Kevin Ball: Sure. I am excited about CSS Subgrid, which just shipped in the latest version of Firefox (Firefox 71). This is the level 2 part of the CSS Grid layout specification. This allows us to nest grids within one another, which solves some really tricky problems with getting nested grid items lining up with your original grid. Previously, it was pretty hard to, for example, have isolated components that used Grid, and put them correctly inside layouts or other components that used Grid. CSS Grid makes that straightforward, and helps in a ton of different ways. I’m super-excited about that.

It just launched. It’s only available in Firefox, so once again - don’t use this for real yet, because it will break in the majority of browsers that are not Firefox. I think we’re at 60% or 70% of people using Chrome.

Acon: Yes. So after you log into High Seas - and you log in using your Hack Club Slack… So yeah, join our Slack. After that, you’re able to submit it to our harbor, and you’re able to basically ship out your project. After that, you have to vote for a few projects yourself before your project is officially shipped out. But your project then goes into this Wonder Dome, which is where it’s pitted against other projects. After a certain amount of people have voted on your project, you then get a doubloon payout. And when you get those doubloons, you’re able to spend them in the shop that we have.

Justin Garrison: [23:53] No, they’re buying startups, right? A lot of the new innovation from any big tech that I’ve seen in, I don’t know, at least the last 10 years has been from acquisitions, acquihires, right? They’re like “Oh, this startup had a cool thing. We bought them. And now we own that thing.” And that’s literally the goal for most of the startups too, right? Because the startups are like “Great. I was a founder. You just bought me for a hundred million dollars. Cool. I can retire after I get this comp payout in four years.”

Jerod Santo: Would you be like GitHub insofar as they took a $7.5 billion payout?

Suz Hinton: And a pretty depressing example of that too is if you’re in forensics, there are a lot of really nasty stuff that you can have to sift through in forensics. It’s the same as content moderation. You’re seeing similar things. And so I’m really interested in forensics, but I don’t think that I – again, if I can’t watch Mr. Robot, if I can’t watch scary movies, there’s no way that I can work in forensics without feeling psychological damage from that, and it affecting my mental health. So cybersecurity has a lot of mental health problems, just because of the nature of how things have really messed up… And I think that it’s a tech community too, so it has its own sort of toxic parts, which we’re all familiar with in coding communities as well. Yeah, I think that tech has a lot of immaturities that still haven’t resolved as well as they could, and I see very similar patterns in cybersecurity, to be honest.

So it does come with a warning, but I think given that cybersecurity is such a broad field, there are a lot of things you can do that can either keep you out of trouble, or can find your niche without really being exposed to some of the darker parts of cybersecurity. But I think that’s a really good point that you bring up. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, that’s for sure, and you can ruin your hobby if you’re not careful. I think that if I did pentesting as a hobby, it would be way more fun than doing it professionally. Such as like bug bounty, right? Like, you can make quite a bit of money from bug bounty; if you find a particularly bad vulnerability, you can have a $10,000 payout. And so I know a lot of people chase that as a bit of a game or a side hustle, and that can be really satisfying.

Birk Jernström: Yeah. So most of our users are doing Stripe, even though we do offer the Open Collective route. In like complete transparency, this is on our GitHub as well, but I definitely foresee and I’m excited about expanding our payout possibilities in the future. Like PayPal, direct ACH payouts as well to your bank, to just scale that more internationally, and to make it more convenient as well for developers.

Parker Selbert: This is all anecdotal, but I think safety’s one part of it. It’s hard to be a contractor; it’s really hard to start software from nothing. To bootstrap something is tricky. And the amount of time it takes, if you have a day job, to build something else for that safety, to try to get to that place where you can actually run it without worrying about an income stream - it takes a lot of dedication. And that’s double work, in some ways, and not everybody’s up for that.

But then also, you get so many startups, and what’s the goal of most startups? I mean, they’re incubated in some way; they have people backing them, therefore those people want a payout. And usually, you have to grow to be able to get there, or you’re letting down your investors. And if you let down the investors and you don’t get to some sort of exit, then as a business you’re kind of a failure.

Whereas if you’re an indie mom and pop kind of place, or however you break it down, even if it’s just a few employees, you don’t have those – you just don’t have that incentive. It’s your lifestyle. And so I don’t know if people see lifestyle business as a detractor, but to me it seems like –

Robert Ross: [unintelligible 00:36:19.11] good amount of revenue. And we had, I want to say 45-ish employees two years ago. We’ve got 63 today. So we’ve had some modest growth. We were impacted by some of the conditions, and did have to let go of a few amazing folks in the past… And that is always challenging. But I think the learning from that is don’t grow too fast with your headcount. Stay super-focused. Pick a mountain to climb, and don’t stop until you climb it, or until you don’t have a good reason to climb it anymore. And I think that comes with – the scale of Fire Hydrant at this point is we service – we have a lot of people that use our products. We have a lot of massive companies that use our product. And when you’re operating in that segment, the scale that you have to operate has to change. You have to have people that have been there, done that. You can’t have a team that hasn’t worked with a multinational, publicly-traded multibillion-dollar company. You have to have people that have worked with that type of client. And I think that we have gotten really good at finding and knowing that we should be building that type of team. We’ve gotten clarity on that.

I don’t think you can scale without clarity, and I think three years ago is when I would say we needed to get better at it. Then we’ve gotten, I would say really good at it lately. Our team has been crushing a lot of features. I mean, we’ve built an on-call product. We launched that, went GA recently, and we did not focus on anything else. We only focused on that, for months. And I think the payout is obvious, and now we don’t want to build anything differently. We want to use that same method moving forward.

Cory Doctorow: Look, there are individual moves, but there’s a limit to the power of individual action, right? If you cannot think of yourself as being part of a group or a polity or class, then there will be a limit to what you can accomplish. Here’s an example that is pretty contemporary, because it deals with the question about AI art. And I’ll just say, as a blanket kind of disclaimer, it’s not artificial, it’s not intelligence, there is no learning. It is statistical inference, or whatever you want to call it. We have to kind of concede a lot of ground to call it AI. It’s like if they decided to call it magic miracle technology, and every time you talked about it you have to go like “Magic miracle technology…” But for the sake of like clarity, let’s just call an AI art, right? So Taylor Swift - very powerful recording artist. She’s arguably the most powerful recording and touring artist in the world. Spotify had colluded with the big three labels to do some extraordinarily dirty stuff.

So when Spotify was launching, they needed to license the catalog of the big three labels Universal, Warner and Sony control six 70% of all the sound recordings in the world, and 60% of all the all the compositions. So you can’t make a move without them. They didn’t invest in that music, they just bought the companies. Again, anti-competitive mergers allowed them to acquire this market dominance. And so when Spotify started, they needed to get the labels on board, and the label said, “Okay, you have to make us your business partners. We want large equity stakes, and we are going to tell you how Spotify works.” And so Spotify did that. And what the label said is “We want the lowest possible royalty rate for the music that you license from us, but we want a minimum guaranteed monthly payout.” So like if your Sony, say, 1/6 of a cent per stream, or whatever it is, and you’re guaranteed $10 million a month… Maybe all the Sony streams streamed this month only add up to $5 million, but Spotify owes you 10 million. The other 5 million are what are called unattributable royalties, and you can do whatever you want with them. You can do them for like new artist development, which might just be sending executives around the world to shows, or you can spend it on studio upgrades, or you can give it as dividends, or whatever. It’s your money.

But the other reason they wanted that rock bottom rate is that every dollar they took out of the company as licensors was a dollar that counted against its cost basis, and made the shares that they had as owners less valuable. Because Spotify gets less profitable the more it has to pay for streams. And so they not only negotiated this, they negotiated something called “most favored nation status”, which means that Spotify could not pay anyone more than they paid the big three, except the other labels, the 30% of labels and independent artists who aren’t the big three - they don’t get minimum monthly payouts, free inclusion on playlists, free advertising, and they don’t get shares. They just get six tenths of a cent per stream.

[42:12] So they then got these huge tranches of shares, which then were worth 10s of billions of dollars when Spotify IPOed. And Taylor Swift was changing labels. And Universal really wanted her to change to Universal. And she said, “I will do that provided that you share that money with the artists, and that you share it with them on a net basis.” So if you make an album, you get paid in advance, and you owe that money back to your label, and then you go into production, and all the money spent in the production is also owned to your label, right down to the taxi fare, to your launch party, and the champagne they serve at it, you owe every penny of that back to your label.

The labels pay you extraordinarily small royalties. The Beatles used to split one penny for ways per LP, but not the whole penny. They got 85% of a penny, because 15% was held back for promotional copies, right? So you will never pay off that debt. And so there are lots and lots of artists who saw their advance and never saw another penny. And if Universal will share the money with them when they could just go in and they say “Okay, well, you owe us $300,000 that you’re never gonna be able to pay back. We’ve just applied some of that Universal money to your account. Now you owe us $200,000 that you’re never gonna be able to pay back”, and they wouldn’t actually give them a penny. Taylor Swift said, “No, you’re gonna give everyone a check.”

Gerhard Lazu: People that care. People that give a damn, as some would say it. And I know that you’ve seen the Kubernetes documentary, but for those that haven’t, I’ll include the link. That’s such a great one to understand the story of Kubernetes, but also hear those people talk, how they think, the struggles which they had. They’re not as extreme as the ones that we mentioned, but nevertheless, they are tough. And it exists, the project, the community, because of many people. Many great people believed in it, and they gave their blood, sweat and tears to make it happen. Not because of payout, but because they believed in it. Simon Sinek has quite a few things to say about that, which is one of my great favorites.

Adam Stacoviak: It does. It depends if you don’t have self-control though. I think the people that feel that way either haven’t learned or think they need to let go of their self-control. You don’t need to be unfettered and unfiltered to participate in social media. I say this as someone who is with you. I am on Instagram, I used to post a lot to Instagram. I haven’t posted in many years, because I showed up for the wrong reasons. I still have my Twitter account, but I don’t exercise the outwards focus of it. I generally just respond to other people, and like their things… I don’t show up in the way of sharing my feelings.

So I come from where you have been, which is cancel social media for me, because it brought me to negative places, didn’t give me the emotional payout we talked about earlier, so it led me down roads I didn’t wanna go down, and bogged my mind with things I didn’t want it to be bogged down with. Now I’m seeing it as a different way, as a different utility, if used wisely.

Chris Benson: I wanted to ask - so one of the things that it sounds like you’ve done a really good job on is by taking those levels of abstraction, as Daniel referred to it, the dream within the dream… You can only handle so many layers of abstraction, you can’t do it all, and it sounds like by taking control of some of that, that somebody can use BaseTen to integrate in with an existing environment by using the APIs. So they get a big payout, and they don’t have to worry about all of the things, from containers - you name it; all the things that Daniel just talked about - and yet, can get the benefit that way… Which is quite beautiful, because I know that it’s kind of where people have been trying to drive to, and it sounds like you’ve gotten a very nice, elegant solution for achieving that. Is that fair? Is that how you would think of using it?

Adam Stacoviak: That means revenue was in place potentially… So you really were able to, I guess, navigate this acquisition, this acquihire, knowing that – I’m sure you got some sort of payout yourself as part of it, but then also the next thing in, to continue to be able to invest in Elixir - I can imagine how that would make you feel pretty secure about your next steps.

Mireille Reece, PsyD: Yeah. We all (I think) want to feel good, but recognizing that sometimes that path to feeling better or having the life that we want actually involves giving up a little something I want, maybe even in the short run, for a longer-term, bigger payout. So I’m not gonna go full-tilt and extreme one way, like we’ve talked about Dan Siegel, the psychiatrist, whose mental health is really this sort of not-too-chaotic or not-too-rigid. I don’t wanna be on either side of the windshield wiper. I need a framework, I need some structure, and I need flexibility within that.

Adam Stacoviak: Yeah. Well, if we’re talking about that, I think the dopamine would probably come from helping people. And I think with technology, generally– so I would say probably the earliest help I ever did with software or any technical thing was our receptionist and executive assistant to the office. She always needed help with that particular thing. She wasn’t technologically inclined, and neither was I; I just was willing to learn it, and so I would help her all the time deal with our database stuff and help other executives - other kinds of executives, because I was a kind of executive as well - deal with our customer base and information and stuff like that. So I I saw value in solving problems. I solved my own problems, I solved her problems, I solved some of our immediate staff’s problems, and so I guess I saw some payout in the fact that if I learn these few things and master a few of these skills, I can help people.

Adam Stacoviak: Right, absolutely. In some cases you might get into the technology businesses of any sort because of a large payout. It’s really well known that there’s a lot of money in technology, a lot of billions get tossed around whenever businesses get acquired… A more famous example was Instagram being acquired by Facebook for billions of dollars, and that was actually a small window of time whenever Instagram began, to acquisition.

So you might get into it for that kind of payout, but it’s just difficult to only focus on that singular outcome, that financial outcome. You really have to fall in love with – and what we have fallen in love with here at Changelog is the people. It’s not about just simply the technology we build, it’s about the people involved, the communities that get formed, the camaraderie, the community, the collaboration. It’s about the people and the intermingling, rather than just simply like “Oh, we’ve created this best software ever, that solves no problems.” It’s about the people, really.

Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D: I think that it’s really important for people to recognize and identify that they have to get a buy-in. They’re never gonna be apt to change a behavior unless they are really uncomfortable, can recognize that there is a way in which the alternative, the desired behavior provides them an immediate benefit, and that that has to be achievable and repeatable. If I can only hit the mark on one occasion, I’m not gonna repeat it. But I want whatever I set as the payout to pay out repeatedly, because I’m really working on building an entirely new network in my brain, that says “This is the way to work we go.”

Brett Cannon: I’m hoping that it will actually – I don’t wanna say accelerate, but I’m hoping it will open up some avenues to some things that we haven’t been able to try before. I don’t think it’s gonna hurt the popularity of the language. I think we’ve reached COBOL level of integration into companies, where there’s no chance in hell people can get rid of us at this point, so Python will always be around, whether or not the name Python is used in hatred or in love [unintelligible 01:03:59.02] but hopefully it stays love. My hope though is by having five of us, it kind of opens up the potential for having ideas of how to try to move things forward.

[01:04:15.00] I kind of view the council as if everyone were to quit volunteering tomorrow, there’s at least five of us to make sure something functions somewhere, and we can somehow kickstart the project again. I view the council now as the backstop. And as part of that, I’m hoping as a council we can work towards focusing the community’s energy towards improving things.

Python 2, for instance, has been a long-running – I don’t wanna say albatross, but it’s been a weight on us in terms of maintaining it and dealing with that transition in the community, and that’s all ending on January 1st, 2020. That’s when Python 2 is gonna officially be retired.

I think the hope is all that energy that’s been put behind migrating people over will suddenly be freed up, and hopefully the council is gonna help focus it towards things that we think can help the community continue to grow and be a wonderful, welcoming place for everyone.

To give actually a concrete example of that, Adam - we’re currently working to potentially get a product manager through the PSF to help out with some things. The initial thing we’re thinking about is the sunsetting of Python 2. That has a very hard deadline, and there’s some things we’ll probably need to work out; there’s communication on that, so we’re hoping we can actually hire someone to do that kind of work, because Lord knows, I don’t wanna have to [unintelligible 01:05:37.20] website and find a reference to Python 2 and rip it out. That’s just not what I wanna do with my Sundays.

We’re also talking about having a vision document with just expositorily saying where we do we see Python in ten years, where can be potentially (as I said) funnel the energy of the community towards things that we think will have a beneficial payout to keep the language relevant going forward, and something people wanna use… Because we don’t wanna end up in a position where we are just comfortable with where we’re at, and then we lose sight of where the community is going, and then we have to be left behind by our users because we just aren’t where they need to be.

So that’s my hope, is that the council will enable that… Because before, Guido just didn’t have the bandwidth on his own to do that kind of thinking, and now that there’s five of us, I’m hoping we can spread that around enough that we can actually see those kinds of things come to fruition, and have a positive impact going forward.

Eric Berry: But I wasn’t. I wasn’t because it didn’t make sense to completely shut it off. I did shut down the platform, I stopped tracking… But I still had developers who trusted me and relied on me to help them get funding. And I had a good friend, Mike Smith, who I believe you know, over at Rollbar, who’s now at GitPrime. I asked him, I said “Are you willing to stick with me? What I can do is you keep providing funding for all of these top-performing sites” – and he looks at them as top-performing, I look at them as needing the most funding. I said “Will you continue to provide funding for them, and I will just take a 15% cut, and that will essentially make it so that we can still do the tracking”, as we were still running it through a tracker… But I didn’t need any of the money. The money was literally just to help the server run. He said, “Absolutely.” He had no issue with that.

So in December I paid out all the remaining money to all of the people that I owed money to, which came to almost $5,000, and then I had an extra thousand dollars of nickles and dimes for all of the other developers that didn’t make enough money to receive that payout, so I made a lump sum donation of $1,000 to the A21 organization for fighting human trafficking. There’s a blog post listing every single developer that participated as a donor in that donation… Because it wasn’t my money; I didn’t consider it my money and I didn’t want it. So in December I talked to a buddy of mine named Freddie Shelton, and I asked him, I said “Hey, are you interested in Code Sponsor? I’ve got all these contracts set up, I’ve got Mike here… Would you like to take it over?” “Sure, absolutely.” So he did, and he kept it going for a month, all the way through early January.

In that time, I was kind of going through this point in my life where I hate my job, I need to find purpose… I found true purpose in funding open source, but I need to be able to go somewhere that I can do that and get paid for it… And that’s what I did.

[36:15] Over the course of about three months, I’ve been talking to Kevin Owocki, who is the CEO and founder of Gitcoin. Gitcoin is a product that helps developers get paid to contribute to open source funding through bounties. We became friends over the months and he offered me a job to come work at Gitcoin, which I accepted.

Once I got to Gitcoin, I thought “I wonder if I can just pick up where I left off and bring Code Sponsor back in.” So I reached out to Freddie, I said “How’s it going?”, I said “Would you be willing to sell me back the company?” and he did. I gave him some money for the company, and then I brought it in as just my contribution to Gitcoin… Just “Here’s me, here’s what I can bring to the table. I don’t want any money for it.” They paid a few of the expenses that I had for the product, but all in all it was like “Code Sponsor joins Gitcoin as sister companies, but they’re basically one company now”, because we’re all getting our paychecks from the same company, and all that stuff. But my role at that point became “Make this work. Help people through ethical advertising.”

Adam Stacoviak: Tim, it’s been fun going on this lane with you. I’m very appreciative of your motivation for your sons, and obviously, the payout for the rest of the world as part of it. This 20-year journey for you, and Mike, and the rest of the team I’m sure is just profound, because you know, it was a happy accident at first, and now it’s just lighting things on fire, so people are excited about it.

Thank you for your work, and your motivations toward this, and obviously, sharing it freely, and even allowing people money if they need to to do the work to educate children.

Drew Wilson: Yeah. So what happened to me was I had sold my company, Plasso, to GoDaddy. And it was literally a dream scenario. An all cash deal, with the option to jump on as an employee, and get a good paycheck and additional payouts if I stay on. So I stayed on there for two years. But with that initial cash sale, I paid back my investors plus some, because they made money on the transaction… And then paid some of my employees that had equity. I made sure everyone who worked with me had equity, so folks made money. And then I had money. And I had never had money before. As a matter of fact, in order to get Plasso to where it was, I had to take out a bunch of loans on the same day, so they would not know about each other, and they wouldn’t show up on the FICO score thing, the credit report. So I took out a bunch of loans on the same day just to keep the company going.

[00:38:24.08] I was making enough for myself, but that’s it. And I needed these other employees to help sell the thing. And so I took on massive debt. The amount of debt that would take me my entire lifetime to get out of if things didn’t work out. And so yeah, I took on that debt… But then, just as I had to fire my last employee, being like “Sorry, I don’t have any money”, literally, that was on a Friday, that was their last day… I came into the office on a Monday, and there’s an email in my inbox from GoDaddy saying “Hey, we’d love to talk about partnering.” And acquisitions always happen under the guise of partnerships. I didn’t know that. And then three months later, I had sold my company. A little over three months. But to me it was like 10 years of my life. It was just so exciting, and at the same time – it’s like a rollercoaster of emotions, because things are going your way, not going your way, is it going to happen, it’s not going to happen… It’s going to happen… Oh, man.

And I didn’t have anybody else. It was just me. I was the only person doing negotiations. There was no advice giver on my end. No lawyers, nothing. It was just me doing it all. And so it was a great experience. It was a great experience. The company acquisition team at GoDaddy is super-nice.

So it was cool, got through it all, made some money… Then I was like “Well, I’ve never had money before. What the crap do I do with money?” And I’m like “There’s got to be a site somewhere –”

Mireille Reece, PsyD: Yeah, and so I would even get real nuanced around happiness and joy, because I would differentiate happiness as more of a positive emotional experience that can be more susceptible to change quicker… As opposed to joy, which is a more deep, abiding, enduring emotional state. I can be joyful and have joy without a sense of happiness, and part of that comes from like “I know the long-term payouts.”

Part of even going to graduate school for psychology was around joy. It wasn’t always happy or fun, but it had so much meaning that that was significant for me to endure all the other things, and that’s what kept me going.

Tobias Koppers: Yeah, I don’t think it’s a problem for contributors or for me that it’s public. I don’t think so many people look it up, what I earn or what contributors earn. Technically, you can download all the contributions, all the payouts to contributors and all the payments by sponsors… It’s basically a [unintelligible 00:26:39.27] but I don’t think it’s used or that anybody cares about how much the contributors earn. It’s not like they’re earning so much that you should have problems with it, so…

Jerod Santo: So only that local browser knows your browsing history to do the payouts?

Adam Stacoviak: And you can have big payouts, too.

Andrew Godwin: Oh, you mean for the Channels. Yes, we had a formalized Channels one from the start. Django, as it grows as a project, we like having formal ways of doing things so there’s no skirting around the problem. When money’s involved, accusations of fraud or favoritism. We have a neutral committee that I’m not on that approves that stuff, and there’s a process. I work with the person who has a proposal, we put it to the committee, they discuss it and then come up with a result. We have a separate structure already for Django called the DSF - the Django Software Foundation; they handle the money and the payouts and stuff as well. So it’s all very well formalized; I’m very happy with how above board and understandable it is. It’s very hard to accuse of favoritism in that respect.