Jerod Santo: I just want to code

Zach Bellay’s life-long enjoyment of both a) computers, and b) hustle culture, has cultivated in him the classic angel and devil on the shoulder.

I constantly find the devil on my shoulder trying to convince me to start a new side hustle. Starting a new monetizable side project is like a latent addiction. Giving in feels like relapsing. The angel says don’t worry about some side hustle, just do well in your day job and code for fun as a hobby. But the devil keeps telling me that you can “be your own boss” and “earn what you’re worth”.

Zach has decided (when this was written in 2023) that he must manage the devil, not vanquish it, because the bills will never stop coming. But he’s also learned:

that I can no longer force myself to work on things that I don’t like forever, since I will burn out. As I mature, I am better honing perception for when and when not to give in to the devil’s call to build something for profit.

Peer Richelsen: So eventually, by just picking a very big, ambitious goal like connecting a billion people, you end up in an industry where you either sell for a couple billion to Google, or you go public. And I’d like this to be an independent company the way Sid runs GitLab as an independent company. And even Stripe will eventually go public. There’s just too much forces at play to liquidate early investors.

So that’s the first line of thinking. Once you’re in this industry, you will probably end up having a liquidation event, if things go well. And the second way of thinking is we think as an open source company and looking at other open source companies. Being a public company is another testament of being just – yeah, a public, an open company, that anyone can share in the upside of.

[01:20:10.23] I bought GitLab on the Daily IPO, because I never had a chance to buy any secondaries before. And I want them to do well. I truly believe in the mission and I want the retail investors to profit off it as well. So I think that’s my view on public companies. I don’t see it as a way of just having it in my CV, or a checkmark. It’s more of like, okay, what’s the economics behind it, what’s the best way to connect as many people as you can, and then fundamentally, that’s probably the outcome.

David Heinemeier Hansson: The best parallel I can give to a programmer is it is like entering the state of flow on command. So this state of flow, where you can at times lose some connection to time itself, where you think like, “Oh, I’ve been programming this hard problem. What - I’ve been sitting here for 20 minutes?” and you go like, “No, it’s actually been an hour and a half.” It is this moment of intense focus to the point where all these other things you might be thinking about disappear.

And there’s this wonderful book and concept of Flow, that’s been exhaustively studied, that essentially pointed as these are the moments of pure happiness for most people. That these moments of pure happiness are these moments of total focus, where you’re activating all your human potential, you’re using your skills in just a way where it’s just beyond your reach; you’re not trying to do something so hard that you will constantly fail, but… As when I’m working on a new system, and I’m trying to come up with sort of the best class names, the best object names, and so on, and I can get into this state of flow where there’s nothing else in my head.

But I’ve found that that’s, that’s difficult to do on command with programming. I mean, I feel blessed when I fall into this state of flow, and it’s really all encompassing, and I make these huge leaps in solving a difficult problem, or devising beautiful architecture. With a race car, you shut the door, you turn on the engine, you drive up to the end of the pit lane at 60 kph, then you push the pit lane button, and you’re flooring this thing - okay, now it’s only about that. There’s nothing else in the world. The corner’s coming up, particularly if you’re driving in a race… Like, at Le Mans, you come up to the Porsche curves; it’s a fifth gear corner, you’re entering pulling three and a half, four G’s, you’re going 250 kilometers an hour, there’s a wall, I don’t know, 10 meters from the edge of the track, or five meters from the track… If you do not give that your full and undivided attention, you could get seriously hurt, or worse. That is such a forcing constraint on your brain that it basically says like, “Hey, do you know what? The state of flow is necessary in this environment for you to– to put it to a point, survive.” That is a very gratifying state to be in, and to be able to activate it with such regularity is truly a remarkable experience.

[54:10] And then the other thing is, driving a race car well is very much like optimizing a piece of code, or editing a piece of prose. It’s a closed loop, and you get a verdict back at every lap, usually two minutes on a normal track, four minutes at Le Mans… Did I do better? Did I do worse? That sense of immediate feedback from your application of skill is intoxicating. It’s intoxicating to know that there’s a stopwatch that keeps track of whether I’m doing better or worse, and I can measure myself against others on the basis of that time. Am I progressing? Am I becoming a better driver? It’s truly a thrill.

And then I also just enjoy kind of the physical aspect of it, consistently pulling for example 4g, or having to wake up at 3am in the morning to go into a car and drive for two hours at 300+ kph… I think when we were driving the fastest, we were always driving 350 kilometers an hour… That is a unique experience that you don’t have access to in daily life in the same way. I was about to say civilian life… There is almost something militaristic about this, this fusion with the machine, which is - perhaps of all the things that having run a profitable company for 20 years have given me access to that I would not have access to otherwise, that is the one thing where I go like, “Okay, yeah, I enjoy that.”

Neha Batra: I’ve had an interesting journey… So I started off in December 2017, on the desktop team. And so we were working on GitHub Desktop, and it’s basically a GUI for you to be able to commit your changes… And so if you don’t want to use the terminal, or if you’re very new to Git, this is a great tool for you to be able to get your work done without having to worry about the terminology, and committing, and adding, and doing all that stuff in the right order. This is a very natural way to guide you to be productive without having to worry about all the semantics.

So that was my first adventure, was learning about how Git fits into the GitHub picture, figuring out what it really means to talk about developer productivity… And that was an open source project. And then I was working with an async team. At one point I had like someone in Sweden, someone in Texas, someone in Australia… So we were truly async. There’s no stand-ups, there’s no retros that you can do like that… And before I came from Pivotal, and we were like all about agile XP… And so it was like a complete 180.

So with Desktop, I got to do that, and then I got the opportunity to start CLI. And it was almost like the absolute opposite product. I did a GUI for Git, and then I was doing a terminal, like a CLI for GitHub. And so what does that really mean, and what does it mean to use – no matter what tool you do, how do you keep people being productive? And how do you make it so that they can stay focused and focus on the flow? So we got to build CLI.

[02:04:11.17] And then I got the opportunity to become the director of what we called Communities. And so that was a bunch of our products that we were putting together to optimize for open source communities and how we can bring people together and give them an opportunity to be more successful. Either if it’s like financially with sponsors, or bringing the conversations next to the code with discussions, or incentivizing the right behaviors, and letting people have a sense of pride with their profile and achievements. So there were a lot of things that we did in order to figure out what the different ingredients are, and what it really means for people to create personality, and thrive, both on the maintainer side and on the contributor side.

And then I got the opportunity a year ago to take another step into core productivity, which is my current area. And so if you think about the daily developer workflow, this is projects, and issues, and pull requests, and repos… Most people think about that. So it’s about like getting your code in. But there’s so many pieces that come into that. There’s your client apps, with mobile and CLI and desktop, so my old areas have come back… And then also like notifications, and search… What are the different elements that you need in order to be productive on a daily basis? And then I also get to look at our cross company initiatives around accessibility, and paving our path for our frontend architecture, and also being responsible for our monolith as well.

Chris Beams: That’s right. So anybody who’s anything like approaching a serious trader, so they have a trading journal, they’re thinking about it all day, they’re watching charts, they’re doing analysis, all of this stuff, they’re basically not going to be able to function in Bisq, because they simply couldn’t act quickly enough to the movements in the price that they’re paying such close attention to.
So for such a user, just to take the extreme example, of somebody who would basically be crippled by this - you basically can’t do a day traders or swing traders, or just kind of active traders’ work in Bisq; it’s simply not designed for it. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a role for Bisq for such people. For someone like that, my recommendation would be as you’re getting into Bitcoin, use Bisq. Then move that Bitcoin to the exchange of your choice. And again, different exchanges have different levels of requirements about how much they ask from you. You’re still exposing yourself, it’s still lower privacy, but you could still use Bisq to get in and out fundamentally. Likewise, if the trading that you’re doing is between crypto token or crypto asset pairs, that first Bitcoin that you get would be trough Bisq, and then you could use a platform like Shapeshift or some of these other crypto-to-crypto exchanges, and then you have a really great privacy profile there, because your coins were never tainted with your personal information, and now you’re just trading and moving stuff around in cryptoland.

So just to be clear - if you’re a super active trader, that’s not what Bisq is designed for. It’s designed for sort of normal individuals who are saying “Hey, I understand Bitcoin, I believe in Bitcoin and the larger crypto space and I wanna get in and I wanna do that in a privacy protecting way and in a secure way.” And maybe just one more point on that is, just to come back to the volume question, yeah, it’s definitely where Bisq needs to go, is to increase the depth of the order book and all of that stuff.

The good news is that it’s basically happening. These things take time. Like I said, we’ve been up for 16-17 months now, and we actually see a really nice curve, not just – you guys have the app open, right? And if you’re looking at the market, sort of top-level nav and you look at trades, by default you’ll see the kind of volume in BTC that’s moved through the exchange on a daily basis or weekly basis or monthly basis or what have you, and if you’re looking at it in terms of weeks, it can be deceiving, because you see the number of Bitcoin, it was kind of growing and growing and growing through June, and then it drops off in July. Then it’s been kind of slowly growing back up… What were you gonna say?

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Jaana Dogan: Yeah, so all the pprof tools – pprof can be tweakable. You can turn it on dynamically, and you can turn it off. So what we do is basically turn it on for several minutes, collect the data, just parse it, store it, and then we aggregate all that data, and we have this daily, weekly etc. report… And you can take a look at “Oh, this service, particularly this handler, is often used, and all these particular functions are accounting for the most CPU time, or memory, or whatever”, and you can just go and dig and optimize those particular places.

I wish that Go had some tools around maybe supporting this type of more continuous profiling features. It’s possible to write a tool that aggregates multiple pprofiles. It could be possible to write a library that automatically just turns once-in-a-while reports to some central service, and then turns it off, and so on. I think we can do much better in this field; it’s just kind of up to the user right now to plan and design and do this type of thing… But that’s basically what we do. I wrote on this topic for a while.

Some companies are aware of these methodologies and some companies are not. It would be so nice if the community was producing more best practices, as well as more tooling around this.

Jaana Dogan: [01:00:01.11] Yeah, so all the pprof tools – pprof can be tweakable. You can turn it on dynamically, and you can turn it off. So what we do is basically turn it on for several minutes, collect the data, just parse it, store it, and then we aggregate all that data, and we have this daily, weekly etc. report… And you can take a look at “Oh, this service, particularly this handler, is often used, and all these particular functions are accounting for the most CPU time, or memory, or whatever”, and you can just go and dig and optimize those particular places.

I wish that Go had some tools around maybe supporting this type of more continuous profiling features. It’s possible to write a tool that aggregates multiple pprofiles. It could be possible to write a library that automatically just turns once-in-a-while reports to some central service, and then turns it off, and so on. I think we can do much better in this field; it’s just kind of up to the user right now to plan and design and do this type of thing… But that’s basically what we do. I wrote on this topic for a while.

Some companies are aware of these methodologies and some companies are not. It would be so nice if the community was producing more best practices, as well as more tooling around this.

Jeremy Daly: Yeah, I totally agree with you. I had kind of gone back and forth about the best way to organize stuff… Because in some cases, if you just think about a simple REST API - a lot of times there’s this argument for serverless functions to say “Okay, so if I have a REST API that looks up a customer, then I should point that to a serverless function that just looks up the customer. Then if I need to add a new customer, I should have another endpoint there, and that should point to a different function that handles just adding a customer. So the idea is to keep these functions as small as possible. But the problem is that then if you have a complex API, you may have 40 functions as part of a single microservice, and that becomes to me a little bit unwieldy. And there’s a lot of shared code you want in there - the database connection information, or configuration information… So there’s a lot of that that you wanna share, and you can certainly have a shared library between those different functions that get deployed when you deploy the function, but I like to consolidate sometimes.

I like to say, look, if I’ve got an API that needs to do maybe an admin of a user, so it can add a new user, it can remove a user, it can update their profile image or whatever you wanna do there - sometimes I’ll stick all of those routes into a single Lambda function, because you also have this problem of cold starts, which we haven’t really talked about yet… But when a new function that isn’t warm, that hasn’t been used in a while - when somebody tries to access that function, it might take a couple of seconds sometimes before that function becomes available. So if you’re using functions as the back-end for an API, you wanna keep those functions warm, and you don’t want those to get cold, because then it could take some time, and it’d be higher latency in order to get a response back. So by consolidating functions or a route into a single function, that again, accesses a library and so forth, I’ve still found the performance to be extremely good, and then the management of it is a heck of a lot easier.

Anthony Eden: So it was great fun. From business, I’m not sure I thought it was great, because you’ve got to actually make a profit at some point… [laughs]

Joran Dirk Greef: So the threat is really that we stop investing in performance and safety. We stop being trustworthy, building trust.

Maybe we should say Jerod too, is that your product is more than the open source. There’s a principle here, too. I think it works both ways. If we connect TigerBeetle to a proprietary API, proprietary interface, our principle as a company is that’s viral. So if someone wants to license their interface as proprietary, our connector will be proprietary. For example S3, if we connect to S3 for massive scale, then we charge for that, fairly. We make our honest profits; so serve the community honorably, at a profit. There must be a profit, because there’s entropy in the world.

Techno Tim: Oh, man. Yeah, it’s wild. But that’s what gets me up in the morning. I think just having a variety of stuff to work on… And if it’s not hardware, it’s definitely software. Whether it’s writing software, or using software, I’m in this kind of weird space where I can write software, and I do, and I build that software and run it in my home lab… But I also use software from other companies, whether it be closed or open source, in my home lab. I have hardware that I built and scrapped together myself for custom builds, and then I have hardware from vendors that’s full solutions that I use. And so I’m kind of playing in that world. So if there’s a Venn diagram of all of that, that’s what I like. It’s hardware, software, open source, closed source… It doesn’t matter. Closed source, it has to be a really compelling story and a good solution, better than anything out there… That’s why some of that stuff might be closed, is because they’re making a profit and they’re making a good product. And I’m not afraid to support good products.

[20:10] But yeah, that’s what gets me going, is really just playing with stuff, and thinking about what I’m going to tell people about the stuff that I’m working on. That’s kind of what goes through my head.

Jerod Santo: Exploring a stablecoin bank

Bridget Harris goes deep on the potential of crypto stablecoins to disrupt Visa and Mastercard’s duopoly:

Right now, Visa and Mastercard charge merchants egregious 2-3% swipe fees — which is typically their second highest cost after payroll. Sadly, smaller merchants are disproportionately hit by these swipe fees…. This is partly why Visa and Mastercard’s profit margins are each higher than 50%: small businesses have no choice but to accept Visa and Mastercard since they control 80% of the credit card market.

A stablecoin network could drop those swipe fees to essentially zero. Merchants hate swipe fees — rightfully so — and if they could opt for a lower-fee network that wouldn’t limit their TAM, they’d switch in a heartbeat.

I’ve long asked cryptocurrency bulls to point me to the killer apps. First it was ICOs, which didn’t really pan out (too many scammy founders). Then it was NFTs, which were a lot like the pogs of my youth (fun for a day or two). More recently, it’s been ~~prediction markets~~ gambling, which I admit is a legit app, just not one I’m interested in.

But, “knocking 3% off every transaction in the world”… That dog could hunt! Unfortunately, it’s also going to require government intervention, of which I’m a perma-bear.

Rachel Plotnick: No, that was definitely a part of my study. I think right to repair is really important to think about. And obviously, over time our devices have gotten harder and harder to repair. So if you do have an accident, the consequences for that are much greater than they used to be. And a lot of what I focus on is how there’s this disparity between advertising, like “Oh, it’s so sexy and pretty. You can take your watch underwater. You can go diving with it. Don’t worry, a spill is just an oops, it’s no big deal.” But then watching how people have navigated horrible warranty plans, and liquid contact indicators… Oh, it got tripped, therefore now your whole warranty is invalidated, and we can’t repair this thing. You have to get a new one.

So I think there are a lot of kind of real world consequences for this, where we as consumers get penalized for our quote-unquote bad hygiene. We’re treated like bad users, and these companies continue to kind of profit off of all of our mistakes, if you will.

Jeff Smith: I would say the initial reaction is the eyebrows go up, and they lean in. Music is ubiquitous. It’s all around us. It’s amazing. And it touches our lives. And so you have this emotional currency that we all get. So they lean in and say “That’s amazing.” And then they’ll kind of sit back and say “Ooh, what does my music say about me? If I’m listening to Nine Inch Nails, does that mean I’m depressed? Or what’s going on here in my heart?”

So they go through that, and then they lean forward again and say “Oh, this is amazing. How do I incorporate this in my life, in my profession?” And I would say the surprise or the unique things that came out of those conversations is really these tributaries that were created.

So we built the tech, you patent it, you apply it to a sector that you understand, have influenced in, that has a large enough addressable market, good liquidity, there’s a budget item for engagement measurement… And you apply it in there. I didn’t expect then where this would take us, right? We’ve got mental health professionals saying “Hey, we want it as a screening tool to get ahead of certain things in our clinics”, as well as creating a profit center for them. We have athletes and sports psychologists looking at it for performance. We have the US military needing to address suicide rates and say “Hey, if we could just know more about how they’re doing…” It’s all about that early detection, early indicator on how they’re doing. And again, I want to stress, it’s a screening tool. It’s not a diagnostic or an assessment tool. So inside of therapy clinics, it’ll just get them to that BDI or GAD, the formal assessments quicker, which is kind of cool.

[12:18] So I think that was the biggest surprise for me, is I’ve launched a lot of companies, and it’s around the innovation or the relationships or the opportunity… This one was just – I use the word ‘ubiquitous’. It just – it’s emotional, it’s primal, it’s historic… It’s just in people’s lives.

We come to learn that the average person listens to 22 hours of music a week. It’s all around us. And so that’s just really cool. So I would say that was a big surprise for me.

Gerhard Lazu: So in all honesty, I think the reason why these Magi, they are faceless, is because it can be many other people. I know that we had Matt Johnson help us. We had James A. Rosen help us. And how many people out there are doing something similar? Maybe they don’t have time, maybe they want to, they’re thinking about it… Crazy groups of people, that have an idea, and just go for it. It doesn’t matter where it goes or how far it goes, as long as you have fun with it. And don’t take it too seriously, I suppose. It’s not about the profit, it’s not about like this VC funding - or at least that’s how I think of it. It’s an idea that we should keep investing in, because it’s the right thing to do, and it’s a great story to tell. Looking back 10 years from now, 20 years from now, we’re like “Wow. We were part of that.”