Jerod Santo: So a metric that you vouch for is the cumulative flow diagram; we’ve been talking about it with regards to things in, things out, how long they’re in the cycle, what’s accumulating, what is not… Have you put this into practice in your daily work and seeing benefits from this particular metric?

Aaron Hnatiw: Yeah, so what you’re referring to is now – I think it’s evolved over time. I think that was what it was originally, how people referred to it. Now most people that do that call themselves freelance security researchers; what’s more common is they’re involved in bug bounty programs. It’s transitioned to a model where – a bug bounty program is a way for an organization to open up an application and set specific guidelines around the ways that can be attacked, but they open it up for attack to anyone, as long as they follow the rules of like “This thing can’t be touched.” As long as you’re not doing denial of service attacks, everything’s open. If an organization opens up their application or their system for doing that, then anytime someone submits a bug to them, a security vulnerability, they will be then rewarded with swag or with real money. There’s a few big players in that space - there’s HackerOne… Sidenote - HackerOne actually has a couple of really good resources if you wanna learn more about security and bug bounties. It’s a really good way to keep up. They have something called the Zero Daily newsletter, which as it sounds, it’s a daily newsletter for security, which is showing just some of the latest bug bounty reports.

Then there’s also HackerOne and Cobalt.io is another one. Those are kind of the main players in the bug bounty space. It’s a way that people practice it in a legal way, but people still do it in that grey area where they’re finding problems and they’re submitting issues. The problem is an organization technically could issue a legal action, and it has happened many times; that’s where it becomes problematic, and there’s a whole other debate around whether that should happen or not, but I think that’s kind of what you were referring to, Erik - people doing research and finding these things and submitting them, and that still does happen.

Eran Yahav: Yeah. I think people trust Tabnine. I think we gained this trust really early in the process, because we committed to running on local host, unless you opt-in for something else, and it’s easy to see that this is what’s happening. And so Tabnine today is used by millions of people in their IDE daily, and so I think it’s very popular. I can talk a lot about why I think it gained such popularity, and also why people like it. Let me just say one thing about that. I think, at least from my conversations with people, one of the things that you like is the variable reward. You don’t know, because you’re working with an AI system that is not deterministic, you don’t know what is that you’re going to get from Tabnine. And sometimes it’s magical, and sometimes it’s magical in a bad way, like “What the hell just happened?” And because of this variable reward, it becomes very engaging. You’re always curious what’s going to happen next. And what you find out, because this is for developers, and developers like advanced stuff, they like to geek out with the edge of technology, they are actually rooting for Tabnine to succeed, which is unheard of for this kind of product. You see people and it’s like, “Oh, yes, I’m so happy. It predicted a thing that I wanted it to predict. I’m happy for both of us.”

Jerod Santo: Yes. I first saw this in practice by a fella whose name I believe is Giles Bowkett. He was in the Ruby community, and worked on some interesting open source library called Archaeopteryx. Now, talk about things that are memorable; like, just that word… And it was like a MIDI library that he was into… And he would give talks at Ruby meetups and conferences. And exactly what you described, with regard to the slides per capita was just completely insane.

[58:24] And it was the first time I ever see anybody do that, and I couldn’t forget it. I was like, every sentence, there’s some sort of reference. And he’s not talking about the slides at all. They’re literally just an adjunct or a sprinkle to what he’s saying. But he has it all timed out, to where like, every time, similar to what you’ll see on the Daily Show, or comedic things like Saturnday Night Live’s Weekend Update, where as the punch line hits, the background updates. And someone’s job is to time that sucker out, you know… Sometimes you’re watching it and it’s alive, and so it’ll be a little bit slow, and they’ll wait for the punch line to land, because the slide hasn’t… But Giles had it completely timed out. And it was like 45 minutes of pure action. I don’t know what he was talking about, I think it was Archaeopteryx, but this was probably 15 years ago and I still remember the talk… It was amazing. And I’ve watched probably dozens, if not scores of other talks throughout the years, and it’s like “Yeah, I’m sure it was good, but not gonna change my life”, you know?

Jerod Santo: Yeah, so I’ve always been a polyglot, and I like programming languages. I like the Go programming language, even though I don’t write it on a daily basis. I like a lot of languages, so I’ve never found one that didn’t have any redeemable qualities. I even like aspects of PHP, even though it has probably less redeemable qualities in it with regard to syntax than many others slight dig I like PHP, too.

We talk to a lot of people about programming languages. I mean, that’s one of the things about our work - we’re exposed to everything. In fact, I was just thinking about something that became mainstream recently, and I was like “We did a show on that three years ago.” Not boasting, but just like reality - we are uncovering things before they blow up. In fact, Changelog Nightly, one of our emails that goes out every single night - its whole point is to… It automatically just gets the most starred repos on GitHub, before they blow up (that’s the idea) or right as they are. And maybe those things are gonna go on to greatness, maybe they aren’t; we’ll pick through them and try to find the ones that are interesting.

Marcin Kurc: Yeah, so my co-founder and I, we started the company before it was – it was around marketplaces and billing, from old days, when AWS showed up, disrupted software vendors with this crazy consumption billing and things like that, and I’ve been struggling, “How do I address that need for my customer? And how do I align with AWS and other cloud providers, for that matter?” Enough to exit to Google, and find ourselves on Google, and day one we started rewriting this application to handle Google levels of traffic and consumption.

[00:10:06.22] And that’s how we really learned how Google operates, how Google sets goals, how Google operate on a daily basis, how they release software. And of course, all the concepts around SRE were very, very interesting to us… But the SLOs, in particular, we came to this conclusion that it’s really, really hard to go into microservices, Kubernetes and the interconnected systems not having SLOs to understand all the dependencies and impact of one service on another, on the application. And then, with this constant push within IT towards more of business-oriented, business-driven decisions on the IT side, to us the SLOs already were a very simple thing to correlate IT to business and vice-versa. And for us, that was one of the biggest things that we figured - if we got into that world of Kubernetes, and microservices, that’s going to be it. People will realize that they need SLOs to operate efficiently.

Adam Stacoviak: So I’m curious, even when we were done talking on the last time on Founders Talk, you weren’t ready to share this intelligence side, which was also the next paradigm. I think this intelligence factor - obviously, code search gives you intelligence, because you can find and understand more… But it was the way that you built out insights and just different things like that, that allowed you to not only manually, like a caveman or cave person type in all these things you can into search; you could just sort of form an intuitive graph towards, like you’d mentioned before, the calls to a database going down, and calls to the new database going up, and you can see the trend line towards progress. Clearly. And even share that dashboard with folks who are not in development, in engineering. Sharing with comms, or marketing, or CEOs, or whomever is just not daily involved in the engineering of their products. And I’m just curious… Give me really specifics, like how easy it is to sell now because Cody just makes the accessibility, the understandability of what Sourcegraph really wanted to deliver so much easier?

Adam Stacoviak: Yeah. This is where I like Warp. I don’t know if it has this feature, because I do use a few machines, but so sparingly that I forget what I’ve done the last time I used it. And so Warp, at least on a single machine - I think you would appreciate this, Jerod, and I know you already use Atuin - is that it does that. So I’m just tinkering on this spare Linux VM I have on Proxmox, because hey, I’m on a podcast talking about TUIs, so I’m gonna install some right. And I want to do it in a way where I can just blow it away, and there you go.

And so I’m logged in and I’m just like “Well, what are some recent commands, just to see if they’re there?” …because I know they’re there. I know how Warp works, but just to see if they’ve actually followed me, even into this different machine… And of course, they’re there. So I have that same feature because of the terminal application I’ve chosen, versus this sub-thing… And I think the one thing that I think Warp is driving towards - and this is zero an ad. They’re not even sponsoring us. I just like them, and Zach’s cool, and I like his team… And I believe it is a version of the terminal the future. There you go.

[00:41:42.07] I think that they’re doing things like team features, which I think would be cool because you can log into Warp and let those things transfer via their cloud service, if they do that. I think that’s what they’re driving towards. I wish they would do that more so as settings, because going between machines - it doesn’t have that. Whereas another tool I use daily is Raycast, and it has that where it cloud-syncs settings. It doesn’t cloud-sync clipboard history and sensitive things. It’s doing things that – like themes, and stuff you really want to have unified between machines. That’s kind of how I look at these tools… Like, even though we’re talking about TUIs, I still feel like Raycast and Warp are kind of similar in that respect, because they’re a layer above the need for a TUI because the application itself has the things in it it needs to give you that history.

There’s other stuff too I’m not even using, like expansions, and snippets… Things I’m not even like – I don’t know, I don’t even know how to use them, honestly. I think some of the tooling –

Jerod Santo: WikiTok is a testament to internet creation

Benj Edwards tells the story of WikiTok, an “endless Wikipedia feed to fight algorithm addiction”, created in the most internet-y way that a thing could be created:

The original idea for WikiTok originated from developer Tyler Angert on Monday evening when he tweeted, “insane project idea: all of wikipedia on a single, scrollable page.” Bloomberg Beta VC James Cham replied, “Even better, an infinitely scrolling Wikipedia page based on whatever you are interested in next?” and Angert coined “WikiTok” in a follow-up post.

Early the next morning, at 12:28 am, writer Grant Slatton quote-tweeted the WikiTok discussion, and that’s where Gemal came in. “I saw it from [Slatton’s] quote retweet,” he told Ars. “I immediately thought, ‘Wow I can build an MVP and this could take off.’”

Gemal started his project at 12:30 am, and with help from AI coding tools like Anthropic’s Claude and Cursor, he finished a prototype by 2 am and posted the results on X. Someone later announced WikiTok on ycombinator’s Hacker News, where it topped the site’s list of daily news items.

An idea jumps through five people and multiple LLMs to its creation (and world-wide distribution) in just 90 minutes. We live in trying times, for sure, but we also live in amazing times. /src

Zach Lloyd: Yeah. So super-early on, before focusing on growth at all, and then total number of users, the things that we were focused on, and really continue to focus on, are “Do the users that we have retain?” So that’s big. Do they engage? Are people using it – like, the terminal should basically for most developers be a daily use, too. Also, are people using it three days a week, five days a week, seven days a week? So how frequently are they using it?

We look at NPS, so people – you know, would they recommend the product to their friends? How do we compare it to other developer tools? And then we look at public sentiment, like what are people saying about it… So if you look on Twitter, people like it. So those are all signs of, I think, product-market fit, beyond just like what’s the total active user number.

For user number, I think what we care about is not all-time users at all. That’s a vanity metric. It’s like, who’s in the active user base, who’s using it every week… Yeah, so those are basically data points. GitHub issues would be another one… And when we first started, the goal was really just like “Can we get a feedback loop going? Can we get anyone to use it? Can we get anyone to be totally engaged, to want to use it as their daily driver?” And so that was sort of the first step with it. And then, you know, as we’ve gotten more mature and gotten more feedback, it’s been more towards “Well, can we not just improve the retention and engagement, but can we also improve the signups and activation, the conversion funnel, and prove that there’s a big enough group people who want to continue to use it?”

David Flanagan: Well, I’m not speaking at it, so it just slipped my mind. But yeah, I’m organizing KubeHuddle. This is a very community-focused Kubernetes conference in Scotland. It’s October 3rd and 4th in Edinburgh, at the Edinburgh International Conference Center. So I’m really excited… We’ve got 28 speakers coming to share their knowledge. When I started planning it, I only really had one idea. I mean, it started with a tweet; let’s just get it out there. I tweeted “There should be a Kubernetes conference that’s community-focused in the U.K.” And then literally, three days later I had a venue. I was like, “Crap, this is happening.” So I had to learn how to organize a conference. It’s been really hard, but I’m really excited and really happy with what we’ve delivered.

[01:02:28.02] My main idea to start with - it has to be a two-track conference, because I want this conference to 1) have a track that caters to people that have never seen Kubernetes before. I think that’s really important, and I had to remember, even though it’s not my own personal content that I want to see, but 80% of our community – arbitrary number that I’m throwing out there, but 80% of our community is new to Kubernetes. We’re still very early in that adoption cycle.

But the other track was going to cater to the other 20%. So these are talks that are advanced, or at least intermediate towards advanced… Because I wanna be able to attract Kubernetes contributors. In the UK and Ireland and Europe there are a lot of people that are working on Kubernetes daily… And I don’t think that other Kubernetes conferences are a great place for them to go and share ideas, because they’re so big that they always cater for the 80%. So we have a track dedicated to these hard things as well, and… I’m really lucky, we do have a lot of Kubernetes contributors coming, and I’m looking forward to be able to give them a venue and a place where they can sit and share ideas about what’s next for Kubernetes and how do we drive the project even more forward. Because it’s fast-paced, and changes are happening, and I think we need to provide the forum to speed up those discussions.

So I’m very excited. It’s gonna be great. And you’re presenting as well… So I’m really looking forward to seeing you in-person again, and again, to say hello. And we have a lot of other great speakers.

Connor Sears: And they looked at it, and they just, “Hey, are you serious? Did you forget to fill this part out?” We were like, “No, we’re doing everything”, and the whole deal fell apart. [laughs] And that was the reason why. It wasn’t that they didn’t believe us. I think even from that standpoint, it was evident that we weren’t scaling ourselves, and that there are natural consequences of that, like whether or not things slip through the cracks. Or in my case, I can’t do all the design, it turns out. It turns out that I need a lot of help with that.

[01:12:09.23] Or that Scott being the only person who can fix the website if a bug pops up, and having to wake up in the middle of the night all the time, and not being able to distribute that burden. I think those are all just very small examples. But I think this is something that we constantly deal with as a team.

Now, there’s this fine balance between being lean - and we do, we try to run a lean, efficient startup that is focused on building a business. We’re not trying to spend a bunch of money just because you have it. I thnk that story is played out, and it’s not one that I want to sort of participate in. So when we spend money, we do it very intentionally, and sometimes what that means is that we hold off hiring a role until it is absolutely painful to not have a person doing this.

But to your point, I think the other thing that needs to balance that out is getting too comfortable just hiring and then saying, “Well, that problem’s solved. Somebody does that now. I don’t have to worry about it.”

For me, personally - as a founder, you sometimes err towards focusing on what you like doing, even if that’s not what’s best for the company. So there’s been times when my focus really needs to be on go-to-market, it needed to be on sales. All this stuff that, before starting a company, I really don’t have that much experience with. I have zero experience, let’s just be clear. But that’s the beauty of startups, is that you’re learning constantly. And it’s not just enough to learn, but like you said, you have to do the job, you have to do founder-led sales, you have to learn everything you can about things that you’re not comfortable with. If anything, a startup puts you in very uncomfortable situations, where you have to sink or swim, you have to learn how to do something. And it could be sales, it could be marketing, it could be a little bit of engineering, it could be anything. Support, customer success - all these things, you can’t outsource it.

Every time I talk to a founder and they’re like, “Oh, I hired a contracting firm that will just handle this for me”, or “I just hired this person now. I don’t have to think about that.” On one hand, more power to you; that’s great. If you’ve found somebody who can do this at a high level, that is great at the job, and that you can put a lot of trust into - fantastic. It’s what everyone is looking for. But I would still say, especially early on, you just can’t outsource core parts of your business.

Finding that balance, it’s a daily – I wouldn’t call it a struggle, but it’s a daily challenge. It’s like understanding, you’ve got to scale yourself, you can only do so much, and you have to focus as a founder on where you can provide the most value for your company. At the same time, you’ve got to understand the different components of your company, and you’ve got to know enough to jump into any conversation and at least have some sort of understanding of what’s going on, while building a team around you that can educate you.

I like being able to get into a room and saying, “Hey, everybody. You know I’m an idiot when it comes to X. So treat me like an ignorant fool, but here’s some questions I have.” And then that age-old question that’s like, “What are the unknown-unknowns for me that you all know I should be asking about, but I’m not asking about?” That helps level you up, and definitely, it’s one of the things I’m most proud of is the team that we are building, that can bring that expertise to the table, and feel comfortable to talk to me when I’m not thinking through something deeply enough. Because oftentimes, I look at something and it’s a bunch of arrogant people do like myself, I say “This is simple. It isn’t that complicated”, and actually it is. “Okay, cool. Let’s talk through it and let’s figure this out together.”

Woody Zuill: You make a request of them. They will find the time to meet with you and talk about the requirement. Then they will find if it’s worthy of being done. They will find the time to schedule somebody to do that work. We’ve automatically extended the queue of this work by a great amount by doing that. So this really comes down to the concept of queuing. I’ll quote Donald Reinertsen, “The majority of waste in product development is queuing”, or the cause, he would say it that way. The root cause of the majority of waste in product development is queues.

What can we do to remove that, if that is true? I’m not saying it’s true. I read a lot of books. I never take anything as truth, I take it as something worth thinking about. So if that’s true, how far can we go – and this comes from Kent Beck, you know… How far can we go towards turning up the collaboration before it does become no longer useful to us? There’s so much more than thinking productivity is important. I don’t think productivity is important at all. I think being effective is important.

So productivity is like another proxy measurement that a lot of managers need to use, because that’s how they think work should be, and they do it. But there’s a famous quote from Russell Ackoff, I think, who said, “Because managers can’t figure out how to measure what they want, they start wanting what they can measure.” This is like a critical thing to think about. What do we do in our daily work that we do because we can’t really figure out how to do things a better way?

Here’s the thing… If we’re focused on flow, that is taking something from beginning to end directly, there are many benefits we get from that. As soon as we start introducing queuing, we also have to introduce the inventory. Inventory is as big of a waste– well, maybe not according to Reinertsen but I’d say it’s a pretty big waste in the lean term of inventory. Inventory is anything that we’ve started on that hasn’t yet been delivered to the end user. In other words, they’re not getting value out of it until we deliver it to them, so it’s waste. This is honest waste in the lean term for inventory. How much inventory do we need to introduce to make it easy for us to work separately from each other? And this is the problem we usually see.

If I’m working on something and I’m blocked because I have to ask somebody else a question, and they’re not here for me to ask them that question, I’m now in a queue, waiting till I can hear back from them. I send them a message, an email, I even called them up and left a snarky remark, because “Why aren’t you getting back to me”, right? And so I’m in a queue, so what do I do? The common solution is work on something else, that we have introduced a waste to solve for a waste, and that doesn’t really work.

Adam Stacoviak: The reason why I think that makes sense though, to celebrate the wins - and I will attribute a lot of this to… I’m digging deep into Atomic Habits right now, so a lot of this is really from James Clear and that book… But the goal is just a ramification of the process. So if the wins and the progress is a result of the process, then you’ve got to celebrate those wins, because those little things add up to big things. If you only celebrated your goals, then you’re really missing out on the daily opportunity to be happy, the daily opportunity to be proud of – not in like a prideful way, but like pride of what you’ve done and what you’re team’s done, or share that admiration of what somebody’s done. Because even if it wasn’t the goal, it still gets you to the goal. It’s still progress towards that goal. And I think that process – even falling in love with the process is a cliché thing to say, but I think after reading that book and hearing James Clear’s story in Atomic Habits, and if you can subscribe to that kind of idea, which… I totally agree, all too often do I fixate on a goal and forget about the process to get there, and fail at getting to the goal. If you can fall in love with and adhere to that process and celebrate those wins, I think you just – as a team. I’m assuming a lot of this about you, because I’ve talked to you several times and I think that’s the way you think, too; you’ve gotta love those daily wins.

Nhung Ho: Yeah, for sure. There was – you know, kind of like figuring out the language of data science and how to translate the skills that you have and the things that you know into this new industry and this new accepted skill… But just knowing that “Hey, I write a lot of code, I know a lot of math, I did a lot of matrix math in my daily life previously - it seems like these are all the things that we do in data science, so let’s just go for it.”

And exactly as you said, Chris - now if you look at the composition of the backgrounds of folks who are coming into data science, it’s all over the place, and the umbrella has really extended. But when I started, I had to go through a program to help me repackage all the things I knew, like “Oh, ordinary least squares”, “Oh, it’s actually regularization, and regression.” So being able to speak that language to convince folks that “Hey, we have the skills…”

[08:10] Because in the past I would write these massive programs to take raw data from telescopes and then actually convert them into meaningful information, and then write papers… And a lot of the day-to-day work is exactly the same.

So that’s kind of my journey towards data science… And I specifically wanted to [unintelligible 00:08:32.06] because when I was in grad school I used Mint a lot. Like, every dollar counts, and you have to be pretty obsessed with it… But I had a really poor user experience with Mint, and I’m like “You know, I’m pretty sure I can do better than what exists right now.”

So when I came from my interviews, they said “Hey, you could totally work on Mint. You can come in and fix this.” Like, “Yes, please. Sign me up.” [laughter] It was just this openness to allowing us to innovate… And I found it kind of refreshing that I told my boss “Hey, I actually hate one of your products. Can I come and make it better?” He’s like “Yes.”

Kayla Cinnamon: Yeah, so the overall sentiment has been pretty positive. I get a lot of tweets saying “Thank you so much for your work on this. I can finally use it, because X feature came in at whatever release point.” So I feel like with every release we open the terminal up to a wider audience, because we’re reliving those pain points of what’s missing… And there’s still a ton of stuff missing. We know that, and that’s why we still have jobs, because it’s still under development… But I think with the 1.0 it was really big because it was officially a stable app, that we knew would likely not crash on you… Which is important, especially if you’re doing command line stuff; you’ve really gotta make sure that’s a stable application.

So that was kind of big, because then enterprises can go in and get it, and rely on it as the daily driver. So that was where the 1.0 was really big… But with every incremental release, when we add new stuff, it unblocks a subset of people. Every month it gets a little bit better. And we still get responses of like “I can’t use this, because X feature is not there.” And it’s on the roadmap and we’re working towards it… So that’s kind of nice for us to know, like “We will get there, eventually”, and it will be something that you can use.

So since it’s still such a new product, and we only have about five developers on the team… So it’s a really small team, and we’re just working as fast as we can…

Chris Benson: Or that. Either one works, yeah. Okay, we actually have a really timely topic right now, because we are having conversations about this constantly… So today we wanted to talk about deepfakes, and we’ll get a cover and overview with it. So much is happening in the news right now regarding deepfakes; we’ll tell everyone what they are, and such… But everywhere I go, whether I was in Boston, or this past week we had our monthly Atlanta Deep Learning Meetup, the topic came up there… It’s just coming up everywhere, and it’s coming up in the news on a daily basis, so we’re gonna delve into this topic and see what we find.

Gerhard Lazu: Well, I suppose the first step was making sure that we keep the “What?” from the “How?” separate, because they’re two distinct things, and for someone such as yourself, Jerod, it’s very easy to mix the two; it’s natural for you to think about the “How? How are we going to achieve something?” in the context of what you’re trying to achieve.

For me, the first thing was to focus and drive out all the answers to my “What?” questions, just to understand what you’re actually trying to get out of this… Because if you’re just wanting to deploy an application, you would have done that yourself; it was a lot more than that, right?

You needed the entire infrastructure to be configured and set up in such a way so that it can be easy to update, to manage, and so that you don’t have to worry about a lot of the details that go underneath.

[11:52] For me, the most important thing was to understand your approach, and also how you see infrastructure and how you see deployment, because based on that we could have gone so many different ways… Just like look at Deliver, eDeliver, Capistrano, Chef, Puppet and all these tools which are used for deployments. There are so many ways to skinning the cat, but the point is figuring out what works for you, what you’re comfortable with… You keep alluding to the old-school approach and to the Bash scripts, and this was something that was easy for me as well; it was a mental model that worked well for me, I was comfortable with, and I have already used it in a couple of production deployments. These are just like WordPress websites and different backend applications… It was something which I’d worked on over the years and it just made sense for me, so I knew that it would make sense for you as well.

Knowing the “How?” part fairly well and understanding the mechanics, I could steer you towards the “What?” and driving out to the important things, such as for example back-ups. Is availability important to you? How important is it and what limitations/constraints do we have when it comes to the infrastructure? Do we have API calls or do we have servers which come and go on a daily basis, or do we have something which is more permanent?

The 17 questions which you mentioned were just like a conversation starter about how you see the world and how you see Changelog working in the big picture, because you went from like an old infrastructure, an old setup, which was working well in some respects, but it had some drawbacks… So you wanted to address some of the drawbacks, but also keep a lot of the things which worked well.

This wasn’t like a greenfield project, in the sense that you already had your Changelog workflows and we had to build something that would support those workflows.

Andrew Godwin: Yeah, I’ve been unusually lucky… Well, lucky/well-fortuned in that regard. The first thing I got money for – and one of the first open source funding things I actually heard of… So when South was still a third-party app at the time, I wanted to merge it into Django. That is a lot of work - it was actually basically a full rewrite of the code pretty much - so I turned to Kickstarter and went, “Okay, I need around 3,000 GBP to pull this off”, in my spare time (I had a day a week free); my freelance rate would be around that, so I did a Kickstarter and I was like, “Hey, this is a single feature, there’s a clear-defined end goal of it in Django. Would you like to give some money?” and the response to that was overwhelmingly positive. I think I raised almost 18,000 GBP from a target of 2,500.

I was very fortunate that the community really rallied behind that. That gave me the funding, the time to basically merge it in considerably faster than I would otherwise have been able to, and just spend some of my freelancing time directly on that stuff. That was really nice. So that was good for the South feature.

For Channels, there was a different approach. Mozilla have a project called The Mozilla Open Source Support grant system (MOSS), and what they do is Mozilla are doing this wonderful thing of giving money to open source projects that they rely on - which I wish every company really did, but that’s on the side. I think it was Django: Under the Hood last year, we were having an informal meeting of core developers and somebody went “Oh yeah, there’s this Mozilla thing that we should probably apply for.” Specifically, the Mozilla thing was also for a new feature, something that you could specify and bound and say, “Okay, we’re going to do this, this is the end goal. Here’s a rough estimate of the timeframe and the cost” and then apply.

I sent an application, and we were very fortunate to be given the money, $150,000, which is a lot of money to know what to do with in many cases, and that was the estimate of the amount of work for both Channels and also some Django REST framework integration with Django as well; it’s still ongoing. That was also a sort of single lump sum raised from a company, rather than from the public, although Mozilla is a very public-thinking company, in many ways.

[01:03:58.03] So both of those I’ve been really honored to have the public and Mozilla both be happy and confident in my proposals and my work to pull those things off. The Channels money is more than sufficient to pay both the time it takes to develop the main part of the project, but also we are paying individual developers for features. We have a list of big features on the GitHub issue tracker; if you want to work on one, you can send in a small proposal. We have a small team of DSF and Django members who’ll vet it and make sure you have a relatively decent history and then just approve it to work and then we’ll pay you your going daily rate to work on that stuff. As a sustainable way of doing open source, I really like this. It’s a way of saying, “We can pay you to do what you are normally paid to do and write good software”, and I really like that as a way of doing this stuff.

We’ve already had six or seven major features being paid for through this program, and we have a few more that I’m sort of trying to rattle up people to do. It’s sometimes surprisingly hard to find people to pay money to it turns out, but we’re getting there. That’s been a really nice way of doing.

Tobie Langel: So that was a great segue, right? Nadia wrote this really important piece in 2017 called Roads and Bridges. I can’t remember what the subtitle was… “The unpaid labor behind our digital infrastructure”, I think. I think it’s really important that we start thinking about open source and this whole pool of software as the infrastructure to the digital revolution; the third industrial revolution. And that a large part - not only the internet; there’s a bunch of things, but the open source pool of software is clearly infrastructure.

I gave a short presentation two days ago on this topic, and it was really quickly after this original thread, and so I decided to just use the Twitter thread and use that as a deck. So I was missing a title, and I quickly came up with a title that was something along the lines of “Open source is public infrastructure. It’s about time we treat it as such”, or something of that nature… And I tweeted that so that I could actually have the title for the first slide of my Twitter deck.

[16:06] And people went really – like, it was so tense, the responses to that tweet; that wasn’t supposed to be a tweet, I was just using it as sort of a scratchpad… And this really tense culture, and really a strong difference in perspective between North America and Europe in terms of what public infrastructure is, and whether it’s something useful and great, that we can rely on in our daily life as individuals and as businesses… And the opposite perspective in the U.S, where you think of it as broken bridges, and potholes, and all of that stuff.

So there’s a real tension there. But regardless of how we’re actually thinking of public infrastructure, I don’t wanna really say “public infrastructure” to imply “must be owned and operated by the government.” I really mean it sort of like in a broader, more loose way, in terms of like “This is what we build our things on today.” And I’m not trying to imply specific solutions that are tied to more taxes, and the government owning open source…

Feross Aboukhadijeh: Who here still uses an RSS reader and reads it daily?

Jerod Santo: Yeah, because don’t make me install something… That’s just my attitude towards things, unless it’s like a daily use thing for a drive-by use case, like “Let me go to a website…” And again, going back to that conversation of not just progressively adding features, but as a user, what do we say? Slowly introducing it to you. Honestly, I love having tabs open in Safari, and that’s as far as I’m probably gonna take it for a conference or for a drive-by scenario, so make that experience awesome!

Adam Stacoviak: I guess where I struggle, I suppose, is not to say, “Hey, Scott… Open source, man… You’ve got to open source this thing.” It’s not about that, really. It’s about - as I have researched your story personally, and I’ve researched Docker’s story as an organization, I see more and more how important your current growth has been in regards to Docker Desktop; how important that tech is. And if it is ubiquitous, so Docker has won, it’s very clear in terms of how you deliver applications to production, how you run things… I mean, I use Docker daily. My Plex server runs in Docker. Thank you so much, by the way. I love that. I mean, you’ve made hardcore tech that’s just impossible for folks like me… I’m not in DevOps. I’m a developer, but that’s not my normal thing. But I find fun in homelabby things, and tinkering, and stuff like that… That’s my exposure to this ops world, so to speak.

The point I’m getting at, I suppose, is that it seems to me that Docker Desktop is like paramount. It is the bedrock of everything you’re building upon. And while I understand and I hear you on single sign-on and these other features… And I’m not even saying “Hey, be open source” necessarily, but I wonder why – you know, you have these competitors who want to come in and “We need an open source version of Docker Desktop.” Whatever it might be. And the easiest way to squash that would just simply be to be open source. Did you consider BSL license, for example, if you need to have protection? Did you consider the licensing? That’s what I guess I don’t understand. Can you speak to the struggle of that choice?

Adam Stacoviak: What I was trying to drive towards was this idea of the terminal as a platform. It’s been there, it’s been a tool. As Jerod said, it’s a daily driver for me, for him, for many of the developers out there. But it’s not always the platform for which you do things. Like, Vim is a thing, obviously, you’ve got many of the tools you use on the daily… But I’m thinking HTOP, stuff like that.

In terms of this platform, this TUI platform, are you thinking beyond version one is maybe more native ways to do TUIs kind of thing? What are your thoughts on beyond this realm?

John Graham-Cumming: And I thought “oh it had to been wrong”, So anyway, I googled the phone number, and sure enough, it’s the switchboard of number 10 Downing Street. So imagine me - I’m lying in bed, groggy as anything, so I call this number and I’m like “Okay, this is who I am”, and immediately I get put through to this woman, and she’s like “The apology is going out tonight. We’ve already placed it in the Daily Telegraph.” That’s where it was gonna be published. “I just need to read it to you and I need you to approve it.”

So she reads it to me over the phone, and I thought it was great… It’s a text that everyone can read. And then she goes “Gordon wants a word.” Now, Gordon was Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister…

Sacha Greif: Yeah, that’s a good question. It’s really tough to answer… For me, I thought about that a lot, especially after last year, where a lot of the criticisms – because the survey got bigger, so I got more criticism, which is fair… So my philosophy is not really the number, or whatever that matters; it’s just people knowing what the data says and where it’s from.

If you survey 20 people, that’s fine, as long as you say that it was 20 people. If it’s 200,000, that’s fine too. If it’s 20,000, but they come from such-and-such sources, which might introduce its own bias, it’s fine as long as you disclose that. So that’s really what we’re trying to do.

For example, for the State of CSS, since a lot of our respondents are coming from having done the State of JS survey, I’m sure there will be a bias towards things like CSS-in-JS, or whatever… But I think that’s fine, because people can know that, and see that, and also then use the data critically. For example, maybe the proportion of respondents who use CSS-in-JS libraries will be higher, but their opinion of these libraries will still be representative of the larger community.

I think in our daily life, when we see numbers in surveys, we’re not taught how to analyze them. It’s like “Oh, Trump has 30% chance of winning”, or something, so you’re like “That’s tiny. It’s never gonna happen.” Then he wins and you’re like “Well, the polls were wrong, because the polls said 30% and he still won.” But obviously, that’s not how polls work, and I think there’s kind of an effort on the part of the people reading the data as well to see the raw data and then make their own opinion, rather than just want something that’s kind of pre-baked for them.

Colin Billings: I think we’re reaching the place where the slope of awareness becomes much higher. I wouldn’t say that everybody understands it, but I would actually say that most people are having experiences that are proving it out in their daily lives.

Flux eventually underwrote the introduction of things like Night Shift on iPhone, and I think there was an app called Twilight, and now it’s actually built into the operating system on Android, that essentially does this around the light on our devices, and in particular our smartphones.

[16:02] I wouldn’t say 100% of people know about those features, but I would say that 100% of people that I’ve ever told “Hey, turn on Night Shift on your iPhone” and then come back to them 4-5 days later and say “Hey, what do you think?”, they’re like “Oh my god, I can’t believe I was not using this before. I’m always gonna use it.”

I think that there are ways that this - in particular the devices we use every day - is really starting to become a more common experience. I also think that the movement towards wellness or health is really driving awareness as well.

For a long time health was all about nutrition and exercise. In the last 3-5 years health has become nutrition, exercise and sleep. So if you’re really working on your sleep and you quickly find your way to “How can I do things that help promote my sleep?”, and of that, at the top of list (probably position one or position two) is now your light exposure.