Adam Stacoviak: These projects are not many businesses, what you’re saying. You don’t think that these open source projects should transcend from communities to many businesses that aren’t really businesses. Not necessarily disagreeing with that either, by the way. So the trend line, I think, for capitalism right now is it’s becoming more and more pervasive. Fractal. And there are better tools and representations of value - one of which is crypto, by the way - that will allow people to participate in capitalism more easily, in a more fractional way in the future. You can come up with some buzzword for all that. I don’t know what that would be. I do not think philanthropy, donations, chipping something into a hat is sustainable. Nope. That is not sustainable, because it is not a system that creates more inputs relative to the outputs. It’s not.

[01:42:17.21] So your example - the way I would describe your example is this person is respected by a community, they raised their hand, and the community responded and said “Look, you asked for this. We’re going to chip in. There’s what you asked for.” Great. That is not sustainable, though. It’s like a one-off activity. How many more times could that individual make such a request? I mean, I guess it would depend on the value of what they’ve done before… Things are going to get, I think, pretty weird in the future as these AI systems can produce very valuable technologies… And so how do you actually sustain the notion of value, and then connect a currency to that? I think that we’re careening - not gradually, we are careening towards a world of completely repricing and reshaping the way value is represented, both in terms of basic standard goods and services in the economy, like bananas and bread, to digital products, and also the price of advertising, which is like the predominant business model of the internet still today.

So I try to remain humble about – like, I have no freaking clue how these things are going to get solved… But I deeply believe capitalism is a very sustainable thing. And you want to create a continuous stream of revenue and income, and have your cost structure and your spend be less than that. To me, that’s called sustainability. There are many other – I’m just like a business person, sort of, so I kind of use the business example… There’s many other examples that you can use… Like in physics, and systems that have inputs and outputs; the same principle applies. To me, that’s how I think about sustainability.

Bill Kennedy: Now, when we talk about Go - one of Go’s language design philosophies was being able to do more with less code. It’s coming from these – I believe. I can’t speak for Robert, and all… But I believe it’s coming from these ideas that if there’s less code you need to write, there’s going to be less bugs. Now, why did they say this? Because Stroustrup says “If you’re writing more code than you need, it results in ugly, large, and slow code”, where ugly means you’re leaving places for bugs to hide, large means you’re ensuring incomplete test coverage, and slow means you now start to make shortcuts and dirty tricks away from your frameworks and your patterns, because you’re moving fast and the code gets out of control… And these things absolutely happen.

So I think we’re talking about all of this… It all works together, and I think Go is tied into that. And we complain about Go’s error handling. We love to complain about it. But do you know that there was a study done where they looked at 48 critical failures that brought down systems. Hundreds of bugs in Cassandra, HBase, MapReduce, Redis… How many systems run on Redis today? And they’ve found in this study that out of those 48 critical failures, 92% of them could have been avoided if error handling was done better. Failures from bad error handling.

So again, I think that Go designers knew this. They knew this, because they were developers themselves. They were not necessarily academics. They had to build software. They knew what the average developer needed, they knew where they were falling down. And I think Go comes in and solves these things.

[36:15] Personally, I think when somebody complains about error handling in Go, they’re complaining about – they want it easier to do, not easier to understand. [laughter] We come back again, right? So sometimes when you make things easier to understand, things have to be a little more tedious.

But here’s another design philosophy, Johnny? Two of them. One, you shouldn’t be writing code for yourself. You should be writing code for the next person that has to come along. Because if you don’t, if you’re not thinking about the next person and/or the average developer on your team, when you leave, that codebase leaves with you. It gets replaced. And the 3, 4, 5 years you spent on that ends up resulting in meaning nothing. I’ve got code that’s 20-something years old, 10-something years old in production right now. The 20-year-old code should go, because that’s way too long… But I think it’s there because I always wrote code with the understanding that somebody else has to be able to maintain this. It wasn’t about me, it was about the next person, and that allows that code to now not just have to be replaced, right? You need to have that design philosophy in your head; you need to be thinking about that, “Who’s the next person that’s gonna come along here?” And then you’re always writing code for the average developer on your team.

If you’re the average developer on your team, that means I can wake you up at 3 in the morning (God forbid) if I have to, and you can handle the bug. That’s the average developer. If I can’t wake you up at three in the morning, then you’re below average. So another question is “Why are you below average? Is it because I’m failing you, or are you just not coming up to speed?” And then for me, the next thing is the above-average developer. That’s scary, because those are the developers that tend to get bored, and instead of being able to write for the average developer, or bring the team up - that’s where the clever code comes in. That’s where we trip up.

And I tell people all the time, “When you’re hiring, evaluate who this person is for your team. Are they below, are they average, or are they above?” And consciously understand what you’re gonna need to do as an individual and a team to get this person in the right place. If they’re below average – which is great; let’s hire developers who are below average for our teams, so we can bring them up and we can create a stronger team. Those are the best developers in the world, because you can really teach and train them. And now you’ve got somebody who will stay a long time and really work hard and thank you for the opportunity.

But if you put me on a team that’s doing business APIs, I’m above average. If you put me on a team doing crypto, I’m below average. And if I wanted to learn crypto and you gave me that chance, I would be ecstatic, and I’d work hard, and we’d get there. But if you’re hiring somebody who’s above - and I’ve done it before - they can either be amazing mentors and coaches, which is why you’re hiring them, I hope, or they can create utter chaos and destruction, because everything they’re doing is not comprehensible to anybody else on the team, and you’ve gotta maintain it.

[39:40] So those are design philosophies around building teams, around the ideas of all of this stuff. And you wanna apply it back to micro-level decisions, like constructions, functions versus methods, to macro-level decisions around app layer, business layer, foundation layers of code. Policies for these. Import policies. Error handling policies. Who can shut down an application? Who can’t? Who can log? Who can’t? Who can wrap errors? Who can’t? Who can set certain import dependencies? Who can’t?

And you don’t have to have all of it day one. You have to develop it as “Suddenly, there’s a hole in the engineering decisions. Hm. We don’t’ know what to do here. Okay, that means we may not have a design philosophy here.” I get excited when that happens. I’m like, “Oh my God, we’re gonna have a design philosophy for this. Oh my God, we get to do something new! WOOOH!”

Now, you’ve always got some of your base, foundational, right? But those are exciting days. And it’s also exciting sometimes when somebody finds a hole in a design philosophy or policy, where we thought this was the right thing to do, and suddenly we’ve found an exception. And there’s exceptions to everything. There are some exceptions you just can’t take. I don’t really take exceptions between project layers. I’ll never let the foundational layer log. There’s no exception to that. If you have to log, you’re in the business. That’s it.

But then there are other exceptions… Here’s a good one, Johnny. Here’s one where you might take an exception. So baseline design philosophy - a type system is not to be shared. A type system exists to allow package, which is a unit of code in Go, a clearly compile-time unit of code. A type system is design to allow data to flow in and out of the package API, where a package has a purpose. So if the type system’s job is to allow data - if. There’s my philosophy. If you agree with this. You don’t have to agree with anything I’m saying today, by the way… It is totally fair. But if you believe that a type system’s job is to allow data to flow in and out of a package, then that type system is highly localized to that package and that package only. So now you have to make a decision about every API. When it comes to data flowing into an API, you have two choices. You could say “I want the API to accept data based on what it is.” This is what I would call concrete functions, accepting a concrete type. It can accept a user, and only a user. That’s what it is. But thanks to interfaces, we can write polymorphic functions let’s say “No, this API will accept concrete data based on what it can do.” And that’s a next level of refactoring, hopefully; I don’t wanna start there, but suddenly you realize “Not only can I work with a user, I can also work with a customer. Based on this common behavior, we make it polymorphic.” Okay. We all agree with that. You have both choices, and those are the only two choices you have. And those types should exist as types within the scope of that package.

Now, here’s where the fun begins… I have a strong rule that functions should only return concrete values. The function’s job is not to pre-decouple or wrap concrete data already in an interface; that is not the API’s responsibility. It is the caller’s responsibility to decide whether or not they need the decoupling or not. Not mine.

So minus the error interface, which is a whole another set of interesting design philosophies and things I have, I don’t wanna see a function that uses http.handler as the return type. I don’t care if you know or think they’re gonna put it into a handler already. I don’t care, it’s not my job. My job is to give them the concrete value that they can then do with what they want.

“Well, Bill, then we’re leaking a –” No, you’re not leaking a type. They already imported your package. There’s no leaking there, what are you talking about? Stop trying to abstract for the caller. Let them do it. Now, there are two exceptions to this. One is the error interface; we’re handling errors in a decoupled state. There’s lots of reasons why we wanna do that.

[44:04] And until 1.18 comes out, there are times where you might need the empty interface. It should be a little bit of a smell, but let’s be real, I’ve had to write a function or two over the last six years where I was trying to be, for whatever good reason, generic. Maybe I was just doing some data flow… And we were using the empty interface, which - now in 1.18 we’ll be able to replace with a concrete type. [laughter] I mean, what is generics at the end of the day anyway? Generics is concrete, polymorphic functions, where the polymorphism isn’t happening at runtime, the polymorphism is happening at compile time. We’re choosing the concrete type, the data – because the only data that flows is concrete data anyway. We’re just choosing that at compile time. For me, it’s concrete polymorphism, as opposed to runtime polymorphism.

But there’s a philosophy - we shouldn’t be using the interface as a return type, minus those two exceptions, when they happen. And people disagree with me there, but… There it is. So if I see a function that’s returning an interface, it’s immediately code review style, so “What are we doing? Why are we doing this? Prove to me that we need to take an exception”, but it’s gonna be hard, because if I return the concrete type, that doesn’t prevent the caller from doing whatever it is they’re doing.

Jerod Santo: Firefox could be doomed

The court’s ruling on the U.S. v. Google LLC case on search competition won’t merely impact the tech giant itself.

The DOJ wants to bar Google from paying to be the default search engine in third-party browsers including Firefox, among a long list of other proposals including a forced sale of Google’s own Chrome browser and requiring it to syndicate search results to rivals.

Mozilla CFO Eric Muhlheim testified in Google’s defense that losing the revenue from Google’s default placement deal would doom the company and serve to only further Google’s browser monopoly. Why? Because Firefox makes up 90% of Mozilla’s revenue and ~85% of Firefox revenue comes from that single deal alone.

On cross-examination by the DOJ, Muhlheim conceded that it would be preferable not to rely on one customer for the vast majority of its revenue, regardless of the court’s ruling in this case.

This single point of failure for Mozilla’s business may be shocking, but it’s not new. I consider it a case of gross ineptitude that Mozilla leadership hasn’t found a way to diversify their income, considering just how beholden they are to a single customer (who also happens to make a rival browser to theirs). What path might they take to get there? I enjoyed this comment by “Sly Mr. Fox” on the linked Verge article:

Let me pay you money for Firefox. Stop doing all the other weird crap and just make a good, user-focused (really, actually user-focused, not “we value our users voices!” user-focused) browser, and let me pay you money for it. This is not hard. Resolve all the conflicts of interest, be the Kagi of browsers. No, you won’t beat Chrome, but you’ll do good work and help to keep a free internet.

Adam Stacoviak: The keyboard kind of thing. Go back in the day, you’ve got the OG ErgoDox, right? But here you’ve got this OG, simplistic, everybody can afford it for the most part… Like, it’s in the – if you’re in a certain income bracket or below a certain income bracket, you can likely afford this thing, and plug it into your 120-volt outlet. It’s that accessible. You don’t really need a radio. It’s nice to have it… You don’t need it. You don’t really need power windows. It’s nice to have it. You don’t need it. You don’t really need the dashboard and all this stuff to show you maps… You don’t need it. You have a phone. It’s nice to have.

Kendall Miller: It is a very, very good item. So let me be clear about a couple of things. One, I would have totally done this exact same thing with a terrible distillery, and a terrible end product, because I think the marketing has legs. We have a fantastic product, that I can’t believe how good the product is. I actually think the gin is the best gin I’ve ever had, and I am a gin snob. And I don’t feel like I can say that about my own gin, but it is so very good. And I can say it because I didn’t make it. I had some input into the recipe, but that’s all. And the whiskey is also very, very good. So it is a luxury product, and it costs a lot of money, and I’m selling it to a group of people who have a lot of disposable income, like to make jokes like this… My thought is not that Jerod will become a daily drinker of Generative A Rye; my thought is “Sometime in the next year Jerod is going to want to give a gift to somebody he knows in tech, and he’s going to ship a bottle of Generative A Rye.” Or director of engineering at XYZ company is going to buy his team all a bottle of whiskey for Christmas, and they’re going to buy Generative A Rye. My goal is that.

I don’t think anybody’s going to buy a $95 bottle of gin, even though it’s a very pretty bottle of gin, and it says Force Push right there on the label, and it’s – it’s Friday Deployment Spirits, Jerod. It’s funny.

Adam Stacoviak: [01:27:59.25] Okay, so the Iconic Pro Package… Hey, Orman, if you like this, pay us… But listeners, just check it out. Don’t buy this. Don’t go and buy this. I’m kidding. You do what you want. Solo is 99 bucks a year, and team is 249 a year. And you get access to all the icons. There’s new icons every week. So I think if you revisited this as your passive income plan, John - steal their model; borrow their model.

Ashley Jeffs: [unintelligible 01:27:57.21] Understandably, everybody basically just immediately turned off. Because why would you? Like, I’ve got a company now, and… I think that’s fair enough. Yeah, there were sponsors that were giving me quite a lot, and some of those lasted a few months… But to be honest, my assumption was that they would all just disappear. I’ve closed it now. I’d feel a bit uncomfortable with people sponsoring me now, because I feel like I’m monetizing the project, so I don’t really feel like it’s a reasonable thing for me to go out there begging for it. I mean, I know that’s not what’s happening. If you’ve got a Sponsors page, you’re just kind of like asking for tips, and for most people it’s nice because it’s a bit of validation that somebody uses and appreciates your thing… Whereas I was in a position where it was an actual like source of income. So I feel a bit conflicted about leaving it there. Even if people just want to give me like a tip of the hat, I feel like - keep that money and buy me a drink if you see me in person. But otherwise, I appreciate you, but…

Jerod Santo: That’s the news for now, but also scan the companion newsletter for even more news worth your attention. Such as: you have built and Erlang, using coding skills to make passive income, and Docker on macOS is still slow?

ICYMI, last week we published two awesome shows: an interview with Elecia White from embedded.fm and a news roundup with Adam and yours truly talking Nvidia Digits, Waymo infinite loops, and modern terminal experiences. Scroll up in your feed to find those and stay tuned for this week because Wednesday we’re speaking with Ashley Jeffs about his open source ride & selling Benthos to Redpanda and on Friday we’re joined by Kris Brandow and Matthew Sanabria from Go Time’s spin-off, Fallthrough.

Have a great week! Leave us a 5-star review if you dig our work, and I’ll talk to you again real soon.

Jerod Santo: [00:31:49.05] Well, there’s a sideways application of Parkinson’s law here… Which, you know, Parkinson’s law is the one that the scope of a project will expand to match the time allowed for the project. Something like this. That’s a bad paraphrase. And I was just teaching my kids about budgeting this morning, and I was talking about how if you’re not diligent, that your lifestyle will expand to match the size of your income, right? Sometimes beyond. It’s just kind of a human nature thing… And I think our software expands to match the size of the hardware that it’s running on. To use every last bit. And it has allowed for many of us, web developers like myself included, to be lazy, and do things the easy way, the fast way, the cheap way… But in that embedded world, where every resource counts and it’s heavily constrained, you must have to know all of the optimizations, all the little tricks, the way to manage your memory so as not to bloat, or leak, or… Do you like – I mean you must like that… I mean it’s literally a constraint.

Jerod Santo: The new $30,000 side hustle

Bloomberg reports (but I link to Megan McDonough’s commentary on LinkedIn because paywall) that employee referrals have become a lucrative side hustle for tech workers.

Platforms like Blind and Refermarket are connecting job seekers with company insiders willing to offer referrals— for a fee.

I’m not surprised that this is a thing, but I’m certainly disappointed. How can you feel good about making money by referring a complete stranger for a position!? I guess you get over it because it’s an easy $30k? Crazy times…

While this phenomena is likely rare, it is indicative of a job market that is way out of wack. The $30k income referenced in the headline is one individual who produced “more than a half a dozen successful hires for the company” after referring more than one thousand job candidates to his employer.

Nick Sweeting: Yeah, that’s sort of what I’m gravitating towards as an initial carrot to offer - if you agree to time-unlock, then I’ll host your stuff for free as a backup. It gets dicey when I have to re-host content for other people… So the way archive.org works is they basically operate as a library. They’re a nonprofit institution, they don’t earn income from their hosting… They have a separate LLC that does some paid services, but it’s a separate LLC, and they’re basically not earning revenue directly off of re-hosting often copyrighted content.

[31:49] If I ran a public hosted service where I’m mirroring people’s content, I would have to either be a library like them, in which case I can’t accept payment for hosting at all. So this is the only way that I could offer to host people’s stuff. Or I have to figure out some other new legal system that hasn’t been invented yet to do this. Basically, you’re trying to make a business out of BitTorrent, right? It’s a very similar problem. It’s very hard to charge for this and not be legally liable for re-hosting copyrighted content. So there’s probably some middle ground where it’s a – people are buying an app that they are running locally, that they are operating, that’s connecting them to other people running this app. But I am never hosting public stuff unless I have a signed release from the archiver saying that they own the content, and it’s okay to be time unlocked. And then I’m taking on the central moderation labor of, unfortunately, delisting that stuff if I get copyright complaints. If someone sends a DMCA notice and says I have to take it down, I have to comply as a central agency. But the people running those individual archiving apps can still share it if they want to. Something like that. That’s sort of a middle ground option.

Break: [33:00]

Tobias Fried: Yeah. They’re converging ultimately in what they offer… But yeah, they still exist in people’s minds as a certain thing.

And it is true that - yeah, there wasn’t always a one off payment thing in Patreon. It was only subscriptions. And there wasn’t always a subscriptions thing in Buy Me a Coffee. It was only one-time payment.

Anyway, the point is to say we’re not generating a lot of income there. It feels good. It still feels really good to see the feedback, the direct feedback, and to feel the love… But it’s not paying any bills at the moment.

Quincy Larson: Yeah. So we think 50 years out, 60 years out. I think in terms of what is likely to be accomplished. Okay, so if you go all the way back to the the first printing of the Gutenberg Bible, the first mass-produced book in history, it was more than – it was like 600 years ago. It was just with the advent of the printing press. And this book came out and it brought literacy to everyone in the 1450s. 1450s. 600+ years ago. 670 years ago. And still, we have illiteracy. I don’t believe that AI is just going to magically change illiteracy. I think that there are a lot of people who just – it’s still hard to learn to read if nobody teaches you how to read; it’s very difficult. I hear all these things of people who have unschooled their kids, and they haven’t necessarily put effort into teaching the kids… There’s just this idea that the kids will naturally learn how to read. And some kids might, but a lot of kids won’t necessarily learn how to read, and they’ll end up not having reading level nearly what their peers, and it’ll be a huge kind of crushing weight on their shoulders, like “I’m not good at reading.” And they’ll carry that with them. And I feel like it’s the same thing with technology.

People certainly have this with math. “Oh, I just suck at math.” They never learned how to do math, and they always feel bad about themselves, and they’re always intimidated whenever they’re reading a book and there’s some math, or something like that, or whenever they look at some equation… Even the most simple equations, when they’re walking around the science museum and they’re just “Oooh…!” They get this anxiety. And same thing with software. “I don’t really know how a web server works. I don’t really know what garbage collection is doing.” It’s just, in the back of your mind you’re just kind of unsure of yourself.

[01:30:00.20] And so if over the course of 600 years there are still people – when they have had this relatively abundant thing that they could read, mass market… 600 years… It’s going to be a very long time before technology literacy is solved, and before everybody can just feel confident that they understand how recursion works, and things like that. And I do think that these are things that people in Star Trek – like, I always look at Star Trek and I realize that it’s flawed in the sense that it’s just kind of this vision from the ’70s, and then it got interpolated through the ‘90s, with Next Generation, Voyager, and D6-9, which is the best one, according to Andrew Brown, big Trekkie and massive contributor to freeCodeCamp… He’s created 50 certification preparation courses on our YouTube. But I realize that it’s just kind of a sci-fi vision of the future, but it makes practical sense. A lot of the things in that show, I can see that that’s where we’re heading. We’re heading toward computers where you just talk, and you can use declarative speech instead of imperative speech. And the machine, it just gives you a lot more affordance in figuring out what needs to be done. And if you watch The Expanse, there’s lots of AI… But it’s not everywhere, and they’re not talking to AIs, and stuff. It’s just like doing the little things like recalibrating the turrets on the ship, and stuff like that.

And I think that 100 years from now, if we want to talk 100 years - let’s just choose a big, round number - people are still going to exist. We’re probably not going to be all walking around in exosuits. I will be impressed if we’ve terraformed Mars at all by then. I just genuinely don’t think that there’s the political will, and the budget, and all that stuff, and I think that people greatly underestimate how difficult it will be to colonize space, and stuff like that. I think realistically, we’re still going to be here. Hopefully, we’ll have done some stuff to mitigate climate change and mitigate job loss due to automation, and stuff like that… But people are still going to need to learn. People are still probably going to need to work and figure out a way to make money. I don’t believe that UBI is coming to save us, universal basic income, or anything like that. I think fundamentally, people are going to still need to learn and they’re going to still need to go out and do things to provide for their families. That has been how it has been throughout civilization, throughout the history of every civilization, whether that is the hunter-gatherer tribes… People have needed to go out and figure out how to keep the calories coming to keep the body going. And I think institutions come and fall, but we’ve got these human animals, 100,000 years of human tribes interacting with one another, and warring, and things like that… But I still think that they’re going to need to learn. I don’t think there’s going to be a magic matrix thing where you just “Teach me how to fly a helicopter” and there’s a program.

Justin Garrison: Multiple streams of income, all that stuff. Like, no.

Adam Stacoviak: You were just talking about the churn, or lack of churn with customers, and how there was not churn going away, they were staying there, there was steady income over a period of time that made sense to give you at least enough foundation to say “This is a safe bet.” And zooming back out a bit to maybe eight minutes ago, you were saying “Could we do this?” And you have a lot of friends who say “Yeah, you probably could do this.” I also agree. I think you can probably do this. We’re betting hard on podcasting, obviously… We have gone the route of “Build it versus buy it” in our case, but because that’s our business model in terms of sponsors, partners… Just the way we went; infrastructure partners are core to our business model, really. And I think we’re a unique scenario in the podcasting world in the fact that we podcast around software development, software engineering, business, growth, things like that… And we also benefit from the various partners we can work with and attract, because they have awesome platforms. And I couldn’t imagine us doing what we do, and host it somewhere else. We just would not have the same clout, I would say, in those cases, where we can actually eat the dog food or drink the champagne, and share the sentiment of the taste, of the grapes.

Jerod Santo: Rug pulls aren’t cool, but are they worth it?

RedMonk’s Rachel Stephens decided to “examine if changing an underlying open source project’s license from an OSI-approved license to a proprietary license has a measurable impact on financial outcomes for the commercial entity backing the project.”

That’s not an easy question to answer, but that didn’t stop her. She looked at MongoDB, Elastic, HashiCorp & Confluent’s revenue, market cap & net income over time. Click through for the charts. For the conclusion:

While in our sample we see revenue grow post-license change, we don’t see a notable change in the rate of growth. We also see very mixed results in company valuation, and there does not seem to be a clear link between moving from an open source to proprietary license and increasing the company’s value.

Benn Stancil: [50:11] The thing, actually, like sort of the ideal is like these banks – you’ve got like an investment bank or whatever, and they have like these rotational programs where you end up “Okay, go work on the trading desk for a while, go work in fixed income, go work at the deal desk”, and M&A stuff, or whatever, and you spend like three months in each of these things… Basically, I’m like “I’ll just go on some professional rotation program around different things in the world.” Basically, I think tech is interesting, but there’s so many other kinds of interesting problems out there, that just seeing – even if it’s data-related, but like doing data stuff for an industry that isn’t selling software to other software people… There’s lots of interesting things in that. You just get exposure to like “Oh, this is like a fun problem.”

The person I was talking to, we were talking about casinos. Casinos are like a little bit of a greasy industry, but the problem there I bet is pretty fascinating. The things that casinos have to deal with I bet are pretty interesting. I have some friends who work in various political circles; they do the same thing, but it’s like a very different sort of set of problems. So all that kind of stuff I think is more to me about like “Is this a fun thing to think about?” And I say all that, and then probably it’s like “Alright, fine, I’ll sell my soul and start a new company”, or whatever…

Kilian Valkhof: At some point mortgages, yeah… And one of the downsides of a browser is I can’t build it, and then ship it, and then never touch it again. Because a month later, there’s a new version of Chromium, and if I don’t update to that one, then within two months it’s just super-insecure to run. And within half a year, it’s terribly outdated. And then within a year, all your users who have more modern browsers than you… So it’s something I continuously need to update. But yeah, that also meant that I had income from the get go.

Adam Stacoviak: That’s right. And as long as you’re running, I’m not complaining. But if I look across the room, and there’s a person over there handing out the hamster wheels, but that’s it… Like, “Hey, man, why are you not on the hamster wheel?” He’s like “I am the banker. I am the stockbroker. I trade off of your middleman activity.” So you’re making money off of the fact that I’m working? He’s like “Yeah. And it’s totally fair, because I am working.” And so when I think about it, what happens – I asked the question one time to someone, “What happens if everyone was debt-free?” And that person told me society would collapse. I was like “Why would it collapse?” Like, wouldn’t it be good if people were debt-free and had more disposable income to buy the things that they need? He’s like “Kelsey…” And that’s when I started having this opinion that things are not priced at what people can afford. Things are priced at what people can borrow. I’d rather sell you a car for $100,000, than sell you a car that you can pay cash for 50k. I’d rather just make another 50,000 and you’ve just got to go get a loan to buy it, so we just keep the prices high. And if you have trouble getting a loan, then you can buy here, pay here. And I’ll just charge you 17%.

So if you do this long enough, you have the perfect recipe to make sure that everyone works for ever. Like, why would you stop? You can’t stop working. And if you stop working - “Man, something about inflation, man… We don’t know what happened, but all the houses are now up 40% than last year. So yeah, you’re about to retire, bro, but you can’t afford it anymore. So back to work you go.”

So to me, I keep thinking about “Why would you want a system like that?” But I don’t think we’ve figured out a better way of having people do a bunch of work, and a subset of people not doing any work. People still like that model, and I think what we’ve done is said “Hey, what have you had a chance to not work, and everyone else had to work?” And that’s what we call retirement. This is why I’m very respectful of – the only reason why I get to not work is because everyone else has to work, and so my dollars still have meaning. So I am conflicted. In many ways I’m a hypocrite, that I’m benefiting from the exact same system that I’m trying to wonder why it exists in its current form?

Autumn Nash: Yeah, basically. And it’s wild because they – I read an article and it talked about two different middle classes. There’s the middle class that has a house that was bought like 15 years ago, and no kids and childcare. And then there’s the new generation of the middle class, that you make all this money, but you have kids and childcare, or you bought a house in the last couple years, and you are two different income levels. You may make the same amount of money, but you are living two completely different lives.

And it was really interesting, and it talks about how women are only able to really do well in the workplace when they have 50/50 relationships, but also when jobs are more flexible, because it then gets to the point where it needs to be flexible for both partners. So when you give a man a more flexible job, it also helps the gender pay gap, because they can then be better partners. So it’s really interesting. So flexible work is actually how we will get to better equality in the workforce. Yeah.

Birk Jernström: Yeah, absolutely. So for those listening that might not know, just a quick – like, Serenity OS is this project run by Andreas, a Swedish guy who’s building his own operating system since like four years ago, five years ago. And now also Ladybird, which his own browser as well. And to be fair, it’s a community now of thousands of developers contributing to the project. But it’s this absolutely wonderfully ambitious and insane project that one person took on, that just is one of the best examples of where open source shines, and what’s possible. So that’s Andreas and Serenity OS.

And so September of last year I came in contact with Andreas, and we had issue funding. That was the only feature we had at Polar at the time. And the next chapter that we were in was what we called rewards, which is how can you take the funding that you’re getting for these issues and easily split it with contributors that are helping out solve that specific feature, or whatever it might be? And Andreas had I think about around the same time just received $300,000 in sponsorship. $100,000 from Shopify, amongst others… And so he was in this phase where now he had like a larger pool of capital, and he brought on two engineers full-time to work on Serenity with him… But he just started thinking about how can he distribute the funding that he started to get more and more of, to more of the contributors that are helping out with Serenity.

So we sort of met at this perfect timing… So Andreas was actually part – I shared Figma designs with him on how rewards would work, and got his feedback, and we’ve sort of designed that feature together in many ways. And that’s how Serenity is primarily using Polar. So they have select issues for Serenity and Ladybird, where contributors can help out and they would get 100% of the funding that the community funds those particular issues. And it’s been working really, really well for Serenity and the team. And the reason why they switched so that it points now to Polar from GitHub is because of that as well. Like, Andreas loved the idea that with Polar he can highlight more developers that are part of the project, and help distribute that funding, versus centralize that funding to him alone.

And I can share that idea, which is something we’re working on now, but we’re taking that concept of rewards and really centralizing it throughout everything we’re doing at Polar. So inspired by the 1% climate program that Stripe launched, we’re going to introduce like a 1% OSS program, where the idea is if you’re building commercialization, and you’re like building or wanting to build a HashiCorp or a Sentry, whatever it is, that you can automate and recognize “Here’s the upstreams, and here’s my dependencies that I’m dependent on”, and automatically that gets distributed to them. You can set it at 1%, you can set at 10%, 20%, 50%, whatever you want. But that’s I think a very key distinguisher from other platforms as well, where hopefully that will open up the door that like commercialization can push even more capital through, as part of the model being set up to distribute the income from that to your transient dependencies.

Annie Sexton: But I get that allure. And so we have this huge wave of people doing bootcamps, and sometimes self-educating, getting into this… So I will say, it is okay to just keep striving for a job, and the likelihood that if you don’t have a job right now and you don’t have income - yeah, having an income will make you happier.

Louis Pilfold: So I don’t earn as much as I would if I was doing a developer job here in London. I would like to get my income up to the point where I could pay myself that full salary, and then I would really love to be able to start employing, or like outsourcing, or contracting or something the core team members. There’s a few people – the first one is probably Jack, who lives in Italy… He’s an amazing guy; he does so much work. And I would just love to be able to pay him for the amazing work he’s doing.

And yeah, it’s a bit daunting working out how we’d get enough money to be able to do those things, but everything’s moved so fast since v1, it makes me think “Oh, actually, this is really doable.” Things that didn’t seem possible before do seem possible.

There’s lots of avenues… I think sponsorship’s always gonna be a big part of that. And I like sponsorship, because it really feels like an open source thing to me, this idea that if you want something, you support it, whether it be by fixing a bug, or like testing something, or like giving them $5. That’s awesome. I really want to find ways to get more corporate sponsors like Fly. I think as more companies start to invest and use Gleam, I think we definitely naturally get more who want to support in that way. But I also want to explore doing some other things, like having maybe like a Gleam enterprise, which is the same as support, but it’s just wrapped in a way to help you get it through procurement. [laughs]

But things like premium educational content… There’s a bunch of open source projects that have something like that, where they just have like some amounts of educational content or references, and stuff like that… And then you pay a small for a company subscription amount of money, but large for an open source project amount of money, and that gives you access to that. And from talking to projects that do this, it seems that a lot of them - the companies don’t actually seem to use it that much. It’s just that companies like buying things, so I want to sort of play around with that interaction a little bit. It’s hard for a capitalist company to just say “Yes, we’ll give you some money”, but it’s easy for them saying “Oh yes, we’ll give you a few thousand dollars every X amount of time, such that we can have this relationship with you, and we have this content.” So that’s something to explore.

Other things are merchandise. I’ve got a friend working on a merch store… So if you want to buy your Gleam keycaps and Gleam T-shirts and Gleam stickers, that’ll be a thing we can hopefully do soon. I have no idea if that will actually make money or not, but I just love the idea of people having like little Gleam logos on their keyboard.