, what do you mean!? There's someone else out there?!"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** "Whaat?!"
+
+**Julia White:** I have to say, being the number two cloud in the world, it keeps you on your toes. It's kind of a fun place. I was in Office for all these years where we had this number one position...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** The incumbent, yeah.
+
+**Julia White:** \[20:02\] Yeah, right? And it's all about protecting the franchise, and... It was so fun to switch over to Azure, where you're like "Oh no, we've gotta go, baby!" So how are we differentiated - actually, the core of it goes back to that developer experience. We spent some time, like "What's the soul of Azure and the company?" Satya made us all spend the time, like "What's the soul of Microsoft? Why do we exist?", in his very interesting and philosophical approach to problems... And we did the same thing on Azure, like "What's our soul? What do we wanna stand for?"
+
+The thing we came back to is the developer being productive, and having that incredible developer productivity experience is part of our cloud. It's just a developer platform, it's what it is, so that's our core - how do we do that differently? There's tech - fine, we'll just support all the same tech everyone else does, and other things, but HOW we do it.
+
+One of the things I talk about is around serverless; event-driven came out... So AWS launched Lambda. Innovative, new, but they didn't put a lot of support around it; you had to kind of figure it out... On the forums people were like "This is kind of complicated. I don't get it yet." And then when we brought out Functions, it had the whole VS toolkit ready, with SDKs, we had support and docs around it, so that you can just get going... And it's a subtle thing, but to me it's a good example of how we think about what we want. Every developer, whether you've never heard of serverless in your whole life, or whether you're the master at it... we want you to be great at this. We wanna make sure you can be incredibly productive with building whatever you wanna build.
+
+So as we think about the technology and how we support that delivery of it, it's much about how we wanna be different and more helpful, frankly. And then also, there's a little bit of -- you know, Microsoft has always been great at saying "We want everyone to be on this. We wanna make it something that everyone has access to, and not have any judgment. And I look at some of the competitors and I see there's a little bit of judgment; like, if you're not like the leading edge developer and you don't totally get cloud, there's a little bit of like "Hm..."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Which is intimidating, right?
+
+**Julia White:** Yeah, there's a little bit of like, "I guess you don't get it..." And like, I don't judge; we welcome all. I want everybody to be successful. I don't want any kind of like "I guess you don't get it. Too bad for you." I don't know, I just think that edge doesn't work, so that's how I wanna...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's interesting you got there by doing a little soul searching.
+
+**Julia White:** Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We're big fans of retrospectives, big fans of iteration... In the case of Microsoft, you've been around long enough to re-examine who you are...
+
+**Julia White:** For sure.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...and even at one single service level to understand what's the direction, because you can't get everybody on board of a plan unless you understand who you are and what you're gonna do, right?
+
+**Julia White:** Yes.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Can you maybe share a bit more about that retrospective aspect, going into who was involved, how did you get there, and what were some thoughts that came from that?
+
+**Julia White:** Yeah, it was a really important time, because AWS has started so many years before us; we came in second place in the delivery order (I call it)... We really had to say -- we can't just chase the leader; that strategy is the most flawed strategy you can find, right? No one wants the same technology from--
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[unintelligible 00:23:01.17\]
+
+**Julia White:** Right, no one wants that. So we had to do some just core matching the tech; so there was work to be done just to make sure we had equivalent technology from the VMs, networking storage, that kind of thing. But then we just stopped and really -- and it was the entire leadership team, and it was a pretty long process, because it had to be true and authentic, because people had to buy into it. We kind of like had to earn our own stuff internally, to get everyone on board...
+And we started with just what's going on in the industry broadly, what are the topics from a trend and a technology perspective... But then it really got into these in-depth, long, over dinner sessions with customers, and we'd wallow with them... And you'd start with tech, and then you'd stop, and you start more talking about like "What about you? What do you want as a human?" Really getting on this other level of conversation with developers, with IT admins, with business decision-makers, and the thing we kept hearing was "This is a little scary and a little overwhelming."
+
+\[24:00\] After you got past the idea of like "This is awesome! There's so much cool tech! It's super great! I can't wait to do event-driven! Containers are awesome!" and then they'd be like "And I think it's a lot of work, and I don't know which one I should be using, and everyone thinks I should know, and I don't know, and I'm kind of scared by that."
+
+I remember a couple guys, they would pause and they were kind of like "I just have impostor syndrome all the time. That's how it feels." To me, those were gems of like, okay, there's tech and all this stuff, but then there's this truth, and this quiet place inside, of like "What are you gonna do about that?" So that's what we grabbed on to... Like, "Hey, we can understand that, we can empathize with that in a way that I think other companies who are newer and haven't been through the journey that we've been, and the humble self-reevaluation that we went through as a company, that gives you a new perspective on the world, versus the hubris of never making mistakes..." So I think it allowed us to hear that in a different way, so that's where we started re-centering.
+
+Then we had this conversation like "That's the history of our company. That's been true of our DNA since the beginning of time", and one of the engineering leaders that works for Scott starts saying "Let's help our customers fall into the pit of success. How do we find that in like this Pit of Success idea?" Anyway, so it was long -- you know, we iterated, iterated, where it really started to get to the point where we'd talk to anyone across the team and you'd just see them get it, and they were like "Yeah! That's what we are! That's how we're different! That's what we stand for! That's how we're gonna change the world!" and it started to emotionally hook them. You kind of see it.
+
+So that culmination over it, like the whole course of the time - it was probably nine months of really iterating, spending time thinking like is that quite right, not quite right, move forward, and kind of picking our spot.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** To give you a little credit to your nearest competitor, they'd never shipped boxed software... So you kind of was born in the idea of you have to get it right, because if not it's a recall.
+
+**Julia White:** That's true, yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We talked to Julia Liuson about the idea of like -- what was it, recall bugs I believe is what it was... \[unintelligible 00:25:56.17\]
+
+**Julia White:** Yeah, recall class bug.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...recall class bugs, where you have to ship software to a store, in a box, and somebody buys it, buys a license of it... It's a different world; Amazon never had to do that with AWS. There was never a box software mentality for them, so to have to reevaluate how you what you do--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** They were pretty good at shipping boxes, though... \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes... But different kind of boxes. \[laughter\]
+
+**Julia White:** A whole different kind of box.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, a whole different kind of box.
+
+**Julia White:** Yeah, we remember those days of recall class bugs...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So you had to change your perspective, because you had a different DNA then, and to evolve into the new cloud-based world, everything is a computer -- or the world is a computer... You had to evolve.
+
+**Julia White:** Absolutely. Actually, the real cloud story at Microsoft didn't actually start with Azure, it actually started back with our Exchange Server, our email server, and it was actually Ray Ozzie, a million years ago... We happened to run an exchange server business back then, and he came into the company -- I remember he would come along and sit with us, and he'd be like "I don't know what's going on at Microsoft here. I feel like this world is happening, and time has stood still here."
+
+I remember Terry Myerson actually was the engineering leader of Exchange back then, and I was leading the business side... And Ray would just say these things that were like "Oh my god, it cannot be true..." Like, this world has gone somewhere and we are being left behind. Terry would be like, "What are we gonna do about this...?"
+
+Finally, Terry Myerson - I give him tons of credit... He was like "We're going to cloud. We're putting this stuff on the cloud, we're doing it", and everyone thought he was crazy... They literally thought he was crazy, so he actually did it in secret.
+
+He did this thing called Exchange Labs, where he launched it as an education program for universities, as an excuse to be able to ship things in the cloud, that wasn't gonna affect businesses, so he stayed out of the line of fire from the sales team and other things... So we started to kind of secretly out of the back closet creating this cloud service for our email system, under Exchange Labs.
+
+\[28:05\] It was this crazy and insane story, and Ray Ozzie, every time someone would light up at the company and be like "What is this thing!?", Ray Ozzie would protect it and shut him down... We were always running to Ray, like "Ray, help...!" And that's how it started, so many years ago. I can't even -- I wanna say 10-12 years ago... A long time ago, when we put the first thing in the cloud.
+
+I remember they came to me and they were like "How are we gonna do customer support on services? How are we gonna make money in subscriptions?" and I was like "I've got no idea, I'll go figure that out... Hold on, I'll just go figure that out." Anyway, but we did it, and then that became over time Exchange Online, and then over time from there it became Office 365, and then right about that time was when the original Windows Azure launched... But that was our first shove into commercial cloud, it was over this interesting Ray Ozzie-sponsored side-project.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Where do you think Microsoft would be if you didn't have Azure or the cloud direction, if you didn't change direction? If you didn't agree that you were stuck in time and everybody else was moving forward, so to speak - where do you think Microsoft would be if you didn't do what you've done?
+
+**Julia White:** We'd be in a bad place. We'd be in a bad place...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I agree, yeah.
+
+**Julia White:** These cloud services is where the world is going, it's unquestionable -- and because it's a better model. There's so much truth to it. I wanna make clear when I say that - we have a clear worldview about the cloud in Edge; we talk about hybrid cloud - intelligent cloud/intelligent edge is another flavor of that, essentially, where the edge is not just your data center, your edge is this distributed thing. So when I say the world is going to a cloud model, that means the approach, not necessarily every piece of code will sit on the public cloud.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. It's involved, yeah.
+
+**Julia White:** Yeah, but it is the center of this whole thing. So we would be in a really bad place, and it would be true for the Office franchise, as well as what we're doing on the Azure side of things, so... Absolutely essential. We would be in a sad, sad, sad decline.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Not number three in the world.
+
+**Julia White:** No. No, no. That was essential. Actually, we're doing a video for Terry Myerson's farewell, and I was thinking, "You shoved us, kicking and screaming, into public cloud. You had the cojones to do that, where a lot of us didn't."
+
+**Break:** \[30:26\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You're a corporate vice-president at Microsoft, which is one of the largest companies in the world... We're a budding media company. You're effectively looking at our company. There's more than just us...
+
+**Julia White:** It's impressive, it's impressive. \[laughs\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[31:49\] ...so I suspect we live very different lives. I'm thinking about your work life, what it means to be corporate vice-president, and I was just thinking you have to have worlds of insight into leadership, into getting things done, pushing the ball forward... Can you share with us stuff that you've learned through the years about how to inspire people to do what they're doing and how to push the ball forward at Microsoft?
+
+**Julia White:** We've all got an opinion, so I'm happy to give you mine, from the wisdom that I've gleaned over these years... First of all, as a leader I think authenticity is so core to everything, and I think other human beings smell bull\*\*\*t (can I say that?). I have a bit of potty mouth so I've gotta check myself. No, but human beings smell that; if you don't feel like that leader is being authentic and true to you, and brave, even though they don't know all the answers, people waver... So I think that's so, so important, staying super authentic to who you are and what you believe, and getting people to follow you and wanna work with you and be with you and take these crazy risks with you... So that's super essential.
+
+I think as a leader in tech particularly, you constantly have to be questioning everything you've done. Just because it worked last year doesn't mean it's gonna work next year... And that uncomfortable push of changing all the time. You know, human beings don't love change; it's caused us to survive all these years, being risk-averse... But that absolutely destroys you in technology, so having the willingness to be like "I know we did everything like that last year, but we're gonna change it all next year." Everyone's like, "Ugh...!", and there's so much resistance in the system...
+
+I remind myself constantly as a leader, like "Hey, a lot of resistance and a lot of pushback doesn't mean you're wrong. It just means you're driving change, and change is hard, and there's uncomfort to that, with all the people around you." So being bold and courageous in those moments of heightened resistance is still super important.
+
+I talk to teams on things like "Change doesn't feel good, but it doesn't mean it's wrong. You have to separate the discomfort and being wrong, and realize those are different things... So don't take that signal." A lot of times I'm like, "Hey, we've gotta drive this change, we've gotta move forward" and people are like "Everyone's upset about it", and I'm like "And you've still gotta go do it...! It doesn't matter." \[laughter\] There's good ways to do it and bad, but just know that that is the truth... And I think it took me a while earlier in my career, like "Oh, there's a lot of resistance... I must be wrong", and actually, no, it's the opposite often times.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** How can you detect that? Is it always in retrospect? How do you know when the resistance is because we're wrong, versus the resistance is because there's change?
+
+**Julia White:** Because you quickly become tone deaf if you're like "I'm always right, everyone's always wrong!" and I just jam my ideas on them.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Exactly, exactly!
+
+**Julia White:** So I think that combined with really truly listening... And listening with empathy, not just listening for what I wanna hear. Most people listen for what they want, and they remember that part...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, or just waiting for their chance to talk.
+
+**Julia White:** Yeah, or that. But Satya spent a lot of time on empathy, which to me has been so essential in my career... Really, really understanding -- when someone's saying "I hate your idea... Let me tell you why. I think you're totally wrong" and I'm like "Okay, I really wanna know."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's time to listen, yeah.
+
+**Julia White:** Like, "I don't wanna be wrong... Please, that's a gift. If you think I'm wrong, I wanna know why."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Welcome criticism.
+
+**Julia White:** Yeah, and listen... Really listen, and I really try and understand where they're coming from, and their condition of being, so I can say "You know what, from where you sit and the pressures you're under, and what motivates you and what people are expecting of you, your perspective makes a ton of sense. Now I really understand what your point of view is and I understand why you don't like what I'm doing." Then I can evaluate and say "Hey, there's real truth in there, that I have to listen to" or like "Gosh, that is a condition of being that would of course make you resistant to this. I get it. I get it."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Or is there other people that feel the same way? Is it systemic, across the team?
+
+**Julia White:** Right, right.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Do we need to pause and change on thing before we change several things?
+
+**Julia White:** Yeah, because sometimes your idea around how you're doing it is bad, right?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right, sometimes you need a minor course correction, but sometimes you need a change of directions, right?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Or even expectations...
+
+**Julia White:** Yes.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Clarity, expectation - those are things that often lead people in... You know, lack of clarity. Sometimes you need to circle back and "Here's the mission, here's why we're doing it. This is why it makes sense. I understand the circumstances, but this is the way we should move forward, and for these reasons."
+
+**Julia White:** Yeah, yeah. You know, we've done a bunch of research at Microsoft around decision-making, human condition, emotion, reaction, and actually we had a bunch of PhD's in brain sciences to help our leadership team in general get better...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[36:17\] Is that right? Awesome.
+
+**Julia White:** It's been fascinating.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You have a team of PhD's available to you to make decisions...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Julia White:** You know, it's nice...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Why not, right?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I love that.
+
+**Julia White:** There's a few upsides in being with a big company like ours, and that's one of them.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Can we borrow some of them?
+
+**Julia White:** And the leadership principles that have been laid out - they're so beautiful and they're so simple and they're so true... They are clarity - which you just spent time talking about - and energy, and business results. Those three things. Everything you do as a leader kind of comes down to that - can you create clarity about where you're going, why you're doing it, what's the purpose? Make people really understand it. Creating energy, meaning people wanna follow you, that people are in, they're putting their whole selves in this...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Enthusiasm, yeah.
+
+**Julia White:** They're with you, you're getting rid of the resistance... And then delivering the results, which then of course gives you the reward of like "Hey, let's do more of that." Every day, literally, I come to work and I'm like "Alright - clarity, energy, results. Clarity, energy, results." It's so simple, yet it's so incredibly effective.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I like that, Jerod. A lot. Clarity, energy, results.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I like that, too.
+
+**Julia White:** See? And you can remember it, too. It breaks it all down. Because there's like 65 wheels of leadership, blah-blah-blah; I can't remember that crap.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** "Give me three!"
+
+**Julia White:** Totally!
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I can operate on three.
+
+**Julia White:** Yeah, and if you can do a lot of other things, great, but those three are essential.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's interesting, we've spoken with you, we've spoken with Corey Sanders, and we also spoke with Steve Guggenheimer, upper leadership positions, and I can't speak to the results, but across all three of you what I've experienced in listening and just conversing with you is clarity for sure, energy is like the number one thing -- you know, there's a lean in, there's an excitement to all three of your guys' responses to these questions.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Definitely!
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So it manifests itself...
+
+**Julia White:** But of the three, I'm really the best...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yes, of course. \[laughs\]
+
+**Julia White:** Sure. Corey, you hear that? \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** On the playback. Listen, Corey.
+
+**Julia White:** And he's got the worst jokes; he wins there, but you know...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** If you can win for being the worst, I guess... \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What's a day like in your day?
+
+**Julia White:** Never the same, I would say. Where I spend my energy is essentially making sure that people have the right direction, and then I'm getting obstacles out of their way. Like, "This is where we've gotta go. What do we need to get it done?" And some days that I can sit down and write something or build something... But it's about making sure that the direction we have set is moving forward smoothly, whether that's reviewing something, or approving something, or authorizing something, or giving feedback, or tackling a blocker... That's kind of how I spend my time.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's fun, right? Tackling blockers...
+
+**Julia White:** It's not bad, it's not bad... \[laughs\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Sometimes that hurts... Sometimes it feels good...
+
+**Julia White:** You know, I was like "Sometimes I think I'm gonna get a glutton for punishment", but you know, it's how it works...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Can you give an example of maybe what a blocker might be and how you tackle it? Maybe a recent, fun one for you...
+
+**Julia White:** Let me think of a good one...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And how maybe it was strategic in leadership.
+
+**Julia White:** You know, it's super recent, so let me pick it, because it's super recent and on top of mind... So we announced here Project Kinect for Azure, basically bringing the technology that was in the Kinect Sensor that we launched with Xbox, and into the Hololens and now essentially connected it with Azure AI services to create a new, very intelligent edge with this incredible depth sensor. So we made the decision, we're gonna announce this, we're gonna do this thing, and we're gonna be part of the Azure family. Previously it was over in the Xbox team, and from the Xbox perspective they had sunsetted the product...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Julia White:** So there was this interesting thing of like those of us from the Azure side were like "Oh, it makes perfect sense. The intelligent edge is coming to fore, the IoT - there's so much incredible opportunity with this world-leading tech..."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** There's a lot of technology sitting in that thing, right?
+
+**Julia White:** \[40:03\] Yeah, like unbelievable, right? But then, if you were from the Xbox team, you just made the decision to end-of-life this thing, and now you're onto different pastures, and we work with people to move on. So there was this incredible resistance to this idea of how we do this, and why, and when, and was it gonna feel like we're just bringing something back, and all these things... So we really had to a) provide clarity of like "What is this about?" and "What you believed this tech was for before - it's about a whole new thing." Yes, it's the same tech, but a totally new use case, and a different approach, and a different way... So just getting everyone, kind of top-down, when everyone came up like "Oh my god, this is ridiculous, this is crazy!" Like, no, no, let me explain why it's not... I spent some time making sure they understand the vision for the future.
+
+And then also really listen to -- like, I didn't know the history, so I had to be like "What was this? Tell me. I don't wanna do the same things again. I don't wanna step into a big doo-doo."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** To know the history so as to not make the same mistakes. They repeat themselves.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Julia White:** And be sensitive to what history was, and make sure that when we talk about this thing, that people get it, and they don't be like "Oh, this is the same thing!"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Stomping on toes, and stuff like that... You don't wanna do that.
+
+**Julia White:** Yeah. So it was an area where I kind of dropped in with not a lot of information, but like the "Go get it done" kind of thing... So it was this intense moment of understanding, listening, driving, and making sure I was really hearing signal from noise, and like "That didn't matter, that does matter, that's relevant, that's not relevant... Go." So as an example...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So what does the future look like for that? ...for the Kinect on -- as an edge device, or as the way you're thinking about it now.
+
+**Julia White:** Yeah, I can't wait... I think it's amazing. Like, literally, the camera can be still and you can render like a 3D understanding of an object. If I think about -- whether it be retail, or healthcare, or manufacturing... So many different scenarios where suddenly what was just a camera, suddenly they're looking for a movement, they can suddenly actually see something completely different, and help people do more efficiently... Especially in healthcare, there's a lot of opportunities there.
+
+I mean, we're just early on this one, but wiring it up with our AI services, you're like "Man, this could be a game-changer."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So are you gonna sell it as an individual product, or are you gonna integrate this technology into new products?
+
+**Julia White:** We're actually looking at all options at this point. We have great tech, and we wanna get developers' hands on it, and work with it... I mean, again, a little bit of like, you know, new Microsoft culture... Like, "Let's start, let's put an idea out there. Let's try it, and let's see what unfolds", in terms of --
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And this is part of the open source announcement too, the IoT runtime.
+
+**Julia White:** So we open sourced our IoT Edge runtime, so people can take that and put it on all different kinds of devices, including this new Project Kinect for Azure... It's gonna be one of the places. But then what we can do with this incredible depth sensor that we have, in addition to those IoT and AI services - it just gives a new technology to the stack.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So we served you the softball on the differentiation question... Are there any other questions that we didn't ask that you've just been waiting for? You're like "I can't wait till they ask me about this, so I can answer that..." What didn't we ask you?
+
+**Julia White:** I actually expected you to ask more about this intelligent edge, and hybrid, and in that area... I don't know if that's as relevant -- it's more about build, and I don't know if that is relevant to your audience, though.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Go ahead and tell us about it, I mean...
+
+**Julia White:** You're like, "We'll find out..." Satya is a brilliant man, for real. Like, the real deal. And he has these ideas that are so deep and so long-term that sometimes people are like "I don't know what he said." \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** "Let's just follow him anyways..."
+
+**Julia White:** I'm sure it's right, but... But you know, the worldview that he's created, of intelligent cloud, intelligent edge, and he spent some time on this keynote talking about intelligent cloud, intelligent edge, and I've gotten a lot of questions like "Okay, so is that IoT? Does that mean hybrid? What exactly is that thing that he's talking about?" So I tried to break it down for folks... It literally is his point of view and a shared point of view that every application type that we build moving forward will be this combination of the technology that is the public cloud, and the technology like compute and data sitting on these edge nodes; and the edge nodes, if you think about it today, the biggest edge nodes are these giant data centers, or technologies running, and they're using the cloud, and most people call that hybrid.
+
+\[44:12\] But that data center is gonna evolve into a huge set of distributed connected devices, from cars to tiny little sensors in refrigerators and thermostats and that type of thing, and each one of those will hold application code, and will be running local processing, local compute and AI and make meaningful things, not just dumb sensors that ping back to the cloud, and just ping on a regular basis.
+
+So the edge is gonna become maybe just as powerful as a data center, but a far more distributed technology set... So how do we think about it as a developer, how do you think about "Okay, my world is gonna look like that, and every application is gonna have a cloud and edge component to it. How do I start thinking about that?" And the most obvious way that happens today is IoT. So we bring it right back to like "Okay, is IoT, is this a use case people can kind of get their head around today, right now, and understand it?" But I do believe that IoT and edge will converge over time into this -- just an example of what this intelligent edge looks like.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I thought we crossed this chasm of like application developers, web developers, to now not just delivering an application to, say, the web, and an application on a phone, or something like that... To now think like "Well, my device could actually include a drone, or a refrigerator, or the washing machine, or just various interesting things that may end up on somebody's plate. That's an interesting web developer to, say, a world developer.
+
+**Julia White:** Yeah, I like the way you put it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, a world developer... So I think I understand intelligent edge a little better now that you've explained it, because I'm likening it to kind of the move away from mainframes with dumb terminals, to more of a -- still a client-server model in the traditional sense, but now you have the fit clients, right? So the idea is our edge points - that button in your house, or that thing in your fridge is not going to be a sensor that's just sending data, which is what they've kind of been so far...
+
+**Julia White:** Yes, they've been dumb edges. Small and largely disconnected and not dumb edge.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right. So now the idea is like "Now let's actually move - similarly with fit client architecture - that intelligence into the edge." Of course, still the cloud is where the bulk of the work will be -- or maybe the source of truth is, but there's lots we can in these devices; of course, smartphones is the number one example of like a very fit client, a very smart edge.
+
+**Julia White:** Yes, absolutely.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's interesting. I didn't put that together...
+
+**Julia White:** See? It clicked.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I was like, the word "intelligent edge", I was just like "It's kind of just a buzz word", until now it makes sense.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, that makes sense.
+
+**Julia White:** Well, there's two things that are happening right now... What's sitting on the edge, when it is even connected, is kind of dumb. It's like "It's hot. It's cold. It's hot. It's cold. It's off. It's on." That's the amount of information being processed there and being connected with the cloud. But the potential there is gonna blow up fast in terms of what's possible and what we can run there.
+
+They showed a computer vision model running on that Raspberry Pi device - super simple example, but there's a lot more you can do.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[47:15\] Well, demos have to be somewhat simple to not fail in real time, right? \[laughter\]
+
+**Julia White:** It helps, too...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right, that helps. And also approachable...
+
+**Julia White:** Yeah, we really tried to put it in examples people could kind of get their head around... Because it is a different way to think about the world, so you have to -- you know, like, "Let me show you some ways we think about it", to kind of bring people along.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Well, Julia, thank you so much. I know we've got a hard stop here soon, so... It was a pleasure talking to you.
+
+**Julia White:** You guys as well!
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Thank you for sharing the back-stories... I personally love hearing those. I like to have the opportunity to talk to someone like you, to lean back to this issue... Like, Microsoft is a big part of my entire life, and so to kind of like even retrospect it back into my life, and see where this company is now, where it was then, and the process you took to get there.
+
+**Julia White:** Yeah. It's pretty amazing, but I love the -- in any maturation there's a lot of humble pie you eat along the way... But it makes you better, and I kind of love that about Microsoft. And I see other companies that are younger and they have a lot more hubris still, and I think "They're gonna figure it out..." But we have this unique wisdom that I feel fortunate to be part of.
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+**Jerod Santo:** Paul you're CTO and co-founder of WSO2, formerly with IBM, lecturer at the University of Oxford... You've got a lot going on, but you're here today to talk to me about Ballerina, which is a new programming language that makes it easy to write microservices that integrate APIs. First of all, welcome to The Changelog.
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** Thank you very much, Jerod. Nice to meet you.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Nice to meet you, too. Well, let's get to know you a little bit, Paul, and your background, and what brings you to be the CTO and co-founder of WSO2.
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** \[03:56\] I grew up a complete geek. I had a ZX80 as soon it came out, when I was 12; I badgered my parents. My birthday is just near Christmas, and I got them to buy me the computer as a joint birthday, Christmas and all my savings put together.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Now, do you get double presents around Christmas time because of that, or do you get a lack of presents?
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** I would always try and kind of wangle a big present. I would say "Look, I'm gonna join them together. Give me the best you can."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I like that angle. It seems to have worked.
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** Yeah, because otherwise you just end up with like a good one for your birthday, and then three weeks later they've got no ideas and they give you a useless one, so... So there we go.
+
+So I kind of grew up as a massive geek, and programming - I guess I've programmed in 20 different languages... And I ended up joining IBM kind of in the '90s, working on internet stuff, and security, firewall, a bit of web design... All sorts of kind of webby things.
+
+And then I joined a group just when dynamic web applications were first coming out, and people needed software... And we created some of the early software to do that, using Java around servlets, long before it was called web server express. And then I got into helping people build web systems... And just at the end of the '90s, beginning of 2000, I came across XML, and I suddenly started getting into distributed computing, and stuff... And integration, and how you connect different systems together. That led into something called service-oriented architecture.
+
+In 2005 I and another guy at IBM were really into SOA and web services and distributed systems, and we were building those at IBM and we realized that actually there was an opportunity to do something in open source, and to set up a company. So we set up WSO2 back in August 2005, so we are as of about two weeks ago officially teenagers; the company is 13 years old, so...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Congratulations!
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** It's kind of fun... I don't know what a teenage company is like; does it sulk in its bedroom? I don't know.
+
+And then we went from doing XML-based integration to REST and gRPC and event streams, and all sorts of fun stuff... And I guess that's where I am today.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So you've been in this game for a very long time. Just to give some context, that '05-'06 era - I was coming out of university, so I feel like I've been doing this for a while, but you got me dwarfed... I'm curious what keeps you interested, what makes you wake up in the morning and think "Technology", thinking about programming languages, and services meshes, and microservices? What's the kind of stuff that makes you wanna go to work still?
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** So I think what's really exciting is that pretty much everything is becoming a network-programmable endpoint. You can connect to so many different systems now through APIs, so many different Sass systems... You can build completely massive, powerful applications just by connecting other stuff together, and that kind of ability to program the world kind of really excites me.
+
+I'm also quite big into IoT. I took some time out of WSO2 to finish up my doctorate, and I was really focused on IoT privacy and security, and how to build systems where you can manage your own IoT devices.
+
+\[08:02\] This kind of explosion of endpoints, this explosion of things... And to me, what's exciting then is how easy can you make it to program all that, how easy can you make it to interact and program and do these powerful distributed things. I think that's really kind of fun.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Let's talk about WSO2 a little bit before we get into Ballerina. You said you're teenagers now... What does the company offer? Is it services, or contract, development? What's the kind of stuff that WSO2 does? I think that will help us understand Ballerina a little more when we start to dive into it.
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** It definitely will, because although it's quite different from what we've done before, it's evolved definitely from our background. WSO2 is a completely open source company; we're a software and development company... We build software products that customers use, and we have around 500 customers in all sorts of walks of life. We have customers like eBay, Fidelity, StubHub, if you're in Europe, we help the tax offices in the U.K. and France and Switzerland, which you may or may not like... Transport for London - it runs all the underground and buses in London, and we helped them build a system that manages all the road works and does real-time alerts to people about traffic throughout London.
+
+So it's fundamentally software products, but we do help those customers as well, so we have some consulting... But most of our revenue comes from selling a subscription to an open source product, so it's very much like Red Hat. The products are really -- we have four main products. The first three go together really clearly; the most popular product is our API management product. This is used by people like StubHub, Bank of New York, Mellon, Proximus... A whole bunch of customers, and they effectively offer remote network accessible APIs to their partners, to other developers, who can then build systems that connect through those APIs. We manage the security, we help build the portal for the developer to find out about it, we do things like policy management and analytics on those APIs.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Gotcha. I think that does speak a little bit to kind of the circumstances in which Ballerina rose out of, because it sounds like -- I mean, a lot of people who are writing programming languages, of course, they may have capitalistic interests in mind, but of course, they're probably solving problems that they have... Is that the case with Ballerina? It was something that you guys needed, so you decided "Let's build it"? Give us a little bit of background into that.
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** So the next thing that we also do is we help people actually integrate those systems - both internal systems, external systems, APIs, legacy software databases. The way we've traditionally done that is with something called an enterprise service bus; that's a piece of software that you configure with a graphical interface and an XML configuration language, and it helps link together your Salesforce, SAP, Oracle databases, RESTful APIs and XML services and so forth.
+
+\[11:50\] That's the second of our products, and it's the oldest of our products, really. It's a highly successful product; it's used by probably more than 300 out of those 500 customers... But it's definitely a challenge to developers, because although it's got a lot of capabilities, lots of power, it doesn't really fit into the kind of edit, build, deploy, test cycle that developers like to do. So that kind of rapid, agile development cycle doesn't really fit with this kind of enterprise service bus type software.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Because... Why?
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** It's a set of reasons. Firstly, they're quite big products, so they typically have a slow startup time. Our product is one of the quicker ones, but it still takes about a minute to boot it up. It doesn't fit that well into containers in Docker. We've done a lot of work and we've actually just released some improvements on that front, so we are still -- as well as doing Ballerina, we are still kind of tweaking and improving the ESB product... But that's a challenge.
+
+The fact that it has a graphical interface to design flows, which is backed by an XML syntax -- you know, certain people love graphical interfaces, kind of drag-and-drop, build my flow... But fundamentally, when you're a developer, you're most productive in Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ, Atom, VI, or whatever your favorite editor is. That's what makes you productive, and editing XML in there is not a nice experience. You want a language, you don't want an XML... And just because the XML has a graphical syntax, if you're a developer, it doesn't really fix it.
+
+So there's that, and also just -- there's things like type safety. One of the reasons developers have become really rockstars in the last ten years is because they're so productive and they do all these amazing things, and one of the reasons they do all these amazing things is because you have type checkers, you have all the compilation toolchain, and the unit test toolchain that helps you build a continuous integration pipeline... And then you're really rapid. If someone says "I wanna change this", you can change it and you can be sure that it's robust, because you've got all the tests, you've got all the type safety, all the compilation checks. So those things are really valuable, and they don't really exist in the world of an ESB.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, let me tell you a few things that stuck out to me about Ballerina as we get into the language a little bit, and maybe the genesis story of it, how long you've been working on it, what it is and that kind of stuff... There are a few things, and you mentioned them a little bit. You mentioned that the graphical interface of the XML configurator things aren't that impressive or interesting to developers.
+
+One thing that's very cool about Ballerina is you have textual AND graphical syntaxes, so it's kind of the best of both worlds. I thought that was very interesting. This idea that maybe this is the first, or one of the first cloud-native programming languages -- but a lot of the stuff when you talk about your ESBs in the system, that many of your customers are still using, I would assume the reason why it's not container-friendly and all these things is because, well, this pre-dates these technologies, or at least the proliferation of these technologies.
+
+So sometimes just starting fresh, even though it's tons of work to start fresh, and maybe it's not even a complete fresh start (we'll get into that), it allows for things that are just incredibly cumbersome, with older technologies.
+
+And then lastly, just the ambition. Anytime I see a new programming language, I think "This is an incredibly ambitious project", and that just impresses me. One thing I read just today - you guys have an article on The New Stack, and your CEO and I assume co-founder says that he envisions Ballerina replacing Java over the next decade. That's an incredibly ambitious thing to say and believe.
+
+\[16:19\] So these are a few things that caught my eye about Ballerina... But tell us about the start of this new programming language. You mention why it was needed, but even inside WSO2, was there arguments, was there a big decision? Was there a meeting that had to take place, or were you coding this on the side? How did it get started?
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** I think all your points are really valid, and they're really interesting. I'll come back to the replacing Java... \[laughter\] So Sanjiva, my co-founder, is much more bullish than I am. I'm very English and reserved, and I would never say that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, I liked that level of ambition, even if it's misplaced. I appreciate that he's thinking it big.
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** No, I think there's a difference between expectations and ambitions. The ambition to do that is one thing. The expectation is another. In other words, having the ambition to say "Actually, we wanna create something that could replace this, that has that capability, that has that power, that has that ability" - I think you need that when you are starting a new language; you have to have a big vision.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. Otherwise why go through it all, right?
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** Exactly. On the other hand, to say "I expect it" - that's a different thing.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay, fair enough.
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** I'm more pessimistic than that. But I kind of -- you know, just for a second let's diverge from all the questions you've asked and just talk about... You know, Java, for example, is used in lots of scenarios, but there are increasingly -- it's really ended up as a server-side language. And on the server-side, increasingly people are writing applications that are not just standalone applications that talk to a database; they're all talking to SaaS endpoints, to other APIs, they're writing microservices.
+
+If you fast-forward 5-10 years, you can say "Well, what is Java gonna be used for mainly?" Pretty much all new programs I think will be writing sort of glue logic between network services. So in that sense, if you see where the world is moving and you look at that point, and you say "Well, if we can do that better, and we can create a language that really targets that, then maybe it's not gonna replace all of Java, but maybe those key -- maybe that particular use case you can see that this new language..." There's an opportunity, let's say, for a language to be the one that is used to do that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Fair enough.
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** So back to "How did this start?" Well, this started by -- honestly, we wrote this ESB product I talked about... It was in production ten years ago, and over the last ten years we've probably had about 40 meetings where we tried to say "Look, we did this... How can we do it better? How can we make a better ESB configuration model? How can we improve it? How can we write ESB version 2, the next big one?" and in all of those meetings we never really succeeded, because that model, that idea was to still have this configuration language, and every time you have a configuration language, you kind of end up with problems, and this lack of agility.
+
+\[20:16\] About three years ago, Sanjiva, the CEO and co-founder, he just said "Look, why don't we just write a language?" and that was kind of like a massive moment of truth. And the other thing that I think really influenced it, another really interesting aspect of this is he talked about the graphical syntax. The graphical syntax of most ESBs is sort of a flow, it's like a pipeline, with occasionally divergence. But when we actually sat down to build systems with customers, the pictures we ended up drawing the most, the ones we always drew, the mental images we'd have of these distributed systems was always a sequence diagram, where you have the columns, these lines coming down which represent different parts of the system, different entities, and then you draw the lines between them that capture the interactions between them.
+
+So the other real inspiration here was to say "What if we used a sequence diagram as the kind of inspiration for a programming language?" That's kind of a weird thought, but it has real implications for the concurrency model, for how you manage workers and independent parties, how you think about services and endpoints... So that really kind of gave Ballerina kind of an amazing foundation to say, "Well, actually, we have a model for the language that's actually a sequence." That's something you've just mentioned - any Ballerina program, you can say "Show me what the sequence diagram is", and automatically we can draw that sequence diagram of the interactions that are happening between different parties.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That does sound very cool and innovative. Is there prior art, or is there anybody else that was doing this? One of the things I appreciated about -- maybe it was a blog post, or maybe it was on the Ballerina website, which all these things are linked up in the notes for those curious... It was that all your influences - and I love when people who are creating new technologies aren't doing it in a bubble, and you're thinking "Java, Go, C, C++, Rust, Haskell...", all these languages, which... You kind of have to have a breadth of knowledge in order to write a new language, so I'm curious if that particular aspect, which sounds foundational and very differentiating, of having these diagrams built right in or as a foundational part of the system - has anybody else done that before? Is this a first?
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** The only thing - and it's sort of an oblique aspect - is that there's this website called WebSequenceDiagrams; it's not a programming language, but it's for drawing sequence diagrams... And there's actually some Eclipse plugins and some other tools that do the same thing. There's something called PlantUML that does the same thing, but in open source.
+
+With this website what's really nice is you don't draw the sequence diagram. What people have done for 20 years is pull up Visio or PowerPoint or CorelDRAW or something and physically lay out the lines, and everything. With web sequence diagrams you write a text, you program, you type a little definition of the sequence patent between the different parties, and it draws the diagram for you.
+
+\[24:08\] We sat in meetings doing this, and I think somehow behind the scenes this may have influenced the idea that maybe you could write a programming language on a sequence diagram. It's not the same thing, but I think there's a bit of a leap from one to the other... Or a massive leap; I'm not trying to say it's not a big leap, but... Maybe that inspiration came a bit from that.
+
+**Break:** \[24:43\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So a few years back, Sanjiva said "Let's just make a programming language." What happens after that? Because to me, that's where my brain just explodes. When you decide "We're gonna do this", where do you go from there? What's the first step?
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** You know, we have an unusual company, which is that we are now around 500 people, we've taken multiple rounds of venture capital funding, but none for a couple of years now; we're cashflow-positive. So we have very happy customers, who give us repeat business, and we're growing pretty strongly... So as a result, we have some spare capacity. What WSO2 did was just stick a couple of smart people off on the side, prototyping, going through little iterations, "What does this language look like?"
+
+That's a luxury that I guess not many companies have, but it was a nice luxury for us to have. We were small enough to have a very clear focus, but big enough to have the ability to do this kind of work on the side.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Effectively, like an R&D budget. That would be the equivalent.
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** Yeah. I mean, obviously, we have a kind of more normal R&D budget, which is about improving our existing products and investing in those, and we have a small research team that writes a few papers and does some sort of longer-term research, but this was a sort of -- yeah, it's part of the R&D budget, but a kind of little aside...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Like a skunkworks, but a bigger play... Like trying to hit a home run.
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** Yeah, exactly.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So were you one of those people? I mean, CTO - probably not. You've probably got other things to do.
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** I wasn't one of these people, and I regret that. I regret that. But you know, even sort of being a side player on this has been really fun. I don't take a lot of credit for this. I'm just the mouthpiece that gets to talk about it, really... But it's still an exciting initiative, and it's kind of really exciting for me, because I always -- you know, I love programming; I really am not a great programmer, to be honest. I shouldn't be telling you that \[laughter\].
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[28:16\] Why not?
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** I'm not a great programmer, but I love programming; I just adore it. And I said how annoying that XML syntax and the ESB stuff is - I like hacking on that; I like hacking on XML stuff. And you mentioned earlier that I teach... I teach some courses at Oxford University, and one of the courses I teach is on service-oriented architecture, and of course, as part of that, we do all sorts of things... We use Spring Boot and JAS-RX and all kinds of Java, and Node.js, and Python, HTTP stuff... And we would do an ESB example and show people what that's' like (that's part of the course), and the last couple of times I've run it, I've replaced the old ESB example with a Ballerina example... And a lab exercise that used to take people about two hours and lots of struggling, and kind of like "I don't get this", with Ballerina they just finished it off in between 30 and 40 minutes, and they get it instantly, and they love it. That kind of joy of programming, but doing kind of complex distributed stuff in a really easy way is quite liberating, it's quite kind of enlightening.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, in my mind I stopped at "You're not a great programmer." You just stopped me dead in my tracks; I'm thinking "What makes a great programmer and why aren't you one?" and then I heard you say you like hacking on XML files, and I thought "Okay, maybe he's not such a great programmer." \[laughter\] Just kidding.
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** I love creating stuff, Jerod. I love creating stuff, and anytime I can create something that does something, then that gives me a buzz. It's the best. And if I have to use an XML file or I have to pipe together some UNIX commands into a kind of ugly thing... I've written Perl before; I'm not proud of it, but I've done it... Anything that actually makes something work and does something, to me is an achievement, it's a thing.
+
+So what makes me not a programmer is that buzz I get from making it work the first time.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, you don't wanna make it better... You don't wanna make it resilient.
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** I don't wanna fix all the bugs, and handle all the error cases, and document it... I wanna move on. So once it works, I'm happy.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Here's the secret - nobody wants to do that work, but...
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** I know, I know.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** ...somebody has to. The great programmers, they realize "If I don't this, it is only gonna work right now; it's not gonna work later."
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** Do you have kids, Joe?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I do.
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** Excellent. I once wrote a blog years ago about - it's probably still somewhere on the web - how before my first child was born I was really focused on the birth, getting this kid... And the birth is kind of difficult and tricky and whatever, but it was fine; she was born, she was fine, she was a perfectly healthy baby. And then we got her home, and then I realized that that was the wrong thing to focus on. It was the maintenance of Anna -- not the launch of Anna 1.0, but the maintenance of the project that was the challenge. \[laughs\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[31:56\] Yeah. It's the same way with marriage. So many people focus on their wedding at first... I mean, that's the first thing you do, so of course it's a big focus, but... So much emphasis on the wedding, and the planning, and the cost, and where it's gonna be, and who you're gonna invite, and it has to be perfect, and this and that and the other thing. And then they don't realize that the wedding is not the marriage. The wedding is merely the first day of the marriage.
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** It's day one, exactly.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** The marriage comes after the wedding, and it's way harder and way more important, but... Yeah, we tend to focus on beginnings, that's for sure.
+
+Okay, so let's loop back in, somehow... There's no good segue back to where we were, but we were talking about Ballerina, and we talked about its influences a little bit, we talked about its genesis... You had R&D budget, you had even this skunkworks budget, a couple people working on it to figure out things, like "What's it gonna look like?" Of course, we have this great idea of the graphical diagram-based underpinnings, but what are the language influences? What does it look like? What came out of it? Let's talk about the language, its features, and give me the nitty-gritty of what Ballerina is all about.
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** It looks sort of similar to Java and JavaScript, because it has curly braces, and that sort of thing going on. So it's not too dissimilar to C\#, and so forth. The type system is a little bit more like a functional type system. The type system has what's known as a union type system. I can say "string or xml or error response =", and you now, in a lot of languages you would have to create a wrapping object in order to do that... But in this, you can just say "this could be a string, it could be an xml, or it could be an error."
+
+Actually, that's very reminiscent of what you actually get over the network; sometimes you might be talking to an old XML service, but there's some proxy server or gateway in the way, and when the proxy server sees a failure, then it sends back a text message; when the network has a failure, then you get a local error, and when it all works, you get an XML. So those kind of union types are there.
+
+It's a strongly typed language. Although it has type inference, so you can "var response =" and the compiler will work out that it could be a string, an xml or an error, but it does validate all the types.
+
+The other thing that's really interesting is that null is not a part of -- things like strings and ints cannot be nulls. So there is a null, but you have to say it's a string or a null. So it explicitly makes you handle nulls separately from normal values, and you have to deal with them. So it's deliberately forcing you to firstly say "Well, this could be a null, or it couldn't, and if it can be a null, then..."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Deal with it.
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** ...deal with it. So in a way, that's encouraging you to say -- you know, most of the time where things are nulls, it's usually not true; it's an error, or it's a value.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** So in other words, it's just as easy to deal with an error as it is to deal with a null, so there's no point in using a null, if you see what I mean... So that's a really nice aspect.
+
+\[35:46\] And the concurrency model is based on communicating workers. This has some similarity to Go and the goroutines. They're based on CSP, which is a mathematical concept. In Go the channels have names; in other words, you have name channels. In Ballerina, the name is implicit, so you have a channel between two workers, and the name between those workers is really implicitly based on the two workers... But it's similar to that, you have these sort of channels between workers for communication.
+
+So those are some of the things that look like other languages, and it has imports, and it has a main function... But then there's some things that don't look anything like other languages. Firstly, a lot of programs don't have a main. They aren't really a "I start up, I do something, and then I exit." A lot of programs these days are providing a service; it just sits there and waits, and then gets called over the network by gRPC, or Kafka, or HTTP, of course...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** So a service is a first-class citizen in Ballerina. A program can have a main or a service. It can just say "I'm not a main, I have a service, and that's what I do - I wait for people to call me."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And does that service imply a network service? Like, sitting on some sort of port, a TCP service?
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** It does.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay.
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** It does imply some kind of network service... So that's kind of implicit. You've got some kind of endpoint there... An endpoint is another thing that's a first-class citizen of the language. So whenever you talk, whenever you listen for other people to call you, or whether you talk to others, there's an endpoint defined, and that's a key part of the language... Because here's how that's interesting, which is that there's a syntactic difference in the language between when you call an endpoint and when you call a local object.
+
+When you call a local object, like in most languages, you \[38:15\] but when you call a remote endpoint, there's a little arrow, and you say "I want to send a message to this HTTP client endpoint, this HTTP server over there", and I go \[38:34\]
+
+There's two things about this. One is it's giving the programmer a visual difference between distributed local calls, and I think that's -- you know, there has a lot been written about the fallacies of distributed programming, but it comes down to this, that distributed programming is not the same as local programming. So seeing that right there in front of you, "Hey, I'm making a remote call. At this point I have to now be aware of network errors, I have to be aware of load balancing, circuit-breaking discovery", all the kinds of things that happen when you do distributed computing... It's a pretty important thing.
+
+The other thing is that under the covers, we do everything in an async way. One of the challenges with building these network systems is "What do I do while I'm waiting for this web server across the internet to respond? Do I block a thread? Do I sit waiting, or do I do it in an async, non-blocking way?" and every time you use that arrow to call a remote endpoint, we under the covers are doing non-blocking I/O, but you don't have to worry about that in the language.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[40:01\] Nice.
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** So if you're writing Node.js, you use callbacks, and I know there's a lot of great libraries in Node.js to make that better, but the fundamental model is quite difficult for developers, to kind of keep track of all these callbacks, and so forth.
+
+I know this from the first time, because I wrote a lot of the code for my PhD thesis in Node, and literally a few months later I went back and looked at it and I was like, "Oh my god, what was I doing?" I mean, it all works fine, but I have no idea how.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Sure.
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** So this kind of takes care of that. In other languages, the default is to be blocking, and then if you want to do non-blocking async I/O, you have to go find all kinds of clever libraries and packages, and learn a new programming model. In Ballerina, it just happens under the covers, because we've kind of designed this to build network services and talk to network services out of the box.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's really cool. I wanna go back to the arrow versus the dot in terms of -- what we call the remote procedure call versus a local procedure call... It seems like a -- as a developer, I don't wanna know the difference. There's this idea of uniform access pattern, so you're kind of violating that... I understand the reasons why; it's like, the distributed world is worse than we hope it would be, and we just want you to be aware of this, but isn't it -- I guess maybe in a perfect world (or in a better world) wouldn't I not have to know? Because like you said, you're going async in the background for me anyways, and I don't have to program in an asynchronous fashion, so... It seems like it'd be nice if there was a language that just papered over that, and yeah, if there are networking problems, it has to deal with it, but I don't have to deal with it. Is that just a pipedream, or...?
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** So we were discussing how long we've been doing this...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** We've been talking about making distributed computing seem transparent for 20 years. I remember going to the launch of a system called DCE (Distributed Computing Environment). I still have a mug at home, a beautiful mug that I got given at the launch of DCE... This was maybe -- this was before I joined IBM, so this must have been 1993 or 1992, and they were trying to do that then... And we haven't succeeded yet. So we kind of have come to the conclusion that you just can't paper over it, and it's better to just say "Look, this is local, this is distributed, and be aware of it."
+
+Now, we can make life as easy as possible for you, and we have done a lot of things in the language to help deal with those sort of problems, but I don't think you can solve that. I don't think you can say that these two things are identical and you have uniform access.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, I'll just defer to your experience. \[laughs\]
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** You know, I never say never, but certainly it seems to be more effective to kind of admit that this is a remote part of the call, and this is what we're doing.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I think that's fair. I think when it comes to readability, going back to code and reading it, I think in that case explicit is better than implicit, and so saying "Yeah, it's an arrow; I know for sure this is going over the network", versus "I don't know, let's go check the method that you're calling and see if it's a service, or see if it's a local thing.
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** Yeah, so go back to that sequence diagram - you have these different parties communicating, and you have this arrow that says "Hey, I'm talking across boundaries between you." So it's very reminiscent -- I mean, I know we draw the sequence diagram from it, but it's also very reminiscent in the text as well of what's going on here.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very cool. That makes a lot of sense. Alright, moving forward, what else have you got in terms of unique bits, or design decisions? Something that makes Ballerina stand out from the crowd.
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** \[44:12\] I think that those core things are really important. The other things we've done that are kind of nice, that some of them are unique, some of them are similar -- if you look at things like C\#, they have this thing called LINQ, which is Language Integrated Query... It's basically, instead of using SQL, you sort of jump into -- you have a real program syntax that is reminiscent of SQL, and it allows you to code queries.
+
+So we have the concept of a table in the language; effectively, you say "I have a record structure, and a table as a set of rows of that record structure", and you can query that table. That table can be backed by a real SQL database, or it could just be in memory. That's just like C\#'s stuff, but it's very nice. I'm not saying it's great - it's really cool, and it makes you very productive.
+
+But then something that we've taken and done that I don't think anyone has done in that way is that we have -- one of the things you often do in distributed systems is you start looking at events and you start trying to process those events... And if you're just processing one event at a time, then that's kind of a service. But you start thinking, "Well, actually I want to know what's happening to these events over time..."
+
+A classic example is I'm maybe trying to spot someone trying to break into my system, or trying to build a fake app, or something... And what I see is I see multiple logins from the same IP address, happening within a certain period of time. So now I'm not just looking at individual events, I'm kind of saying "Well, what happened in the last 10 seconds? Did I see that?"
+
+So we've built that concept of a stream right into the language, and the language-integrated query allows you to query across time as well, across those events. So you can really quickly and simply say "If I see the same IP address sending a login request over the next 10 minutes, then we're gonna send an alert out, or disable that IP address."
+
+So that's one aspect I think is really cool. Another one that I think is really important that I haven't really come across is that we're trying to really build security right into the language, in a way that I haven't seen before.
+
+There's two aspects of security and distributed systems that are kind of difficult. One is identity. Most people nowadays have moved to kind of trying to use token-based systems for identity across distributed systems, so things like OAuth tokens are very common. Google, Facebook, GitHub - everyone uses them all the time. But typically, that kind of identity model and the idea that I might say "Well, okay, I've got a request coming in. It's got an identity attached to it" - it's something that's handled through some libraries, or whatever... So we've built that right into the concept... The concept of identity of callers, and we're actually building the identity of the service itself into the language. That's some research we're doing right now around a standard called SPIFFE. We're kind of trying to build the identity of the service itself into the language.
+
+\[48:06\] But then the second thing that's a big problem in distributed systems is basically spoofing, and tainted data, and injection attacks. That's another big challenge, and we've built that kind of concept right into the language, as well. When you receive data over a network socket into Ballerina, we automatically realize that that is potentially tainted, and the taint analysis is part of the compiler and the compiler checks. So effectively, you as a developer - your code won't compile if there's potentially a SQL injection attack here... Because unless you've actually cleaned that data and validated it's not tainted, we won't let you use it somewhere where it's dangerous.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I'm just over here looking at your "Try the language with Ballerina by Example" on the Philosophy page... Because one thing that I think of with a new language -- you're just demonstrating how much you guys have already accomplished, and you always think "Well, it's brand new, or it's a few years old; surely there's a lot of missing pieces, or there's things that I cannot do", and I'm sure there are things that are missing, but I look at the list of things that are accomplishable, I'm just looking at your security section - like you mentioned, the taint checking, Secured Service with JWT, Basic Auth, OAuth2, you've got Swagger stuff, gRPC... I mean, it goes on and on. Testing built right in... What's not there yet? What's glaringly obvious? What are you trying to get to, or what am I missing here?
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** So before I answer what's not there, I wanna make a really interesting point, which is that effectively, we've spent kind of ten years building middleware, and we have these products, and they're kind of big products... We always were proud that our products were a fraction of the size of Oracle's and IBM's equivalents. So what we would ship in a 200 MB download or a 300 MB download would be what they would ship on a DVD, because it was so big you wouldn't wanna download it.
+
+Effectively, we've kind of built pretty much everything our products do into a language. Effectively, we've taken what was four products, four big products, each a few hundred meg of download, and a lot of complexity and so forth, and put it into just a language. So it's kind of mind-blowing, in a way, and one way of looking at this is to say -- this is a way of sort of saying "Well, you don't need middleware." Middleware is a set of these servers that do stuff. You just need the right language to do things.
+
+So I guess what I'm saying is it's remarkably productive what you can do once you have a compiler and once you've built up a certain level of maturity of the language... And with the right vision, it became quite quick and effective to do a lot of these things you're talking about.
+
+So what's missing? You know, I don't think there's anything really major missing. I mean, there are certainly things that are in our to-do list, and we haven't declared the language 1.0 yet, so it's still morphing.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** The actual runtime is very stable. If you wanna build something today, we're pretty confident that you can build a production system with it today. What we're not confident is that if you build a production system, you find it won't compile the next revision, because we're still tweaking the language a little bit.
+
+So I think we want to get to the point where we think this is really a robust, resilient foundation for the future, and we're not quite there yet. Every time you make a nice tweak and you tidy it up a bit, you think "Well, hey, what if we did that there?"
+
+\[52:12\] The union type system that I was talking about earlier - a really good example of this is when you have JSON and XML built in. Now, you can just think of JSON as being a union of different things. JSON is either a string, or an int, or an array, or another JSON. So we put in this union type system and we're like "Oh, we could rebuild our JSON support just as a union type of other stuff."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** So there's definitely things we're doing there. I don't think there's anything really major that's missing. Maybe it's because it's late at night and I've forgot some massive thing that's on our to-do list, that we should be doing... \[laughter\] I should say we're recording this across timezones, so it's early in one timezone and late in another. But no, I don't think there's anything really major missing, but there certainly is a lot of kind of tidying up.
+
+I guess the one thing I would say that is not there yet is the standard library. For example, we haven't got the ability to do complex sorts of strings. We have arrays and records and maps and tuples, but we don't have list objects. So some of the sort of things you'd expect to be in a standard library aren't quite there yet. Now, that's not really the core of the language, but obviously, they do need to be added.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** So getting the standard library really up to the spec of the C standard library or the Java standard library is gonna still take a little bit of time.
+
+**Break:** \[54:06\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So as you mentioned, Ballerina - not quite a 1.0, but still very feature-complete, very useful, downloadable now, available for Linux, MacOS and Windows... Tell us what it's like using Ballerina building something from scratch. Take us maybe from like, I'm hitting the Download button on Ballerina.io, to I've written a simple service and I've somehow deployed this into a cloud, or into a production environment.
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** Yeah, okay. So the download comes in really four major flavors. There's, as you said, Linux, Mac, Windows, and there's a Zip file. Now, there is one thing that -- you asked me just before the break what's missing... So at the moment, we've built Ballerina in kind of an interesting way; we've built a bytecode specifically for Ballerina, and a bytecode interpreter, the Ballerina virtual machine, that interprets that bytecode.
+
+That's the same way C\# is written, the same way Java is written, and a whole bunch of other languages. Now, that bytecode interpreter is built on top of the JVM, so at the moment, you need to have Java running in order to run it. So you don't see the Java, the Java is not visible and you can't call Java libraries. This is not like Scala, where it's kind of a mixture between Java and a different language. This is really a clean separation, because it's got a different type system, a different threading model, a different worker model, different concurrency, and so forth.
+
+One of our big goals is to completely rewrite that Ballerina virtual machine on top of LLVM. So at that point, this will generate native code. Today it generates what we call a .balx file, which is the Ballerina bytecode.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Gotcha.
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** But in the future, the LLVM will help you generate native code for your particular Linux, MacOS system. So just explaining that - when you download this, the download includes the JVM; we embed the JVM into that Linux, Mac and Windows distribution. There's also a Zip file which is a bit smaller if you already have a JVM, so you can just download it and run it on top of your existing JVM.
+
+So you download it and you start writing code, and there's a simple command line, Ballerina Build. Our extension is a .bal file, so you then build that; that creates the .balx, and then you do a Ballerina Run and point to the .balx, and that runs it.
+
+So it's kind of a bit like, you know, you have the Java compiler and the Java runtime, or you have a Go compiler... It's very similar to most programming languages. Now, I would recommend, if you are downloading this and trying it out, that you also download a plugin for your favorite IDE.
+
+So we have IntelliJ and Visual Studio Code - those are probably the two best plugins, the most feature-complete. I personally use Visual Studio Code. So that gives you all the kind of tab completion that's going on, and it has syntax checking within it; if you've made a syntax error and there's gonna be a compilation error, then it will tell you in your code editor by underlining it.
+
+\[01:00:04.13\] So from my point of view, if you were gonna try and get started with this, I would download the Ballerina distro and I would install the Visual Studio or IntelliJ plugin. Now, those are both in the respective repositories, so if you start editing a .bal file with Visual Studio Code, it will say "Hey, we have something in the marketplace to help you" and you can go and install it. If you start up IntelliJ and go to Settings, there's a plugin, and then there's a plugin repository on the internet and you can find it there. So you don't have to download anything for that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So let's say I've done all that and I'm loving this new little Ballerina service that I've written, and I want to make it a production-deployed thing.
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** Excellent. So let's suppose you wanna deploy into Kubernetes.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay.
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** That's gonna mean you're gonna need to build an image, a Docker file, and you're gonna have to create deployment YAMLs and service YAMLs and all sorts of stuff to say "This is how it deploys, this is the endpoints and the ports it listens on, here's the config files it needs" and so forth. So in Ballerina, what we've done so far for Docker and for Kubernetes - and we're looking at other orchestration systems as well... But let's say Kubernetes...
+
+So let's say you've written an HTTP service. So it's sitting there, it's gonna listen for requests on a network port... So you have - as I said before, and it's hard to visualize this, because we're just talking, but you have an endpoint definition that says "I'm listing on port 8080" and I have a service definition that says what happens when a request comes into that port... So you can actually use some annotations in the language. In your .bal file - you have this one .bal file, you have an annotation in there, and you say "I want this to be a Kubernetes deployment." You give it an image name, you give it a service name, and if you need a config map to parse some config file to that, you put that in there... Now when you type "ballerina build", it doesn't just build the bytecode, it actually creates those deployment YAMLs for you; it creates the Docker file, and it will even push it to registry as part of that build process.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Nice.
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** And at the end of the compilation step it says if you type "kubectl apply -f" and it gives you the directory, that will deploy this into your Kubernetes... And bingo - you try it out and it does it.
+
+One of the kind of aspects of this is we've really tried to make it the concept of we've clearly defined what maps into a container, how do you build that container, how do you deploy that container right into the language?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** The last thing I'd like to chat about before I let you go, Paul, is the community side of Ballerina. This is a fully open source Apache 2.0 licensed thing; you've recently had a Ballerina Conference (the first one, I believe) and you seem to be really trying hard to build not just a programming language that happens to be open source, but it appears to be one of those fully open sourced things, where it embraces the ecosystem.
+
+Can you tell us about Ballerina's community? Where it is, what you're trying to build there, and kind of the angle that you guys take at -- not just WSO2 building Ballerina, but a group of people building it.
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** \[01:03:56.22\] This is really key to us. We've obviously put some significant effort into creating a language, but we are very keen that this takes on a life of its own and develops that community. As you say, it's all in GitHub; we've got more than a thousand stars already, and hundreds of people forking it. We've got a very active Slack channel. I would say it's a small group getting into this, but there's certainly a real excitement about it that's built since we launched this in May.
+
+And we have the Ballerina Conference, as you say, in San Francisco and online... We had, I think, 150-200 people coming over the web to participate, and a similar number in-person in the room, so that was really exciting... As well as really wanting this contribution to the core language, we've done an awful lot of things to try and create contribution around the language as well, so let me just talk about some of those...
+
+Firstly, one of the things we did from day one with Ballerina was to build a package management solution, like npm or Pip or Maven. The package management is built right into the language, and there's a website, central.ballerina.io, where you can go and -- so when you build a package in Ballerina, you can just type "ballerina push", you sign in with your GitHub or Google ID and you get a name in Ballerina Central... So you can start creating connectors to different systems, new libraries and so forth, and that's a really key part of our aim - to create a whole environment and an ecosystem of "How do you connect to the world?"
+
+Going back to how we started this, the idea that everything is becoming integration, that every program anyone writes is now gonna talk to remote systems - the logical conclusion of that is that there's gonna be billions and trillions of endpoints, there's gonna be hundreds of thousands and millions of different types of endpoints, and the only way to solve that problem, to let you program all those endpoints easily, is to crowdsource this, to have the community, to have an ecosystem of people saying "Hey, I learned how to talk to Twilio from Ballerina. I'm gonna push that in the wrapper, and anyone else can find it and use it." That's a really big aspect.
+
+Another really interesting thing we've done is - you know I explained about those Kubernetes and Docker annotations that build those artifacts as part of compile time... Those are actually done in a completely open way, so anyone can actually extend the compilation using annotations, and can write a plugin that will actually change the way the compilation happens, or create new artifacts out of compilation. That's really cool.
+
+I guess what I'm trying to say is we're really trying to make it open, not just the core language, but the way that you can extend the language, the way that language can fit into this ecosystem of APIs and cloud systems. It's really vital to us that anyone can help extend it as well.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[01:07:49.21\] Yeah, just checking Ballerina Central as you talk here, it looks like there's connectors for Twitter, Gmail, Twilio, GitHub... A lot of these are WSO2 packages, but there's also a lot of community packages; Amazon EC2, S3, these are all third-party packages. So people are definitely getting involved... What's the best way for the listeners out there who are interested in Ballerina? Obviously, we have all the links in the show notes, so Ballerina.io, the Downloads page... You can just go read about it. But specifically on the community side, what's your call-to-action on the community? Is it join the Slack channel? Is it come on GitHub issues and participate there? What's the best inroad for people to get involved in Ballerina?
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** I would say the first point is just to join the Slack channel... Because there's channels there for users, as well as people who wanna get into the language design. I think the second one is that if you raise an issue on GitHub, that's always really valuable for us to improve the product, improve the language; that's always brilliant. And then if you're really into this language and you wanna participate in the discussions around the language itself, then there's a Ballerina dev group on Google Groups, which is where all that discussion happens; all the design happens in the open.
+
+The way we do it is we basically create open Google Docs, and we use them to document the specs, and then we have the discussions around those Google Docs in the Ballerina Dev Google Group. So those three things are sort of like incremental stages of involvement. Number one - start chatting to us on Slack, ask questions. Number two - get involved in raising issues on GitHub, and number three is actually join the core development channel and start discussing the language design there.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very good. All the links are in the notes, for those interested. Paul, thanks so much for joining us. Hey, any last words before I let you go? I know it's getting late there... Anything you'd like to say as we close the show?
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** No, I think this has been a really useful discussion, it's been really engaging. We certainly will be making announcements; we're gonna do more Ballerina days. We did the one in San Francisco, we did one in Asia, that actually was so over-subscribed we had to run a second day to repeat it...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Nice.
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** So we're gonna be doing more of those, so keep an eye out on Ballerina.io. And the other thing I guess I'd like to say is that we do run regular webinars from the Ballerina team often with other partners, talking about how we fit into build systems like Codefresh, into observability like Jaeger and Prometheus and Honeycomb, into all sorts of stuff... So come along and sign up to our mailing list and you'll get notifications for all those.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very good. Well, this has been a joy, Paul. Thanks so much for joining us.
+
+**Paul Fremantle:** Thank you, Jerod. It's been a great pleasure.
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+**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's kind of give an intro to both of you. You're both well-known, but we're gonna start with you - give a back-story of who you are to Kubernetes, so to speak.
+
+**Brendan Burns:** Sure. So I am one of the original creators of Kubernetes, one of the people who wrote the original prototype that sort of was the pitch vehicle that got everybody involved in saying that we should do this and started to set the ground rules for the project, and been involved from the beginning, sitting on the IRC channel, talking to people, going out to conferences and meetups and king of hitting the pavement for a long time, to kind of drum up a lot of interest...
+
+You know, I look around at this conference and there's a lot of really interested people, and it wasn't very long ago that I had a lot of people asking me why the heck they should be interested in this thing... So it's an interesting turnaround.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** How long ago was that point of view?
+
+**Brendan Burns:** I don't know, it depends--
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Two years, three...?
+
+**Brendan Burns:** \[03:42\] Certainly two years ago, but even a year, a year and a half ago I think you ran into people who were still -- and then obviously still, throughout, there's a lot of people who haven't necessarily... If their thing is working for them, that's great, there's don't need to change. But definitely early on there was a lot of... I think people were just sort of still kind of getting used to the cloud and virtual machines and traditional tools like Chef and Puppet, and all of the sudden all this new stuff -- it's like, "Oh, I have to learn all this new stuff? What am I gonna do there?"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha.
+
+**Brendan Burns:** That was an interesting time, doing a bunch of meetups. It was a lot of fun though. It was a lot of fun to get out of your shell and go and meet with a bunch of different people from different places, different experiences, get to know them and get to know the kind of products they want you to build.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So for the listener's sake, it's safe to say that you've been here since the beginning.
+
+**Brendan Burns:** Yeah, I would say I've been here since the beginning. I think a lot of the technology stretches back further than that...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Because it's from experience, inside of Google...
+
+**Brendan Burns:** It's from stuff that's been in the Linux Kernel since 2008, and work that's been done on the Linux Kernel... And even further back. I did this talk a while back about sort of like the history, and you can point back to chroots in UNIX in the late 1970's as sort of being the beginning of containers. It's important to point back and know that this is not an original idea; this is a collection of tools that have put together a lot of different ideas that people have had over the years. Now I'm a distinguished engineer at Microsoft, and running a lot of the container and DevOps stuff that Azure does.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Very cool. And Gabe, what's your history with Kubernetes specifically?
+
+**Gabe Monroy:** So I kind of came at it from a different angle from Brendan. My history really comes from the developer experience angle. I was doing some consulting in New York, and 2008 happened and it kind of evaporated overnight, and I took all the commonalities that I was seeing around all the different companies that I was working with, and it was all around deployment automation being on fire everywhere... So I started a company called OptiMend, building tooling to make deployment automation easier; basically, running around and adding on early CI systems and Debian packaging and a bunch of stuff to automate software delivery, at a time when that wasn't commonly done.
+
+From there, I sort of evolved a sort of PaaS and created this project called Deis, which turned out to be really popular. It was more or less Heroku, but running on your own servers, which was a very common refrain we were hearing from people back in 2009, 2010 timeframe. But I had the interesting experience of having to replatform the container-based -- actually, early involved in the container ecosystem, close with Solomon, and it was one of the largest external contributors to the Docker project for a while, just before it became popular... Only because we needed it for the Deis project.
+
+What ended up happening over time was every orchestrator that we tried to platform it on just didn't work, and something was wrong... That eventually led me to Kubernetes. I think the first time I ever talked to Brendan was about extending the Kubernetes API. I'll never forget... I was on a plane or something, and I think you said--
+
+**Brendan Burns:** SREcon. It was Dublin. Going to SREcon in Dublin, and I'd done this stuff--
+
+**Gabe Monroy:** And you did the TPR -- first pass at TPR, the extension model, on the plane. He's like, "I'm gonna push this branch up, you guys take a look at it." And me and Matt Butcher (the architect on Helm) were super excited to work with him on it. So from there, I ended up joining Microsoft by way of an acquisition seven months ago, and now I'm sort of Brendan's counterpart on the PM side, working on the Azure containers portfolios - the AKS, the ACI, the servers broker stuff, dev tooling... Lots of different things we've got in the hopper.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think it's interesting the perspectives here. You represent the end user, so to speak, to a degree; a user of Kubernetes to build a platform on, pre-Kubernetes even, trying different platforming tools, different orchestrator tools to build Deis on, and eventually... You know, my perspective from it isn't as a user with Deis, but it seemed like Deis was trying to catch some steam, but it caught a lot of steam with Kubernetes. That's what really solidified in making it easy to use.
+
+**Brendan Burns:** \[08:14\] I think it was one of the first PaaS platforms to realize that the future came in replatforming on top of container orchestration. I think now, a year and a half, two years later it seems obvious, with Cloud Foundry and with OpenShift and others replatforming on top of container orchestration. I think Deis really saw that early, and I think that caught a lot of attention.
+
+**Gabe Monroy:** Yeah, one of the interesting things to me is how the developer experience of the time when Deis was popular is kind of falling out of favor, in a lot of ways; Twelve-Factor is pretty limiting, and Kubernetes opens up a lot more opportunities. So we ended up kind of shifting our focus to things like Helm and Draft and Brigade and some of the newer stuff that's a little bit more Kubernetes native in this disposition, and I think what you're seeing from Brendan with Metaparticle is taking that jump a little bit further.
+
+I think it's really tricky with developer experience, because on the one hand you want to be innovative, but if you go too far, you're gonna lose people; if you don't innovate enough, people are gonna be like, "Well, that's not compelling enough for me to drop whatever my current thing is." I think Deis definitely hit a sweet spot in kind of where it was at the time, but I think in a way we've kind of, as an industry, move on from that a bit, right?
+
+**Brendan Burns:** Yeah, I think that's the case.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What's the state of Deis right now? I know it was in acquisition seven months ago... What's the state of the company, the project? Because it's like a company, and then a project in the same, which is somewhat confusing to most people.
+
+**Gabe Monroy:** Yeah, it's an open source project, and what's really cool to me is we've spent a lot of time trying to put proper governance around it, and even small things, like semantic commit messages so we could write changelogs... A lot of that stuff to really just try and get a community of maintainers to step up. What I'm really excited about - there's a group called Team Heffy or whatever, who is sort of taking on the Deis workflow project and driving it in a new direction. I'm really excited to see that work taking off. It's been highly active.
+
+**Brendan Burns:** And I would say the Deis team itself, the engineering team from the company has been -- they are a core part of the Azure Container Service team at this point, responsible for a lot of the engineering work that went into the AKS launch that we did recently, as well as the open source projects that we've launched recently Kashti, this GUI for Brigade... It's a workflow engine. The Draft tooling that we announced a month or so after the acquisition... So that whole team is contributing to both the core Azure container's experience, as well as open source tooling that makes Kubernetes better, regardless of where you're gonna run it.
+
+**Gabe Monroy:** And even things like the Open Service Broker, which interestingly derived -- we started thinking about it first at Deis as a PaaS thing, because it was a Cloud Foundry-ism, and when we were platforming on top of Kubernetes, we were like "Well, there's really a better way to solve this in Kubernetes." That linked us up with Red Hat and Google, and we all kind of worked together. I'm really excited to see things like the Open Service Broker stuff landing, not just from Microsoft, but also from folks like Google and Red Hat. Everyone's talking about this, because it's a pretty important part of the modern stack.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Was that announced here at the conference?
+
+**Gabe Monroy:** It was, yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I didn't catch that announcement. Can you give me kind of an overview of what that is?
+
+**Gabe Monroy:** Yeah, sure. The general idea is, you know, just because you can run something in a container doesn't mean you should, right? So things like data stores... Often the operational characteristics of a hosted cloud service - Azure Cosmos DB, for example - are gonna be much appealing to a container-based equivalent. And yet, people wanna be able to use the Kubernetes APIs to manage that stuff, so how do we build a bridge between Kubernetes and this world of Azure services? Or even on-prem services, Oracle databases, things like that.
+
+\[11:57\] The Open Service Broker API has some verbs, provision, deprovision, bind, unbind and give me the catalog and that's basically the broker, that's it. And so what we did was we built a set of Kubernetes resources and Kubernetes controllers that can manage the lifecycle of apps, and what you get at the end of it is a Helm chart where you can Helm-install Wordpress, and it looks and feels just like any other Helm chart that you would install, but where there would be a MySQL container, you instead have Azure database for MySQL. But the lifecycle management of the tooling is exactly the same.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Very cool. Let me go a little further back in the past... How many years has there been since the public birth (of some sort) of Kubernetes? How far back does it go?
+
+**Brendan Burns:** It was about three and a half years; it will be four years next June.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Four years. So I think pre-call -- I don't know if those made it into the actual audio that will go to the listeners' ears or not, but Brendan, when you said you remember a year, a year and a half back even(ish) when people were still questioning Kubernetes, and we're a point now where to me - and maybe everyone else is thinking this, too), Kubernetes has won. You've got a conference that was 1,000 people last year, 4,200 people this year, significant growth, a lot of buy-in from worldwide partners, members in the CNCF and so forth, so it's definitely won. Can you kind of, as somebody who's been there since the beginning, shed some light on kind of where you came from and where you're at now?
+
+**Brendan Burns:** Yeah, it's really incredible to see; it's humbling, I would say.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Did you expect it? Is it a surprise to you? I know you're good and the team behind you is good...
+
+**Brendan Burns:** I don't think you can ever expect this kind of stuff.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. This is a shift.
+
+**Brendan Burns:** You have to go into it and believe that you're gonna work hard and hopefully the right things are gonna happen, but I don't know that you ever take it for granted. There was a moment -- I really actually remember a distinct moment about a year and a half ago, I would say (maybe a year and three quarters ago) where I kind of felt the wind. It's like the wind switched from being in my face to being at my back. It was sort of just this intuitive sense of, like you've crested the hill... And you're not done, but it's getting easier.
+
+I still think that there are a lot of people out there who are thinking about container orchestration and still sort of wondering "Where's the value prop for me?" So I think that we're still talking about container orchestration, but I don't think we're gonna talk anymore about what container orchestrator to use. I think we kind of always knew that that was gonna happen for some API.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** At some point, someone was gonna --
+
+**Brendan Burns:** Someone was going to -- it just doesn't make any sense, right? If you were a monitoring company, if you were a developer, you don't want there to be multiple APIs, you want there to be one API, because then you know... You know, I remember we had this discussion, and Gabe knows this, because he actually took Deis and platformed it on a bunch of different orchestrators before they chose Kubernetes.
+
+We talked to people and they said "Which one am I supposed to target? I'm a monitoring company, which one am I supposed to target?" We don't have those conversations anymore, and I think everybody's happier, the developer ecosystem is happier for having that. I kind of always said there would be sort of a POSIX standard here, and I think that's what we're seeing emerge... And now the exciting thing is "Okay, if this is a commodity, if every public cloud has this as a service, what do we build next? What do we build on top?" So I think that's the other exciting part - we can finally sort of put the orchestration API behind us. It was never intended to be the final API. We need to start thinking about 'What are the layers we build on top?", and that's really exciting to me.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Do you have any insights into what's next then?
+
+**Brendan Burns:** Well, so Metaparticle, that I talked about yesterday, is something that I think is important.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That was interesting. Do you wanna give you a breakdown real quick for those who didn't catch your talk?
+
+**Brendan Burns:** Sure. Metaparticle is actually an independent open source project at Metaparticle.io. It's really trying to, I would say, bring distributed systems to people who might not otherwise be distributed systems developers. Another way that I've said it before is like "Visual Basic for the cloud." How do you have an experience where you can think about the concepts of cloud-native computing, but not necessarily the details of "Hey, there's this YAML file here, and there's this Kubernetes object..."
+
+\[16:17\] Maybe I just describe my system as having four replicas, and I want you to take care of ensuring that -- you know, in code I'll say I want four replicas, and you take care of figuring out how to deploy it, how to put a load balancer in front of it, and stuff like that.
+
+I think that there's always been this inevitable trend in configuration management - and actually, we talked about this a lot with the Helm team - around like... Configuration management gets more and more programmatic, and eventually it turns into like a bad programming language, and I think that at some level we should just admit that (as some people said) configuration is code, and I think we should admit that like "Well, if configuration is code, maybe you should just write it in a real programming language." There's all of this tooling around unit testing that we've built, all of these practices around writing software code, that don't extend into the way we configure and deploy our applications at all. I don't think that anybody -- someone pinged me and said "I was just starting to think about what it meant to unit-test a Kubernetes config", right?
+
+It's kind of crazy that we have 20 years of people thinking about unit-testing code, and yet we're having to reinvent it for configs... Like, why? We should just go to a place where there's frameworks, there's UI, there's all of the kind of stuff that we expect - code conventions, all of this stuff - and then we can express that in code.
+
+I think if you do that, not only do you end up with a better system with one source of truth, but you actually also build a more accessible system. You can have people who might otherwise just be front-end JavaScript programmers, who are starting to think about deploying distributed systems. I think it's the only way that we scale the industry to the number of systems that need to be built.
+
+So I think it's maybe like Kubernetes at the beginning, it's an experiment, it's an idea; I wanna start a conversation, start a community. I don't know that it will be the one, but I think something like it will be the way that we build systems in the future.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** This question is more for either of you really, just kind of teeing off what you said there, it's how we got here - can you go back into the history of Kubernetes and the community? Not just the technology, but the community, the impact... How did we get here? What were the right recipes that other open source would-be's of Kube-- maybe there's not a repeat, but there's somebody out there looking to what you all have done around the technologies, around the community, around the governance, even around joining CNCF, and Google's perspective, and now Microsoft's perspective on containers...
+
+**Brendan Burns:** I can talk about that a little; I'll start it, and then Gabe can give his perspective as well. I was a student of the FreeBSD Linux course in the early 2000's, and what I was thinking about community and technology and how technologies win, I thought a lot about that. And you know, I think Linux in that world won, because it was friendly and open and it was an ecosystem that you could build on. There are no technical reasons why it won, I don't think. It won because of the community that it built, and it won because of the ecosystem that developed around it, and then the technology came afterwards. People were like, "Oh, okay, it's won. Let's go in and harden security, let's go in and do all of these things."
+
+So that was part of it - it was that it's not okay to just build a community, you have to build an ecosystem. You have to do a good job of sort of telegraphing what you are and what you're not, and staying to your commitments and saying, "You know what, this is the line where Kubernetes stops, and this is the line where--" and I think we did that with Helm, actually. I had conversations with Gabe where we said configuration management, package management is something that Kubernetes is not gonna do; we're not gonna pull that into the core. That's gonna be a project that lives on top, gives space for an ecosystem to develop around you...
+
+\[19:58\] I also think I went into it with a real humble attitude, a real "every single question is important" kind of attitude. I think that's incredibly important also. It makes it a welcoming community. I'm really proud of the community that we've developed; I think it's pretty unique, honestly, and in tech in general, in terms of the degree to which it welcomes people in. I think that's critically important, and it was (I hope) a big part of the success as well. I don't know.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What do you think about the perspective, since you kind of come at it as a developer, user experience implementer, kind of end user perspective... Because you weren't involved in the creation of Kubernetes, you were involved in building something like a PaaS and needed an orchestrator the entire time, and here comes Kubernetes. Can you kind of show your perspective on that?
+
+**Gabe Monroy:** It's interesting to me, one of the things -- before I joined Microsoft, I would pull up a quote from the Borg paper. A lot of these systems are sort of inspired by the way Google is managing infrastructure internally. And in the Borg paper, right in the first part of it, they call out the reasons why they built it, and there's three things they call out. The first is they wanted to empower developers for self-service. They wanted developers to be able to deploy these large clusters without having to involve ops, for example.
+
+The second thing is they wanted to build software that was extremely reliable and resilient to underlying infrastructure failures. And the third thing was that they wanted to be able to throw hardware at the problem to scale out. So if there was a scale event, or they needed distributed workload, they could just add capacity and everything would take care of itself. And what's interesting to me is I think that though not all companies operate at that scale - Microsoft scale, Google scale, that kind of scale - those three things are still important to everyone, especially as... You know, the reality is there's only so much compute power you can pack into one server; as you get the benefits of distributing this stuff out and self-healing infrastructures that eventually converge, declarative models for how you wanna manage this stuff - this really impacts folks who are operating at the 20 server scale, as well as a many-thousand server scale.
+
+I was enticed by that proposition, and I think that we still have a lot to go on that first thing, the empowering developers, and I think that my big takeaway from this conference, including not just Brendan's keynote, but also Kelsey this morning, and Michelle Noorali actually at the keynote before, talking about "Look, Kubernetes is still hard for developers."
+
+So I still think we've got a ways to go there, but the good news is that on the other dimensions I think we're actually in a pretty good place. Brendan and I actually were joking the other day that when we start talking about enterprise security features like RBAC, and policy and governance, you know the project has moved on from its phase... So I think that's a good thing to see, because it means things are maturing.
+
+**Break:** \[23:00\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's talk about the acceptance of it and who's using it, because I think at this conference my eyes were opened to a different type of user which I really hadn't considered, but I'm not as close to this project as you guys are... But it's like you've got people who are accepting the cloud, and then you've got traditional IT, which is present here more than I've ever seen at maybe the tech conferences I've gone to over my years.
+
+I see a huge presence of actual IT, not just cloud application developers who ship to the cloud and are in this new world, where sort of like old school virtual machines and behind the scenes, behind firewalls - that IT is present here, looking to new ways where Kubernetes is taking over what they had done before... And in some ways they're kind of scared of it.
+
+**Brendan Burns:** Well, I don't know; I would hope that they're not, in the sense of actually--
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, not so much scared... Let me clarify what I mean by "scared" - it's that it moves so fast; they're used to deploying and chilling down and just sort of maintaining, not in a bad way, but that sort of like the older IT world, you know? And that's not here with Kubernetes. Kubernetes is fast-moving.
+
+**Brendan Burns:** Yeah. You know, we've talked a lot about how much it needs to slow down; I think that there's a component of like once you're starting to talk about those enterprise features, you're also starting to talk about "it's great to have a three-month release cycle, but if half your customers aren't gonna adopt your three-month--"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...what's the point of releasing?
+
+**Brendan Burns:** What's the point...? But I would also say I think that as much as we talk about Kubernetes empowering developers, I think Kubernetes actually also really empowers operators, even traditional machine operators, because the whole purpose of the technology is to provide this abstraction boundary between the developer and the machine. So just like I can deploy apps and not care what machine they land on, that makes a reliable app.
+
+I can upgrade machines and know that I'm not gonna impact customers. If I'm an IT ops and I wanna roll a new kernel, I don't have to go talk to all my application owners and convince them, and try and say "Hey, please, could you reboot your app? We need to do this security migration..." - no, I just go through the cluster, one by one, do the upgrade, reboot the machine, do the upgrade, reboot the machine, and then I know that the Kubernetes infrastructure will move those end user applications around, so they won't even notice. They won't even know that I went into the software upgrade across my entire OS. That's a hugely empowering thing for a traditional IT developer.
+
+I think that separation of concerns is actually one of its real strengths. We think of it as being developer-oriented technology, because at the end of the day it's a developer-oriented API, but the abstraction boundary and the isolation, the decoupling works in both directions. So I actually am not surprised at all that there are more traditional IT people here; if I were them, I would adopt this in a heartbeat, because it's gonna make my life dramatically easier.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. Gabe, do you have anything on that?
+
+**Gabe Monroy:** \[29:37\] Yeah, one of the big things that we're seeing from those traditional IT folks is the desire to lift and shift workloads into containers. I've been present for some pretty shocking -- the idea that you could go take a bunch of existing legacy Windows applications and in a few days get those things wrapped up in containers, moved over to an orchestrator and get all the benefits of, you know, the self-healing system, node failures, the workloads are gonna move around, the applications are much more resilient, you don't need to go back and decommission a bunch of old servers and hardware, maybe you throw a cloud move into the mix... I mean, that stuff is really enticing to traditional IT orgs, and these are the things that container orchestration makes possible... So I definitely agree with Brendan, there's a lot to like here.
+
+I think we have to be conscious that container orchestration is sufficiently generalized that sort of modern cloud-native microservice development that we associate that with Kubernetes very closely, there's actually a lot of other uses for this stuff, IoT being another one. Lots of different things; machine learning... There's lots of different things that you can use this for. I think we're just scratching the surface of that.
+
+**Brendan Burns:** Yeah, and I think that's definitely the case that I see people with... Maybe they're running a binary that they don't even know how to recompile, from an old version of Linux, and suddenly, with containers, they know that they can upgrade the kernel, but keep that whole thing working, and package up all the libraries and all the... They can effectively run Red Hat 4 binary on top of a modern Linux operating system. That's hugely compelling for a lot of IT operators.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So what do you say then when you said before about slowing down, in a press conference yesterday - neither of you were there, I don't believe; I didn't see you there at least - a fellow asked the question of LTS-ing Kubernetes, to the point where some IT can, like you had said, implement it, there's a new release, have some sort of schedule where this will be supported for a while, you can kind of depend on certain APIs, you can build upon certain things... Is there any conversations around that kind of slow-moving pace, or-- not slow to the point where you're not innovating and moving fast, but to the point where your release cycle can actually adopt some users?
+
+**Brendan Burns:** I don't think that we've -- we haven't had the conversation about a formal LTS. We do back-port patches, important patches, not just to the previous release, but actually several releases back... So we do do some of the sort of more longer-term support things that you might consider, into the past releases. But that probably buys you a year, maybe... You know, conservatively, that would buy you a year before mostly the project would throw up its hands and say "Sorry, you should upgrade."
+
+I do think we're gonna have to do that kind of stuff. I mean, I think maybe looking at the way that Ubuntu does long-term support, with a long-term support release, and then a bunch of smaller releases along the way that you can use if you want, but they're not the long-term support releases may be the kind of model that we need to move to.
+
+I do think though that in the move to cloud one of the things that I think you're seeing is a move towards more auto-upgrading systems. One of the analogies that I draw is people used to update their browsers; now people don't update their browser, the browser just updates itself.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I don't even think about that anymore.
+
+**Brendan Burns:** Nobody even thinks about it, right? You couldn't even tell me -- I guarantee you can't even tell me the version of the browser you're running.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** 75.
+
+**Brendan Burns:** Yeah, like who knows?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's how many versions there have been...
+
+**Brendan Burns:** That's how much you pay attention to it, right?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah...
+
+**Brendan Burns:** So I think there's a degree to which if we're good about backward compatibility and we're good about making sure that what you did last year still works, people aren't gonna care as much about what version of it is, in an AKS world where we're delivering the Kubernetes API as a managed service. So I think it's a little bit of both. I think we're gonna have to do some of that, but I think also as people enter into this service, Kubernetes as a service world, maybe they're not as worried about that stuff.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Maybe let's talk about something you mentioned yesterday in your keynote which I thought was pretty interesting... It was this being able to scale to 100,000,000 developers. We'll link up to your keynote on video, but can you give like maybe a two-minute overview of what you meant by scaling to that? ...the scale at which GitHub is moving and open source is moving and what that means for...? Because we said earlier, one of the key components of successful Kubernetes cloud native is community, and that means more developers.
+
+**Brendan Burns:** \[34:08\] For sure, and I think one of the reasons we've invested -- I mean, Gabe mentioned about third-party resources... I sort of worked on third-party resources before we even hit 1.0... Because it was clear even then -- I didn't try and merge it until after 1.0, but it was clear even then that extensibility and enabling people to build and integrate with Kubernetes without being in the core of Kubernetes was gonna be critical to our success. We were already seeing the strain points of the community, and we were -- I don't even know, probably at 100 contributors at that point, not the thousand plus that we have now.
+
+So that's a big push - making sure that we can effectively continue to innovate and iterate on the ecosystem without having to change the core codebase as much, and that's a huge part of scaling. But I also think that we have to start considering that the people who we are trying to appeal to are not necessarily gonna be distributed systems experts, right?
+
+I think up to this point we've basically assumed that you have some degree of experience with delivering reliable systems at scale, if you're gonna come play in the Kubernetes world. If we're gonna go forward from here, we have to not make that assumption, and maybe separate out... Maybe if you're in the core, you need to do that. But if you're building on top, you should be able to consume abstractions that make sense to you at the level that you wanna build at.
+
+**Gabe Monroy:** Brendan and I talk a lot about this idea - from my PaaS heritage, it's easy for me to color it all in PaaS, but talking about this idea of verticalized pass. I think that part of getting to 100 million developers is gonna be crafting a set of experiences that are unique, that are targeted at different audiences. Some are gonna be GUI-based, some are gonna be CLI-based, some are gonna be editing code in an IDE, and others are gonna be... Who knows, right? But there is no one-size-fits-all answer to all the problems that we're gonna need to solve going forward, so I think approaching this thoughtfully, with an eye towards principled architecture of the different layers is what's gonna allow us to set up a really resilient foundation in order to build the type of experiences that frankly society is depending on us to build.
+
+**Brendan Burns:** Yeah, for sure. And I think someone once said the most important thing in any project is knowing what you are not; it's not knowing what you are, it's knowing what you are not. And I think if you set those things up the right way and you resist the urge to try and become everything then you build the right layering and you build the right modularity. I think that's one of the guiding posts we try and live to.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Maybe in closing let's talk to those out there who've heard the term 'cloud native', they've heard the term Kubernetes, they've looked at orchestration, they've looked at containers, but they've never really taken that first step -- they've dabbled with containers, but they've never really taken the adoption to even cloud.
+
+**Brendan Burns:** Sure.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What are some good resources that you all point people to often to kind of get those first steps to get that a-ha moment? Because both of you have a - not so much you, but Gabe, you have a first day that you touched Kubernetes, and you were like "This is amazing." So where do you send people to to kind of get that original a-ha moment with Kubernetes, and to say "This is what you should do."
+
+**Gabe Monroy:** Well, there's a couple things... I think the first thing for me is the 12-factor - it's not directly related to Kubernetes, but I think it was a really important moment in the development of how you would build software in a way that is friendly for the cloud. I think reading through that - it doesn't take very long...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What is it called?
+
+**Gabe Monroy:** \[37:51\] 12factor.net is the website, and it's actually pretty dated, but it's held up quite well over time, I'd say. And then the other -- I don't know if there's a research for this, Brendan; you might know... But the thing for me that really hit home with Kubernetes was the idea of declarative infrastructure that has control loops that reconcile desired state and current state... These self-healing systems, and how all of Kubernetes is basically a series of objects that are representing desired state, and then a series of controllers that are enforcing that desired state, and pushing the world towards that state over time.
+
+It was the first project I'd ever seen that had that kind of architecture that deeply. I actually think that was part of the extensibility model, because really what you do with the extension model is you say "Well, here's a new type of resource, and I wanna run another controller that's gonna enforce that sort of state." And there was a level of elegance and simplicity to the whole model that -- it was just different than anything else that was out there. Everything else felt cumbersome, complex in comparison.
+
+I think the only thing that was weird/awkward about Kubernetes was the networking model, but shockingly, it only took a few months for everyone to realize that the Kubernetes networking model was actually the right one, and then everyone started adopting this IP per container, IP per pod kind of model. Once that's sort of behind you, you're left with this core of Kubernetes... It's actually really quite beautiful and really quite elegant in my view.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** One last one before we go... This podcast speaks to developers, so you've got people out there that are thinking "How can I get involved?" Not so much just using Kubernetes, or getting involved in CNCF, or the different places they can go to, or the different projects involved in CNCF... But what about contributors for open source? I hear there's a contributor ladder... I think its' CNCF Global, at the TOC level, but not so much at a Kubernetes level. What do you do to get new contributors? What's the onboarding ramp? How do you adopt new developers into the project?
+
+**Brendan Burns:** I think it's a variety of things, one thing I would say is that the Slack channel is super active... And it's separated - we have a separate channel for users versus developers. Some people go and ask "How do I deploy apps?" questions on the users channel, but if you wanna go do coding, there's the developers channel. We try and mark a bunch of the GitHub issues with things like "Help Wanted." Some of that stuff is sometimes dated, and we don't probably do as great a job curating that as we could, but that's a good place to start.
+
+I would also say though that we're reaching a place where there is so much in the ecosystem that often times a great way to get started is in one of the ecosystem projects. I've been doing a lot of work lately on client libraries in different languages - working on the Java client library, the .NET client library, the TypeScript client library... And that's nice, because it's an important part of the ecosystem, but it's a separate project from the main project, so it's an easier thing to wrap your head around, and maybe it's even in a language that you're familiar with, as opposed to Go, if you haven't had a chance to look at Go. So I think there's a variety of different places where you can find access points.
+
+I would say with the main Kubernetes project, be persistent and patient. We really do want and value the contributions. We know that it's messier and harder in places than it probably ought to be, and in fact there's a SIG contributor experience - it's a special interest group for contributor experience - that's just kind of continuously trying to make it better. That's where things like the contributor ladder comes out of, and some of the messages that the bots chat back to you on your GitHub issues, and stuff like that. We definitely welcome people to come in and contribute, and figure out the place that works best for them.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Very cool. Anything else that I didn't ask that you guys are like, "Man, I wanna share this to this community listening to the show"? What didn't I ask you?
+
+**Brendan Burns:** One thing that I'm kind of excited about that we announced at the conference is this thing called the Virtual Kubelet.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I've heard about this... Erik St. Martin is a friend of mine, he runs GoTime; he was part of the hack team that's been here for a week doing that, I think. I've got some of the back-story on it.
+
+**Gabe Monroy:** \[42:05\] Yeah, Erik helped out quite a bit on that effort, actually. And what's cool about it to me is that it's really evidence of Kubernetes' staying power, because we didn't have this concept of a serverless container runtime like what we shipped with Azure Container Services back in July; it was the first major cloud provider to come out with anything like that. And we knew when we launched it that people were -- yes, they were gonna want to use it directly; containers in the cloud is pretty nice, easy...
+
+Container Create turns out to be a nice experience for doing simple stuff. But we also knew folks were gonna wanna use the Kubernetes API, so we shipped a connector that basically bridged the two things; immediately, Hyper.sh, who had a similar product, they forked the connector (the connector-friendly fork), wrote their own runtime. Since then, Brendan and I were like, "Oh man, there's probably something we should do here", and there's actually a lot of meaty problems that we don't know how to solve yet. How do you attach volumes to a serverless container? How do you manage load balancers, scheduling affinities and things like that?
+
+There are a lot of open questions, and I'm really pleased to see the reception to the Virtual Kubelet has been tremendous, and it looks like we're gonna have pretty much all the major clouds (and startups) who have these serverless container runtimes working together on this codebase that we're gonna be donating upstream to the Kubernetes ecosystem. I'm really excited to see that come to fruition.
+
+**Brendan Burns:** Yeah, for sure. Over the next few years, I think one of the things we're definitely gonna move to is -- you know, if Kubernetes lets you not think about your machines, I think in many cases people don't even wanna have machines. So this move towards serverless containers and orchestration of serverless containers I think is the next really important part of what we're doing.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So listeners, I know we've just barely scratched the surface on this Virtual Kubelet, and I'm sure that in a future episode of GoTime Erik will go deep on what's going on there, so tune into a future GoTime episode. But for now, fells, thank you so much for your time, I appreciate it.
+
+**Gabe Monroy:** Absolutely, thank you so much.
+
+**Brendan Burns:** Thanks for having us.
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+**Jerod Santo:** Okay, so we're joined by Corey Sanders, head of Azure Compute. Corey, first of all, thanks for joining us.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Of course, great to be here. Thank you for joining us to Build.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's great to be here for us as well.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We're honored to be here, honestly. Thank you very much for having us.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Yeah, absolutely.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So for the completely uninitiated, never heard of Azure perhaps, have been living under a rock, what is Azure Compute? Give us the high-level first.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Yeah, totally. It is a set of services (not just a single service) that on the core VM side offer you Agile infrastructure - you can spin up virtual machines, you can run your services on it... But then the services in my team go well beyond just the core compute. We also do the Azure Kubernetes service, which we've talked a lot about today in the keynote.
+
+\[04:09\] We have also Service Fabric, which is a sort of managed PaaS service, and then higher-level services - some of the eventing services, messaging services are also in my team; Event Grid is also in my team - sort of more of an event-based pops up type solution.
+
+They're all a part of our overall cloud offering. I don't know how much broad of a spectrum you want me to give, but that's our cloud offering on Microsoft.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So let's talk specifically maybe about Event Grid first, because it seems like that's a good place to dig in.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Sure.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What exactly does it offer? You mentioned it's event-based, but that's about all -- you said it pops up, but... Go into it more.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Totally. With the growth and excitement that we're seeing from serverless-based application models, we've sort of identified that there was a gap in some of the model, where certainly there's the ability to run just arbitrary code functions, which is basically an event fires, and you run some code - great. There's also sort of workflow - we have an event fire, and we run through a workflow called Logic Apps services. These are kind of our core serverless platforms.
+
+The thing that we've identified was those are great, but there's no platform in the cloud (period) that offered sort of an event-first platform to make it very easy to launch those services. Basically, a publishing and subscribing model where different services, whether inside Microsoft or outside Microsoft, can create an event.
+
+Let's say every time you drop an image into a storage account, this will create an event using our event service, and then this event service will fire whoever's subscribing, whoever is saying "I will now listen when you publish." You can make that something like Azure Functions, and so on. The reason why it's so important for serverless is that your classic eventing model is a polling model; it's like "Okay, I've got an event, now listen..." But for serverless, that's nonsense, because the whole point of serverless is you don't launch until you need to launch... So now you need something to call into you, and that's where this idea came from.
+
+What's really cool about Event Grid is that it's not strictly tied to our services. You can have third-party calls that will create events, and you can also call out to third-party services or applications that you write. You can basically write your own serverless application services using Event Grid as sort of the backbone.
+
+In fact, even just last week we launched an open source model called Cloud Events, which is basically a CNCF-led open source model that will allow pretty much any service anywhere to call into Event Grid and take advantage of it. It's very cool.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What's the name of that?
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Cloud Events was the CNCF solution, and then Event Grid is the service that we offer.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha. So did that go through the natural incubation period? Is it a project?
+
+**Corey Sanders:** It's version 0.1, announced last week at KubeCon.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. Well, we've missed that. We weren't there.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** I'm sorry, it was in -- where was it in?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Copenhagen.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Copenhagen, I was gonna say. It's far away, but...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, it was a long one.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We came here instead , we would have you (on the podcast)
+
+**Corey Sanders:** I owe you, I owe you...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes, sir.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** I have people who were at both, so just to--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** People who were at both? So we're slacking, is that what you're saying...?
+
+**Corey Sanders:** I didn't wanna say it, but you said it. \[laughter\] Yeah, we had people who were there Friday for this announcement, and then flew in this weekend.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow. Congratulations, that's awesome.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Yeah, it was a cool thing.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That is cool.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** If you wanna see something super-cool, Friday morning the keynote had a demo that had us, I think it had Google, it had AWS... Basically, it had all the cloud providers taking part in this sort of end-to-end event experience using this Cloud Events thing that we're part of the work group for... So it's very, very cool.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So this is open source then... Is it an extension of Event Grid?
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Cloud Events is a spec that now we've implemented.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, gotcha.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** \[08:03\] We were the only cloud actually that did a "You can publish out of Cloud Events", but many of the cloud providers you could subscribe into. With Event Grid you can both send out Cloud Events format, and listen Cloud Events format. It's a specification that now you can use, and it's a nice thing with where events are going and where IoT is going... Having sort of a standard that you can go write your events to is really nice, because it means you're not tied in with any cloud.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Exactly, which is awesome.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** We're pretty excited to support that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We like that as users because we think it makes the clouds compete on a level that we would prefer them to compete...
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Of quality of service, versus an ability to lock in.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Exactly, so that's spectacular.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** I'm with you.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Is there any other examples of that going on?
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Tons. Cosmos DB is a great example of this. Cosmos DB, if you saw this morning...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We did, but give us the -- we're uninitiated.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** So the exciting thing about Cosmos DB is it's a NoSQL offering, it's a global offering. It has some really interesting things -- it's got multi-master write, so you can have writes happening all over the world and figure out how to sort of reconcile that... You've got different consistency models, so you can decide whether it's strictly consistent, so it'll automatically write all the time, or eventually consistent it'll get there... And then it has some crazy SLAs - latency SLA and five nine SLA for availability.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** There's a latency SLA? I don't think I've ever heard of that before.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** There's a latency SLA. It's the only service that has a latency SLA. Yeah, it's really cool.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Interesting. So how does that work? You say, "I need like 50 millisecond SLA..."
+
+**Corey Sanders:** It's basically a commitment of sort of "When contacting the service, this is how long it will take you to get reads and writes out."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Huh. Okay.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** But the really cool part about it is that it's multi-model, which means you can write to it using a wire protocol with Cassandra or Mongo or Gremlin, which are all open source-based solutions... So you can basically write a Cassandra-based application, point it at Mongo DB, get this high SLA, get this multiple-region replication, get this consistency model... So you're not locked in, you've got portability, you can move to another Cassandra deployment if you want to, but the service that we offer I think is the best around, so you'll hopefully want to stay because it's such a great service. And Kubernetes service that we've talked a lot about this morning, as well - similar category.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, absolutely. Let's go back to serverless and this Event Grid...
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Sure.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** ...because I've taken a few stabs at serverless... I think it makes tons of sense for the IoT space, especially when there's like -- maybe not single-use devices, but simple use devices...
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Sure.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Areas where I get into confusion are like -- I'm like "Well, am I doing this wrong, or what's the deal?" I start shoving all this stuff into a single function, or I start wondering "As a developer, how do I get my"
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Where do you draw the lines for your functions.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, like, we believe in the single responsibility principle, and refactoring into smaller functions etc. How do you architect these serverless things? Do they scale up, or is it only good in the small?
+
+**Corey Sanders:** It's like the old porcupine joke, "Very carefully."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, exactly.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** I think that this is one of the challenges that actually we as an industry have with serverless. Serverless is fantastic when it comes to IoT, as you mentioned, and there's going to be a core capability there, because it really breeds that scenario, right? Like, you've got your edge solution, you've got your IoT solution; when you need it, it fires, and when you don't, it's quiet.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Exactly.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** I also think actually it's a great scenario for automation. This is where we've seen a lot of usage for serverless, in fact maybe even more than IoT, which is every time a VM gets created, do this thing; every time a storage thing happens, do this thing. This type of automation, this type of DevOps experience - I've seen a lot of usage of serverless in very exciting scenarios.
+
+\[11:56\] The one that I think is still pending, frankly, is an entire app being written with serverless. It's very hard... It's very hard because the tooling is just not there, and I feel like we're farthest along in some of these things - like, you can do local debugging of functions, so you can basically bring a function down, you can run it locally in your box, you can debug it, you can put breakpoints and so on, just like you'd expect for a normal app... But still, function chaining, which you need to write a large app, is very hard.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Exactly.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Monitoring a function chain - where does the function fail... It's really hard, and I sort of think back to the early days of object-oriented coding, where the way you would debug object-oriented coding would be you'd actually go into sort of the C language and look at what your variables were, right? None of it actually worked, so you basically had to fall back down to --
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, it was a facade.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Exactly right, it was a facade... And with pound defines right. So until you sort of got to models that were actually built with object-oriented first class... I think we'll get there; I just don't think we're there yet. That would be at least my perspective on the serverless world.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, that's heartening, because I just thought maybe it was--
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Maybe it was just you?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, like I don't get the serverless -- I mean, I get it... But I didn't get.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** I mean, that may be true too, I don't know; we've just met, so I don't know. I don't wanna speak on behalf of--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, very possibly.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What's some of the tooling out there for this scenario, for serverless?
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Well, the integration with some of our dev tooling I think is a good example, like VS Code, which is nice, open source, run anywhere, so the ability to take it and debug it locally - that's some things that could really help. And then monitoring - I think that the monitoring tooling is getting there; both us and other clouds - I think we're getting this ability to monitor between it... But you really need -- I think you need some sort of programming model abstraction on top that is going to understand function chaining and sort of take care of it for you, and sort of be able to build out how to go monitor and debug it along the path...
+
+I feel like there's constructs that are still missing, and frankly, we're working on some things... I know some of our cloud friends out there are also working on some things... I think we'll see a lot of improvements over the next year in this area.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Do you believe that it is inevitable that serverless will be the way to go for large-scale applications and we're just not there yet, or do you think perhaps that's just a round peg in a square hole?
+
+**Corey Sanders:** I think it's gonna be a fundamental part of the overall programming model. I don't know how long it will take to get there. I actually do return back to the object-oriented world, where in the early days of object-oriented if you'd ask some of that questions, they'd say "I think probably C is gonna stick around for a long time", right?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, exactly.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** I mean, it has, right?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's still going.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Exactly. So I think that there will be a long time before we say a majority of the world is even written in this way, but I do think we will start seeing that, because the benefits are so clear.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I was gonna ask, what are the virtues?
+
+**Corey Sanders:** I think both the agility and the cost... Imagine effectively having a program that you've written, an application that you've written and it's split up into functions today... Now, imagine in your mind you only pay for each one of the functions when they get called, and never any other time. So it's never sitting on a server, it's never sitting anywhere in a PaaS service...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's priced in milliseconds, right?
+
+**Corey Sanders:** It's priced in milliseconds, by the lines of code that are executed. It's hard to get much more agile in your pricing than that...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, that's as minute as you can get. Next is nanoseconds though...
+
+**Corey Sanders:** That's right. Nanoseconds... \[laughter\] That's right.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And then picoseconds... I don't know what comes after nano... \[laughter\] Give me some pico.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Either way, it's getting smaller, so keep it going.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** That's right. What comes below pico? I should know this...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Zepto... I don't know, I made it up.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** You may be right.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Something like that...
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Well, zepto is the big side but then it starts getting... Anyway, you can look it up.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Jerod's googling right now.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** "What is smaller than pico..."
+
+**Corey Sanders:** \[15:58\] Either way... And then the other aspect of that is that you look at something like a microservice model - and we showed this a little bit today with some of the cool, new development tools that we've talked about when it comes to Kubernetes, and being able to basically take a microservice, take it out and build sort of updates to that microservice while leaving the rest of the service untouched... With serverless, that's even easier. You're function-chaining, you start saying "Great. Take this function and just update it", and it's like that, updated and calling in into it, and suddenly you've got an entirely new path for your application going through that new function... So the agility and the cost reductions I think will drive it there.
+
+But then you start thinking to yourself, all CI/CD -- I mean, what CI/CD pipelines have you seen that really have deep chaining of functions and sort of pipelining of functions? They don't really exist. We do have CI/CD updating with functions, but it's still pretty primitive. So I think we're getting there, and I think we WILL get there, and I think it's gonna be a core part of many services, but I think it's gonna see the progression like object-oriented saw.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Real-time update - a picosecond is one trillionth of a second...
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Makes sense.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Smaller than that is a femto...
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Femto...! I did know that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Smaller than that even is an attosecond, which I've never heard of in my life...
+
+**Corey Sanders:** I did not know that one.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** ...and I can't even pronounce what that means, so we'll move on.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So zepto doesn't even exist then... \[laughter\]
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Zepto -- I think it's the other side, it's the big one.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I made it up. It was pretty -- it sounded on point...
+
+**Corey Sanders:** It sounds like something from Superman, I think, so that makes sense.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah... Corey agreed, in the moment...
+
+**Corey Sanders:** In the moment...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** There you go.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** I'm a trusting soul, I'm a trusting soul.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Zeptosecond I think you're referring to - one sextillionth (you've gotta be careful how you say that one) of a second. Alright, so we've covered that...
+
+**Corey Sanders:** It sounds good. I'm glad we got to the bottom of this.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** This is an educational show.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** We've all learned.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Now we know.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Now we know.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** One of the slides in Satya's keynote - I think it was almost an opening slide - was "The world is a computer", and I'm in this, I get it, but I didn't really consider that being the truth, right?
+
+**Corey Sanders:** It's crazy, that's right.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That seems so profound to see on that screen... What does that mean to you in compute?
+
+**Corey Sanders:** This is where when you look at some of the services and things we've talked about today with like the IoT Edge, this is really where you start seeing this become a reality, with the sort of explosion of IoT, where just everything is gonna have some level of intelligence to it... That sort of pushes down this whole edge concept of "Great, now that you've got that, you're going to need these edge components to be able to do some work." You can't just have them all calling home and saying "Tell me what to do." They need to be able to do some work... So this concept of taking computation, pushing it out to the edge -- but then the principle of that, it's just a part of the cloud; that's not creating something different from the cloud, but actually creating sort of a--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It extends it.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** It extends it, exactly. And then how do you take a consistent programming model, a consistent application model and make it possible to deploy on that edge? This is where IoT Edge, which we open sourced today, which is very exciting... So that means, again, portability - you don't need to feel locked in with our platform.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Come back to tell us exactly what that means, but keep going...
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Yeah, I will. And then the ability to deploy -- perhaps even more important, the fact that all of the components that deploy into IoT Edge are containers, which means again, they have portability, they can deploy anywhere... So you take our cognitive services, you take our function platform (also open source) - you can take those, you can containerize them, you can deploy them in this IoT Edge, and suddenly, that IoT Edge can run disconnected, so we can start doing intelligence and using the cognitive services that you've built/developed in the cloud, but it can run without talking to the cloud.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Which you open sourced with the runtime portion of it.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** With the runtime portion of it, exactly. I think that is super-compelling -- and then Azure stack sort of up the chain, where it can run even the full cloud in that environment... It's super compelling when you look at that sort of cloudy picture, where it's got the center cloud, and then sort of the edge cloud... It's just super-compelling to say "Look, you write once and you can deploy anywhere." It's just a very, very exciting world that that could be.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[20:14\] Yeah. Let's go back to the open sourcing of the runtime...
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What is that runtime, what does it look like?
+**Corey Sanders:** It's fairly simple. It effectively runs containers and manages the health of the containers running inside that edge device. In the example today, the camera - it could run containers inside the camera, and the camera had enough computing power to be able to sort of do that, and do that work. That included cognitive services, it included functions, it included those aspects, and then the IoT Edge was basically taking the containers that were built in public Azure and accepting them and deploying them, and sort of managing them so they could take updates, and they could communicate back, and they could communicate the health of the containers, and so on. So it ends up being sort of a hosting platform for the actual containers running on it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Kind of like an operating system, or actually, well--
+
+**Corey Sanders:** It's sort of a layer above the operating system, right? Because those things have an operating system. It's more of a PaaS type environment. It's more of a container or orchestrator, but on the local host.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What technologies is that built with?
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Well, it's built with a lot of technology inside Azure. It uses components of actually Service Fabric, which has got some capabilities to do container management, but it also has actually Kubernetes-based support as well. So it's ending up trying to be kind of an enablement of whatever type of orchestration you want, but it also shouldn't matter. So it's built with those sort of core functionality capabilities, but in the end the customers just see that their containers are deploying, so you know - they bully.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We saw that today running on a Raspberry Pi.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** You did, exactly. Raspberry Pi, you saw it on the copter.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The Maverick I think it was...?
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Yeah exactly, the DJI... And then you saw it running on the camera directly, the Qualcomm camera; all of those were running that runtime directly.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's an interesting partnership too to see you guys working with DJI. I mean, they're obviously the number one drone--
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Yeah, I called that a copter and I'm embarrassed, because I don't think that's actually what we call it... Drone is the word. I'm embarrassed...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm not correcting, I'm just saying the proper term...
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Don't edit that, people should know that I'm embarrassed. \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** There's all sorts of people using drones, from the DJI's perspective... I'm a drone user, we do some filming, and stuff like that; it's a lot of fun. I guess, where do you see -- the example they gave us was agriculture, in the industry, examining pipelines or going over fields... This is an interesting place to put that. Do you see, say, agricultural companies becoming software companies and using this runtime on the edge? Who's using this runtime? Is it DJI, or is it farmers...?
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Yeah, it's interesting... One of the points we do talk about a lot is that we think every company is becoming a software company. I think as you sort of look at both AI and you look at the cloud capabilities, there's a little bit of every company getting involved in technology, because they have to; that's the only way to compete.
+
+Specifically in this case, it can be a combination of both of these. I would actually expect in this case that DJI is creating the environment and the platform to be able to deploy and control the drone and engage with it, but the end business requirements are gonna come from that end customer.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. How I use the drone is how I wanna use the drone, and...
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Yeah, exactly, and what sort of machine learning am I doing? Am I detecting broken pipes, or am I detecting broken fields? I presume that's a different model. So even if it is the demo that we showed on the stage - take a bunch of pictures and identify it and learn the model in Azure, take the container and deploy it, that should be fairly easy; it doesn't take a lot of development skills to do it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's so interesting to put that kind of power in general developers' hands...
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Yeah, it's unbelievable.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[23:58\] It's astounding. It takes so much to train these models and do all this interesting stuff around machine learning and neural networks and all the necessary things, and you've--
+
+**Corey Sanders:** We democratize all the time. Democratizing AI, making sure that whether you're a data scientist or an entry-level developer, you can take advantage of these tools.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Tell him, Jerod... We have to make a practical rhyme; we're Practical AI people around here... Tell him.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Yeah, we have a show in the works, a brand new podcast...
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Is this a secret? This is for real...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We're announcing it. Right now!
+
+**Corey Sanders:** This is an announcement!
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Nobody knows this but you!
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Okay, good.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And maybe a few other people.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** The people that may be listening...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Everybody else who's listening to this. \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's known...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's called Practical AI. It's a brand new podcast. It's not an episode, it's a whole new show.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** A whole new series. A spin-off series, as it were.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's right. And we're quite excited about it.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** So it's gonna be focused on... Practical AI.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Making it practical.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Making it accessible. We're democratizing it. It's very mystical to many of us still, and there's so many high-level concepts that need discussing... There's ethical implications, there's privacy, security, there's the nitty-gritty of how you deploy it to the edge and whatnot, and there's so many conversations that would take over the Changelog if we were to have them all... So it's like, "Well, let's give it another outlet." So anyways...
+
+**Corey Sanders:** You saw the video at the end of Satya's keynote. Very touching... But it's a good example of sort of the power of AI, which is just being able to change the rules of accessibility. The two parents who are visually-impaired, who are blind, raising a child who's not, and using machine learning and computer vision to tell them what's happening in their surroundings. It's changing our lives in front of us. I'm sorry, I'm getting choked up; I don't know if it's the video or the beer or what, but anyway... \[laughs\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's exciting stuff. There's a lot going on, especially in the robotics space, in the AI space and in the serverless space... It's very exciting. What else are you excited about that we haven't asked you about or haven't talked to you about today?
+
+**Corey Sanders:** I think we talked about a lot of the things I'm excited about. We talked about IoT edge, we talked about the overall edge strategy and where we're going, which I think is exciting; we talked about AI and the opportunities there, and we talked a lot about the open source work; we talked about Cosmos DB... I think maybe one that we didn't spend as much time around was the Azure Kubernetes Service, which has been really exciting to see our container-based implementation of this, and then the developer tools around it.
+
+Some of the things that we showed today, the developer tools, things like doing live share, being able to edit a single container in a microservice environment without touching the rest of the environment...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's particularly hard to demo that one, because it's kind of invisible, if you don't look closely...
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Exactly. It should just work, right? You shouldn't see anything wrong.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** And then even one of the things that we didn't show today, but is very cool - IntelliCode... Which you should go take a look at as well if you haven't yet. This is actually built as part of Visual Studio, and it goes in and it uses AI - again, using AI for practical purposes - to try and detect bugs that you may have in your code... Do you like the pitch that I used for your show?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I love that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We love it every time somebody says "Practical AI." We nod. \[laughter\]
+
+**Corey Sanders:** So that practical usage case there... Now you have to get these guys on your show to talk about this.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We will.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** It goes in and it can predict bugs that you're writing based on other ways that you've written your code. So it'll come in and say "92% chance that you meant this when you wrote this in your code." And it can even use external, sort of like "Hey, we've seen other people do this, and they always use this instead." It's really pretty cool, actually.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What if you don't write bugs? Just asking for a friend...
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Then you become the model that AI needs to learn from.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[27:59\] Oh, I like this... Tell me more. \[laughter\]
+
+**Corey Sanders:** You are patient zero for the system, so we need to study you, I think.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That' interesting.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I'm very expensive to study. \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** However, one downside potentially to this is the feeling of over-the-shoulder as you're coding.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Sure.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Coding is kind of an intimate, personal thing...
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Sure.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** you get in your zone, put your EDM on, whatever... And you kind of feel like your editor is always watching you.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Fair.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Cue the police song...
+
+**Corey Sanders:** There's actually a deep discussion on this exact point, and the way it's been implemented is very similar to IntelliSense, which is why we use the same name... So when you're using it and IntelliSense comes in and tries to autocomplete your thing, you don't mind.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Not creepy.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** So this is the whole point. It's like spell-check.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** But it's better.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** When you're typing, squiggle-squiggle-squiggle, "Hey, are you sure this is what you meant?" Yeah. Done.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I've got a word for you then...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** "I wouldn't do that if I were you..."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Bugcheck.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Bugcheck. \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Spellcheck, bugcheck.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Yeah... That may mean something else, though.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Bug...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Bugcheck.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Yeah. That means blue screen in my world, so that's a bad thing.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's way worse, yeah. It's a bad connotation.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'll take it back then. \[laughter\]
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Let's think harder. I mean... I don't mean to be critical, but you're better than that; that's all I'm gonna say. \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What's the official name for it then? If it's IntelliSense, what's --
+
+**Corey Sanders:** IntelliCode.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** IntelliCode, okay. That is slightly better...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's a better name.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** It's a good name.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Better than bugcheck.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Bugcheck... This went sideways quickly. This is totally an evening show.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Either way though, you've got the feeling of like somebody looking over your shoulders, and I think if you're--
+
+**Corey Sanders:** You could turn it off. \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** This is turning into a counseling session.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** That's right, that's right.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** "It's okay... Turn it off."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Making it like that makes it more approachable, to not feel like somebody's watching you?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh then I have a real person watching me !
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Yeah, that's right. It could be...
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Oh, gosh... I'm not allowed to bring that up, am I? No...
+
+**Corey Sanders:** It's a soft spot...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's a soft spot.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We're hitting the borderline here... Adam, do you have any more questions?
+
+**Corey Sanders:** I'm gonna get the knife here... I loved Clippy.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You know... That's it. That's it. \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay... Closing out gracefully then. \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's been fun...
+
+**Corey Sanders:** He doesn't seem convinced...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** No.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Obviously, we have a show coming up where we can talk a lot about AI together, so I would say any conversations you think make sense...
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Practically. We'll talk practically about that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We'll talk practically... In a future show.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** Alright, I love it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Thanks, Corey.
+
+**Corey Sanders:** You guys, this was fun. Thank you for having me.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Thank you.
+
+**Break:** \[30:48\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So we're joined by Steven Guggenheimer, vice-president of Microsoft AI. Steve, thanks for coming on the show.
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We're excited. We love AI, we're very interested... We're kind of outsiders, in terms of we're not like using it in our day-to-day lives yet... I feel like a lot of people are in that circumstance, right?
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** Well, I think you are, you just don't know it. The core origin of almost all of the search engines that are out there, be it Google, or Bing, or even Amazon - there's AI at the core of that, sort of looking at very large sets of data trying to proactively give you a little bit of help. You may not think of that as AI, but it's there.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, it's deep down underneath the covers, right?
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** Exactly. And those building blocks are now finding their way into lots and lots of software and programs. It's still early, make no mistake. We're really high on the hype cycle, and sort of low on the "It's broadly available", but it is there, and I think people are just starting to understand that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So when you speak to laypeople about what you do and the progress you're making with artificial intelligence, what's the way that you go about describing it? Maybe even defining what AI is to somebody who's not on the inside of the scene.
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** Yeah, I think there are a lot of definitions for AI, but in general, how do you, on one hand, take large sets of data and find information from that? And then, more importantly, how do you sort of move from a reactive "Hey, I know something. Let me help you", to a proactive, "Let me proactively help somebody in any activity that they're doing."
+
+So the most useful case I think people think about is robotics. When people see movies... It's sort of a physical instantiation of AI; something that can communicate with me, hear me, see me and interact with me on what feels like a natural level. In some way, AI is trying to bring those different capabilities to life... Whether it's a virtual agent on a website, whether it's proactively giving you ideas on what to buy next or what movie to go see, whether it's the ability to have ambient computing around, so that ability to have speech-to-text translation or language-to-language translation... It's woven in lots of ways, but at the end of the day, how do we allow people to interact naturally with the computing environment around us?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** A lot of our space that we're speaking to in this podcast is developer, but I think I still sit back and think like "When is AI a threat?" Being responsible about it... When can it be like Skynet, which is the typical thing...? You talked about responsibility in terms of the way you approach that kind of thing... What's Microsoft's stance towards responsibly deploying artificial intelligence, making frameworks, making it practical for the users out there?
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** Well, I'll start by saying the good news is for all the hype on AI, we're still pretty early, so we've got a ways to go before it gets to the levels you see in most movies, in most commercials...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's getting close though.
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** I think for us, we're trying to take a leadership position and enabling the conversation. When the web first came out, we all sat around going "Oh, the web is gonna change the world", and it has. We didn't sit around and say "Okay, now let's have a conversation on the ethics of the web and how we wanna manage it and how we should work..."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's true.
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** With AI, I think we can see the potential for the transformation we'll have, and in that light, it's not one company that's gonna define it; frankly, it's not one government that's gonna define it, and there's no particular group in society... So how do you create a conversation between sort of society as a whole, government and industry, to have the conversation? We've been trying to get that proactively out there.
+
+\[35:55\] We published a book - our chief counsel and our head of AI published a book called The Future Computed, and it's meant to sort of start the conversation. We have a council inside of Microsoft on the ethics of AI, and it works across the entire company. On the ethics side, we have sort of published a set of base-level things to think about for the ethics of AI. There's seven areas; things like transparency, removing bias... So we're trying to drive that conversation proactively and get ahead of it. Again, it's not up to use to define per se, but if we're not in a healthy way trying to move forward, we're all gonna collectively sort of not get to the point we want. So that's our approach right now.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What are your thoughts on organizations like OpenAI, for example? You know, just doing the research behind things, kind of putting the information out there in a non-biased way...
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** I think that's what we're all after - trying to get information out there in an unbiased way, and honestly, in an educative way. To your statement earlier about a layperson who's not living and breathing AI - how do you help people understand what's possible? This is tough. To some degree, it's generational. If I look at my parents and trying to help them with computers - they didn't grow up with computers, so there's not a super comfort level there. If you take even our generation, they didn't grow up with AI.
+
+I talk to people, my friends that are our age, who worry about data privacy, they worry about the things they hear about different providers and their information... You take the next generation, you take my 19-year-old and my 20-year-old, they understand a lot more about how their data is used, they understand how these things work, how to turn them on and off... So a part of this is generational, a part of this is sort of trying to help people understand what's there, and making sure the tools and conversation are going forward.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It seems like in the current state of the world, with these technologies, there's -- maybe it's an uncanny valley...
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** Uncanny valley?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Uncanny valley, are you familiar with that term? It's from CGI graphics, where if we see computer-animated things and they're not trying to look like humans, it's fine. But then if they try to get to a certain point looking like a human...
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** And they don't quite get there?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's almost worse. It almost looks like a monster, or something...
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** It's like the Turing test for things, which is "Can I interact with something and not know it's a computer, versus a human?"
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right, and we're in the place with AI where there's insights that these systems can make - the proactive stuff that you're talking about - but it's not so useful that humans perceive it as helpful; we perceive it as creepy sometimes. I'm thinking specifically of like specific ad targeting based on data models and profiling, and those kinds of things... And I guess the question is what steps is the community taking to get over those hurdles? Is that like a thing that soon enough it will be less creepy or is it gonna get more creepy as these systems learn more and more about us?
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** I think that's up to every person to sort of define what's creepy to them and what makes them comfortable or uncomfortable...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, their thresholds...
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** It's a little like sort of the trade-off between privacy and security. People want more security, but to do that you often give up a little less of your privacy, so there's this balancing act where you have to find your own personal comfort level. People like free stuff, so what is their willingness to trade off their information for free?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, exactly.
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** For me, when I think about it, I tend to think about -- like, if you do a good job infusing AI into systems, people don't know you've done it. They just work better. So it's all about "Do things work better?" and if they work better, they don't necessarily feel creepy. For us, with Office, the fact that we can filter out spam - a lot of people would find that positive, but that's sort of AI in the background.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, exactly.
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** The ability to help people when writing a paper know "Hey, that sentence looks like this sentence, and maybe you wanna change it", that's very comfortable. Laying out pictures - the ability to take a set of photos and throw them on a slide and have it give you 4-5 layouts and give you a sub-caption - that's AI. It feels like PowerPoint's just working better; it doesn't feel like "Hey, that's a creepy AI thing." So again, it's sort of how it gets used relative to the scenario it's in, and does it feel natural or does it feel unnatural?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[40:09\] Yeah. Going back to the point about responsibility, and kind of the community deciding maybe self-regulating or determining what's the responsible ways to go about these things - are there any efforts across organization (the Microsofts, the Googles, the Apple) by the people who are working and making huge progress in AI to kind of standardize and work together, share...?
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** Definitely sharing, in particular on the ethics in the AI conversation. Look, sort of like this podcast, there's very few forums you go to where you don't get some combination of the -- you know, if it's all developers, you get more depth on the technical side, but you do get these sort of social conscience type questions... So trying to have that conversation in a vacuum isn't too useful, so we do talk with the Facebooks of the world, we talk with Amazon... I get a lot of interesting questions from other large corporations and we connect them with the folks in our company who are sort of leading that dialogue on behalf of Microsoft.
+
+What you wanna try and do is have an industry conversation. It doesn't mean everybody agrees with the approach, but this notion of "What are the ethics of AI? What are the seven principles we have? What are the N number of principles a different company has? How do we have a unified conversation? How do we have a conversation across borders, across countries?"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Can you say again about the seven principles, what book is that from? You put out a manifesto, right?
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** Yeah, The Future Computed is the name of the book. It's sort of about "Hey, what are the things we should be thinking about with AI?" For developers, should we have -- I forgot what the oath is that the doctors take...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** The Hippocratic Oath?
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** Yeah, the Hippocratic Oath - is there something equivalent for developers in the future? They talk a little bit about their Geneva Convention for the Use of Data. When you think about the things that have traditionally had boundaries for countries, which are borders, data doesn't quite work that way, AI doesn't quite work that way, so what are some of the new tools we might need in terms of how we think about this? That's why it comes back to some combination of government and companies and society, because there's not one group that's gonna sort of be able to make it work across the world that we live in.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** This is the second time we've been to a Microsoft conference in the last year. We were at Connect(); last November...
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** Oh, nice. We're glad to have you back.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Thank you. Artificial intelligence was a big conversation there. It's a big conversation at Build. Obviously, this is more towards a developer conference for Microsoft, so I guess maybe the devs out there are thinking "How is my job gonna change because of artificial intelligence? How are the tools, the things I'm making...?", how will this impact developer's lives over the next decade?
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** Well, I think one of the things we're working on is how do you take what's traditionally lived in the research world - computer vision is a research, or natural language processing is a research area... How do we sort of create a normalized set of tools for developers, that they can think now of a new layer in the developer stack specific to AI? Traditionally, we have the cloud as a layer, we have data as a layer - we had these cognitive services; here's how you, as a scientist, could work with computer vision, or here's how you could take CNTK or TensorFlow and build your own models.
+
+We're starting to build a normalized set of cognitive services - the ability to understand speech, the ability to talk, the ability to see, the ability to reason, and taking them from being sort of individual research area in projects to a developer toolkit where there's documentation, where there's a consistent set of APIs, where there's sample code... And then making them more enriched over time.
+
+So now as a developer I can say "Hey, can I infuse sight into my application, or listening into my application, or reasoning? How can I start to infuse AI into the applications I'm building and how do I have that as a tool set where I can pull it from Visual Studio or whatever tools that I wanna use? I can use them against the cloud, I can use them at the edge..." So you're moving from a world that's been pretty heavy research where you pretty much do it on your own, to a set of tools that are more standardized, so every developer can use AI, or every data scientist now can more easily work with data and create models.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[44:12\] It almost kind of reminds me of JavaScript Sprinkles in a way... Like, AI Sprinkles.
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** Yeah, Sprinkles, for sure.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I've been waiting for this for a while, because as a developer, I'm like "Just give me the API call, give me the SDK..." I don't wanna go learn the math necessarily, or the deeper concepts required to deploy these things. I just wanna be able to sprinkle some AI onto my application and immediately affect my users. Are we there? Are we coming to that point?
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** We're getting there. We're at a point now where -- I always say, it's too early to do everything with AI and it's too late to do nothing.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I like that.
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** It's been an interesting time... You know, I liked your notion of Sprinkles...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I stole that, by the way. \[laughter\]
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** I know, it's been here for a while.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Everything's a remix.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's a remix.
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** It's a remix. You know, this notion of starting to work with AI and infusing it into what you do - that is the point in time we're at in. Sometimes I get asked, "Hey, where do I go get AI developers?" Generally, you don't. You can go find AI researchers who are really deep in computer vision, but AI developers - that doesn't really sort of exist.
+
+But if you say, "Hey, are we at a point in time where developers can start to infuse AI into what they're doing?", the answer is yes. You need to go spend some energy on it, it's sort of a new set of tools, and there's sort of a different approach if you're trying to create a solution that's sort of more probabilistic in nature versus linear coding... but we're there, so now is a good time for developers to start to at least spend some energy on this.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So we see this migration of (as you've mentioned) these technologies and lines of mathematics and research in Academia, in the labs, for years; many of these things existed 25 years ago...
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** Yup.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** ...and then finally, the practical use of that in the industry, and now it's transforming everything... Are there any other things going on in the labs where it's like "This is not ready for primetime yet, but 5-10 years from now..." - are there new technologies in AI...? Because it seems like we have this curve where we have like a massive growth and then like a flattening out, and maybe we're at a plateauing of a phase?
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** No. The research is still super-active. There's three things that get us here today to start with - that ability of compute storage and networking that scale in cloud (us, Google, Amazon etc.) It means every developer now can build and work with models that scale; you couldn't do that before, unless you sort of worked somewhere that had that sort of core.
+
+The second is the growth of data. We just didn't have that for building models and working with it... And all that research to bring these APIs to life. So now you're at a point where everybody can start to play with it, but it's actually just fueling more research.
+
+For example, if you look at deep neural networks, there's not one approach to a deep neural network; people are discovering new types or new approaches to deep neural networks for speech, versus vision, versus "How do I apply this to music? I wanna replicate music" or "I wanna replicate art", or "We're working on ambient computing; I wanna be able to mix multiple sensors together, and computer vision..."
+
+So the research is actually accelerating, and when we look at the solutions team, actually part of the team is researchers, keeping up with machine reading and comprehension, because it's changing so quickly we need the latest... And then developers, because frankly, I've gotta go build something that I can ship.
+
+So you're actually seeing an acceleration of the research and you're seeing these records about sort of a human ability, so the ability to recognize as well as a human, or the ability to speak or understand. Now we just did one that was sort of English to Chinese translation; three weeks ago we beat the record. It was Christmas time where the record relative to reading comprehension equal to a human for specific tasks was equal... So you're actually seeing it accelerating right now.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Awesome. You sound excited about this stuff...
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** I am.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What's the angle into it that makes you the most excited, that you're most bullish on?
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** Well, if you think of this, there's patterns relative to AI, and one of them is AI assisting humans. This notion of "How do you help people?" How does Microsoft and the industry and AI help us as humans in any field is incredibly powerful.
+
+\[48:10\] The one that always catches you the most is healthcare. Project Emma, if you go look that up, and what we're doing relative to Parkinson's... Seeing AI, the ability to help people who are sight-impaired... I mean, the ability to help people, the work going on in genomics and radiomics... Look, I'm getting old; this stuff is like "Boy it's pretty cool!". I might be needing some of it soon.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, you might be using it sometime soon.
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** It is that ability to amplify human ingenuity or amplify human capability that is so powerful... And I feel comfortable because we're early enough in it that I worry less about the Skynet scenario. And the truth of the matter is the kids coming out of university today - they're gonna grow up with a new set of tools; they're gonna grow up with AI, blockchain, virtual or mixed reality, IoT... So they're gonna grow up with a new generation of people--
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Connectedness, yeah.
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** ...with a new generation of building blocks which will vastly change the future, and it's kind of fun to be at the beginning of that. We grew up with compute storage networking, and we've been from client, to client-server, to internet, to cloud mobile, to now intelligent edge, intelligent cloud... They've got a whole new set of building blocks, they have a different attitude towards life, and it's pretty cool to be on the front edge of that, and being there at the beginning. I won't be in there at the end, unless of course some of this healthcare stuff comes through, but it's fun to watch, and you can just see people light up when they start thinking about what's possible.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Your notion though of the AI-assisted human I think is a pretty interesting notion, because I think that if we as humans can have more information faster and more relevant, considering our context and surroundings, maybe even the particular tool we're working in or the thing we're working on, or whatever it might be - I can't really consider any particular scenarios, but... Humans are pretty quick with thinking logically about the next advancement and not have to rely on the machine to do it for us, but feed us the necessary information at the right time to make a good decision.
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** Well, it's that curation of information... We're drowning in stuff today; between your social networks, and your work networks, and all the information that's out there, having it curated for you proactively, based on you as a human, and having it sort of easier, and whether I'm at a small screen or a big screen (like a TV screen), or at work, having it proactively help me work with that information so that I can sort of leap ahead further, is again, an incredibly powerful concept... Versus me going out and searching.
+
+Bill Gates made a statement... I don't remember the exact phrase, but it was something along the lines of "We all sort of go to computers and have to know how to use them. We're hitting the right point with AI when computers know how to work with us." It's the opposite approach.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow.
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** And computing is becoming more of a fabric, as opposed to a device.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So there's a lot of big players in AI. Microsoft is definitely one of the big ones... When you look at the landscape and you look at your competition, what gives Microsoft an advantage in moving faster and delivering more than the other guys?
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** I think there's a couple things that differentiate us, and we can decide whether it's about moving faster or not... First off, those core buildings blocks, which is compute storage and networking at scale. Azure is obviously one of the large cloud providers, there's only three of them on the planet, and growing well...
+
+The second is not only do we understand it, but we have some very unique data assets, between Bing, and between LinkedIn, and between the Microsoft Graph.
+
+And third - look, Microsoft research has been there for 25 years. We've been doing research, so we have sort of the core in place.
+
+I think the second thing, frankly, is sort of customer and commercial ethos. When you talk about people using AI, the notion of security and privacy and management and solutions that are on premises and into the cloud, and edge and cloud computing - I think that ethos of sort of a commercial entity and how you apply this sort of in a business setting, I think people get a little less nervous about us, where we have sort of stricter rules on how we use data... We always have, and we're not in industries, we're not adding ourselves into certain industries that others are... So that combination of a commercial ethos, core fundamentals that are very sound, non-competitive, and then sort of taking this proactive approach for example on the ethics - I think that gives people a comfort level in sort of saying "Hey, we're looking for help in AI (because a lot of people are) and you seem like a good set of folks to talk to about it."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[52:23\] I think that these keynotes like you did today with Satya, his keynote, the first thing he said was privacy... That was how he essentially opened it up. It wasn't like "Here's how awesome we are and what we're doing", it's "Here's how responsible we are with the data and here's how we apply data to problems."
+When you take that and you say "Well, here's artificial intelligence laid on top of big data or cloud software", things like that, you really have to look at Microsoft differently from the point of view of like that's what you came out the gate with, not "Here's our latest tool."
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** "Here's all the cool science." I mean, at the end of the day, you need the science... But it comes back to that ethos - what's your ethos as a company, how do you think about the commercial landscape versus the consumer, how do you think about helping other companies use this technology, how do you think about doing it responsibly?
+
+I've been at Microsoft 24 years, been through a lot of ups and downs, and you learn a lot over that period of time... You know, how you work with developers, how you work with open source, how you work with data, how you work with governments, how you work globally... There's a lot to learn to there, and I think that helps us.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What does someone like you do? Your role - vice-president, right?
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Big role, it's over-arching, you've gotta be in the weeds, maybe, managering...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What does that look like in the day-to-day sense?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What's the day-to-day in your life?
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** A good chunk of it is spending time with customers and partners. Before this role, I managed our developer evangelism, and before that I managed our OEM ecosystem, so I'm used to community and partners, so I spend a lot of time with customers and partners, just having this kind of conversation... And then working across Microsoft. Look, we're still a big company; how do you orchestrate the sets of work going on between AI and the research group, between AI and the platform team, between AI and the product groups? And then managing people; how do you build and grow people, leaders in the company? Anyone from fresh out of college, to other leaders... So my time is split between internal and external, and trying to be a good advocate for the company.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I think because AI is such a cross-cutting concern, like you said, it's gonna be infused into everything... It doesn't lend itself well (I wouldn't think) organizationally into like a siloed approach or a functional approach.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Very integrated.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You probably have to integrate it into lots of teams. Is that a challenge?
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** You end working across teams... Look, you have a set of people that are working on the platform, the things that developers would use, and then you have a set of people who are using it, and really what you wanna do is enable the conversation so that the platform teams learn from the people who are actually using it, and you feed things back into the platform that you need to. Teams that are busy advancing stuff are making the most of it in the products, then you've got researchers on the other side... So a lot of that is enabling the conversation, it's helping get ready for events like this, it's helping sort of bring it to life for customers...
+
+\[55:02\] So there's a decent amount of orchestration, and having been there a long time, that's actually helpful, knowing your way around... But you know, it's just fun, it's just good. I always say I like being the center of the whirlwind. AI is definitely the center of conversation or energy today, so that's where I like to be.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Maybe as a closing question - biggest challenges moving forward for AI? What are those biggest challenges/hurdles?
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** Expectation setting... You've got two ends of the spectrum - you have the "Gosh, it should be able to do all these great things..." Well, it's not that easy; we're not there. Then you have the other side, which is "Oh my gosh, this is scary." So you end up working on both sides, which is sort of the over-expectations on what it can do, from both a good perspective and a discomfort perspective.
+
+So I think once you can get sort of the expectation setting, which is one of the biggest hurdles by far, then it's helping people pick the right path.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** How do you apply expectations?
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** On the not overdoing it side, it's just sitting down and talking to people. I don't know in terms of any new technology area or any new conversation -- unless you're in the dialogue, unless you're in the community, in with the developers, you're just not there. So I think our biggest way to help is to be a part of the dialogue and part of the conversation. Again, it's not one person or one company, but you've gotta show up; you've gotta show up ready to have a dialogue, and some of the dialogues are easy, and some of them are hard.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's my favorite advice, "Just show up."
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** Just show up. \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You've gotta show up, right?
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** I agree. Having been here for a long time, having worked a lot with it - you've just gotta show up.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, consistently.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, speaking of the dialogue, we have a brand new podcast, Practical AI.
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** I love it!
+**Jerod Santo:** It's a weekly show...
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** That's my kind of show.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** All about making AI accessible, practical...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And fun.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And fun for everyone. We'd love to have you back on that show to keep the dialogue going around these topics.
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** Great, I'd love to be there. I just did the precursor for a sort of Practical AI blog today, so we'll kick that one up and we'll do two more in the next two weeks.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Awesome. Beautiful.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Thanks, Steven.
+
+**Steve Guggenheimer:** Alright, thanks guys. I appreciate it.
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+**Jerod Santo:** So we're here in the wake and aftermath of an event-stream malware incident that happened to the open source community, to the npm community, to the JavaScript community, and to Dominic himself, the maintainer of the repository...
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** Former maintainer.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Former maintainer, yes. Thank you for correcting me. Please correct us as we go here, as there's lots of details and we're definitely going to probably slip up on some of them. For those who weren't on the internets on and around November 26th, 2018, we will recall some of the events that happened, to catch everybody up and get us on the same page.
+
+There is a repository and package called event-stream, which was created by Dominic Tarr, and maintained up until recently by him, which had an issue opened on November 20th of this year by a fella - he goes by FallingSnow; I think his name is Ayrton Sparling. I probably mispronounced, but it's the best I can do there. He was wondering what happened to this repo and why specific access was given to a GitHub user by the name of @right9ctrl. He had found some issues there, and was asking about it.
+
+It turns out that this person injected some malware into the npm package, with a specific version of event-stream, which was used by many folks, and that was very problematic. Now, this caused all sorts of confusion, conversation, some yelling, some nice things... It caused a lot of discussion on Monday, and some actions. Thankfully, npm acted pretty quickly and the package was removed the morning of November 26th. The initial incident was about a week earlier, but didn't really hit too much of the zeitgeist until Monday.
+
+\[03:59\] Dominic is here with us. Dominic made a statement on November 26th, and we're here to talk about that and talk about the aftermath, what causes these problems, really open source, the community and the culture writ large, because there's huge implications... And lots of fun stuff.
+
+That's my summary... Adam, Dominic, please hop in and help me out there or fix any things I had wrong, and we can get going.
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** Yeah, so I woke up that morning to a friend telling me that the issue had been posted all over the internet and I might want to lock it, or something. I was actually quite excited, because I thought that that issue brought the attention to quite important issues for open source. Everyone was very excited about it, so I made a statement about it... But I'd like to explain how everything fell into place.
+
+I wrote the event-stream module like seven years ago, and at that time -- Node.js is now hugely popular; by now there's hundreds of thousands of modules on npm. Back then it was like tens of thousands. I've been involved with Node since there were -- I remember when there were a thousand packages on npm...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's funny...
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** ...and that being celebrated as a big thing.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Big deal, yeah.
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** So event-stream was of that era. I went on to write a huge number of stream-related modules, and event-stream was actually the very first one that I wrote. I wrote it, and then after about 11 months of stream experience, I realized that event-stream was kind of the wrong basis, and I wrote a thing called Through, which became the basis for all of my streams stuff after that. So even by that point - that was six years ago - I had basically moved on from event-stream; I wasn't really interested in -- I wasn't using it as my first go-to thing for writing streams anymore.
+
+Then another year or two after that the Node core team had decided they were gonna fix all the problems with Streams and create Streams 2. I hadn't managed to participate in any of these discussions on what was gonna go in Streams 2; it was all at this Node conference in California, and I wasn't there... And when I saw what they wanted to add, I was like "This is horribly bloated and ugly." But it was also backwards-compatible, which made it twice as bad. I tried some mild protesting, and they were just like "We've already decided, this is how we're gonna do it."
+
+That sort of spurred me to be like "Well, if you're gonna really make a really minimal efficient stream thing that wasn't backwards-compatible with the current streams, what would it look like?" I started experimenting - me and some friends - and came out with pull-stream. Pull-stream is really minimal -- you just have two functions; one function is just a normal Node async function, and you call it repeatedly, one at a time. So you have a readable function. And then you have a reader function, which is a function that the readable was passed to. I've got detailed blog posts about both the history of Node.js streams and pull-stream, so you can go through them at dominictarr.com.
+
+\[07:46\] Pull-stream was like -- I decided this was actually so much better and solved several of the problems that node streams had, like error propagation... So if the error occurs somewhere in the stream, it cleans up and aborts the whole stream, and you know that the stream ended in error... Or just move data about, like you did with event-stream. It was just much more minimal and lightweight and efficient, and benchmarked that it was faster, and stuff like this... Even though I hadn't really tried to optimize it, I had just written all this code... So I had fully moved on by that point. It was like "This thing is great." And I've really tried to promote pull-streams.
+
+Some people caught on and there's a pretty good community of people that use it... But anyway, by the time -- that was also several years ago, so I had completely moved on from event-stream like twice.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, not only had you stopped working on it and maintaining it, but you had replaced it with things that you consider much better quality, the way to go. In your mind, this particular package was ancient history, right?
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** Yeah. And at that point it wasn't really popular, yet I think it became popular when Gulp used it. I never used Gulp... It's like a build tool, kind of like Make, or something like that. It's for building all of your projects, and stuff like that... I always felt that JavaScript didn't really need one of those, but anyway, Gulp happened and got pretty big, and it used event-stream; in the first version it used event-stream in its example documentation, and stuff... So that's when it actually became more popular, but that was after I had already moved on to pull-stream's family enough.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So you moved on twice, then it became popular, and you're still moved on from this project... Like, from how you use it, its usefulness to you. Not so much just the project, but its usefulness to you - how you use it to develop applications, or using your tools and toolchain... But Grunt made it popular, Gulp... I'm not sure if Grunt may have used it or not, but they were all on -- no, you said Gulp, I said Grunt.
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** Yeah, it's Gulp.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** They all run together to me - Grunt, Gulp... All in the same era, of this "events as streams to build things" era prior to Webpack becoming more and more popular and things changing.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** The real interesting thing about this situation is that the compromise or the injection of this code didn't come from hacking GitHub's permissions, or npmjs.com... It was really a third-party who came to you on a project that, like you said, you moved on from twice. This is the @right9ctrl user on GitHub, which is no longer a user on GitHub, of course; a malicious actor... And must have been acting like a normal, and obtained credentials to this repository basically by asking for them, and then used that access to add, according to FallingSnow, flatmap-stream, which has an injection in it... Very briefly added it, published a new version, and then took it out in order to cover their tracks and leave the actual installed version, of course, on as many computers as possible.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So that's really the bigger picture of this - this was an interesting and unfortunate situation, but one that is very difficult for you to see coming, right? Tell us about this maintainer that you added. I know you're kind of working your way there, with the story of how event-stream was outside of your own mind and use... Tell us about that decision - was it a long time ago, was it recently?
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** \[11:59\] Well, it was at the start of September; it was only a few months ago. My maintenance of event-stream was basically ignoring it. I hadn't made any feature changes in five years. If anyone made a feature change, I'd tell them to publish it to this module.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Let me throw out a couple of stats about Dominic, because I doubt he would say these things himself, in order to boast... But if you're thinking about Dominic Tarr as perhaps like event-stream was one of a couple packages he's written, "How could you ignore this thing that you toiled over...?", Dominic has, at the time of this call, 628 source repos on GitHub. That means these are non-forks; he actually created those repositories... And 422 packages published on npm under his name. In November alone, Dominic, according to GitHub's activity, you've done 257 commits on 33 repositories, in November... I would call that prolific in your open source work and products.
+
+Event-stream, at this point, was an old package that you wrote, that you'd moved on from twice, and it's not like you've got these six packages that you care for; you have hundreds of packages, and so like you said, the maintenance on that was you were basically ignoring it.
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** Yeah. And none of my friends used it either. I'd occasionally get issues or support emails, but for me these were all just annoying, just like "I wish this would go away." Then someone emailed me and was like "Hey, this was useful to me. I can spend a few hours a week maintaining it", and I was like "Hell yes!" I jumped at the offer. \[laughter\] "Please.., Thank you so much." It was the first person who actually offered to help, so I gave it to them.
+
+This is a critical thing that ended up exasperating the whole situation - in-between then and now, maybe a month later, I had a whole bunch of old modules that I was no longer really interested in, that I didn't use, and occasionally people would post issues and pull requests, and it was always a huge bummer for someone to earnestly come looking for help or want to make some change, and then this would require me to probably think about the implications of their change for at least 20 minutes, or something... And I'd moved on from all of these things, and it was just a huge bummer to tell them "Look, I just can't be bothered. I'm just not interested in working on this."
+
+And it was not the 20 minutes or something, it was just the letting some stranger down that hard; I realized that that was getting to me... And because I had hundreds of modules, I thought I wanted to disown in that bulk... So I've actually written more like 700 and something modules, and in-between handing off event-stream and now, I disowned like 340 of them...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, wow.
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** Yeah, so I wanted to do it in a way that I would no longer have access to them. So I tried an email, and then used a random password that I forgot, and then used that to sign up for another npm account called No Person's Modules; then I forgot the password to that as well, so I can't log into these things. Then I transferred hundreds of modules to that account, which now no one controls. I emailed npm support and told them I was doing this, as well, based on mental health reasons.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Drastic measures.
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** \[16:00\]Yeah. But I thought that it was quite cathartic for those to be no longer my responsibility, and the things that I still retain control of are the things that I actually use, directly or indirectly, mostly... Maybe there's a few things I can clean up as well, but... And then there were a couple of cases where I'd added someone else as a publisher as well, and so if someone else was already a publisher, I just removed myself from those modules. Event-stream fell into this category, where already someone else seemed to be an active maintainer. At that point, they seemed to be legitimately maintaining event-stream, so I was just like "Okay, that's under control." So I no longer had access to it. By the time they reported the attack, I was like "Sorry, I actually can't help you. I don't have access to this module anymore."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Was this recently then, this cathartic moment for you? Because you said @right9ctrl reached out a few months ago and asked you for commit bits, so that they can help you maintain, and you gave it to them... So was this cathartic moment you're talking about, where you did this deliberate --
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** Yeah, it was something like a couple of weeks after that, or something like that. It was a coincidence, but there was basically a coincidence in timing. I think if I hadn't have done that, then when someone reported this thing, I would have been like "Okay, we'll just unpublish that version, and remove this weird thing", and stuff like that. It probably would have never made the news, because it would have been dealt with in that issue...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right...
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** ...but because I had forcibly locked myself out of it...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's interesting...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You really couldn't go in and save the day.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** This was like a perfect storm. And let me just say that it was a pretty sophisticated social engineering attack... Because that's really what it is, right? We talk about hacking into computers and whatnot, and we realize over time - go all the way back to Kevin Mitnick - the best crackers are the ones that just ask for your password, or act like they're somebody else and get a password. Most people were very forward with information.
+
+This was a situation where this person picked really a prime repository, where it hasn't been active, probably the issues were building up... You can tell when somebody's ignoring one of their repositories just by doing a little bit of research... And then not only that, but so deployed, which you can probably see via npm download stats on builds, and stuff, how many downloads of this particular package in the last month... And then really weasel their way in. It's so interesting why we found out about this. First of all, I think FallingSnow is like a saint; I love people like that, so thanks FallingSnow for doing this -- I don't know what you were doing necessarily, poking around and finding this thing, and shedding light on these things... But then also the fact, Dominic, that you had removed your own access from npm, and so there was really nothing that you could do; this was gonna have to be brought into the light, and so here we have it.
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** Yeah. But I think one thing important to note is that the attack that @right9ctrl was trying to pull off was actually a very targeted attack. It only actually affected a specific Bitcoin wallet, that I understand hadn't actually been fully released yet, or something... So it didn't end up doing any--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Massive damage.
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** It ended up failing completely. Basically, people's time got wasted, because they had to remove the code.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I wonder if they were targeting a specific person that they knew used event-stream, or something... Of course, that's all just conjecture.
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** Well, it's quite obvious who they were targeting, because the malicious payload was encrypted, and the key to the encryption was--
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The wallet.
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** \[20:03\] Yeah, it was the name of the wallet thing. It was like, it goes into an environment variable that is "see it when it's run inside an app." So they found that there was some suspicious encrypted material in the minified file, but they had to go through every single module that depended on event-stream, until they found the one that actually decrypted the thing. They had to just try thousands of things, until they discovered that it was this Bitcoin wallet.
+
+Of course, by the time they had noticed that there was some encrypted thing inside the minified content, and not inside the regular content, then obviously something was up, and they didn't know exactly what was the thing... Although now next time this happens, some Bitcoin wallet is probably a pretty obvious case.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's interesting. I didn't realize that they had figured out that much. I also wanna point out just the highlights of the community, with people like FallingSnow, but also the others... Like you mentioned, so many people digging into the code, and really the reverse engineers come out, right? And do all their Sherlock Holmes work to figure these things out. It's really quite amazing how fast and successful they are at tracing the trail here.
+
+Also, what's up with @right9ctrl? Don't they know that Bitcoin is crashing right now? Come on, what's the deal...? The value is way down.
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** I think they started working on this hack before it crashed, as well.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** If we could just get all cryptos to go back to zero, then maybe we'd have less problems like these out in the world.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, The Analysis of a Supply Chain Attack by Hayden Parker laid some of this out, in terms of the backdoor... It would only be activated if the code was included in BitPay's open source wallet called Copay, or any forks that did not modify their project's description. So like Dominic is saying, it's very targeted... But I think one thing that I'm seeing here that's kind of interesting - and correct me if I'm wrong - is GitHub and npm are not a one-to-one. It seemed like this person was able to deploy this sort of undetected in a way, because they had done some merges on GitHub, and then undone their work, and did a deploy or something like that to npm, and so npm and GitHub were out of sync... Which I'm sure is very common to be a case, but I'm wondering if that's not a line for security vulnerability, whenever something that is on GitHub, in source code, does not somehow match as a code repository place npm, the final built module. What do you guys think that? ...the misnomer there, the anomaly of the fact that they're not connected or they're not the same.
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** There is a number of ways that this particular attack could have been systematically prevented, or made a lot more difficult to pull off, or a lot easier to identify. One of those is you check that the build product is deterministic from the sourced product. The minified version of the code -- like, if someone else minifies the same code, it should produce the same result. And if the unminified thing didn't include the encrypted stuff, then the output shouldn't include it.
+
+A simple thing that you could do to prevent this kind of thing is -- or at least that would have detected this thing... Let's say there was this tool that you install your dependency tree, then you run this thing, it goes through all of the dependency tree, it clones all of the repos, builds them all, and then checks that what you've installed is actually exactly the same, down to a byte, as what was built... And if anything is different at all, then you'd be like "There's something going on here."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[23:51\] Even from a maintainer's level - a maintainer isn't gonna catch this unless they have the right kind of tooling, because no maintainer... Well, maybe not "no maintainer", but not many maintainers are gonna confirm that what is on npm is what is on GitHub. Especially if it's minified, who's gonna take that measure to ensure that "Hey, I'm gonna give commit bit access to this person, and I'm gonna assume that they're not malicious because the previous commits...", whatever. They're just not gonna do that level of vetting. We need tooling in place to, as you said, systematically catch this kind of exploit because GitHub did not match npm, in this case.
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** Yeah, and this issue of deterministic builds hasn't been on the radar I think until now, of the JavaScript community, but is something that... Like, Debian has for the last couple of years been moving -- every Debian package, which is mostly compiled C, C++ etc. is fully deterministic now. It means if two people compile the same program, the built output will be exactly the same.
+
+If you have multiple trusted, independent people building something and one of them is different, then you know that there's something up, and possibly it's a Trojan inside of the compiler.
+
+This was an attack described like in the early '90s, by the creators of UNIX, the Trusting Trust attack... Which is pretty famous, but also, generally, no one had actually used it to do anything malicious, that anyone was aware of, although there had been a benign Trojan inside of GCC for some years. It was something that when you compiled it, it would insert itself into the compiled output, and never appeared in the source code, and then when you used that to compile the next version of GCC, it inserted itself. And it didn't do anything bad. I guess it was probably just a funny prank.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Perhaps a good moment, Adam, to once again cross-promote an old episode we did - Reproducible Builds and Secure Software, with Chris Lamb. We talked to Chris Lamb all about his work with reproducible builds and how that's going into the Debian and Ubuntu distributions... Back in February 2017, so a couple of years ago, but man, that was a prescient show, because it's coming up so much lately, as these are definitely things that people are starting to realize are super-important, because we're having fall-out from not having that as a feature of our package management tools, so... Go back and listen to that. We'll put that in the show notes if that is of interest to you.
+
+**Break:** \[26:36\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So we're talking about ways that these kinds of attacks can be prevented down the road, systematic things we can do, or maybe if we can't do them and maybe certain platforms have to do them; certainly, maintainers have things that we can do, but you mentioned the deterministic builds/reproducible builds, but you also have some other things that could be features of our systems, that would help from this kind of attack happening. Wanna elaborate on those, Dominic.
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** Yeah. Well, firstly, reproducible builds might have made it easier to...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Detect.
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** Reproducible builds might have flagged this, but he might have gone to -- like, if they had checked in the malicious code, maybe no one would have noticed. Once it was apparent that there was some encrypted code that was being run, it was like "Something is differently very suspicious", but if it had unencrypted, that might have actually been more effective. We don't really know... It could have been overkill to encrypt it, and so that would have actually gotten past a reproducible build, because the bad stuff would have been just hiding in plain sight.
+
+And the other thing is that the attack depended on the event stream code doing several things that -- well, rather the flatMap() code doing several things that really had no business doing. So to successfully steal people's Bitcoin keys and then send them back to the attacker, it needs to do network IO, and event-stream itself didn't need to do that; that is completely outside of the stated purpose of event-stream... Same with accessing the crypto module and that sort of stuff. So if there was a specific list of what permissions, on a module basis, that...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That you could request from...
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** Yeah, that that module depended on. Event-stream was like -- it doesn't do any IO, it doesn't do any networking or file access... it just loads other things together... Then compromising event-stream wouldn't have been useful for this attack. You would have to compromise something else that had access... And then, of course, it also monkey-patched the constructor of something that then it got the keys from; if you had a good sandboxing thing, it wouldn't have been able to do that.
+
+I've been aware of this stuff being developed for some years; there's this thing called ERights, which is quite old... This guy, Mark Miller, who is also the chief architect on the Xanadu project... Are you familiar with Xanadu?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** No.
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** This is something you should definitely know about... Maybe you should do a whole podcast on it. So this guy Ted Nelson had this idea for the World Wide Web, but better. It had versioning built in, and you had this thing called transclusion, where a link just embedded other documents. But the thing is he had this idea in the 1960's, and then spent several decades trying to develop it... And by the time the web came along, the first release of the web from Tim Berners-Lee cited Xanadu, and was like "I wish Xanadu was ready, but given that it isn't, here's a crappy version of the idea that I cobbled together."
+
+Project Xanadu was like a far, far more ambitious idea. It actually inspired a lot of people, but failed to deliver any usable software. The history of it is quite amazing, because it has quite a big impact in terms of ideas, but it didn't successfully deliver anything. It still was instrumental in actually creating the web, but the creator of Xanadu was like "The web is actually a really disappointing, crappy version of what we were trying to do."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I found Project Xanadu on Wikipedia, reading a little bit along, and I agree this would make a great show to do separately... But what's interesting is that there was a working deliverable called Open Xanadu that was released in 2014; it was called "Open" because you can see all the parts... So not necessarily open source, but just open to see.
+
+On the site, the creators claim that Tim Berners-Lee stole their idea, and that "the World Wide Web is a bizarre structure created by arbitrary initiatives of varied people, and has a terrible programming language, and the web is a complex maze." I'm not sure if this was Mark Miller doing this, or it was somebody that was inspired by Mark Miller's work on Xanadu, but... It's super-interesting. This is just Wikipedia, by the way, so... Take it for what it's worth.
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** \[32:12\] Mark Miller was the chief architect, but the Xanadu Project was started by Ted Nelson. Actually, I had the privilege of meeting Mark Miller a few months ago as well. I had been aware of his work on ERights since then. The idea was he was trying to build a programming language that was optimized for security auditing. You could definitely say that "This part can only access these things, and unless something has been passed into it, it can't interfere with that other thing in any way at all." And there's this website that explains this. Those look like excellent ideas for mainstream computing, which is basically being completely ignorant of security. Security is just a huge pain in the butt for most people. They had envisioned "This is how we could solve all of these problems", and they've been working on it for decades now... But interestingly, in the main time they had actually infiltrated Google and had managed to add several features to JavaScript that enabled JavaScript to have all the pieces of the puzzle to create this in JavaScript.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Who's "they"? You said they infiltrated Google. Are you talking about Mark Miller?
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** Yeah, Mark Miller. "Infiltrated" perhaps is the wrong word, but he worked at Google, and I understand he was -- who's the other JavaScript guy...? Douglas...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Crockford?
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** Crockford, yeah. Crockford had been like "JavaScript nearly has all of the features you need to make this secure thing." From my understanding, this produced Strict Mode and Object.freeze... And now left Google and is working at this thing Agoric, which has produced now a thing Secure EcmaScript (SES), and there's a bunch of versions that are more or less constrained, or something like this, but it gives you pure JavaScript; you don't need a special platform... So you don't change the background; this already works in a web browser, and you could block off some code. So you could completely use user-provided code that then runs in a context that you can be confident it's not touching other things. It can't do things like prototypes, and it can't use things that haven't been passed to it directly.
+
+Many people will point out that getting sandboxing right is extremely difficult, and that's absolutely true... But luckily, these people have literally spent their careers working on this.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So who would be the people that would be tasked with working on something like this? Are we talking about browser vendors? Node? Are we talking about package managers? Where would the sandboxing and the application of these principles go?
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** Adding it to a natural, deployed application, that was originally created without this stuff in mind, so currently written code in applications, that are running and npm is up to date, someone would have to decide, I guess, what APIs things have access to, and stuff like that, so...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Mm-hm. It'd be easier to start fresh.
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** Well, I think it could actually be added in userspace. You might have to go through and be like "This thing can have these permissions or not."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You mentioned earlier that it didn't need IO access, so that would be an easy one... So if this module ever requested or used IO, then something is very odd about its behavior, because its described behavior says that it shouldn't use certain APIs or certain feature sets, essentially.
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** Yeah, and for the most part, unless they do something really weird and dynamic, probably 95% of the modules would be an easy call to say what they should be able to or shouldn't be able to access. But you can just weed out dependencies that do weird stuff.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[35:47\] So as the attacker though - let's say I have what @right9ctrl had, I have access to the source code, as well as the deployment mechanism... Even in this world where there is this sandbox, could I not simply -- I mean, I would have to provide the whitelist as the author of event-stream, so would it not just add IO to my list of things that I require and then deploy? Maybe you could have at that point some sort of like "These permissions have changed? Do you want to allow this to do that?" kind of a thing...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. Gosh, yeah... What a world...
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** Yeah, I think it would be a good improvement, like Android phones, etc, already have this kind of permissions system. And I think most people would just click Okay.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Exactly, yeah. \[laughs\] We're pushing the attack vector up the stack, to the end user, who's more likely to not even know what the heck it's talking about and say yes.
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** Yeah. But on the other hand, when you install a module, if you made the call then, and it was actually controlled -- because you end up with things like... BitPay didn't actually install event-stream; they installed something that installed something that installed event-stream.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** So when you install something, you say "Oh, that should never do such and such", and then it's basically a question of like "Who do you trust?" And perhaps if you were something like a high-value target, such as a Bitcoin wallet, then you would just go through the entire tree and be like "What should this be able to access? What should this be able to access?", which might take a while if you have hundreds of modules, but it would definitely give you peace of mind and be an appropriate action, and this kind of attack wouldn't even be worth bothering with.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, you said something there too, like, the trust... So we talked through sort of like systematic ways to prevent this, which seem to have varying degrees of user experience degradation and/or as you said, Jerod, just pushing the attack vector up or down the stack to different places that may have ill effects, like clicking Okay, or just bothering the developer at some point, or maybe even the user at some point with things that they're just not concerned with... The other is what you said there, Dominic, around trust... And even in your readme, the statement on event-stream's compromise, you mentioned two strong solutions to this problem, one being paying the maintainers, but the additive to that was only depending upon modules that you know are definitely maintained... So I'd like to kind of get your idea of what "definitely maintained" means to you, because your version of that, my version of that and Jerod's version of that may or may not be the same...
+
+And then point two you made was when you depend on something, you should take part in maintaining it... So maybe you could break down those levels of solutions, where it's like, rather than changing how the software only makes sense reminding people to trust their dependency tree, but how do you do that?
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** Yeah. Well, a big part of the problem here from the social perspective is that the tooling basically assumed I was responsible for this module, and had full control over the decisions made about it. So when you delegated to someone who had installed something that installed event-stream, you didn't have control over who made the decisions about event-stream... So it was basically like I was able to just transfer the right of access to event-stream. And I didn't want to have the right to control event-stream, because I had no interest; I had no skin in the game.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You abandoned it, basically. You wanted to be out.
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** Yeah. It's sort of this really weird thing that only happens in software. There's no other part of -- it's really hard to make an analogy to some other part, where like a hobbyist ends up maintaining some kind of critical infrastructure while they don't want to. It's, like, insane.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What's funny is that -- maybe I could break this down a little bit... You, to the world, own this thing. You personally have moved on from the concept, the paradigm and the idea; meanwhile, the rest of the world found it to be useful years later, and made it widely useful in many different ways. It's been included in several different packages, and very popular organizations, but meanwhile, the original creator, who was best described earlier as a prolific open source developer, has since moved on not only from the project or desire to move on - and in some cases with some angst, because you had some pain with telling people that you were or were not gonna be involved anymore, and you mentioned the mental tear on yourself there... But the fact that you've just moved on from it, but the world hasn't, yet you're still involved, or at least somehow in the blame zone.
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** \[40:30\] Yeah. And I think it's also important to mention that the module itself hadn't changed at all, in any significant way, over that entire time. It became popular for what originally it was back when I thought it was a good idea... So I hadn't really been doing anything, except for just ignoring it and reluctantly occasionally responding to something, or merging pull requests. Basically, it was just like a pain in the neck.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So how do you deal with that then? ... I guess maybe that's where we can camp out. If this is now a thorn in your side, you've moved on from it, the world still feels it's popular, two million downloads per week according to TideLift, used by large open source projects like Angular, Mocha, Electron and others, other commercial codebases from organizations like BBC News and Microsoft... So clearly somebody had some value in this thing, but you wanna move on... How do we collectively as open source look at this scenario and say "How can we allow maintainers to move on in ways that a project that is widely used, or at least widely useful to many people, organizations - how do we let them move on in a way that keeps the codebase secure and doesn't allow something like this to happen?" Do we hand this off to support organizations like Ruby Together might be...? In this case it's a JavaScript npm module, so maybe Ruby Together isn't the right one, but that example there where you have organizations that are intended to be sort of this catch-all, that are trusted or could be trusted or have some sort of vested interest in the future of an ecosystem.
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** Yeah. When something is new and exciting... The thing is, I think most of the code on npm was created by -- I mean, there's probably some big things that people are working on for their job, but the vast majority of them are small things that people have created in their own time, or to fix their own little problem. Some of those things, such as event-stream, became hugely depended on, and the thought process and skills and interest and motivation for creating those in the first place is very different from the thing that is required to maintain them in the long-term.
+
+Once people are using something, then you don't really wanna change it, because if you break anything, loads of people are gonna be upset with you; everyone's gonna have a bad time. It's better just not to change anything at all; just keep it completely stable. And that's not really very fun. When you've created it the first time, it was a new idea that you were exploring, and something that worked really well; it's fun for a while, but by the time it's popular, maintaining it is a job... And it's not like a job that you necessarily signed up for. It was much better if it was maintained by someone who saw that as their job.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So what you're saying is if somehow over the 700(ish) modules you've created in your career - I think you mentioned roughly a hundred or so you decided to abandon a couple months ago or a couple weeks ago...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** 300.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** 300, okay. Thanks for correcting my math there... What you're saying, if I understand you correctly, is if there was a way for you to be paid, a fee that makes sense, a fair fee to continue to be a security measure, a maintainer even, if that's necessary, to improve - most of these are mature and stable and don't need to be changed much - you would stay on board as an on-the-hook person to provide maintenance and security.
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** \[43:59\] Sure, yeah. I mean, there were 300 modules, but only a small handful of them were really popular. And I think this is the other thing, too - the most popular ones are completely boring. The things that I'm personally most proud of, the most interesting problems are not really very popular at all. The things that have millions of downloads... Like, my most downloaded - which I actually still use - is rc, which is a configuration loader. It just loads configuration files.
+
+It's kind of like pop music - to have the broadest appeal, it has to be completely bland and uninteresting, such that the broadest spectrum of people can relate to it. Everyone has to load a configuration file.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** General purpose use.
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** Yeah, there's no exciting way to do it though.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I agree with you completely. I think that's why Nadia Eghbal's report about open source funding/sustainability was so well-named - Roads and Bridges - because we're really talking about infrastructure, and the phenomenon I guess that we're actually seeing here is people accidentally create infrastructure. They're not trying to; they're solving problems they have, but it turns out those problems are general use and easy to pull in, and easy to deploy, and over time it becomes infrastructure... And the fact is that nobody wants to work on a road, or nobody wants to work on a bridge. Maybe building that bridge was a fun and interesting problem for engineering, but it's just maintenance... So we accidentally create these roads and bridges, and they become public infrastructure... Or not public, but you know what I mean... And then it's like "Oh, I'm supposed to just work on this road for you for free?" And that's where the rubber hits the road - we accidentally got here. You accidentally became the maintainer of a thing that you wrote seven years ago, and people are still using today, and you have zero interest in. I think that's why many of us turn to "Okay, now I'm ready for a financial compensation to take care of this, because I also wouldn't maintain a road for free."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** To that effect too, you don't have a lot of people coming by this perfectly fine bridge saying, "You know what, I think I'm gonna build a different bridge right next to it, slightly better... Because I want to." Like, rc works. Or in this case, event-stream works. Why would you come by and rebuild, as you mentioned? That's why it becomes accidental infrastructure.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I mean, the metaphor falls apart, because we can clone and fork these things... You can't clone/fork a bridge, but to a certain degree it fits.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Anything to respond to that? Do you agree with that analysis? Is that how you feel?
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** Yeah, but the thing I'd like to stress is that when I talk about paying the developers - that's actually not my first choice. I like hobbyist-style programming. I don't necessarily want that; I would rather people who depend on that code for their job take over maintaining such code. My point is just that the incentives for "Who's gonna take responsibility for this?" should be who ends up actually feeling the impact.
+
+The problem here was that someone who wasn't interested in having that responsibility ended up with the responsibility. If people who actually needed that thing ended up being the ones maintaining that... The other thing is you can give it away, you can hand things off to someone who will maintain it, but you're still responsible for figuring out who that was, and that's what I thought I was doing when I handed it off.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And to speak a little bit in general - this system does work. I've seen many cases where somebody writes an open source thing, and then other businesses or enterprises come to rely on it, and the original maintainers do not use it anymore, and then the businesses or the enterprises, or whoever currently has a stake in it - they take over maintainership; this is something that happens... And I agree with you, I think that's the best for it to work. In lieu of that, when that doesn't happen, pay the maintainer if you don't want to maintain it but somebody has to... And I do see it working. It's not like it's utterly broken, it's just that there are times where things fall through the cracks and then we have issues.
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** \[48:15\] Yeah. A lot of people who were upset about this were like "Why couldn't you just have deprecated it, or stopped maintaining it and not given it away?" and the funny thing is that's actually the decision that I was coming to, and I actually did that for hundreds of modules shortly after... But coming to that decision, when I had like hundreds of modules that I didn't want - it wasn't like a one at a time thing; it was a bulk decision, that involved writing scripts to disown all these modules. The current tools don't provide a good way of doing this in bulk. For example, I had most all of these modules off my npm, but I hadn't archived them on GitHub yet... And I just simply hadn't got around to it. I felt that removing myself from them on npm was sufficiently cathartic that I was like "Oh, I'll just come back and do the GitHub thing later." If I had done that before it was reported, then they wouldn't have been able to post the issue on there, and something else would have had to happen.
+
+**Break:** \[49:27\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We've talked about some technical things we can do (us as a community), we've talked about some better practices in terms of consumers of these things, as either hop in and help maintain, throw some cash at the problem - which is always nice, but harder to convince upper management to do... As maintainers, Dominic, it sounds like you hit on some of the things, which was like "What is a good practice for abandoning a project?" And you hit on -- like you said, a few weeks after you gave access here, which, in a bit of serendipity, we've allowed the community to have this conversation and really to talk about these things, so we can all together learn and realize what we should be doing about our projects that we're maintaining... One of the suggestions in our community Slack - I think Dan McClain brought it up - in terms of how it should work, or what would be a good way of going about it, is basically he says "I'm really starting to think that the model should be, if you don't want to maintain it anymore, update the readme and let it be forked. Forks have to establish their own reputation. I would hate to have my name used maliciously; at the same time, I don't feel that I need to keep maintaining something." And then he says, "Look at CanCanCan, which was a good example of a situation, where there was CanCan (this is in the Ruby community). CanCan was created and maintained by Ryan Bates, and abandoned by him when he took his long hiatus from the internet... And then the community came around and created CanCanCan, established their own reputation by improving that, maintaining that, and eventually people switched over."
+
+That seems to make sense to me in terms of the passing of the torch. That seems like the hardest part, because in the situation where you're like "I'm just done", but there's people who still depend upon it, how do we actually pass the torch in a way that makes sense, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak?
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** Yeah, I mean... In hindsight, obviously, the solution is something like that. In this particular case it was just really a matter of time, and that meant that that hadn't happened. If @right9ctrl had come to me a month later, I might have been like "Sorry, I abandoned that module. I can't give it to you."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Which makes sense on GitHub's side, but from on npm's side, in terms of just the mechanics of that, if there's still hundreds of thousands of dependents out there, with event-stream in there package.json, how would they know it's abandoned, how would they be able to come back and see "Okay, here's a new one. It's event-stream-SomeNameSpaceOfaNewPerson", and then maybe eventually switch over... Are those things that are unsolved problems at this point?
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** There is a deprecation option, but I never really felt like deprecating something. The code worked, it was fine; nothing really needed to change, so it didn't really feel right to me to deprecate it. Just leaving it as it was was just fine. It still worked; I hadn't really changed it. It didn't need improvements.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, let me throw out a hypothetical then. Let's say that event-stream is out there on npm in its current version, and it's just fine. And then some sort of dependency of event-stream has an issue, and the npm security team detects it and goes out and says "Okay, everybody who depends on this version of event-stream - you're gonna need to bump your version up." So event-stream needs to be patched, basically. That's the case, right?
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** That's when someone needs to fork it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** There's other issues around that, though... Being able to adopt eventually an abandoned package name, too. Assuming event-stream was a super-cool name, it's abandoned, there's a way to flag it as abandoned; after a while, someone -- I guess the smaller, less concerning issue is that. Because this has been talked about when Kik, Left-pad and all that stuff happened.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And what if I wanna name my thing Kik? Then what do I do?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[55:58\] I guess you have to sue somebody.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You know, you might wanna take over the abandoned name, or something like that, but that's what I was thinking - I was like, if you could just allow somebody... But that means claiming that owning a name on npm becomes far more valuable. Because if you're claiming to own it originally, even if it's not used... I mean, obviously, npm could do whatever they want to circumvent those rules as well, but they kind of inch back into some sort of policing model of the community, and what is and is not allowed, so they become more and more vulnerable to attacks of their choosing, by just basically how they choose to run things.
+
+But in this case, if there was a way for Dominic to say to npm, "Hey, I want to abandon this. Let me attach an Abandoned flag..." This is what you're saying, Jerod, where the dependency tree now knows that, so as I ever use this package or dependency, then I'm somehow made aware, like "Hey, this dependency you have in your tree has been flagged as abandoned on npm. There may be something you wanna look at here, and/or look for a fork, and/or create your own fork, and begin a new line of trust." What you're saying is that if that's the case, then this abandoned version is cemented in stone and frozen forever.
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** So let's say I had just been like "Okay, I've abandoned event-stream." If that somehow prompted the users of event-stream to update, then that would actually be a prime time for the attacker to come along and be like "Oh, I'm maintaining a new fork of event-stream. I'll respond to things, and users, that sort of stuff", and people then opt into that. You could pull off the same kind of thing there.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, you're right.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Don't you think that's the case though, that that would be seen as like, hey, the same model comes back into human choices, which is, you know, to part one of your statement in your readme was basically like "Hey, make sure you trust the maintainers." That would go back into rule one at least, based on your two strong solutions - a human should trust this new fork, and there should be reasons to, and that's a brand new opt-in, a brand new line of trust, and a brand new line of synchronization, versus this inherited one.
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** Yeah, but continuing to use the abandoned code might actually be better, unless an update was really needed. The funny thing is like, compared to the one last year, the WannaCry worm - that was a hack that only affected people that hadn't updated their code. This one was one that only affected people who had updated their code.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, you're screwed either way then, I guess... Updated or not updated.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You're here, in the wrong.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** We're all in trouble...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So this leads to a follow-up... Just as an end user of dependencies, as a developer, I've always looked at dependencies with two extremes. On the on extreme you have dependency hell, where it's just like "Pull it all in, all the time. I don't write my own code, I'm just gluing my dependencies together, to cobble something together." The other side - we have the pristine Not Invented Here syndrome, where it's like "I know every single line of code in this thing, and I've written every single line of code." Those are the two extreme angles you can take at dependencies.
+
+I've always said it's a balance, it's a trade-off, you have to make these decisions with as much information as possible, but the older I get, the more I'm starting to err on the side of Not Invented Here syndrome, because it seems like the trade-offs to having more dependencies is worse than the trade-offs of having to write some more code myself. What are your thoughts on that?
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** Well, I have been accused more than a few times of Not Invented Here... But at the same time, there's a lot of things that I am satisfied with someone else's solution, and have used that instead.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What are some of the heuristics for you? What are the things that make you satisfied? Is it a personal relationship with the maintainer, or at least maybe a reputation of quality, or is your own inspection of their code? What makes you more comfortable than less comfortable?
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** For things like: I didn't create JavaScript or implement my own JavaScript... They're problems too big to handle when, here's a good thing that does it... One is like if it's a small thing that I could do, I would end up looking for a whole bunch of options, or something; I would evaluate them in terms of "Is this sufficiently compatible with my opinions? Would I do it the same way? Does this make me really mad, or something like that? Is this some stuff that would just be a pain in the butt to create myself, like time zones?"
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Well, time zones are easy, what are you talking about? Just kidding.
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's the bane of every programmer's existence - time and timezones.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right.
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** Yeah, and it's especially worse if you live in New Zealand, because you're constantly dealing with people--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You're an edge case.
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** Yeah... With people in other time zones. And the Northern Hemisphere one is fun too, because you go in and out of daylight savings at different times, so between say California or New Zealand, there's like four different possible differences... You can both be in daylight savings for a bit, and then you're both out of it, and then one of you is in, another one is out... So you change how many hours you are apart multiple time throughout the year.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Ugh...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I don't even think I really understand daylight savings time. There's times I think I understand it, and then there's times like "No, what you thought was daylight savings time was not --" So I just don't even know. I just know where I'm at. This is my time right now. What's your time right now?
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** It's one of the worst ideas ever.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh man, and there's certain small precincts, geographic areas which will not abide by it, like states, or cities, or countries...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. It's like, do you even understand time, and the Earth's rotation, and the things that actually calculate that, and the things that have been established scientifically ages ago to make time time, and us being in sync with what we think time really is... Yeah, it gets really deep.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, time zones are political, and political things change with new administrations, and so...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's a complete mess. Well, one thing we haven't asked yet, and we did mention at the top, Dominic, that it was a lot of conversation - this has been THE big topic of the week, around these parts... So I think that's a good thing. I'm curious about you personally - it sounds like you've taken it all pretty well, but no doubt there were some people that were mad, or were criticizing what you did... "Why couldn't he have just done this? Why did he do that?" I'm curious what your overall feelings are with regard to the way the community has received this, the way it's gone... Have you gotten a lot of backlash? Do you feel attacked? Do you feel loved? How are you feeling?
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** I've received many personal messages of support from old friends, and other open source developers, and sometimes random strangers who had admired my work, and stuff like this, so... I really felt quite boosted overall from that. They certainly gave me the confidence to use this to draw attention to what I feel is the plight of the open source developer, and what are the systematic ways that something like this can be approached and addressed.
+
+I think the way that I've been very determined to shirk responsibility for actually adding a thing, actually \[unintelligible 01:03:28.06\], it made all the people who thought I should apologize... It made them way more upset.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] You were very nonchalant about it all...
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** ...which to me was refreshing, because I could tell that you were kind of cool, calm and collected about it, and just this situation. The conversation around this being a fun project for you - "I think that was fun. It was no longer fun", and that's what you said in your statement, "If it's not fun anymore, you get literally nothing from maintaining a popular package." That's just the cold, hard facts.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:04:03.19\] You can't be or act guilty if you're not guilty, right? If you don't have a guilty conscience in the scheme of this, then you're not gonna run around acting guilty or feeling guilty.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** Yeah. We're kind of weird to people who enjoy programming for fun, but there's still quite a few of us out there, and lots of them are my friends, so I felt like I was speaking for these people.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** As Brett Cannon said in that recent episode, Jerod - I forget which number it is; help me out if you can - open source maintainers owe nothing. I believe that's somewhat a direct quote. Correct me if I'm wrong; we can pull up the transcripts and confirm that, but... Just basically like, you know, the maintainers of projects haven't signed on for a "We'll maintain this, we'll be responsible for everything in this forever." It's in their good interest and their heartfelt interest to create in open source in the first place, and it's your choice to use it, so they owe you nothing.
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** The other thing I want to say is like, on one level, creating open source is fun, challenging, interesting technical problems, but also the social side of it. So for the most part, you're just solving problems with friends and helping each other out, and no one is the boss of anyone... So if you want to get things done, you can persuade people. And sometimes people get wound up and there's strong emotions because it's things that people feel strongly about, but on the whole it's a very rewarding kind of mode of interaction, and I wish that more of life gave you the ability to effect change on things that affect you like you get in open source. I think that's a big part of why I've continued to do it for the best part of the decade.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Absolutely. Dominic, we just wanna say thank you for all the work that you have done. No doubt, you've brought lots of value to lots of people, countless people around the world that you've never even met, and the beauty of open source - all these modules on npm, the work that you're doing in the JavaScript community... Hey, we definitely want to get you back to talk about Scuttlebutt and the interesting stuff there. Talk about hacking with your friends - this seems like a very cool kind of offline social networking thing happening, which is very much in the spirit of what we like to cover on The Changelog, so we definitely want to have you back, but... We're happy to have you, we're glad you joined us, especially on short notice, to talk about this situation.
+
+Any last words from you with regards to event-stream, or what's happened, or anything else you'd like to say to the open source community before we let you go?
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** Yeah, I think despite all this, open source is a great idea and we need more of it, and more sharing, not less. If we let things like this make us too suspicious of each other to share and collaborate, then the terrorists win, and that would be worse than being hacked occasionally.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I think that's a perfect note to end on right there. Dominic, thanks for joining us.
+
+**Dominic Tarr:** You're welcome.
diff --git a/The road to Brave 1.0 and BAT (Interview)_transcript.txt b/The road to Brave 1.0 and BAT (Interview)_transcript.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..dbd410faf88c08094b5f2c3d4c23f1f5ab060b62
--- /dev/null
+++ b/The road to Brave 1.0 and BAT (Interview)_transcript.txt	
@@ -0,0 +1,563 @@
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Brian, let's start this conversation where a conversation like this should start - Star Trek, or Star Wars? Or both?
+
+**Brian Bondy:** \[laughs\] I'm a Star Wars guy. My wife likes Star Trek. I know Brendan is more of a Star Trek guy as well.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Does that cause a rift in your relationship, having both sides of that fence represented in the family? It's like red and blue, living in the same house.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Well, she likes both, so I guess I'm lucky enough.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** There you go.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** I actually like Star Trek, but I'm definitely more of a Star Wars fan.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I asked that question because I wanted to know who named the dog.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Okay... Yeah, probably my wife's idea...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What's the dog's name?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Leia.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Leia... Although we have another dog, an Australian Shepherd, and I wanted to call her Rey, on that theme...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Nice.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** ...but she wanted to call her Nymeria, after a Game of Thrones direwolf. So she won.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, that's switching universes right there. I don't know why you'd do that, but it sounds like she did.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah, exactly. That's why I wanted to keep it that way... \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's still the full breadth of their culture, you know? It's like "We are in the times. Star Trek, Star Wars, and Game of Thrones." You can't go wrong. It's a great feeling to be a part of.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah, for sure. And I have a son named Link as well.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Now you're pulling on my heartstrings right there...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Come on...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's my jam right there.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** All hackers are pumpin' their fists... \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You validate yourself, Brian, as very welcome on our show now, as you had all geek culture represented inside your household. That's spectacular.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah, thank you.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So let's talk about you, Brave and BAT. You're the co-founder of Brave and the CTO; previously Khan Academy, Mozilla, Evernote... Maybe talk about those 0.1% on Stack Overflow. You've spent a lot of time there. Let's stop there for a second. Did you just answer everybody's questions, or what does that mean, top 0.1%? Is that like point totals?
+
+**Brian Bondy:** It just means I guess I was top 50 users, or top 20 users at one time... But I think I still maintained the top 0.1%, but... You just keep getting upvotes after a while, so I kind of stopped answering, but I still get lots of upvotes every day.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's like the long tail of points, huh?
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah, and they capped the amount of points that you can get per day, and I think I just automatically achieve those points every day, so I just kind of let it ride. I was one of the early users there, and I did mostly C++ at the time, so I was answering C++ questions, and I was getting kind of bored with my current work, so I'd just kind of refresh the page where the new questions were posted, and I'd be the first one to get it in there, and I would do the most simple, easiest answer first, and then I would edit it and then add more, and edit it, and add more, so probably every one of my answers was edited 40 times.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** I'd start to get upvotes even from the first answer, but the trick is really just to get in there first and answer if you wanna be at the top of that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Stack Overflow strategies... I've never heard of such a thing. That's amazing. It seems to have worked out for you.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What do you think you've gained from it, aside from obviously the points--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** He gets to put it in his Twitter bio.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Exactly, yeah. No, I mean... If you think about how much money you spend for university education, that's one factor, but... People also look at your Stack Overflow bio, so that's just another way to build up your reputation, I guess, and just to show that you know what's going on... But it's also to help people as well, and just because you generally enjoy it... And also, you learn a lot just by answering things.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's true.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** A lot of times I would just answer something in the most simple way that I knew, and then do a little bit of research and then improve my answers from there... So it's a great way to learn as well.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very cool. Let's get to Brave, because it's definitely the thing that we're all here for, and why we invited you on the show, and something that Adam and I have both been somewhat excited about, have both used this year, and have had our own experiences, either still using it or swapping back and forth between our preferred browsers and Brave... Of course, Brendan Eich, your co-founder, and very influential in JavaScript and the web in general - we've had him on Request for Commits; definitely a bright spot of knowledge in our ecosystem, so a lot of attention there, as well... Tell us about the genesis. We like to hear the beginnings of things. Whose idea was this? Did Brendan sell it to you? Did you sell it to him? What did the original pitch sound like? Give us that genesis story.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** I don't know how far back I should go, but I was at Khan Academy at the time, working... I was there for about a year and a half, and I had always really wanted to get to Khan Academy, so I finally had got in; I was really loving working there. Then a Twitter message came in from Brendan, just saying "Please DM me." I wanted to DM him but he wasn't following me, so I couldn't... \[laughter\] I did have his email, so I emailed him; I'm just kind of playing it cool, I'm like "What's up?" Meanwhile, I'm turning to my wife, who was next to me in bed - I was on my laptop at the time - and I'm like "Holy crap! Brendan Eich just messaged me to direct-message him. I don't know why."
+
+Apparently, I'd made some list -- I had worked at Mozilla before with him, and I was delivering a lot of the features, I was in a lot of the blogs, and things like that. I had recently done a Metro style enabled browser from scratch for Firefox. That was a project that was canceled last-minute... So anyways, I delivered a lot of things, and I made some list of people that he wanted to contact to start something in the future... So yeah, we got to talking. This was late December 2014.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Maybe he just went to the top users on Stack Overflow; he sorted by top users and started DM-ing...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** There you go...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** "The first one to DM me back gets this offer." \[laughter\]
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah, it didn't start as a co-founder situation; I think it started as he wanted me to do contract work, and I think mostly because I was a good Windows programmer at the time, and Windows is where most of the users were.
+
+We talked for about six months, and after a while he just asked me to go fly there, or he would fly here. I had three young kids at the time, three young boys, and it was kind of hard for me to travel at the time, so I just said "Well, just tell me what's up." That's when he proposed to just start the company. So we secured funding from a company in China for 2,5 million, and that's how we got started, really.
+
+Right from the start we had the plans to create a desktop browser for Windows, Mac, Linux, as well as Android, as well as iOS, so it was really just the two of us at the start. We eventually got a third person, and we were working on all these different products for these different operating systems all at once, so it was pretty ambitious right from the start.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Was the initial pitch "Let's build a browser?" Was there a bigger picture? Because we know Brave has big ambitions, especially with trying to  t, or subvert, or replace traditional forms of advertising, and have a micropayments model. Was the financial side in there, was it all about privacy? What was the initial idea behind Brave that got you excited and that Brendan was excited about?
+
+**Brian Bondy:** I think he originally wanted to do maybe a mobile phone or something like that, but once he had contacted me, he moved beyond that; I think a mobile hard phone is really hard to fund. You need just an astronomical amount of money to fund something like that. So yeah, it was already decided that he was looking to do a browser when he contacted me.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I was pretty impressed with Brendan -- I mean, obviously, beyond his existing accomplishments, but just having heard him on Request for Commits. I was a behind-the-scenes person for that call, listening live, because Nadia and Mikeal hosted the show, and I was the behind-the-scenes producer... And I'm listening to this conversation and it's like the history of the web, from no perspective other than the one you can get from Brendan. He has some -- I don't know how to really describe his history, aside from just extensive, and in-the-trenches-of-it... And just how it had been funded, from major corporations, the reasons why it was funded, the back-story on early browser wars... Not only that, but how ads have always played -- monetization models have always played a place in it... Just kind of hearing that -- if you're listening to this show, I wouldn't say you have to go listen to Request for Commits episode \#11 before this one, but it might do you a service just to have some background on Brendan, maybe to precursor some of the things you'll uncover here. That was such a phenomenal episode, and I never expected to get that kind of deep-dive into the history of the web than that show right there. Seriously, this is amazing.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah, he definitely has that depth there. And what's funny about him is that you can talk to him about any topic in the whole world and he kind of will talk the same way. He's definitely an impressive guy.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** An encyclopedia.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Exactly, yeah. But the main reason why we started was we really wanted to get users ownership of their own data, create a user-first browser, one that's not in service to \[unintelligible 00:10:58.17\] broken system that was out there. We wanted users to own their own data, so that they could basically be valued for their attention that they're giving to ads as well.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Why do you think that aside from your awesomeness on Stack Overflow and your contributions to Mozilla, and those things, introspectively, why do you think that you were the co-founder that he chose to work with? What was it that stood out to say your skillset, your background, given that you didn't even really know each other, and to be such a crucial person for such a crucial future of clearly something he's been dreaming of for years? Why do you think you?
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah, I've wondered that as well and I've never actually heard the answer from Brendan, so that would be an interesting question to ask Brendan. But I think he's a smart guy, I think he knew that I was someone that could get what he needed to get done. It just takes someone smart to realize that someone like me, that's not -- like, I don't have a name out there like he does, for example... So just the fact that he found me - I think he's a pretty smart guy for that.
+
+But I've been a software developer for 25 years, and literally living and breathing coding. I've written HTTP, HTTPS libraries, SMTP, POP3, image file formats, FDP protocols, client server... Literally just non-stop coding for like 25 years. So that's really my passion, and it's something that I'm good at, coding. But like you said, I don't have a name out there, so it's pretty weird that he found me and chose me for it. Maybe I was just there at the right time and was really entertaining his idea. Like I said, we were communicating about it for about six months before it actually became something.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** How serious were those conversations during those six months? Did they start with "What if..." to "When are we gonna..."?
+
+**Brian Bondy:** It started with a slide deck that he put together, just of "This is what I wanna create" at that time. My response was just like "This is how you do it." I would go into really deep detail about "You're gonna need this, this and this", and I think he just really saw that from there as something I could deliver. I don't know how many people he had contacted originally or how many people were on that original spreadsheet that he had. Maybe he contacted me as well because I was no longer at Mozilla; I had left a year and a half before that, so maybe -- I have no idea what his contract was like with Mozilla... Maybe he couldn't take people from Mozilla, and I just was one of the lucky ones that had gotten out already.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** One of the things that I'm always impressed with with people that can really think systems-level thoughts around a thing and have an idea from scratch, that Brendan had, and then you yourself say "Okay, here's how you would go about building this...", and this is something that I've done or tried to do throughout my career and I've been very good at it in the small... So one of the things we tend to do is invite people on that have ambitious projects, such as a browser... A browser is not just what you see on the screen there, but there's so many aspects to it, especially when you're trying to compete in mobile, on the desktop, with syncing, with all these other things... And so don't give us the deep-dive technical on where you went necessarily from day one until now, because where we are is about four years later, you're almost at a 1.0... We do wanna talk about the big 1.0 release and the switch away from the Electron front-end to the Chromium front-end, but probably a little bit later... Where do you begin to think of "Okay, we wanna build a browser. Here are some of our goals around privacy, around security and these other things. Where do we start?" How did you go about thinking about that problem?
+
+**Brian Bondy:** One of the papers that really spoke to us right from the start was something from Monica Chew. She was at Mozilla at the time and she had done this really great paper in tracking protection; she had coded it and it was ready to ship, and Mozilla was just not willing to ship it, basically because they were worried about relationship with advertisers that do tracking. So it was like there's this great idea, this great feature, the ability to stop all the trackers, and it showed the advantages and page load speed - two times faster page loading... So I guess it was born from thinking about that paper, and executing on it and actually shipping it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And it ended up getting shipped?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, how long did it take from scratch to something in production?
+
+**Brian Bondy:** When we first started coding it, there was a project called browser.html by Paul Rouget at Mozilla, and it really looked to be like -- at the time I actually thought that Firefox would die and that browser.html would become the new thing... Because Firefox is coded in this kind of old, HTML-like language called XUL, and browser.html was using HTML5 technologies to deliver this browser. It was created in React at the time, as well. That really looked like the system, and it was based on basically the same engine that Firefox OS was, something called Graphene.
+
+So the very first version of this we created was for Graphene, and we just called it Brave at the time. And we had just found that the APIs were not built out enough yet, and also browser.html eventually stopped getting momentum, and so it died off... This was about six months in, and we realized it's gonna be probably another six months if we need to build all these APIs that we need... So we started to look at alternatives.
+
+We had this HTML5-based front-end with JavaScript, and I had a background of a lot of C++ as well, so I felt comfortable there, but the other people on our team didn't have that kind of experience... So we did consider a Chromium front-end at that time, but we decided that we really need to get it shipped; we only had a limited amount of funding, so we needed to get the product out. It was at that point that we found Electron -- we knew about it already, but we decided to switch to Electron, and it only took us a month and a half to port it from the Graphene system to Electron, and then get the first dev preview out. So we just wanted to tell the world that we created something, and "Here it is, and we're working on it." So that kind of became the release channel over time, because people just started adopting it.
+
+One of the embarrassing moments when we first released that just for people to see what we were creating - it wasn't meant to be released yet, but Eric Lawrence had found -- I think it was him... He found a command line switch has been passed to disable the sandbox and the render processes. That was an embarrassing moment... And the reason that it was doing that was because Node was being loaded into the render process, but then disabled afterwards. So we did a lot of work -- we basically completely forked Electron, to remove Node from the render processes completely, enabled the sandbox, did a lot of other security things... We tried to upstream them to Electron, but they didn't wanna take them, mainly because we were adding extensions and they didn't wanna have extensions in Electron.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I think it's interesting to show definitely the path taken towards a 1.0, and really the compromises along the way in order to ship, in order to have users, and then in order to maintain a certain level of security... You forked, and maintained -- you just call it Muon, which is your fork of Electron with security fixes and these patches that they didn't necessarily want upstream... And then to kind of end up back where you would have started or did start right away... If it had been maybe just building it by yourself, you would have done it this way from the start... But once you got on the Electron/Muon train and were shipping product for a while, what's the big move away then? For what purpose?
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah, so we were originally just kind of waiting for upstream Chromium patches to come down from Electron, and we could just consume them and not have to spend our resources doing those rebases. Everytime Chrome comes up with a new version, it's a massive rebase. What we found was that they didn't really care that much about being on the latest Chromium, and to us that was like a major security no-no, something that you really can't do if you're shipping a browser.
+
+In their defense, Electron was never meant to be used for a web browser, and we just started using it that way, so it made a lot more sense for us to be on the latest version than it did for them...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Sure.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** So rebasing - it really took us two engineers and it took about six weeks to do...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Wow.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** And every single time that there's a new Chrome version. So if you look at the amount of cost that goes into that, it's probably about like 50k for every Chrome rebase, which is an insane amount that goes into... Because every time we did a Chromium rebase as well, there'd be a lot of things broken that we'd have to fix, we'd have to have QA find, and...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** They're on like a six-week schedule, aren't they? How often are they shipping new versions?
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah, a six-week schedule. If they wanted to make a change to Chrome, they would basically copy a C++ source file into a different directory and then they'd make changes to it, and that really is not a good way to maintain a codebase over a long time. What you should do instead is create subclasses of delegates and observers, \[unintelligible 00:21:02.26\] and do it that way and have very minimal patching, and zero copied files.
+
+So I guess one of the advantages of being on Electron is that we've seen a lot of things not to do for a browser, where the primary importance is always being up to date on the Chromium upgrades... So when we did the Chromium rebase, it took us 11 months. It is shipped right now on our website, by the way. It's not called 1.0 yet. We'll get there, but... Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** But the rewrite is done and out there, it's just not called 1.0 yet.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** That's right, yeah. It's called 0.55x, I think. We're just about to ship 0.56x, and eventually we'll just skip to 1.0.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So one of the side-benefits of that switch, I believe, and I've seen people trolling around in the subreddits, talking about different features, and one of the things - we'll probably talk about this more - when we talk about adoption, because that's a huge part of the conversation, I believe, and one that I think Adam has lots to say about as well, is that you get more access to all of the extensions that will run in Chrome? Those are kind of free to you guys? Is that a correct assessment?
+
+**Brian Bondy:** That's correct, yeah. And in Muon we only had support for six or seven different extensions, and just adding a new one was a lot of work, and we found that the Chrome rebase is rough, and breaking the extension that we did support, that we'd have to keep refixing... So by doing this switch, it automatically gave us support for every Chrome extension by default.
+
+Now, we do have shields inside, things like blocking the trackers, HTTPS upgrades... We do have shields, and those also equally apply to the extensions. There can be some extension kind of like web compat issues, the equivalent to the Web Compat extension, but for the most part all extensions pretty much work out of the box.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** As Jerod mentioned, we have been users of Brave, but not daily, or complete switchers. I've found myself ebbing and flowing from comfortability in Chrome to the daring worlds of a new web really in Brave...
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah... To use the old Brave - it's something that you kind of felt like you should do, but you didn't wanna do... \[laughter\] And the new rewrite is really just -- I actually wanna start Brave; so I don't find myself just automatically going to the Chrome icon anymore. I wanna be in Brave, and I'm not trying to force myself, it's just...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, for me it's less around the browser and its features and more around the web and the lack of -- I guess just the weirdness the web is whenever you have a more secure, a more private web you're browsing. The experience is faster, obviously, but much different, and sometimes, in some cases, just plain old broken, which I have plenty of feelings about... But on the extensions front -I think we were talking about it in Slack recently, Jerod... I just went ahead and removed every extension. I was like, "Forget extensions! I'm done with them!" I don't even wanna be slow, or privacy-concerned, or security-concerned, and I'm like "Why don't I just use Brave?" That's when I was like "I'll just start using Brave more often if I wanna be in a scenario where it's about security and privacy, and just trying to enjoy the web, so to speak."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah... So I didn't have that experience that you had, Adam, because I've been using AdBlocker for my entire life, pretty much...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So you're used to it. I was not.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. And you're used to just like "Oh, this website doesn't quite work unless you enable this particular little thing, because there's some sort of thing waiting for this thing to fire, and then the rest of the website will work." So you get those crappy websites where it's like "Yeah, I have to re-enable this one little script", but you figure those out once and then you kind of move on. And for the most part, on content sites, it's like, if your content can't load without these scripts, there's plenty of things to read; I just move on, close tab. But on banks, and those particular sites where you have to finagle with it to get it to work without just giving them the world, I've kind of been used to that; so I didn't have that particular hold-up when using Brave, but it's funny how minor things can get in the way when you have something that you use all day, every day.
+
+For me, I used Brave just this fall for a couple of weeks as my primary browser. I still use Chrome as a development browser, I've always done that. I use Safari on desktop as my primary browser, and I use Chrome just for development; I have done that for years. So now I was gonna get rid of Safari in my day-to-day and use Brave as my primary, and Chrome as my dev environment. And everything was pretty good, pretty much a one-for-one.
+
+The thing that kept just sticking with me - and I don't say this to like submit a bug report or anything, just to say that it's funny how these small things become big... It's almost like that old fable with -- was it The Prince and the Pea? I don't know... The pea underneath the bed, where it felt like a boulder. macOS's emoji picker wouldn't always open in Brave; it would open like one out of four times, or something... And hopefully, when we get to the Chromium version, that's just gone... But that was just bugging the crap out of me, and finally I'm like "Meh, not worth it... \[laughter\] I'll try again in six months."
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah, there's so many things like that. The old repository has something like 4,000 different issues, and it's just a long tail of small things like that. It would have taken us a couple of years really to get through that backlog. So that was another big motivation, other than the extensions, to go to the new -- we call it the Brave Core... Just because automatically we close out like 4,000 issues all at once, and all the little things that will drive people nuts is now fixed.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So the little things getting in people's way - those are blockers and those are things that people either have to get over, or just not convert, or eventually those things get smoothed out... But what are the big ten-pole features for those out there who haven't tried Brave like Adam and I have? We're assuming people understand a lot; we've mentioned privacy, but if you could just give Brave's big sells of why to use it instead of a Chrome, or instead of a Safari, or even a Firefox... What are the ten-pole features?
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah, so if you're an advanced power user, you're already familiar probably with a lot of these features, but a lot of us aren't, or a lot of us just don't wanna have to bother setting it all up properly... But I'll get into some advantages for that too later, of why it's better not to use the extensions. Out of the box there's ad-blocking, there's tracking protection, there's an HTTPS Everywhere implementation, so upgrading links that could be served as HTTPS, but there's a link to them with HTTP - it will automatically upgrade those to HTTPS. Cookie-blocking, there's an implementation of NoScript baked right in as well... So that's just the ability to completely block scripts and then selectively enable them just for the ones you want. That will completely break your web experience for most sites, but some people just prefer to browse that way.
+
+And then also fingerprinting protection. Fingerprinting is just little bits of entropy that websites can collect and use to create a unique fingerprint against you, things like your user agent, your fonts that are installed, your screen resolution, your operating system... That's all a big trade. These are all things that you could get if you install four or five different extensions, but it's just easier to download Brave and have everything working all at once.
+
+Now, we could have just created a Chrome Browser with all these extensions just by default packaged in, but we've instead decided to create our ad-block library as a C++ implementation, so it's faster than a JavaScript-based one... As well as we can do it on the network thread, which an extension can't do.
+
+So there's little advantages like this, like performance and better security, and really -- there's so many things that your browser reaches out to the Google service for that we disable, and if we were just an extension, we couldn't do those things either.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The extension route is interesting, because I was thinking... Obviously, I was doing something like that and Jerod has used an ad-blocker, as he had mentioned... So he's kind of doing a Brave, but not a Brave browser; in another browser. At least the features that you just mentioned, in terms of like security, privacy, and just making the web better for the individual as they feel to curtail it. If you go and choose these extensions but then you kind of give up some assumptions to those extensions that they are 1) legit, which in most cases they probably are, or 2) they haven't been circumvented, i.e. they're open source, they have the best protocols for security, like 2FA on their GitHub repos, they haven't got an attacker that somehow slipped some code in there... You're putting a lot of trust in someone else, whereas in the case here of Brave, it seems like you were like "Let's go back to the roots here and ensure that at these basic levels we have a browser that gives people the assurances that they can browse the web safely", and then having Brendan have such a rich history of desiring a better web, as he said either on Request for Commits or on other shows or other areas, in his mission to just share his vision for the web, to not be a product... I think that's one thing that I didn't hear you say, which is the biggest thing; if you go to Brave.com, the very first thing you see, big, is a woman in a hoodie with a Brave logo, and then right beneath that is "You are not a product. Period." That's a statement. Why do you feel that statement is such a crucial thing for you to communicate to people who are like "What's Brave?"
+
+**Brian Bondy:** The reason why it's so important is what we're just talking about - if you have this set of extensions, you're not just getting the same level of privacy, really, because you're trusting Google and you're letting Google treat you as their product, basically. So one of the reasons why we have the browser is because we wanna cut that all out. We don't want you to trust Google, we don't even want you to trust Brave, really; we don't store any data on our servers whatsoever about users. All the data that exists is just gonna be only on your browsing machine. Even our sync implementation works that way, where we will store stuff on S3, which is encrypted, but it's encrypted on your machine, not our servers. There's no way to get that out.
+
+Also, if you have extensions, you have things like AdBlock Plus... How that works is they have paid ad deals with certain companies to let certain ads through. So it's really just this level of trust that you have to give up, and you have so much more control basically with a browser. That kind of gets into the whole digital advertising - I don't think that would be possible to do in the same way as an extension, just because we need local machine learning to understand your data, and then if you opted in to turn on ads, you block everything by default and then it's an opt-in thing at that point. If you do that, then it can then use your local data. Nothing from our servers, just basically your browser will download a catalog of ads, match that to the local data, and then present you with advertising. And why in the world would you ever want to turn on advertising? That's where BAT comes in - it's because you can get paid for that using the Basic Attention Token.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You know, I would potentially be an enabler of ads if there was some sort of standard that said "Do it ethically." If it wasn't such a -- I don't wanna be enraged on this show, because it's just not my MO, but I just wish there was a better way for the world of the web, because clearly, it's been a good model, it's been there since the beginning. But it's just terrible for user experience. I hate that my future presents to my wife get ruined because we're on the same IP address, and the next thing you know, Facebook or Instagram or whatever is advertising to her either what I planned to buy or what I bought for her. So that's just one small thing, but it just drives me crazy the standards of advertising. I just wish there was a better way.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** They had like a "Do not track" header spec. You're just asking the server not to track you.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[unintelligible 00:33:38.08\]
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah, they don't need to listen, and why would they listen if they can make money off your data...?
+
+**Break:** \[33:54\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Listeners, we take breaks, obviously, but during those breaks sometimes we have some conversation and we learn a little bit about our guest... And we asked Brian -- because we say "Hey, do you have anything to drink nearby? Go ahead and get a drink of water", whatever, and Brian didn't share it because he felt like it was better on the show... So Brian, how well did you prepare for your drinks? What do you have next to you?
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Every day I drink a couple of extra-large Tim Hortons coffees. I've also got a water here, and a Gatorade, but... I consume coffee pretty much all day.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well-prepared...
+
+**Brian Bondy:** \[unintelligible 00:35:32.25\] before bed.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** He's a prepper.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well-prepared, and a proper Canadian with Tim Hortons nearby.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** That's right.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And we had a little bit of crossover too, in terms of our geographical paths in the past... We were both prior residents of Kingston, which is a city in Ontario, which is where you live... I don't know where you live at in Ontario now, but we were both in that area... Why were you there? Was that interesting?
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah, so I worked at an army simulation center there. The reason I worked there was because when I was at university - the University of Waterloo, I was part of the co-op program there... So they have 6-8 placements that you do, and one of those placements was for an army simulation center; another one was for Corel Corporation, and the last two, it was actually for my last startup before this one, which I ran for about ten years... I didn't tell the University of Waterloo that it was my own company at the time, but one of the things that you have to do is you have to get your employer to give you an evaluation... This is to say I had an outstanding evaluation from my own company, since I did my own review.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And then that helped you to block ads how? \[laughter\] It's interesting having that kind of past, but I'm really curious how that teed up for your back-into-the-ad-discussion we were going on, the qualities of it and being able to block it at the -- what layer was it that you mentioned versus the JavaScript layer?
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Oh, just like on the network and thread basically for that, yeah. No, that was kind of unintended \[unintelligible 00:37:00.07\] \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It made sense to bring it in for the listeners, but we've gotta bring it back to ads, because that's where we left off, and they're listening and are like "Get back into that..."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Let me hard-transition, because I had something I was gonna say prior to the break, that I'll just bring it in hard, and we can go off of that... Historically, I have been very skeptical of security or privacy-focused software products, specifically DuckDuckGo previously, and also Brave when I first heard about it, because of the human instinct to throw out privacy and security as soon as they need to trade it for convenience, or something shiny, or a feature.
+
+We've continuously thrown our privacy under the bus in order to get the new feature of this thing, and that made me think "Can you actually build a movement or a user base, or get momentum around products that are specifically offering privacy and security as THE primary features?" I used to say no to that, but I feel like DuckDuckGo, as well as Brave... I mean, you guys now have probably more than -- the last time I heard it was 4 million active users...
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah, about that many, yeah...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I'm sure about that now, but an amazing number from zero to four million in such an amount of time... And I'm wondering if maybe we've hit the tipping point where people are starting to wake up to the results of trading in our privacy all these years for shiny new things, and thinking "We need to step back from the ledge a little bit and protect these things." What are your guys' thoughts on that trend?
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah, I don't think that probably our biggest marketing point is that we're a privacy-based browser; not everyone really understands privacy or the need for privacy, but people do understand speed, so when you're just not loading more than 50% of an average web page, you can really see the difference in speed, and people understand speed pretty easily.
+
+There's also the point that people are kind of tired of Google and Facebook, so just being the anti-Google browser, that gives you the same kind of functionality kind of speaks for itself. Then there's also the cohort that wants to try out the user private ads, and wants to basically make money for giving out their attention, which they give for free today.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think for me it's just like -- I'm with you, Jerod, it's been an evolution; I think for a while there we were like "What's the worst that could happen?" And I've always been skeptical; don't just think I'm just blindly, naively using everything that the bad people have to offer, thinking "They'll never harm me." No. I've always suspected they eventually would, but given that every day you're talking about a data breach, or some sort of -- as you said, Jerod, the trading of our information for something that they get that is definitely not beneficial to us (let's just leave it there on that). Having that be a daily headline on the repeat for three particular companies, essentially -- it seems almost like monthly now, or weekly in some cases... It's like, enough is enough.
+
+Now, I still do use Chrome, but I realized that there are better ways... And I'm not even sure if Brave is there yet, which is kind of part of this call and this discussion. But it's like, we are being more aware of our privacy, and we are being more aware as a society that we have traded so much, and now we need to take it back.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah. Google will say "Don't be evil", and although they do have good intentions, like you said, there can be a data breach, or maybe they're just gonna change their mind over time... So the difference with us is that we just put ourselves in a position that we can't be evil. We don't store any user data whatsoever, so even if there was some kind of data breach in our servers, there's no users at risk, there's no breach at all that really happened at that point.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I like that. You can't be evil if you can be evil, right?
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Right. \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's actually -- you should change that "You are not a product" to "We can't be evil."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** "We can't be..."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yup. We intentionally put ourselves in positions that we can't change our mind later.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Ads aren't the worst thing though... What else are the bad players, the key players that are bad, aside from ads?
+
+**Brian Bondy:** In what context do you mean?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, in terms of privacy and security. Obviously, it's your user data and stuff, but what layers should we go down?
+
+**Brian Bondy:** There was a story that came out yesterday, I think, about an extension that was harvesting Facebook passwords. There's malware that gets installed, often through ads, but also with different mechanisms, as well. Like I said, when you load one web page, more than 50% of it is just a slew of crap that you don't want.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. One of the things I like to bring up is that when we talk about evil or not evil, when we talk about things going well or not well, specifically with Google -- and I guess with other advertising-based companies, it's about alignment of incentives. Like you said, Brian, it's not like there's bad intentions necessarily; that doesn't mean that everybody has good intentions... But when you assign evilness to a corporation, you need to realize that that corporation is a homogenous group of a lot of people trying to do good, and trying to make money for shareholders. And that incentive on how they make that money is what ends up crossing the user's best interests, right? So the shareholders' best interests is above the end users' best interest, and that's why your guys' pitch is "You are not a product", but it's somewhat a slippery slope too, to personify an evil empire... But a very powerful marketing technique.
+
+I go back to the Firefox campaign back in '04-'05... When Firefox was taking over, there was a single evil empire, and it was Internet Explorer and Microsoft, and it was the giant in the room, right? It was the 400-pound gorilla, or whatever that analog is, and it was a very easy target to say "Firefox is the anti-Microsoft, or the anti-Internet Explorer", and there was grassroots movements; I remember even my little brother was the first person that showed me Firefox, and it was like an evangelical moment for him, like "You need to use the --", to show me a more excellent way, which was Firefox, versus what I'd previously known.
+
+Now, of course you could set Brave against Google, but there's lots of browsers out there, it's not just Chrome, even though Chrome is, I think, dominant in the marketplace; 70% share, or something like that.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yup.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** But there is Firefox, there is Safari, there are even smaller ones that we've covered; Min is a new one, there's one called Vivaldi... There's lots of browsers out there, which is awesome... But do you think it's potentially harder to kind of mount an offensive today than it was back when Firefox took hold, and what kind of market share is Brave hoping for? Are you trying to become a 10%? Do you have goals of complete market domination, or can you carve out your own little niche and still survive and make a dent in the world?
+
+**Brian Bondy:** We can definitely survive without having domination or anywhere close to that, but I wouldn't necessarily cap us at anything, either. I think that Chrome won't last forever as the dominant, even though it's the dominant today. You might not think that, but you could say the same thing about Internet Explorer in the past.
+
+I've been using Firefox right from the start, when it was called Phoenix, and then they had some trademark issues with Firebird, and then they had another trademark issue, so they went to Firefox... And I think maybe their user share got up to a 50% or so, I don't know exactly... But I guess the user share - we hope to get, I guess, a lot.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] I like that, "We hope to get a lot. As many as we can."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I like his consideration of his words, and then "I guess a lot." Because why would you state an actual number here and then undershoot it, but then --
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Like, "Once we hit 20%, we're done."
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah. We're looking for... Let's say 100%.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, roughly 100%. So I definitely am with you that just because Chrome is the biggest browser today, that doesn't mean it will be tomorrow. I was going back and looking at some of the global stat counters, just trying to track back to where things were back in the day, and the furthest I went back was '09, but back then IE was still at 62% (March 2009), Firefox was around 30%, and Chrome had just come onto the scene, it was about 4%-5%. So in less than ten years, it's dramatically changed. Chrome is at 60%, Safari is at 15%, Firefox is at 5%, and then IE is down at 2,87%. And that was a swing, right? Go back another ten years, and it was probably IE at 90%, or more. So these things change, and they change often and fast.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** That's right, yeah. I joke that we want 100%, but we don't really want 100%, because you really wanna have competition because that spurs better products... And just the openness. If you did have 100%, you could introduce something proprietary and lock others out, and we wouldn't want that either, so... The more implementations there are, the better. Firefox has been declining in market share for quite some time, and I hope they find a base at some point, so that -- just for web compat issues, so there's not just one implementation that rules it all.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Maybe give us a zoomed out version of this... The state of browsers, basically - where are we going? Where is Brave leading? Where is Brave following? What's the state of browsers at large in terms of what they're trying to deliver to grow their markets or maintain their markets? And I guess in this case not markets, but more like user bases, as you said. What's the state of browsers happening today from your point of view?
+
+**Brian Bondy:** I think people are opening up a lot more to ad-blocking. You start seeing that more and more just as built-in features; I think Opera has some form of that... I guess everyone has a different goal, though. Vivaldi is more looking at different UI things that they can do that they find would be useful, Mozilla is bringing in Rust code and trying to go for more performance... They do have the Servo project, but I'm not sure if that's actually gonna ever happen or not. I think it's still going well with it, but they started bringing in big components from that to make themselves more performant. We're also using Rust code now in Brave for some things as well, for the same reason. It's a safer way to code.
+
+Yeah, I guess everyone has different reasons and different motivations, and there's always new sensors on different devices... For example, new web APIs that you can take advantage of, so there's never shortage of things to work on.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Jerod, when you mentioned the growth of Chrome, that's where I -- and I may not be the perfect person to ask where the growth comes from; it seems like their growth came from being...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Fast.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...what developers preferred. I guess yeah, fast, but developers-preferred.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Chrome came out and it was fast, and it was lightweight... And it just blew everything else out of the water. And then of course, the development environment.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. Advancing the web, web standards.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. I think today what keeps specifically developers inside of Chrome - now, when I say developers, I'm pluralizing myself; what keeps me there is DevTools. And it's not that other browsers don't have good dev tools, because I've used Firefox's and they're good, Safari's for a long time, back when both Chrome and Safari were on WebKit; they shared the dev tools and that was awesome, and now they're different, but they're similar... But it's just familiarity inside of the dev tools.
+
+So from a web developer's perspective, Brian, does Brave use the same dev tools that Chrome has? Is that a place where you're competing, or hoping to just have the same thing, or are you lacking there?
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah, we didn't use to have the exact same tools with Muon, but now we have the exact same tools with the rewrite, since we're using the Chromium front-end.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's a huge advantage.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah, exactly. I think market share-wise, you're saying that Chrome was probably because of speed, and maybe security, just by having things out of process. I think Firefox probably originally had the edge, because they were willing to do pop-up blocking that no one else was willing to do, so they got users from that...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** And now we're doing things that other browsers are not willing to do, as well. When you get to a certain size, you worry more about protecting that size and not pissing off people, and you kind of stop caring about putting the users first, so I think the little guy always has an advantage there, because they can do things that the bigger guys can't.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Another thing that you do, which I think was just recently added - you actually built in [Tor](https://www.torproject.org/), into the browser. Can you talk about the implications there and how that was built? I think it's nice, because this is always something that's been available to nerds and power users, but more difficult for everyday people to go and browse anonymously via Tor; now if it's just a built-in button in your browser, that opens it up to a whole new class of users.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah, so like you were talking about, users are willing to kind of give up their privacy a little bit too easily sometimes, so Tor is really a way to -- even if you have done that in the past, you can just open up a new Tor identity right away and you can start browsing the one thing that you wanna keep private in your alter universe, private like that... It's just nice to not have to have the Tor browser installed separately, and also the Tor browser is Firefox-based, so this kind of gives you a different outlet to explore that with.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I love the disclaimer you give, "Tor hides your IP address", and all these things... Basically, it says "The web might suck, basically, if you use this."
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah, it's a lot slower when you're using Tor, but...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Sure.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And it is pretty terrible, so I would say that you would probably use it in cases where you're doing something where maybe you're shopping for gifts, like I try to do, and not let them be revealed through IP stuff... Does Tor -- for those who are not very familiar with Tor, maybe even myself included, since I don't use it too often... I understand the basic of what it is, but why was it important for you to implement this into Brave, and what does it actually do for a user?
+
+**Brian Bondy:** The Tor browsing experience - it really does what most people think private browsing does...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Should do.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** What it should do, yeah. All that private browsing really does is not store what you're looking at locally, so that if someone else from your family goes on the computer later, they don't see the history of where you've been. But really, your data is being spewed there anyways, and you're being fingerprinted, and things like that... So Tor really gives you not just the local privacy, but also the remote privacy as well.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So you mean when you're traveling the internet, your IP and different things about you are not available to the websites you're going to, basically...
+
+**Brian Bondy:** That's right, yeah. There's some APIs that are disabled; it uses onion routing, so that you're never making a direct connection from your client to an endpoint server. You're basically going through a different series of nodes in between, each taking out a layer of encryption on each step.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Which is why it's slow, because it's onion routing you around before you get to your final destination, so it's necessarily slow, it's not just like "Oh, they should make this faster." It's like, "No, it's kind of the speed of light, through like 15 servers, on every request."
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah. There's other problems, too. If you search on Google, you'll get a Captcha thing right away pretty much, because they detect something's a little bit off, or weird, or they don't like the \[unintelligible 00:53:15.28\] So it's not the best experience, but it does give you the extra privacy.
+
+**Break:** \[53:28\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** One major topic when it comes to Brave that we've touched on but we haven't focused on and we'll focus on now is the Basic Attention Token. You've got a cryptocurrency inside the browser, and potentially -- maybe not THE first, but one of the only real-world use cases so far for cryptocurrencies, aside from the straight-up value transfer of Bitcoin, and everybody else that can just transfer a value is this token that's all about attention, and using it inside Brave. It's very cool to see a cryptocurrency actually being used for a real-world use case and providing value. Tell us all about it, and we'll ask our questions once you give us the lay of the land of the way BAT works, how it works in Brave, and what you guys are doing with it.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Sure. The Basic Attention Token - the whole concept is just to value our users' attention and to be able to reward them. We did an ICO in May 2017; the ICO was on the Ethereum network, it's an ERC20 token. We raised 36 million in 26 seconds...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Wow.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** I remember I even tried to buy some myself, and I reloaded the page to see if it was at the right block number yet, and by the time I reloaded it, it was already over.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Wow.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** So I actually missed out on it. \[laughter\] Yeah, it's rare when you meet someone -- I met one person, I think he was an employee from Coinbase, and he said he actually did get in on time to buy some, and I was impressed by that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Those Coinbase employees, they're on top of it, you know...?
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah. \[laughter\] As part of that, what we did was we issued 1,5 billion tokens; 300 million of that - and this is one of the big reasons why we did a token in the first place - was to create something called The User Growth Pool. That was really just to be able to give people free BAT for either referring people... Like, if you go brave.com/refer, you can sign up to get a referral link basically, and every user that you refer that uses the browser for at least a certain number of days, they get five dollars in BAT for that. And also, just to give anyone that's using the browser a free grant, so that they can basically pay the publishers and reward them while we're working on the ad system.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Tell us how it works inside of the browser. There's a set of BAT-enabled websites, or can any website receive your BAT, and then how does it get divvied out? Kind of give the lay of the land of how as one user uses the web inside of Brave, what that means for different website publishers and for the user.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah, so any website at all on the web can get BAT sent to them. You can also sign up to be a publisher, and if you don't sign up to be a publisher, we'll automatically email you after you reach a certain threshold.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And then as a user, you give away some free BAT to play with, right? So I download Brave, and I get some BAT, something like 25 tokens, and as I'm browsing -- I can turn it on/turn it off, I can participate or not, but as I browse the web on Brave, is it based on how long I've been on certain websites for a given time period, it's divvied out? Is that how it works?
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah, so there's different things that we do, and especially with the new Brave browser we've kind of reworked how this all works... But as you browse the web, there's something called Auto-contribute, and you can set up to automatically pay based on your browser history like that. You could also just go to either like a YouTube publisher, a Twitch publisher/creator or a website and you can send a tip on-demand, right away, for whatever amount you want. Then if you actually sign up to be a publisher, you can configure a lot of things of how it will be presented to users that are on your site as well, like the amounts of BAT to send, for example, the banner to display when the tipping window comes up...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Using the new Brave it's pretty interesting, where you can in the right-hand corner see the known BAT triangle icon, and you click that and it pops down and shows you your wallet, and it actually shows you that you're on a Brave-verified publisher. Of course I'm on Changelog.com talking about this, so if you're listening somewhere and you wanna open up a tab - sure, why not? Go ahead and go to Changelog.com and follow my direction here... But it's pretty interesting, you have a button here that says "Send a tip", and I find this kind of interesting, because we've always kind of been pulled into this "Pay with your attention" model, and it's never been attached to something so foundational to a user's day-to-day usage and/or software habits like a browser. I don't know -- Jerod, am I crazy? This is the first time, right? ...a cryptocurrency available to give it out; it's based on attention. Right now my attention is slightly higher, towards Changelog.com over Brave.com. I've been to two sites in this new Brave browser app installed, so 61% of my attention is going to our site, Changelog.com, and the other 39% is going to Brave.com... So does that mean I'm automatically giving those two sites just my attention and I can divvy it later, or is there some sort of auto -- like you said, it's auto-contribute, right?
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah, that's right. It will automatically figure out what to do, and you can set a monthly budget of how much you want to give out... So there's basically a consolidation period that happens once a month currently; we might lower that to be more frequent later. But once you hit that monthly amount, I think it's defaulted to maybe 15 BAT that it'll give out from the 25 BAT that you get for free just by installing it. Yeah, it'll pay out using the Anonize protocol, so your anonymity is preserved that way.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So only that local browser knows your browsing history to do the payouts?
+
+**Brian Bondy:** That's right. Correct.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay. Pretty cool. So take me through this as an end user of Brave - let's say my 25 BAT are gone, but I'm down, I'm into this idea and I support indie publishers like Changelog.com and others; are there any others? That's the one that matters. Let's say that I'm a supporter, and I'm like "I wanna give my actual USD to these people." I've got 100 bucks in my pocket, or let's just say it's in my bank account, because that's probably easier than in my pocket, cash... How do I get BAT into Brave to set it all up and distribute money that's not the 25 free tokens?
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah, so you can add funds, whether it's through -- you can put different cryptocurrencies in, and you can get BAT spit out. Probably the average user wouldn't wanna do that, but you can definitely put in funds that way. The way that the whole system will work once everything is completely working... Later this year we'll be launching ads, and when you turn that on -- by default ads are off, but if you wanna turn it on, you can then get paid in BAT, which then can float to the website that you visit. The ads will be delivered to you user-private, so your user data is not on any servers anymore, it's just on your machine... And yeah, you get paid for your attention that way, so you wouldn't have to put money in that way.
+
+But users can put in, like I said, whether they put in BAT, or Ethereum, or Litecoin... There might be some other options. They can also go to Uphold and buy through that way, as well.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So once you have some crypto, you can get it into Brave via the traditional crypto wallet transfers, basically...
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah, yeah. We keep doing these grants from that user growth pool that I said, even to existing users, until ads is launched, at least... We'll keep doing it as well, just to give out more.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, so tell us about ads, because that's the point where I start to wonder -- we talked about the incentive of Google or the incentive of ad companies, because basically, the way ads is going to work as I understand it is as an end user I can turn ads on, and it's like "Okay, block all the regular ads, but show me these classy, awesome Brave ads", and I will look at them for like some very small amount of BAT, which eventually ads up, and then I can take that BAT and redistribute it, or I can cash it out to buy myself a lollipop, or something... But aren't you guys then basically a new ad platform? Haven't you become Evil Empire in that case? Because now you're the ad network.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** I wouldn't say that we're the ad network; I would say that your machine is the ad network, so I guess the difference is that your user data, which is normally, like I said, spewed across a bunch of different servers, is now only on your machine. You're just downloading a catalog and locally matching what you want to give out.
+
+The current ad system is slow, it adds more than two times the amount of things that you need to download, it costs you money in your data plan, there's creepy aspects to it, which you said -- it doesn't really work for users... It doesn't work for advertisers either, because in the current ads system there's a lot of fraud; 16 billion in the U.S. in 2017 alone... And then it also doesn't work for creators, because there's declining revenue because of all these problems as well. The only company I guess that it does work for is Google and Facebook.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So like any smart network though, it's powered by machine learning. Do you know much about that part of this, or are you playing at a different level when it comes to the ads, and the future of Brave ads?
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah, most of the machine learning type work is being done by -- Ben Livshits is our chief scientist, so he's working on that stuff.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Cool. We'll have to get Ben on Practical AI, which...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, we should.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...if you're a listener of the Changelog and you're not listening to Practical AI, shame on you. There's two easy ways you can do that...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Shame, shame.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** One, you can go back to your podcast client and just search for Changelog Master; that's our master feed. It's the easiest way, actually, and you get some bonus content that only hits that master feed... Or you can be cool and just subscribe to Practical AI directly, by searching for "Practical AI" and subscribing to that, or going to Changelog.com/practicalai and look forward to a future show on Brave and data science machine learning with -- you said his name was Ben?
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Ben. Cool.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, that'd be an awesome show. So continue explaining this to me, now as from an advertiser's perspective. Let's turn Changelog around from publisher, and let's look at us from an advertiser. Maybe we want more people to listen to Practical AI, so we would like to advertise Practical AI to Brave users. Are we then paying? Do I get some BAT as an advertiser, and say "Okay, George (George is my hypothetical user), I will pay you this BAT in order to look at my advertisement", or am I paying Brave Inc. as a middleman, and then Brave Inc. as putting the ads... Is it a direct relationship between the advertiser and the viewer of the ad, or is there also a middle company involved?
+
+**Brian Bondy:** No, it still goes through Brave, and you upload your creatives there. We have a whole different portal that you'd go to. But yeah, you would buy BAT in that case, and the whole system works on BAT. But you might not even need to buy BAT, because you might be already earning BAT, so you could just then use the BAT that you have earned on your website just from casual users to then buy ads with as well... So it's kind of like a whole ecosystem like that.
+
+There's different types of things that you can do. We have browser ads -- and again, this is opt-in, so it's not enabled by default... But there's browser ads, which is completely separate from a website. In that case, I think Brave takes 30% and the user gets 70% of that money. And then there's publisher ads, and the publisher has to opt in for this. So if you want to enable ads on your website for the Brave users, the publisher would then get 70% of the ad money; Brave would get 15% and the user would get 15% in that case as well.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Going back to what I asked earlier, I was like "I wish there was a standard around ads." Does this mean that you're gonna begin to institute some sort of ethical version of advertising? Like "These are things you could do in terms of how you advertise." Is what you're doing simply a conduit, or are you saying "This is how we prefer to deliver ads to users", meaning -- I mean, I don't even know how to really say it... I guess the tracking isn't there, right? So that's one thing. But you do get the attention. So you're just essentially tracking anonymized attention.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah, exactly. And BAT's not just limited to Brave. We plan to have it in lots of different products. Brave is just the first one.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So back on the advertiser thing... Sorry, Adam and I are on different channels a little bit here, but let's say I only wanna advertise to hackers. Like, "You should be into AI if you're gonna see my Practical AI ad", right?
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Right.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Now we can't do that, because you've been anonymizing, you've privacyzing... I can't potentially--
+
+**Brian Bondy:** You can do that. You definitely can. The way that that works is that every client, if they opt into the ads, they are then downloading the entire ad catalog and locally figuring out which ads to show on your device. If you look at what does the browser know, the browser knows even more than Google knows, for example, because you spend all your time in the browser on different websites, and it knows everything about you really.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Gotcha.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** We can do very targeted advertising, without telling ourselves anything, really.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** This is basically the same model that Apple was using with iOS, with regards to its intelligence - you put all of the intelligence, even the machine learning things, into the device, which has all the information.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. \[unintelligible 01:09:23.25\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right. And it doesn't have to go back to Apple to get that done... Whereas on the Android side, a lot of the smarts is in the cloud, it's in Google's servers, and so there's roundtrips for these things, and Google's hypothesis, or their statement/supposition is that they can do better, smarter things server-side than you can do on a device... And Apple says the opposite, that you can do just as well, and then also have the privacy. So it's a similar model here, where you're saying "We can do all the smart things that you could do with an ad platform, it's just that the platform is inside the browser." All the smarts are right in there, and therefore they're only known by that browser, and therefore siloed to your device.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah. And as an advertiser, you can select all the different segments that you're interested in as well, when you're uploading your creatives.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Pretty cool.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** BAT... So you have a cryptocurrency, and one of the gifts and the curses of cryptos is the price goes up and down a bunch. No doubt that probably had some implications on your runway, on your ability to pay yourselves. I know you've raised initially from China, you had a big ICO, and that 36 million I think you said that you sold in 20 seconds probably looked like maybe 360 million for a while there back in December, and now it might not look so hot. Is the volatility of the BAT price something that has come into play at a practical level for Brave Inc. or for the browser, or is it really something that doesn't matter all that much, and you just kind of assume eventually is gonna hold some sort of value?
+
+**Brian Bondy:** The way that ICOs work is basically -- for an ICO funding, when I say 36 million, it's not 36 million in BAT that we have; it's 36 million that people used in Ethereum to buy BAT with. At that point, we're not speculators, so most of this is converted to USD in fiat to run the company.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Gotcha. So you sold almost immediately after the ICO.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** I mean, not all; we still have some ETH as well, but yeah... We sold a very good position of that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, that was smart. \[laughter\] Okay, so that doesn't affect the company, but what about the volatility around the token itself? As a publisher, as an advertiser, as an end user, you give me one BAT today, it might be worth half of what it is tomorrow, it could be worth 4X... Is this the kind of market where if you have publishers who are saying, "Man, maybe we could make a living as a Brave publisher", but that living might be volatile.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** The volatility is definitely not that big. There's definitely not like a overnight 4X type thing that's happening; it's a lot less than that. But I think over time, especially as we launch ads later this year, I think it will stabilize more and more... And over time -- everything was against Bitcoin pairings on exchanges originally, and more and more different exchanges are creating pairs for USD, so at that point you become a little more independent from the Bitcoin swings.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** From the Bitcoin price, yeah. So I alluded to Coinbase being in on it - I was joking; I wasn't alluding to insider trading or anything, but I was saying that Coinbase people know what to do with regard to ICOs; they get it, because they're inside that world... But related to that is that you guys have recently been listed on Coinbase with a USD -- I think it's their Tether, their USD token...
+
+**Brian Bondy:** USDC, yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, which is not your dollars, but it's tied to your dollars, so it feels like your dollars...
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah. I don't know much about them, but I'm pretty sure it's just a stable coin, so it's tied to one USD, I think.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Exactly. So it's close enough, where you don't have to go from USD to Ether to BAT, or from USD to Bitcoin to BAT. You can go from USD pretty much directly to BAT, and that will hypothetically remove the price volatility from BAT, away from Bitcoins, away from Ethereums, assuming a certain amount of transactions and liquidity over time.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What I find interesting here though is that the confidence in the verified publishers is tied to something that is certainly insider baseball kind of speak. Even there, it was very difficult to explain; so you're trying to get someone's confidence to trust 1) a new browser, and I'm sure this is a known hill/mountain/hurdle, however you wanna describe it... But where I'm trying to get at is the bad rep or the reputation, so to speak, of crypto markets at large, as they're talked about on CNN Money, or CNBC Money, or Bloomberg - there's some sort of that up and down of that market, and there's some sort of lack of awareness to the general public. Does that impact -- clearly it does; it impacts Brave. But I mean, to be a publisher, and to be, say, an ad publisher or whatever, you have to have some confidence in the thing, and when that confidence is constantly waning because of the crypto markets, which is just kind of a weird market generally, and a lot of insiders speak, it's just hard to put the confidence in.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah. I guess from a publisher perspective, it's kind of an easy buy just because we do allow the money to flow to these publishers that aren't signed up yet... Some of our bigger publishers, they're already getting four-figure payments, so it's not that hard of a sell to say "You have something-thousand dollars waiting for you to collect it." It becomes a little bit easier at that point \[unintelligible 01:15:30.05\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I hate when people say that to me.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** \[laughs\] Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[unintelligible 01:15:35.06\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** "You have thousands waiting for you."
+
+**Brian Bondy:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** The other thing to put in there, and I agree that there's either like FOMO or a JOMO (the joy of missing out), there's a stigma on the crypto markets, depending on whether they're bulls or bears; we're in a major bear market, so it's like "Oh, that thing..." But just like the Brave team didn't need to speculate - they ICO-ed, they got a bunch of Ether and then they sold that Ether immediately (most of it) for cash, for fiat money, you can do the same thing as a Brave publisher. Every time BAT comes into your account, whether it's worth two cents or two bucks, you can just take the two cents or two bucks today. You don't have to ride the wave.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And because it's opt-in, but they're already collecting them for you... Like Brian says, you get an email, "Hey, you've got all this money. Come and get it", that's a pretty easy sell.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's where the awareness needs to be then. Because here I am, sitting here and thinking -- not so much just about us in particular, because I get it, but I'm thinking about all the people who don't, that don't even take that first step to get the confidence, because they're like "Well, I'm stuck in BAT" or whatever. That's the awareness that needs to drive it home; it's like, "You're not stuck in this currency that you're totally unaware of."
+
+I just think back to the Seth Meyers skit... Cryptocurrency was around the $20,000 mark for Bitcoin, holiday timeframe, maybe around the new year, and they did a skit on it... To me it was hilarious, but that's what the mainstream people think, and when you try to get past a hurdle of like, okay, here, technological people like Jerod and I and our listeners have accepted Brave to some degree, or are willing to try Brave to some degree... We're the ones you get easier and earlier, whereas the mainstreamers will be like "I still don't get it, I'm not trying it." The awareness needs to be around that stigma of like "You're stuck" to "Hey, it's just a conduit, so that we can have a digital currency on the internet that transfers easy and you can easily do it." So your explanation, Jerod, should be written down and put on loop, so to speak.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Thankfully we have the technology, we can loop such things.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right, that's right.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And I'm sure the Brave team has marketing folks and people who are interested in helping educate the general public of these things. It's nice that it's a -- it comes along for the ride. The primary sale for Brave as end user is your privacy, your security and your speed; a good browser where you're not the product is their pitch on the homepage... It's not BAT and the attention economy; that's kind of the inside baseball that you find yourself into. And it's somewhat a nice, viral marketing scheme from a publisher's perspective, because now you have people giving publishers money, all of a sudden "Hey, here's a publisher that's aware of it." Well, what do publishers do? They publish stuff, so they're gonna write about it if they're getting some sort of payments from people browsing their websites using this browser.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Let me ask this question... Let's say I'm The New Yorker or someone who has a subscription; is my choice -- tell me if this is the level it's at... Do I choose to have my own subscription model, or do I choose to say "Use--" because BAT is gonna be so influential, maybe not today, but sometime in the future, do I subscribe for a buck to get a week free of The New Yorker and go direct, or do I just choose a different, better (however you wanna air-quote it) browser like Brave because of BAT and attention tokens with BAT? Will The New Yorker or someone like them, just to use an example of like a publisher who has their own subscription model - will they trade theirs in for the idea and future of Brave and BAT? Or let's just say BAT in general, since this is the implementation, it's at the Brave level at this point, for attention.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah, so a good comparison of that would be we partnered with the Dow Jones Media Group, and they have a paid subscription and paid newsletter, and as part of this deal, they would advertise Brave on their site, and they would get BAT in return. But if you downloaded it from their site, you would then get a free subscription to their premium content, as well. So yeah, we're definitely open to things like that, where it kind of gives you an end to this premium content.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So you mentioned bringing BAT to other products beyond Brave... What are some ideas? Are you thinking about podcasting? That's where I'm trying to get with this.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Bring it home, Jerod.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah, now -- podcasts is a great alternate product, but I think it's gonna probably be exposed via an SDK. The SDK is already in progress, it's just we're the first user of the SDK. So yeah, we can't even imagine--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Nice.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And how are we gonna enlist for the payment? \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, I'd say we've had lots of -- or, "lots" might be a stretch; we've had a few emails from people who are saying "Do you know how Brave is great for browsing and reading publishers? What if there was a podcast app that could do what Brave is doing with BAT?" and most of my response is "Podcast apps are really hard to make, so make sure you actually wanna build a good podcast app first, and then think about the economy around it." It's similar to what you do in Brave - building a good browser is really hard, I'm sure, Brian, as you know... So that's usually what I tell people - maybe partner with an existing podcast app that already has a user base...
+
+The point is that people are thinking about these things. It's interesting that you're saying, "Okay, here's an SDK for Brave payments in BAT where you can build it into your own things."
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yeah, and there's a lot of companies that we're already in talks with and that wanna adopt it, so... It's more just waiting to get everything deployed first, and working and improving, and then bringing those other platforms as well.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think what's interesting here is we started off the conversation talking about Brave, and the mountain it needs to climb, and those it needs to fight to get to the mountain and become a winner, or just a large enough market share to survive and thrive, if given the options, to a world where there's a brand new product called BAT that may have been previously already known at the inception of Brave, to some degree, but maybe I missed it, or Brian you could shed light... But you know, sometimes you do one thing to get to the next thing that actually is your home run, and it seems like Brave is just a browser - not to say it's just a browser on BAT, but like--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** How rude...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...but it doesn't have the same kind of legs that BAT does by being in multiple other products, offering license opportunities, partnership opportunities... It's a transient where it can go anywhere product for Brave Inc. Was BAT always an idea, or was it always Brave and then you just stumbled on BAT?
+
+**Brian Bondy:** No, originally it was Brave, and we used Bitcoin as the back-end... So before BAT even was a thing, everything was already built out on Bitcoin; that was part of the value prop, that we already have the system that is proven with Bitcoin, and we can just use BAT instead. Now, we did BAT back when the transaction fees for Bitcoin were insanely high, like you'd have to -- yeah, it just wasn't working very well \[unintelligible 01:23:11.27\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It didn't make sense for micropayments when the transaction fees are huge, right?
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Exactly, yeah. And also, we couldn't find anyone to give us several hundred million dollars in Bitcoin to give out to users for free to grow our user base. \[laughter\] So that was part of it as well.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So you've got the big 1.0 coming up with the new Chromium front-end... If you go to Brave.com right now, you can download a version that is the new Brave browser. It's not 1.0 yet, but it has the Chromium front-end... I've checked it, the emoji picker works beautifully; you're gonna get your Chrome extensions in there, you're gonna get your Chrome DevTools in there, you also have the ad platform upcoming... I know people like to pin down, especially cryptocurrency-based projects with ship dates and these kinds of things, but just a general idea of when is 1.0 coming, when is Brave -- not Brave payments, Brave advertising coming...? What is just the general timeframe for these things that people can expect to see them and try them out?
+
+**Brian Bondy:** So 1.0 - we're probably looking around February; ads before the end of the year...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, ads first?
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Yup.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What's holding back 1.0, since you've got the big rewrite in there? Are there additional features, or getting ads integrated?
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Well, there's multiple platforms... We wanna basically have the whole system running; we wanna have it not only running on desktop, but also on mobile for example as well. But really, a 1.0 event is kind of like a big marketing deal, it'll be compared head-to-head against everything, and you wanna make sure that -- you only get one chance to do one of those 1.0's, so we wanna make sure we have everything in place for that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Brian, we're at this point where it's time to let you go, but is there anything that's been on your mind during this conversation that you're like "Man, I wish you'd asked me this question", or just one final piece of advice...
+
+**Brian Bondy:** I was thinking earlier, you were talking about the stability of cryptocurrencies, and I think in the past month Bitcoin has actually been more stable than the S&P 500... And also, another thought that I was having was that mass adoption in crypto is not just gonna come from people going to buy the cryptocurrency; I think it was the CEO from Coinbase, Brian, that said "People won't buy their first crypto, they'll earn it", so I really think that BAT is the perfect platform for that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm with you on the earning part of it. Buying is a weird play; earn it somehow, and go from there.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Exactly, yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Brian, thanks for your time, man. We appreciate you being a man on this mission, and a team on this mission to help a better web be safer, more secure, and then potentially publishers like us finding new ways to generate sustainable revenue from the attention our users and/or listeners desire to give us in ways that just make sense for the future and the way that web will work, so... Thanks so much for your hard work and for sharing your time with us today.
+
+**Brian Bondy:** Awesome. Thanks so much for having me on.
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+**Jerod Santo:** We have a two-pronged episode, two for the price of one today, and the price of one is zero, or free, so we're really luckin' out. We're here to talk, first of all, about Dgraph, which is the world's most advanced graph database, according to Dgraph.io. Then we're also going to talk about some licensing and some re-licensing woes, some of the stuff that open source developers and popular projects have to go through, but are kind of the difficult, weedy, "how do we do this, how do we re-license if we change our mind?" and Manish has done all that with Dgraph. It's gone through a few different iterations of licensing, and he's here to tell us that story. Manish, thanks for coming on the Changelog.
+
+**Manish R Jain:** Thanks for having me, guys.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And we should probably give a shout-out to Ping, because this is an episode that started in Ping; if you've never heard of our Ping repo, it's on GitHub at [thechangelog/ping](https://github.com/thechangelog/ping). Hop in there, give us your thoughts on what shows we should do. This one was actually opened up by an epic transcriber, [Horst Rutter](https://twitter.com/horst_vie)... Adam, you know Horst.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** He has been faithfully fixing and improving our transcripts.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The "unintelligibles" are missing. When it's "unintelligible", Horst goes in there and corrects it. He has done a ton, and we appreciate that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And he was interested in hearing about some of the decisions and some of the process of how do you change your license from one to another, and then a follow-up to that was [vespertilian](https://twitter.com/vespertilian), a.k.a. Cameron Batt, which is probably the real name, who pointed us at Dgraph as a user of Dgraph, and one who had watched the [Common Clause License](https://commonsclause.com/) and the [Apache 2.0](https://opensource.org/licenses/Apache-2.0), and the [AGPL](https://opensource.org/licenses/AGPL-3.0), and all of this over the last 6-8 months happening over at Dgraph. He said that this would be a good project to focus on that conversation, so thanks to those two for being a part of our community, and thanks for suggesting this and getting us hooked up with Manish.
+
+With that out of the way, Manish, let's talk about Dgraph. Tell us about this project, where it came from, how long it's been around and what you're up to with it.
+
+**Manish R Jain:** \[04:09\] Sure. Maybe I can start with my own journey a bit before I get into Dgraph. I used to work at Google in Mountain View, California for six and a half years, working in the web search infrastructure team. There we were dealing with real-time distributed systems. In fact, we built an incremental indexing system and launched that in 2010, got an \[unintelligible 00:04:32.02\] award for it... Basically, what that did was to reduce the latency that it takes for a web page to go from the first time we crawl it to the first time a user sees it on [Google.com](https://www.google.com/) from four days to a few hours.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, wow.
+
+**Manish R Jain:** That was the biggest [Bigtable](https://cloud.google.com/bigtable/) database installation at Google at the time, and it gave me a lot of freedom to work on real-time distributed systems. Now, back in 2010, after we launched this thing, I started looking around and seeing "Hey, what else could I dig my teeth in?" Google had acquired [Metaweb](https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/deeper-understanding-with-metaweb.html), which is the company which brought [Knowledge Graph](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Graph) to Google... So the Knowledge Graph that is here these days came from Metaweb... And I started a couple of projects there.
+
+One of the projects was to unite all structured data at Google, that was all of what we call OneBoxes - that would be weather, and events, and movie showtimes, and flights etc. - and the Knowledge Graph into a single graph indexing and serving system. That was a big challenge, obviously.
+
+We didn't have a graph serving system at Google; we had a web search index serving system, but not a graph one. So along with a few other tech leads - one was in India, one was in San Francisco, and I was in Mountain View - we started this project to build something which would be able to do arbitrary depth joins and would do traversals, and do them in a sub-second latency. In fact, we had a limit on how much latency it can have, because if the system does not respond to a web search request internally, that search would just move on and would not surface anything interesting from the Knowledge Graph.
+
+So I was involved in that, and while building that, we obviously put together all the research that Google had done at that time, and I got to learn a lot. I left Google in 2013, I moved from the U.S. to Australia - I had some family reasons to move - and around 2015 I remember being involved in a freelancing gig where this person is like "Hey, can we use a graph database?" I was like, "Well, the existing graph databases - they are not that good. They don't scale very well, they have issues with consistency, and in general are just never considered primary databases." And that's what triggered me to say "Hey, maybe we should build something like that."
+
+I looked around, and the biggest one was [Neo4j](https://neo4j.com/), which is a single-server database... In fact, the most popular one on the market, but limited by data corruption issues, and performance issues. Then there were some others which were not databases, but more like graph layers. You would think of [TitanDB](http://titan.thinkaurelius.com/), DataStax ([DSE Graph](https://www.datastax.com/products/datastax-enterprise-graph)), [JanusGraph](http://janusgraph.org/), which are built on top of other distributed databases. So you'd put [HBase](https://hbase.apache.org/) below it, or you'd put [Cassandra](https://cassandra.apache.org/)... And when you put a layer above, it (again) suffers from performance; you need to run multiple systems.
+
+\[08:02\] Dgraph really started as a way by which we could have a native graph database which could also scale horizontally, and perform with a pretty tight latency. I used a lot of concepts that I learned about at Google. On top of that, while we were building it, we realized if we were to build a database which has to be a primary database for big companies, it must support transactions, it must support synchronous replication, it must provide linearizable reads because when you build these things into the database, applications have it a lot easier; they don't need to worry about whether they're hitting the master or the replica... They don't have to worry about any of that; they just hit any of the servers in the cluster and they are guaranteed to get the freshest response back. So those were the ideas that we built Dgraph for.
+
+I launched 0.1 in December 2015. We went on to raise three million dollars over the course of two years, launched 1.0 in December 2017, and now we are in a place where Dgraph is close to being used in production at a few big companies. And obviously, we have a huge open source community.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very cool. Well, you mentioned Neo4j - just in the news yesterday; I believe they raised a series E -- the company behind Neo4j. 80 million dollars series E, so definitely investment interest in this space, and Neo4j has been around for quite some time. You said Dgraph's advantage is that it's built for distributed from the ground up, and also potentially some of the technology, or just the timing of Dgraph in terms of it starting in 2015... Can you give some of the underlying technology languages or tools that you're using in the open source software, and speak to that for us?
+
+**Manish R Jain:** I'm a big fan of [Go](https://golang.org/) language, and this was not when I was at Google; I was pretty much writing C++. But after I left, Python just could never stick with me, and the moment I got to know about Go, I started trying it out. Back in 2015, [CockroachDB](https://www.cockroachlabs.com/), another database company in New York - they had raised a series A; I saw their stack was [Go](https://golang.org/), and that immediately excited me.
+
+Dgraph is written purely in [Go](https://golang.org/). We use [gRPC](https://grpc.io/) for communication, both internal, between the cluster, and for external communication from the client to the cluster. We were initially using [RocksDB](https://rocksdb.org/) as an embedded key-value database to put our data in, but then we realized that when you go from Go space to cGo to C++, which is where RocksDB is written in, it just causes a lot of headache. Go tools don't get to see the memory profilers; for example, you don't get to see what's happening in C land... The Go performance profilers do not get to see what's happening in C land either... So at some point, after much thought, we decided that we should just build a good RocksDB alternative in Go.
+
+We looked at the alternatives at that time... One was [BoltDB](https://github.com/boltdb/bolt), which was a B+ tree-based key-value database. Then there was obviously [LevelDB](http://leveldb.org/). RocksDB was already an improvement over LevelDB, so for us that seemed like another great choice.
+
+\[11:53\] BoltDB's write performance -- and not just BoltDB, but in general, any [B+ trees](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%2B_tree)' write performance is definitely always a bottleneck... So we wrote something which was based upon a new paper by the University of Wisconsin-Madison. What it did was it took some of the negatives of [LSM trees](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log-structured_merge-tree) and spread it by separating the values from the keys. So the values go into a log, and the keys go into the LSM tree. We based our main design upon that... And it took us a while to really get it right, because the paper didn't talk about all the nuances involved with having a separate value log, so that's something that we have been sort of perfecting over time.
+
+The end result was that the performance of this thing called [Badger](https://github.com/dgraph-io/badger) basically outperforms RocksDB on a lot of use cases. It works out pretty well for us, so we use Badger as the underlying embedded key-value database.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very cool. One thing you mentioned earlier - you said that many people were using graph databases not for their primary data store, but as perhaps a secondary data store. Maybe they put their social network-style data in the graph database, but maybe they have a more traditional relational database management system for their primary tables... Can you give a high-level decision -- of course, once you decide "I need a graph database", you may say, okay, Dgraph, or Neo4j, or perhaps a proprietary option, but what about even like "Do I need a graph database versus a Postgres or a MySQL?" Help people with that decision. Is there a pretty simple flow you can go through in your mind to decide "Is this the data store for me?" especially if you're gonna pick it as a primary?
+
+**Manish R Jain:** That is a tough question for a lot of people. MySQL and Postgres have been around for such a long time. Literally, SQL is being taught in schools and colleges all over the world. It's hard to convince somebody who was, let's say, a Postgres fan or a SQL fan to switch to something else... I try not to engage directly or try to convince anybody to use graphs. What happens for us as the companies -- so Postgres and MySQL are very popular with the young startups, but as they progress and they start to realize the limits of these systems, the limitations of these systems, the limitations of not being able to do recursive queries across tables, and stuff... All that code that goes into the application because the database is so simple, as the company size grows, they start to hit those limitations... And at some point, a new project would be like "Hey, it would be great if we had a graph database for this. It would really save a lot of work." Or "Hey, we tried this with SQL. It's just too slow for our users. Maybe we should switch over to a graph database." So that's what happens. Then they start looking into a graph database. Obviously, they come across some of the popular choices, they try them out, and then accidentally almost, they get to hear about Dgraph, and that sticks.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So it's one of these things where you'll know it if you'll need it, because you'll have grown past certain needs potentially in your traditional relational database. That makes it actually a pretty nice space for an enterprise offering, because your community is enterprise. It's companies that have grown, at least data-wise, to a size where they feel the need already, so they're probably a certain level of successful, at least hopefully.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[16:08\] Or they're even doing special things with their data more so than simply like "Hey, we have a web app with basic CRUD." MySQL, Postgres - those databases are perfect and great and fine for those types of apps, but once you're past a certain point, you won't actually make more sense, or get insights, or analytics that really draw relations or different things from a database. You may want to experiment, and even use in addition to, versus simply replacing.
+
+**Manish R Jain:** Yeah, absolutely. We do see some of these medium to big-size companies - I think they're the most active users of graph technologies. Even if you were to look at yesterday's news article about Neo4j getting the 80 million dollars, they said that 20 out of 27 (or 24) top banks in the U.S. are using Neo4j, so it gives you some idea for how popular graphs are with enterprises. But you know, I do wanna say one thing though... I feel -- and we've actually done some work on that as well... Even for some basic stuff which you typically think is squarely in the SQL space, for example building a question-answering website, right? You have Quora, you have Stack Overflow, and you have a bunch of these things (even Facebook) where you have a post, you have comments on the post, you have likes on those comments, you have comments on comments, likes on those, and so on and so forth - it's a very recursive sort of... You know, if you need to show a post, it's a recursive traversal, and that's exactly what graphs are great at.
+
+What we did, for example, (I think it was) last year was we -- Stack Overflow does these data dumps that you can just pick up as an XML file; you can pick it up and you can do whatever with it. So we picked that up and we loaded that into Dgraph, and we thought "Hey, let's build the three most popular pages on Stack Overflow." One of them is the questions page, one of them is the homepage, and there was one more page, I forget which one it was... And we just built those three pages. The amount of back-end code that we needed was not that much, because the query language, in this case of Dgraph, was sufficiently complex that it could just retrieve all the data for you and give it to you in a nice JSON, so all the work that needs to be done is just in the front-end in rendering it, as opposed to in the back-end where you pick up the question from the questions table, then pick up the answer from the answers table, pick up the likes and upvotes from another table, and then try to join them together... You don't have to do any of that code; it just happens automatically at a database level.
+
+So I feel graphs can be used in a lot more broad way, and they are a lot nicer and faster for developers, but that level of developer awareness - that takes some time to build.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. That's a great idea for getting people to see how easy it is to build these recursive data fetches, is to use something we're all very well aware of, which -- I don't know, do you think developers know what Stack Overflow looks like, perhaps...? \[laughter\] Also, you have another cool one on your homepage - play with 21M facts from the Freebase Film Data, load it up on a demo Dgraph instance, so you can just hop in there and see what different queries will look like.
+
+Speaking a little bit to the timing of Dgraph in terms of its competitive advantage over potential other graph databases is its query language is inspired by [GraphQL](https://graphql.org/), which just couldn't have been inspired by GraphQL if it was ten years ago... So this is something that's very familiar, at least to front-end web developers. Can you talk about that?
+
+**Manish R Jain:** \[20:09\] Yeah, I think GraphQL was a great choice for us. It was very early on, in fact... I think Facebook had just released GraphQL, and I remember looking at it and I'm like "This just fits", because when you go to a graph database, you want to get a subgraph back; you don't wanna get a list back... Because if you get a list back, it's hard to know what was connected to what. You cannot create a subgraph from a list, but you can take a subgraph and convert it to a list. And most of the other graph queries - [Cypher](http://www.opencypher.org/) and [Gremlin](https://github.com/tinkerpop/gremlin/wiki) - they are all returning lists of things back, just like SQL does, so they lose some of that relationship data between things.
+
+I looked at GraphQL and I was like, "Hm, this s very interesting." In fact, I went back and checked with the CTO at Metaweb who was at Google; I showed it to him, and I was like "What do you think about this?" He said that it was very close to Metaweb's own query language, called MQL, which was popular at the time. So we decided, "Hey, let's use this as a query language."
+
+Now, the thing with GraphQL that we did not realize at the time was that it was really a replacement for REST APIs, and it was still designed keeping SQL in mind, the types of the GraphQL, think of them as SQL tables, and the connections are similar. So we decided to quickly hit some of the seams of GraphQL, where we felt like we could not really work with it if we wanna build a graph database... So we had to then start to modify the spec, and basically go outside of the spec and modify... We simplified some, we added some features like shortest path, we added filters in a simple way, and so on and so forth... And we still don't have a good name for this language; we just call it GraphQL+-, because we added some and we removed some. \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's the first I've heard that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's hilarious. I was looking at that +- and I thought maybe it was like a typo there, because it looks like it was accidentally in the link, but... Yeah, that's a good name - just plus some and minus some.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Is ++ still being used often? I feel like it's had its heyday... I remember it from maybe ten years ago, maybe even eight; I don't know, it doesn't seem like it was a couple. Is it still kind of a current, known naming pattern? ...like a hacker pattern, something++?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I think so. I think it's still out there. Hackers are still typing daily, for sure...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** +- is brand new.
+
+**Manish R Jain:** We still use C++, and we were like "Hey, is it GraphQL++?"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Sure.
+
+**Manish R Jain:** But then I was like, "Well, it doesn't do everything that GraphQL does, so it would be wrong to call it ++. It has to be +-."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I dig it. So is that something that potentially those pluses (or maybe the minuses) could work their back into GraphQL, or is it just because working with graph databases there are things that just don't make sense for the broader web API GraphQL?
+
+**Manish R Jain:** \[23:36\] Honestly, that's the question on my mind almost every other day. We do see how popular GraphQL has become; in fact, this has become way more popular than I anticipated... And there's an open ticket on Dgraph to support the official GraphQL spec, so it will play well with all the tooling out there. [Apollo](https://www.apollographql.com/) raised a bunch of money and Apollo is being used quite a lot in the GraphQL community... And we would like GraphQL to play well with all of those tools.
+
+I think there is definitely something that we wanna do, is to support the official one. It probably takes a deeper discussion with the authors of GraphQL to see if they would like to integrate some of the modifications that we have done back into the spec. That's probably a harder discussion though.
+
+**Break:** \[24:37\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Manish, help us understand some of the killer use cases, the sweet spot for graph databases. Similar to the idea of -- I think Mongo came out really talking about document-based data stores and saying "If you're running an e-commerce site such as [Magento](https://magento.com/), look at all these crazy joints on these different tables just to pull together a shopping cart. Really, that's a document, so let's have a document database", and that was a compelling use case, or at least selling point for that style data store. When I think of graph databases, I think of social networks, but that's just me. From your perspective, what's the sweet spot for these types of data stores?
+
+**Manish R Jain:** Yeah, so there are certain uses cases where people immediately think about using a graph database, and I think there's a sweet spot there. The top one which comes to my mind is real-time recommendations; these days companies have a lot of data around the users, for example... You have credit cards and you have rewards cards from even big airlines, or hotels, or e-commerce companies around what users have purchased in the past, and what other people have purchased... Amazon comes to mind; Amazon runs an amazing recommendation system. That's one of probably the most demanded features or the most demanded use cases from a graph database.
+
+Then we have seen particularly medium to big companies go really hard after real-time fraud detection. It's very easy in a graph to find circles where they can identify if there's the same person or entity trying to create multiple cards, or multiple money sources, and figure out if it's a ring and crash that.
+
+\[27:45\] We have also seen identity reconciliation. People trying to figure out if it's the same person on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and so on and so forth. So those kinds of reconciliations - now you can apply them to other data sources. That's actually a good usage for graphs.
+
+And the last one - this is the most relevant to particularly big companies... They have a lot of data silos. They have a lot of different databases, or even just different database instances where they actually grab data, and one silo never talks to the other one. What they then do is they unify all of the data from these different silos into a graph database, because remember, graph databases do not have any boundaries; the idea of graphs is that you just put all the data into one place, and it can traverse from any node in the graph to any other node, however far away it might be. There's no tables, there's no different databases, it's just one graph. That concept really helps when you want to query across multiple data sources.
+
+The fifth one, which is really jumping up these days, is around artificial intelligence. There was a paper by Google that I was reading last week around how they realized that they have reached the limits and they need to use a graph database to be able to do better AI. They even launched a small graph library that you can use to integrate with TensorFlow. In fact, just reading it from yesterday's post around Neo4j funding, AI was the top thing that they're gonna go after with the new money that they're getting... So I think for AI, graphs are a no-brainer.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[30:09\] If you had to give somebody a graph database 101, would you just say it's like a string that threads different data points, and that string (as you said there) can infinitely scale? If you had to give a 101 of what a graph database is, how long might that be and could you do it here?
+
+**Manish R Jain:** \[30:27\] Absolutely. I think graphs are probably the simplest things to think about, really. People think about SQL tables - you have a row and you have some columns. Think of a graph as three columns where you have a subject, a predicate, and an object. If you put together a whole bunch of these things, you get a graph. A subject is essentially -- think of it as an entity; a predicate is the relationship, and the object is either another entity, or a value.
+
+The subject could be, let's say, me. The relationship might be "lives in" and object might be "San Francisco." Or it could be me - the name is Manish, and that's sort of like a property. So you just put together a whole bunch of these facts, or triples, and you get a graph.
+
+Then other people who live in San Francisco would have similar facts, and then you could run a graph query around "Hey, tell me all the people who live in San Francisco and who eat sushi." So you pick up all the people who live in San Francisco, you intersect with people in the world who eat sushi - which are completely different facts. You didn't create them as "This person lives in San Francisco AND eats sushi." This is something that we're doing on the fly. So you pick up all the people in San Francisco, you pick up all the people in the world who eat sushi, you intersect the two lists, and now you get people in San Francisco who eat sushi. Now you can take that result and say "Intersect it with all the people who have been to Japan." You pick up another list of people who have been to Japan, intersect it with this, and now you get people who live in San Francisco, who eat sushi, and who have been to Japan. So the power of graphs is really in these joins that you can do, coming from just very simple facts.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[32:12\] It makes sense too why in part one you mentioned not having to rewrite a bunch of code. When you explained it in the 101 that these things naturally appear based on the way you query the data, versus traditional ways you might have done it with MySQL, or Postgres, or relational databases... In this case, the graph or these points become more and more clear as you intersect across over the data, because it's just naturally how it works... And you're saving time, but also insights that were just so much harder to get to in traditional ways, or other database ways.
+
+**Manish R Jain:** That's absolutely true. I was playing with the Freebase movie set that we have also on our website, and one of the interesting things is that you can look at the data all you want and never really find these tidbits; but I put it into Dgraph and run some queries, and it turns out that the directors of Indiana Jones movies were also in the movie. Steven Spielberg was in one of the Indiana Jones movies as one of the characters in the movie.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Manish R Jain:** There's all these interesting things - they just become really obvious when you put them in a graph.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's interesting.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So you add that, the built-in ACID transactions, which gives you a lot of safety... And what are you missing then? Is everything better in graph database land, or are there things that relational databases still do better today? What are the drawbacks?
+
+**Manish R Jain:** I used to say the drawback was that Dgraph was not great for financial transactions... But then we added transactions, so now it's great for financial transactions. The other drawback that we still have is that it's not really great for flat data... And by flat data I mean like time series data. You just have tons of things which are not really connections, but just more and more record points for the same thing. That kind of flat data is just not done very well with graph databases. You could use a graph for that, but it's better if you aggregate it somewhere else and bring the results into a graph database than to try to do the aggregation or storage in the graph database.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So basically in a world full of subjects that have many verbs, with many like-minded objects, graph databases apply.
+
+**Manish R Jain:** Absolutely. Any SQL table, which is essentially row and column and data, can be easily converted into graphs. And I think every time we have tried to switch from a SQL use case to a graph use case, just the model backend code that was in place before reduces by at least half, because the query language is so much more powerful.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** To go further into Jerod's question of where you reach for a graph database over, say, a Postgres or MySQL or a relational, you said you used to not recommend it for transactional, but then you built it... Is there a checklist of things that is like you'd reach for Postgres over Dgraph or other graph databases, that is consistently being chiseled away where graph databases just went out?
+
+**Manish R Jain:** Sorry, could you repeat that question?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Is there a list of things where you recommend "Okay, if you're in these scenarios, don't use a graph database"? You said before you don't recommend it for transactional database, and then you built transactions, so now you take that back.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Maybe that was the list.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[36:05\] That was the list? Okay... I wasn't sure if it was comprehensive or not...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** "We had one thing in our list..." Well, it's flat data, so if you don't have a lot of relationships, then it's -- I mean, you can, according to what you've just said, Manish... You can use them, but they're not necessarily optimized for that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You're not gonna get any advantages necessarily.
+
+**Manish R Jain:** Right. I think the time series data is the one which I mentioned...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Time series...
+
+**Manish R Jain:** Yeah. It's just not great for graphs.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What about management and maintenance? I am a Postgres user, and I have been for years, and so I always look at the shiny different data stores, and I think "This sounds great when I'm in development", and then I have to actually put the thing into the world and run it, and back it up, and make sure it's always up, and so on and so forth... And then it's like "Now I have to learn a brand new set of maintenance or management skills that I already own on the Postgres side." I think that's probably a barrier for a lot of people. What's the story with deploying this thing? I know it's built-in distributed, so it's gonna shard horizontally for you, which sounds amazing, but also potentially scary... I don't know. Tell us about deployment.
+
+**Manish R Jain:** Deployment is where you lose customers, I think. Not for Dgraph, but I'm talking about in general this is where you can easily lose customers, because DevOps guys are always hard to impress... And we have spent a lot of time making sure that DevOps guys are happy with Dgraph. We already built in -- as I said, it's distributed, so it can shard the data for you... But it is also replicated, and all of that is part of the open core. A bunch of deployments that we're doing right now, they use what we call a six nodes cluster where we have three replicas for Dgraph Zero and three replicas for Dgraph Alpha. Don't worry about the terminology here, but just understand that it's three replicas each.
+
+Dgraph uses a consensus algorithm called Raft to make sure that every data that you put into Dgraph reaches a quorum and gets replicated across a majority of these replicas before the acknowledgment is sent back to the user. So in case one of the servers crashes, nothing happens. Your queries will keep on running, your data will keep on mutating, everything will just be fine. The DevOps guy would get a notification, they can either swap the machine, or if you're using Kubernetes, the machine just comes back up automatically, and your users don't even see it. So it becomes really easy as a DevOps person to just run Dgraph and keep everything happy.
+
+One more thing that happens at the developer level is that, as I said before, sometimes with Postgres for example - or any database which has eventual consistency in the replication system - they will (let's say) create a new account into the master; then they want to read this new user's account, and they end up going to a replica... And the replica still doesn't have that new record, so it will show "Hey, account not found", which is just a bad experience for users.
+
+\[39:36\] There's a lot of systems built on top, or you have to build it yourself to make sure that if you're doing a read after write, then the read goes back to the master, which basically means your replicas are not used as well, or you have to do a bunch of application-level tweaks and techniques to make it work. In Dgraph you don't have to worry about any of that, because it's all consistent... So even if a node crashes and is down for a long time, comes back up and you immediately run a query, the query would block until the node has caught up to the rest of the cluster, and only once the data is up to date would reply back. Obviously, there is also ways by which you can time out and query another server. All of these things are built in to make sure that you always get the freshest data, what we call linearizable reads. It tackles some of the common issues from both the DevOps side, and also from the developer side.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So does it give up availability then, in that case when the query blocks until it's consistent, so you're losing availability?
+
+**Manish R Jain:** Yeah. In the [CAP Theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem) it goes for consistency in partitioning, instead of availability...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay.
+
+**Manish R Jain:** But note that a lot of people mistake this - CAP Theorem is not the same as high availability. Dgraph is highly available, but it still goes for CP instead of AP.
+
+**Break:** \[41:21\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Manish, based on what you've shared with us so far, it sounds like the initial start for Dgraph as a company was 2013. Is that right?
+
+**Manish R Jain:** 2015.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** 2015. And in 2015 you did a round, you raised 3,5 million dollars if I remember correctly... Is that right?
+
+**Manish R Jain:** We did a round in early 2016, and that other round in late 2017.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay.
+
+**Manish R Jain:** A total of, I think, 2.9(ish) million.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So that means somebody trusts you with millions of dollars, basically, is what I'm trying to get at. You're establishing a company, you've built a technology that's obviously proven itself, and somebody said "Yeah, here's money. I trust you, I trust what you're trying to build, and I think it makes sense to do so." Sometimes that means that you've licensed things appropriately - the project has been open core/open source; you can tell us more about the inner details of that and what that means, but somehow, someway, at some point you chose the right license that allowed you to take on funding and build a company around it.
+
+\[44:17\] Can you walk us through what that is? Because I'm imagining there are just so many developers out there going to choosealicense.com, and they're getting enough information, but still yet the wisdom is not there maybe so much. The definitions and details are, but I feel like you can bring some bloodied knuckles and some wisdom here... So preach.
+
+**Manish R Jain:** Absolutely. I think when I was starting Dgraph - towards the end of 2015 - I naturally went for open source. It was not clear to me at that time how the business model would work. In fact, a lot of people I talk to around this idea of "Hey, I'm gonna build a graph database and make it open source", and they were like "If you're putting all the API out there, then what's left for you to make money off?" So the business models around open source only became clear to me later, and I think a lot of people who are in the Valley are probably more aware of them, but definitely people in Australia were not. You get open core, and so on and so forth.
+
+Now, the choice of licensing was kind of important to me. The behemoth in the graph space Neo4j, was licensed as AGPL, which is considered to be a copyleft license. Now what AGPL does is that if you were to touch any code and use this AGPL code as, let's say, library, then you must open source your code also as AGPL; it's sort of like a viral license. If you touch it, it affects you as well.
+
+We decided to go with a more permissive Apache license. Now, a lot of people think the reason to open source something is around getting contributions from developers all over the world, and I would say that is true, but it is not the main benefit of open sourcing something. The biggest benefit of open sourcing software, in my mind, is around adoption. It's basically free marketing. You put your code as open source, anybody can see it and they feel more comfortable using it. They don't have to pay you a dime to use it, particularly in permissive licenses like Apache, and BSD, and MIT etc.
+
+These days, if you wanna build an infrastructure company, I've noticed most startups, most tech-based companies really want the underlying technology to be open source. And they have multiple benefits of doing so; when they have the code available to them, they already have the engineering talent and that talent can potentially go and modify the codebase to improve it, or modify it to their liking etc.
+
+So the biggest thing I've seen around permissive licenses is adoption. You also get contributions, but more importantly over the journey of both Dgraph and Badger that I've noticed is just the fact that people give you feedback around issues that they run into, and that feedback, I feel, is more important sometimes than the actual code contributions that you get.
+
+\[48:10\] So if you look at any open source repository, you'll see 90% of the contributions are being done by the core team of 3-4 people, and then there's a whole long tail of small contributions done by the bigger open source community. That's sort of like the ugly truth, or unknown truth about open source projects... Really, I think it's the feedback that improves the robustness of code.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's definitely an interesting take. I think most people would say that the contributions are the main reason, but I think that's a compelling statement that you have there, with regard to the feedback versus actual code contributions.
+
+So you mentioned picking Apache versus AGPL... Tell us about AGPL, maybe even contrast it with GPL, which it's a modification of, to a certain degree, and then why it wasn't attractive to you as a license.
+
+**Manish R Jain:** Let me start with explaining a bit about AGPL itself... Again, this is to the best of my understanding. With GPL, the idea is that the code is on the same place, and the users are sort of linking to it as a library. Again, the virality of this whole GPL series comes into play. So if you link your code to GPL code, your code is supposed to become GPL as well, and you must make it open source in the GPL terms.
+
+Now, AGPL was then devised as a way by which it can tackle GPL running as a server, and you interfacing with it over the network. So I think the idea is to try to make the same virality affect you if you are writing GPL code in the server and interfacing with it over a client.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's my understanding, as well. The GPL had a "loophole", because it was designed before the proliferation of services - websites, web servers, web services where you're not delivering the end code, you're delivering a byproduct of the code... And so the AGPL was basically a fix for that loophole to also make the server-side -- even if you don't deliver the code to the end user, still covered under the (as you said) the virality portion of the GPL... So I think we're in agreement with that being the primary means, and then for the aim, and also I think it was effective in that regard.
+
+**Manish R Jain:** Absolutely. And a lot of companies who still wanna hold on tightly to their codebase tend to use AGPL as sort of like a stopgap between going fully permissive open source, while still trying to make sure that they have a more solid business mode around this.
+
+Now, Dgraph initially -- we did also try to convert from Apache to AGPL. When you do such a conversion, the first thing that you have to make sure of is that, even before the project started, you have a good ICLA in place. What's an ICLA? It's an Individual Contributor License Agreement, which means that any contribution that you take into your open source project, the rights to that contribution are given back to the company running the open source. We put that in place into Dgraph very early on, even when we were under Apache.
+
+\[52:04\] That means that, in a way, the authors of that contribution hand the rights back to the company, which means the company can now change the licensing if need be. We do not accept any contributions without the author signing the ICLA, and it's just a standard practice, I've noticed, across not just Dgraph, but other open source companies as well.
+
+That meant that we could change the licensing terms, and we did change it to AGPL. This was, I think, after MongoDB went IPO, and MongoDB was using AGPL... And we felt maybe that's a better way for us to make sure that we have a good business model. Once we had switched over to AGPL, we started hitting some of these things that we did not really understand before.
+
+To give you a bit of history, Google explicitly bans AGPL code. Google's open source guy, Chris DiBona, in fact famously said that "No AGPL code is useful or good, and we don't need to use it." They banned it. Now, when Google goes and bans a license, other companies follow. Facebook doesn't publish it openly, and I don't really know, but I know that much that in Facebook and in Apple and some of these big companies it is very hard or almost impossible to bring in any AGPL code... And we actually had some of these things. So if somebody wants to play with Dgraph at one of these big companies, they're unable to because they can't even bring the code into the company, at all.
+
+We started realizing that because of this, people were having a hard time adopting Dgraph, and again, going back to my point about why would you choose open source over proprietary license - it's largely for adoption. So we started seeing some of those issues, and we switched over from Apache to AGPL in March 2017, if I'm not wrong, and then towards the end of 2017 we decided "Hey, we need a better solution here. AGPL seems too toxic to be used for Dgraph."
+
+Around that time we started a discussion - or probably somewhere after that - with the Redis Labs folks, and together we came up with this thing called the [Commons Clause](https://commonsclause.com/). The idea behind the Commons Clause is that you use a permissive license like Apache, or in this case of Redis, they use BSD, and you had a clause which basically prohibits some company or some person to sell the software as it is... And why would we go to AGPL or why would we go to the Commons Clause? The reason is that what's been happening lately and what none of the open source licenses have thought about is that big companies, and these platform as a service or infrastructure as a service etc. companies, most notably Amazon and the Chinese counterparts - they would pick up an open source project and they would run it as a service at a much cheaper price, and because they have the bandwidth and the engineering talent and the money for it, they would run it as a service without contributing back to the open source project. The main thing that we were going for is to avoid that. If you wanna sell this thing to developers, you should at least contribute back, or you should help the company financially who is actually doing most of the contributions.
+
+So all of these licenses - AGPL, or Commons Clause, and now Mongo's SSBL - they are really around trying to dissuade big service providers from just ripping off an open source project.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[56:30\] It seems like this stems, based on your earlier points, as like your motivations, your lens from which you're navigating this... And in your case, in particular Dgraph, you are optimizing as open source for adoption, not so much contributions, right? So you still want contributions, it's still important, it's part of the world, it's how open source works, but you're doing it based on adoption, so you've had to go through different licenses. And you wanna have a liberal license, with a clause that protects you so you can be a company and actually be viable and sustainable... And there's some that say that that added clause basically makes you not open source. What do you say to that?
+
+**Manish R Jain:** I think it's a very delicate trade-off between trying to choose a permissive license, which allows most users to just use the software, while also dissuading a big company from coming in and stealing your financial longevity in some sense, right? And if you put Commons Clause in place, it's true, the project is no longer open source, because the Commons Clause is not OSI-approved.
+
+Now, Redis did a smart thing there - they kept most of their codebase under the BSD license, which is still open source, but chose some of the modules that they had built and put them under Commons Clause. So you can think of, again, as this open core model in some sense, where most of your code is open source, but then some of your code is not. When we applied Commons Clause for Dgraph, we applied it fully, which means all of the codebase was under Commons Clause. And we were just not convinced that that was the right move, and this became very apparent when, again, Google went in and banned the Commons Clause as well. Now, I don't agree with their reasoning for Google to ban the Commons Clause, which was that they feel that the Commons Clause prohibits all commercial usages, which is completely wrong, really... The Commons Clause has this term called "if the code is substantially the same as the original code, then they can't sell it." "Substantially" is a term used very commonly in legal documents to basically indicate that if you tweak things a bit, it doesn't make it different. That is just a way of saying that if largely you're selling the same thing, which is selling, let's say Redis modules in this case, or selling Dgraph, then you would not be allowed to do that. But you can build something on top of it, for example you could build a question asking website, you could build some other proprietary service on top of Dgraph, and you can sell that; nobody stops you from doing that, because it is not substantially the same thing.
+
+That was the idea behind the Commons Clause. I feel like the intentions were correct, but it was very hard to convey to people in the community, and even cooling this case, what "substantially" meant. I think we went through many debates around explaining to people "substantially doesn't mean this, substantially doesn't mean that", but I don't think it's a fight that is easy to win.
+
+\[01:00:12.23\] After we realized that the Commons Clause was banned by Google - it brings us back to the same place where AGPL is banned by Google, and again, it affects that option, so we decided that we will switch back to the Apache license. Now, there's an interesting backdrop here. This is back in 2017, I think - CockroachDB, a database company in New York, had come up with a license which was essentially Apache plus enterprise license (what they called the Cockroach license), and what they did was instead of trying to closed source their enterprise modules, they made it source visible, and they collocated it right next to their open source codebase. Now what they have is they have the main source tree, which is Apache-licensed, and then certain modules which are under the enterprise license, are still with the code visible.
+
+That was a very attractive system, and it was very well-received by their community, and it's something that I had in the back of my mind for a while, and I felt that Dgraph was still young enough, and we had started to build our enterprise features, but I felt that we can easily switch over to that license and make it work... So what we have done now is that we have brought Dgraph back to Apache without any clause, and we're gonna build the enterprise modules, which will be source visible. This system is also adopted, I'm not wrong, by ElasticSearch, and is just in general a very big win for liberal open source licenses, in some sense.
+
+One more thing on top of this is that -- so this is our journey; that's where our journey sort of concludes... But after we switched over to Apache license and enterprise license, MongoDB, which was previously AGPL, has gone even stricter and created a license called SSPL (Server Side Public License). Now, as AGPL was sort of stricter that GPL, SSPL is even stricter than AGPL. It tries to do the same thing as the Commons Clause in some sense, but it does it a bit differently. It says that if you run MongoDB as a service, then you must open source the codebase which helps you run MongoDB as a service. Again, it's a jab at the big service providers, like Amazon, but it's just done in a different way, where they probably have a better chance of getting it approved by OSI... But in my mind, it's trying to achieve the same thing as what Redis was doing with the Commons Clause.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** There are plenty of people out there that are vehemently opposed to Commons Clause, with regards to open source software... Because as you said, the OSI has not approved it, and potentially will not approve it. So there's Commons Clause-licensed projects that claim to be open source, and even on CommonsClause.com it says "Is this open source?" and it says "No" because of that specific thing. That being said, do you believe the Commons Clause is in the spirit of open source? Because I'm on the fence there.
+
+\[01:03:57.21\] It seems like the freedom to modify, the freedom to dispute it - it seems like a bit anti-freedom, but only for a small subset; it's like "Large corporations/service providers, we'll take your freedom away, but everybody else is still free." I don't know... This was something you've gone down the path, you implemented it, it's kind of there and back again; Apache 2.0, maybe AGPL, maybe Commons Clause, you've had some pushback from your community, you mentioned Google banning it was the show-stopper - it makes a lot of sense for adoption... But all along the way, Manish, it seems like your intentions are good, from what I can tell from this conversation... So what do you think about the Commons Clause with regards to -- maybe it's not open source approved, but do you believe it's in the spirit of open source, or not?
+
+**Manish R Jain:** I absolutely believe it is. I feel it is more in the spirit of open source than AGPL is.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Why is that?
+
+**Manish R Jain:** The problem with AGPL, with being used at any medium to big company, is that the moment you bring in AGPL, you have to be afraid about "Hey, do I need to open source my own codebase?" And the problem with companies is that they have this staggery code, which is part proprietary part ancient. It's very hard to say "Okay, this piece I can break off and maybe open source this, but this piece I can keep proprietary." It's very hard to say that, and therefore if you look at Google, for example, when they built Kubernetes or when they built gRPC, they didn't just open source the existing systems Borg and Stubby; they had to rewrite them from scratch to make it open source. So AGPL puts this restriction upon these companies that if they use any AGPL code, they must open source because of virality... It's very prohibitive.
+
+Now, you bring in Commons Clause + Apache. Apache gives you anything - basically, you can do anything with the codebase. You don't have to open source, it's not viral... And Commons Clause stops you from selling the database, in this case, or whatever the codebase is, from selling that particular code. It works for big companies.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Very cut and dry.
+
+**Manish R Jain:** It should work for, let's say, Google, it should work for Facebook, because they're not trying to sell Redis, they're not trying to sell Dgraph; they're just trying to use it. So I feel it is more permissive than AGPL. The only companies it should really affect is if you're Amazon and trying to sell Redis and all the particular modules that they put under Commons Clause, then you're not able to sell that... Which I feel is fine, because if they did not contribute, then maybe they shouldn't sell it, and maybe they should let the contributors sell that. That's my take on it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** For AGPL I might have a somewhat analogous take on this, so to speak. It reminds me of CSS, in a way; there's a cascade, an unwanted effect of using it, which is not always clear when you make changes or use a class, or something like that. There's hidden things. So if I use AGPL, it may affect licenses or other future software I ever use in unwanted ways, and those unwanted ways provides ambiguity and it's not clear, so if that's accurate, then I can see why it's less likely... Whereas Commons Clause is more like a razor blade; it's clear-cut. It's like "I can license my code permissively at one level, and then clause in or add an addendum", which is the point of it. "Here's one clause, and it's only for this project, and it doesn't affect any other things it touches. If you're trying to resell my thing here, then that's just not possible."
+
+And I'm with you too, Jerod, on Manish's take. He seems to be a great guy, I like him...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[01:08:09.14\] He's still here... \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, he's still here; we haven't hung up on him yet...
+
+**Manish R Jain:** I can hear you...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right...? This is where I think this needs to be a dialogue, and blog posts are great for getting points across. I really feel like this needs some sort of at-large, literal discussion, because behind all software, as human beings with often great intentions -- Manish isn't trying to hurt people; he just wants to be able to create awesome tech and have people use it. He said that here. And he is trying to look for, and he and his team, and I'm sure his investors too are trying to make sure that remains possible. So I'm for that--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** But couldn't he just do that -- now that we're talking about him and he's not here anymore, couldn't he just do that by having closed source software? I mean, if you wanna do that... I'm just playing devil's advocate.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** If you wanna do that - and obviously, Manish, please feel free to respond; we're not actually talking about you like we're not here... Couldn't you just closed source? I mean, keep it proprietary, and then you get to say "Hands off." You don't have these problems.
+
+**Manish R Jain:** The thing about closed source - again, it goes back to the reason about why do you wanna open source in the first place. I think it's not about the contributions; I mean, obviously, if you get contributions... I always thank people for contributions, I thank them for the feedback, but the reason you make anything open source is adoption. You wanna build something which a lot of companies, a lot of people are going to base their entire tech stack upon, in this case a database. They're going to trust you with their data. They wanna be able to look at the code and make sure that the codebase is good quality, it doesn't have any weird bugs, that they are able to modify the code... And what if the company dies tomorrow? They should still be able to adopt that codebase and maybe run with it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You can do that with a proprietary license, as well. You could ship them binaries plus source code as part of their license. This isn't something they wouldn't be able to do. That's the thing about proprietary - you can do whatever you want with it.
+
+**Manish R Jain:** True. The other part of this equation is that when you make something proprietary, the selling becomes a lot more work. You need to have an entire sales team to be able to go to individual companies and be like "Hey, have you hear about this thing called Dgraph? It's a proprietary thing, you can't see it online, but we can sell it to you for use." It is a lot harder pitch than "Hey, developers, it's just free. It's out there, you can try it, and if you don't like it, it's fine. If you like it, it's fine. You don't have to talk to us." And I think that's the beauty of open source - it avoids having to have salespeople running around, and you just become part of a developer conversation anywhere in the world. Nobody has to pay you to try it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think the problem though is being seen as masquerading as open source, but not really being open source.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Exactly.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It goes back to original things; it's been said like the anti-Commons Clause, or whatever... Just in terms of the spirit of open source -- and sure, it is open, you can see it, I can contribute back if I want to, but I think what the community is really pushing back on is less like "Hey, that's a bad thing" and more like "Hey, this really isn't open source, so just don't call it open source and it will be okay."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[01:11:45.01\] Yeah, it's potentially a namespace conflict, as all things are... Because the benefits of open source are immense, as you said, Manish. And in many cases, especially in infrastructure-style, missions-critical enterprise software in 2018, it's almost table stakes for a success, because people expect it; as you said, your sales processes are easier, the trust is immediately there... And yet, when you add Commons Clause to it, it's restricting in that regard; so now it's like "Well, they're on CommonsClause.com. This is not open source, it's something else", but then it's almost like -- and I'm not saying this personally against you or against Dgraph, but it's as if you want the benefits of open source without actually being open source... So maybe it needs to be like "available source" or "readable source." It's almost like we've just gotta come up with some more nomenclature, similar to how we have copyleft/copyright, or free and libre versus open source - we have all these different terms; maybe there's a need for another term for this style. I don't know, what do you think about that, Manish?
+
+**Manish R Jain:** We were very careful when we switched to Commons Clause and Apache that we removed all the references to open source, and we swapped them with "liberal license." It goes back to my take on this - that it's more liberal than AGPL and some of the other open source licenses. So we had to switch it over to liberal license. It was a bit of a heartache for me, because I've been an open source guy for a long time. Back in 2005 I rolled this thing called flickrfs to build a file system on top of Flickr, which was the most popular image sharing site at the time... So I'm a through and through open source guy, and it was a bit of a hard decision.
+
+Just to clarify - we have moved away from Commons Clause, but still, I would sort of defend... The thought at the time was that it is probably not approved by the folks who are at [OSI](https://opensource.org/), but in terms of the spirit of open source, I feel it was there. I think open source has to evolve to a point where people who are building open source can sustain themselves from what they are building, as opposed to having to ask for donations or having to work for another company, or having to be acquired by another company who is writing proprietary code.
+
+Every time I see some open source author having to go join a company and abandon their open source project which is very popular, it hurts me in some sense; it just feels bad. Why shouldn't a person who is writing an amazing code not able to sustain themselves, with the right intentions in their mind, which is that "Hey, open source obviously makes sense"?
+
+There should be a deeper conversation about "Hey, open source makes sense. We all agree. Let's figure out how do we make money, how do we make sure that people who are in open source continue to make money, and not just by making open source their secondary project, but having open source as their primary project AND the source of income?"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Hearing it from that perspective and then also knowing what a history you have in open source back to flickrfs, it makes you really consider what you say is a necessary evolution of open source, because based on what you've just said there and how you said it was that the free and libre of open source is there, but at some point it does restrict potentially the sustainability by restricting its original creators and maintainers and community from being able to profit in certain ways from it, because of just sheer competition. You can't compete with Amazon; maybe you can -- I mean, you really can't, but like most, if Amazon launches a furniture line, Wayfair's stock goes down 6% in a day. I mean, that happens, right?
+
+\[01:16:10.14\] So how can we expect little ol' you guys in your team to compete...? And the restriction comes back to the original core theme and how you can sustain it financially without having to -- as you said, the examples were either ask for donations, work for a company... You're not liberated to operate a company around this source code in a way that is financially feasible if you have to face the sheer weight of competition that is just so massive. Does that summarize somewhat of what you're trying to say there?
+
+**Manish R Jain:** Yeah. I think one thing we failed to mention is the three models of open source money-making. I think we should quickly mention that, so it all ties together. The first one is that you have this open core, which is under an open source license, and you build proprietary features on top of it which you sell. That's the first one. In Redis Labs' case, they basically try to make those modules under a Commons Clause, so that they can sell those.
+
+The second is that obviously support and training comes in. Red Hat pioneered this a long time ago, and every open source company does support and training. That's how they make money.
+
+The third one is that you run that software as a service, and I think this is where Amazon's story comes in the picture. For example, with Redis Labs - Amazon is probably running Redis behind the scenes for their ElastiCache, or I forget where it is... And they're literally just running that without paying anything back to Redis Labs, and Redis Labs in this case also has a competing Redis as a service availability. Both MongoDB and Redis and whoever is trying to use Commons Clause is trying to avoid a big company like Amazon, and also these days their Chinese counterparts... I forget the name of that, but they also are running Redis and Mongo behind their service providers, and charging customers for it. These companies are like, "Hey, we built this thing. You shouldn't be competing with us on this, and we should be getting that money."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Trying to stop the leeches... You know, stop leeching off people. Contribute back. It makes you kind of mad, even though I totally get it; I can see it from Amazon's side, but... Yeah. It's like the Leech Clause, we should call it...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** There you go, the Leech Clause.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] It's just a naming problem.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, in a free world, people are free to do literally whatever they want, and so I think in the spirit of open source, the idea has been for it to be a free world, in most or all senses of the word. And I think when you restrict that freedom, it does begin to munge the original intentions... But I think we do need to recognize this leech scenario, and the viability of it. If we continue to allow that to happen and not have conversations that hear all sides, then we essentially allow the freedom of the software, as good as it may be, to stagnate and potentially -- like you said, Jerod, why not go into proprietary, and then we wouldn't even be talking to Manish...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I mean, what would be the point? "Open source has won." That's in quotes, it's been said not just by us, but others...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's in quotes... It's official.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:19:58.17\] Well, [Nadia Eghbal](https://twitter.com/nayafia) said it on request for commits many times, and others agreed, so that's why I say it's in quotes, because it's been said not just here by us, but by others... Yeah, I just think it needs more attention. I'm not saying I agree, or it's wrong, or it's right... I definitely see the pain points, and we need some sort of evolution.
+
+**Manish R Jain:** I would like to add one thing. I think this seems like a fresh thing, it seems like a new thing, that there's this attack on open source in some sense by this Commons Clause etc. But this was done before; if you look at GPL, the idea behind GPL was that "Hey, open source is important. We must do open source." In fact, we force you to do open source.  If you use other code, you must also open source your code, right? And then AGPL was the evolution of that, to say "Hey, also on the network, same thing." And then the MongoDB SSPL is extending that to say "Hey, if you run it as a service, same thing", right? But think about what they are really doing practically, what are the practical consequences of this - in some sense, they are dissuading others who have not contributed from leeching off it, in some sense... And I think that's the direction that Commons Clause and SSPL are all going.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I recall we had Joseph Jacks [on the show](https://changelog.com/podcast/320) (OSS Capital) a couple of weeks back, and we asked him about Commons Clause, because it was drafted by Heather Meeker, she's part of OSS Capital, so I'm sure you know her as well... And one thing that he said about it, he sees it as a stepping stone or as an effort in a specific direction, and that there are things, like you said, there's necessary evolution that has to happen for the greater open source community to continue to -- not strive so much, but thrive, right? And so I'm happy to have this conversation; I've learned a lot here, Manish... Thanks so much for coming on...
+
+**Manish R Jain:** Thanks for having me.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** ...and continuing to talk about these things. I know it's kind of the nitty-gritty licensing, kind of a dry topic, but there are so many facets to these decisions, and the implications of changing a license, picking a license - they're just massive. And we're definitely living in a brave new world where we're trying to figure this out together.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Including a world with big numbers. We've seen the headlines on Changelog.com this week in the news feed - billion-dollar valuations, hundreds of millions of dollars invested into new companies or companies that are now unicorns, HashiCorp being an open core model type company that's just taken on a new round of gigantic funding... So there's clearly lots of money at play here, and it's a new world for open source every single day.
+
+So where do we go from here? Clearly, we've had a great conversation, that's led from not only Dgraph as a tech and how it applies, graph databases 101, on through how they could be used... You're clearly super-smart; you've had to relicense, you've been through a journey... What do you suggest may be the next step? Maybe not here today, because we're getting out of time, but what are some suggestions for you to continue this conversation in ways that are meaningful, that can get to meaningful change? Do we have a conference about it, do we do a Sustain-like unconference, or just kind of a gathering? How can this best be approached by the right people in ways that are not vicious and attacking, but in ways that are meant to actually get to change? What do you suggest?
+
+**Manish R Jain:** \[01:23:30.13\] I think it's a tough conversation. It's a conversation of ideals versus practicality. It will require flexibility from the maintainers or the people in charge at OSI to think through some of the practical considerations of running an open source company into this environment, and I think it would definitely need a bigger dialogue. If MongoDB's SSPL gets approved by OSI, that would be probably a great outcome of this, and I can easily see a bunch of other companies jumping onto that bandwagon. If it gets rejected, then other open source companies are gonna keep coming up with something new, which might work. There's definitely a need for a change here, I think that much is clear.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, let's close the show with anything for you - I know you've got lots of stuff happening; we've obviously covered quite a bit of ground, but if people are following along with you, where do they go, what do they do? Do you have anything to announce here at the close of the show?
+
+**Manish R Jain:** Yeah, I do want to announce something. We are solving really complex problems at Dgraph, and we also have Badger - both are done purely in Go, both open source. If you wanna help us and if you wanna experience these challenging problems, come join us. You can go to https://dgraph.io and see some of the job openings; we are looking for back-end engineers, so apply.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Manish, thank you so much for sharing not only your story, but your wisdom here. I know it's a tough subject, and going on record -- because we do have an awesome transcript for this show. Thank you, Alexander, for being so awesome, and all the contributors out there who help us... Like our friends we mentioned at the top of the show - they make our shows less unintelligible, and more intelligible, so to speak.
+
+So I know it's tough to be on record about very tough subjects, and we just appreciate your courage to share how you feel, and the willingness to continue to go on the road, even when it's bumpy... And thank you for sharing your time with us.
+
+**Manish R Jain:** Thanks for having me, guys.
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@@ -0,0 +1,247 @@
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What's it like to be on a mission of making open source software better, for everyone? Donald Fischer is one of four co-founders and the CEO of Tidelift. Their mission - to pay the maintainers; to pay the maintainers of open source software and provide a new spin on the highly successful business model that's a win/win for the maintainers, as well as the software teams using the software... So I asked Donald what's it like to be on this mission.
+
+**Donald Fischer:** It's amazing, actually, to be on that mission... And it sort of naturally is an outgrowth of everything I've been working on for the last 15 going on 20 years, actually. I've built my career in and around open source, in a couple of different ways, and so when we saw this opportunity to sort of contribute something new to the equation with Tidelift, we decided we had to go for it, because we saw the opportunity to create a new win/win scenario for all kinds of different stakeholders in and around open source.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I wanna go back into your past and figure out what got you here. What makes you and the rest of the team at Tidelift the team that can make this happen? Help me understand more about you and Tidelift and what you're doing.
+
+**Donald Fischer:** We're building a methodology with software, and a set of practices to help professional software teams make better use of open source software, and the way that we do that is by helping to address a bunch of pragmatic concerns that professional software teams have with the software that they use. That's in areas like security, licensing and legal issues, just everyday ongoing maintenance... And the way that we address those problems is really what's new with Tidelift. We do it by partnering with the individual open source maintainers and teams of maintainers who work on open source projects, and we kind of ask them to provide these professional-grade assurances for their individual open source projects or components.
+
+Then what Tidelift does is we basically join those together and we represent them to these professional software teams as a whole product. In so doing, we essentially address two different challenges. One is that professional software teams - they need support, they need maintenance for the software that they use, whether it's open source or not. And on the other side, it creates this economic opportunity for open source maintainers to do something that's very closely related to the ongoing development of their software, and something that they're best equipped and best situated in the world to do, but now for the first time for many of them, they can do that in a context where there's an income associated with it, and an income that scales.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[04:12\] To kind of give some -- maybe I'm speaking for you in some sense, so help me course-correct what I'm saying and make sure it's accurate, is you did a lot of interesting things with Red Hat, there's a lot of things you and some of your team members have learned from the experiences of Red Hat, and obviously, Red Hat is one of the most successful with supporting paid versions of open source, and support, and things like that. Are you bringing a lot of what you're doing now from your experiences with that? Is that safe to say?
+
+**Donald Fischer:** Yeah, definitely. I had the privilege of being part of the early development of Enterprise Linux at Red Hat, and all my co-founders also had tours of Red Hat around the same time; we all knew each other back then and worked together and stayed in touch since then... But honestly, what we're doing now is also informed by an awful lot of other experiences, in other open source communities and commercial ventures around open source communities; it's not just a Red Hat copycat, it's actually -- if you want to put it in reference to Red Hat, it's almost a generalization or an evolution of the Red Hat business model.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, where like their focus was one single open source project and one right way to scale it, to enterprises, and support, and all the things that everyone's aware that Red Hat does - you're doing it at scale across open source. How do you make the decisions then to choose which projects to work with? How do you determine what matters? Do you go to the community and say "Hey, which maintainers should we work with?" or do you go to the maintainers and say "Which maintainers of--" and maybe you're even agnostic - not just JavaScript, not just Go, not just Rust, or other languages... How do you even choose where to place your focus?
+
+**Donald Fischer:** Ultimately, remember that the way that we frame our solution is that we're solving real-world problems for professional software development teams who are already building with open source components, but don't have the kinds of safety net assurances that they would expect traditionally from enterprise software vendors... So to your question of how do we choose which open source projects and maintainers to engage with, actually our subscribers choose; the customers of the Tidelift platform - they essentially direct us towards the maintainers who are best suited to participate in Tidelift. There's a mechanism for doing that whereby we've built a software platform that attaches to the software development process at our customers, it sort of integrates with their code collaboration platform, sort of in a similar way to how a continuous integration system would connect, and we look at the open source components that our subscribers are using in their projects, in their applications, and then we go and recruit the open source maintainers of those projects to provide professional assurances around them. So we just kind of follow where our customers are voting with their feet, so to speak.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And potentially their money too, since it's a subscription. The word alone elicits that there's some sort of recurring payment into some sort of system that's monthly, yearly, biannually, or whatever that might be; some sort of commitment on the long-term (or some sort of term) that says "We wanna use enterprise-level type software that's open source, that includes support, includes SLAs (or whatever they may be needing) on a certain duration" and their vote is essentially participating in that subscription, but then saying "Hey, this is the software we're using. Can you go out and establish these relationships with those maintainers?" Is that how it works?
+
+**Donald Fischer:** \[08:07\] Yeah, exactly. So in other words, a customer of ours will subscribe to Tidelift for one of the applications that they're building, connect to our software, connect to our software infrastructure. Now we have a lens into what are the actual open source components that they're using...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Dependencies.
+
+**Donald Fischer:** Yeah, I was about to say, not just the top-level components, but we look at the transitive dependencies as well, all of the packages that those depend on...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The entire tree.
+
+**Donald Fischer:** Yeah, we build the tree. And then the way that we've packaged it is we charge the subscriber a fixed cost for all of the packages in the Tidelift subscription. It's sort of like a Netflix subscription in that way, where Netflix might not have every movie that you want to watch, but if it has a lot of the kinds of movies that you like, it's gonna be interesting for you to be a subscriber; there's always more movies joining the catalog.
+
+So we sort of simplify it by charging one blanket subscription price, and then we bill the subscribers on a monthly basis for that. Then at the end of the month we take each subscriber's payments for that month and we split them up and allocate them specifically to the participating maintainers of the packages that they use. So a subscriber's dollars only ever get directed to the participating maintainers for the actual packages that that subscriber is using, and that's one of the ways that we align the interests up and down the system.
+
+And if there's not a participating maintainer for a particular package that the subscriber is using, we sort of note and increase the potential payment that would be available for a new maintainer who showed up and agreed to participate in the Tidelift system. So we sort of create an incentive for somebody to -- we signal the funded incentive for somebody to come along and take us up on following through on those maintenance tasks around that particular package.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So if I'm a maintainer and I'm participating in this, my "income" or "revenue" generated from this style of funding for my project or my teams - is that number coming from Tidelift, does it ebb and flow then because of that? Or is there some sort of barrier or predictability they can have into how they can begin to step away for their full-time job or do this full-time, or whatever it might be? How do they understand the income that's possible, and even not just possible, but on a day-to-day or month-to-month basis, how does it ebb and flow?
+
+**Donald Fischer:** This is actually one of the fundamental reasons why we started the company, and one of the fundamental contributions that we wanna make - it's really hard to dedicate your efforts on an ongoing basis to an open source project if you're not sure what you're gonna be paid tomorrow, or especially if your income is swinging erratically in terms of what you're receiving related to your open source project. So our goal, in other words, is to make it a lot more predictable month-to-month.
+
+It doesn't mean that your income could never ever go down in the Tidelift system; as I said, we pay the maintainers based on subscribers using their software, so if all of a sudden none of our subscribers are using that software anymore, the amount could go down. But in reality, once software is in place, it tends not to go anywhere; just new software gets added.
+
+\[12:01\] On the other hand, we're growing quickly, the audience of participating subscribers, so the total dollars in and the number of potential teams that might be using your project for any given maintainer is increasing. We think that what will practically happen as a result of this model is that open source maintainers will see much greater predictability and have sort of a steadier income to depend on, which is in contrast to some of the other existing models for funding open source projects that might be more episodic if they're based on grant funding, or sort of bounty kind of mechanisms. Actually, I think all of those systems are great, and anything that is funding open source is laudable and awesome, but we just saw an interesting opportunity to contribute another model that's additive and incremental on top of those.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I wanna rewind a little bit back to the dependency tree that you mentioned, just for those listening who may not be intimately familiar with how software works, which leads into one of your acquisitions, and you can speak to that if you'd like to... But it just kind of helps to get a lens into the dependencies of dependencies; so when you have an open source project or just a project in general and you've got an application you're building, when you use Vue, for example, on the front-end, well Vue has so many layers of dependencies beneath it that whenever you, as you mentioned, come into the platform, you're scanning their dependencies, and it probably points out some opportunities to grow as you've mentioned you are...
+
+But I kind of wanna just touch on that a little bit, because not everybody listening to this is that familiar with the software process and what dependency trees actually are, how deep they might go as dependencies of dependencies; Vue has tons of different things it relies upon, and all those things tend to be other open source projects that are probably not receiving funding or really have any sustainable model behind it, aside from maybe side work... Which is fine, that's open source, but we're looking for ways to make it enterprise-level and enterprise-grade, I'm assuming... Is that right?
+
+**Donald Fischer:** Yeah, that's right. The issue of the lack of appreciation or really understanding of how much software exists below the visible water line is really remarkable... For example, we recently wrote on our blog about look at React - super popular web front-end framework, born at Facebook... If you go through the prescribed Hello World creating a new React application, using the very well-executed Create React App tool, you'll end up with a sort of Hello World web app based on React, and that thing by default will have 1,103 dependencies as of the last time we that we looked. So that's over 1,100 distinct packages coming out of the npm JavaScript package catalog. Those are coming from a lot of different places. A couple dozen of those are coming from being authored by the Facebook React engineering team... But the beauty of open source software is that the vast majority of those are coming from somewhere else, from somebody else... But all of them are getting built into your React application.
+
+So if you're a professional software team at a large enterprise that has a bunch of goals around security and compliance or needs/requirements, things that you need to comply with, it raises a lot of questions about "Who's on the hook to support all that stuff, and why would they be on the hook?" To which our answer is the best reason for them to be on the hook, or a great additional reason for them to be on the hook is that they're getting paid to do the work to make those things true about those open source components. That's really the meat of what we're trying to do.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[16:08\] An example that -- I'm not sure if you're familiar with Nadia or not, but Nadia Eghbal, when we first learned about her was several years back, and we've since done a podcast with her called Request For Commits (I can link that up in the show notes if you wanna check it out as a listener)...
+
+**Donald Fischer:** I'm a long-time fan of Nadia's and the show. I recommend it to all of your listeners who have not yet explored those paths.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And it is retired, so when you go listen, just know that, and send us your hate mail; we wanna hear more of it, because we wanna do more around sustainability of open source, but that show just is in a retired state, for its own reasons... But the last episode does tell you why, so if you're really curious, just listen to the latest episode. But you know, she'd written about the economics of open source, and the example she used was the rate at which Instagram was able to become a billion-dollar company and then be acquired by Facebook - I don't mean to keep going back to the Facebook well, it just happens to be that example... But Instagram was built on open source software. Now, I'm not that intimate with the details of what they've given back to open source; I don't know what Facebook's involvement is, and they've since acquired Instagram, but that was the initial yardstick, at least by Nadia, on like, you know, Instagram was worth -- the acquisition was like 4 billion? One billion? I can't recall right now. It was like 4 billion dollars from Facebook, so somehow they got to that value and they were built upon open source software... So going back to your model - we have this economic need of all these dependencies, and they would have never been able to get there building all the technology on their own. They had to lean on open source. So there's a responsibility there to support the dependencies beneath the tree.
+
+**Donald Fischer:** Yeah, there's a couple different ways to look at it, honestly. One lens of looking at it is to say if you're building on all of this software, you owe it to the creators to allow them to drive some participation in the value that they're creating. First of all, I agree with that; I think that's a very reasonable worldview. But it's hard to get large organizations to open up their checkbooks for things that are purely morally justified.
+
+One of the things that we're bringing to the table with our model is we're just inviting professional software teams to act out of their explicit self-interest, and we're helping open source maintainers create a new service offering that didn't exist before, that we're seeing as very appealing to a lot of the professional software teams who are using their software... And again, the specific service that we're helping put together is a community of maintainers who are proactively committed to maintaining the individual open source packages to a well-defined standard, and then Tidelift's role in that is to sort of be the intermediating agent that helps all of those individual open source maintainers and teams connect to a particular professional software team in an organization.
+
+We're not asking people to buy a Tidelift subscription mainly because it's a morally correct thing to pay the maintainers; we're inviting people to buy a subscription because it's in your best interest to pay the maintainers. When you pay the maintainers, the software that you're using is better and more reliable, and we're adding some business process and technology to the mix that helps you kind of define what is meant by more well-maintained and reliable, and sort of gets everybody on a common, shared mission.
+
+**Break:** \[20:10\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So you say "professional software teams" - I think I know what you mean when you say that, but put it in laymen's terms for me and the listeners. What is a professional software team as it relates to what you're doing with Tidelift?
+
+**Donald Fischer:** When we say "professional software team", we're typically referring to a team building software within an enterprise. Enterprise is kind of a silly IT word, or entrepreneurship business word; it means a company, and often times like a larger company. Again, I've spent the last 20 years in and around open source, so I know one of the beautiful things about open source is that it's accessible to all different kinds of audiences.
+
+If you're an indie developer -- I mean, I started working with open source, getting involved in open source when I was a student. There's individual entrepreneurs kind of picking up raw open source and building with it... It's awesome; it's part of the beauty of the whole thing.
+
+There's also big teams inside of mega-corps that are building with open source as well, and those different audiences have different needs in and around the software that they're using. When I'm doing a side project on the weekend, kind of cobbling together some open source components to sort of scratch my own itch, for sure I do not need an enterprise support contract, I'm not super-focused on intellectual property documentation for this thing that's only ever gonna live on my laptop and never go anywhere. But when you have a team at a financial services company, or a healthcare company, or an industrial company, and they're building the core software that powers those businesses, and in 2018 for sure they are building that with open source software, they would love to have some additional guarantees around that software.
+
+So the open source software, by the open source definition, gives them a bunch of capabilities right off the bat for software that's under an open source license. They can access the source code, they can change it, as long as they adhere with the different requirements for what they need to do if they redistribute it... But the open source license doesn't give you somebody who's on the hook to make sure that security vulnerabilities that arise will be dealt with in a timely way; it doesn't give you any certification around the licensing of all the components of the software that you find that are connected to that, or that are dependencies of that... And it doesn't give you any kinds of assurances about what's gonna happen with the software in the future - is somebody gonna keep caring for it, and taking care of this essentially living organism that the software projects need to be, as the world evolves over time?
+
+\[24:10\] Those are the things that we think that professional teams need, that not all open source developers need, but professional teams do need it, and as a result, they're willing to pay for it. One of the things we've done in the Tidelift context is verify that by talking to a lot of those organizations, surveying a bunch of those organizations; we shared the results of a broad survey we did this year that said something like more than 80% of professional software teams were very interested in paying for those kinds of assurances around the open source software that they use.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Another aspect to the professional software teams I thought you used in this context was describing the teams creating the software, meaning the open source software. Did you use it in that context as well? Like, when you're identifying who to work with?
+
+**Donald Fischer:** No. The way that I've been using the terminology "professional software team" - I've been focusing more on the subscriber side in our terminology, or the consumers of open source software.
+
+I actually think there is a really compelling opportunity on the creative side of open source to also, in a sense, professionalize there. And I wanna be careful about what I mean by that word, professionalize. Open source maintainers, whether they're paid or not, it is demonstrably true that they create amazing software that is prograde, is used in real-world applications all over the place. I guess a missing part of the "professional" definition there is that often times they don't get paid for the work that they do, so it's hard for it to be a profession for the individual open source maintainer. So I do think there is a double entendre there, which is "We would love to help open source maintainers make it their profession", and that's really one of our ambitions with Tidelift - to enable more open source creators to dedicate more of their time to their open source projects, innovating the features and functionality there, also just like doing the everyday kind of maintaining it tasks, and if we, all of the users of open source, give them the license to do that, and the necessary financial incentives to do that, then we're gonna benefit, because the software that we all use is gonna be better. It's awesome.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The reason why I asked you that question in the opening was I'd heard you use it and I thought that your reference was essentially helping to understand the type of maintainers or type of teams that maintain software describe them; that's how I thought you were using it in that context, which is why I opened up with that question... Because I wanted to understand more so like when you focus your attention on -- I know that a lot of your subscribers are the ones that are leading you to, down the dependency tree which matters to them, because they're paying for the subscription, and essentially, you said they're leading with their feet... That it would describe the kind of teams that are good candidates to be a part of this, because they can provide the support, they can provide the other assurances that enterprise teams need to rely on open source.
+
+Like you said, in 2018 it's pretty difficult to build software today in any real capacity without using open source... So we have to find ways to support it, and I asked you that question to think that maybe you're describing a type of maintainer, a type of maintaining team, their philosophy, the way they organize, the way they govern, what are healthy balances in there... I thought that's what you were talking about, that's why I went that direction.
+
+**Donald Fischer:** \[28:00\] Yeah, so just to comment on one really fun part of what you were touching on there... I think the really happy news here is that teams inside of larger enterprises that have the requirements for security, licensing, maintenance kinds of assurances around the software that they use - it turns out the software projects that they're picking to build their new applications out of, the software components that they're taking out of the package managers, they're the same ones everyone else is using... They're using the same components at a big bank that I'm using to do my weekend project.
+
+So it's actually a really nice situation, where if those professional teams are interested in paying for these additional assurances, the creators of those open source projects and technologies can access that income that's associated with that, it gives them the license to spend more time on the projects that they're creating, and then the improvements or increases in functionality - that can be shared by everybody, the payers and the non-payers. That's actually one of the beautiful things about open source.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's why I love your name, Tidelift. That's the underlying (to keep the puns going) current of what you're doing here; you enable subscribers to lift the tide of everyone. Like you said, I could be using whatever the library may be that's part of the Lifter project you have going on, which we'll dig into more... If I'm paying and they're getting supported, then I'm just enabling others to benefit from my subscription, and then therefore funding of those maintainers in those projects. I love the name, it's spot on.
+
+So we spent the better part of maybe 40-ish minutes kind of digging into the context. I wanted to go into more of the getting started, where the idea came from, some of the background even, which is sort of like the crux of what this show is really about... Which I love doing - a deeper explanation of what Tidelift is and what you're doing there, for the better part of 40 minutes. Let's kind of rewind a little bit and just get a picture of some of your personal experiences, and maybe the experiences of other team members... But maybe let's start off with back in 2017 when this began - from what I understand, you were in venture capital, you stepped away, you had this idea... I believe this began with a fundraising round; I'm not really sure. Can you go back to those details and help pave the way for how this got started?
+
+**Donald Fischer:** My personal history briefly is I started out as a programmer, I studied computer science... As we talked about before, I had a really interesting tour at Red Hat starting in the early 2000's, and was able to be part of the team, participating in building the Red Hat Enterprise Linux business there... Which is really an amazing thing, that is I think often under-appreciated in the IT industry.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Absolutely.
+
+**Donald Fischer:** Red Had as a whole is an over three billion dollar recurring revenue business now. It's really a beautiful and amazing thing, and there's a lot to be learned--
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Did you say billion?
+
+**Donald Fischer:** Yeah, three billion dollars a year in revenue.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Three billion... Just to make you say it twice, because that's pretty big.
+
+**Donald Fischer:** Yeah, it's big. And you know, it just steadily grows. It was an amazing time when -- you know, I did not figure this stuff out myself, by the way, but as a team, and as an organization, we learned a lot of things about what (again) professional software teams that are using open source really need, and that doesn't just come for free... And we've figured out a model that was appropriate for that set of technologies at that time, and it has continued to evolve to support a steady business today.
+
+\[32:08\] What I did after Red Hat is I've spent almost a decade as an investor, working with early stage founders who were starting and growing businesses around open source communities, and I chose to focus on that theme... Because I've personally just always been fascinated and sort of in awe of how open source communities arise. This phenomenon where technology will come from a creator or a small band of creators, and then a crowd of individuals will start to kind of assemble itself around that technology.
+
+You see technologies sort of form these tribes, and when I say tribes, I mean in a good way... Not in a tribalism kind of way, but in a sort of...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** A Seth Godin way.
+
+**Donald Fischer:** ...collective way, yeah. It's really amazing. You might join the Python tribe, or the Ruby tribe; or maybe it's not a programming language, maybe it's the deep learning tribe, or something like that, right? But it starts to become part of individual people's personal identity, their professional identity. It's really a powerful thing, so what's always fascinated me is if there's this fundamental energy around technologists sort of assembling themselves in these tribes - there's so much power to it - and what are the opportunities to add a commercial component there.
+
+The thing that I've always really focused on is not just how do you go kind of harvest that energy from the community, which I think is a very pessimistic way to view the world, but can you build a complementary business that sort of amplifies the energy in one of those communities that helps capture more resources to invest more aggressively into developing the technologies, or advocating, evangelizing the technology? How can you build businesses that sort of amplify those communities and make them even more successful, and make the individuals within them more successful?
+
+I think there's a really fortunate history of startups and businesses of different scale being built over the last 15 years now that do that, and that's just been a phenomenon that I've loved to follow, and sometimes to be part of.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think the important thing to draw from this is it seems to me that you've spent a lot of your life trying to find ways to support open source, and it's either helping certain types of businesses build themselves around open source through venture capital and investing, and I'm sure in a lot ways leading product, because that's also part of the investor's role, is to be somebody who is an advisor to the direction of the business and the viability.
+
+I think the other important thing you said there was that you're the support, rather than -- I forget the exact language was that you used, but essentially, you're there to amplify versus to draw and take away from the energy... What was the word you used of how you're not attaching to the community?
+
+**Donald Fischer:** I think the language that I used was instead of trying to harvest energy from these communities, it's like "Can you actually build an engine that contributes net energy back to the community, that helps it grow and become more sustainable, as opposed to sort of drawing energy off of it?" Those are the really powerful companies, and also I think they help to form really powerful communities.
+
+\[36:14\] If you look at the different businesses that have been built around Linux, or different big data technologies, or core systems-level databases and things like that, if you can get a community going that has complementary and additive businesses, that's a beautiful thing. And to connect that to the story of Tidelift, I've been a student of that phenomenon for a long time now, and I've had the great opportunity to work with a number of other folks who are also fascinated by the same kinds of dynamics.
+
+One of the things that annoyed me about the existing models for commercializing open source or building these complementary businesses around open source is that, you know, if you look at something like the venture capital model, where I was personally quite active, there's only a relatively small number of open source projects or communities or tribes (if you will) that have enough scale to them for the traditional venture capital model to work.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Donald Fischer:** There definitely are some... At this point, there's several dozen substantial venture capital-backed companies that have been formed, are performing, several have gone public... It is a model that works, but it only works for a really pretty small subset of open source in general. And one of the really interesting things to me is that it only works for a subset of the commercially relevant open source projects.
+
+So I would often, as a venture capital investor, meet with entrepreneurs, open source creators who had projects, they had lots of real-world professional users - often times the users that they had were asking them for "Hey, can get a support contract for this, or a service-level agreement for it?" and yet they didn't really fit the venture capital model of going and raising X million dollars and then building a company from scratch with all that that entails; building a sales force, a finance function, a way to handle subscriptions, a level one support team and so on.
+
+So when I started talking to my co-founders, the gentlemen who eventually became my co-founders at Tidelift, we looked at that problem and that opportunity and we said essentially "What if we build that go-to-market mechanism, like the sales and support and finance, back office kind of stuff, what if we just build that once, instead of asking every open source project to do it themselves, and then just let the open source projects and teams plug into it?" Sort of like in the way that creators plug into Etsy.
+
+You know, one of the beautiful things about these marketplace models is if you're amazing at creating some craft good, you can go to Etsy, and Etsy helps you access an audience of people who are interested in your kind of thing, they handle all the payments, and the logistics, and customer service issues and so on, and you don't have to go learn how to do all of those things. Etsy is kind of your partner for doing that. You get to focus on conducting your craft. That's one of the things we're trying to do with Tidelift - we wanna make it possible for open source teams who are building technologies that are used by these professional organizations to be able to access some of that potential energy and income that can be associated with that, without having to go become salespeople, or customer support people themselves. We'll kind of do that with you, in the sense of do that for you, as the open source creator; you plug into our infrastructure and you focus on making the open source project amazing. We'll help with all the bunch of the business stuff.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[40:25\] These teams generally would still have to be the ones providing the service-level agreement, right? If I understand correctly, you may institute it and do the business-level side of things to ensure that there are subscribers that have desires to bring on certain lifters or whatever, but it's still the lifter's job - which is a term we haven't defined yet, so maybe it's a part of your response, to help me understand really what a lifter is, or what that role is there... Because they're gonna have to eventually support that software, and provide the enterprise-grade stuff that you're selling as part of the subscription... This whole general sales thing - that's what the product is, it's reliable, it's supported, bug fixes etc.
+
+**Donald Fischer:** The way that it work is that one of the things that we add to the equation by creating Tidelift is we are an intermediary between the professional teams that are paying for these assurances and the individual open source maintainers. A couple benefits of that - one is that we turn a many-to-many relationship that would basically be impossible for every open source application development team to strike a business agreement with every one of those 1,100 npm module maintainers that goes into their web app; we allow them to have one place to go, which is Tidelift, and then we sort of federate all of the participating maintainers behind that.
+
+So we have a relationship with each of the paying subscribers, and then Tidelift also has a relationship with each of the participating maintainers. And what we ask the maintainers to do - it's actually detailed on our website, for any maintainers who are interested in understanding what we propose in our model...
+
+We ask maintainers to look after their projects according to a certain set of criteria. These are things like work with our security response team if there is a new security issue that arises, sort of make sure that it's addressed in your particular package, or if there's an issue in one of your dependencies, make sure that your package is adjusted to take account for that, help us documenting new releases that are happening, any licensing changes - we sort of record all of that. Those are the kinds of things that we ask maintainers to do.
+
+Just to highlight - at least for now, we're not asking maintainers to fix a bug or add a feature, or provide help desk support for a runtime issue that was encountered by a subscriber. Those things -- there are open source business models associated with that; they're challenging business models, because they scale with the number of hours that an open source maintainer has in their day. There's only so many support tickets you can respond to, or so many consulting engagements that you can have. So since that's already possible in the world, we're trying to focus on sort of a new model, which is doing things that can be done once where many people benefit from them, like resolving the security issue - you do that once, and all of the users get to benefit from it.
+
+Our part is to create the alignment of interest, so that those things always get done with predictability, and we do ask our participating maintainers (lifters, as we call them) to do those things, and then Tidelift's role is to make sure that everybody is following through correctly, deal with any kinds of issues that come up.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[44:12\] You used the term "a well-defined standard" earlier in the call... I am assuming that that means that it's either written down once, or it's the way things are, or it's maybe a case-by-case basis with each lifter or maintaining core team, that they say "Okay, Tidelift, we wanna be a part of this, we wanna be a lifter. Sign us up, we're ready to go", and then there's something in these well-defined standards that says "Hey, this is what you're committing to." Is that accurate? Can you describe that?
+
+**Donald Fischer:** It's more like a set of open source project best practices that we ask our participating maintainers to follow... And here's actually another really great part of how this all works - most open source projects that have a substantial user base are already doing most of these things, or all of these things. This is things like having a responsible disclosure policy and adhering to a responsible disclosure policy around security incidents, or using two-factor authentication on all of your systems that are involved in the build and distribution chain for an open source module. Sort of like checklists for healthy living as an open source project.
+
+Those are the things that we ask open source maintainers who are participating in our system as lifters to do. And even though many of them are doing most of those things by creating a uniform standard where everybody who is participating in the Tidelift system is doing all of those things, it allows us to represent that this collection of software as a whole meets those standards to our subscribers... And again, that's worth a lot to these professional software teams that are building enterprise applications; if we can show them a menu of healthy open source project attributes that we're ensuring are true for the dependencies that they use, they love it... And it's a modest cost for them to pay, to ensure that the software that is really powering their business is well cared for.
+
+**Break:** \[46:32\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Most companies have co-founders; in this case, you have three other co-founders, I believe. What's the story there? Who are they and how did you all meet?
+
+**Donald Fischer:** Yeah, this is the best part of Tidelift for me, it's my co-founders, and then the team that we've built to go on this mission together with us, and it is an interesting story. I have three co-founders - Havoc Pennington, Jeremy Katz and Luis Villa. We've all known each other pair-wise for at least 15 years, and a couple of us go back longer than that. As I mentioned before, we all intersected at Red Hat in the early 2000's, and then we've collaborated on different projects since then... And each of us sort of has a different ingredient that we contribute to the mix.
+
+I talked about my background a little bit; a lot of it is sort of the business side of open source. Havoc, our co-founder, currently is leading Product for us. He is a long-time veteran of the open source world. He was originally one of the founding voices in the GNOME Freedesktop community, the Linux desktop, and co-led the creation of the GNOME Foundation, which continues productively to this day, and implemented a lot of the software himself that powers the GNOME desktop. I got the chance to work with him first when he was leading the desktop development team at Red Hat. Then Havoc has interestingly gone on to do tours in a couple of other interesting and different open source communities. He was working for a stretch in the Scala community, in sort of the greater Java world, and then most recently was back in the Python data science community before we got together to start Tidelift.
+
+Then the third co-founder is Jeremy Katz. Jeremy is an amazing technologist. I got to know him when he was one of the core developers at Red Hat, then he went on to sort of grow his professional portfolio beyond just open source - he was an early employee at HubSpot, the marketing SaaS company. He led the implementation of this product called Stackdriver, which was a startup that was sold to Google and now serves as essentially the management console for the Google Cloud platform, so really a seminal piece of software in the cloud generation.
+
+And our fourth co-founder, Luis, has (I think) the most unusual story, which is Luis started with the rest of us as a programmer, open source developer, but Luis ended up going to Law School, and then closing that loop by becoming an open source legal expert, really, one of the widely respected voices around legal issues associated with open source. He did a really interesting stretch working with Mozilla, where he actually led the drafting of the Mozilla Public License 2.0, and then he had a really interesting time at Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind Wikipedia, dealing with a whole bunch of open content issues there, and sort of leading the community effort there as well.
+
+So it's a really interesting set of disparate backgrounds and professional experiences, grounded in having all been open developers, software developers, and open source participants in the early years. I guess what we're trying to do is bring those different experiences back together and apply them back where we all started, trying to make open source work better for everyone, the creators and the users.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's an interesting mix of people. Obviously, you've got business, you've got -- I'm sure everyone was somewhat involved in coding, at least at some point in their life, but taking a role on that, having a role in Google and what powers that, and then legal; the licensing part of open source is, to some, often overlooked, but pivotal to how it could be used.
+
+\[52:20\] We see license changes in business; there's some recent news not long ago with Redis around Commons Clause, or License Zero... All those things have implications. And even React - because you've mentioned them earlier, and we even logged that, about who actually supports React... They had -- I'm not sure of the details because I don't follow this closely, but it had some concerns around the community, the way Facebook licensed React. We've even had Heather Meeker on Request for Commits, since you've mentioned that earlier, and with Nadia - we had a deep conversation around the importance of licensing.
+
+It sounds to me like you've got an ensemble of the right components to do Tidelift... And I don't know how you did it, but that's pretty insane that you have. And it's even more interesting that you all intersect at Red Hat.
+
+**Donald Fischer:** Yeah. I mean, I just feel so privileged to work with these gentlemen, and then again, the team that we've brought aboard to share this mission with us; it's a lot of fun. But to the point around licensing - the legal code is one of the technologies that makes open source possible. It is sort of a technology onto itself, and like other technologies, it's complicated. It's complicated for the creators to make the right sets of decisions around "Which license should I use? What are the tradeoffs?" and so on. It's also really complicated on the consumption side, and that's (again) one of the things that we're trying to help address for professional teams that want to engage with open source in the right way. They don't have the time to each go become an open source legal scholar like Luis did, so we're gonna try to create some tools and standard ways to approach this, that let them get the advantage of some of that substantial knowledge that Luis has accumulated in his days.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm sure this is the case for most founders or co-founders, but I find it kind of interesting that each of you have a particular milestone in your career, each of you can point to a particular thing you've done that is widely notable, to say -- not so much that this is why you do what you do or you belong here, or you can trust you, but it's like you all have some large-scale contribution to the community you're currently serving through what you're doing now... And to say "We're part of the community. We're not just entering (like you said earlier) and trying to solve a problem, and we've never been here before. No, we've been boots on the ground for decades, and our resumes and the work we've done before" is what you point to to prove it.
+
+**Donald Fischer:** Yeah. I mean, the only caution there is that every situation is different. One of the things I always try to remind myself is to learn from the past, but not to over-apply models from the past, because sometimes they can be misleading. The world changes.
+
+The world is a lot different now in 2018, in terms of where open source is in the software ecologies in general versus 2002. Back when we were doing the first version of the enterprise Linux business model in 2002, most professional companies looked at Linux and said "This thing looks crazy. What do you mean free software? How could this possibly work?" etc. Now, fast-forward 15+ years later, there is no proprietary software to buy in most of these categories, right? It's pretty hard to go find a proprietary application framework to build with these days. It's almost complete takeover by open source, but our point that we're trying to highlight with our work in Tidelift is just because open source is everywhere, it doesn't mean that software doesn't need to be maintained. In fact, it sort of heightens the question of "Who is taking care of that software, and why?"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. Who is responsible, yeah.
+
+**Donald Fischer:** \[56:31\] Yeah, and who needs it to happen, and how do we connect the dots?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, let's close the loop on this idea of sustaining open source, maintaining open source, this phrase that often gets put out there and talked about, and the actual mechanics of what that really means. There's other models out there, and every model is needed, because you said earlier "Hey, if money is coming in open source - great! Let's not say one way is wrong or right", but I wanna kind of go into the differences of other models. We've talked to Pia Mancini on here before around OpenCollective, we've talked to Eric Berry around CodeFund, previously CodeSponsor... I haven't talked to anybody from Patreon before, but we've definitely talked to Evan You on Request for Commits and several others... Henry Zhu from Babel on how they're leveraging their ability to go full-time and using those platforms to really good advantages... But then here comes Tidelift - so what is the biggest difference between Tidelift and other models where they could be seen as like more charity, or somewhat value-based?
+
+**Donald Fischer:** First of all, just to get on the table - the more, the merrier.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right.
+
+**Donald Fischer:** I've said it before, I think every channel to pay the maintainers is additive, and so we're just trying to add another option into the mix, and probably "the answer" is not one of these, it's a polyglot solution of multiple of these working in different ways.
+
+I do think that we have a somewhat different approach than a lot of the systems that have been implemented before, and it comes back to just being very practically-minded around not just asking organizations to pay back the maintainers that created software that they're using because it's the right thing to do, not only because it's the right thing to do; we're seeking to give them the additional self-serving reason to do it, which is if I pay for a subscription that covers these open source components, I know that there is somebody who is committing to me that they're gonna care for this software. And when we say "care for the software", it's written down what we mean by it, and if an issue arises, I'm gonna have someone to go to; they're committed to work with me. So it's something that they don't get if they don't pay, and we think that's compelling to a certain audience.
+
+And again, we're more oriented towards these software teams within enterprises. That's not particularly compelling to most hobbyist developers. They're not really the audience for Tidelift, at least at this moment... Not the one that we're targeting, at least. And for hobbyist developers, I think there's a bunch of other options on the table.
+
+By the way, as a hobbyist developer on the side myself, I happily contribute to a number of different funding mechanisms for the projects that I use. I think it's great, and I love doing it, and it makes me feel good, and everybody should. \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I definitely echo what you're saying on "the more, the merrier." One question I have for you though is like, since you've said you're a listener or this podcast, and you listened to one of the latest episodes with Eric Berry, one thing I can recall him saying in the conversation we had was around this extra layer... So the example we used in that show was Jack Lukic, who was the creator of Semantic UI, which we actually use here at Changelog; it's the UI framework we use for our back-end...
+
+\[01:00:19.18\] And the question in the conversation there was essentially like layering on one more thing for a maintainer to do... So Jack may be really great with user interface, maybe really great with the framework, and that's all he may really wanna do, but he's hit a stopping point of time invested because of the lack of funding. So in the Tidelift model - and maybe Jack is not the perfect person; Jack may be considered a hobbyist, even though his project is used tremendously, and very vital to so many projects that are using it... But he may not have the time or the desire to wanna do the other things to support or to be in the Tidelift model; how does that fit in?
+
+**Donald Fischer:** I think if I was to rephrase the question, it's like "What if the open source maintainer or team isn't interested in doing the Tidelift-style maintenance?"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Assurances, yeah.
+
+**Donald Fischer:** We sort of look at that, again, from the -- think about it from the open source user's perspective. The user is still interested in having somebody look after the security, look after the licensing and the maintenance of this component... So if the current contributors to that project are not interested in doing that, can we create an incentive for some new contributors to join the project to do that? And one of the patterns that I've witnessed being in and around open source communities is when somebody shows up in an open source community and they say "Hey, I'm interested in doing some of the grunt work around here, to sort of help with some of the day-to-day maintenance tasks", especially if everybody else has already passed on volunteering to do those things, usually they're accepted with open arms.
+
+So I think that our model can potentially help in those scenarios by giving someone else a nudge to sort of show up and volunteer... It's not really volunteering, because they get paid to do it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** They're getting paid!
+
+**Donald Fischer:** Yup. "Pay the maintainers" is our mantra.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I like that tagline a lot. It's short, it's three words, it gets to the point... Pay the maintainers. I like that. And you said "The more, the merrier", I think that's what everyone is saying - let's just find ways to pay the maintainers, so that they keep maintaining, so that they keep innovating, so they keep really just enjoying it. Open source is fun to be involved in. What makes it not fun is whenever you're not -- not so much not rewarded, but just when you feel depleted at the end of the day because you wake up to 35 new issues, all these different things, and then you've got your day job, and your family, and your life. That's what drags it down and makes it very difficult to scale, and maybe why earlier you mentioned venture capital... Capital wasn't a great option for it, just because of the way the market worked. There's all these different ways, but this is just one of several ways we can pay the maintainers, and I like that mission a lot.
+
+Donald, we're coming to the close here... I'd like to end with this question. Super-secret - something's going on at Tidelift that maybe people aren't aware of; you know, I don't know. Is it a new announcement, something coming up...? What's something that no one knows about that you could share here on the show today? Or even tease, whatever it might be.
+
+**Donald Fischer:** \[01:03:53.25\] Yeah, I'll just mention a little tease. We're gonna have some really exciting to us, and I think relevant news coming out in the next couple of weeks, talking about getting to a certain kind of scale milestone on the Tidelift platform. Stay tuned for that. Stop by Tidelift.com, depending on when you're listening to the podcast, to learn more about sort of showing the model working at some interesting scale that we think people will find compelling.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** When you say "milestone", it means the big deal, right? So this is a big deal.
+
+**Donald Fischer:** It means we're reaching another waypoint on our journey to demonstrating the Tidelift model working at scale... And paying the maintainers.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha. So even if you're listening to this distant in the future, and this announcement has since passed, we're gonna update the show notes for what Donald is talking about; we'll definitely link it up, whatever it might be. I don't know where it's at, but wherever it is on the internet, we'll link it up, so just go back to your show notes. We'll make sure we have those up to date.
+
+Donald, anything else in closing? It's a fun journey that you've been on, from your history in open source, all of the different co-founders that have worked with you on this, the mission you have to fund open source, in particular "Pay the maintainers" - I love that. Anything else you wanna say in closing to the listening audience that may be interested in the journey of open source and what it's about?
+
+**Donald Fischer:** First of all, I would just say thank you to you, Adam, and to the Changelog and Founders Talk for covering these topics, because I think you're a really important voice and you're shining light on important issues. I guess that would be my parting thought - these issues are important. As a lot of folks now have pointed out - you referenced Nadia did an amazing job shining a light on the importance of open source software...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Donald Fischer:** We have now decided collectively to build our civilization largely out of software, and that software is open source... So if we want our world to be a great one, we need our software to be great, and that means we need our open source software to be great. I'd just invite everybody who is interested in these topics - learn more about the different models that are being proposed. I'd love for folks to come and learn more about Tidelift, and talk to us and help us evolve it in the right way, take it the right way; launch additional models. Let's try a whole bunch of things, and collectively I think we can have a really positive impact on the world... And thanks a lot for paying attention and putting this in front of an interested audience, Adam.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Absolutely, man. Thank you so much for saying that. This has been a labor of love for many years, turned business, and we've been fortunate in that. And if it weren't for our listeners and those contribute to open source, and this entire community, we would not be able to exist obviously, because there'd be nothing to talk about... But we're just so thrilled that we get to be in this position; we've been down a long road, and I'm honored to have 1) you on the show, then 2) you as a listener... And when I mentioned things, even in the breaks, you were like "I've already listened to that." I didn't know that you were that passionate about -- you know, sometimes people say thank you, but you're an actual listener, who listens to every show, or at least a lot of them. That's awesome, I love that.
+
+**Donald Fischer:** Keep up the good work, man.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Thank you, Donald. It was a pleasure, and I really appreciate it.
+
+**Donald Fischer:** Thanks for having me on.
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+**Jerod Santo:** So Truffle is called an "Ethereum Swiss Army knife." We're gonna dive into all of the details of Truffle, Tim, and we're gonna have you explain it soup to nuts to us... But let's get to know you a little bit and understand your relationship with the Ethereum ecosystem and how you got into this game in the first place, and how you became the Truffle developer. Can you tell us that story?
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Yeah, sure. The short version of it is when the Bitcoin boom hit in 2013 when it went from $5,000 to $1,000, I got into cryptocurrency after that, and got really excited about what it is and what it could do. In early 2014 I started mining, I mined on a bunch of different altcoins at the time now worth nothing... It was a fun experience for me, and I did it mostly on the side. I was working for startups and have worked for startups my whole career coming out of college, and the startup I was working at I eventually got laid off, and by that time I had been doing other work in cryptocurrency, I had built an application on my own time to track all of the price data for a bunch of different trading pairs; basically, every trading pair on ever exchange available at the time. I was trying to aggregate all those and eventually sell that data...
+
+In any case, that whole thing got me in interested in the blockchain world itself, so when I got laid off from this company, I told myself "You know what, I'm gonna go work in blockchain." So I searched around, I eventually found a post on angel.co, and that led me to consensus. That was around April of 2015. The post was actually for a web designer job. Excuse me, not web design, a graphic designer job... And I can't actually do graphic design, but I sent them a message anyway and said "Hey look, I could try this. I'm really excited to work in the blockchain world, I'd love to work with you", and they responded the next day.
+
+\[04:13\] The rest from there is kind of history, but as far as Truffle is concerned, my past history in software development is actually in the software testing world. In college -- I have a software engineering degree, but I worked a lot with a professor in software testing, and that was big in the software testing community... So when I came out of college, I used that network to find jobs in the software testing world.
+
+What that means is that for most of my career, effectively 8 years leading up to coming into the Ethereum world, I was doing developer support. This is everything from performing manual testing, to writing software testing frameworks around new technologies. When I came to Ethereum, it was very clear that there were no tools at all; you had a compiler and a JavaScript library for interacting with the Ethereum blockchain, and that was about it. From there, it seemed very easy to fall back into this developer support role, and I ended up building tools through the Ethereum ecosystem.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, it's very apparent looking at Truffle that there is a lot of tooling around Ethereum that has been lacking. I was actually commenting to Adam before the show, as we were doing a little bit of reading, how we found EthPM, which is like npm for the Ethereum ecosystem. I was just telling him, it seems like everything is being recreated in this particular Web3 Ethereum world, and it kind of reminds me of when Node first came out, and I remember Ryan Dahl announced it, and it was like a bunch of interest and a bunch of developers like "Okay, this is cool. I wanna dive into this", and there was just nothing. It was completely greenfield. If you wanted to be influential and helpful in Node, it was very easy at the outset, because there was so -- I mean, pick a library, pick a domain, and there was just no tooling. So it very much feels like the early days in that regard, with Ethereum.
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Yeah. Everything you just said is probably applicable to how it is now, even with Truffle and other tooling, but it was even more applicable in 2015. There was one other tool or framework available; I looked at it, I didn't like the way it was built, and instead of going into that project and telling them to re-architect their whole thing, I created Truffle, and really, it was formed out of a bunch of scripts that I had built for myself to do all the 17 steps that I needed to do in order to build an Ethereum application. So it just started out that way. As far as being influential, this is just something that I needed, and now I've built the most popular Ethereum framework so far.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I kind of wanna go back to a small point you made a little bit in your back-story that struck me, which is that you said that posting by ConsenSys -- by the way, will you just fill in for all listeners what ConsenSys is, so that everybody knows?
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Yes, ConsenSys is a startup incubator for the Ethereum ecosystem. So effectively, we have something like 40 different projects or teams - we call them "spokes". These spokes are working with ConsenSys to become their own companies eventually.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay, very good. So you had -- this ConsenSys job post was out there for a graphic designer. And like you said, you don't know graphic design, but you applied anyway or you contacted them anyways, and it reminded me of that meme - I don't know if you guys have seen it - where it's a picture of a cat in front of a computer, on a keyboard, and it says "On the internet nobody knows that you're a cat." \[laughter\] Have you guys seen that?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's pretty funny.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[08:07\] And it's so true. Every once in a while I just kind of think about the power and the beauty of the web, and what it provides to people, in the sense of not even anonymity in this case, but just kind of allowing yourself to kind of define who you are, and giving us the confidence and the ability to say "Yeah, I wanna go after that anyways." I feel like there's a liberty that the web provides that is a beautiful thing.
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Absolutely. Previous to ConsenSys, I worked at startups... I think it was eight startups in roughly eight years -- no, that would be seven in eight years. And obviously, if I'm not staying at any of these places, I didn't really feel like those companies were something that I wanted to build my career on. And so far, I've been at ConsenSys for three years, which is almost as long as you can be at ConsenSys...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] It can't be that much older of a company, since Ethereum is about maybe four years old...?
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Right. And I don't wanna leave; I feel like I've been the most influential I've ever been in any company that I've ever worked for, and I see myself -- maybe I'm getting to the right age and settling down, but really, this is probably gonna my career company for a long time.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What is it that you do day to day? Just curious. So you started Truffle, but what do you do day to day?
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Yeah, that's changed a lot. When I started Truffle, I was literally coding every day, most of the time... Coding or interacting with our users, in our Gitter channel. Now, since the team has grown - in three years we've grown from one to six - my job now is mostly vision and management. Effectively -- well, this is a story on its own, but when I hired developers, I felt like what I was doing was handing my baby away over to people that were gonna go develop it themselves and go figure out what the right way is, and that was actually a hard thing to figure out. But once we've figured out the right way to work together, what we found now is that - what I do is I work on the product and where Truffle and the other product are going to go, how those are communicated (go on podcasts like this, for instance), and I'm spending a lot less time coding. I would say I'm in that transition period now where my whole job and what I expected my job to be has completely changed.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, that's awesome. It sounds like it's an exciting change at this point, and hopefully in the long run -- I'm sure it will just continue to move and evolve, as the company and the industry does. I know there's a lot of CTO-style positions where there's satisfaction to the work, and there's also this deep inward desire to get into the terminal, the text editor and code things up.
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Right, right.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So hopefully there's some balance there for you. But nonetheless, coming on a podcast, getting to talk about these things, helping to guide a team of talented people sounds like definitely fulfilling work.
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Yeah, it's fulfilling and a huge learning experience at the same time. I have to take this time to give a shoutout to my team, but I've got a great group of people working with me and I couldn't ask for anything less.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** When you said the headcount - that was just for Truffle though, right? Not ConsenSys at large.
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Yeah, yeah, just for Truffle.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I was gonna say -- because that was a little small for ConsenSys at large.
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Oh, super small for ConsenSys... Super small. In fact, when I say one to six, I was worried myself, I'm like "Oh, that doesn't sound like big growth..." You know, at Truffle we're trying to keep things lean, so six in a period of three years is okay. ConsenSys though - I believe we're over 600 people now, so...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[12:16\] I wanted to put that clarity for those listening, because I'm like "I know that ConsenSys is bigger than one to six."
+
+**Tim Coulter:** \[laughs\] Yeah. So ConsenSys is huge, and we're only going to continue to grow as we bring on more projects, or as projects scale... For instance, I know that one of our spokes, the MetaMask team, is roughly the same size as Truffle right now, and they are getting huge traction (we're talking millions of users), so that team needs to scale, and this is happening all across the Ethereum ecosystem.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. Well, let's get into Truffle a little bit. I already quoted one of your taglines when you say it's the Ethereum Swiss Army knife; here's another one, a description: "Truffle is a world-class development environment testing framework and asset pipeline for Ethereum, aiming to make life as an Ethereum developer easier." When we had Kevin Owocki on the show with Gitcoin, I'm not sure if he said it on the show or after the show, but he says Truffle is like Ruby on Rails for Ethereum...
+
+So those three things: Swiss Army knife, testing framework, asset pipeline, Ruby on Rails - does that pretty much encapsulate what all Truffle has to offer?
+
+**Tim Coulter:** That's a bit of it. Two of those phrases that you said I actually wrote; the Swiss Army knife one...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So you agree with those two... \[laughter\]
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Yeah, well, kind of. Actually, one of them is pretty old. Truffle has evolved from when it was originally created, and if you look at Truffle now versus where it was, the features and the scope have completely changed. Originally, it was meant to only help you build web applications, Ethereum-enabled web applications. Now it's' meant to help manage the whole workflow of building an Ethereum-enabled application, no matter what your user interface is; no matter whether it's a console application, a web application, a desktop application or what have you.
+
+So the asset pipeline part of one of those phrases is no longer true. We decided to get out of the asset pipeline game and push that off to libraries that do that better, for instance like Webpack, or Browserify, of whatever you'd like to use.
+
+But what we do, and Truffle's main focus is giving you the tools to build a smart contract. And if you come into Ethereum, you're not gonna know what to do. The paradigm, the way you program on Ethereum is completely different from the way you might program in other environments. This goes back to one of those things that you said where things are completely new in this space, and that's part of the reason why.
+
+As far as the Rails phrase is concerned, that is pretty close to true. Rails was an inspiration for me when I was building Truffle originally. I come from a Rails background; on the side, when I was doing all the testing work I told you about for those startups, I had a Rails app that I'd built... And what Rails does, among other things, is provide that workflow for web applications, and we do the same thing for Ethereum applications.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very cool. Well, I think it's a very apt comparison then. Let me give you a little bit of the lay of the land from Adam and my perspective, as well as our listeners, what I would expect in terms of developer knowledge, what we've covered on the show, and then we'll have you walk through -- because one of the reasons why we have you on is to a) understand what Truffle offers, but also using Truffle as a lens, learning what all it takes to build these decentralized applications and what all the moving parts are, because as we've said, it's all kind of new and different, and that means it's also kind of intimidating and maybe difficult to approach.
+
+\[16:25\] So we've covered Ethereum conceptually... Way back in the day we've had Gavin Wood on the show; we had shows about blockchains, and Hyperledger, Bitcoin, distributed exchanges... We had shows about the concepts around blockchains, cryptocurrencies, what have you - Ethereum specifically, we've covered smart contracts both generically and a little bit specifically with regard to Gitcoin, which was our most recent show. And with Gitcoin, we talked a little bit about how that application specifically works with regards to MetaMask, and Web3, and those kinds of things.
+
+That being said, from a developer's perspective, building an Ethereum-based application all the way through, even after myself having all these conversations, is still kind of a black box... So why don't you give us the high level of all the parts that are involved, and then we'll kind of dive into the specific regions?
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Yeah, so if you're building an application for Ethereum, you have to execution environments you need to worry about. You have the execution environment that your app is running in - if it's a web app, that would be the browser - and then you have the execution environment of the Ethereum blockchain. Now, if you're a web developer, you would understand this separation as just client and server architecture. What makes things different in this case is that every action you want to perform on the Ethereum blockchain has to go through a transaction, and that transaction has to be mined, there's some wait time involved... You have less control over the architecture and you can't create the responses that you'd like to create if this were your typical server client architecture, that would return the right answer as a response to the request. Instead, you have to make requests, wait for the results to be mined and on the blockchain, and then do something with those results. That kind of turns things on its head a bit, and you have to program a little bit differently.
+
+First off, you have to get code on the Ethereum blockchain, which is a completely separate process than, say, building your own web server. You have to build your front-end application - that's pretty similar to how you would do it now, except you would need software to connect your typical way of building your web application with the Ethereum blockchain. Then you need to take all of the (we'll say) locations of the code - or I guess you've talked about Ethereum, so the addresses of the code and where it exists... You need to take all that and hook it up to the front-end so everything knows how to talk to each other.
+
+**Break:** \[19:31\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So what does that look like in terms of Truffle and the code that's provided and the code that you actually write?
+
+**Tim Coulter:** The biggest thing you need to and the first thing that you're likely going to do is worry about your contracts that are going to exist on chain. The contracts are the code that's effectively gonna run your back-end of your application. You can build more complex applications that also use a server that interacts with the blockchain and all that stuff, but let's just ignore that for now, and let's just say that the Ethereum blockchain is your...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's your whole back-end, okay.
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Yeah, exactly. So what you need to do is you need to write all those things, which you're using a whole new language, you're writing code in a way that you've never really thought about writing code before... For instance, if there have been bugs in the past that two lines were swapped and it cost people 150 million dollars... So you're writing code and thinking about security and finances and all these things that generally as coders we don't think about, unless we're in the finance world.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So when you say it's a whole new language, this is Solidity, right?
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Correct.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** This is the language built by the Ethereum team to run on the VM and to interact with the blockchain. So you said you write those - those are obviously a big part of your deal, especially if it's in this case of our hypothetical example, it's your entire back-end. Where I would start with that and where I'm assuming Truffle comes in almost immediately is I would love to write a smart contract in complete isolation with like unit tests, because like you said, swap two lines and you lose a lot of money, or you lose somebody's money... Is there tooling around writing those smart contracts a little bit at a time, and testing that they're working according to you, or before you're even doing any of the other stuff?
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Yes. So you can write your contracts and write tests with them and test them before even deploying them to any Ethereum blockchain. So what Truffle is gonna do is, believe it or not, help you compile those contracts, because the compiler itself is pretty simple... So it's gonna make that experience nice for you. It's going to help you write tests, if you're a JavaScript programmer, in a way that you're familiar with, and interact with those contracts within your tests, as easy as possible. And then after you're done writing the contracts and testing them, it's actually gonna help you provide a simple way of deploying those contracts to your blockchain of choice; this could be the main net, it could be some test net, it could be a network you've set up between a few people...
+
+\[23:55\] And so all of these things - except for perhaps testing, but compilations and deployment - produce very important (what we call) artifacts, which include for instance the address of where that code lives on the network. These artifacts are super important because you're gonna take this output from Truffle and then you're gonna go integrate that into your front-end using various different tools and libraries, or roll something your own, if you like... And after doing that, you'll be able to easily build a front-end that interacts with those contracts that you've just built.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay. Let me ask you something about Solidity, as somebody who's intimately familiar with it, but also didn't build or design or choose it... Why Solidity? Why do we need another language, one that I've looked at and it doesn't look like it has any particularly interesting aspects to it...? Why not just Python or JavaScript for writing the smart contracts? Do you know why that had to be its own thing, that now millions of people are learning and struggling through?
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Right. I think there's a couple reasons. First is we needed a language that compiled down to the EVM, which I know we could probably do with a different language, but it's scoped around things that the EVM needs. For instance like the cost of every instruction has a Gas cost to it, and Solidity is kind of built around that as far as its internals... But more importantly, the EVM supports (I believe it's) 256 bits of information, or bytes, or -- shoot, I'm getting this mixed up right now. But regardless, huge data types that effectively don't exist in other languages, and these data types have to be perfect because you're dealing with money... You can't use JavaScript to deal with large numbers, because JavaScript only goes up to like 14 bazillion, which isn't that large of a number...
+
+So my hunch - I'm not from the Ethereum Foundation, but my hunch is that they needed a language specific to what it's like to build for smart contracts, with respect to the needs of smart contracts.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It makes sense with the Gas primitives and all those things, that something specific would make a lot of sense.
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Now, I think that's where they started. The ideas around smart contract languages is evolving, and so we're thinking - well, not we, but the community - about working on other ways of incorporating other languages... For instance, I don't know if you've ever heard of eWASM, but we can get a lot of the languages that currently exist in the world to compile down to eWASM, and then eWASM would be translated to the EVM. eWASM is WebAssembly.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What's the e in front of it? Is that like Ethereum WebAssembly?
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Actually, I believe so.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay... See? You're reinventing everything. EthPM, eWASM...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ERuby...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Can I get your eBrowser?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** EJS? \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What about email? We could do email...
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Ethereum Mail? Absolutely. \[laughter\] So I think with the eWASM project what they're actually doing is compiling normal languages down to WebAssembly that somehow Ethereum can know about. I'm not too well-versed on that project, but I do know that it's supposed to be the big connector of all of our current languages. The hard part there is how do you take advantage of the specific things that make the blockchain the blockchain? Like, I don't know, if you're writing Java or something, how do you specify that this is like a storage variable? A storage variable, for those listening, is data that's actually going to be stored in the blockchain, and you're paying as part of the transaction to store, versus like something in memory that you're just using as part of a computation.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[28:06\] Okay, so Solidity is what we have today; maybe there will be better things down the road. Another is competing blockchains, they are trying to do things like native JavaScript smart contract language, but none of those have the size and steam that Ethereum has at this point...
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Right.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** But Solidity is what we have --
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What about here, before you go there Jerod. The question is this isn't the only blockchain, right? You do have other places you could do cryptocurrencies; we're talking about Ethereum here in this case, and building on Ethereum... Obviously, Solidity is for Ethereum. Is there other languages you use elsewhere? This is only for Ethereum...
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Yeah, as far as I understand, Solidity is only used for Ethereum. There are actually other new Ethereum languages, if you guys are interested in those. Viper is one that takes its ideas from Python, LLL (Lisp-Like Language) is another one, which obviously takes its ideas from Lisp... I don't know if any of those languages are -- if people have written compilers for the other blockchains or if they'll work on other blockchains.
+
+Now, I have heard of many other blockchains that use the EVM, so for instance they will change the consensus protocol around, or change something about the blockchain itself, but still use the Ethereum Virtual Machine under the hood, and in that case those languages are likely to work.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very interesting.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha. But for now Solidity is the primary language most people working with Ethereum use.
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Right, yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I know there's a Bitcoin team that are building a language called Simplicity, I believe, which is going to be some smart contracts on the Bitcoin blockchain. It caught my eye because I thought the name Simplicity was awesome for a language, and that was pretty much as far as I went into researching it. I have no idea of the state, or anything.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** They got you right there with the name...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I was like "Simplicity - now, that's a language I wanna use." \[laughter\] So back to Solidity then - we talked about testing them in isolation, and then generating these artifacts... Are the tests that you write against the smart contracts also written in Solidity, or is there more leniency and leverage there to use other tools?
+
+**Tim Coulter:** They can be. Right now we support writing your tests in JavaScript, as well as Solidity, so you could think of these as two separate, but very similar testing frameworks, built within Truffle. Both of them take after Mocha, so you build individual tests, and then you have hooks that can happen before or after certain tests are run, or before a suite is run...
+
+The Solidity ones work slightly differently in that you're actually writing smart contracts that will act as your tests. So these contracts are being deployed to an internal test network that Truffle spins up as part of running the tests; they're deployed to that network, and then transactions - the same transactions you make to the blockchain - are sent that will run those tests, that will run each test function that you've specified.
+
+There's benefits to both JavaScript and Solidity testing. In the JavaScript testing you get to write tests that kind of act or interact with the blockchain from the outside, whereas with Solidity tests you can write more detailed, more fine-grained tests that interact with the individual pieces of code itself. So you can write tighter unit tests, I guess.
+
+\[31:57\] Now, something on this which -- we've been thinking a lot about testing, and as I mentioned, these are Mocha-inspired, and actually use Mocha under the hood in order to run. Mocha is one way to write unit tests, to write automated tests. What we're trying to do is build a plugin system for Ethereum that will allow other frameworks for writing smart contract tests. That's on the horizon, probably Truffle 5, which might be a few months away. With that plugin system you might see more advanced ways of testing or user-contributed plugins that provide different frameworks.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very cool. So that tells the smart contracts and the testing story, to a certain degree. Also, we're getting a little bit into the deployment story - like you said, the artifact generation. Deployment to me is scary and black box... But then you also have these Truffle boxes, and so in my mind I thought "Maybe that has to do with the deployment", but I'm not sure. So can you talk about what Truffle offers in terms of "Okay, I've written my smart contracts..."? There's probably more to my application -- we haven't really talked too much about the client side that interacts with it, maybe we should go there... Actually, let's start there, and then we'll get to deployment.
+
+I have my smart contracts... What's the other moving parts on the client side of my application, where I'm interacting with those artifacts?
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Right, so the artifacts just provide information to your front-end, that will allow your front-end to easily interact, and it will allow you to write code that's easy to write for those smart contracts. Some of the information - for instance, I've mentioned the address of where that contract might exist on the network, but also, it includes information about what functions are in your smart contract, and the function signatures of those... And what happens when you pull those artifacts into your application, especially if you're using the libraries that we've written, is it'll actually create JavaScript objects for you that represent those contracts, and then you can make function calls against those contracts, and built into that library, it will actually make those transactions for you... So you don't have to worry about the nitty-gritty of sending all the transactions over what we call the Ethereum RPC protocol and how to deal with all that. Instead, you actually have a representation of your contract in JavaScript that you can just call directly.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, that makes it super easy, as you're basically referencing functions and objects, and you don't have to think about any of the other nuts and bolts once you have that set up.
+
+**Tim Coulter:** That's the idea, you still have to understand that your transactions do take time, so it's not like you're making a request to a server and the server, as part of the response to that request, returns whatever information you're looking for; instead, the library itself needs to wait perhaps 15 seconds for it to get the right response. So what we've done is we've written that code for you, that effectively makes building that frontend a breeze, so you don't have to worry about every transaction or every button click that calls a transaction, or whatever... You don't have to worry about what's going on under the hood. All you have to worry about is "Did my transaction succeed, or did it fail?" and we'll take care of the rest from there.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So you provide those via callbacks, or async/await type of things...? How is the actual interface into what Truffle's providing from the JavaScript side look like?
+
+**Tim Coulter:** \[35:49\] Yeah, so right now the library that I've described so far is what we call Truffle Contract, and this is actually a library that's existed for quite a while. This one turns everything into a promise, so you can use async/await with Promises, but it doesn't use callbacks because what generally happens when writing a front-end for a smart contract application, or what you generally do is you say "Make this transaction, then do this transaction" after a specific request happened. There's also other pieces of that, so not all interactions with the blockchain are right, not all of them are transactions. Sometimes you can call a function that will get executed, but it's actually just there for reading data, so it doesn't get recorded on the blockchain, it doesn't cost you any Ether to do that... So a lot of the times it becomes like "Perform this transaction, read some data, perform another transaction..." and so this library provides it to you as sort of a promise chain - "I'm doing this, then I'm doing this, then I'm doing this...", so you can have easy control flow.
+
+Something that we released today actually is a library called Drizzle, which is the next evolution of this idea. The JavaScript world and the front-end world has been moving away from effectively home-grown transactions, direct interaction with the server, and instead you're moving to a React and a Redux architecture. Well, wouldn't it be great if you could take those Truffle artifacts that Truffle creates for you, throw them into a library and you've all of a sudden got a Redux store that is tailored to your smart contracts? That's what Drizzle provides - if you like the React and Redux world, there's almost no work involved to fit your contracts into your front-end application.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, if there's anything that us developers do like, it's having almost no work involved... \[laughter\] That's always gonna get us to have the emoji with the heart eyes, for sure.
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Right.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So Tim, how do you get all this stuff finally up and running in production for Web3 denizens to use it?
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Right, so two parts you need to think about, as we've mentioned before - you have your contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, and then you have the front-end. The one we haven't really talked about is the contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. In putting your contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, if you just go do it yourself, there's a lot you'd have to do. We've mentioned these artifacts before; you'd have to save all those artifacts, somehow create a way for you to save them in a specific format, and then integrate that into your front-end, and XYZ to make that work. Instead of worrying about all that during your deployment process, what you'd rather worry about is the steps of actual deployment, of "Get this contract on the network, then get this one and pass the right data to that contract, and then get this one...", perhaps make a few transactions to configure those contracts after they're on the network, and then you're done. That's what you wanna think about.
+
+So what we have in Truffle is a system that got its ideas, as I mentioned before, from Rails. So our deployment mechanism is actually called Migrations, and what you do in Migrations is you write steps for deployment. Effectively, they're small deployment scripts. You use a library that we provide you as part of the migrations - it's called the Deployer - and you just say "I would like to deploy this contract. Deployer dot deploy this contract". Then you can write multiple lines and deploy another one, or deploy a contract passing variables... And then what this sets up for you is you get these first sets of contracts that make, let's say, version one of your application out, and then you've already got a system with which you can change, alter or perhaps update your contracts later in a migration system very similar to Rails.
+
+\[40:15\] So the short version of this is ideally you can write deployment scripts with Truffle; you're gonna worry about what you need to do, rather than all the nitty-gritty details, and then Truffle will save all that data for you and make it easy for you to integrate with your front-end.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And then you just push your front-end out to a CDN somewhere, or on your web server, and just serve it up...?
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Yup. So what we've found is that the front-end, and how to do the front-end, and how to build and release the front-end is hotly debated, and changes effectively depending on your developer preferences. Like I mentioned, we got out of the pipeline game... The way that Truffle is built now, you can use this same workflow to build a web-based application as you can to build a desktop application, for instance. You have the artifacts, and then you integrate that with your front-end, depending on what your front-end actually is.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So what exactly is a front-end?
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Well, it's the part of the application that the user interacts with, and it's very different depending on what type of application you're working on. If you're working on a web application, it's gonna be something that runs in the browser and you'll have to deal with all the details of deploying a browser-based application, for instance like taking all of your assets, your JavaScript, bundling them and putting them into a single file, and then somehow pushing that off to a server that's going to host that.
+
+For an Electron-based application, for instance, it's kind of similar, but a bit different. You have to get those artifacts injected into the application itself, and then actually create builds that are compiled to create the desktop application... But there's even a front-end in the console application, and that front-end is what you type into the terminal itself.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So it's the interface.
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Oh, absolutely, yes. Maybe that was the easier way to say it. \[laughter\] Yes! The interface, yeah. But the interface is always different, and whatever interface you're working with changes what you're gonna do. Truffle doesn't do that for you anymore, and we guide you how you might do that, but otherwise let you do it yourself.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very cool. Well, I would be remiss not to mention another feature of Truffle that made me very excited, as it is basically where I live with building Ruby on Rails applications, or building Elixir and Phoenix-based applications is - Truffle provides an interactive console for direct contract communication. Please tell me that that's not something you've moved away from, because that right here is how I do most of my coding - just dorking around in the console until I figure something out.
+
+**Tim Coulter:** We have not moved away from that, we 100% still support that. There's two features now. You can type in Truffle console and connect to a currently running Ethereum client, so maybe the main net or something, or you can type Truffle develop and it will spin up an in-memory blockchain for you that you can just use for development. In both cases, you get a console that takes your contracts that you have, takes those artifacts, turns those into that JavaScript representation of those contracts and it allows you to interact with those right from the console itself. So you're not typing Solidity in that console, you're typing JavaScript, but you have access to your contracts just like you would if you were writing that code in your front-end.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very cool. That is worth the price of admission for me right there, especially since the price of admission is always zero with open source software.
+
+**Tim Coulter:** \[44:06\] \[laughs\] That's actually really great to hear, because I don't actually program with the console so much.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** How do you do it, man? How do you do it...?! I guess you write tests, huh? \[laughs\]
+
+**Tim Coulter:** I don't even wanna say... Actually, this is something that we should talk about. Well, I write tests, but I almost hate to say it - I use console.log() a lot in the browser, it's terrible... But one thing that we're now actively working on and will likely be released in a week or two weeks, depending on how this works, is an interactive Solidity debugger. This goes back into the things we've talked about as far as having to recreate the things that we all love in development. Here we're going to have a debugger where you can make a transaction and then debug that transaction no matter what Ethereum client you're on or using; it doesn't matter if you're in Geth, or Parity, or something else, or using our own internal Ethereum client... And you could actually see in the Solidity code, step through the Solidity code and see what happened.
+
+If you've used a debugger and you've used one to figure out tough issues before, well you obviously know the value of this, but really, this is kind of opening up the black box that is the Ethereum Virtual Machine. That's something that's gonna be a huge, huge feature and should come out in, like I said, a couple weeks.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very cool. Two other quick things that we will mention - we've mentioned before Truffle boxes, which you can tell us about real quick, and then also we do wanna hear about EthPM and what all is on offer there... So what are Truffle boxes?
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Yeah, so they're effectively our answer to rolling your own front-end. You have to integrate Truffle's artifacts with different kinds of front-ends; what we do with Truffle boxes is give you boilerplates for how to do that in different styles of applications. It depends heavily on what you wanna use, and front-end developers seem very attached to some of the libraries that they're using (and for good measure); so we have Truffle boxes that show you how to use Truffle with React, we have Truffle boxes that show you how to use Truffle with Webpack in order to build your application, we have Truffle boxes with 8-10 boilerplates of how to build different styles of applications, and we're building more as necessary, as fast as we can.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very cool. And EthPM - we're very familiar with npm; this has to be an Ethereum-based packet manager. What are the kind of packages that you could pull into a Truffle framework app that would do some heavy-lifting for you? What are some examples?
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Yeah, so the basic package that you'd want from EthPM or even npm is a source package. So literally, it downloads the source for you, and then it runs as part of your application. In this case, you would download Solidity code as a source package. But because people can deploy contracts to any network - let's just say the main net for now... Because you can deploy contracts to the main net, you can actually create packages that connect your application with their application.
+
+For instance, if you are downloading a package and it contains artifacts of addresses of contracts that the package maintainer deployed, you could then integrate those easily into your application and build off of their code. That's part of the visions of Ethereum or the promise of Ethereum - not only we're gonna be able to build our own applications and deploy them, but we're gonna be able to build applications that build off of everything other people have deployed. That's the idea of EthPM. It's still having a bit of trouble gaining adoption, but we're working on that and hopefully we'll have new versions in the future.
+
+**Break:** \[48:11\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So Tim, one thing that I've been thinking as you talked, especially back when you were talking about the anatomy of a Web3 decentralized application is you have to wait... You have to wait, because it has to go on the blockchain, it has to be confirmed, what have you; consensus has to happen, these things have to happen on chain... And we've talked a few times I guess, Adam, I think - was it Preethi Kasireddy who talked about Ethereum scaling...?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And we've had scaling problems, we've had CryptoKitties... You know, all of the transactions going on the blockchains are causing many people to talk about how we're gonna scale, proof of stake versus proof of work, sharding - all these different things, right? And so the question is "Why are we doing all of this?", if we get a little bit big picture again. What's the big wins? Because we're talking about the details, but when we look at the forest instead of these cute little truffle trees... Why are we going through all these hoops to get dapps? What's the big win?
+
+**Tim Coulter:** You know, everybody looks at CryptoKitties, and some people might laugh or not take it seriously, but it's actually a great example of something you could do on the Ethereum blockchain. The thing here is that they created - we'll just call it digital art, and created ownership of digital art, and something that people can interact with. Now, that use case in and of itself isn't necessarily the most compelling use case, but it brought Ethereum to the forefront of like what we can do.
+
+You can take applications like this that create ownership or manage finances or script trustless interactions with people using the Ethereum blockchain, and it kind of changes the way we build things.
+
+I mentioned CryptoKitties because I wanna give you an example of something else that you can do, and this is going on to the vision of Ethereum... They built CryptoKitties because they thought they were building a fun application that people can interact with, and I'm sure they've made -- they have a fee system in there, so I'm sure they made quite a lot of money in doing it. Something that Truffle is doing on the side for fun is creating an application that we call the Pouncing Dead; we were gonna call it CryptoZombies, but somebody stole our name.
+
+What's cool about this is we can do what I was talking about before - building our own application that extends the use cases of somebody else's application. In ours what you do is you send the ownership of your kitty - you send ownership over to what we call the Horde. You essentially sacrifice your kitty over to the horde and you get a zombie out of it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[54:16\] Oh, my gosh...
+
+**Tim Coulter:** You kill your kitty. But in killing this kitty, you get a new token, you get a new (for lack of a better word) piece of digital art. And what you can do from there is trade them just like you would CryptoKitties, but you can also feed other people's kitties to your zombie to create even more zombies... And this zombie apocalypse comes up.
+
+Now, what we can do with that (with the Pouncing Dead) instead of making money, we can take that fee structure and give it to the Horde itself, so that whenever you sacrifice a kitty over to the Horde, that money gets paid out to you. We could actually create this really interactive -- and in doing so... I mean, you guys reacted yourself, like "This is so cool!" We can create this really interactive system where people are interacting with CryptoKitties, they're interacting with Crypto Zombies... It becomes a narrative that's fun to talk about and fun to interact with.
+
+Like I mentioned, this is just one thing that you can do. People are using the Ethereum blockchain to manage provenance of fish or products that get created and make sure that the authentic things finally make it to consumers... People are using it to check out oil production and make sure that we're producing things right, blood diamonds don't need to happen anymore, we can create applications like decentralized eBay... For instance, eBay is great in that it brings people together, but along with PayPal they take a 17,5% cut, which is outrageous; that doesn't need to happen anymore. The value transfer can happen over Ethereum. So what we're going to do is reduce what we call the amount of rent-seekers that are in our industry today, that are just kind of building an asset and then sitting on that asset, and instead put that value over to everybody else.
+
+And part of this question was really hard for me to answer because there's so many cool things that people can build, but a lot of this stuff we haven't even thought of yet. The promise of Ethereum is there, we just need things like CryptoKitties and the Pouncing Dead to show us how cool this stuff is.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, it's certainly a place to jump in and in a fun way understand and learn, you know?
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Right.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's right for innovation.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You can see the potential, but all of the uses so far have either been -- admittedly, I thought CryptoKitties was kind of brilliant as a game, as a piece of digital art (I love weird internet art things), but not revolutionizing the world.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think you can learn better by fun. You learn while having fun very well.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Sure. I think crowdfunding was a great example of a capability that was unlocked, and then we see the positives and the drawbacks of that with the scams and what have you... But that's kind of just the market sorting itself out. But I think we all can agree that, like Adam is saying, it's a good place to jump in and be bleeding edge and have fun and learn something that has tons of opportunities... But I don't know if any of us have even seen where the real killer use case is, where they're coming, you know?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. I have one question before we go to that... In a world where we have to -- I think it's always been this way, but in a world where we need verifiability or trust in a marketplace, like you had said, to ensure authenticity, how do you attach the real world to a blockchain in terms of knowing that I've authentically sent you this eBay item, or given you this blood diamond, or non-blood diamond? How do you track real world in blockchain? How does that attach itself?
+
+**Tim Coulter:** \[58:23\] Yeah, that's the hard part. You only transfer digital value. You can only easily transfer digital value over Ethereum itself. You'll have to use external systems that connect to the blockchain in order to transfer real-world value. For instance, I mentioned the eBay example... The value transfer that I mentioned there is only the value transfer of the buyer paying the seller; it's not the value transfer of the actual product, or...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The physical good.
+
+**Tim Coulter:** ...the physical good being sold, being transferred over. Here there will always be a level of trust involved when you deal with the physical world. You're gonna have to trust FedEx in this case. But FedEx could implement features that track the location of the good and where it's at and who's handling that, on the blockchain, if that actually makes sense for them.
+
+The FedEx example of actually putting that on there - that may or may not make sense for this example, because basically we're all fine with checking our tracking number online and using their current existent databases. Blockchains don't make sense all the time. But there are cases where you might want to track physical goods and where they're coming from, and pair identity - which is something we're solving - with the blockchain itself, so you then have this person making a statement that something about the real world is true, whether it's the location of a physical good or something else. If we can do that right and we get the identity thing down, then it can unlock quite a bit of things.
+
+It's gonna come down to, you know, I suppose I could lie in person to you, talking to you, as much as I could make a transaction on the blockchain. But if we can build systems that make that harder or make it very clear that I'm the one who embezzled whatever this thing was, then perhaps we can increase accountability or what have you.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. The blockchain provides one side of the equation of truth...
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Right, right.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...and then it's up to us to have the other side, which is physical truth.
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Right, yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Or somehow bridge those, the analog and the digital systems with RFID chips, and FedEx integrations, although admittedly at that point your trusted third-party is FedEx... So yeah, sometimes I feel like we're the cat and the hat, where they have the stain on a tub, and then clean up the tub and now it's on the rag, and then it gets off the rag and now it's on the wall... And it's just kind of pushing that smudge around and you can't actually get rid of it... But it's progress, I think.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Right. Yeah, and there's some things that -- I've mentioned identity, because that's really important to effectively everything we do on the blockchain... But for instance, if we get identity solved and the politics around voter ID laws or such that it's fine, we could actually have secure voting online, without the possibility of...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Tampering.
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Tampering, exactly.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Or coercion, or all the things...
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Right, yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:01:54.18\] You were explaining -- I think where we were trying to go is like real-world examples... Like, who's using it? Why are they using it? What are they building with it? We kind of know some examples now, like we've mentioned ICO's and fundraising and different things like that... Actual value, which is a cryptocurrency, or in this case maybe the FedEx example, or eBay for example, but other examples might be pretty interesting to share... Can you share more about what people are building with it and why they're building with it? Maybe what the value is happening in a certain community, around what they're building?
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Yeah, so the current things that are being built are mostly around financial transactions. That's because our money has been digitized for years now, so it's really easy to write code or systems that mimic the ones we already have, but in a trustless manner. For instance, I forget the word, but there's this idea of taking two assets - if both of us own an asset of a different type, and we want to swap the risk of owning each asset, we can actually perform those swaps... Those things are terribly hard to do in the real world, of just getting everybody involved, but when it's a blockchain where you have tokenized assets and people can just send the transaction that gets them into the swap, everything is taken care of. There's a word for that that I'm looking for, but really the financial use cases are the ones that are winning out right now, and we're still figuring out how the real world...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Fits into that.
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Exactly.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's blockchain at large, or maybe even Ethereum at large. What about Truffle at large, specifically? Like dapps, Web3... This kind of thing.
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Truffle -- you know, I hate to use this example, because it's of negative... But if you have a gold rush, somebody's gotta build the shovels, and I feel like that's where we're at with Truffle. We need to build the tools that people need in order to unlock these new use cases of blockchain or the next generation of blockchain applications... And that's where we see ourselves as Truffle.
+
+We know that there's huge opportunity here, but his opportunity isn't going to be taken advantage of if the tools don't exist. We're working to build the tools, we have a heck of a good time building tools that people find are useful for them and we get great feedback, and hopefully we can build a platform that people use in order to build that next generation application or that -- what did you call it? The app that's gonna win, whatever it is... There's a word for that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The killer app.
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Thank you, the killer app! \[laughter\] Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think it's interesting though with what you said using the shovel analogy... You know, t think of the way that, Jerod, you were just saying earlier how you love how the internet makes it available to you that you can define who you are, and in the same way our ancestors, maybe even one or two generations up, parents up, you've got people who literally made physical shovels. Now we're making digital shovels, so to speak. I think it's just interesting how the world has changed and is changing and will continue to change to just essentially -- we're makers. This age is makers.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very true. Tim, while you were talking there I did find, just probably to trigger your brain on a few of the companies and projects that are using Truffle in production, you do have some listed... To give you some more - you mentioned the Stablecoins, so there's one called Stable; ShapeShift, which is like a currency exchange. Colony and Aragon, which I believe these are decentralized, democratic organization type of operations...
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Yup.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[01:06:03.07\] So there's definitely interesting and new things being built with the digital shovels you all are building, so... It will be interesting.
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Yeah. Another one on that list who has been an active Truffle user for a long time and they've been using Truffle perfectly is Digix Global. They manage tracking and selling -- or we'll just say tokenizing actual gold, so you can sell it, and make those markets more fluid.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's interesting, you remind of actually when I asked the question about how can you track a diamond... They actually have tiny lasers -- well, I guess I don't know how big the laser is, but the laser is probably just as big as it needs to be... \[laughter\] But the thing that lasers onto the diamond is a sequential number, so that number could be a token, so to speak, for the blockchain.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** They hatched it in.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Right.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So there you go, Adam, you answered your own question on your own podcast.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** There you go. \[laughter\] Why do we even have guests, Adam? You could just answer all your own questions.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I don't know, man... Geez. \[laughter\] It's interesting.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I love that - perfectly-sized lasers. \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The laser is as big as it needs to be, I don't know.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's just as big as it needs to be. Like, "Boss, how big is that laser you ordered?" He's like, "The exact size it needs to be." "Okay, good."
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Excellent.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, Tim, anything else before we let you go? Do you have a call to action, a way that people can get involved, help out Truffle, help the community effort around this framework and people building on the Ethereum network?
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Yeah. So I mentioned previously that Truffle is six people... I haven't looked in the last couple days, but since Truffle's inception we've had something over 300,000 downloads of Truffle itself, not to mention downloads of Ganache, our blockchain tool. So we are six people working as hard as we can to build these tools for you. What we need and what helps us the most is your feedback. So whether or not you're building an application for your company or you're building something for yourself, we need to hear what problems you're having, what you're getting stopped up on, so we can make our tool better, make our documentation better, and make the whole developer experience better for you.
+
+The best way to do that is to hit us up on our Gitter channel, which is Gitter.im/consensys/truffle, or you can send me an email at Tim@TruffleSuite.com. Please, please reach out.
+
+Oh, and I didn't mention that we are heavily tracking our issues list on GitHub for Truffle and Ganache and Drizzle. Please feel free to write an issue there if you're having one.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I guess since you've mentioned your stats too, we should also mention that awesome dashboard, which does share a lot of the information you just shared there, so you've got... It's actually 327,704 downloads lifetime, which is up 42% from the past month, and there's quite of an uptick there too, from like September/November timeframe to now, of downloads, so that's -- you can see that real-time.
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Yeah. This is open data, so it's pulled straight from the services that provide you those stats. For instance, the downloads is pulled directly from npm, GitHub stars is pulled directly from GitHub; your browser is actually doing the pulling of that data, so you can keep checking back there... I roughly check that every day or every other day.
+
+This huge growth, this huge up-tick has actually been really surprising to me. It reflects the growth in the Ethereum community in general, because many of the other up-ticks, if you're looking at our download graph, are related to us putting out a new major version, where in this case that uptick just happened.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:10:11.00\] Yeah. To put it into perspective too for the listeners, we're looking at I think 29,925 downloads - and this is total downloads in a month; that number is for that month. So roughly 30,000 downloads in November, and then come January, they're pushing almost 48k downloads in the month of January. That's a significant difference.
+
+**Tim Coulter:** Right.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I wonder how well this chart correlates on top of the price of Eth, as it has also risen quite substantially... \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We need a second plot there...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Because, you know, there's a reason why the people who were selling shovels were selling them to people who were going after gold... Because there's a lot of money to be made and lost in this ecosystem, for sure.
+
+**Tim Coulter:** That's true, absolutely. If it means anything, we're not actually selling any shovel yet. However, we are thinking about getting into the support and consulting world, so if you're a new user to Truffle that needs your team onboarded, or you need some custom work done for you, please reach out.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Very cool. Well, Tim, thanks so much for schooling us on all things shovel-making. This has been a lot of fun.
+
+**Tim Coulter:** \[laughs\] Absolutely. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate being here.
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+**Jerod Santo:** Guys, we're here to talk about Octobox today, but let's talk about Libraries.io and where you guys have been over the last couple of years, just to catch everybody up. Andrew, we have had you on the show a couple of times, I think The Changelog once, talking about 24 Pull Requests and Libraries.io... Long time ago, I think episode #188. We'll link that up. Also, you were on Request for Commits back in episode #3, all about measuring success, with Arfon Smith, and of course, Libraries was/is all about measuring things... So we've had you on -- Ben, we haven't had you on the show before, but happy to have you... Tell us, before we get into Octobox, what's up with you guys, what's up with Libraries... Give us just the recent history of what you all have been up to.
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** Oh yeah, I totally forgot about that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Forgot about Libraries.io, forgot about being on the show before...? What.
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** No, sorry; I totally remember being on the show... It's great to be back. It's been a bit of a crazy year in terms of Libraries. I think the last time I spoke to you I had been working on Libraries on my own, kind of in my spare time, building it up from scratch. And I met Ben, actually I think during a 24 Pull Requests event... Was it 24 -- or, definitely related to 24 Pull Requests.
+
+**Benjamin Nickolls:** Yeah, it was at a local Ignite night, a lightning talk session... I think you did a talk about 24 Pull Requests, and at the time I was working on another project that kind of became the Core Infrastructure Initiative, and it was like "Ah, that seems perfect!" and then  we kind of started talking at that point.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Tell everyone real quick what 24 Pull Requests is... Since it is the season right now, go ahead and just give that.
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** It is the season. 24 Pull Requests is in its seventh year now. 24 Pull Requests is basically trying to encourage other developers and open source users to contribute back and give little gifts to the maintainers of those projects that they've been benefitting from all year round, and kind of trying to get that swarm of people working together to bring in the holiday spirit with software.
+
+This year we've actually kind of changed [unintelligible 00:03:45.04] a little bit. In previous years it was literally "Try and send 24 pull requests during the 24 days in December, on the run-up to Christmas." This year we've opened it up to all kinds of contributions. It's still called 24 Pull Requests, but it's really 24 contributions to open source software in any way that you consider to be a contribution; that might be writing a blog post, or answering Stack Overflow questions, or running an event, or speaking at a conference, or even doing a podcast episode on a particular bit of open source would be considered a contribution. So you can record those alongside your pull request, as different ways of showing how you've contributed back to those open source projects that you have benefitted from all year.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[04:32\] That's awesome. I'm happy to hear that you've made it more inclusive. Something we talk about often and stress is the importance of non-code contributions to the open source community; they're paramount, and they're so valuable, so that's pretty cool to see it moving beyond pull requests to more things. Very cool. 24pullrequests.com, check that out. You have a couple more weeks to get involved before the month is out, so check that out.
+
+Ben, you were saying that you all met at one of these 24 Pull Requests events back in the day. Andrew, you were working on Libraries by yourself... Take us from there, guys. What happened next?
+
+**Benjamin Nickolls:** So at the time I was working at a civic tech company called My Society, and I'd got pulled by Ben Laurie into a group of workshops that became the Core Internet Infrastructure kind of workshop, which was built out of the kind of fall-out of the Heartbleed vulnerability. I was comparing, effectively, an event, and 24 Pull Requests was featured, and Andrew started talking about Libraries and started talking about how he was mapping the relationships between projects and their dependency tree, and at the same time I was trying to work out how to highlight projects that were like OpenSSL, that were part of this digital infrastructure concept that hadn't really had much thought contributed to it, so there's wasn't really a standard for that... And thought "Well, actually, that's pretty much the same thing." Andrew is coming at it from the exploring open source for projects to use and contribute to, and I was looking at it from the perspective of "What's the next thing that could potentially blow up and cause a massive problem for users of open source software, i.e. everyone?" And yeah, we just got talking after that, and it kind of built from there. Two aspects of the same technology, brought together.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I recall you guys got a grant or some sort of funding to work on libraries for maybe a year or 18 months, and you guys worked on it together... We met at the Sustain event; Sustain 1... Sadly, I didn't make it out to Sustain 2 this fall... But we met in San Francisco at GitHub headquarters, and at that time the grant was just about running out, or the time period for that was just about running out. You had been doing Libraries.io (both of you) for a while, and you were looking at what was next and it seemed like what happened next was this move into Tidelift, and working with them... And now you're working at Octobox. Give us just the 30-second version of that history, and... I just wanna highlight your guys' path together and through these different projects, landing us on what we're talking about today, which is Octobox, which seems like it's a different thing altogether than what you've been working on for the last couple years... Which is interesting to see how you got here.
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** \[07:39\] The long story short is that we were excited by Tidelift's high-level mission, but when it came down to actually trying to get work done and move towards achieving some of those goals, we kind of clashed with the founders quite heavily. There was a lot of frustration, and we ended up being pushed out of the company... Which has left us in a situation where we can't work on Libraries for, at this point, another six months. Libraries still remains open source. It's AGPL licensed for exactly that kind of reason, as a protection to ensure that it always remains open... And the Open Data release that was released just before we left, in -- I can't remember the exact date, but we can always get that added to the show notes... It was also a Creative Commons license. So we kind of have that sat, waiting for the ability to pick that up and work with it again, possibly fork it off, so that we can continue to do that... But we kind of had our hands tied a little bit, of what can we do, to still help the developer community, and try and look at sustainability from a slightly different angle, rather than directly the financial sustainability, but also kind of thinking about developer burnout as an important part of that sustainability.
+
+Octobox had been around for a year and a half, nicely ticking away, and it felt like a good place to jump to, where we can try out some of our ideas and get back to actually shipping software, and then try and also making Octobox itself a sustainable open source project.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So Octobox (Octobox.io) is a project "Untangle your GitHub notifications." So this is a separate client/tool/resource in order to do a better job of dealing specifically with the overwhelming amount of notifications that many maintainers get via this open source project that, Andrew, you began, like you said, maybe a year or two back. Was this just something that you were scratching your own itch, and doing on the side? Because libraries was your main thing, but Octobox - you put it out there and it seems like it's really been attractive to people.
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** Everything is always connected. Octobox was inspired by the need to do something to keep on top of 24 Pull Requests, which every December it comes around and it kind of punches me in the face with the amount of people that jump on it... Right now I think it's 22,000 developers active on the 24 Pull Requests website this year. It's always a flood of issues and pull requests to the project itself, as well as pull requests to my other open source projects... And I was just left feeling like I had no way of knowing what I supposed to be doing.
+
+Also, the way that GitHub notifications has worked for the past few years is once you look at a notification, it's gone, and you can't get it back, unless you drive it entirely from email, which really doesn't work for me as someone who is a terrible email manager. I kind of wanted to separate those to pieces, but... You kind of get the fear then. If you know that when you look at an issue you might not be able to find or remember that you didn't solve that right away, then you kind of don't wanna look at it and you leave those things there for like "Oh, eventually I'll get to this important issue, but if I look at it, I'll forget that it's something I need to do."
+
+\[11:43\] So Octobox started off as a simple idea to be like "Let's have a kind of archived state for notifications." It pulls in your notifications over the API, and then it basically says "Everything is unarchived" or is in an inbox, and then you choose when you are done with those issues, or pull requests, or release notifications, or all of the kind of things that you could get notified on GitHub... Then that instantly gives you back a level of control, of going like "Okay, now I know that none of my notifications are ever gonna disappear. Even after I've read them, I've still got a full list", which then we started to layer on different ways of slicing and dicing those notifications. Because now you're looking at a list that never goes away; you're like "Okay, I've got 1,000 different things here that are all incoming towards me. Let me filter out by pull request, let me then filter that by pull requests that have already been emerged, or have been closed, and I can throw those away; I'm fairly confident they're not needing any further action from me, especially if I haven't been mentioned on them since."
+
+We get some information from the GitHub API that says the last reason that you got notified, which could be you were subscribed to this repo, or you got mentioned, or you were assigned to solve that particular issue... And so you basically end up with every possible different way that you can filter down those notifications, to really triage and drive through the list in an effective way, and actually leave you with the things that you haven't done yet, but still need to do... Almost like a to-do list, which then you can work from; new things come in at the top, or an existing issue that you've marked as Done, archived, will actually pop back up, in the same way that an email would in your email client. And the whole thing is heavily inspired by Gmail's interface.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, it looks very much like Gmail. It's funny that it happened because of 24 Pull Requests, because I just recently had such a scenario during Hacktoberfest... You know, I've maintained small open source libraries for years and I've always had kind of a trickle of things, or other people's issues that I'm involved in, or pull requests of my own on other people's projects, but it's never been an overwhelming thing with GitHub's notifications for me, and I am an Inbox (0) kind of person, so I've just always managed it via just another thing in my inbox. However, I've made the "mistake" (air quotes around mistake, because it was awesome), I accidentally promoted our transcripts repo as a really easy way of getting those Hacktoberfest pull requests opened up. I even said we had the fastest Merge button in the West... Just joking around, but setting myself up to do a lot of work in October.
+
+So during the month of October - and just thank you to our audience, everybody who got involved, because I only kid, it was awesome how many people came out and helped us make our transcripts more awesome. I think I merged over 300 pull requests in that month alone, and my inbox was just completely overrun by notification emails.
+
+So I can definitely commiserate with  you with regard to 24 Pull Requests. Now, I'm not quite as industrious as you are; I didn't say "Okay, I'm gonna solve this problem." Of course, I did know Octobox was a thing... But I knew also that October only had 31 days, and after all those Hacktoberfest T-shirts got sent out, everybody would stop contributing to our transcripts repo... To the point where it's back to a trickle, which is kind of how I like it.
+
+But it's hilarious - you have this problem; for you it's gonna happen once a year, and it inspires you to create a tool that now is helping out lots and lots of people, so that's pretty cool.
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** \[15:47\] Yeah, I mean, I've kind of put up with it for 2-3 years, and then as Libraries started to take off, Libraries spread across (I wanna say) something like 20 different repositories as well... So with a certain amount of automated actions to tell me that there were updated versions of dependencies as well. For lots of people who have Dependabot or similar services plugged in to their depositories, they're gonna get regular amounts of updates - either pull requests or issues - telling them that there's something to update...
+
+So the number of projects you have kind of multiplies the amount of notifications you get, and it can quickly kind of -- the thing I didn't want to do was to stop working on those projects. That would be the other way to solve my notification problems - it'd be like "I can't do this much work." But if felt like a solvable problem to actually enable me to effectively handle more things, rather than it being like "I'm overwhelmed by the amount of humans incoming." Actually, the tooling was failing me, so I kind of just tackled it in similar way that I tackled 24 Pull Requests or Libraries, which is "Let me see if I can spin up a basic Rails app that does just enough to get by, open source it", and encourage other people, if they have the same problem, to dive in and to add their take to it, or to drive it in a way that they feel would improve it.
+
+We've had something like  80 different people contribute some very significant features and design work to Octobox over the past couple of years, that have made it into this kind of really nice, well-rounded, solid tool, that people actually really depend on to get work done now.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Were you surprised by how many people shared in this problem space in terms of needing Octobox the way that you did, considering how prolific you are with the open source work, and then 24 Pull Requests just getting so much attention, as well as Libraries being spread [unintelligible 00:18:01.01] but that's another reason why it hasn't been too much of an issue for me - we have very few repos in terms of number count... But when you have a single project that has maybe 20 repos, it's very hard to track everything.
+
+One thing that surprised me - maybe it doesn't surprise me, but... Well, it does, but it shouldn't. I'm live-thinking this through... It's just the amount of people that have been like "This is THE thing that I've been waiting for. This solves a huge problem for me", which goes to show how many maintainers out there are really drowning in our inboxes, or drowning in our notifications.
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** The thing that surprised me the most is that the amount of notifications I get is tiny compared to people who are maintaining projects as big as VS Code, or Electron. They get absolutely drowned in notifications, and have already had a number of systems in place. Mike McQuaid, who is the maintainer of Homebrew - Homebrew is one of the most active repositories on GitHub, or at least the Formula repository, with updates coming in for new versions of a different Formula multiple times a day... And then actually having the codebase move forward and have to keep up with all the macOS updates...
+
+He's had to build up sets of clever Gmail filters to be able just to compartmentalize all of those different things, so that it doesn't just overwhelm him. That felt like such a -- it's a clever hack, but it's such a hack to have to use Gmail to augment the features in GitHub; especially as a kind of allergic to email, that was not particularly useful for me, and it felt like having something that was specific to the developer problem was kind of what (I guess) kept my interest in the project past that simple "Oh, I've got a basic thing working here."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[20:13\] 4.74 million notifications managed, and counting. That's quite a few. Ben, you were gonna say something? Go ahead...
+
+**Benjamin Nickolls:** I was gonna say as well - in my opinion, Mike has also got a lot of procedure and process around how he deals with people that sometimes he gets some flack for, but it also kind of works as the maintainer of one of the most active projects on GitHub. So it's not just the tooling, but there's also an attitude and a way of thinking about a project that means that he can get effectively quite a lot done.
+
+I think, to be fair, he gets a lot of flack for that, but it's part and parcel of the problem, and this is one of the extra things that people don't necessarily think about... It's not just the tools - the tools are there to support - but also it's how you deal with the project and how yo deal with the people in that project, as well.
+
+I thought I'd say that just because I know Mike gets a lot of flack for that sometimes, but it's difficult for him, and you have to--
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** He does use [unintelligible 00:21:14.00]
+
+**Benjamin Nickolls:** Yeah, exactly. You just have to deal with it.
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** He's got a number of ways of almost shielding himself from the onslaught.
+
+**Benjamin Nickolls:** Yeah. I mean, the thing is, if you wanna take the conversation back just a minute - you started off at the top by saying that compared to Libraries, Octobox seems like a project that's quite separate in terms of what it's trying to achieve, but the threat [unintelligible 00:21:41.27] is for a month your life was full of pull requests with Hacktoberfest, right? And imagine if that was your every day. The thread that pulls through this whole thing is we wanna try and help solve the problem that exists today for maintainers of popular open source packages... And Octobox is part of that. Octobox is one of the tools that helps solve people's problems today... So I would say there's like a pretty strong thread that links from libraries through Tidelift into Octobox, in that respect.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, definitely in the spirit of what y'all are up to, for sure. I agree with that. I think I was referring to it in terms of functionality it just seems like a different thing altogether, but in terms of what you and Andrew are doing with your life's work these days, I absolutely see those ties, for sure.
+
+Speaking of people who do this every day, as opposed to just during October, we went to Microsoft Build last spring, and we were speaking with the VS Code team. Andrew, you mentioned how they have to deal with a lot of issues... And I'm not sure if this conversation made the final show or not, or if we just had it after we finished recording with them, but they were sharing with us some of the lengths that they go through just to triage their issues... Not even to deal with them necessarily, but to be the incoming person who labels, and assigns for code review, or closes things that are off-topic and whatnot... They have a full-time employee there. They transfer ownership of this triage position on the VS Code issues, similar to how you'd be on like PagerDuty. This is a full-time thing that they're adding to the other work that they're doing, just to maintain the status quo. That doesn't mean to get down to zero issues, it means just not to let it explode into thousands and thousands, so... Yeah, there's lots of people with these problems.
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** \[23:41\] Yeah, the Microsoft team - especially the Microsoft Open team - are one of the biggest users of the hosted version of Octobox.io. The amount of stuff they get coming in is just overwhelming just to look at it, and I'm not even involved.
+
+Talking about that triage and the way that they manage that - we were actually talking about potentially a feature to enable that within Octobox, to kind of have the ability for a team who have a lot of incoming support requests, or activity from external people, rather than, say, an internal team that are mostly doing progress and their issues are managed within, say, more like a project management tool. Actually, you get kind of an interesting shared inbox, despite Octobox looking like it's literally just a tool for the individual developer and it's entirely based on their context and their view of all of the work that they're involved in. You could actually get to the point where a team could almost triage and work through a certain amount of the other team members' inboxes for them.
+
+You can imagine, like, "Oh,  I've seen these five new issues come in, so I label them up, I close the ones that didn't make any sense, and I commented to ask for more details on these ones." Actually then, for the other team members, they could filter their inbox in Octobox to go "Well, lower the priority of everything that has had someone else on the team go through and touch these things", thereby leaving me with things that haven't been touched yet, or things that I'm involved in the conversation. Effectively then, the team has the ability to share the work and pre-filter for each other, so especially if you're distributed across timezones, you're able to essentially treat it almost like a help desk, without needing to literally use a help desk piece of software, because everyone still reports their issues via GitHub issues.
+
+# **Break:** \[25:59\] to \[27:11\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So let's talk about how Octobox works, and that will lead us into what y'all are doing with the Octobox app, and the GitHub marketplace, and trying to make a real go at this. Andrew, you said you started up a Rails application... I'm on Octobox.io, I can sign in right here; I assume you can also run this on your own server, maybe you've got a "Deploy to Heroku" button... Tell us about the way it works and the way people use it, and then we'll go into where it's going from there.
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** Yeah, so... Interesting how you said that it's slightly different from the other projects that I've worked on in the past, like Libraries.io and 24 Pull Requests... Octobox has that challenge of where Libraries.io and 24 Pull Requests are kind of the one instance that's running online. You can run it yourself, but it's not designed -- it works best when there's multiple people all using the same thing, the network effect, and all of the data is in that one place.
+
+\[28:06\] With Octobox, it was kind of designed from the start for anyone to be able to spin up their own version, and that's mostly from a privacy point of view, that you just might not want to give me access to your notifications, or to have them stored on Heroku - you might just wanna keep those things to yourself -  as well as enabling people to use it for their GitHub Enterprise installation. So you can actually point your version of Octobox at your own company's internal GitHub enterprise, or github.com, and then suck down all of your notifications from there.
+
+Shopify are big users of their own hosted instance. I think they had something like seven million notifications across their internal team on their GitHub Enterprise installation, which was like "Whoa..."
+
+**Benjamin Nickolls:** That's actually bigger than Octobox.io's installation.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. That's a big company.
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** And another big user is GitHub itself. They run their own internal Octobox instance, which gets used a lot... Which is really surprising, because it's kind of an admittance that notifications isn't as good as it could be.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah... We'll definitely get into that when we get to the business side, because I've got questions there... But yeah, continue with this instance thing that you were telling us about.
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** So the main way that most people would deploy Octobox is using Docker. It has a docker-compose file that will basically group everything up - Postgres, Redis, the Rails app, and stand it up in basically one command, in a similar way to deploying to Heroku, and that's gonna be configured as a GitHub app, OR... So this is where it gets -- it's kind of perhaps why no one else has built this before, because the GitHub permissions gets really, really weird around notifications. A lot of the GitHub permissions APIs are designed around individual repositories; the GitHub app, kind of the new -- it's not the GraphQL in particular, but the new GitHub app style setup specifically for the marketplace is designed entirely around "You install this integration into a single app or multiple apps within an org."
+
+The notifications API is different to that, because it's based entirely on the user that enabled it... So it spans across every repository that that user has access to. So to be able to download a user's notifications and then also be able to pull in extra information, so the status of an issue, or the labels on the pull request, or if your CI is passing or failing on the pull requests - we actually then need to go and hit the individual endpoints for each of those bits of data. The notifications API is not available via the GraphQL API, so we can't do a nice N+1 set of queries in one go.
+
+And you also then kind of have to work out, like, "For each of these notifications, do I have the ability to pull in the extra data for each one of these subject types?" So it gets slightly complicated in the different ways that you can configure it. And actually, if you run it yourself, the simple way is to plug in your own personal access token, and that enables everything, because the personal access--
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's always the easiest way, isn't it?
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** \[31:54\] Yeah, it gives you full permissions and doesn't require permission from the owners of the organizations that would be the gatekeepers to install in the GitHub app. But the GitHub app does come with the nice benefit of the webhooks, so we actually can then listen for any changes to issues or pull requests and instantly react by syncing that data in and updating your notifications, as well as using that as a hint to update other people's notifications that may have heard about that before... So it kind of speculatively syncs people's notifications as it hears from one of the webhook events, and that has made everything seem like it all just happens magically.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I was gonna say, in lieu of that webhooks, are you pulling on an interval then, if you don't have the webhook capabilities?
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** We basically have a sync button, which is very much like Gmail or Apple Mail's kind of check for email.
+
+**Benjamin Nickolls:** You don't wanna exacerbate the problem with people who feel like they're overwhelmed by notifications already, right? You don't want that...
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** Just keep piling them in...
+
+**Benjamin Nickolls:**...new notifications popping in at the top when you're in the middle of triaging them, so...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I see, so this is by design so that you -- you have to go check your notifications by your own agency, and you have to say "Okay, sync my notifications, because I'm ready for the flood", as opposed to them just popping in,  "You have a new email, you have a new email..." all day long.
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** Yeah. And that was pushed, again, by 24 Pull Requests, because I was refreshing the page and seeing more things come in; I was like "I can't keep up with this. I need to chunk this up into at least something that can fit in my brain until I can [unintelligible 00:33:40.29] done with all these, and now I can check to see if there's some more.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So I'm just sitting here, staring at the UI as we talk, and I think -- and I think this about Gmail all the time, too... I'm like, "This seems like it's better as a desktop app", not as a hosted thing with either your own instance, or the shared instance... Was that anything you ever considered, or you just reached for your must trusty tool, which is Rails, and built a web app right away?
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** That was definitely -- kind of the start was "Oh, I can solve this with Rails. It's using a lot of the same libraries that Libraries.io and 24 Pull Requests are using to interact with the GitHub API", but it also works to building a web app that is mobile-friendly means keeping data in sync across multiple devices. Octobox works really nicely on your phone, so that you can actually kind of -- I can look at a notification, and then when I get back to my laptop, it's still there, and I can continue to work on it... Which then means you don't need to build different clients. But you can wrap those up so there's a nice selection of tools to put a website inside of an Electron desktop wrapper. There's one that -- I forget what it's called; I'm sure we can find one and stick one in the show notes, but you command line with a URL to a website, and it will just hook up everything, generate a Mac app or a Windows app, and then it'll pick up the nice icon from -- I guess it's the Apple Touch icon... So everything kind of happens automatically, and then you have it sat when you're ready.
+
+But personally, I'm kind of against the always-on, constant stream of notifications. I like to actually choose and be thoughtful about when I'm gonna check my email, or when I'm gonna get notified about new pieces of work, because it can just be distracting if you're in the middle of some fairly complicated bit of code... You don't wanna have someone reporting a bug on one of your other projects pop up and kind of distract you. So it wasn't kind of a "I'm imagining this as being something that would always be on, and always be able to tell you when there's new things."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[36:12\] Well, I can get that sense from the Sync button, and I also am somewhat intentional with the way I use specific communications. I make rules for myself... For instance, on my phone I will not set up my mail client to pull in new emails and show me the Unread count, because I'm a completionist, and I can't deal with an Unread count; I have to go read it. So I always check my mail. My old saying was "Don't let your email check you. You check your email." And then I can only check Twitter on my phone. I actually break this all the time, but I had this rule; it was hard set for a while - I would not check Twitter from my laptop, it had to be phone only... Just to kind of silo things and feel like I'm in control and the devices aren't in control. Ben, do you have any sort of things like that? You seem like you're keen on that Sync button being intentional... Is this something that you work through?
+
+**Benjamin Nickolls:** I don't mind having an inbox... I use the Apple Mail client, and my process has always been for the last decade like I'll read something and flag it if I need to do it later, and I might panic if I have too many flagged emails. So I would in Gmail use the equivalent of a star, in Octobox we have stars as well, and we go by that.
+
+I'm not the Inbox (0) kind of person, but I completely use the same batching process, and I think maybe the three of us are the same type of person, and it turns out there are a fair few other people like us as well out there, who prefer to batch those kinds of tasks up. That's what Octobox is - Octobox is a shift in paradigm from what is effectively like an activity feed style notifications experience to something that's more inbox.
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** You also don't wanna carry around that kind of mental baggage of knowing that you've got things... I don't know if you have this - if you copy something and you're going to paste it, can you kind of feel that it's on your hand? You've pressed Cmd+C and you can almost feel it until you put it down with Cmd+V. It's there, like, mentally... [laughter]
+
+**Benjamin Nickolls:** You know it's still there, right?
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:**...and I have that with some important messages, or issues, or notifications, that I'm like "I can't put this down until I know it's somewhere that I'll be able to make sure it's there..." And yeah, a clipboard manager changed my life. Once I -- I was like, "Oh, I don't have to worry about this thing going away or not", and then I became a lot less scared of having something I've copied that I haven't yet pasted...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Do you have a good clipboard manager you'd recommend for me? Because I've always looked at them and I've never found one that I actually liked.
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** I  use Alfred, which is a combined search, and it has a clipboard manager built-in, with kind of a nice ability to search through those clipboard things, and I use that hundreds of times a day... It's wonderful. As well as just being a much better Spotlight replacement.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, lots of Alfred fans out there... I'm [unintelligible 00:39:09.16] with my software. If the operating system provides it, I'll tend to use that, so I just use Spotlight, and it's just like good enough, because I don't wanna have to install yet another thing and manage it... But that's because I'm particular in my ways, as we all find out we are.
+
+That's funny that you think that when you have the copy, but not the paste, you can almost sense it on your finger... It's like part of you until you can put it down. I definitely have that in my head, but I don't know about how strong the sensation is as it is for you, Andrew.
+
+**Benjamin Nickolls:** I think that's possibly the greatest compliment you could give to the UI developers of desktop software in general, is that you actually feel that it's in your hand and have to drop it. [laughter]
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** Literally walking around with...
+
+**Benjamin Nickolls:**"I can't get it off...!"
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** \[39:52\] It's similar to like if I've not put my kids somewhere down, that I know I've got this -- "I need to go put my keys on the hook, because otherwise I'll never find them again."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, that's my problem - I can't find my keys, but they're my hand the entire time, and I'm walking around the house looking for them, holding them in my hand, like a fool...
+
+**Benjamin Nickolls:** I think you've basically got PTSD for skeuomorphism, right? That's basically what it is.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** [laughs] Well, I like that. That needs to be like a Tumblr, or something... Is Tumblr still a website...? Anyways. Alright, back to Octobox - so that's a little bit about how it works. I guess this Rails-by-default in your brain, Andrew, worked out pretty well, because it allowed you to create a centralized service for people who don't wanna manage their own instances and to do all the heavy lifting for them, so hence the GitHub app.
+
+Let's talk about the move from a side project really to something that you guys are trying to give a go as a sustainable open source business kind of thing, with the GitHub Marketplace. What are your plans with Octobox in terms of generating revenue?
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** Do you wanna go, Ben?
+
+**Benjamin Nickolls:** Yeah, sure. Octobox is two things for us - it's a tool for ourselves and for maintainers to solve one of the problems that we feel maintainers have, which is they have lots and lots of notifications, whether it's from many repos, or a single monolithic repo with lots and lots of activity... But for us it's also a trial by fire experience of putting ourselves into this situation that a lot of open source maintainers are in, where they have a project which is popular, which is used, and they would like to work on it more, and they need to find solutions to be able to enable them to do that, whether it's gonna be sponsorship, whether it's gonna be donations, whether it's gonna be paid support...
+
+These are some of the models that have started gaining a little bit of head room in terms of popularism, and have had kind of dribs and drabs of experience from people who have tried [unintelligible 00:41:50.22]  One of the things that we wanted to do is just expose ourselves to that as a microcosm of the types of people that we're trying to help; we want to throw ourselves in it.
+
+The main goal for us is to make Octobox sustainable for ourselves and our community, which we're kind of at a bit of advantage - we can play both sides; we happen to be the maintainers of Octobox.io, and there are certain things that we can do with Octobox.io, and we are also members of the community. We're members of the 80+ developers who have contributed to Octobox as a service, that people are running themselves, that people are running  in Docker containers, and so on... And we want also to experiment with some of the questions that we've been unable to answer in the past around sustainability of open source software.
+
+Questions like "Do people care more about supporting a commercial entity that provides for a project, or do they care more about supporting the community directly, and being able to ask and answer those questions with data?" We want to just prove it to ourselves and to other people who are in a similar situation to us that it is possible, how to do it, and that it is repeatable. And that extends for the community, as well.
+
+We as the maintainers of Octobox and the operators of Octobox.io are in a certain position when it comes to having that shared instance that people go to, and having a point of focus for users, that some open source maintainers do not have... The guys who work on the key core components that you just include as a library; the people who write API interfaces for things like Redis, and so on. It's very difficult to do some of the things that we can do with Octobox to make money, effectively. So what we wanna do is also demonstrate some of the things that we can do as a collective community to support one another, to support those maintainers that don't have the opportunities to expose the service effectively and make money from that kind of service, so that we can support one another. At this point it's a big experiment in terms of what a new kind of small, but through a certain measure successful open source project can do.
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** \[44:33\] We're also trying not to be too restrictive. There's been a spat of open source projects recently that have kind of swung very far the other way in the ways that they try to monetize their projects by some literally forgetting where their roots are in the open source movement, in the free software movement, and kind of rescinding on those basic freedoms of free software.
+
+It feels like there are ways to get around that without needing to literally put up big roadblocks, and that kind of works out really nicely with the way that Octobox works, because because it's open source and because it's AGPL licensed, we don't ask for the copyright of people who are contributing, so we can't change the license without literally reaching out to everyone, or without ripping out all of their contributions, which we're definitely not going to do.
+
+So actually, if people don't like the service that we offer via Octobox.io, they can always go and run their own version. That keeps us honest to a certain degree, and kind of avoids us poisoning our own well, or kind of trying to take everything for ourselves. It forces us to act as good actors within the community, whilst providing a service which people see as valuable enough to pay for.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What's pretty cool here - you talk about the experiment that you are doing, Ben, and you guys have Octobox free for open source projects, with basic notifications for private projects. Of course, it's also open source, you run your own instance, so if you wanna do it that way, that's all good. We're talking about Octobox.io. And then it says "To add enhanced notifications for private repositories to your organization's account, there's two ways to pay", and I think this speaks to what you were talking about, Ben, where they'd rather provide funding to a community versus to a commercial enterprise that's really supporting that community, but is somehow distinct from it in terms of limited participation... So you have an Open Collective donation, and then you also have the GitHub Marketplace option.
+
+**Benjamin Nickolls:** Yeah. And then we have another page underneath our Pricing page that explains "Wait... What?", which is kind of like... [laughter] It's kind of like, "You probably need a little bit of a back-story in order to understand why we're telling you that you can pay for this exact same thing two different ways." It just explains what we're trying to do, and it's just proving to ourselves - if other people are gonna do something like Octobox, should they create a company, should they have that company set up as a shell that basically provides for themselves and their community, or should they just go whole hog for the community, and which one is more successful?
+
+I mean, sample size of one, but this isn't the only experiment that we're gonna do... But I do think it needs some explanation. And I'd also shout out for the whole "What you're paying for enhanced notifications" - a lot of that is to do with the dance around the notifications API versus the way in which GitHub apps work as well, so...
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** Yeah... I think we're gonna try and simplify that a little bit in the new year...
+
+**Benjamin Nickolls:** I think we have to.
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** \[47:52\] It often confuses people, and they think either "Oh, is this gonna be like having to pay $100/user/month?" Or sometimes they think "Oh, I don't need to pay for anything", because everything continues to work with the basic notifications... So I think we've exposed the levels of permissions a little bit too much, with kind of my developer hat on, compared to -- someone who comes to it without understanding the complications involved often won't appreciate that, and we should do a better job of explaining it, or hiding the complexity.
+
+**Benjamin Nickolls:** Initially it was actually just a lie. It's easier to explain to people that the standard [unintelligible 00:48:44.09] "Free for open source, paid for private projects", but then with the notifications API you get some small amount of private repo notification information as well, and people are like "Hang on, there's something wrong... I've got some private data here." Like, "No, no... That's the way it works. We were lying to you effectively, because we were trying to help you understand it easier." So it's an experiment, and it's still very early on.
+
+I think -- when did we go live on the GitHub Marketplace, Andrew? It was probably about four, five, six weeks ago maybe?
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** Yeah, six weeks maybe.
+
+**Benjamin Nickolls:** Six weeks, yeah... So we're still kind of finding our feet on how to talk about the service and what you're paying for, but we'll keep experimenting with that. Going back to the business model though - one of the other things that we're trying to find our feet on and experiment with, and kind of demonstrate to ourselves and others that this might be a responsible way of running an open source company is doing things like saying "We're gonna share 15% of our revenue as a commercial company with the community as well", because we don't want -- if the experiment about "Hey, do you wanna pay like a commercial entity, or do you wanna pay the community?" to end up with "People wanna pay the commercial company", which means Ben and Andrew are gonna win. We want to make sure that the company is tied to the community in such a way that it has to provide for its community, as well.
+
+So there are various things that we're doing as an  experiment that aren't just overtly user-facing in terms of pricing, but they're also kind of behind the scenes in terms of how we set the company up, how we commit the company to the community... And in the future, the goal is if the commercial company holds more revenue than people have donated to the community, to pull people from the community into the commercial company as contractors, employees and so on, and work out how that relationship would work most effectively, so that people have the protection of a commercial company that owns Octobox.io in this particular instance, and they also have the freedom to come in and do paid pieces of work on not only Octobox as an open source project, which has benefits for the whole community, but maybe even specifically for Octobox.io if they see something that needs to be done on that particular instance.
+
+So it's all an experiment, it's all gonna be as well documented and publicized as we possibly can when we have that evidence. Andrew and I - we both live and die by the evidence of the data that we collect, that comes back from working with things like libraries, where we have this vast wealth of data that we can pull from.
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** Talking of data - we've literally turned off Google Analytics on Octobox.io last week... To give ourselves just a little bit more challenge.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I was gonna say, because you don't want data...? I thought you guys were evidence-based.
+
+**Benjamin Nickolls:** Yeah, but also, my background is in computer security and I'm a massive privacy wonk. [laughs]
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** \[51:42\] It turns out that quite a lot of developers actually block Google Analytics, as well... Comparing the data that we were seeing from usage on Octobox.io from Google Analytics, compared to coming through Cloudflare and compared to our server logs - it was wildly different, so we could really rely on it to make many good decisions anyway... So we figured we'll just cut Google out of it, make the page more secure, make it faster, and stop exposing people's data out there, while still being able to have a good indication of how people are using it via Cloudflare and our own server logs.
+
+The other area we don't have much visibility on is how much it gets used on individual instances, so... It's been downloaded almost 600,000 times from Docker Hub. We have little visibility, but I get the feeling that there is a lot more going on with Octobox outside of our control. People want Octobox to continue to work and be developed, as well as kind of integrating with what Microsoft are pushing forward with the changes they've recently came in and started to encourage... So you just see the bookmarks have shown up in notifications, so you can bookmark an individual notification - we'd like to be able to feed that back and kind of sync it up with the stars in Octobox, so that you can have your data the same in both places.
+
+So it's not like Octobox is gonna be a done project any time soon and we won't need ongoing maintenance. There's a lot of work to keep it moving forward, with this moving target that is the GitHub universe.
+
+# **Break:** \[53:47\] to \[56:25\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Andrew, one thing that you mentioned is how GitHub has recently put some efforts into notifications with the bookmark feature. We know GitHub under new management, new CEO, Nat Friedman - he seems to be very focused on small polish and improvements to areas that maybe have been neglected over the last few years, that power users such as maintainers care about... And of course, Octobox is all about the power user.
+
+Any concerns with GitHub basically building what you guys have built internally, as a first-party thing? Of course, anytime you build on a platform you don't wanna get sherlocked, as the Mac community well knows... Apple is known to sherlock their platform vendors. And here you are, you're on the GitHub Marketplace... What are your concerns about GitHub and replicating some of these features and making Octobox not quite so intriguing to folks?
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** I kind of swing backwards and forwards on this, but I have spoken to a few people internally at GitHub since the acquisition, and I'm fairly confident that Octobox isn't in their line of sight right now. Octobox really works well for a particular kind of user - the users who are not wanting to use email, but are getting a load of notifications and are driving across a number of different repositories, which is actually quite a particular set of users... And trying to solve those problems while still enabling all of the other kinds of users that are on GitHub actually becomes incredibly difficult.
+
+We can kind of lean on the fact that we're only solving problems for a particular kind of power user, that we can be like "Well, actually, Octobox might not be for you if you're okay using email." Or "If you only get a few notifications or you're not working with many other people on a private repository, that's okay. Octobox isn't for you. But you can use it if you like." But we're really gonna focus on making those people who are doing huge amounts of work on managing a lot of communication to really make those people seem like they've got super-powers, because they've kind of been struggling for a long time... And a lot of the testimonials we get are people kind of suddenly feeling like they're back in control or they're able to actually then start to take on more things. You're kind of like, "Oh, I could never possibly watch this repo, because I already get too many notifications." And then suddenly, you're like, "Actually, maybe I can."
+
+I personally started watching the Ruby on Rails repository again, after I guess five years of not doing it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, wow.
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** I used to do it back when I was a junior, learning Ruby on Rails and kind of wanting to see what the masters were doing. I would watch for what was happening on the pull requests, and of course, then as work happens, you're kind of like "Oh, this is too much..." But Octobox has actually let me compartmentalize that enough to be like "Oh, let's see what's going on over here" and then put it away again, so you can context-switch out to just the Octobox stuff, but when December comes around, I just wanna look at the 24 Pull Requests stuff. Then once I've gone through that, then let's go see what else is still there, if I have the bandwidth for it. Otherwise, it will be there tomorrow.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** [01:00:05.11] That's pretty cool. I used to follow that repository as well, and I think I lasted maybe  two or three weeks, and I had to just -- I just couldn't. Even just like "Meh, I'm not that interested." Do you ever do that? You star a repository or you subscribe, and then a few emails come in and you're like "I'm just not gonna do this."
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** Oh, yeah... You wouldn't believe the amount of -- I must have starred over five thousand repositories or more, and my actual activity feed on GitHub is the most useless thing. The homepage tells me nothing...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, it's never been useful, yeah...
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:**...recommendations are like "Oh, here's EVERYTHING."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** So I can't get much out of that page, because I just broke it from starring too many things.
+
+**Benjamin Nickolls:** I mean, the question is what does a star mean, right? It's something different to everyone. We could definitely [unintelligible 01:00:50.06] on that, so... Maybe not.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** I think we literally covered that in the last time I was on Request for Commits.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's right... That's right. And the answer is a star doesn't really mean very much at all. Because it means something different to so many different people, it makes it very difficult to mean anything at all that's useful.
+
+**Benjamin Nickolls:** But it's an interesting point that you say about Nat and GitHub... Notifications was one of the three things that he said in his opening gambit as the new CEO that he wanted to focus on... And we've seen a lot of those improvements, but as Andrew says, I think personally that there are so many more casual users of GitHub than there are the power users that we're catering for. It would be difficult, or at least it wouldn't be a problem that I personally would wanna solve, to bridge between the two in one interface.
+
+Having something on the marketplace, even from GitHub's point of view - I think could be very positive for them, because it can allow them to refocus their efforts on what might be their core group of users, which are the maybe more casual, medium-level, while they still have something like Octobox to offer people.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. And as the platform, that's what you want - you wanna provide the 80% solution, and then you want that marketplace, which you're still getting cuts out of; it has this cottage industry around your platform, filling in all those gaps that you don't wanna fill in yourself, or aren't worth it for you, but are worth it for somebody who's smaller than you. So hopefully that symbiotic relationship will just continue on forward.
+
+So you're focused on the power users... Octobox is in a place now where it has a nice core set of functionality; it seems like you've got a good 1.0, or I don't know if you consider this 2.0 or what version it's at... But it's there, it's available, it does what it's supposed to do, but for power users, we always want more, better, faster, deeper, more power, so what are you guys thinking about Octobox moving forward? Some things that maybe current users can look down the road and maybe hop in and help out with, or even give a thumbs to "Yes, I want this feature. Where are you gonna take Octobox in the next 6-12 months for the power users?
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** I love this. There's so many different ways. As you say, we're in a nice place where we can kind of take stock, listen to users, feel their pain... Because we solved a lot of our own pains that now it's like "Okay, now let's go out into the world a little bit more, interview some people and see how they use it."
+
+I regularly watch Suz Hinton when she's streaming on Twitch, and she starts every Twitch coding session by looking at her Octobox and going "Okay, what do I need to work on today?" That's a great way to see -- it's interesting; she's using it like this -- it looks like maybe she could do something to help her shun a few things away that like "Oh, this isn't ready to work on until next week", so perhaps features that are maybe a little bit more like a to-do list. I can imagine having the ability to snooze notifications, to say "Put this away until next week, because I need to go check on it again" or "I'm totally not ready to deal with that right now."
+
+[01:04:06.29] Or you're  waiting on, say, an API change somewhere else, and similarly, maybe having a due date or some other way of highlighting the importance of particular kinds of notifications... That would allow you to really focus down on the things you need to do today.
+
+The other really interesting area is trying to get into some more automation, or -- I don't wanna say intelligence, because I really don't wanna add an unknowing machine learning, with no real clear boundary to why it did something, or having to train it up, because what we don't wanna do is have to share behaviors across different users. It's very much like "This is your data that's only used for you." So I can imagine allowing users to say "Well, if a project comes in and it's been labeled as, say, a bug, then can we automatically assign that to this person, if it's on this repo?" Or "If it is a notification from a bot user, then I just wanna automatically archive that... Potentially even for people who have usernames like me."
+
+I'm "andrew" on GitHub, and I get a lot of actual spam through my GitHub notifications where people have mentioned "and Andrew", and it comes up in my Octobox, in my GitHub notifications, and it's completely irrelevant to me. So being able to look at it and go "Well, you've never interacted with this repository before. You got mentioned, but there's no indication that you would ever want to do that." Maybe that is actual spam, and that could just be automatically moved away.
+
+But rather than try and do it in a one-size-fits-all, I feel like doing Gmail-style filters and automated actions would probably be the best way to allow developers to build the "if this, then that" that they need, rather than try and make a set of simple actions  that would be very easy to do, because the power users are gonna be like, "Well, I've got these very specific sets of things I wanna do when these things happen", and Octobox already has a really powerful search that can let you filter down by every different kind of state to get exactly what you need; every time that there's a state change, fire off, see if there's any search results that match that, and run that particular action on them.
+
+**Benjamin Nickolls:** I think there's also some of the stuff that we might see coming in the more medium-term, as well. At the moment it's just in beta, but we have the thread view, which we'll show you the content from the thread of that notification within Octobox, rolling that out to users and putting more time into that, so that people don't have to jump out of Octobox as readily as they may already be... And then that can kind of build into some of the potential team discussion stuff in the future, as well.
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** I've been using that feature quite a lot. You can enable it from the settings, if you're in Octobox.io, and basically it will give you a three-pane view on a regular laptop size screen... So you can jump through all the different conversations and catch up with them without needing to open many different tabs to GitHub. Then potentially that also opens the door to being able to comment directly from Octobox, or even label and close issues without needing to jump backwards and forwards between the different tabs, that is the current behavior if you're gonna have a lot of things to work through.
+
+**Benjamin Nickolls:** [01:08:06.13] There's a balance for us there, between -- you know, we talked about GitHub sherlocking Octobox, but also, we don't wanna rebuild GitHub, so it's finding that fine line between where do people want Octobox to be a part of their workflow, and where do they want GitHub or their other existing tools; talking about contribution to open source in the greater, more whole sense... We need to find that line, and one of the things, Andrew, I think you did recently was just kind of reach out on Twitter and say "Hey, we're really interested in talking to people about their current workflow in their tools, whether they use Octobox or not", because we're getting to that point now where, you're right, we do have a reasonable 1.0, and now it's kind of finding your way as a built product, to add and take away things that are gonna make the users that we're building for as productive as possible.
+
+That's the key, really - we wanna solve for people like us, who have the same problems as us... We wanna kind of do that, between Octobox and the other tools that people use.
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** Yeah. For example, the one thing that Ben and I actually do quite a lot is we have a backchannel for Octobox. We don't set it up as a separate, private repo, but instead we're -- depending on where we're chatting at the time, it might be text message, it might be in Slack DM, but often it's about Octobox. Potentially, with this thread view, we actually have the ability to then allow Octobox users to message each other directly. And I don't know if you were on GitHub back nine years ago, but actually GitHub used to have the ability to send messages to other users, and they yanked it, and it has never come back since...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right. I can remember that.
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** But the potential to have that kind of data, that is not just a mirror of GitHub data, but other data in Octobox, or potentially even having an API that allows users to push data from other platforms in... So you can imagine, take your notifications from Stack Overflow and feed them into Octobox, so that you can actually drive multiple different kinds of developer-focused events that maybe act as to-do's, or things that I will need to check on and confirm that I have done something with them - in one nice, unified UI, that doesn't just fall down to the lowest common denominator of email.
+
+**Jerod Santo:**  Very cool. I like that idea quite a bit. Actually, a lot of these are good ideas, so you guys have a lot of work ahead of you. So Octobox.io is, of course, the website... How do people get involved from a community perspective? Maybe they love that messages idea; they wanna let you know that you should build that, and they will come... Or they wanna get involved and sling some code - what are the waypoints for people to get into the Octobox community and maybe become a user, but also, hopefully a contributor?
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** We drive most of the development from an issue tracker, encouraging people to propose new features or report bugs. We also have a roadmap document within the repository, so actually proposals to add things to that roadmap are very cool.
+
+The other thing that we use is Gitter, which is similar to Slack, I guess, but focused on GitHub repositories, or GitLab as well, now that they -- I think they got purchased last year... So that's kind of the more real-time chat area, and it's completely open. You can just drop in and someone will probably be hanging out there.
+
+[01:11:58.27] And then we also try to make the project really friendly for new people to get in, so one of the design or architecture decisions was to try and stick with Rails conventions as much as possible. So if you have any experience with Ruby on Rails, this will feel right at home. You'll be able to find exactly where you would expect the logic to be, because we don't try and do custom bits of code that stick outside of it; it's literally like models, controllers, views, Turbolinks, and Postgres with Sidekiq as the queue... So it's very easy to get involved.
+
+We've had people build whole features, because it was so easy for them to dip in and go like "Oh, I recognize this... This is a Unix system." [laughter]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Jurassic Park reference? Nice...
+
+**Benjamin Nickolls:** Yes.
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:**...and literally be able to fix bugs. I'm probably pretty bad because I'm checking Octobox so often that I will often merge a  pull request and roll it out within minutes of seeing them sometimes. Then other times they'll get merged, but maybe not rolled out straight away. We don't have continuous deployment mostly because we are the only people who are responsible, so kind of 24-hour ops makes me slightly more cautious... But absolutely open to different ways of contributing, as well as potentially even as people can spin up their own forks. We have a lot of people that fork the project, making changes, seeing how they work for their own instance, and then seeing if they can suggest them as features after they've kind of kicked the tires on them a little bit.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very cool. Well, guys, thanks so much for coming on the show. Thanks for all the work you've done on Libraries, 24 Pull Requests, which was super-cool... Octobox - I hope you guys have great success with this. Hey, come back after the experiment has some facts that we can get some evidence back, find out what people are up to with regards to do they wanna support a community, do they wanna support a commercial enterprise? Do they wanna do both, or maybe do they wanna do neither? Maybe that's what we'll find out... Or hopefully we won't find that one out.
+
+And then also, one thing we didn't talk about and maybe we'll just tease it now and have you back for another show later - all about how you also have this desire to divvy out revenue to your downstream (or is it upstream? I don't know), to the stream dependencies that help Octobox be what it is, because that is something that I definitely wanna talk about. But we're out of time for now, so we'll have you back on later on to talk about that and get a follow-up to find out how you all are doing.
+
+For now, that's our show. Thanks so much for joining us. Ben, Andrew, it's been a joy.
+
+**Benjamin Nickolls:** Thank you.
+
+**Andrew Nesbitt:** Thanks very much.
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+**Jerod Santo:** Joseph, we're here today to talk about OSS Capital. I think this is a first in the industry, a company that invests exclusively in commercial OSS startup companies. Very cool, you announced this recently. First of all, welcome to The Changelog.
+
+**Joseph Jacks:** Thank you so much for having me. It's really, really cool to be here.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So is this the first of its kind? I feel like maybe it's a threshold moment for the open source community. We have not just venture capital, but specifically, exclusively capital focused on open source startups.
+
+**Joseph Jacks:** Yeah, I think it is pretty much the first of its kind. It sort of happened organically. We've been thinking about the sort of nature of open source as it relates to company building, and this sort of broad class of companies that you can call commercial open source software companies.
+
+There's certainly been venture capital investors who have an affinity for open source and they've certainly invested quite a lot. People like Peter Fenton come to mind, Mike Volpi, Martin Casado, Dan Skolnik, others... It's certainly a really exciting area, but what we felt needed to exist just in terms of the critical, profound nature of open source as it relates to changing the world and changing the technology industry and the software industry at large is really a focused firm that also has a bit of a different structure. We think it is pretty novel, and I'm super-excited to be talking about it here.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[04:32\] We actually shared some interesting things that you share recently on our news feed, which was an index that you have - an open source software company index of companies with 100 million dollars plus in revenue. Now, the caveat also is recurring or not, and then also an or, which adds that also potentially could just generate the equivalent of 25 million dollars in a quarter. I put my own sub note there saying these companies have found a way to build a very large business around one or many open source software projects.
+
+I think maybe a place to begin might be the fact that it exists, and there's -- I didn't even count them, let me count the rows real quick.
+
+**Joseph Jacks:** I think it's 36 or 37 in there. I know there were only six or seven about four years ago meeting that criteria, so... It's quite a lot.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's grown. It's a space growing then.
+
+**Joseph Jacks:** I think it'll actually be a little over 40 by the end of the year. Yeah, definitely a growing space, for sure.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You were pretty close - there's 37 rows, not including the header... Or including the header. Well, 38 not including the header, so that means 37. So you were pretty accurate. This is over a 13-year period, so it makes sense to see a fully-focused venture capital firm come into this space... But it's 13 years later. Why so late? It's almost late, right?
+
+**Joseph Jacks:** Yeah, that is a really good question. I think there's lots of ways to answer that question, but one potential way of looking at it is 2018 is a really huge year for commercial open source. I guess open source software overall is about 20-25 years old, and just in the last five(ish) years we've seen a huge amount of growth in this kind of emerging category of companies that you could classify as commercial open source software companies. Your mention of the index that we've been managing/maintaining for several years kind of indicates that obviously there's quite a lot of activity in companies that have formed, that have reached huge levels of scale.
+
+100 million in revenue or 25 million revenue/quarter was chosen as a metric just based on that revenue number being pretty relevant to companies that can kind of go public, or have large outcomes.
+
+So "Why now?" I think is really a function of 2018. I'm actually just at the GitHub Universe event right now, so GitHub's a good one to mention, but... So far, in aggregate, we've had over 30 billion dollars in either IPOs, private equity events, or mergers and acquisitions of commercial open source software companies. Most of those are companies that have been in existence for several years, at least 5, 6 or 7 years, in some cases 10 years... So it takes a sort of similar or same amount of time roughly for commercial open source software companies. I believe it's possible to do this in a shorter period, but roughly between 8 to 10 years to become large, sustainable, public, IPO-able companies...
+
+\[08:11\] And I think 2018 has been sort of this tipping point year for public markets, and then seeing lots of these large outcomes occur, where most of these companies are venture-funded. But as we've talked about in the opening, we haven't really seen a focused firm I think mostly because there just hasn't been the synthesis of appreciating these companies are fundamentally different as compared to proprietary, closed source enterprise software companies or just software companies in general.
+
+We very strongly believe that commercial open source software companies are fundamentally different functionally in almost every way, as compared to proprietary closed source software companies. And that's kind of another motivator for starting OSS Capital - the founders need to be served differently, the support structure is very different along lots of different dimensions, and the companies kind of just grow and evolve and go to market and build products for businesses also quite differently.
+
+But just to answer your question, I think 2018 has been a really remarkable year for large open source outcomes, obviously GitHub being bought by Microsoft, MuleSoft having their second exit to SalesForce after IPO-ing last year, Magento getting acquired by Adobe, SUSE getting acquired by a private equity firm, Elastic's IPO, CoreOS getting acquired by Red Hat, Alfresco getting acquired by a private equity firm... We think there's quite a lot of IPO dominoes (if you will) that are gonna fall over the next several months even. We think there's probably a few more between now and the end of the year... So that's one of the other factors of 2018.
+
+I guess maybe one last comment - in 2018 almost on a monthly basis, like January, February, March, April, May, every single month we've actually seen a large commercial open source outcome... Every single month. So it's been pretty amazing so far, as a year.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Definitely a head of steam going. I wanna hear from you on these differences between these types of companies, but before we go into that, let's talk about yourself and your team, and what makes Joseph Jacks the guy to be the founder and general partner of OSS Capital. As I mentioned, you have a team, you're not the only one; you have Asim Aslam from Micro, you have Heather Meeker, who we've had on Changelog shows, amongst others... But what makes yourself well-positioned to head up a fund like this, and why are you so specifically not just focused on OSS, but excited by it and want to put money there and put efforts there?
+
+**Joseph Jacks:** That's a great question. First of all, I'll say this whole thing happened organically. I've never had a masterplan in my mind to go out and say "I'm gonna become a venture capitalist", or go invest in startups for a full-time thing.
+
+I am hugely honored and blown away by the reception that we've had... And just on the team, Heather is really incredible, awesome. Nick White, Kevin Wang - we have this support structure of founders behind the firm, and a handful of other folks will be making announcements on over the next couple of weeks.
+
+\[11:52\] I'd say, just to genuinely answer your question from my own personal standpoint, I've really just been thinking about commercial open source software company dynamics and developments and stuff like this for many years. That was part of why I started maintaining the spreadsheet, and part of what has drawn me into working at different open source-oriented companies, whether it was talent... Almost ten years ago, or early on at Mesosphere, working around the Kubernetes community... I think open source is just fundamentally changing the world, will change the world, continue to change the world.
+
+For me personally, it really came down to "This just needs to exist." We're at a point in time in history where the investing model for companies that are fundamentally commercial open source companies is I think kind of broken. It's not that people can't get funded, it's not a function of funding the unfundable, it's more of like "This architecture, this sort of structure needs to exist." And in terms of me, myself, why I would do this - it was sort of "If not me, who is gonna step up and who's gonna actually do it?" So I just sort of thought, "Well, no one's really stepping up...", months went by, month after month... I thought "Well, this is pretty obvious. Someone should take a shot at doing this", so I thought "If not me, who? And if not now, when?" That was the second question. If not right now, it doesn't make better sense to do this next year, or in a couple of years.
+
+I think I ultimately just poked on that a little bit more, and now ultimately became very clearly the right thing to do... So yeah, that's organically how things came together.
+
+You mentioned Heather - Heather is really incredible; she's been leading a lot of really amazing projects in work, and initiatives around the legal side of open source software, in terms of commercial IP and licensing and things in that area for almost 20 years. We're very honored and excited to have the team that we have.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Heather wrote a book called "The Business of Open Source", which I highly recommend reading...
+
+**Joseph Jacks:** Yeah, great book.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...of some recent controversial licensing around Common Clause. I believe she penned that. Something I thought of when you were saying this was I was thinking about the different types of commonly venture-backed ventures. A typical might be a startup, which is (I'll just say) "Bring your idea and customers. VC may back you." In terms of an IPO -- or, I'm sorry; I'll back up and say ICO world (initial coin offering), "Bring your whitepaper", and then maybe in open source it's "Bring your code and community." Is that fair to say, or are there some more layers to add on there?
+
+**Joseph Jacks:** That's interesting... I never looked at it from those dimensions, like code and community to VC, whitepaper to ICO, and... What was the third one?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The first one was just "Bring your idea and customers."
+
+**Joseph Jacks:** Idea and customers, right.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Shark Tank is like "What's your idea? What's your customer? What's your sales?"
+
+**Joseph Jacks:** I see, yeah,
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ICO is like "Hey, bring your whitepaper. If your whitepaper is clear enough and your idea is big enough and it's whatever...", and then maybe here it's more like "Do you have code? Do you have community?"
+
+**Joseph Jacks:** Right. I think that's an interesting way of looking at it. All of those things -- not to be pedantic, but I think all those things probably matter a lot in any conversation with either going and doing something in the cryptocurrency blockchain world, or as a venture capital-oriented thing, or just as a general startup raising money, whether it's open source or not... I think for us, we fundamentally take a very technical approach, and definitely look at the code and authentic open source nature of a given company and team and project, and then sort of reason up from there. So I'd definitely say the distinction, at least for whitepaper to ICO reasoning - it's different, for sure. But yeah, that's definitely an interesting way of looking at it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[16:25\] We should also mention, while we're -- I guess we're past Heather slightly, but before we go completely past Heather, Request for Commits episode 9, Michael and Nadia had Heather Meeker on, talking all about open source and licensing, so we'll link that one up. Definitely a good one for the archive. It's evergreen. Go back and listen to Heather... She has tons of knowledge about this stuff. And for me, where I get in over my head just thinking about the challenges of commercial open source is in the nitty-gritty of the entities and the licensing and the legal... So I think you're well-positioned to have her on your team for those things, because -- I mean, you can make or break a business model with those details, ain't that right?
+
+**Joseph Jacks:** I think that's absolutely true. One of the things that we're -- I think we'll be talking about it a little bit more as we share our perspectives and views of the world and different things that we believe in, but we think that business model innovation is a really critical topic in the world of commercial open source company building.
+
+If it's possible to build on what you're saying around ICO-able, VC-fundable and just generally open source or general company funding dynamics, we think that there's maybe 3-4 reasonably well-understood and implemented business models for commercial open source software companies, and you could sort of categorize them as -- you know, maybe one is the Red Hat business model, where you don't have any intellectual property that you're holding back; you're just selling support services and subscriptions, and there isn't any proprietary code that you're holding back through closed source license-based mechanisms where people have to sign a contract and get access to a key and then use the proprietary features.
+
+Then there's the open core model, which -- I think we don't really quite yet have an industry agreement on in terms of what that actually means, but... I wrote a little blog post about this a few months back, just defining open core, what that really means... Sort of a spectrum, it's not really a binary thing. And then what some of the trade-offs are between different approaches.
+
+We think open core is another model under the business model, and maybe a third one is hardware-based distribution... Like a kind of Sourcefire, or Snort, the IP intrusion detection project, of for example Cumulus Networks, the custom Linux-based network operating system that Cumulus goes and distributes through white box switch vendors like Super Micro and others. That's more of like a hardware-based distribution model. Those are maybe three.
+
+A fourth that we're starting to see emerge -- but again, I think we really strongly believe that there needs to be even more business model innovation even broader than these four. A fourth is potentially the sort of like decentralized, network-based, supply-demand dynamics between consumption and the products of a given open source project's primitives, either over a network, or over a storage service, or what have you... So there's one storage network that is sort of based on a decentralized model called STORJ. They made some announcements a couple months back (or a month back) around partnering with different storage-oriented open source projects for that sort of decentralized, developer-oriented business model, so that you can have more of a fractional alignment of the compensation between the developer consuming a service and the author of the project producing the service on the network.
+
+\[20:12\] That's also very interesting, but we really deeply believe there's definitely gonna be more business model innovation, but there SHOULD be more business model innovation... And I think the main reason that causes us to have a strong conviction here is that we really believe open source software creates or generates many orders of magnitude more value than any constituent can capture, and that includes cloud providers. So if cloud providers are building a really differentiated service, like RDS for Postgres, or MySQL, or other open source databases... But then you also have the vendor ecosystem behind those projects directly building perhaps competitive cloud services, or competitive products...
+
+We just believe that open source software is so widely deployed and so widely permeates the world in so many different environments, and it's free to use, so the friction is basically zero in terms of the distribution cost of the code and the project itself. It's actually impossible to calculate this precisely, but we just believe there's sort of a fundamental math constant that you can model potentially that will say "Open source software will always generate and create orders and orders of magnitude more value than any constituent in any of those dimensions can capture." Cloud providers, commercial open source companies like Elastic, like Cloudera, like many others... And then even including the creators. This is a more controversial topic. Even including the authors, that they can capture.
+
+So we just think those four business models, if you could categorize them in a way that we have industry agreement, are necessary but not sufficient. We should encourage and we should try to move towards just more business models in general.
+
+At OSS Capital we tend to be of the inclination that we're not opinionated around a given business model engineerically, and sort of say "Oh, this is the one that works." It tends to be more contextual, it tends to be more project-specific in many cases... But we just know for sure that there's a lot of innovation that needs to happen here, and we're gonna be very supportive of that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It sounds like potentially a manifestation finally of the actual 10x developer, right? ...the open source developer, which is able to generate far more value than they can even capture over proprietary. Maybe 100x. Like you said, orders of magnitude, maybe not just an order of magnitude. But the elusive, the unicorn, the 10x developer might just be an open source developer.
+
+**Joseph Jacks:** I think that's actually true. One way of looking at this - and this is actually a study we're currently working on, so I can give you a quick preview. Some data we'll be releasing here and some research, but if you go and survey or interview, say, three or four of the large commercial open source software companies -- and I'll just pick out some random ones; I'm not selecting these for any reason other than just maybe they're good candidates... But say Confluent, the company behind Apache Kafka, say Docker Inc, the company behind Docker and the Docker tools, and let's say maybe Cloudera, the company that's commercializing Hadoop and recently merged with Hortonworks.
+
+\[23:48\] If you were to go and survey those companies and see how many people are using those open source projects in the industry at large, how many deployments, and then sort of tally up those numbers per company, and sort of say "Okay, maybe there's 2-3 million deployments of Hadoop..." I'm just picking a random number; it's probably smaller, or it might be larger, I'm not sure. For Docker maybe it's five or so million people using the Docker toolchain, or Docker's container runtime perhaps... For Kafka maybe it's hundreds of thousands of deployments or companies using Kafka. So whatever those numbers are, pretty large numbers let' say...
+
+And then if you were to ask each one of those companies also how many paying customer entities they have relative to the number of deployments of those open source projects, it is probably -- and we've sort of done anecdotal estimates of this, but we actually wanna get the hard, concrete data to publish that, so it's useful for the industry, and also useful for our founders... But it's probably likely in the range of (on the low end) a fraction of 1% that can actually go and convert over, all the way up to the very high end potentially, depending on different constraints and situations, maybe 3%-4% at the absolute most. And we actually don't think that that's a bad thing. We think that that's totally fine, and just a function of how open source works in general. You can still build enormously huge, successful companies by just converting a very small fraction of the users, because the value that open source creates is always orders of magnitude more than any constituent can capture... Which is great. It's just something that I think we should all accept as an industry; it's one of the awesome things about open source.
+
+**Break:** \[25:46\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Let's talk about this huge gap, this big difference - you said there's a fundamental difference, in many aspects, between commercial open source companies and commercial proprietary software companies, and that is why the focus of OSS Capital is important, because you have specific people like yourself, like your partners, who know the difference, who get open source, and can help guide and invest in those projects. So if you had to break down where this chasm is and why they're so fundamentally different - help us understand that.
+
+**Joseph Jacks:** \[28:03\] Yeah, and that's a really big question. I'll try my best to give you sort of a concise answer, maybe in the context of how we're building out the firm... And maybe I'll just constrain that first to functional portfolio partners that are focusing on two really core things that we believe are very fundamentally different in commercial open source software companies, as compared to proprietary closed source software companies.
+
+If you look at legal, which is obviously Heather's domain - she's extremely knowledgeable and has just deep, deep experience for a couple decades, the legal side of open source in the business context is one of the most non-standardized, hairy, polarizing, complex and error-prone topics and areas in the industry. That's probably the first functional part of a company that I can talk about where things are really fundamentally different.
+
+If you consider a proprietary or a closed source software company approach to licensing, it's pretty simple, it's pretty straightforward. You flesh out what you want to build - a design doc, or an idea, or a napkin, or you go through whatever product development methodology that gets you to understanding what needs to be implemented, and then you go and build it, implement it... And then you work really hard to get early design customers or companies to agree to use your product and give you feedback, and you probably sign different agreements to make sure that confidentiality is maintained - it's quite a costly process, from a sort of first highly valued customer, to the tenth and the twentieth and onwards. It requires lots of manual effort.
+
+With the licensing side of that though, as it's a proprietary company, you don't really think through too many complexities in terms of the customization of a license, or the nuances of open source licensing. In fact, if you could actually look at one example where we have a huge number of startups getting created - in fact, mostly software companies - and look at how licensing is standardized there, it is actually in fact standardized, and I'll pick on one really great organization, and I'm not gonna say anything bad, I think they're doing amazing things... This is Y Combinator, the YC incubator program in Silicon Valley.
+
+What Y Combinator has is a sort of set of standard legal documents that they have sort of distributed out to their incubator companies, companies that get enlisted in Y Combinator, and they actually do have one for a sort of standard subscription agreement for access to software, that their startups go and license and sell to customers. And it's really valuable - it sort of short-circuits the cost and complexity of hiring a lawyer, and drafting a custom agreement, and figuring out exactly what terms you want to implement... Because all those things are pretty standardized, Y Combinator just says "Hey, use this template subscription SaaS software agreement", whether it's an actual SaaS offering delivered over an API, or whether it's on a cloud provider, or you're gonna ship a custom proprietary binary to someone... Whatever it is, just use this license. And it's really helpful, it's extremely useful for the companies in Y Combinator, because it just gets them going without any friction. There's really no need to hire a lawyer, and you can often times just get customers to look at that, and it's something that the industry has sufficiently agreed upon as terms that aren't super-complex and onerous.
+
+\[32:04\] So that's one dimension. We have sort of the standardization of licensing for proprietary closed source companies that are building software-based products. Y Combinator produces something like -- I think it's on the order of 600 or so startups per year, so that's quite a good reference point.
+
+On the open source side of things though however, the complexities are astronomical. You first have to take into account when you open source a piece of software, which license you're gonna choose. Do you choose Apache? Do you choose BSD? MIT? GPL? MPL? Affero? Which version of the GPL do you choose? What copyleft constraints are you interested in protecting? There's a vast array of choices there. However, we've sort of standardized on the open source licensing aspect, quite a lot of industry agreements around Apache 2.0 being really valuable. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation actually encourages -- I don't believe it's a hard requirement, but they strongly encourage new projects to use the Apache 2.0 license. We also have quite a lot of industry standardization around the MIT license, and around MPL 2.0, which is great, which Heather on our team helped write and was on the team that implemented the Mozilla Public License version two... And then we also have quite a lot of industry agreement on the trade-offs and the constraints and the reasons why say Apache 2.0 is a really good license to standardize on.
+
+So let's say you're a startup and you say "Okay, great, we've got a new project, we're going to release it as an Apache 2.0 licensed piece of code, we're gonna open up the repo and call it a day", and that's a pretty fast decision. However, when you want to build a product around that commercial open source company, that sort of builds on that Apache 2.0-based project, you run into all kinds of complexities. It's not a simple matter of saying "Okay, we've got 20,000 companies using this open source project, and we want to go and use the Y Combinator (I'm not picking on Y Combinator, but...), we'll just bolt on the Y Combinator terms of service, and IP, and warranty, and indemnification, and trademarking, and all the sort of template terms - we're gonna just bolt on that agreement to our open source license, and maybe hold back some code in a private repo and just distribute that to customers." That would not work, for a myriad of reasons.
+
+What we see with commercial open source licensing in these commercial open source companies, what we've observed - and Heather has been very close to this - is there are actual full-time legal teams, typically headed up by a general counsel, which is a similar role in proprietary software companies... But what they do is basically they spend a huge amount of energy and effort, case-by-case, relative to the project that a company is based on, and they write custom agreements from scratch. The cost and complexity of writing those custom agreements for the commercial proprietary bits on top of the open source project are very nuanced and tailored to what kind of product they're building, and how they're going to market, and what transaction volume looks like in terms of the size of the customer base, how large the deals are, how strategic customers are, what needs the customers have in terms of the indemnification side of things, and multiples, and the warranties... There's just a huge \[unintelligible 00:35:48.26\] of legal customization that goes into those agreements. They're often called Master Software License and Service Agreements (MSLSAs).
+
+This is one of the things that we're kind of scratching on and working on... You mentioned Commons Clause, which caused quite an uproar and a lot of excitement in the industry, which Heather did author...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[36:15\] I didn't see anything from her though on the response, just earmarking that...
+
+**Joseph Jacks:** Yeah, for sure. I'll come back to that in a second, but basically just commenting on the standardization side of things, if you look at the opportunity to potentially have a level of standardization on the commercial licensing side of things for open source that we have for the open source licensing part of projects, so Apache and GPL (let's say) being really standardized, if we had some industry agreement on the terms and the constraints of how intellectual property is protected for the commercial proprietary parts of an open source based product, that would radically deliver efficiencies to large commercial open source companies on one dimension, and it would reduce the burden and the cost of frankly building a product, going to market and dealing with a bunch of other downstream effects that come from costly legal agreements, overhead, negotiations, large contracts and many other things.
+
+That's how the legal side of commercial open source company building is very different from the proprietary \[unintelligible 00:37:42.11\]. This was a very long answer...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, it's super-hairy, and it's probably the main problem space that people need help solving right out of the bat, or maybe as they bring their product to market. It could even have implications on how you go about building things.
+
+Definitely a huge difference, like you say - with proprietary companies licensing is very straightforward. YC startups have a canned thing; I'm sure you can buy off-the-shelf ones or you can hire a lawyer, and you basically build a license and you're done. But for commercial open source companies, it's a quagmire. They definitely need counsel, need advice, and it's a place where you all can bring a lot of value for people getting started.
+
+You said you were gonna give us two. I know that was a big one. Do you wanna dive into another difference, or should we move forward from the conversation?
+
+**Joseph Jacks:** I'm happy to dive into -- I'll just say, at a top-level, if you were to sort of stack rank by function, and legal is obviously a really important, super-critical function... But if you were to stack rank by function where these commercial open source companies are fundamentally different as compared to proprietary closed source software companies, I totally agree with you that legal would definitely be at the top of the stack.
+
+Perhaps the second rung int hat stack would be finance - how you deal with accounting, revenue recognition, reporting, auditing, general P&L management, and just overall the finance function. We have Nick White as our portfolio partner for finance. Nick is a really experienced open source company veteran on the finance dimension. He was the founding finance executive, very early on, through to the large outcomes of companies like SpringSource, which joined VMware (the company behind Spring). Talend, where Nick and I worked together many years ago, which IPO-ed as a sort of ETL, middleware company. Talend is a public company now.
+
+\[39:58\] Obviously, he helped and consulted a bit with Hortonworks, but he was also the founding finance executive and head at Elastic, the company behind ElasticSearch, through to setting them up to IPO, which happened very recently. So Nick has a lot of wisdom and experience there. I can go into lots of the reasons why the finance function is very different fundamentally in many ways for open source companies.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That one confuses me, or surprises me, because once you get past the licensing, you now have a model that's working. I would assume for any corporation you have -- I mean, profit and loss works very similar across all organizations, right? Or the accounting, the checks and balances... I don't necessarily wanna camp out here for the rest of your time, because I know you have a hard out here, but maybe just enlighten me on what I'm missing here with regards to finances being different.
+
+**Joseph Jacks:** Yeah, that is a really good question. I'd say that for managing a P&L, for doing the duties of the finance role in terms of generally accepted accounting practices, or rigor and industry standards overall, like legal, I don't think things are radically different. It's contextual to the approach of applying those functions very differently in commercial open source software companies, that you start to see a lot of divergence and just a huge amount of behavioral uniqueness.
+
+For example, when you're actually looking at managing a budget and applying constraints and priorities around where dollars are spent, for example, and how you actually run a budget and manage the flow of money in and out of a company, with commercial open source companies typically you're doing a lot of upfront R&D and development for a given product, and maybe you're also investing pretty heavily in becoming a really influential, core part of the community and the ecosystem around that project, or the set of projects that you're building around, and perhaps also maybe you're investing in non-product development work, which is quite different from proprietary companies. So you sort of recognize and account for those expenditures very differently in an open source company because the value that you'll accrue from them is somewhat indirectly correlated with your valuation as a business.
+
+If you're a venture capitalist and you're saying "Well, we're pouring in 20 million dollars into a company and we expect that 20 million to come out the other end as a business that's generating 10 million in revenue", you probably aren't gonna have anywhere near the same level of decisioning with a commercial open source software company. You might sort of relax the constraint of "Well, we're not looking for 20 million in revenue out of a 20 million dollar investment. Maybe we're looking for 5 million more end users of the project that the company is based on, and we wanna measure ourselves against spending that capital to achieve those goals." I guess the flow of the investment and how the accounting side of things works to accomplish those goals is quite different.
+
+Also, I'll say one other thing, just scratching the surface (it's a much deeper, more complex topic), but commercial open source software companies - the best ones, the ones that scale, the ones we've researched and observed over the years are geographically distributed and they are not fundamentally centralized in one area. That translates to running the finance function very differently.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[44:14\] That makes sense.
+
+**Joseph Jacks:** Yeah. It translates into running office space, lease management, the size of leases, the overall scope of office space and international expansions, subsidiaries, the cost of setting up the subsidiaries, country-specific \[unintelligible 00:44:32.02\] laws... There's a lot of things that can come out of that.
+
+So there's a couple of areas to double-click on in the finance function, but it is definitely one of the things that we think is a fundamentally different aspect of commercial open source companies.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** One thing I'm seeing here too, since you mentioned Commons Clause - and just tell me if I'm poking the wrong direction here, but the connections I've seen is that Commons Clause definitely made a stir, begin with about a month ago, where -- what was the relicense? The name is gapping me, and I hate that when it happens on air...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That was Redis.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Redis. Redis was relicensed, or some parts of it were... The commercially-viable open source sides of it were licensed under this new Commons Clause. It created a stir... It seems that the source code at least for the license was about a month old, and I'm wondering - Kevin Wang (also strategic advisor for you) was the open sourcer of that, via his company, which is FOSSA, Heather Meeker obviously was the person who had penned it, and she's also a partner in OSS Capital... And you mentioned a couple times YC and their way to roll out and make easy legal documents, to talk through sort of all that you just went through there. Is this all orchestrated, is that all connected, or am I just reading between the lines here?
+
+**Joseph Jacks:** I would say a lot of those things are connected, or sort of inter-related, slightly. Maybe just to summarize a thought of looking at Commons Clause - maybe it's like a stepping stone or a building block. There's a useful way of framing this, which is if you look at the problem and then reason up from there, it's maybe easier to understand all the moving parts, because there's quite a lot of things happening in this area.
+
+I think the problem can be summarized as "We don't have commercial open source licensing agreements." We don't really have industry agreement around how to implement the protections for products that are built fundamentally on top of a given open source project, or a small number of them... And that's where we have all this inefficiency, and duplication of effort, and lots of overhead in terms of legal effort we spend.
+
+Commons Clause was really an effort to protect against a couple of things, and Redis certainly has a focus area in terms of their relationship with cloud providers. I'd prefer to hold off on commenting there specifically, given that's a pretty hot topic.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Of course. Yeah, it's deep. Too deep.
+
+**Joseph Jacks:** Yeah. However, the general problem space that Commons Clause I think is a great building block for is basically trying to get industry agreement on how we can have standardization of some kind, or at least some agreements around the legal constraints and the legal terms for proprietary-based product, that has a sort of thin layer of proprietary code, or a thick layer potentially even... But that's going back to business model implementation on top of an open source project, where you already have a huge amount of distribution in that open source project, and the base kind of open source project license is agreed upon and standardized, whether it's Apache or GPL. That's kind of the general problem space.
+
+\[48:15\] This is a super hugely complex topic. The way I summarized it there might even be an over-simplification, but that's how I look at the broad problem space.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Maybe a really easy yes/no question might be "Is Commons Clause fundamental to what you're doing with OSS Capital?"
+
+**Joseph Jacks:** That's a really good question, and I think what I'll say is Commons Clause is a good building block, and there's lots of benefit to the industry starting to talk about these problems with more rigor, with more focus, and I think Commons Clause accomplished that. Even though there's a polarizing dynamic around how certain vendors might be for Commons Clause, many others might be against it, I think what's happening and what's important is getting the conversation started, and it's a really good building block.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** On your website there's four big goals. You have strategic 15-year goals, and one of them (number four) is "Commercial OSS license best practices." So this is like a big goal of yours - to help create this similar to the way YC did with their off-the-shelf licensing, that's like "Let's come around some best practices of how to do this." You call it kind of a Creative Commons for commercial OSS. This is a goal of yours, so tell me if I'm reading correctly... What you're saying is right now Commons Clause is a stepping stone towards that, it's a beginning point, but it's by no means the end game for the way you think commercial OSS companies should move forward.
+
+**Joseph Jacks:** Absolutely. I 100% agree with what you've just said. For sure. It's a really big area, it's something that we think is hugely important to have, a big strategic goal like that. Commons Clause is a great stepping stone, for sure.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Could you maybe just give a quick explain of why it's so important. I know we've covered a bit, but just a quick version of it. What is the biggest "going to commercial" issue that companies face? \[unintelligible 00:50:15.08\] but let me maybe summarize what I think it is quickly, and then you say "Yeah, I agree with that" or "No", and add to it as you need to... There seems to be an organized effort around hackers that create open source because they're passionate about it, they eventually open source it, build a community around it, everybody thrives, conferences, Kumbaya, everybody's happy... And then they need to sustain and build a company around it, and they do, but then there's threats from cloud providers - or other players if it's a different space - and this is an effort to continue to sustain and build from the creators and/or originators of a project or community, and this licensing essentially is a pushback against that threat, so they can essentially protect some barrier or ownership of something, not to keep people out, but so that they can live, and survive.
+
+**Joseph Jacks:** I have my own personal perspective on that, which is very different, and I've tweeted a little bit about this... It's very different from the way that Redis has communicated their intentions behind the Commons Clause. As I mentioned, Commons Clause is a building block; it could potentially be getting some good conversations started, but I do not think it's the destination. There's a lot of additional work we need to do beyond Commons Clause to try and really move the state of the art forward here.
+
+\[51:44\] I personally do not believe that open source authors or open source companies, like Elastic, Cloudera and many others, should be trying to protect against cloud providers from capturing value that open source software creates. I think that is fundamentally wrong; I'm very opinionated here. And the reason I think it's actually wrong is very well-summarized by a tweet that Doug Cutting, who's the creator of Lucene and Hadoop, sent out actually I wanna say a year or so ago... It'd be really awesome to showcase it in your show notes, but I'll read it out here. I think it's extremely profound and concise, and I completely agree with it.
+
+His comment, and I'm slightly paraphrasing here, but it says "It is absolutely insane to expect contribution back to open source proportional to the benefit from it." I think that is very directly related -- it's slightly orthogonal, but it's directly related to this topic of trying to prevent cloud providers from capturing value around open source projects... Because they have no legal obligation. They're actually delivering great user experiences and value to their customers, and they're furthering the distribution of the open source software through their platforms. Cloud providers have millions of customers.
+
+I don't subscribe to this view that we should actually try and prevent the cloud providers from capturing value around open source. Instead, what we should do is try and make open source more widely distributed, more widely adopted, we should try and push for an open source future across the whole technology industry, across the software industry, and we should try and capture the value in the context of delivering differentiated customer experiences with different approaches, and I think that'll make for a really great future.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** To maybe transition into a topic that's probably much deeper and longer, but we've got about three(ish) minutes to go through it, is that seems to dovetail into maybe the kind of companies and/or open source projects you may be funding... Which was the real point of our call, and we kind of got in the weeds with licensing -- and obviously, this is all layered and thick and deep, and that's maybe why it's taken 13 years for someone like you and your team to arrive at this table, but where are you at with in terms of the types of projects or companies or commercially viable open source companies you're trying to invest in? Who are they, what are they, what are they doing, how much are you giving? Whatever you can answer in those blankety questions there.
+
+**Joseph Jacks:** Yeah, we announced our first investment on the 1st of October actually, the same day we announced the firm, and it's a company in New York called DEV (The DEV Community). They're the really awesome folks behind @ThePracticalDEV handle on Twitter. Their social network corollary to @ThePracticalDEV Twitter handle is -- it's sort of like a Reddit, but for software engineers; a really awesome community. They open sourced the whole front-end site PR Workflow for content generation and for engaging developers. It's really an exciting community; they fundamentally believe that open source is crucial to their product, and they're building on an open source based model.
+
+\[55:30\] We've done a handful of investments so far, we've done around ten. We're not really announcing details about our fund for now, but in terms of the focus area, we're very focused exclusively, coming back to the OSS in our name, around companies that fundamentally depend on an open source project or a small number of projects to justify their own existence. That's the definitional constraint that we're operating under in.
+
+We're super-excited to back founders anywhere. We're not geographically constrained, and we're very excited to talk with folks who contact us, while also reaching out to teams on a case-by-case basis.
+
+For people who are interested in learning more or chatting with us, there's contact info on our website, OSS.capital. And folks can always DM me on Twitter, as well; that works, too.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Good deal. And even on your site, you do have this version of it as well, where you define what commercial open source companies really are - if a given company heavily relies on and/or builds an open source project(s), as the fundamental building block \[unintelligible 00:56:38.04\] it is definitionally a commercial open source company.
+
+Good job on defining that. That's sort of the hard part in most cases, when it's so new and so fresh, yet 13 years later, right? Or 13 years earlier, whichever you wanna apply there... But definitions are certainly helpful, because it definitely lets you draw a line and understand where you're operating, where this is such new territory.
+
+Joseph, it's been an awesome conversation with you. Enjoy the rest of GitHub Universe... We'll definitely have more questions in the future, so we'll look forward to talking with you down the road. Anything in closing, anything you need to close out with before we let you go?
+
+**Joseph Jacks:** No, I just wanna say it's been super-fun. This is a real thrill to chat with you guys, and thanks for having me on. Really fun.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Same here, thank you very much.
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+**Adam Stacoviak:** Max, we're pretty excited because you live in a small village in France - I'm gonna tell some of your story for you - and you say that you're the only teenager... You've got a teacher who you call 'sensei' and a buddy that you pulled into this, and this is an open source project around VR; the headline here is "We couldn't afford an Oculus, so we built one." That's the tee up of this whole story. How did this begin? What's the back-story?
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Okay, the fact that I'm really into computer science is a bit new, because when I was young I was more into art and music; when I went to middle school I completely fell in love with mathematics. I was just so fascinated about it, at the end of each course of mathematics I was going to talk with my teacher, Jerome Dieudonne, and I was always asking him for more. He was that kind of teacher that really made you feel so passionate about the subject he taught... And every single course of math that he was giving was a crazy experience, because he was opening me each time some kind -- even some kind of really basic things about math, he was doing it in a way that expressed math, you can feel that he was really passionate about math.
+
+I think after one year of learning math with him - even sometimes I was not going to the French course or stuff like that, and I was going to his course of math instead of going to the other one. After one year, I think, he started teaching me about computer science.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[04:03\] So it began with math, a passion for math, a teacher who was willing to invest in you...
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yes.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Then what was your entrance into computer science?
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** I don't know if it's the common path, but I asked him a question about -- I think it was the evolution and growing of couples of rabbits, and what happened if you start adding some constant and some variable to this population of rabbits. He just told me "Okay, I will show you something... You can do this using this with a sheet. Just go to Google Sheets and you can do it this way, and you can see how all the population is growing, and gender variables, and basic stuff."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Interesting.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Then he told me "There is another way to do it that is better, because you are not limited by the number of case and you can edit it more easily, and I think you will like it. Tomorrow just go to my class and I will show you."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** I said "Okay", and I was super excited. He said, "Look, this is called Python", and he started showing me Python work, and I remember that we wrote this little code about evolution and growing of population, and having fun with some variables to add, and adding other species and rules for all species, interact with each other... And then he told me "You know what, next week come on Monday in my classroom." The next week I came, and there were other students, I remember... It was Gabriel and Jonas.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** These were your buddies, these were your partners in this project...
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** And basically, those two guys were the other two -- because you know, in France there is like a classment... Does this word exist in English?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Like a classment, somebody you go to class with?
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** No...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Did you say assessment?
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** No, I mean some kind of -- it's not public, but there is some kind of list where you can see who has the best grades in math, and stuff like that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, okay.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** It's not public, but every student knows who is the best in math and who is the best in French...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** How do they know if it's not public? How do you find out?
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Because when a teacher gives back her work, everyone is asking "Hey, what grades do you have?" and there is this kind of feeling that everyone knows that "This guy is the math guy, this guy is the French guy..."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I see... So you get a reputation.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yeah, exactly. And me, Gabriel and Jonas -- that's funny, because Jonas was the Latin guy, because he was studying Latin, the French guy because he was better than everyone in French, the math guy because in his class he was the best in math... And basically the same for Gabriel. And by the way, the funny thing is that my middle school was a really little one, but that was the first time that I met them.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[08:13\] So basically your buddies are top of the class and interested in mathematics, and your teacher, Jerome (that's my anglicized way of saying it), which you call him 'sensei' - I can see why - he gets you guys going in math, and then he basically kind of tricks you into computer science, with spreadsheets, right? He basically shows you those spreadsheets...
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** ...which is interesting, because a spreadsheet (I guess in a corporate world Excel) is very much a gateway drug for many people into programming.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Definitely.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** But many of those people have to live in Excel and in spreadsheets and feel the constraints for years, until somebody opens their eyes and says "Did you know if you use Python, for instance (or insert scripting language here), you can do these things that you've been banging your head against in Excel?" and that leads people into programming. But for you, it happened almost immediately, because he teased you with Excel, and then he said "Come back on Monday and I'll show you something amazing." What a great teacher.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow, yeah.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yeah... I think it's the teacher that had the most impact in my life.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, if you're out there and you're a teacher, and you're listening to this, you can see probably through the rest of this call the impact you can have on somebody's life if you invest... So keep doing that.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yeah. I met them, and we -- what is the expression...? We hit it off.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You guys hit it off.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yeah. We quickly became best friends, and each weekend we started working on little things. Soon, sensei said "Okay, I can teach you the basics about C. I've just heard about this robotics contest. Do you want to apply?" Because of this, sensei created some kind of robotics club and we started competing in robotics contests.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So that was when you were 13 years old, correct? And now you're 16, so you've been doing computer science by way of this robotics club for about three years.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yeah, yeah. That was an amazing time, because we started with really basic things like Arduino. Those kinds of projects are really fun, because you can fast start working on really fun stuff and I could improve them really fast. Basically, we ended up building some really fun robots and drones and stuff like that. This is basically where we started really working a lot together.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's interesting, so you had some time to kind of get to know one another as friends, but then also as peers, in terms of your skillset around math and computer science and programming, and working with hardware and creating software; you've had some time to kind of experiment and get to know one another, and then eventually this VR thing came around. How far down the line is that? When did you start to experiment with what we're currently talking about, which is relative?
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** \[12:00\] It was approximately one year ago. To be exact, the story is that two years ago we started working for one of the biggest robotics contests in France, and we made this project which was kind of -- when I say that, people are like "Wow, this is crazy!", but it wasn't; it was just a really simple operating system that was connected to really basic hardware that you can use to control your house device.
+
+For instance, it was like a little bus with pin for serial communication, and you can just plug servo motors and some solar panel, and use the servo motor to control the solar panel, and with the little operating system implement first some script to control the solar panel, or stuff like that. It was a little project, but it was really fun to make.
+
+We've done some contests, and after doing it, we were like, "Okay, so this project was really fun, but now we need to find another project." I think it was the wrong way to approach this, just sitting and saying "We have to find something else." And doing this, we started to have some really bad ideas, like "Hey, we can build some kind of drones that we will control with this", and some kind of fun brainstorm where you can have some crazy and really bad ideas...
+
+We decided that we will watch again Sword Art Online, which is one of my favorite anime... Did you ever watch this anime?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Say the name again?
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Sword Art Online.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** No, I've never heard of it. Tell us.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** It's an anime where the main character, Kirito, is using VR headsets, and he is plunged into a role-play video game.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So a world within a world, hm...
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** We saw it and we were like, "Oh, we need to build our own virtual world and spend time after school in this virtual world" and creating some kind of VR experience of World of Warcraft, where we could spend hours and hours.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Life imitates art. You see it, you experience it... Art being Sword Art Online. You consume this art, which is this show, and then it compels you to say "I want to do something similar to that", so VR is the next step for you, so it's an example of life imitating art.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's interesting how they're looking for the next idea, and it's like "Hey, here's our favorite anime." And in this anime, the main character is experiencing his/her world via VR, and whatever the storyline is... And they're like "Hey, we should create a VR world. Let's do it!"
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Like, how often do you do that, Jerod?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I've never done that. \[laughs\] I've never done that. You see, I live vicariously through people like Max, because I'm sitting here, and my takeaway so far is "I should go back to school and have a bunch of free time." That would we awesome. That's my current takeaway.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Be curious.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[16:00\] Yes. But the hiccup here, with your idea of "Let's live in a VR world", Max, is you guys could not afford an Oculus, right? That's the punch line there.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yeah, exactly. Because we just sit down and said, "Okay, so what we need to do is buy an Oculus, and learn Unity and start creating war games." But the first step was just impossible, and I remember I was like "Okay, so how can we find this money to buy an Oculus?" and Gabriel said "Well, maybe it will be easy to build the VR headset ourselves."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** And I said, "Yes, that will be easier!" \[laughter\] "Yes, it would be easier to build the headset", which in fact wasn't true, but it was a lot more fun.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** How much does an Oculus cost?
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** It's like 600 EUR, something like that. I'm not sure, because the price went down recently.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So in U.S. dollars it's about $750. 600 EUR is around that much.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So you guys thought that building your own would be easier than somehow scratching together 600 EUR.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yeah. \[laughs\] Because he said that and I was like, "Yeah, it's just a screen and some components... Yeah, we can do that... Like, next week." \[laughs\] At this time we had no idea about how VR works, and we just asked ourselves, "Okay, so we will build the headset ourselves, so what are the most fundamental things about a VR headset?" And the most fundamental thing about a VR headset is that it tracks your movement and your position. Knowing that, we just said, "Okay, so we need a component that will help us knowing the position and the movement of the player." And it turns out that the most efficient component to do that was using a magnetometer, an accelerometer and a gyroscope.
+
+So we bought them and we started trying them and seeing, "Oh, okay, so this is how this component works, this is how this one works..." And after one weekend playing with them we just said to sensei, "Okay, so we have these components, we are able to get acceleration and absolute position using the magnetometer, and now we want to use these to have the position of the player. How can we do that?"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So this is the original teacher, going back to like "Hey, we've gotten so far... We've kind of hit a bottleneck on how to actually know where the person is in the world", and now you're back to math, finding out algorithms that help you figure out what the person's placement is and whatnot, is that right?
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yeah. We said that, and he said "Okay, I will teach you about antiderivatives." So we started learning about antiderivatives, acceleration and proper acceleration, and then a bit about Quaternion... And we started going each time a little deeper about those concepts in math, and I think we spent like two months learning about this math concept, and dig into them, and do some exercise, and really just focus on the math side.
+
+\[20:15\] Then we said, "Okay, this is how it works, so now let's find some good open source library to do that", because it seems that it's something that has already been done a lot of times. We programmed in Python, we created some funny things with antiderivatives and stuff like that to have the position, and we even created some Quaternion to alert angles and a lot of funny algorithms. Then we started implementing this. That was the first part - implementing those algorithms, which was not as hard as learning the math concepts.
+
+**Break:** \[21:10\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So Max, the first step in building this thing was to figure out how to manage all the math required to detect location, and distance, the physics and all that... It's pretty cool your teacher was basically using this VR headset project as a laboratory to teach you all kinds of math concepts, even ones that I haven't heard of before, like Quaternion, which apparently he's an expert in... And I'm just now finding it on Wikipedia, saying "Hm, interesting..."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** ...that that actually exists. He's an expert, and you're just finding it out...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Right. So that's pretty cool. What was interesting to me about that was what you found out as you would go and learn the math, apply it to the code, is that that was actually easier to implement and to get done than you thought it was going to be... Which is always great, when the light bulb moments happen. Tell us the next step. Once you get past those difficult concepts, you have some things working in the code - where did you go from there to get to a finished product?
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** \[23:52\] Yeah, he taught us those math concepts in a way that was really useful; he gave a course, then we did some exercises to be sure that we really understood the concept, and then we tried to code everything that we think that we understand, just to be sure that we really master the concepts. We've done this with the first component, the first accelerometer, and after having played with it and implementing some little thing, we switched from a component that is the MPU, and that of DMP, that does all the calculation and send us the Quaternion.
+
+To be honest, we could have directly buy this component and use it with some documentation, and build the headset without knowing anything about the math concepts behind it, but we felt like we need to understand the math black boxes inside of these components. And I really feel like it was necessary to understand this math; if you don't know about those math concepts you can build the headset, you can improve it, you can even do better than us, you can improve it in a way that we haven't thought about, but we learned those math concepts just because it was a pleasure.
+
+The component that we bought, the MPU - basically, it does all the calculations for us, because... In fact, that will be a little bit hard to explain with the language barrier, but I will try. What an accelerometer does is that it only detects acceleration. What is acceleration? If you akek a graph and you look at position and time, and you draw the function of position and time, and you search for the derivative function of position by time, you have what is called the speed. And if you look for the derivative function of speed, you have the acceleration. To go back to the position, you have to do two antiderivatives on the acceleration, to have the position.
+
+Doing that, there is some drift happening because of all antiderivative works. Those two derivatives took a lot of calculation. Inside of the component there's a part that is specialized only to do that. The core headset only asks the component for the result of this computation, and the component sends us the Quaternion, and we basically send them to the game.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So there is on your readme - which we should include this image in our show notes... A nice picture of all the components laid out there on the table. The one that you're talking about, the accelerometer, is the MPU, correct?
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yeah, exactly.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[27:54\] Okay. So you learned all of the math to do that, and you understand how to calculate acceleration, but at the end of the day am I hearing you right, that this MPU is basically giving you those readings for free?
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yeah, the MPU sends us the angle in Quaternion, and what we learned is how to do this. But the MPU already does this.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay. So that's nice.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Maybe just to throw that in there, too - we'll go over costs later, but that's a dollar, based on your components list? The MPU is a dollar?
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's a lot of functionality for a dollar.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, exactly. If you can get that for a dollar, why wouldn't you?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes. This is intense math... Sensei is a master, of course, but it's not easy math.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Easily packaged math, though... You can package it up and sell it for a dollar; that's called leverage right there. Pretty cool. Great, so keep going... Get us to a working deal, because we wanna go through the components list and the pricing, and I wanna hear the story about - was it Jonas? That got some discount products by talking to some manufacturers, and stuff. So keep going down that path, and get us to where you guys finally hit pay dirt, or finally had success.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** So after having done this, we started working on the game rendering parts. We've done this in Unity, because the actual SDK is only compatible with Unity. But we will release one for Unreal soon.
+
+After some time working on the headset and having created the first prototype, we discovered that we could help democratize VR. We had a lot of fun, but what we've done wasn't useless, and it could help some other people to democratize VR. The thing is that, like every other technology, the two main aspects to democratize VR I think are price and content. For example, if you look at the mouse, the democratization of the mouse is due to those two things - the price of a mouse, I think it went from $300 in a Xerox lab, to something like $15 in Apple's one. So that is for the price aspect.
+
+The other aspect for democratizing something is the content. For the mouse, it's the fact that it became feasible to create gyro application to use the mouse inside of them. And for VR, it's a bit the same. The first step for the democratization of VR is the price, and I think we could help on this, because our headset is a lot more affordable than an Oculus. And for the content, we try to create some kind of easy SDK to let developers create their game easily.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Let's start with the component prices, since you said the first part of this democratization is price, right?
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yeah, yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So let's talk about what you've come up with, because the pitch and the description of the project is "Build your own VR headset for $100", which as we said before, an Oculus in U.S. dollars is about 750 at the time of recording... Let's talk about the individual components, because you do list them out, and we can add them up and we can see where the price all comes in. Because $100 is quite a lot cheaper than $750.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** \[32:12\] Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What all do you need? What are the different parts and how much do they cost?
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** The first one is the Arduino Due, which is basically the core of the headset. The Arduino Due is a bit expensive, it's like $10 for a Chinese clone. But we chose this one because when we decided to put the project open source, we wanted to have a component that was easy to use and easy to understand for a lot of people. Most of the people know about Arduino and they are comfortable with this, so even if an Arduino Due is a bit expensive, it was some kind of obvious choice to make the headset more easy to build.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's not only expensive, it's also currently sold out, if you go to Arduino's website. The $37,40 one is currently sold out.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yeah, but we don't buy the official one because they are too expensive...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So the knock-offs you're saying are about $10.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yeah, for a Chinese clone.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** A Chinese clone, $10. Okay. So there's $10. What else goes into this?
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Then there is the MPU, which is $1 on eBay. Then -- I just noticed that the link to GitHub is the wrong one... But there is the screen, which is the most expensive part. The issue with this part is that the price varies a lot.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You've gotta do some shopping.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yeah, yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And is it the 5.5 because of the housing hardware that you've chosen? Like, if you wanted to do a 7-inch screen, you could do a 7-inch if you could manage that, but you're spec-ing it 5.5 based on your kit...?
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yeah. The funny thing is that some people on the fellowship -- we created a server on Discord which we called The Fellowship of Open VR...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Nice. \[laughter\]
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** The thing I always say is it's like The Fellowship of the Ring, but without Sauron and with Sensei. \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You guys are full of the references, I like that. So The Fellowship of the Open VR. This is a Discord group that you have going?
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think it's linked down at the very bottom of this readme too, and it does say that - "Chat with me and the fellowship."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So if you wanna hang out with Max and the fellowship, check out the Discord link at the bottom of the readme.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Some people bought some 4k screens, which are a lot more expensive than 2k screens... But they were like "Yeah, but I can choose the spec of my headset, and it's like--" and some people buy screens with lower resolutions, and some find some middle spec screen for like $15... You have to do some shopping. It's a bit hard to find the latest screen that you want.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Have you found a difference in like the resolution playing a part in the quality of the experience? Like, is the less than a 2k, or even a 4k screen - does it make a difference since your eyes are so close to the screen?
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** \[35:57\] I haven't tested a 4k screen, but the comparison between full HD and 2k, I think - and this is why I recommend this screen - that a 2k screen... I'm sorry, I'm searching the American expression for it; like, when something has the right price.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, it's... What is that word? It's affordable.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yeah, I was searching for another one. I have the French expression, but not the American one.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Say it in French. Let's hear how it sounds in French.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yeah, in French we say "cela vaut le coup".
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think that means "perfect price." I think that's how it translates, "the perfect price."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Best bang for your buck, that's what I would say.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** There you go, Jerod. So a 2k screen...
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yeah, so 2k is a bit more expensive, but this price comes with a better resolution, and this better resolution makes the experience really better.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And the final component - at least from what I can see here - is Fresnel lenses.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yeah. I just noticed that, once again, Fresnel lenses are -- the one that we're working on is $3, but you can find a cheaper one. The reason why we recommend this one is that this is the one that we bought and we are absolutely sure that there is no issue with them. And those are built in Europe, I think, so the time travel for them is really different than if you bought them from Hong Kong. But you can find some Fresnel lenses for $1.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So I'm doing the math over here on the low end and on the high end, just following along... And if you go Arduino Due and go high-end, and you go with the most expensive available 2k screen on Aliexpress, you're only hitting about $150, high-end. Low-end, if you go to a Chinese clone and you find the cheaper one on Aliexpress, you're looking at like maybe $55 US. So even cheaper than you guys are advertising is if you can get at the best deals.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yes, but those kind of deals are -- we just want to be sure that... We don't want to sell it too much.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Sure, I get it. I'm just pointing out that maybe it's even better than we think it is.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What he's saying too is that it's accessible, and there's a lot of people out there who are just like "I just wanna tinker, and I don't wanna tinker and spend $1,000 on tinkering. I just wanna spend maybe $100 or $200", or whatever in Euros, like...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** 50.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. I think that's pretty interesting, that you can have some fun, tinker a little bit, play with some open source, and it doesn't have to cost you a ton of money. It's something you can do with kids, in the case of sensei a student... You can have some fun with this, and it's accessible to people.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So on the second side of your democratization of VR you mentioned content. So you said you can help with price, and we have a list of parts here, and instructions, and you can put it together yourself and it will cost you anywhere from $50 to $150 US. What about the content side? How are you bringing that to more people?
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yeah, actually we will release soon a big update to Relative and the core of Relative, but the current version came with FastVR, which is an SDK for Unity that helps you create VR games really easily, and the SDK is really easy to understand and to customize.
+
+\[40:09\] I'm not sure that it will increase the number of VR games, but truly hope that some developers will be interested in the fact that this SDK is fully open source, and it will somehow help to create VR content. But actually, the most interesting thing about Relative is that it's compatible with Relative games, and soon we will release the update that will make Relative fully compatible with SteamVR What it means is that you will be able to play some Oculus or HTC games with it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Awesome.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** ...which could help a lot, because if there is no content that is Relative-compatible, it's okay, you just launch the little software and then you can run some SteamVR games. And if you're a developer and you don't want to use the SteamVR technology but you want your games to run on Relative, you can compile your games to be native compatible with Relative.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very cool. So if I'm understanding this correctly, FastVR is your open source SDK, that works with Relative to create VR games in Unity.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yeah, exactly.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So that will help people to create content for it, right?
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yeah, I hope.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You hope, right? In addition to that, you're modifying Relative so that it will work with SteamVR.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yes, exactly.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Is that via some sort of emulation? How is it accomplishing that?
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** In fact, thanks to the fellowship, because they help a lot... What we do is there is a very cool project, OSVR, that is an open SDK for VR headsets. OSVR can be connected to SteamVR thanks to some plugin, and we just found a way to connect Relative to OSVR. And by connecting Relative to OSVR and connecting OSVR to SteamVR, it works.
+
+**Break:** \[42:50\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The reason why we're having this conversation, Max, is because 1) it's a cool subject, and your story is super cool, but on the flipside, you've open sourced everything, and through this journey you got to level up your math skills, make some new friends, play with some cool new tech - potentially even say it's a bleeding edge tech - and in a lot of ways innovate, but then you've also gotten to meet people from the Oculus team, and I believe it was -- Atman is how you say his name? From the Oculus team?
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Atman Binstock.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. From Oculus...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Chief architect.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The chief architect - I mean, that's a big title. And that person said "Hey, nice to meet you. Cool thing, you should open source it." Can you kind of wind that out into the real story? What was that like? How did you get to meet that person?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, how did you meet him?
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** In fact, the real story is a bit more complicated...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It always is.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** So the real story is that I became obsessed with democratizing VR, and I was wondering what is the best way to do that. One of the things I thought was to create a Kickstarter and setting up a company. And I was like, "So I'm 16, I have no idea of how to launch a company", so I cold-emailed Oussama Ammar, who is the co-founder of The Family, which is an investment firm in Europe, which is the European equivalent of Y Combinator... And I just sent an email saying "Hey, I'm 16, I've built my own VR headset with my best friends and my math teacher. Can we meet?" In less than one minute, he responded "Yes, see you in Paris."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What?!
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** And I was like, "Whoa..."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Wow.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** And this day was funny because I've chosen three people - two billionaires, and the co-founder of this investment firm - I've sent them a mail, just like "Who knows what can happen? I will send them this, and I risk nothing", and they responded.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** All three of them?
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yes, but only one of them accepted to meet me. He just said, "Yes, meet me in Paris."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, how do you know where in Paris to meet, and when, and how?
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** It was in the local of The Family Paris, and I just went there with my father. We arrived, and we said "Hi, I have a meeting with - I think he is one of the CEO's of the company." They said, "Okay. How old are you?" "Oh, I'm 16, and I just got back from high school." And they were like "Wait, we're looking at his schedule and we don't see anything with you. What is your name?" I said, "I'm Maxim. You know, he said yes to the mail." And they were like, "No...? He doesn't have anything planned." I was like, "Oh, what happened?"
+
+Then Oussama Ammar arrived, and he saw me and he said "Hey, are you the high school guy?" I said, "Yes." He said, "Come on." He came, he said hello to my father, hello to me, and we started talking.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[48:08\] That's so cool.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** We just sat and I told him the full story about sensei and my friends, and he listened really carefully to the story, and he told me "Listen, Max. I know it can seem to be a good idea to start a company, but I've done the same when I was 16, and it was not a good idea to start a company at this age. I really want to help you, but I don't think it's a good idea to set up a company. But what we can do is I can bring you to Silicon Valley and I can introduce you to some people that will give you good advice about what to do with this technology." I was like, "Oh, awesome. Yes."
+
+What he did is he started inviting me every weekend so we can talk about the project, and he was giving me some advice, and he was convincing me that creating a company wasn't a good idea. I remember the first lunch with him I was so excited, and he told me about his story, and I was really impressed. He told me "Do you have a passport?" and I said, "Yes." And he said, "Do you want to meet the CEO of Core?" and I said, "Yes..." He said, "Oh, cool. And what about meeting the CEO of Oculus?" and I said, "Yeah, that could be fun!" He said, "Okay, so let's say in one month, tell your parents that I will take you to Silicon Valley." I was like, "Okay..."
+
+My mother was like, "Who is this guy?" So my mother met him, and all my brothers and my family, and they said, "Okay, you can go with him." Then we went to Silicon Valley and he introduced me to a lot of really friendly people, and it was an amazing moment. I understood that it wasn't a good idea to start a company, and that I can help by putting the project open source. And it was Oussama Ammar who made the introduction to Atman Binstock.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And Atman Binstock gave you this advice, to open source it?
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yeah. But to be honest, there were three people who gave me this advice: Oussama Ammar, Atman Binstock and Dorion Carroll, who is VP of product of Amazon Mobile. I've met her in Silicon Valley with Oussama... And I remember this because it was really moving. He told me his history, and he started explaining me all this code, even if it's not perfect, not the same as an Oculus, that even if it's not as good as Oculus, there is obviously some people somewhere on Earth that will find that this code is cool, and that this code will obviously help at least some people somewhere.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Good advice.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[51:54\] Right - if it's not Oculus... Obviously they've got many engineers behind that, maybe several senseis, you know? So they've got something up on you, obviously, but that doesn't mean it's not valuable; that doesn't mean what you did isn't worth something to the world.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yeah.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And let me also add that I'm in agreement around the starting the company. I think you received great advice all around, because -- and we don't necessarily wanna focus all about your age for this conversation, because there's merit to what you're doing regardless of your age, but... I mean, you're 16 years old, you'll have your entire adult life to start companies and go down that path. There's no need to rush into that. I think the end result of what you've accomplished is amazing, and the fact that it's open and freely available, and you're following this desire to democratize VR, and you have this group of people in the fellowship - it's so cool what you're doing... And none of that would have happened at the scale it's happening at if you kept it proprietary and tried to sell it.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Absolutely. And you probably would have driven your parents crazy... Er. \[laughter\]
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** No... My father was in IP. \[laughter\] So he was like "Do you want to open source it? Okay, that's cool."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] So tell us about your sensei's thoughts, and his feelings through all this... Because this is an amazing story, if you're flying to Silicon Valley, rubbing shoulders with all these important technology people, and getting this advice from the chief architect of Oculus... It has to just tickle him to have inspired this turn of events in your life, that have led to such fortune in terms of your education and experience. Has he been involved all along the way?
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yeah, he really tried to help us... I don't know if this word can be used, but grow.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** As a person, and not only in the scientific way     but he taught us -- for example, some of my best friends I've met thanks to sensei, because he not only created that kind of perfect ecosystem for learning math, he also created a tabletop role-play club. And we went to this club and it was really amazing to be with -- by the way, sensei was the master of the game on the tabletop game... It sounds a bit strange. \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Does that mean he was the best, or does that mean he was in charge?
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** No... You know, when you play a tabletop game there is a -- I don't know the word in English...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** MC.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yeah, MC. Exactly.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** The Dungeon Master.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yeah, exactly.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Dungeon Master... Now, Jerod - okay, so everybody listening can tell that you grew up in the '80s, just because you said that. We had that game when we were kids... Dungeon Master.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** You're showing how out of touch you are, because that game is still very much alive, and people still very much play it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** They still play it?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Absolutely.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow... Okay, I am out of touch then. \[laughter\] I didn't know that DM didn't mean Twitter DM's, or something... It was Dungeon Master.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Operator overload, but yeah, it definitely still means Dungeon Master.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, well...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, let me say this, Max... First of all, the next time I'm in France, I'm stopping by to hang out with you and sensei and the whole team, because I would love to just play tabletop games with you guys...
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** That would be awesome.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[56:00\] It sounds like an awesome scenario. And secondly, I wanna point out what you say in the section about open sourcing, just to get back to the story with Atman Binstock giving you the advice, and this whirlwind tour of rubbing shoulders with bigwigs... You decided to open source it, and what you say - and I think we've all had this feeling, when we go to open source something - is that you deleted all the code and you started rewriting it from scratch, when you decided... Tell us about that.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** \[laughs\] Yeah, I remember... It was on an Uber with Oussama Ammar in San Francisco, and I said, "You know what, Oussama? I will open source everything", and he said, "Cool. What is the first step?" "Deleting all the code." \[laughter\] And he was like, "What?! What are you doing?" and I was like, "Yeah, there are some mistakes in the code, and it will be easier if I delete it."
+
+It was because the first version of the code was really raw/rough, and the new one is still a bit rough, but it's a little bit better. And yeah, it took a little bit of time to rewrite everything from scratch. To be honest, I'm not sure if it was really worth it to do this, because for the moment I'm not really sure that it has been helpful... I hope, but I'm not sure.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, the industry experience with a big rewrite in software development is that it's rarely ever worth the effort, even though it always sounds like the right idea when you're in a certain circumstance... Rewriting everything from scratch rarely pays off. Everyone once in a while it will, but rarely it does. In your case maybe it was a small enough project at the time, and the investment in rewriting wasn't too much... I don't know how many weeks or months you spent rewriting, but yeah, we often find that the thing that we come up with the second time either never finishes, or is better, but not worth the 6-12 months that it took...
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yeah... I don't feel like it was that much needed to do that, but it was an experience.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** For sure, for sure. Well, tell us where you're going from here. You have the fellowship, you have your buddies... I'm assuming you're still in high school, but you have this goal of democratizing VR, and you mentioned the next step, which is really getting it to run the Steam games, and that will be a big step. What else do you? Have you been thinking down the road, and where you're gonna take Relative from here?
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** I think there are two issues with the headset. The first one is that the headset is a bit ugly, and the second one is that it's a bit hard to set up. The second one is maybe not a big deal, because for the moment we focus on developers, and for them I think it's easy to build the headset... But even knowing that, I want to improve the setup of the headset to make it a little bit more easy. And after doing this, what we will do is try to improve the design of the headset, and then some optimization in the core headset.
+
+\[01:00:05.00\] For the moment, the roadmap is the following - we focus on SteamVR compatibility, then creating all the resources to help everyone create their own headset. We plan to shoot a video to release a wiki and some resources to make the building up the headset even easier. Then if you have any suggestions, you can join the fellowship and give us some idea. For the moment, the roadmap is short-term; it's focused on SteamVR and making it easier to set up.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** On that note, I was thinking about the casing it's in; you may have said this, but I don't see it in the list, so we didn't go over it, but I'm curious... Because you like to go into different routes that you've never gone before and learn new things; have you considered maybe 3D printing your headset, rather than buying a kit, or anything around printing parts?
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** The main case has been 3D printed.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** One step ahead of you, Adam.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, he is. It seemed like it was 3D printed; that was what was curious... Because it's not in the list.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Is it not on the list of components/
+
+**Jerod Santo:** No.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yeah, it's under Building the hardware, I think.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, there it is. It's under Building the hardware.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Yeah. Some people told us that they feel like the headset is a little bit too big, so we will try to improve something on both the design...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, look at that right there, Building the hardware - he's got all these files I'm assuming are in the repo, for 3D printing that part, too. I missed that. Did you miss that, Jerod?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I've read it, but I didn't mention it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You didn't comprehend that it was part of printing the hardware?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I did, but I guess I just didn't focus on it in my mind.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I was just thinking, like what's next to do here? I was like, "Oh, let's tinker with printing your own parts." Done it!
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Done it!
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Very cool.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Anything further down the road? I mean, you mentioned short-term, which is integrating with Steam and offering that. You're young... Do you have a plan to kind of keep this vibrant for many years? Is this just a fun project? I know you're taking advice from smarter people than Jerod and I, but where do you see this going in like two years, three years from now? Do you plan to keep working on it until it's just done, or what's your plan?
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** \[01:02:54.00\] Oh, for me it's absolutely not done. The long-term goal is to have a simple website where you can just click and buy your own DIY kit, like for example you buy some 3D printed parts on 3D apps, some components... Making the process that much easy that even non-technical people can do it. And because the goal is democratizing VR, all the work on maintaining this project will be to always keep updating the projects as VR evolves. If something new came out in VR, we will try to replicate it in an open source way. That is the long-term goal of this project - having a community that when the company is releasing something in VR, we replicate it in open source and we publish it.
+
+For example, a lot of companies are working on pay tracking. That is one of the things that we will work on. And when something new will come out, we will update the project to always try to democratize all the elementary things about VR.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Very cool. Well, thank you so much for coming on this show and just kind of sharing the story. I mean, it's such an interesting story... You have such a rich life already at a young age; I can't wait to see what you do when you're Jerod or I's age... So exciting.
+
+**Maxime Coutté:** Thanks a lot for having me. That was really cool.
diff --git a/Winamp2 JS (Interview)_transcript.txt b/Winamp2 JS (Interview)_transcript.txt
new file mode 100644
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+++ b/Winamp2 JS (Interview)_transcript.txt	
@@ -0,0 +1,512 @@
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think the best place to actually start is by talking about this tweet that you put out first, Jerod... It was huge. It was like 3,000 retweets or something, it was crazy.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, that might be hyperbolic, but it was definitely popular.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** But that wasn't the first time at the rodeo - there was reddits, there was Hacker News, there was other stuff... The thing we're talking about is called Winamp2-js. You can find it at webamp.com. Is it .com? It's not .com.
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** .org.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Webamp.org. Let me share some coverage here, because I was actually looking this up as I was live streaming the other day, the hacking on this Winamp2-js... In the readme, Jordan has press coverage. He's been covered by TechCrunch, Gizmodo, Motherboard, The Changelog - which is a different section, but I understand... \[laughter\] And I was looking at the different dates and I was thinking "Do we scoop these guys?" So I looked at Motherboard, they covered it in like February this year - we scooped them. I was looking at TechCrunch - they saw Motherboard posted it, basically, and they covered, and I was like "February this year... We scooped them." And I was starting to feel pretty good about myself, and then I went to Gizmodo's coverage of Winamp2-js, and it was like February -- I don't know the month, but it was 2014... 2014. So props to Gizmodo for scooping this project up years ago and i guess thats going to date how long it's been around and how long you've been working on this.
+
+Tell us a little bit of the story. It's four years later... What was this idea and what were you doing back in 2014?
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** Yeah, it's a funny back-story... I was sitting in my room, just -- I don't have any idea what I was doing, but a memory of Winamp skins came back to me, and I guess for anyone who doesn't remember, Winamp skins was the way that you could theme Winamp, and the implementation of it was just a zip file that contained bitmap files, which were sprite sheets.
+
+\[04:07\] I guess at work I had been doing some stuff with CSS sprite sheets, and suddenly this parallel kind of popped into my head, that like "Whoa, Winamp skins were sprite sheets, and I'm used to doing sprite sheets in CSS now... I wonder if you could sort of reconstruct the Winamp UI using CSS." I was like, "Oh, that sounds really fun."
+
+So I sat down at my computer and tried to pull up some bmp's, realized that "Hey, browsers can still show bmp's, just like any other image, and yeah, you could do it.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What's a bmp?
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** Bitmap... It's like a very primitive, non-compressed image.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, okay, Bitmap, yes. I'd forgotten. Geez, it's been a while.
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** \[laughs\] Yeah. No transparency in Bitmaps. But yeah, that first little bit worked, and I was like, "Wow, that's pretty cool." Then I was like, "Well, how do you connect up the audio?" So I went and learned about web audio API stuff, and I got the main window... So Winamp is broken up into three different windows - there's a main window, which has like Play, and volume, and a little visualizer on there... And then there's an equalizer window, and then there's a playlist window. But I got just the first one working.
+
+I tweeted about it, because I thought, "Hey, maybe my friend Jake would think this is cool", and yeah, it kind of blew up back then; it was 2014. I think that's when you were saying Gizmodo picked it up, and made it to Hacker News...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, it was on Hacker News, as well.
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** Exactly, yeah. I was someone who was fairly new to the mainstream tech industry; I was like over the moon that I got posted to Hacker News...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Sure.
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** It was kind of unbelievable.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** And I guess maybe just that interest -- I was like, "Well, I guess I'll keep working on this." Then four years later I guess I haven't really ever thought to question whether I should stop... \[laughter\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** How much time do you have into this?
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** That's a good question. It's a long-term project, but it sort of goes in phases where I come back to it and work on it, and then sort of walk away for a while... I'm a person who likes to have a lot of different projects going in parallel, so that when I get blocked on one, rather than sort of being forced to solve a problem in an imperfect way, I can just sort of walk away until sometime in a shower two months later I'm like "Oh, that's how I could do it...!", and then I can come back to the project. So I really have no idea, but I probably often will spend three or four hours a week or more, and in busy times when I'm really feeling it, probably a lot more than that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow. It reminds me of a tweet I saw recently, where it was a cartoon -- and we retweeted it, so if you follow us on Twitter you'll see this, but... It was a cartoon that was a brain, and saying "Hey, (to the person who owns the brain, essentially) are you gonna go to sleep?" and then in the next pane it says "Yes, now shut up!" (the person talking to the brain). And the brain says "I think I figured out how to debug your program" and then suddenly the next one is the eyes wide open... It's just like "You're up now! You've gotta go to work."
+
+So it's nice to have those side projects where you can sort of like step away and do something different. In this case it's sleep, but... You get the point.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Take a shower...?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, take a shower... I like that. You've gotta give yourself room, and that's an interesting --
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Do you like taking showers, is what you're saying...?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I think it's an interesting perspective to have a reason to have many projects ongoing, so that you can break from one on blocks, and still have fun and enjoy your craft, but not get stuck and be pulling your hair out.
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** \[08:06\] I think that's another big advantage of side projects - they enable you to work in that way where rather than being forced to solve a problem... If you don't have a good solution, you can just say "Well, okay, I'm putting that one on hold, and either I'll decide that it's important to come back and hack something in and move forward with something imperfect" or "Hey, I'll just sit it on the backburner and let it stew for a while...", whereas in work you've gotta ship, otherwise you're not gonna get your paycheck.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So there's two kinds of people, and probably a sliding scale between them. You've got people with a bunch of ideas and no time to do them, or maybe just enough time to work on one or two, and then you have people with a lot of time and no ideas. And then like I said, there's a sliding scale, but Jordan, you seem like the kind of guy who's got lots of ideas, and you also execute on some of them, at least. We've seen Winamp2-js, we'll also probably get around to talking about UrlMe.me, which is cool as well... Where do your ideas come from? Can you give somebody advice who's like "I can't think of a cool side project"? How do you initiate a cool side project?
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** That's really funny, because I spent a lot of time feeling like I was in that first camp, where I had all this time and I really wanted to be doing something cool, or to be participating, but I didn't feel like I had any ideas... And I think as you pointed out, now I've sort of transitioned into this other situation where I've got more things that I want to do than I have time in which to do them. And I was looking back at all these projects that I've done, and I'm definitely like a side-project-oriented person, and I've realized that the one theme throughout them is trying to do something in a medium in which that thing is surprising. With Winamp2-js, I think it's somewhat surprising that you can do as much as you can, that you can reimplement to the level of detail that is possible inside of the browser, which is a pretty tight constraint. And with UrlMe.me, which you said we might get into later, which is like a meme generator where the URL is the user interface, so you should be able to generate a "meme imagine" by just typing a URL... Again, I think it's a surprising thing that you could actually do that.
+
+Looking back at all my projects, I think that's sort of the recurring theme... And the inspiration then I think ends up coming from understanding the technology and learning about the features of the technology, and then those ideas sort of bubbling around in your brain and overlapping with other things that you've come across in your life... So this example of Winamp being inspired really by this idea of CSS sprite sheets, overlapping with my memory of hacking on Winamp skins as a teenager... So I wish I had a direct like "Go do this thing and you will have great ideas...", but I think really it was when I started having a deeper understanding of technology and exploring the edges of obscure API's and things like that these ideas started coming to me more regularly.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I mean, when I look at Winamp2-js, and Adam and I often discuss what makes something interesting and what makes it popular, or what resonates with developers, because other things that I think intellectually stimulate us - and obviously, we're in the arena of covering those kinds of things, and talking about them... And Winamp2-js specifically had two things going for it.
+
+\[12:00\] The first was an extreme amount of nostalgia that it evokes to most people who were around either -- I guess in the formative years or older in the late '90s, early 2000's when it was very popular.
+
+And then secondly, this little bit of a surprise factor that impresses you, that you can actually do this in the browser. It has two aspects to it, which makes it very -- I don't wanna say necessarily viral, but it had waves of coverage, and it has resonated with so many people.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's sticky.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, it's sticky. Thank you.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's sticky. You turn back somebody's time a little bit, especially somebody who has actually used this to play music, not just look at as this thing here, which is cool, of course, but somebody who has used it and managed playlists, and fine-tune the EQ to their favorite rock song, or whatever... You kind of bring out this inner child, this child-like joy that we don't often get to face, because you're stuck on a block, and you don't have enough side projects, or you've gotta ship, because you've gotta get a paycheck, like you said earlier... You give that back, and then you go one step further and dig a little further into this open source codebase that, if you wanna learn something - hey, this is how you learned it.
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** Yeah, I think the nostalgia angle is really huge. I think if I have any advice for how to come up with a side project that is going to generate interest, it's ride somebody else's coattails as far as possible... \[laughter\] Because really, that's what it is...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** As far as possible...!
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** You know, this thing has gotten posted in a bunch of places, with comments, and every time I read through the comments, maybe 5% are actually about the project, and the rest of the comments are like "Oh man, Winamp...! I still use Winamp" or "Winamp was the best, and everything more recent is garbage." I think that was the same impetus for me doing it. I have, like you said, this sort of emotional memory of this MP3 player from a time that was formative for me, both as a person -- like, music as a teenager, which I think is probably the people with whom this is resonating the best... The way that you consume music as a teenager has got to make an imprint on you, because music is so important in your teenage and college years.
+
+So I think much in the same that that's what has maybe driven the interest in this, it was also what drove my own personal interest in it - wanting to recreate those experiences. In fact, I said the original idea came from Winamp skins, and that was actually I think the first constructive thing I ever did on a computer... I went from a consumer of software to creating something from nothing, which is I think a really powerful moment for any -- probably almost any programmer can remember that first moment when you sat down at a computer and then sometime later a thing existed that didn't exist before, only out of your time and your brain. You didn't have to go to the store and buy parts; it was just your idea made something new in the world, and that experience, even though I was making the world's ugliest Winamp skin, that never saw the light of day and nor should it have... \[laughter\] But I think that was really formative, and I see a direct line from that experience through to writing software today. The experience of working on Winamp2-js definitely feels like that same kind of joy of sitting down at a computer and making something that didn't exist before exist, just from your own time and mental energy.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[16:04\] Yeah. Winamp definitely has the same warm, fuzzy feelings for me as well. I didn't take it as far as you, I didn't actually create skins, but I do remember -- this specifically for me is attached to Napster in the timeline, in terms of what was happening at the same time... And it was like, you're waiting for your files to download, right? And they're taking forever, because the internet was slow back then... And while you do that, what do you do? Well, I'm just out there download Winamp skins and swapping them out, creating playlists, and just wasting hours upon hours.
+
+I never quite made it across the void like you did, to like "I'm gonna create my own", but definitely down the road I had times where I peeled back the covers and saw the power of programming. Adam, were you a Winamp user back in the day?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I was, and actually your story reminded me - when you talked about skinning - of skinning forums. That was a huge thing. I can't remember the most well-known forum... Maybe you all might remember the brand name of it, but it was the most used, and skinning those and skinning Winamp was like the coolest thing, and I was never cool enough to do either. \[laughter\]
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** Yeah, I totally remember downloading these skins and just being like "Oh my god, the people who made these must be the most massive kings among men. Oh my gosh, oh to be one of those people who can make these amazing works of art..."
+
+It's been interesting, I've actually been able to through this project end up connecting up with a couple people who were big-time skinners back in the day and had made some of these very cool skins, and it's really funny having a little bit more perspective in life, getting to talk those people. Certainly, the work that they did was pretty incredible, but the outsized presence that those people had in my mind as a teenager - it's really funny to look back on these days.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Someone out there is screaming vBulletin, because that's what it was called.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Was that a specific website, or was that just the forum software?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's the forum software. I think that was the most popular, and a couple others that I recall, but... Envision I think might have been the other one...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** PhpBB - what year did that come out?
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** That's the one I was thinking of, phpBB.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I was thinking Envision, and then vBulletin, and yeah, phpBB as well; that was in the mix, too. But yeah, you'd hang out on these forums, you'd find people to connect with... This is the old days of the internet. I guess you still do that, but that was the only way then; it was pre-blogs, where it was like on the cusp of blogs, and it was totally in the era of Napster and downloading music. You did it not because you wanted to steal, you did it because it was new. Maybe I was probably poor then too, so I probably had to, I couldn't afford it... But I don't think I did it because it was like "I wanna steal your stuff", it was more like "That's how you do it now, I guess. The world's changing, I don't know... Mp3's, give it to me."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's right.
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** Yeah, I think it's hard to untangle the experience of Winamp from the experience of digital media, digital audio being available for the very first time, and sort of just sky-rocketing into the mainstream, and suddenly this huge availability of music and the ability to just ingest music from all over with very little friction... I think everybody who went through that transition from "Oh, you only get music at a CD store, where you can drop 10-15 bucks on a CD" to "Oh, everything is suddenly available for me at my fingertips." I think that feeling is probably a very important, potent part of the emotional reaction that people have to Winamp, I would guess.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[20:18\] And not just music that you could buy at the CD store... Is that a thing? CD store...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** When you said "CD store", I was like "CD store? That's interesting... It's not music store."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, what was that called...? Music store.
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** Or record store?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Record store, yeah. So it has been a while, hasn't it?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** They're actually labeled by the media type - CD store.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] We used to go to the MP3 store. \[laughter\] But actually new music, like things that didn't exist outside of the digital... Like the covers and the remixes, and the MIDI stuff.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Bootlegs...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** There was so much new... Yeah, bootlegs. But one thing I wanna ask both of you guys, I guess (open question), because as developers, even asking Jordan, like "What's some secrets to creating something that will resonate with the community?", thinking about Winamp -- I mean, in this case you're tapping into the love of Winamp to a certain degree... But if we're thinking about Winamp as a software product, and what people loved about it... We wanna create things that people love, right? That give some value and joy. Are there lessons that we can learn, aside from the one that it's attached to music, and that was also formative and important to people...? What was it about Winamp that we all loved about it? Was it the customizability, was it the interface? What do you guys think?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right time, right place.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's all?
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I mean, it was cool, but what else competed? You might have had like Windows Media Player maybe? There was nothing that was like that, that was catchy, sticky, that allowed you, like Jordan said earlier, become the creator, something from nothing, that didn't -- I don't think Windows wanted you to change their media player, so that might have been the customizability of it, and the timing.
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** I think you're kind of spot on with the timing, but I think there's another aspect to it as well, which is that it was a little bit punk. I think at that time the Mp3 algorithm was still under -- you couldn't use it without a license... And then somebody leaked it, or something like that. Someone probably knows this story better than I do, but there was the Fraunhofer Institute, or whatever... Somebody leaked the source to an Mp3 decoder engine, and suddenly it basically became possible for anyone to integrate it, and I don't know what the legal implications of that were, but I think basically that patent suddenly became indefensible.
+
+I think Winamp was one of the first to sort of jump on that and be like 'No, we're shipping this inside free software."I guess that's another thing that was a big piece of it, it was shareware, or freeware, whatever... Which I think was also another thing of that time.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, it didn't cost you anything. And it had the catchy song... Not the song, the tagline...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That does play into the punk, or at least it had attitude, right?
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** Yeah, and I think a lot of that is attributed back to sort of the main guy, Justin Frankel, who created it. Maybe your listeners know the story of him, that after he sold Winamp - or I guess he and Nullsoft - to AOL, there were a number of stories about his behavior within AOL, because he was then on contracted to stay on the project for some number of years... But he did not fit in at AOL at all, so he was releasing peer-to-peer file sharing software on AOL's website against his boss' wishes, and a bunch of stuff... You know, after they paid a him millions and millions of dollars payday.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[24:10\] Yeah, so according the history books, they sold it to AOL in 1999 for 80 million dollars. The nostalgia for Winamp 2 specifically - because you didn't build Winamp3-js or Winamp5-js, even though these things exist - is that once AOL took it over, it lost a lot of the things that people loved... There was a major rewrite, new UI, it was very AOL - which is very anti-punk, right? It's like the most mainstream thing company at the time.
+
+Another reason why I'm thinking it's so nostalgic is because it reminds us of a better piece of software than currently exists... Kind of like the glory days.
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** Yeah. Well, you know, it was fast... And I think we have a lot of maybe -- as a JavaScript developer, I feel this a little bit more cutting than others, but this sort of rebelling against modern high-level languages, which are comparatively slow and resource-heavy... It was fast, and it was graphically beautiful - depending on your aesthetic tastes.
+
+The fact that it was a singular vision from a very singular person, I think, and then it was just well executed on top of that... And it wasn't compromised into any kind of corporate requirement. It was like, this was the thing that Justin wanted to build, and that I think has a lot of power.
+
+**Break:** \[25:53\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Jordan, you've been working on this off and on for 4+ years... Surely, it's taken different forms. I notice now it's built with React and Redux; those things didn't exist in 2014... So take us through some of the history of the software itself, maybe some technical hurdles or interesting bits, and we can talk about all that's packed into Winamp2-js.
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** Yeah, so originally it was written in jQuery, and I think it didn't last very long in that form... But I honestly didn't know JavaScript at all when I started the project. I was trying to figure out, like "How do you make a class?", which of course is not a thing, or "How do you split this across multiple files?"
+
+**Jerod Santo:** What were you used to coding in at the time? What's your original language...?
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** I was just writing bad PHP and bad jQuery, like stitching together plugins and whatnot... And it was really this project that taught me JavaScript. I was curious about it, so I'd come home each night, eager to try to make it better, and as a part of that I ran up against my own limitations of knowledge. I kept having to learn, like "Okay, how do you actually (like I said) make a class?", or I'd learned about prototypical inheritance, and whatnot.
+
+\[28:21\] So I wrote it all in jQuery at first. I was very primitive at that point, I didn't do very much, and then pretty quickly I realized that this wasn't really the right way to go about it, so I rewrote it all in what we call vanilla JavaScript, without any framework at all. It existed in that form for quite a while, until then I started to run up against limitations of that, and having learned a little bit about React at that point, I realized that this sort of declarative nature of being able to, rather than managing transition between states, just managing state and then a projection of that state into a DOM state seemed like it made sense for this problem.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Were those bumps that you were hitting with the vanilla JS version? If you recall back then, what were the particular aspects? Or was it just like crazy amounts of state everywhere, and you're having to react to it? Gosh, pun unintended... \[laughter\]
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** Yeah, I think the main thing is when you don't have this declarative sort of React model of your UI being a function of your state, you end up managing the transition between every state, and so then the complexity of your application is exponential of the number of states that you have, because you have to manage the transition between all -- you know, any two states have to be able to go between them... And so I was running into that with -- as I was adding more and more detail, the pain of maintaining that was rapidly exploding, so I felt that a switch was necessary.
+
+So yeah, I switched to React and Redux... I think from there -- it was a pretty good fit for that model, but I think the real technical limitations were not like in the framework decision, but some of these... You know, I think I said earlier about trying to do things which are surprising in a medium; the things that you can do in JavaScript that you might not think you could do. Some of those technical challenges I think were a little bit more interesting.
+
+I think the most interesting one is, you know, Winamp2-js actually loads actual skin files, and getting to do that inside the browser posed a bunch of interesting technical challenges, and I could go into that or not... But I think those kinds of problems were much more interesting than what framework to use.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, and that was a surprise to me... I assumed it was just going to be looking like Winamp, and like the Play button works and all that, but the fact that you can click the upper-hand left corner and swap skins was awesome. And then when I actually cloned the code down, because I was dorking around with it, and I saw "No, these are actually just skins. This is not some sort of -- like, he didn't remake these skins. These are the actual..." Can you go download off of Adam's old vBulletin forums? Can you go download an old skin and pop it into Winamp2-js and it'll work?
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** Yeah, you can just drag it from your desktop right on top of it, and it'll change...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Uh-uh...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's so cool!
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's what I say when I'm in complete disbelief, "Uh-uh... You can do that?!"
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** Yeah...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow...
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** \[32:04\] It's hacks on top of hacks to get it to work inside the browser. Once I realized that Winamp skins are just zip files of bitmaps, and someone has written a JavaScript zip utility, it's like, "Well, okay, you can do it, I guess..."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So it unzips them, and... How does that work? You said you had some hurdles there...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, what's the hacks on hacks?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Teach us some hacks.
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** So the first step is, of course, unzipping this binary blob, and then you get access to these bitmap files. Then of course you need to -- those bitmap files can't just be used directly, because those are sprites... And anyone who's done stuff with sprites might know that one of the limitations of sprites is that you can't do repeating tiles using sprites very easily, because you'll end up repeating the whole spreadsheet.
+
+So we end up extracting the zip file, getting the sprite sheets out of the zip file, rendering those into a canvas, slicing the individual sprites out of that canvas into a data URI; then given those data URI's, you might think like, "Oh, I can just set these as like background images using JavaScript", but in many cases you have to apply them to pseudo-elements, so like the hover state of an item, or like the handle of a slider, and there's no way to do that from JavaScript.
+
+So what it ends up being is we get these data URI's, and then we dynamically generate a CSS style sheet and then inject that into the DOM. So none of those things are particularly beautiful, but it does work.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Which with a side project "It does work" is pretty much what you're after, right?
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** Yeah, exactly. And I think actually the thing that was most interesting about it was not only does it work, but I feel pretty confident that even though it's not the right -- it doesn't feel like a clean solution... It is the only solution. \[laughter\]
+
+I think having an excuse to do something terrible where you're still doing the right thing - I think that's when I know I'm having fun.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So when you drop the .wsz file - while you guys were talking, I was hacking on some fun stuff here... Is it actually uploaded into your UI and then depacked -- because it happened pretty quickly; I dragged one on there and it changed real fast.
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** Yeah, so I think one of the limitations I set for myself with this project is there's no server component; it's just JavaScript. So everything happens inside your browser. When you drag the file in, I get access to a reference to that file, and I can get access to the bits in that file, and so it all goes from there inside your browser.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow... That was something you brought up actually, in your Twitch livestream yesterday, and I was thinking "That would be super cool", and then I was thinking "Where do you even begin? I don't know."
+
+**Jerod Santo:** 1997 I think is where you've gotta start.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, you've gotta go back in time... \[laughter\] Where do you begin, Jordan?
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** I guess if you wanna make a skin, all you really need to do... I guess what you do is you go google "skinners atlas", which was in 1998 the canonical reference for how to write Winamp skins, and actually was hugely valuable to me trying to reimplement all this stuff... Because not only do I have to -- I have to really fundamentally know how these skins get used, in order to recreate the Winamp UI to a high degree of detail.
+
+It's a bunch of bitmap files in a zip, that's been renamed, and then there's a number of config files in there as well... Some .ini files and whatnot, which of course I also have to parse.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[36:17\] It's tangential of course, but in this journey of yours, having to go to all these obscure, and to some degree kind of older websites that have information that not a lot of people are actually looking for anymore, and you've gotta deal with all these ads everywhere, and this weird old-school web, too... Or maybe kind of new school; there's ads everywhere now. It's like, "Is that a Download Skin button or is that an ad?"
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** Right...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Both!
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** It has been an interesting experience understanding bit rot, and how these things that we sort of took for granted being around are not necessarily gonna be around forever, unless someone cares... And you know, as part of that, I actually -- this actually goes a little bit into one of the things that spun out of this project was I wrote a... Someone suggested I wrote a Twitter bot which tweets out Winamp skins. So if you go to Twitter.com/winampskins, I have a little bot there which once or twice a day will tweet out a screenshot of a Winamp skin and a link to webamp.org with that skin turned on... But just as an effort to sort of preserve some of these things that people put a huge amount of effort into and are really iconic of that era, and sometimes it's because they're just like really incredible in the craftsmanship that went into them and whatnot... But sometimes it's because they're pretty atrocious, and you're like "Why is there a worm protruding from an Mp3 player? That's a little bit strange..." But it's impressive, I guess.
+
+So yeah, I certainly didn't set out on this project with any kind of noble ambition, but I think in retrospect if there is anything really valuable that has come out of it, it's that it does provide a way to take these artistic artifacts, which were becoming sort of increasingly hard to share or to experience, and sort of lower the barrier to entry there. And in fact, I've reached out to some folks at the Internet Archive and looking into maybe ways that we could have a collection of Winamp skins up there on the internet archive.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** It's a great idea. Did they answer back?
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** I tweeted something, and a friend of mine tagged somebody else who I guess works there as a volunteer, and was like "Yes, give me all of them in any format." So I just have to follow up with him and figure out exactly what we can do. I think my main goal would be if we could get a great UI for experiencing them, and integrate it with Winamp2-js... But I don't know whether that's more than they wanna take on.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** By checking out your tweets, it looks like you can actually inject a skin via URL.
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** Yeah, if you pass a carefully crafted JSON in the hash of the URL, you can inject either an Mp3 or a skin. Now, Mp3's and skins are both a little tricky because of cross-origin headers and whatnot. Something that a lot of users have asked for is this ability to -- and in fact, Winamp itself could do this; you could paste in a URL and it would play it for you... But alas, due to the cross-origin restrictions, more often than not, that experience is not gonna actually be good for the user, so I've opted to not expose it in the UI.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[39:58\] As part of that, a side effect or a side conversation might be are you cataloging these things in an S3 bucket, or something like that? Because it looks like it's on Amazon AWS; it's just you collecting these as you tweet these?
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** Yeah, so I got some huge zip file of many thousands of skins, and I've been sort of reviewing them and looking through them, and picking ones that I thought were notable, I guess...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Pac-Man Favorite - that was super cool; March 10th. That's notable.
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** Yeah. There are definitely -- I try to pick the ones which are either interesting... Which are interesting not necessarily because they're great, but because they are interesting. So I try to include the ones that are great, and also the ones that are surprisingly not great.
+
+Then I just push them up to S3, because they do have to be available somewhere, and that's a pretty fast server for me to host them there...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Let me just change out this image for something malicious, or just whatever.
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** Right, exactly.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So here's an idea... I'm still stuck on a Changelog skin, so I'm trying to think of ways of getting this done...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I knew it...!
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Here's the plan, to the listening audience... This episode of the Changelog, Jordan has agreed to host it indefinitely at Webamp.org, which is his website for Winamp2-js (maybe we'll talk about names in a second)... Webamp.org/changelog. We'll link that up in the show notes. When you go to that page, you can listen to this episode inside Winamp2-js. Now, how cool would it be if somebody, anybody out there, created a Changelog skin that we can use on that part of this player, so it's branded... Super-cool, right? So if you have skills -- or even if you don't have any skills; if you've got time and you wanna try this out, contact us, we would love to work with you. We even have a brand guideline you could use, so you have all of our colors, our fonts, everything you need...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, or you could just pull all the colors from our style sheets too, on the .com.
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** I'm totally on board with this... I think this would be great.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Awesome. So that's skins... Let's talk about other features, because it's really quite functional. You can separate the different segments, drag them around separately, you can resize... What all is in here that maybe people don't know, not just by looking at it first?
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** Yeah, I think it's taken on the form of like a puzzle box; you open it up and it's like "Oh yeah, I can click Play", but under the hood, the more you dig, the more little details (that I guess just bothered me enough that I decided to do them) will reveal themselves. So I think the simplest one is you play and there's like a visualizer, right? So there's two different kinds of visualizer. If you click on it in the main window, it will go between this sort of bar graph visualizer and a line graph visualizer, and that's all hooked up to the web audio API.
+
+The equalizer works, so you can tweak all the different levels, the different frequency bands... And again, that works actually pretty simply through the web audio API. Once you workaround a bug that I discovered in Safari, which depending on how you ordered things in the web audio API, it would just like hard crash, like segfault Safari. That took me like three months to figure out.
+
+\[43:50\] But those are good ones, and then I think the window management has been interesting, too. Like I said, I released this first version back in 2014, and it was just the main window at that point... And then going from one window to two windows, suddenly there was a huge amount of additional extra layer of work required. So you can drag these windows around, but they -- Winamp had this great feature where most of the time you probably want them stuck to each other; you want the windows sort of arranged, but you wanted them to form a single unit... So it had like snap; so if you drag two windows close to each other, they'll sort of align directly. Getting that to work was quite a bit of effort, and in fact just recently... Another piece of that is the windows have this shade mode, where they'll collapse down to just their title bar.
+
+And Winamp, again, has this interesting UI feature where if you have two windows one on top of the other and you put the top window into shade mode, all the lower windows will sort of travel along with it. So getting that to work was another bunch of effort.
+
+Let's see, this laundry list of other things... It can parse the binary equalizer format files that Winamp can generate, and it can also generate them; if you set the equalizer to a particular level, you can export that as a binary file, and then drag it in to bring it back to that level. The playlist works, and you can export your current playlist as an HTML file, which again, Winamp could do.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What's this file type .eqf?
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** It's pretty simple... I had never actually had to do anything with a binary file format, so it was my first entry into that kind of world, which is good; I learned a lot. But it's very simple, it's just a name and then like 11 values between 0 and 255.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So why can you save a preset for the equalizer and not the playlists? Is it completely different? Is it like just a JSON -- would you kind of modernize it, or would you still go old-school with it?
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** So you're saying like why can't you save the export of the equalizer but you can't export your playlist?
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, exactly.
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** I think Winamp has this .m3u format... Yeah, it's another thing people asked for, and the reason is that I don't have direct access to your file system. So if you had dragged in your Matrix soundtrack to listen to, and the you tried to export that playlist...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Nice choice.
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** \[laughs\] And then you load up that playlist again, I can't go look on your file system and find those files for you. So while I could certainly read and generate .m3u files, I can't actually do anything useful with them. It's again one of these limitations of the browser, where you can do a lot, but you can't do everything.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Now, here my memory isn't serving me, but this snap you mentioned before, when the different panes snap together - that just seems exactly how Winamp used to work. Is that exactly -- I mean, as much as you can... Or am I just having backwards nostalgia where I think this is like the real thing, the snapping?
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** Yeah, I mean... As much as possible, I've tried very carefully to recreate everything exactly. And partially, it's just because it's kind of fun to do, but also it's actually kind of freeing, as an engineer, who -- even with the most well-defined spec, I think any project ultimately ends up being a lot of judgment calls as an engineer of like "Okay, how should this thing actually work to be the best?"
+
+\[47:52\] There's something kind of liberating about not having to make that decision ever, and just knowing like "Okay, the spec is this thing. I want it to behave exactly like this, for better or for worse." So I was literally slo-mo screen-capturing actual Winamp in a VM to see how many pixels away it is until is snaps...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow...
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** And for better or for worse, there are some cases where Winamp has bugs where things don't behave in a quite sensible way, where I've actually gone ahead and reimplemented those bugs, just because for me that's kind of more interesting than trying to make the best Mp3 player, just to make the one that already exists.
+
+**Break:** \[48:43\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm thinking about how this works... It actually works. Not just looks like it works, but it actually works, and you've thought through all this cool stuff, and even recreated bugs, and I'm thinking like... We're talking about usefulness, and exporting playlists, and equalization, and all that fun stuff, but could this be like a front-end to, say, Spotify's API, for example?
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** Yeah, there have been a lot of people who would pull it up and they're like "Oh my gosh, you can really drag in Mp3's? That's so cool! Let me go find an Mp3. Oh yeah, I don't have Mp3's anymore..." \[laughter\] So there have been a lot of requests for like, okay, how do you take this thing which is really just a gimmick, right? It's a web page that you can go to and you're like "Oh, ha-ha! Neat." and then you move on with your life. But there have been a number of people who have thought like "Okay, how do you turn this into something that's actually useful?"
+
+I think the ones that I've seen are, like you said, the Spotify people want it to integrate with Spotify...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** They want it?
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** Yeah, yeah.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, this is them approaching you. Alright, cool... Let's hear more.
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** I'm not saying Spotify wants it, but...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, the people of Spotify, not Spotify the company.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** The Spotify users. Is that like "people of Walmart?" People of Spotify...
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** So Spotify itself actually did have a player called Spotiamp, which was a C Winamp clone that you could run on your desktop if you have a Spotify Premium account. I wish I could remember the guy who did that, because he's a notable guy... But he was working at Spotify and he built this Winamp clone that you could download and run and it would interact with Spotify...
+
+\[51:42\] And I think first they had some licensing issues with it, and then I think ultimately there was a whole to-do about - people were using the underlying library which that thing used as a hacking monetization model. So they were creating fake Spotify accounts, and then they would hack into arbitrary people's computers and play tracks on those Spotify author accounts tracks, and then make revenue from having their tracks listened to a bunch. So eventually Spotify had to shut down that, or they chose to (I guess) shut down that thing.
+
+So yeah, Spotify itself I think - or at least some people within Spotify - would like to see a Winamp interface, and they do have this API that's available online... And I don't know for sure, but I think it might have something to do with the new DRM-enabled API's in the browser; that's a whole other conversation. But because of the DRM, we can't get direct access to the audio stream, so there are some features which don't work. The equalizer can't work, because we can't twiddle the bits the way that we need to, and the visualizer can't work, and the balance can't work...
+
+So for now, and unless maybe a bunch of these things get added on top of the existing web API's, for now those things can't work; someone has a copy working, and once I think that solidifies a bit, I'll share that... But because it basically can't work fully, I think I'm not gonna include it in the core. But today there's Dropbox integration, so if you go to the options menu, if you say "Open a file..." or "Play file...", you can pick from your Dropbox folder.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Can you actually point it at a Dropbox folder and that becomes a playlist?
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** Yeah. Dropbox has a little file picker UI, and you just pick from there and it will populate your playlist with a directory of files.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow. While you were talking about that, I was also thinking about alternate ways to use this; that would make a really sweet-looking iPhone interface or even mobile interface, because it's vertical, and the playlist can be -- you know the top two sections are essentially the same height, and then the bottom is... It's the same height too, but I guess it's variable in the fact that you can scroll to see more playlist; that could be one more place to take it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[unintelligible 00:54:22.21\]
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** Yeah, I've done some work to make sure it works on mobile, and it does work, but I think the touch target issue is pretty devastating...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Bummer...
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** You can't really click on anything... Although it does bring to mind -- back when the iPhone was still like a myth, when people were doing all these mockups of what an iPhone would look like based on what a mobile phone look like and what an iPod looked like... But someone did this mockup of like a hardware Winamp, which is -- I'll see if I can track it down maybe so you can stick it in the show notes, but it's pretty incredible. It's literally just like a little candy bar-size hardware device that looks like Winamp UI on the top, with like a headphone cable coming out of it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, definitely share that with us and we will add it to the show notes. Let's talk about the name - you've just mentioned Webamp again... We've been calling it Winamp2-js. Surely, there's a story there. There's always a story with names.
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** Yeah, so Winamp2-js was I guess the name I came up with originally just because I thought it was the most terse explanation of what the project was, right? ...it's Winamp 2 in JavaScript. And shortly after I tweeted it that first time, I got a tweet response from Tom Pepper, who I guess was one of the very early people at Gnullsoft, along with Justin Frankel... And he said "Hey, congratulations from Gnullsoft! We have these domains if you want them." So that was webamp.com, .org and .net.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Nice.
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** \[56:04\] And I guess they maybe had some internal project or something like that; at some point they had been doing some kind of web thing and it never came to fruition, and I don't know how he came into possession of those domains or whatever, but... Yeah, I guess long story short - there might have been some legal complications about getting me those domains, but I have them now... Except for .com, which I got scooped up, but...
+
+So I thought it was very cool to 1) have a much more shareable URL than \[unintelligible 00:56:33.08\] on my own JordanEldredge.com domain, with three subdirectories down... So I thought I might as well take advantage of this domain, because it seems like a cool place for it to live. But I guess I haven't fully committed to changing the name and introducing the complete confusion of, like you said, news articles and other things that talk about it as Winamp2-js, and then that not being the canonical name anymore.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It could be like a codename, or something.
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** It felt worse to use the new name, but I guess it's too late now. There's gonna be confusion, it's just a matter of "Where does that confusion live?"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What's crazy is that you create this thing, you tweet about it, and then the originators of Gnullsoft -- what did you say his name was again?
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** Tom Pepper.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Tom Pepper. I love that name, too. It's such a cool name... Tom Pepper reaches out to you and says "Hey, we have some domains we can probably give you..." So why did you not get the .com? What happened there?
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** Let's see, how do I phrase this...? So he wasn't able to actually give me the domains, but in the intervening years they did expire, rather conveniently, but I wasn't watching closely enough.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I see.
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** It's a bit delicately put, but that's what happened.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I'm reading -- and everybody else read between the lines there, we're not gonna repeat it, because it's just too close... It's too close. But this is crazy though - so a long time ago you kind of got nostalgic and you wanted to play with this back in 2014 (when you released this), and now you're doing this... I think this is such a crazy journey. This is open source at its best.
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** It really is. There haven't been a ton of contributors. I can say there have been people who have popped in and done a thing or two that they thought was interesting... I mean, I think most notably the addition of actually parsing the skin file in the browser, using that JavaScript library, was a very early pull request. But I think the amount of input that has influenced how it's evolved has been really tremendous... Just people popping in and being like "Hey, did you know this obscure thing about the Web Audio API that would allow you to do this other thing that you would probably want to do?"
+
+While most of the code has been commits that I've written myself, a lot of the core ideas or breakthroughs did come from people in the community. The attention that it got has really enabled that in a way that I certainly -- without people knowing about it, their ability to come in and lend their particular expertise, I don't think would be possible.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It may not be open source traditionally, in the fact that you said that you said there's not that many contributors... However, it's not as if this is code you have behind the firewall that nobody can see, and I think that is inviting for those with knowledge to contribute, whether it's a direct code contribution or a "Hey, did you know about...?" Being open source, in the open, with no (at this point, I assume) commercial intentions, that's the cool thing... Like, why would you do this not open source? It would only make sense to do it open source.
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** \[01:00:01.09\] I think a lot of people who are friends of mine and whatnot have seen like "Oh man, you've got..." -- I think when it got on TechCrunch, that was like... It felt pretty hilarious to me that something like this would get written up in a publication like that. But you know, when I was telling my friends how cool that was, and they were like "Wow, now you've really hit the mainstream..."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** "You've made it!"
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** "Are you gonna start putting ads on there? What's the monetization strategy?"
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, wait, wait... What's the monetization strategy? How are you gonna make money from this?
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I know what it is... You just sit there and wait for AOL to call. It will happen. \[laughs\]
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** They're like, "No, wait... Don't we already own that?" \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** No, they sold it off. They'll buy it again.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** "We'll buy it again! One more try!"
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** I very strictly do not have any interest in that. I guess the answer to my monetization strategy has been to do something really interesting, hope that people who know or who care see it, and then that that has a positive influence on my career trajectory. That actually is directly true, in that my current job at Facebook was the result of a recruiter reaching out who had seen this project, and then in my interview loop I think two of the engineers I talked with had seen it, so it gave us something really interesting to talk about.
+
+So I guess don't discount just having something be visible as a monetization strategy by just improving your career... And of course, I think all of that is secondary to all the things I learned working on the project.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** How much of this overlaps with the things you do day to day? How much has what you've done at the day job, either at Facebook or elsewhere, kind of led back into this, or vice-versa?
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** Yeah, I think the vice-versa is actually more the case. I started working on this project, and then I got really into JavaScript, and in order to do some of the things that I wanted to do here I had to dig pretty deep into understanding the language, and some of the web API's and whatnot... And I got really fired up about JavaScript, and at my previous company, the state of the JavaScript codebase was a little bit lacking, so then I sort of got on this warpath about improving things there.
+
+Then that led to me sort of evolving into a very JavaScript-centric role there, sort of heading up the JavaScript infrastructure at that company, and then of course that had a feedback loop to learning a lot more... So I think it really was like -- this project gave me the impetus to go really deep on some of these things, which then had value in my career, and then there was a feedback loop on top of that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And what you're not condoning is that the only way you get hired is by having side-projects, right?
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** No, I'm not condoning that, but I do think--
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** But you're saying that it could help...
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** I do think that finding something that you're passionate about, and certainly ideally you should do that at your work, and ideally you can do both of those things, too... You can have a project at work that you really care about, and you can have other things on top of that if you wish... But I think in the interview process having something that you're really fired up about and that you've thought about in that sort of all-consuming way - I think it comes across. And whether that thing is because you were able to find that alignment with your day job, or whether that thing is something that you found on the side is certainly a personal choice.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So I'm a big fan of experimentation myself, and in fact if people listened to our previous episode - probably two episodes back now...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Suz...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[01:03:58.25\] ...about live-coding on Twitch with Suz Hinton, you'll be happy to hear that she has convinced us to actually begin live-streaming some code, and I've had a couple of sessions now; I'm committing to doing some experimentations every Monday afternoon roughly, U.S. time.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Two o'clock - you've been on time, too.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** So if you're interested in that, I guess...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, two o'clock CET, so...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I'm a punctual guy, I like to be on time.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, Monday...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's right. Which is like 4 AM Australia time, so... Which I found out by one of our Australian friends on Slack, who was a bit disappointed, but I think he understands. I think if you live in Australia, you're kind of used to a lot of stuff happening in the U.S.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, the cool thing is you've got the playback, though. You've got the videos going on. So the first one you didn't, but the second one you did, so that you can get the playback.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** That's right. So if you're interested in that, Twitch.tv/changelog\_
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Hey Twitch, if you know us and you like us, give us /changelog, please. Somebody out there, help us!
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[unintelligible 01:04:56.28\] Nobody wants it. For the time being, /changelog\_. Of course, you can also just go to our website and find a place to click on that, follow us on there if you want to live-code with me on Monday afternoons... And I've been hacking on Winamp2-js. Jordan had a sweet idea, which has kind of morphed into what we talked about earlier, with the Webamp.org/changelog view, but how could we get a specialized player, maybe even on changelog.com? So we've been experimenting with getting Winamp2 loaded onto our site and running, and I'm happy to report that that worked, and it played one of our episodes served locally...
+
+But we hit some road bumps... As Jordan said, there's people that are hacking on this, but not too many outside contributions. So the thing that we hit first and are still kind of stuck at is there doesn't seem to be much of a public API; it seems like the way you built it it's very much for the single use of "I'm loading a single page with just this on it within the middle. Wich also hilariously turned out as a loop, because instead of it being in the middle of the viewport, it's actually in the middle of the page, and you're not used to there being a scroll; well, our page is quite long, so it took me 15-20 minutes to realize "Oh, it's actually working... It's just completely outside of the viewport.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's funny. I missed that live-stream, so...
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. The video is out there, I think it's about like an hour and four minutes or something. I linked it into our Slack. It made for one of those joyous programming moments when you realize something is working, and then you also realize you've just wasted half an hour, thinking that it wasn't working... But anyways.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Jordan's laughing over there, he's enjoying it.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Well, Jordan was actually kind enough to hop into that livestream, and actually give me some feedback as I was dorking around with the code and trying to figure out how to use it, so that was fun as well. But if we talk about what's coming down the roadmap, my hope is some sort of API so that we can at least invoke it from an outside party, maybe pass it some metadata and a track, or a playlist, or something.
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** Yeah, I think the common wisdom is that open source works really well for libraries and not very well for applications, and I think this is sort of in that middle ground there, where it's not quite low-level enough to work with most of the abstractions that open source relies upon, and having an actual UI widget that works on other people's pages, that people can just like npm install, is I think not -- I guess Web Components was supposed to try to solve this, but this is not a problem that's very solved...
+
+Like I said earlier, I actually have to inject style sheets into the DOM in order to get this thing to work, and while I try very hard not to step on anyone else's toes, there are certain things that are just a little bit hard to figure out how to do on other pages...
+
+\[01:08:13.12\] But yeah, it's something I'm very open to, and I think there are people who are playing with it -- What is it...? Let me see if I can find it... 98.js.org - there's a guy who has done a really amazing JavaScript clone of MS Paint, and he has this entire Windows 98 clone going on, at 98.js.org. He has included Winamp there. There are some other projects that are similarly trying to pull it in...
+
+I'd love to get it to work, and it should, and we do have some kind of public API where you can load it pre-populated, but I think there's a little bit of a question as to like "Okay, well it's its own UI... How should you be able to control it from another UI?" I think at this point I'm looking for people who have use cases that they can show to me and say "This is how I want to use it", and then I would really like to add those API's, as necessary. Because all the logic is there, it's just a matter of exposing it in a way that doesn't expose internals that I want to be able to change in the future.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Sure. I'm happy to report that in terms of CSS clashes or anything like that, it worked surprisingly well. There was a little bit of a z-index issue, where some of our avatars are on top of it, and in the console I just changed the z-index to a really high value on the Winamp, and that fixed that. It's the positioning that was problematic, and I'm sure I could probably overwrite some CSS to fix that as well, and then really just the ability to pass it a track and say Play... As opposed to like, right now the only way you can do that is on initialization. It'll probably be enough for us, but yeah, our use case -- I don't know if you'd ever even ship it; I would have a hard requirement of lazy-loading it when somebody invokes it from our on-site player, because I wouldn't wanna ship that with every page load, because 0.1% of our users would ever click on it.
+
+So I would love to get it working, and I probably will continue to hack on it in the upcoming Monday afternoon sessions.
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** Yeah, it's a thing I've been thinking about for sure, and it actually has influenced somewhat the architectural choices that I've made. So I actually do -- there's like a Winamp class internally, which then I consume on the page itself. For example, the Dropbox integration is not actually part of the core library... But that's an API that I exposed to myself, such that I could inject it on the webamp.org page.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Very cool. Anything else, aside from me bugging you to add API's, that you have planned? Like, "This is where I'm taking it." Are there aspects of Winamp 2.9 that it doesn't do? Are there grand plans for the future, or are you feeling like it's good to go?
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** Yeah, I'm definitely approaching the limit of getting everything of these main three windows working... On the one hand, that's exciting, but on the other hand it raises the issue of like "Okay, what's next?" There are people working -- or there's at least somebody working on an Electron app, which would be one interesting place to take it... I'm a little bit skeptical that something that's like "Wow, that's so cool!" in the browser, as soon as it's an Electron app, the response would be like, "Ugh, god, Electron... JavaScript... Everything is sloooow! I remember Winamp - Winamp was fast; this is not fast", and that there's gonna be this sort of like an uncanny valley... I don't know if you know that notion in 3D rendering, that as things get more and more real, eventually they reach a point where they're like so real, but not quite real enough, that they become very disconcerting, and I worry a little bit that if this does actually get packaged up as a desktop application, that something which felt like a very detailed and accurate reimplementation in the browser is gonna feel like jarringly not quite right on the desktop.
+
+\[01:12:23.09\] So that's one thing that I'm thinking about. The other one, of course, is that Spotify thing, although I don't think that that can ever quite be right, due to the DRM limitations... But the thing I'm actually more interested in is there's this -- one of the other iconic things about Winamp was the visualizations; there were these very ornate visualizers. I think the most notable one is called MilkDrop, which would do these psychedelic visualizations of your music in real-time, and you'd sort of see the screen ondulating in beat with your music... And all that stuff should be possible in JavaScript, and in fact it is; there's a guy here in the Bay Area who's done a project called Butterchurn Visualizer (butterchurnviz.com). It's basically a JavaScript reimplementation of MilkDrop, which was one of these visualizers.
+
+We've gone back and forth a few times. I think he's interested in trying to integrate it, but he's been busy, and his project is not open source, so I can't just jump on it. And the other main visualizer which I think was built into Winamp was called AVS; I don't know what it stands for... But that actually did get open sourced as Nullsoft sort of got acquired, or whatever. The C (or C++) source code is out there, and there are some people working on a JavaScript port of that, and there's also someone working on like a WebAssembly transpilation of that.
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I was just gonna say, that might be a good use of WebAssembly for that.
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** Yeah, so there's some talk of trying to get that to work, and I would really love to see that, because the AVS work with these presets, which were these declarative files that people -- I guess in the same way that skin authors would be distributing these skins they had made, these preset authors would be distributing these visualizations, and similarly, there's no place to go experience those anymore... So it would be really cool to offer a home for those things that could be revitalized on the web.
+
+So those are the things I'm thinking about, but I would love to see if anyone else has any other ideas of places that we could take this, or other things like that.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What a journey... Just one side-project away, and the next thing you know, down the rabbit hole, all this fun, Facebook, archiving the web, going back into history, hitting up old forums, resurrecting skins, tweeting them even and loading them via URL... That's an interesting path. And then also, like you said, the vice-versa on the learning process of like taking what you've learned here and applying it to stuff you do at work - it's crazy; it's just crazy. I'm impressed very much.
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** It's been pretty amazing I think how much it has unlocked contact with different people. I think that really has been the one thing that -- I'm a self-taught engineer, and I've spent a lot of time doing contract work outside of what I felt was sort of like the developer community... And in fact, it's funny, I have to mention this - I remember listening to this very podcast before I really had any friends in the industry, and being like "Oh, this is what real engineers are talking about."
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So you're talking about this podcast...?
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** Yeah, the Changelog Podcast.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:15:57.07\] Whaaat...? Alright...
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** Yeah, I'm serious.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Tell me more, I'm listening.
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** \[laughs\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** Not this episode, I hope...
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** This is not a time-travel story. \[laughter\]
+
+**Jerod Santo:** I wish it was. \[laughs\] Not that your story is not good. Please, continue.
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** You know, and feeling very isolated and not knowing whether I'll engineer or not, or whether these PHP, WordPress websites I was slinging were garbage, or whether I was actually learning anything... And going on this journey of having done something and then getting feedback from people on GitHub, and then getting to meet actual other engineers who had thought about these things, and connecting up with people... I think that really the human network has been the long-term benefit of this project - the people I've been able to meet, the people I've been able to learn from... Because that's stuff that you can't self -- there's certain things you can't self-teach without learning from other people...
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** No amount of money can buy that.
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** Totally! Yes, exactly. So having this community and getting to build this community of all these people who have related interests has been pretty incredible.
+
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That's awesome. I'm glad it's come full circle here and you've been able to 1) be a listener... Bummer on being isolated, but thank you for letting us be a resource for you to not feel so isolated... And 3) just kind of continuing on that journey and then ultimately coming on this show and sharing this cool story. I'm kind of touched, man. That's awesome.
+
+**Jordan Eldredge:** Yeah, when you guys reached out on Twitter, I definitely was like, "Play it cool, play it cool...!" \[laughter\] But yeah, I think finding your community is really important, and for me a big part of that was podcasts and other things like that, blogs and whatnot... And as you do more things and get more things out there, being able to connect up with real people and not being afraid to reach out and say like "Hey, what's up? Let's talk!"
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+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. "Hey, what's up? Let's talk", I like that. Well, Jordan, thank you so much. This ending here is super special because I didn't know that you were a listener, and what we've just shared there. That's really cool, and I'm so glad that Jerod and I get the honor to host this show and then have listeners like you and others listening to this show, and being changed, being transformed, being welcomed, invited by it... Because that's what we're trying to do ourselves, and that means a lot to me to hear that.
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+Thank you for sharing your story. Anything else you wanna share before we call this show done?
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+**Jordan Eldredge:** No, I think... Like I said, I'm very grateful to be on here, and thanks for all the work that you guys do.
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+**Adam Stacoviak:** Cool. Well, thank you. I'll call this show done. Thanks for listening, everybody.