Amanda Silver: They were each on their third job or something like that by the time I graduated from college. And so I thought, when I was graduating, like – I thought I was going to be a scientist, because my dad was a scientist… But I thought, “You know, if I’m going to go get a PhD or whatever, maybe I should try industry a little bit.” And so on a long shot, I just went to the tech career fair and handed out my resume to different companies that I thought would pay me decently in cash, because I wasn’t interested in stock at the time… And Microsoft seemed like a relatively stable company. And Google at the time was a startup, and I was like “Not going to apply.”

Mat Ryer: “I don’t mind Ash… I don’t even mind Bash.. I like caching and cash, and I’ll clash with the dash in a flash, man… I’m not going to say gash… I don’t even mind hash… I’m out on the lash, man… I’ve got a rash. Oh my gosh, man, I’m going to smash your face in if you backslash me. That’s trash. Backslashes are trash. A backslash is a trash… Yeah, a backslash is a trash… And don’t say forward slash… Just say… Slash… Just say slash. Just say slash… No need to say the forward bit… Just say slash…”

Jerod Santo: React Jam is back!

If you’re a React developer (or a game dev looking to try something a little different) check out the 6th edition of React Jam. It’s a 10-day online event starting May 16th where devs build games using, you guessed it, React.

Sure, React isn’t the go-to tool for game dev, but that’s the fun / challenge! Past entries have included everything from simple board games to impressive 3D stuff using react-three-fiber.

It’s all fun and games (literally), but there are also cash prizes up for grabs. Oh, and I’ll be judging once again, so don’t you dare try to bribe me with 5-star reviews in every podcast directory. Don’t. Even. Try.

Adam Stacoviak: And I get it, those things are adding me value. I’ve opted into it, so I’m not like this freeloader, trying to be a freeloader. But at some point I run out of cash or resources to spend places, and I’ve got to choose if I want to eat tonight or code up my Rails new app with my collaborative code version of Zed.

Drew Wilson: My big attempts overall turned out well, but they were never like big-big. So I still am after my big-big one. You know, I have these ideas, I’m like “Gosh dang it, there’s someone out there making supersonic jets. Gosh dang it, there’s someone out there making robots. Why can’t I freaking do that?” I want to, but I feel in my mind that there’s just this massive gap between what my ideas are and what I gravitate towards, versus what some of these guys are doing when they’re making robots, and stuff. My mind gravitates towards solving problems that are in front of me, not towards problems that plague Earth 100 years from now.

[01:02:03.11] So I’ve come to the grips with the fact that it’s probably how it’s always going to be for me. And so my next thing I want to do is I want to build something that has an enormous cash flow, but is like, we never take VC, and it’s just me and somebody else. And I think I’ll actually be satisfied with that, which will be cool. Because I’ve always wanted to be the person that builds the big company, but I just never could figure out how to get there.

Kendall Miller: Because nobody knew what to do with me. They’re looking at my background in China going “What the heck is this?” So I did sales for them, we succeeded at sales, I hired a sales team, I hired a marketing team, I took over operations… I actually ended up taking over engineering when the CTO made an engineer cry… And then eventually took over the company and we sold the company. So it’s that experience where I did literally everything at the company over the course of about eight years. That put me in a position where I could go out – then I started meeting with other technical founders, I ended up on the board of another company in Denver, that has grown, been successful, had a big exit to PE about a year and a half ago… Ended up just advising a number of different places. And I say advising, it sounds like they’re paying me in equity or cash money, and most of the time it was just me helping somebody out. “Hey, I’ve been there before. Let’s talk about this.” “Hey, I’ve got somebody to refer your way.” “Hey, talk to this person, talk to that person.”

Richard Moot: Let them figure it out. Read my lips. But that was definitely a front runner. I can’t really go into all of the details of why that one wouldn’t work… It’s mostly having to do with domains, and trying to acquire domains, and going through some sort of internal process…

I’m actually quite happy with the Square Developer podcast. I know it’s very on the nose, it’s very straightforward… It is what it is, and I think that that works for developers. My original – this is what I don’t know if I would get in trouble for, but whatever… I originally wanted to call it Local Host, because we have a big push on trying to build local tools for sellers to be able to connect with cash users, to be able to give local offers… So that you can sort of see your coffee shop down the street - they have an offer in cash app that if you go over here and use cash, you can get 10% off your latte, or something. And I just love being able to tell these stories of like “This is the local host hangout to talk about sellers, and developers, and what people are building on Square.” That did not fly well with – I mean, once you get all the other folks involved who want to sort of put their little touch on it… It went through a very lengthy review process, trying to see “Is this going to conflict with some other copyright trademark?”, whatever… And so eventually, we came all the way back down to the Square Developer podcast.

Jerod Santo: The AI 2027 scenario

The AI Futures Project is a new non-profit organization led by Daniel Kokotajlo, a former researcher in OpenAI’s governance division, with a goal of forecasting the future of AI. In their first publication, “AI 2027”, the group predicts that the impact of superhuman AI over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the Industrial Revolution.

They lay this potential future out in a scenario that:

… represents our best guess about what that might look like. It’s informed by trend extrapolations, wargames, expert feedback, experience at OpenAI, and previous forecasting successes.

What’s cool about this work, unlike so many you can find online, is its incredible detail. The story goes quarter-by-quarter through the next 2.5 years, weaving one potential narrative of how things might proceed. There are two endings, though: a “slowdown” and a “race” ending. The overall goal is not prescriptive, but predictive accuracy. And they’re so serious about it, that they’re offering cash incentives for alternative scenarios that prove out to be more accurate.

Jerod Santo: That’s the news for now, but also scan the companion newsletter for even more links worth clicking on. Such as: Building websites with lots of little HTML pages, It is as if you were on your phone, PurrCrypt: fur-ociously secure, paw-sitively adorable! and Keep your calendar in a plain text file.

Sign up today at changelog.com/news.

This is episode #135, so that means it’s time once again for some Changelog++ shout outs!

SHOUT OUT to our newest members: Jarosław F, Felix KD, Alex G, Matt T & Scott S! We appreciate you for supporting our work with your hard-earned cash!

(If Changelog++ is new to you, it is our membership program you can join to ditch the ads, get in on bonus content, receive a free sticker pack in the mail & get shout outs like the you just heard.)

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

Adam Stacoviak: Well, that’s cool. I love this exploration, though. I like that there’s possibility to run your own thing like this, to configure it to the way we want to. I mean, to zoom out, the challenge has been that it’s been hard to configure Fastly, not as a CDN, but as the CDN we need. Our particular use case. It’s not that Fastly is not good as a CDN. It’s just that it has not been highly configurable by us. It’s been challenging over the years, mainly just because they’re, I think, designed for different customer types. We’re a different customer type. And we’ve been holding it not so much wrong, but it’s just been a square peg around a hole kind of thing, where it’s not perfect for our particular CDN needs.

I think we’ve had lots of cash misses over the years… Like, why is our stuff not cached…? It seems like it should be. We’re not prioritized as a thing to serve because of the way the system works, and that’s just it. And we’re designing something that serves that kind of system, where it serves the data, holds more in memory, has more available to it, and is not a miss…

Adam Stacoviak: Okay. So when it comes to, I suppose, this – if you want to say it, this $80 million that you’ve got… Did you need that money? Did you need to raise another round, or did you do it because it was time, it was necessary? Why raise a series C? Why that for you all? I know you have to innovate. Do you need that cash to sort of accelerate certain things? Because that’s usually why you raise cash, is to accelerate a new plan.

Jerod Santo: That’s the news for now, but also scan the companion newsletter for even more stories. Including, Block introduces codenasem goose, JavaScript Temporal is coming, and an expense tracker that lives in your terminal.

Oh, and this is episode 130 so that means it’s time once again for some Changelog++ shout outs!

SHOUT OUT to our newest members: Maryam M, Ceri H, Samuel R, Seth H, David J & Marcel B!

We appreciate you for supporting our work with your hard-earned cash!

If Changelog++ is new to you, it is our membership program you can join to ditch the ads, get in on bonus content, receive a free sticker pack in the mail & get shout outs like the ones you just heard. Learn all about it at changelog.com/++

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: Could you try going downstream to like the – you know, if it fits on a credit card, you don’t have to do any of that kind of stuff? Like petty cash.

Adam Stacoviak: I like the idea that, one, it is software, so you can scale, just like you said. Which is a great thing. But at the same time, it’s like “Well, this isn’t real. It’s software.” But the moment I feel comfortable literally buying or spending my cash on some hardware and some wires, and a kit or whatever it might be, I can take the thing that I’ve been playing with, iterating on, and get, like every other software developer’s doing, and I’m learning those software development skills… But now, once I’ve kind of gotten to the point where I’ve got my really good version that I want to really make in the real world, I can translate that to - it seems like at least, translate that to the real world. Now, I’ve written the software for it. Now all I have to do is just pair it up with real hardware, versus this software version.

Jerod Santo: That’s the news for this year, but it’s time once again for some Changelog++ shout outs!

SHOUT OUT to our newest members: Gianluigi R, Jim VW, Dhruman B, James K, Maciej F, Erika E, Jess H, Trung L, Andrew OB, Jean-Baptiste C & Eric C! We appreciate you for supporting our work with your hard-earned cash.

(If Changelog++ is new to you, it is our membership program you can join to ditch the ads, get closer to the metal with bonus content, directly support our work & get shout outs like the ones above. )

Have a great week, send Changelog News to your friends if you dig it, and I’ll talk to you again next year.

Adam Stacoviak: To rewind the conversation back to the beginning… Jerod said something to me. Jerod and I don’t see each other face-to-face too frequently. A couple times a year. And it actually – I’ll say this on the air, Jerod. I think I said this face-to-face, but… He said to me, he’s like “Adam, when you tell me new ideas, I almost immediately cancel them, because we have no time to do anything.” And I’m paraphrasing what you said, but the sentiment is roughly there. So correct me, Jerod, if you want to. But it kind of bummed me out, because I’m generally - not so much the idea guy, but like someone sort of like generating vision in some way, shape, or form… And like when he said that, I also thought in my brain in the moment, like “Gosh, I’ve kind of stopped like casting any sort of vision in my own brain, because I’m kind of tapped, too.”

So anytime I have a new idea, I don’t have any room to explore it, because we’re doing all the ideas we can, essentially.

And I don’t know where Jerod’s at with this, but I would so make room for – I think this certainly makes room for Pipely. And it’s certainly the main thing, because we need an amazing CDN. And I shared in that podcast with Kurt some of the challenges, and he said, “Well, you know, Adam, that Fastly and Cloudflare and every CDN out there is not – it’s not in their best interests to cache all of your content on all their POPs across the globe forever. That’s not in their best interest.

There’s cache misses, not because they can’t cache it, because they don’t want to.” And so the CDN we build, that we want to build, will always cash everything you need to across the globe, and it will only expire when you say “This is expired.” There will never be a cache miss in this world. And that to me is what a CDN is.

And so if we can build that world, I think other people will like that world. And I think people don’t need - and this is even Kurt concurring on this. I don’t think everybody needs what these larger CDNs can offer, or do offer, because they just offer so much more than you need. So I think there’s a lot of opportunity here, honestly.

James Long: Yeah. I need to check that out. It definitely would have helped me a lot if I had one already that was there, that solves some of these problems for me… But I think some of this is a fundamental piece of the architecture, where like people just wanted to build a little client around it, like themselves, and access Actual’s API. I was like “Hey, okay, we don’t have an API.” I ended up building one and you know how it worked? It was the entire app which downloaded the entire data first. And so to boot up the API the first time you run - it takes seconds. Like ten seconds. So very, very slow, and not very tenable.

And the other thing that I was gonna say is things like protected data. So if people wanted to have these roles and authorization, I think that’s something that – I think that that part I think is not fundamental. I think that’s solvable, but it is hard. If you wanted to say like “This user can input this transaction, and I wanna hide it from my spouse, because it’s like for Christmas.” Those kinds of things just got really tricky.

And just these weird things where like, okay, you’re logged out, and you stopped paying for the product, but you still have it all locally, and so people could like keep using it… It’s just like these weird things where like you log out and you log back in as a different user, but the other local data is still there… To me, I was like “I wanna be a startup that focuses on the problem.” Like, solving the actual – and I kept having to be dragged into this weird mind state of “How do I deal with this crazy, weird, mind-bending situation, that local-first?”

So I think that is the benefit of some of the why the community has moved towards this newer model of local-first, where it’s like a really heavy kind of cash where it’s still a little bit more dependent on the server and it’s not completely local-first, but it adheres to the principles where you query your data locally, but it’s not as –

Adam Stacoviak: You’ve won a lifetime of yogurt. That’s right, we’ll fill your fridge with every type of creamy yogurt for years to come, ensuring you never run out of your favorite snack. [unintelligible 00:28:40.14] or restricted by law. No cash value. Taxes and delivery fees may apply. Not an actual prize.

Preston Doster: So actually, when we did the move from Alice, from the basement, into kind of our current architecture, we implemented it then. And actually, a big part of it was a lot of the traffic involved Mastodon is media files. So images, movies, audio, whatever. And the stress that it put on just like the core server, even with caching, to provide that better experience… We were like “Okay, we’ve got to do CDN. We have to have something that’s closer to our folks.” And it’s distributing that cash to take the load off the core server. So that was already in the architecture there.