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**Gina Häußge:** Yeah. |
**Justin Garrison:** So eight years ago you had to make this decision to leave your job and go do -- |
**Gina Häußge:** That decision was forced on me, because the thing was 10 years ago already I left this Java job, because I was hired by a Spanish company who also was vendor of 3D printers back then. They found me, they found OctoPrint, they liked what I was doing, and they hired me full-time to work on that back in 2... |
**Justin Garrison:** I do find it interesting that the commercialized spin wasn't even an option for you there. You could have tried to raise money and say "This is gonna be a product. I'm gonna make a new business out of it", and you have this open core model, sort of like paid plugins, whatever you want to do... So m... |
**Gina Häußge:** \[27:47\] Yeah. I'm really not that big of a fan of this whole open core thing... And personally, I also felt like I could not really do that, because I forked off of open source software... So the part that talks to your printer was something that I basically took from a slicer, of all things, because... |
**Justin Garrison:** Now, I don't know if you can go into details, but where does your funding come from? Is that from recurring businesses that say "Hey, we want to pay for you to --" |
**Gina Häußge:** No, that's mostly users. I have some business sponsorships, but most of the people are really just -- yeah, your average OctoPrint user, who has one or two or something printers, and just likes what I'm doing, and throws me something between one to five bucks per month. And if you have a whole lot of p... |
So... |
**Justin Garrison:** Do you know how many installs you have, or roughly how many -- |
**Gina Häußge:** Yeah, so I have anonymous usage tracking built into OctoPrint; all of this also self-built, completely GDPR okay-ish, and only on my own servers, with my own tech stack and all that... And this is completely opt in, however. So if people do not say "Yes, it's okay to track me", then I will never know a... |
**Justin Garrison:** Yeah. I was gonna say, 150,000 opted in. |
**Gina Häußge:** Yeah. |
**Justin Garrison:** That is usually a very small percentage of people that were like "Yes, I will let you get this information." That's awesome. |
**Autumn Nash:** Which means it's probably like even more people... |
**Justin Garrison:** Well, yeah. So if you estimate ten times more, that's... 1.5 million? I could see that. That's totally not even out of realm. |
**Gina Häußge:** The first time that I saw the first numbers come in, after the first release with the anonymous users tracking, I literally hid under my desk, because that was just... I felt so much responsibility in that moment, and it felt so heavy, literally heavy on my shoulders. I just had this -- I just had to h... |
**Autumn Nash:** I hope that your success story -- I hope people hear about it, because that's so cool that you... I feel like you did the moral right thing, that people say that you can't do and still be successful... And you not only have been successful, but just as like an engineer, people are using something that ... |
**Gina Häußge:** Yeah, and I also consider it my life's work. I mean, I don't know if I will do this forever, especially not given the whole open source printer situation that we talked about briefly... Because at some point, I might just get pushed out of the market by a tendency to locking everything down... But yeah... |
**Justin Garrison:** \[laughs\] Enterprise Java, helping people? I don't know... |
**Gina Häußge:** Yeah... |
**Justin Garrison:** \[31:58\] Sorry, Autumn. No shade. |
**Autumn Nash:** A lot of stuff runs on Java, okay...? |
**Justin Garrison:** A lot of stuff does. It's just, when you mix those two words, of enterprise and Java, I don't have any good memories. |
**Gina Häußge:** It's more the enterprise bit also that gets me nervous in hindsight. |
**Justin Garrison:** Yes, yes. It's more the enterprise than the Java, for sure. |
**Gina Häußge:** The Java itself was okay. I mean, you can also build good software in that, and you could also build performant software in that, and it's not as slow as people always said... But on the other hand, I also have to say that with Python, everything got even faster... Not in the run speed, but in the deve... |
**Justin Garrison:** Well, that's just because your variable names aren't sentenced long. It's just... \[laughs\] |
**Gina Häußge:** You didn't see the first kind of Python that I wrote when I was writing Java during the day, and then at night... So a bunch of stuff is still not in snake caps, but in the other one, so... |
**Justin Garrison:** Camel case... |
**Gina Häußge:** Came case, thank you. Yeah. Because - yeah, I mean, I was a Java developer. |
**Autumn Nash:** Going back and forth, I always mess up like the for loops in certain things. You can tell I've gone back and forth too many times... |
**Gina Häußge:** I can top that. I mean, OctoPrint pretty much is a web application, and the backend is written in Python, but the frontend is JavaScript... And switching between Python and JavaScript is almost as bad as switching between Python and Java... Because I go back to Python, I start putting semicolons behind... |
**Autumn Nash:** It's so funny... There's certain things that you can definitely tell that you've gone back and forth between two languages when you look at yours, and you're like "Damn it, I did it again." \[laughs\] |
**Gina Häußge:** Yeah. And it happens daily. Just yesterday, I can't remember what exactly it was, I just remembered that yesterday I was again "No, Gina, this is not Python", when I was editing a JavaScript file... |
**Autumn Nash:** I do that all the time. |
**Gina Häußge:** It's tricky. |
**Justin Garrison:** So where do you want to bring OctoPrint from here? What's the next thing that you would like to do? What is the next sort of big -- it's not just... I mean, more printers are fine... I mean, I still think that you have influenced that standard of communication by having this early project so long t... |
**Gina Häußge:** There's a bunch of stuff that actually needs to be done, which boils down more or less to taking care of some tech stack situations, because I'm still on a very old version of all of the stuff that runs the UI... But because of the plugin system, it's really tricky to update that, or to swap that for s... |
Also, for the better part of the decade, actually, I've now been also working on a new communication layer, and that is also a very tricky thing to pull off... And I also have had really bad luck with it, because every time that I actually get on it and get it to a point where I'm almost ready to like -- I'm 80% or 90%... |
So the first time I ran into a complete and utter problem with my whole approach, because of some firmware issues out there that I wasn't aware of... So I had to scrap everything and start anew. The second time I lost the job and had to go crowdfunding. The third time I ended up in a breakup after over 15 years of a re... |
**Autumn Nash:** That's a lot. |
**Gina Häußge:** \[35:57\] It's like this huge project that really needs to get done to make everything more modular, and to be able to make it easily adaptable to new developments out there, and to possibly also swap the whole communication stack out to target something else, and serial communication... Like something... |
**Autumn Nash:** How do you push all the developers and different people that are making the plugins to the next version, so you can eventually do an update? |
**Gina Häußge:** I deprecate stuff, write big, big nasty warnings into change logs, and hope that someone actually reads them, and that at some point, some versions later remove the deprecated stuff after it was logging warnings and warnings and warnings to the logs for several months... And if stuff then breaks, plugi... |
**Justin Garrison:** Only after it breaks. |
**Autumn Nash:** Yeah. Nobody listens to the warnings for like 5 years, 10 years... |
**Gina Häußge:** I have this quite nasty situation that -- yeah, Python 2 to Python 3. |
**Autumn Nash:** That was such a horrible jump, though. Like, it was so bad. |
**Justin Garrison:** Was? It's still going on. \[laughs\] |
**Gina Häußge:** And I was right in the middle of it, because all of the plugins out there were Python 2-only. OctoPrint was Python 2-only. And it took a long, long time to get OctoPrint up and running, and that was also thanks to a lot of very, very nice contributors, who helped there, doing a lot of the legwork, and ... |
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