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**Adam Stacoviak:** One of the things you say in your manual too, and you kind of alluded to this a little bit, was in the philosophy section of the introduction you say "Among other things, Deno is a great replacement for utility scripts that may have been historically written in Bash or Python." I didn't really consi... |
**Jerod Santo:** Rake... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Rake. Isn't Make and Rake fairly the same? Isn't Rake built on Make? |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, Rake is based off of Make, but Make is not Ruby. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** You just misspoke; Rake was what you meant. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** My bad. Rake/Make then. Thank you for correcting me. |
**Jerod Santo:** Sure. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You know, being able to do that kind of thing, where you're betting on JavaScript -- not too often will you do those kinds of things, scripts like that with JavaScript. Like before, its lack of ability to have secure access to the runtime, or the system and the file system and whatnot. |
**Ryan Dahl:** Yeah, I mean - Bash is another dynamic language, one that starts a sub-process for every statement in your program... But generally, you would use Bash because it's widely available on all of the different systems that you're running on. It's very portable. It's not a great programming -- I don't think a... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's pretty hard, yeah. |
**Ryan Dahl:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I regularly access documentation to confirm my syntax is correct... Or just cargo cult, because that's sometimes easier. Copy and paste. There's lots of it out there too, so it makes it easy. |
**Ryan Dahl:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** There's probably a Subreddit somewhere where there's people who just love Bash, and it's like their thing... But they're a rare bunch, for sure. Now, like you said, if you take all of the scripting languages together - I agree with you; I've done Python, Perl, Ruby, JavaScript... The more you learn, th... |
**Ryan Dahl:** Yeah, I was much younger, obviously, when I started Node. Shortly after starting it I took a job at Joyent, where they said "Come work for us. You can continue working on this project", which seemed like a great deal. I moved from Germany to San Francisco, and continued building Node... And kind of throu... |
When it became more and more clear that Node was really a thing, Joyent sat down and made a business deal with me, and I ended up selling Node to Joyent, whatever that means when it's an MIT-licensed open source project... But I gave them control of the project and gave them the website and whatnot. That worked out ver... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[52:14\] You didn't feel that at all? |
**Ryan Dahl:** Not at all the case. |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, that's good. So after you left Joyent, what did you do next? I know you were doing research and development at some point, but did you have a job after that, or did you take some time off? |
**Ryan Dahl:** I took some time off, I worked on some other projects that were unsuccessful... I worked for a while at Google, doing machine learning stuff... It was 2018 that my collaborator in Node, Bert Belder, who founded the company StrongLoop, was -- so Bert's journey is also interesting. He was an early contribu... |
We wanted to use IO Completion Ports, so that Node would work as a native, proper program on Windows. This was a massive undertaking, and Bert led this effort. We collaborated with Microsoft on it. It took probably a year, but at the end of the day, Node works on Windows. In fact, Node is very well supported on Windows... |
As I said, Bert went on to fund this company StrongLoop that did Nody sort of things, built some products on top of Node. They sold that to IBM I think in 2015 or so. Around 2018 I left Google, and Bert was wanting to leave StrongLoop (or IBM), and we teamed up and started working on projects. I already mentioned this ... |
**Jerod Santo:** So after you conceived the idea of Deno and maybe you had a prototype, or you had maybe even announced the project - was the Deno company right there in your guys' minds, kind of like "Okay, here's a path forward from then", or is that a newer conception that you came up with later? |
**Ryan Dahl:** So early on in Node -- as I mentioned, I was young and naive about how software is developed... I was very much of the idea that "Oh, you just throw some code out there on the internet, you collaborate with people... This is how software gets built." But Node grew bigger and bigger and bigger, and there'... |
\[55:55\] So you realize that at a certain scale, software becomes a lot more about managing budget and trying to manage an organization and kind of the meta problems around getting funding for people. So it's always been clear to me that if we're going to go down this route and build this programming system that is go... |
And Node is not a piece of software that is unused, that is not attached to revenue streams. There's all sorts of companies using this. If I could have one cent for every Node installation - oh, how great it would be. This is open source software, of course, and it's very liberally open source... And I believe in that,... |
I guess we've known very early that -- we did not know if this project would go forward or fail, but we always knew that if it's going to grow, that it would need to turn into a company, eventually. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** At what point did the company become the company then? I know you had the announcement in March... Late March you mentioned a sizeable round of seed capital... You can name names if you want to, but at what point -- was that when the company begain, and the team of full-time expert engineers working... |
**Ryan Dahl:** No, Bert and I first of all worked on this ourselves for a year. So that was kind of our first investment, and I think we hired our first engineer in 2019 or so... And yeah, we've grown from there. I think we're eight people now. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha. |
**Jerod Santo:** So if there's a video game called "Build an open source business", and if the first step is "Pick your license", you guys chose MIT. That would be like setting that video game on hard mode, wouldn't it? It's like, "Well, I want the biggest challenge. I'm gonna let my software as free as you could possi... |
**Ryan Dahl:** Everybody's trying to figure out open source companies and how to do this properly... And one model of doing this is the open core model, where your open source software would be free, but then you'd kind of have an enterprise edition that you add on some extra nice features, and you would charge for tha... |
You can also get into some licensing trickery, where maybe you make your software AGPL-licensed, and kind of allow people to run this locally, or kind of in non-commercial applications for free... But once you get into the commercial realm of things, you are then asked to pay a fee. |
I think for Deno - this is a programming system that we're asking people to program against. We're asking a lot of our users, we're asking them to invest a lot in the system... And I personally would be very, very uncomfortable with programming using the base layer of my -- you know, Deno sits below all of your other s... |
\[01:00:11.01\] We are pursuing a different funding/revenue model. As I said, we think this software is pretty useful, and we think it's useful in different commercial applications. I haven't mentioned it yet, but Deno - you download it as this one executable, but it's actually a collection of software, and we've been ... |
And rather than a CDN which responds with static content, this invokes a JavaScript hook. It is a serverless system, so think AWS Lambda, or Cloudflare workers... So it's a system for responding to requests dynamically. The best way to describe it is it's a web server, a multi-tenant web server with V8 built into it. I... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. But it's still Deno in terms of the API, so... I'm using Deno to develop, I can use it locally, I can deploy it on my VPS fine, but if I want to run it in this capacity where my users are in Tokyo, so my Deno process is running in Tokyo, then Deno deploy is just like, you know, a push away or a ... |
**Ryan Dahl:** That's right. Of course, you can take Deno - the executable that you download, that's free - and you can wrap that up in a Docker and you can send that out to AWS Lambda and kind of have a very similar experience... But that is not what we are doing internally. We are not running Deno in some Docker cont... |
This is essentially like opening a tab in a web browser. So think of a web server with a bunch of tabs in it, and each of the tabs is for a different tenant on the system. We can respond to requests very fast. We have cold start times in less than ten milliseconds. I'm not sure the exact number. And we do all sorts of ... |
Obviously, it only runs JavaScript. This is not a Linux VM, so you cannot run your Python process in this. But because we've built explicitly on top of V8, we can make all sorts of very nice optimizations, like Cloudflare has done, to speed the response time. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I think even so someone has to be really motivated to do an Amazon deploy with a Deno repackaged. I'm not sure if that's part of their business model to serve customers... But I could be wrong. |
**Jerod Santo:** You never know what they're gonna do next. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:04:08.04\] I mean, you just never know. You just never know... The liberal license, the permissive license MIT, open source, single binary... A collection - sure, maybe they would do that, but I don't think that's their model. So I think your goal though is to provide Deno as it is to -- I gues... |
**Ryan Dahl:** Right. We're working on this deploy product, and that's the only thing we're going to be working on for the foreseeable future. But other applications would be, say, Electron... We think we could do a much better kind of GUI application framework than Electron has, given that we have Rust, and then Deno ... |
But yeah, I think there's databases that may want to do, say, MapReduce with JavaScript. Potentially, there's some commercial application there... But yeah, I think for the moment we're focused on this Deno Deploy. The idea is that if you're writing a website, you write some JavaScript, you might run this locally, with... |
So there's basically three different deployments - the web browser, frontend JavaScript, your local computer where you're going to be writing some server-side JavaScript, and then maybe you wanna deploy that server and run it globally, so then you send out that code to Deno Deploy. And by the way, you can take that exe... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What's the state of Deno Deploy currently? Is it in beta? I know people can use it... |
**Ryan Dahl:** It's in beta. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What is the state of -- it has a commercial product; it's not collecting funds currently. People aren't paying for it currently. It's sort of available to use... How do you plan to convert that into commercial? What's the current state? |
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