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**Jerod Santo:** Four figures just out of high school... That definitely can be overwhelming. So you were providing a website that people would go and test, and then you'd run the tests in the background, or how come the bill was on you? |
**Filippo Valsorda:** Exactly, yeah. It was a website, and you could type a domain, and it would connect, try to exploit Heartbleed, and if it succeeded, say "Hey, this is vulnerable", and even include a little snippet of memory from the website, which I had to turn off for Yahoo! at some point, because it was actually... |
**Jerod Santo:** Oh, no. |
**Filippo Valsorda:** Like, in the 32 bytes it was presenting as a proof... So that wasn't great. \[laughter\] |
**Jerod Santo:** The things you learn... |
**Filippo Valsorda:** Yup. Oh, there were a lot of lessons learned. But yeah, that was another early start that got popular, and I started talking about a few companies, and I landed at Cloudflare, where I worked on some closed source stuff, their DNS stack, their DNSSEC implementation, and some open source stuff, like... |
Then, long story short, I left Cloudflare and joined Google a few months later to work on the Go standard library, on the cryptography in the Go standard library. For folks that don't use that much Go, Go doesn't do like most other languages that mostly have bindings to OpenSSL. Instead, to make it very easy to cross-c... |
And I worked on that for Google on the Go team for about four years. I was lead of the Go security team while Katie Hockman joined, and \[13:56\] is still on the Go team, still working on cryptography, so we work together still. |
\[14:04\] And then, yeah, as we were saying, I left in May, both to take a break over the summer, and to test this new model that we're here to talk about. So I'm still a maintainer on the Go standard library, I still have the commit bit, and I still do issue triage, and all that, just now working independently. |
Aside from that, I have a number of side projects, like makecert, a little tool to generate self-signed certificates that are trusted by your local browser, and Age, a file encryption tool... Which I pronounced Aghe... |
**Jerod Santo:** Oh, you call it Aghe? |
**Filippo Valsorda:** Yes... \[laughs\] |
**Jerod Santo:** In my mind it's been Age this entire time, and now I know it's actually Aghe... |
**Filippo Valsorda:** Yup... I figured tech projects with a G in them need to have a controversial pronunciation to get successful... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Well played. You've hopped on the meme and you're riding it. I like that. |
**Filippo Valsorda:** So yeah, that's pretty much what I've done. Basically, for the past five years or so I've been working on open source full-time, one way or another, which I've really enjoyed. Working in public can get tiring, and I really feel a lot of those maintainer posts where they get frustrated, and even so... |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, as you probably know, here on the Changelog we have been speaking with maintainers for years, we've been interviewing people, learning about what they're up to with regards to sustainability, always interested in new ways of doing it, hearing what's working, what's not working... We've seen, of c... |
So let's talk about what you're up to, how you're doing it, and how you're able to make this so far sustainable for you in a way that's not overly burdensome. We talk about -- there's kind of two ways that are sustainable. Ones like "I work for a large corporation, and they pay me to work on open source." That seems to... |
**Filippo Valsorda:** Yeah, so I clearly come from the corporate full-time employment model. I don't know as much about the build a business around your project, and I feel like that works for different projects from the ones I'm used to work on. I'm not really sure how I would sell Age as a product, or how Go would wo... |
The corporate sponsorship - I think it's great. I think Google did a lot of good to the ecosystem by starting Go, by funding the team, and by investing so much in it, to the point that I think they don't get as much credit as they should. I have plenty of negative to say about Google, too; this is not an ad. But I feel... |
\[18:01\] But still, the problem is that teams like that inside a company don't scale well when the project is successful. And I've seen this at all sorts of companies. I've seen this at Microsoft, I've seen this at Google, I've seen this all over the place, so it's really not a Google-specific or Go-specific pathology... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. They kind of stay where they are. |
**Filippo Valsorda:** Exactly. And so what happens is that the resources don't increase, the workload increases, people burn out, they start churning, and now, since a team -- I like that concept that a team is the connections between its people, not its nodes. A team is a collection of edges, not of nodes. And so as p... |
And I've seen that happen with so many teams, to the point that sometimes you sit down with A fellow maintainer, and they're like "Oh yeah, the entire team that maintains that thing at that company has quit", and you go "Oh, yeah, tell me about it. I recognize exactly how that goes." |
So I felt like we need a better model for something that is so important to the ecosystem. And my theory is that one such model can be that a maintainer can go to the various companies that depend on the project that they maintain, and do what Patrick McKenzie aptly described as enterprise sales. And I'm not going to h... |
So this is pretty much what I'm offering. I go out there and I talk to companies. And I've started with companies that already get open source, because this is a new model, and I wanted people who could get up to speed quickly. But I tell them, "Well, first of all, you have a business risk that depends on Go. You have ... |
The second thing is what I call reciprocal access. The companies don't have the time to spend an engineer or half an engineer to just monitor the issue tracker of Go, right? That's our job; we spend our time on the Go issue tracker, and then we put out releases. And a release comes out, and then two months later a comp... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[22:30\] Right. A retainer. |
**Filippo Valsorda:** A retainer, exactly. What we have is a high-bandwidth channel to talk about these sorts of things. And I go in at the beginning of the relationship and I ask them "What would you use Go for? What are your concerns? What are your worries? What things work well? What things don't?" And then I just k... |
**Jerod Santo:** I kind of like that, because basically what they're paying for is a bit of an advocate or a representative that's on the team... |
**Filippo Valsorda:** It is. |
**Jerod Santo:** ...that's they don't directly influence, and say "Hey, Filippo, you've gotta get this feature in." Maybe that's something else that they might do. But you just know their systems, because you are basically consulting them, and then you can take their best interests, and I guess meld them with everybody... |
**Filippo Valsorda:** Exactly. |
**Jerod Santo:** And then on the other side, you are now better equipped to make decisions, because you have not just your one narrow-scoped view of the world, but you also have these enterprise customers who all have varying needs and concerns with regards to the project... And so you're now a better-informed maintain... |
**Filippo Valsorda:** Precisely. You captured it so well. This is not about paying for features, or "Oh, we need you to review this thing and get it landed." It is much more of an advocate. And to be clear, it's something that companies can absolutely get for free by just subscribing to the right mailing list, and part... |
When my clients come to me and they're like "Oh, we need something about the runtime", or something like that that's not really in my wheelhouse, I don't tell them "Oh, I'll flag down Keith and start a private conversation." I tell them, "Oh, you should probably open an issue here" or "You should email this mailing lis... |
These are all things that are just out there, but companies don't have the headcount, nor would it make business sense to have people so embedded into every project that they depend on. But at the same time, they want good outcomes for their critical dependencies. They want to make sure they stay aligned with their sys... |
So that's the base pitch, right? That's what I call the gold tier of the contract. And it was what I started with. Back in May, the idea was to go for pretty much just this. I didn't have quite these words to explain it. Then I had a bunch of conversations over the months trying to find other things to make this work, ... |
\[26:03\] Because this is a thing that I can do and other projects can't - lots of projects that are critical for companies can offer what we just talked about, right? And here -- by the way, I'm saying critical a lot. The model I'm trying to build is tailored for the kind of project that would take months to replace. |
When I go to clients, I basically start a conversation with this: "Alright, imagine that what I do went unmaintained. Would that a) be okay, and b) how many engineer months would it take to replace it or maintain it yourself? If your answer is "We would be okay with it, or we would just replace it in a couple of weeks,... |
**Jerod Santo:** And when you're talking with them, are you talking to them about the Go programming language? Are you talking about certain security things inside of it, or Age, or your other projects? What exactly is the thing they can't live without? |
**Filippo Valsorda:** So personally, when I go in, I talk about my work on the Go cryptography libraries, and some of my work on security, although I always make it clear that I'm not the only person driving this, because Go is a big project, and as I said, Roland is still working at Google on all this, and we work tog... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Filippo Valsorda:** The Go checksum database is a way to ensure the integrity of the modules you download from the module proxy in a way that even if the proxy itself wanted to lie about, it could. |
**Jerod Santo:** Gotcha. |
**Filippo Valsorda:** It uses Merkle trees for that. I could talk for an hour about that, but we would be going off-topic. |
**Jerod Santo:** We'll get you on Go Time to talk about that. |
**Filippo Valsorda:** Exactly. If people are curious, Katie Hockman gave a fantastic talk at GopherCon a few years ago about it. Anyway, we were saying that that's what the whole offering was at the beginning. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Filippo Valsorda:** And then I started thinking, "What other things would work for other open source projects?" And we talked about it with \[unintelligible 00:28:45.11\] we talked about it with Kelsey Hightower, and what came out of it is that open source maintainers are also very legibly experts. Legible as in seei... |
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