Our old friend, Zeno Rocha, returns to discuss email etiquette, the strange new world of AI SEO, the coming LLM enshittification, and SLATE Auto – the just-announced $20k modular EV truck.

This week Adam is joined by Zeno Rocha — the creator of the beloved Dracula theme and Co-founder and CEO of Resend. They discuss his personal journey and the challenges of balancing work and family life, how becoming a parent has given him new perspectives and influenced his decision to start his own company, the role of citizenship and immigration in his journey, how he prepared for the Y Combinator interview, meeting Paul Graham, the challenges of sending email, and the future of Resend and the possibility of a Series A round.

Adam loves a good dark theme and supporting a fellow creator, and Hedy Li finished the episode we did with Nikita Prokopov covering FiraCode and reached out saying Zeno Rocha’s work on Dracula deserved the same credit. We agreed. So we linked up with Zeno about his passion for open source, how he’s changed his mind on making money with open source, his big release of Dracula Pro and the future of Dracula, and of course his new book – 14 Habits of Highly Productive Developers. Check for a link in the show notes for details on how to get your hands on Zeno’s book for free through our giveaway.

Zeno Rocha, Principal Developer Advocate at Liferay, joined the show to talk about DevRel, his open source work (clipboard.js, Dracula Theme, jQuery Boilerplate, Browser Diet, et al), and his passion for teaching and giving talks at conferences. Zeno also shared some really interesting stories about his first contributions to open source, how that played out, and the lessons learned along the way.