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So I don't think it's a crazy idea anymore. It might have been last year, or even six months ago, but not anymore. Now, I'm genuinely surprised about some of the things that I'm seeing in the WebAssembly space; I was not expecting them. And there you go. |
Who is Jason? There aren't a lot of articles online< I haven't seen any videos... Maybe I haven't done my research well enough, but I'm seeing that you're a former senior software engineer at Adobe, a senior engineer at Geometer, and for our listeners, that was episode 66, that was the intro. So thank you, Rob, for ... |
**Jason Carter:** Man, that's a... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** It's a tough one, I know. |
**Jason Carter:** Yeah... So I've always kind of been very interested in technology from a young age. I grew up in a super-large family, where my dad was always buying the latest consoles to play, and things like that... And kind of, from there, learned a great love of technology, and games... And kind of my first favo... |
You did not -- you searched just fine. I tend to have a very low social media presence; that's been something that I will have to adjust as I kind of grow into this role a little bit more. |
**Break:** \[48:55\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So why Vex? Why were you attracted to this problem space? Because the journey - you explained a few things; like, you mentioned piano, you seem to be into arts, into music... But why Vex? It's really interesting. Not many people choose WebRTC as their problem space, but you have... So what's the story... |
**Jason Carter:** Yeah, so as I've kind of got into programming -- I'm a self-taught engineer; I went to a coding bootcamp, and that was sort of how I got my start. So I've always just been really attracted to complicated problems, and kind of learning as much as I can. I just love learning things; it's part of why I'v... |
And so, you kind of mentioned, but Geometer is an incubator, or a venture studio that was founded by Rob Mee of Pivotal, who was on your show quite recently... He kind of reached out and said, "Hey, we're working on this stuff in the WebRTC space. Are you interested?" I didn't really know much about WebRTC, but -- oh, ... |
\[52:15\] As you mentioned, I play music, and things, so being able to kind of try out "Hey, what if I stream my keyboard into this room? How does that work? Or "What if I set up this webcam on a Raspberry Pi and stick it over here? How does that work?" It's just fun. It's just fun to play with, it's fun to kind of -- ... |
So it's a combination of just like this insatiable thirst to learn new things and try new things... I never want to sit still, I always want to keep expanding my capabilities... And just -- video is a very, very cool problem, and it affects a lot of people. And if you can do it well, you can make a big difference. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That is an amazing attitude. I have to say, it's very inspiring listening to you talk like that. And the one thing which I'm really picking up on is that fun aspect. This is fun, right? That's how it's supposed to feel. It doesn't matter what you do, if it feels fun, and you're genuinely captivated by... |
**Jason Carter:** Yeah, I'm glad to hear that. I think especially if you come from that sort of self-taught, like bootcamp route, right? You're just sort of thrown to the wolves; you get to your first job and you have no idea what's going on, and I think the only way that you can be successful from that -- or one of th... |
My introduction to DevOps, for example, was at Mavenlink, a startup that I worked at, and I was trying to build a bot that would help us with our deploy email automation... Kind of a little boring problem, but I thought it was really interesting. I got to learn about Slack bots, and all this stuff... And it got to the ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Wow... \[laughs\] That is steep. Right? This little bot... "Oh, by the way, there's Kubernetes." Wow... So how did you make that work? That is fascinating, as an entry point. It's crazy. |
**Jason Carter:** You know, I had some great people that could kind of guide me as I got stuck again... Self-taught bootcamp route - like, you're just constantly learning; you always feel underwater. Probably a very large imposter syndrome... So anyway, I just sort of kind of stepped my way up, like "Okay, I guess I ne... |
\[56:12\] Because when I find something cool, I just get really excited to share it with people. "Hey, check this out. See what we can do and." And I think there are some developers that once they've seen the things that they can build when they're masters of both their programming domain and also the operations domain... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So we talked during our multi-cloud discussion about GCP quite a bit, Google, AWS... But we only mentioned Fly.io. So what made you go to Fly.io? What is the story there? That must have been -- I mean, you were using Kubernetes, and you still are using Kubernetes... So how come that you added Fly.io i... |
**Jason Carter:** Yeah, that's a great question. So we originally ran basically everything on Kubernetes, and we found that -- and we still run chunks of the system on it. But we found that for certain things, what we wanted was lower-level access; like, we'd like to build the machine image, deploy that ourselves, set ... |
We also like to support other companies that are doing things with Elixir, and you can imagine -- I'd say there's two ways that we use Fly today. The first is any little app that we want to build and deploy, it's super-fast. We can get something running on Fly in an hour, right? As opposed to -- it's a lot more complic... |
And then things where you want really great regionality. So for example, in the case I mentioned about load testing - a good test of the scalability of a system, and if you want to see "Hey, what's our latency look like across the system?", you're not going to get the most accurate measure if you run all of your load t... |
Fly has its own challenges, too. It's I think maybe where there's a bit of a learning curve, if you want to do super-advanced things... We do a lot of UDP traffic, so I'm still kind of learning how that works on Fly, which has made it so we haven't wanted to deploy the media server workloads there... But hey, we want t... |
I'm really excited to try out their Machine API, that allows you really quick access to booting machines... Because you can imagine, if you're doing a video call or a large event, figuring out how to scale that up and down is challenging. And one of the things that's really a problem with some of these solutions like K... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[01:00:40.22\] Minutes. |
**Jason Carter:** Minutes, right. You can do it quite a bit faster with just the VMs themselves. And Fly says that their system is just wicked fast. So I'm really excited to kind of play with that and see. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** 200 milliseconds, according to the docs. I really want to try that out. Machines - it will be the same one, but spinning up in 200 milliseconds? That's crazy quick. Crazy, crazy quick. We're talking minutes and milliseconds. That is container and VMs. Huge, huge difference. |
**Jason Carter:** Yeah... As I understand it, they have their own hardware, and then they're using a tool called Firecracker, which allows you to create super-lightweight -- they call them micro VMs. So it's pretty interesting; if you're trying to set up Firecracker, it's really like building a VM the hard way. It's li... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's really interesting. Speaking about things that you want to do in the future, what does the next six months look like for a Vex.dev? |
**Jason Carter:** Yeah. So we are really close to launching our private alpha. In fact, it should be open to the public when this episode airs. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yes, please. If you're shipping it, that's amazing. That's the best outcome I can hope for. So yes, please; two thumbs up from me. Let's do it. Let's do it. Yup. |
**Jason Carter:** So I think the hope for us is that we will kind of start getting some folks who want to build some things, and really moving quickly with those people to -- especially if someone has a need for super-high scale, or if any of the things that I've talked about - deploying servers in your own system, or ... |
So a lot of fun days of user research, trying these things out... It's always interesting to put particularly an API-based product in. There's a lot of different techniques for usability testing and research testing when you're hoping that developers find it easy to use, versus a user clicking around finding it easy to... |
\[01:04:22.12\] I think we will focus on stability, performance, monitoring, because I think that's where we can really make a difference. It will be a little bit bare bones at the beginning, but I think you'll find that we move pretty quickly and are excited to deliver just an awesome, scalable, reliable product. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's what matters. Keep shipping it, keep improving, week on week... It always should get better, and you're always learning; that should be constant. And then everything else will take care of itself. That's at least how I'm thinking of it. |
What about the team? Are you growing the team? How many are you? We haven't spoken about that. Is it just you? I don't think it is just you. So tell us a little bit about that. |
**Jason Carter:** Yeah, so I've been working with Geometer for quite some time, and we've actually had some of their engineers working on this project with us. So at the moment, there's me and my co-founder, Sam Pearson, who is an awesome engineer. So he and I are the Vex team. And we've been working with three or four... |
Now, Geometer, they've brought me, that we talked about, is kind of about to make a few changes themselves. We've learned a lot as a team building and operating these services, and so Rob is going to be spinning out a new company; it's currently codenamed P3, but kind of a spiritual successor to Pivotal Labs. And I thi... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That sounds pretty exciting. As we are preparing to wrap our conversation up, what would you say is the one key takeaway that you would like our listeners to have, the ones that stuck with us all the way to the end? |
**Jason Carter:** \[01:07:18.10\] I'd say that building a great product, or -- like, building a startup, it sounds so scary. And it is, in a lot of ways. But like I said before, it's really that curiosity of -- you know, I didn't know much about WebRTC before I started this. Right now, it's my whole job. And it sounds ... |
I'm just a bootcamp kid that was lucky to have a lot of great mentors along the way, and make his way into various companies, and just riding that as far as I can. There's nothing special about that. I just kind of learned these things as I went along. And as long as you're having joy in doing that, and finding that - ... |
And if you're into video and audio streaming, check out WebRTC For the Curious. That's one of the best sort of initial introductions. So if any of this stuff sounds interesting and exciting to you and you want to learn more, check that out. That's kind of where I got my start in this field, and it's just still a great ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's all really good. Thank you, Jason. I'm so curious to see what you do next. I think it's going to be amazing once you get it out there, once you'll get the feedback, once you realize all the things that you didn't even know were a thing. I mean, that's just a magical moment, right? All the thing... |
**Jason Carter:** Yeah, I think there's a phrase, "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy", and I think that's very true in startups in this world, too. We have a kind of idea -- we sort of focused on high scale as our initial value proposition. It could be that people are like "Hey, that's cool and all, but we... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I'm really excited about you. I'm really excited about what you do next, about what Vex does next. I'll be following it closely, and who knows, maybe in six months time or a year time we do this again, and we will share all those learnings and all those highlights, and the lows, the lessons learned, a... |
**Jason Carter:** Thanks, Gerhard. It's been an absolute pleasure. |
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