Jerod Santo: Right? I like golden retriever also, because I do – just in our last episode I was kind of confessing that I treat it like a little buddy… Which feels weird if it was like a full-grown adult person. But like as a domesticated helper, like a dog, your best friend, I don’t feel so bad being like “Good job, little guy.” So I like that description.

Ilya Grigorik: In dog years, it feels like forever. In chronological time, I think it’s been four years. But it’s been a pressure cooker.

Christopher Hiller: Robot Dog? [laughter]

Jerod Santo: Well, we’re getting there… I think we have some decisions to make as we go. I think, roughly speaking, the dog hunts, I think, 4,000 requests per second, well managed, we’ll be fine. And I think we’ll find out otherwise, and be able to scale one way or the other around such issues. What else is left in Pipely’s roadmap, as we look towards the future now? Because – let’s do next steps.

Adam Stacoviak: That dog hunts.

Adam Stacoviak: What a joy ride. What an absolute blessing. And yes, it’s almost like if someone says “Tim, how’s your day?” Well, am I healthy? Is my wife healthy? Y’all don’t have kids, but I have kids… Are my kids healthy? Is my dog even – is my dog healthy? Are my people healthy? Do I have the opportunity to do what I want to do this day? Man, it’s a great day. That’s a great day, right?

Adam Stacoviak: And if you’re dyslexic like I am sometimes… I read it backwards, I will misremember… I will literally read it, and have to say “One, six, zero, five, eight, zero”, whatever… And I feel like that’s also an attack vector, because maybe somebody is sitting next to me and I’m lightly whispering this password that is only on my screen… “One, six, zero, five, eight, zero…”

I don’t know… I always feel concerned about that. If I’m alone, it’s just my pup with me, my dog, then I’m cool with it. But if I’m at Starbucks or a coffee shop, then you could be trying to get me.

Jerod Santo: That’s a tall order, Matthew. I was just going to put an index page up there and see what happens… Okay. Well, maybe I can hire Kris to come in and consult… I’m telling you, Kris, that dog could hunt. If you can formalize that thing into a real pitch…

And I think there is absolutely a lot of value capture there that companies aren’t having, that would be a competitive advantage for a lot of companies, since everybody sucks at it right now. Eventually it becomes table stakes, but if you can get a competitive advantage right now, move faster, don’t break things… That could be cool. I know you’ve got lots of things going on and you’re coming back home to Audition and Final Cut, but I would consider exploring that avenue a little further.

Alright, that’s enough advice from me. Matthew has a plane to catch, don’t you?

Ashley Jeffs: I don’t know, because the goal wasn’t just to like get the most amount of money in the shortest space of time… And I kind of always had my head on the idea that if at any point I felt like I wasn’t actually enjoying what I’m doing, then at that stage, I would just stop, because it was kind of silly at that point. Like, I’m not going to make more money from running Benthos as almost like a – I used to say like a hot dog stand on the street. That was kind of like the mentality I had. I just wanted to be like small potatoes, a small operation, doing the thing that I enjoy. But if I didn’t enjoy it, I was quite happy to just walk away. I think a lot of open source developers get stuck because they still want to work on this thing and they feel kind of like obligated to, but they don’t enjoy it anymore. And at that point you’re kind of trapped. But I kind of had my head on straight about that aspect of things. Like, if I don’t enjoy it, I’ll just let go.

[00:56:14.04] So joining Redpanda and then suddenly we can tap into all these customers and stuff was – it’s exciting. It’s great. But it wasn’t like before that I was like frustrated about “Oh, I just want to tap that revenue.” It was more just I wanted to find – if I could have found a hundred startups that were willing to pay like a nominal amount regularly to keep the project going and if that were enough for me to start building the team out, then I probably would have gone for it… But I’m just not good at wrangling up the startups. There were lots of them, but it’s very difficult to get them to pay a significant amount. Because you imagine a significant amount would end up being more than they’re probably paying for anything else that they’re doing, unless they’re like spending a lot on AWS…

Adam Stacoviak: Well, if you watch the video, I actually think where we may be mischaracterizing its – I mean, I know it’s not feature-rich in terms of its future, but I think they’re planning to kind of keep it around and do some things. I don’t think it’s literally a dead dog. I think it still works, obviously…

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.

Jerod Santo: I like physical things. I of course also lived through a time period where I was digitizing all my things… I don’t like to print, but I also kind of think printing’s cool now. So it’s like, what’s old is new again, and I think that physical media has a tangibility to it that we desire. And so in that way it is cool. Obviously, there’s lots of drawbacks; like, you know, your dog eats it, or something.

Chris Coyier: It’s a good name. It’s like a little fast dog in the movie, and stuff…

Chris Benson: There is a really good point there. And just for a moment, stepping back out of the AI-driven meeting concept, if we step back a few years to when COVID was hitting and we were all kind of just making do, and having remote meetings, we became much more tolerant of one another in terms of how your business life intersects with your personal life. And if the dog was barking in the background, people learned to be just fine with that. And if there was kids, or a baby, people learned that. There is an element of this, as we’re talking about this particular thing about having that clone out there, of kind of going backwards on that trend, and us being a little bit less tolerant of one another, because you’re, once again, projecting that perfect image, whether you’re in the car, or on the toilet, or in the bed, or whatever it is that you happen to be doing that you don’t want to reveal. This is one of those things. It could be isolating to use it in that way as well.

Helena Zhang: Yeah, the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. However, those are very elegant. They’re not necessarily capturing, again, the real world application of a paragraph.

Justin Garrison: [00:32:13.23] I’m on the infrastructure team for Southern California Linux Expo, and we have a Slack channel that has a Pager – not PagerDuty. Data Dog that’s like “Hey, guess what? The site’s down.” Someone’s like “Oh, I’m on. I’ll check it.”

Jerod Santo: So when I first started, I thought to myself “If I want to work 40 hours a week, and I can bill X dollars per hour”, I think it was like 75 when I started… “And I can get that 80% of the time, then I’ll make this much money.” Does that dog hunt? And then you look at that number and you’re like “Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I can live off of that.”

What I didn’t realize is that working 40 hours a week - if that’s what you want to do, which is what I wanted to do - and billing anywhere close to 40 hours a week, those two things don’t happen, right?

Adam Stacoviak: We purposely wanted to have you on here. We could have had others talk. And it’s not we don’t want to talk to them. It’s that we want to hear from an engineer that doesn’t have a dog in the fight insofar as you’re trying to sell something or market something. We want to hear from an engineer who cares about and has been at Red Hat since 2019. Is that right?

Johnny Boursiquot: So Elvish is your default right now. Pretty much everything you do that you need to do in a shell, is – you consume your own dog food, as they say.

David Heinemeier Hansson: I mean, I don’t disagree with that… But then I also constantly try to check myself that - when we had our little kerfuffle in 2021, there were a bunch of people who just thought “They’re just wrong”, right? So I try to keep just an ounce of humility in that… But even so - I’ve also looked through all of it. I’ve looked through the complaint… I don’t have a dog in this fight. I don’t use WordPress for anything… We did, once upon a time. We don’t anymore.

I like the idea that it’s an open source package that’s running 40% of the internet, or something like that. That’s incredible. If anything, I’m biased to cheer for whoever brought that to life. So I’m biased to cheer for that. And I still look and go like “You know what? No.” There’s just some norms here… I don’t even have to render a verdict on the total sum of everything to go like, okay, that part, taking over someone’s plugin in the way it was taken over, and imposturing… That just violates every norm that I’m interested in having in open source, regardless of whether you’re right or you’re wrong on some other trademark questions or other things that are in there.

Now, again, said all that, I also do know that there are other people who would have the same conversation about the actions [unintelligible 01:44:48.28] that I took in 2021… So I kind of – I try to do it with that distance, still having opinions about things. And I also do think some of it is not necessarily that deep. I think it’s kind of you actually to say “There’s a lot of context here that we don’t know.” Yeah, but also sometimes the answer is simpler. Here’s a competitor to wordpress.com, that’s doing really well, reportedly hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue hosting this open source thing… I can see the human response going “That’s fucking bullshit. They make all this fucking money, and I don’t get anything back to my projects. They don’t give anything back. Now I’m gonna get them.” I can recognize that. That’s not an alien instinct. It’s not something that is so far removed from –

Jerod Santo: A hundred percent. And the interesting thing about what Matt Mullenweg has done over the last month is that he’s actually scorched the earth for both of those markets, and one understands why, and the other one – I mean, I was speaking with a friend who just has a WordPress site, and is not a technical person, and he was like “What’s going on with WordPress, man? Because I’ve heard–” Like, everyone’s hearing things. And when all of a sudden you can’t install plugins that you previously installed, just because you happen to be a WP Engine customer - like, you don’t have a dog in this hunt. You’re not invested in one or the other. You’re just like “I’m running my website. And all of a sudden I can’t run my website anymore.”

And so that’s the really frustrating bit, is like all these people who are completely uninvolved, clueless to any of the underpinnings of the web, and all of a sudden their day or their week or their month is tarnished, because of somebody else’s fight. That’s been, I think, the tragedy of this.

Autumn Nash: [00:40:14.08] Dude, I have the best Pete story ever. So I was going through A/B’s, which is like this thing where you get – it’s like the worst SA call you can have, but they test you to make sure you survive it, you know… And I went through a bunch, and we had this one like super-fancy principal, fancy person, that like put me through one for his test, and he made me cry. It was horrible. I wanted to give up. I was like “This is horrible. I’m not good at it.” And my next person was Pete. And I show up to this meeting in tears, I’m ready to quit my job… It was horrible. And Pete was the sweetest, kindest person and he was like “It’s okay. Let’s just walk through some of your slides.” And he gave me all this advice, advice I still use in public speaking when I give talks today. And he’s like “We’ll schedule another one for next week”, and I was just sitting there like “I’m horrible at this. I give up”, and like just a puddle. And he was – he was there with his dog… It was the sweetest thing ever. It’s so sweet.

I think that you bring so much technological like know-how, and like just experience… Like, you watched the like Internet like born, and you saw it from like where it started to where we are now… But you also bring so much like empathy to tech. And I think that makes you much more different than most people with that same technological –

Quincy Larson: Yeah. Well, I’ve talked to tons of people… So freeCodeCamp has a podcast, and I’ve interviewed – I’ve done more than 100 interviews there, including Jeff Atwood, and Joel Spolsky, and David Malan, the Harvard professor, and people like that… And a lot of the people that I’ve interviewed have been entrepreneurial, in the sense that they didn’t necessarily work for very many people, or they didn’t even necessarily work as a developer for people. Maybe they had lots of other jobs, but they were able to build a consultancy, or they were able to build a product-focused company and potentially raise money, or get enough grassroots support to bootstrap it into a sustainable organization.

[00:37:56.28] I think that my general advice would be that is a little riskier than just going out and getting paid to learn by getting a job somewhere. So I always push people in the direction of “If you want to de-risk your future, go just work for somebody else.” And they’ve already figured out the money part of it, and they’ve figured out how to offer you this salary, and then you can take that salary, or contractor compensation per month, or whatever… And then you can just take that money and you can get paid to learn. So I always encourage people to go work for somebody else first, just to de-risk it a little bit. And you’ll learn a ton on somebody else’s dime.

But I would say, absolutely, if you’ve already worked as a developer, you should consider entrepreneurial opportunities. But everybody and their dog is selling some book about entrepreneurship, or they’ve got some podcast talking about entrepreneurship, and I just want to make it abundantly clear, I think that entrepreneurship is great, but I think it’s great to work for somebody else first. Jeff Bezos worked for many years for other people before he founded Amazon. And that’s true of most – and by the way, I think this is the second time I mentioned Jeff Bezos… I don’t even think I’m a Jeff Bezos stan, or anything like that…