Jerod Santo: So I tried to force them to pay that amount, the person that sold the land, and that didn’t really work… And so then I decided, “Well, I’m going to organize…” We have about 10 acreages in the area, all on like three circles, and I found this Great Plains - shout-out to Great Plains in Nebraska - a great ISP… And they’re like “Yeah, it makes sense for us to run fiber. We had fiber around you, but not directly where you are. If we can get 10 households to sign a contract that they will buy it for four years or something, we’ll go ahead and trench out to you guys.”

And so I went around to my neighbors and got people to sign papers… And everyone was very happy, because all we had was DSL that was oversubscribed. And they wouldn’t even let me on it, that’s how oversubscribed it was. So I was using - no, not Starlink. Starlink didn’t exist. This is from 2016, 2017. I was using a Verizon wireless hotspot, 5G… And I would tether to that, even to record the Changelog. And it was dicey, wasn’t it, Adam? I mean, there was times where it was so bad.

Dave Rupert: 5G, I guess that’s what it is. Yeah, it was like “It’s better than WiFi” kind of thing. And he had the CTO of Sprint or something on, to do just like a four block. But they were all four different. And it actually was kind of cool. They’re like two minutes long, or something. But it was kind of like “What industries will it enable?” There’s a rural doctor that it’s helping, because they can use these technologies places that they couldn’t before… And it was like a good ad spot, you know?

Gerhard Lazu: Even like 4G, 5G, even mobile networks are sometimes unreliable. But I’m looking forward to that. So that’s – and it will be a recorded talk as well. So yeah.

Jerod Santo: 5G. 5G is the reason, right? And they stop there. That’s what you mean by drop it.

Justin Garrison: I always just SSH back to the desktop, and that’s kind of my central point. And things like Tailscale and VPNs have made that so much easier to get access to the system from wherever. My iPad has a 4G connection, or 5G, whatever it is, with Tailscale. And I can be anywhere.

Vanessa Villa: I used to work on a project where it’s like “Okay, how do we solve farming in Africa and India? How do we help them with tech?” Because there’s droughts, there’s famine, there’s maybe unreliable weather patterns… You have to use precision agriculture due to the resources. So how do you get that connected, and how do you – there’s no such thing as 5G. So what do you do? And they discovered that TV white spaces travel across large areas, and there’s very little data loss. And it’s very low-power. So that’s kind of the ongoing thing. It’s like “Okay, we’re going to do TV whitespaces, put sensors that communicate in that protocol”, and then you have a hub on the edge, that they connect to. And now you’re using kind of like a mesh system. In order to aggregate the data, you have a centralized hub; only that centralized hub needs to connect up to satellite or up to the cloud.

Mat Ryer: Bram, would you have that fitted, if it was available? Would you have like a little implant, just so you could access it anytime? It’s got 5G…

Chris Ferdinandi: Yeah. So before, for me it was always like a want. Like “Hey, I’d really appreciate if we’d stop using all these tools.” I think what’s different now is that there’s actually some tools that can replace what we’ve been doing in a more responsible way.

When I first came on the show - I can’t remember if Preact was a thing or not, but it certainly didn’t have kind of the name recognition that it does now. Svelte and Astro just didn’t exist. And so now we have tools we can use, that replace the things we were doing before… And so I think that’s a really big, a big difference. The other big thing I’ve noticed is that, for years, I used to shout about the performance implications of these libraries, and I would basically get okay-boomer-ed about it… [laughs] Like, “Ah, everybody has fast internet. 5G is on smartphones now. This just doesn’t matter.” And certainly through no kind of effort of my own. But for some reason, I’ve observed that people are finally starting to become aware of the fact that shipping all this JavaScript has real implications for performance and resilience in the things that people build.

I don’t know if we just hit a tipping point where we started to ship so much that it became much more obvious, or we just had more people talking about it… And so you’ve started to have more kind of just general awareness in the industry than just Chris the lone nut.

Alex MacCaw: You’ve got to constantly be observing. And the other thing, once I got to the Caribbean, I have to contend with this data. So for 30 days across the ocean I didn’t worry about data, because it wasn’t on, and I actually just read a lot of books; it was quite nice. But when I got to the Caribbean, I had to worry about data. And there’s actually really good coverage throughout the whole of the Caribbean, 4G and 5G data coverage. It’s just expensive.

Drew Marshall: So actually, it’s got over double the lifecycle of your PC. And if you’re happy spending 1,500 pounds on a new PC every three years, then spending 500 pounds on a router that outlasts your PC by twice its life actually isn’t a bad investment. And then - yeah, putting the right connections on the end of it to give you as much resilience as you can makes sense.

[52:01] Now, if it’s not that important, or you’re in a lucky position that you have got Openreach and CityFibre on your street – but you know, we can still look at, for example, a 4G failover; plug a SIM card or a dongle into your router, buy one that has that functionality, and then you can have 4G or 5G as a failover option. It’s just about how important is that to you. And these days, I would argue, for home working - very.

Alexis Richardson: This is really important. You don’t wanna be working up in the night, and GitOps can help. We had a customer who just rolled out 5G with GitOps. There’s gonna be a press release next week about that. Everyone’s super-excited about that. And it’s already doing HA, which is pretty cool.

Zac Smith: It’s pretty incredible the pace of software innovation… So I kind of thought, “Okay, if software is gonna get easier to operate in more places, there’s gotta be a way to connect that with the infrastructure”, which is actually becoming more unique, not less. This whole infrastructure-as-a-commodity was such a – I mean, yes, it is, but only if it doesn’t really matter that much to you.

I use the analogy because I always carry around a commodity piece of infrastructure all day long called an iPhone… Which is not a commodity at all; it’s super-special. And when Tim Cook gets up and talks about the new iPhone, they talk about the processor, they talk about the silicon that makes it go… And frankly, all the stuff that’s happening in our life, related to talking at the walls, and the 5G things, and all the apps that magically do things and tell me what’s going on… That’s not normal; that’s special stuff, where software and hardware come together. So I kind of had this vision that, hey, a software is gonna go do its thing… I actually kind of know how to do the other thing. We just have to upgrade and change it for a different customer who’s never gonna speak BGP to you, or rack and stack servers and debug SFP optics. That’s probably not gonna be what they wanna spend their time on. But they do wanna touch the cool, new processor on the machine learning card, so how do we get that to go? That was the idea.

Spencer Kimball: Well, a lot of what I’ve been talking about I’d say is understood by still a small audience. That’s something to always keep in mind, that crossing the chasm thing. I think that the large pool of developers out there - and there’s ten million of them in the world - the majority of those have probably never even heard of Cockroach. That’s also interesting. I imagine people that listen to your podcast are closer on to that innovator side of the bell curve.

The thing that I think might be extremely interesting, that isn’t necessarily obvious from what I’ve already talked about, is just what we think the 2020s holds in store for even a developer at a startup, or a developer at one of the Fortune 500 companies, and Fortune 10 companies even… And that’s really not just a database that’s serverless, but an entire stack above that database. If you really wanna build an application the way that Facebook or Uber or Netflix builds them, so that wherever you do get customers around the world, you can give them what feels like a local experience, it’s more than just a database. The database is clearly a foundational layer in the stack, but you need to have an execution layer as well above it. You’re certainly gonna need additional systems that are also global; you’re gonna need global DNS and global load balancing, and so forth.

[01:04:15.11] So really what’s on the horizon for us is “How do we partner with the clouds, with other technology companies that are complementary to what Cockroach Labs is doing, in order to define the next generation of stack?” You remember the LAMP stack, which really drove a lot of the innovation in the aughts and beyond; the big question for us, and I think what’s extremely exciting, is the emergence of a stack that allows a startup or a Fortune 500 company to build the way that Google builds and operates services and applications.

I think that’s where a lot of our thinking, and I’m sure a lot of the thinking of all of our contemporary peer companies is going to be directed in the next five years. And part of that I think is 5G, interestingly enough. It’s pretty unusual that there is a significant improvement in latency in communication networks. It’s much more common that you have significant improvements in bandwidth. Latency improvements happen somewhat infrequently, and they usually herald quite a bit of innovation. So I think the widespread adoption of 5G in the next five years is going to mean that applications, especially on a smartphone, can feel substantially different than they do today.

I think everyone’s pretty used to hitting a button on a smartphone, and maybe a second and a half later something changes. That is a pretty bad user experience, but it’s just one we’re all used to. Ultimately, you want that to be the 100-milisecond rule, as popularized by Google Gmail, and now more recently Superhuman, which is another email application. And 100 milliseconds is the threshold for a human noticing something as taking time or being instantaneous. Less than 100 milliseconds is instantaneous.

So if you can actually adhere to that latency end-to-end, in other words you hit a button on your smartphone and you get a response all the way up to the backbone, into the – across the backbone, to wherever the data center is, through the application logic, into the backend database, and then all the way back out, that roundtrip time, less than a hundred milliseconds, you can give people real-time experiences. And obviously, for gaming, interactive media of all sorts, self-driving, AR, VR - these are obvious use cases, where this kind of latency guarantee is transformational, maybe even necessary…

Daniel Stenberg: Right. But for me as a person involved with Curl, it doesn’t really matter to me… Because I’m going to support my users 3G, 4G, 5G, connected, Wi-Fi… It doesn’t matter. Because all my users - and there are plenty - they use whatever they can to do things over the network. So they might do more things, faster things, lower-latency things in the next year, two years, three years, but they’re already using Curl and they’re going to use more Curl going forward. So I’m going to just keep making sure that people can do internet transfers, and I’m going to pay attention to what network developments happen, or protocols, how they’re changing.

[28:10] So I don’t see any particular change in anything for me or what’s going on. And for me personally, I don’t really try to predict the future long in advance; I’m just looking at what we’re doing right now and trying to see what should I work on the next few months, really.

Spencer Kimball: [59:58] Well, a lot of what I’ve been talking about I’d say is understood by still a small audience. That’s something to always keep in mind, that crossing the chasm thing. I think that the large pool of developers out there - and there’s ten million of them in the world - the majority of those have probably never even heard of Cockroach. That’s also interesting. I imagine people that listen to your podcast are closer on to that innovator side of the bell curve.

The thing that I think might be extremely interesting, that isn’t necessarily obvious from what I’ve already talked about, is just what we think the 2020s holds in store for even a developer at a startup, or a developer at one of the Fortune 500 companies, and Fortune 10 companies even… And that’s really not just a database that’s serverless, but an entire stack above that database. If you really wanna build an application the way that Facebook or Uber or Netflix builds them, so that wherever you do get customers around the world, you can give them what feels like a local experience, it’s more than just a database. The database is clearly a foundational layer in the stack, but you need to have an execution layer as well above it. You’re certainly gonna need additional systems that are also global; you’re gonna need global DNS and global load balancing, and so forth.

So really what’s on the horizon for us is “How do we partner with the clouds, with other technology companies that are complementary to what Cockroach Labs is doing, in order to define the next generation of stack?” You remember the LAMP stack, which really drove a lot of the innovation in the aughts and beyond; the big question for us, and I think what’s extremely exciting, is the emergence of a stack that allows a startup or a Fortune 500 company to build the way that Google builds and operates services and applications.

I think that’s where a lot of our thinking, and I’m sure a lot of the thinking of all of our contemporary peer companies is going to be directed in the next five years. And part of that I think is 5G, interestingly enough. It’s pretty unusual that there is a significant improvement in latency in communication networks. It’s much more common that you have significant improvements in bandwidth. Latency improvements happen somewhat infrequently, and they usually herald quite a bit of innovation. So I think the widespread adoption of 5G in the next five years is going to mean that applications, especially on a smartphone, can feel substantially different than they do today.

I think everyone’s pretty used to hitting a button on a smartphone, and maybe a second and a half later something changes. That is a pretty bad user experience, but it’s just one we’re all used to. Ultimately, you want that to be the 100-milisecond rule, as popularized by Google Gmail, and now more recently Superhuman, which is another email application. And 100 milliseconds is the threshold for a human noticing something as taking time or being instantaneous. Less than 100 milliseconds is instantaneous.

So if you can actually adhere to that latency end-to-end, in other words you hit a button on your smartphone and you get a response all the way up to the backbone, into the – across the backbone, to wherever the data center is, through the application logic, into the backend database, and then all the way back out, that roundtrip time, less than a hundred milliseconds, you can give people real-time experiences. And obviously, for gaming, interactive media of all sorts, self-driving, AR, VR - these are obvious use cases, where this kind of latency guarantee is transformational, maybe even necessary…

Darren Murph: [03:59] Yeah, so I fell into remote work pretty serendipitously. One of my first major roles was managing editor at a consumer technology publication called Engadget. And newsrooms are really ideally suited for remote work, because stories can be filed from anywhere, especially if you’re a digital publisher… And then the stories that can’t be filed from anywhere, you need to travel.

So I would travel all over the world to trade shows, I would travel to Cupertino whenever Apple would launch a new iPhone… I was just flying from one event to the next, doing trade shows, conferences, interviews… And because of that, I was working remotely, I would be filing stories in the back of a cab en route to the airport, I’d be filing stories from 30,000 feet, flying from San Francisco back to North Carolina… It just came naturally, this is just how we worked… And I kind of fell into it, and also fell in love with it, because I realized that when I wasn’t chained to a commute or chained to an office, it enabled me to travel and explore and do things in life that most people frankly have to wait until retirement to do. And I was weaving them between work responsibilities… And I thought “This is the only way to work. This is life’s greatest cheat code, when you don’t have that commute and you’re able to work wherever you are.”

But it’s wild, because when I started working remotely - this was before the advent of 3G networks, and laptop batteries lasted about 47 minutes tops… So you really had to want it. Back in the day, as I say, it was a lot harder to work remotely. We have it made now; we have ubiquitous LTE, 5G just around the corner, we have tools like Slack and Zoom that make our lives so easy… So although a lot of people are transitioning into remote for the first time and they’re kind of struggling with the cultural side of it, I think we’ve come a long way from the tooling side.

Himani Agrawal: AT&T for me is first and foremost a modern media company, which is empowered by telecommunication engineering, television engineering, and advertising analytics. Along with our subsidiaries, HBO, CNN, Turner, Warner Brothers Entertainment, Xandr, AlienVault, Magic Leap, truly sky is the limit with what machine learning problems can be solved at AT&T. Within AT&T, I work with an organization called Chief Data Office. It’s a really wonderful organization, and very young too, where I work with AT&T business units to develop automation solutions. We collaborate extensively with AT&T Labs and use the research innovations that’s been out of the labs in our applied AI projects in the Chief Data Office. As a machine learning engineer, I work on data analysis and pattern recognition of telecommunication devices, and streaming alarms data to predict network outage and avoid customer dispatches.

Furthermore, our devices have been impacted due to the recent hurricanes, so I’m working on utilizing the weather, flood and power data in conjunction with the streaming alarms data to predict the optimal dispatch time to restore the devices.

Apart from that, AT&T has been a pioneer in the area of 5G, and I believe 5Ge, when combined with Magic Leap, in conjunction with machine learning, is truly game-changing for personalized customer engagement for TV streaming.

Osamah Mohammed Ali: [39:57] And the most exciting thing… FPGA is a very exciting thing for me right now, but I believe [unintelligible 00:40:03.06] of SDR and FPGA together - that’s what’s gonna change the way we push AI o the edge. Because imagine - you don’t have the limit of a certain technology that already sits on this device; just because the technology changed in a few weeks, or we’ve found a silicon-level issue with the design itself… Since FPGA, it’s easy to rearrange. It’s just firmware that you can actually push, and make it easier, a lot easier to control.

SDR also, pushing SDR - which is software-defined radio, basically. That’s gonna make 5G technology, LTE technology and IoT technologies without being stuck in a limit. And imagine if you actually let the machine decide the control of the waves, and the control of which band to actually use, to make sure a swarm of drones, for example, stay always connected. So AI is gonna get pushed to that, and I believe FPGA – I mean, we’ve been in the network industry for a while… It started with FPGA, especially on the network side, because it’s easier than building a complete ASIC, go to the market. But with FPGA pricing going extremely down in the last 5-6 years, until introduction of a new type of FPGAs that are actually built for intermediate devices… It’s not just input/output features; you have more cores from the technology that’s available to you.

I believe, [unintelligible 00:41:33.01] Python being able to actually utilize, to control SDR and FPGA - and we did some research on that - on the edge of the network. It’s extremely amazing. It can push AI capabilities a lot more to the edge, and use more sensors capabilities, utilizing that FPGA and sensor fusion. You don’t need a lot of sensors. You can use less channels by fusing your data together, and having like – we refer to it as the edge of the network, which we refer to it as MAEC (multi-access edge compute) today. But we also believe there’s another layer, so not everything is gonna be in the cloud. It’s in the edge, but also furthermore on the device itself.

There will be some decision-making happening there to eliminate the amount of bandwidth we use. Otherwise, all these connected devices will send so much data; no matter what technology we have, it’s not gonna be enough to process it.

Matthew Carroll: Yeah, and to expand on that, I think the point of the GDPR - again, it’s not designed to be punitive to business generally; we want the global economy to scale, and it’s in our best interest for that to occur. I think that the focus though is they wanted to put teeth around the regulation, hence the 4% of your annual revenue for 20 million Euros and whatever is larger… They wanna show people, listen, there is a massive slippery slope when we start to use people’s data at scale, and I think that there’s a couple core pieces to this.

One is we’ve never had so many people in the world that are producing data than ever before. It’s only going to increase as the internet proliferates and 5G proliferates throughout the world… So I think the goal here is this is a time in humanity where we can say “Listen, we’ve gotta put controls around this, because every industry is going to be impacted.” Everyone wants to build algorithms, everyone wants to operate faster, and humans yearn for instantaneous gratification of all their apps.

Voice is the cool new thing, right? Very few people are now wanting to type in their search; they just use their assistant on their phone… So there’s all these personal items that are being introduced to physical devices, and there’s algorithms behind that, and no one really know how or why it’s being used, and I think that’s generally – the concern is that’s every industry, it’s every business in the world, small, mid to large businesses. But I think the Global 2000 are gonna be impacted the most, because let’s just be candid, they have the most to lose, and the data scientists in those organizations are now carrying the largest amount of risk.

Johannes Schickling: [01:27:34.07] So that shows how brittle our “Everything is always connected” assumption can be. And it’s one thing if, whatever, your access to X or Blue Sky or whatever is taking a hit, but it’s another thing if more critical systems are being taken down. And the other way – like, you don’t even need to step into a plane, or something. Just go to a coffee shop, and use the public Wi-Fi there, and try to just do work for half an hour, and you’ll notice how all of your apps are rendered completely useless. And I think having that constant assumption that everything is fiber-grade, 5G-grade connected, I think can bite back at some point.

In Europe, for example, people use actually trains quite a bit, and trains have similar Wi-Fi compared to your public coffee shop or your plane… So it’s more ubiquitous than you think.

Alex Kretzschmar: I had something with a Vision Pro… And I don’t know whether this holds true to the Apple TV or not, but something to do with the specific 5-gigahertz Wi-Fi channels that the Pro was using had to be a certain channel in order to stop stuttering when I was doing like moonlight game streaming across the network. I don’t know if that’s worth some research on the Apple TV side, but…