text stringlengths 0 2.02k |
|---|
I think that it makes sense for them to be replicating the primitives of every other cloud service. So in 2017 they did service compute with Cloudflare Workers. In 2018 they did eventually consistent data store. In 2019 - website hosting; that's the Netlify competitor. In 2020 they did strongly-consistent data store, w... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[48:34\] A unified API, or something like that... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, they'll just look at AWS' offerings, the ones they like the best, and do it that way, right? |
**Shawn Wang:** Yeah, just pick it up. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Maybe the way to get a prediction out of you, swyx, might be rather than directly predict, maybe describe how you win Go. |
**Shawn Wang:** How you win Go... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, what's the point of Go? How do you win Go? Because that might predict the hidden prediction, so to speak. |
**Shawn Wang:** Okay. For listeners who don't know Go, let me draw out the analogy as well. So most people are familiar with chess; individual chess pieces have different values and different points, and they must all support each other. Whenever you play chess, you need the Rooks to support the Knight to support the p... |
**Jerod Santo:** Are you sure...? |
**Shawn Wang:** ...there's a lot likely of territory claiming, and Cloudflare is really positioned very well for that. It's just part of the final realization that I had at the end of the blog post. And partially, how you take individual pieces of territory is that you surround all the pieces of the enemy and you place... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Which, if you thought maybe that was oxygen, the territory, you might suck the oxygen away from them, so they can't live anymore, so to speak... And maybe you don't take it by killing it. Maybe you sort of suffocate it almost, if their space becomes small enough; if you take enough territory and it ... |
**Shawn Wang:** Yeah. There's also a concept of sente in Go, which is that you make a move that the opponent has to respond to, which is kind of like a check, or checkmate -- actually, not; just the check, in chess. And right now, AWS doesn't feel the need to respond. Cloudflare is not big enough. Like, these are names... |
**Jerod Santo:** Sure. |
**Shawn Wang:** So your competitor is 40 times larger than you. Obviously, Cloudflare is incentivized to make a lot of noise and make themselves seem bigger than it is. But until AWS has to respond, this is not real. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Nice. |
**Jerod Santo:** So as a developer, as a customer of potentially one or both of these... Let's say you have a whole bunch of stuff on S3 - I'm asking you personally now, swyx - and R2 becomes available... Is that a no-brainer for you, or is there any reason not to use that? |
**Shawn Wang:** You're just adding another vendor in your dependency tree. I think for anyone running silicon bandwidth, it is a no-brainer. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. So over the course of N months, where N equals when they launch plus a certain number - I mean, I think this is gonna end up eventually on Amazon's radar, to where it's gonna start affecting some bottom lines that important people are gonna notice. So I just wonder - I mean, how much territory ca... |
**Shawn Wang:** \[52:12\] So Ben from Vantage actually did a cost analysis... Vantage is a startup that is made up of former AWS Console people; they're trying to build a better developer experience on top of AWS. They actually did a cost analysis on the R2 move, and they said that there's probably a hundred billion do... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. It hasn't even been a blip on the radar at this point, the key metrics to the people who are important enough to care are watching. You said you started watching all of these CDNs. Of course, you worked at Netlify... You take an interest in backends. There's something you mentioned in the break a... |
**Shawn Wang:** Let's go there. So if you track my career, I started out as a frontend developer. I was developing design systems, I was working with Storybook, and React, and all that... Then at Netlify I was doing more serverless and CLI stuff. At AWS more storage and database and AppSync and GraphQL stuff... And now... |
**Jerod Santo:** Nice! |
**Shawn Wang:** What is a frontend developer doing at KubeCon...? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** New territory. |
**Shawn Wang:** It's a frontend developer who realizes that there's a career ceiling for frontend developers. And it's not a polite conversation, and obviously there are exceptions to frontend developers who are VPs of engineering, frontend developers who are startup founders... And actually, by the way, there's a lot ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Describe ceiling. What exactly do you mean when you say "ceiling"? |
**Shawn Wang:** Career ceiling. What's your terminal title. |
**Jerod Santo:** Like your highest role, or whatever. Highest salary, highest role, highest title... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha. |
**Shawn Wang:** Like, straight up, how many VPs of engineering and CTOs have backend backgrounds versus frontend. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. I mean, just anecdotally, I would agree with you that it's probably 8 or 9 out of 10 CTOs have -- is that what you said, 8 or 9? |
**Shawn Wang:** Yeah, yeah. So there's obviously an economic reasoning for this; it's because there's a bias in the industry that frontend is not real development, and backend is. And that has to be combated. But also, there's an economic reasoning, and I always go back to the economics part, because of my finance back... |
**Jerod Santo:** I wonder if that changes at all for very product-focused orgs, where I think a lot of frontenders, the moves are into product design and architecture, and away from - not software architecture, but product design. And it seems like maybe if you compare - not VP of engineering, but VP of product, you'd ... |
**Shawn Wang:** \[56:03\] Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** Maybe that's their path. Do you think that's -- |
**Shawn Wang:** Totally. But you're no longer a frontend dev. You suddenly have to do mocks... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, but when you're VP of engineering you're not a backend dev either. |
**Shawn Wang:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** So you're kind of both ascending to that degree |
**Shawn Wang:** Backends devs will never report to you, let's put it that way. |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. Fair. |
**Shawn Wang:** \[laughter\] But somehow, frontend devs have to report to backend devs, for some reason; just because they're superior, or something. I don't know, it's just like an unspoken thing... It's a very impolite conversation, but hey, it's a reality, man. |
**Jerod Santo:** So do you see this personally, or do you see this by looking around? |
**Shawn Wang:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. You felt like you had reached a ceiling. |
**Shawn Wang:** Well, again, this is very impolite; there's a ton of ways to succeed, and there are definitely exceptions. Emily Nakashima at Honeycomb - former frontend person, now VP of engineering. I don't know, I could have done that. I have interest in backend and I'm pursuing that. So I will say that - this is a ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Sure. |
**Shawn Wang:** But there's a ceiling though, because you can see the numbers. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What is it in particular the VP of engineering does that would make a frontender less likely to have that role? What specifically? I mean, engineering is one of the things, right? Commanding the software... Which is not necessarily frontend. |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, frontend is also an engineering discipline. |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.