Jerod Santo: That’s the news for now, but… I leave you with a quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, which phk quoted in his Varnish post:

“Perfection is attained, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove.”

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

Christina Warren: Well, I loved it. First of all, it was a hybrid event, which was great. So we were in-person, we were back in-person for the first time, I think, since 2019, it was the first in-person Universe… But we still, I think, had a good hybrid experience from people I’ve talked to. It was in San Francisco, it was really great to see people… I’ve been to a couple conferences since 2020, but up until March of 2020, I was on an airplane almost weekly. I was in the air all the time, and speaking at tons of conferences, in lots of countries… As I know many of us were. And then it stopped.

So I’ve been to some conferences since then, but this was definitely the biggest one I’ve seen. And so for me personally, even putting aside all the products that we’ll talk about, just being able to – I was doing, along with Antoine Simmons and Damien Brady, I was hosting the event for our audience online, and we also had like a big stage that was available to people in person; that was outdoors, it was really cool.

And when I would step off of sage, and kind of go mingle in between setups to a time, I would just immediately would run into people that I hadn’t seen in years; or people that I’d only met online. And that to me was the best thing; just being able to – you know, we were talking before the pod about how you two hadn’t seen each other in three years before All Things Open. And I imagine that with your hallway track stuff that you did, that it had to be similar, where you’re running into people that maybe you met them over the last couple of years, maybe you haven’t seen them in years, and just that kind of… To me, that’s what conferences, the really special thing about them – the content is great, the new products are great, but it’s those connections with people that are really incredible.

Jerod Santo: Yeah, license is a very tricky subject, and it’s not something I’m a huge expert on, to be honest. I wanted to keep the open source version, and I still maintain it, I still improve it. Even today I was reviewing a theme for Adminer; I don’t know if you heard about this database manager, but anyways… And for the pro version I tried to do something around the number of computers that you’re using. That was the thing that felt the most appropriate. So you can use it on three different computers for your personal use. If you buy one copy and you share it with your whole company, you’re violating the license… But that’s pretty much how it works.

Maria Boland Ploessl: Yeah, so when we talk about issues still very much at the forefront of our community, that is a humongous one. This is such a core issue, on so many different levels… How are we expanding access and opportunity to multiple different groups of people? Frankly, it’s one of the big reasons that I’m in this community. I’m not a trained technologist, but I’m extraordinarily passionate about diversity and technology. We have so much talent in our community, and how are we expanding this and being intentional about bringing more people into this? It also is very lucrative, and you talk about economic development programs, and you talk about the impact that that can have on communities; that’s huge, too.

I think there’s a long way to go, I think that there are some really, really great things happening in our community… You talk about – the national Blacks in Technology Conference was just here; it was held here, of all places, for the first time, and that was huge. Shout-out to Sharon and Antoinette for putting that together. You talk about Hack the Gap that happens every year… There’s really good things that are happening, and so from our perspective it’s “How are we, as Minnestar – if we are a community organization, how are we supporting and really putting the weight behind promoting and supporting these events and groups?”

We have a lot of ideas. Last week we piloted our first brand new event in I don’t know how many years… It was a MinniDemo format event; we called it “MinniDemo Back to Campus.” All of the presenters were current students or recent graduates, and we had seven amazing presenters. We had one who is 14 years old…

Jerod Santo: Yeah. One of the things I like to bring up is that when we talk about evil or not evil, when we talk about things going well or not well, specifically with Google – and I guess with other advertising-based companies, it’s about alignment of incentives. Like you said, Brian, it’s not like there’s bad intentions necessarily; that doesn’t mean that everybody has good intentions… But when you assign evilness to a corporation, you need to realize that that corporation is a homogenous group of a lot of people trying to do good, and trying to make money for shareholders. And that incentive on how they make that money is what ends up crossing the user’s best interests, right? So the shareholders’ best interests is above the end users’ best interest, and that’s why your guys’ pitch is “You are not a product”, but it’s somewhat a slippery slope too, to personify an evil empire… But a very powerful marketing technique.

I go back to the Firefox campaign back in ’04-‘05… When Firefox was taking over, there was a single evil empire, and it was Internet Explorer and Microsoft, and it was the giant in the room, right? It was the 400-pound gorilla, or whatever that analog is, and it was a very easy target to say “Firefox is the anti-Microsoft, or the anti-Internet Explorer”, and there was grassroots movements; I remember even my little brother was the first person that showed me Firefox, and it was like an evangelical moment for him, like “You need to use the –”, to show me a more excellent way, which was Firefox, versus what I’d previously known.

Now, of course you could set Brave against Google, but there’s lots of browsers out there, it’s not just Chrome, even though Chrome is, I think, dominant in the marketplace; 70% share, or something like that.