Samuel Goff: So a couple of things. First of all, when it comes to blockchain, specifically Bitcoin and others that are based on proof of work, not proof of stake, I have a real issue with… Because the energy intensity of the computation is so high that you could power multiple countries now. Right? And so what’s happening is a lot of dirty energy sources such as natural gas, coal, oil, things that, where increasingly, it is economically unsustainable, because grid-powered solar and wind have completely leapfrogged them in terms of cost efficiency. If you’re building brand new energy sources right now, by far, you can build anywhere from six to nine times more grid-scale, solar or wind, compared to nuclear, which is the second cheapest, or third cheapest, I should say… But everything else is more expensive by comparison. But the problem is, you go to an oilfield where they have these toxic gases, and they set fire to those toxic gases as a way of making it safe. Well, that’s wasted energy.

So what’s happening here in Texas is a bunch of Bitcoin miners set up in the oil fields, and they’ve harvested that heat energy, what would normally be just waste heat. And that becomes an additional revenue stream for those oil extractors, those oil companies. And so it basically takes what was a dying revenue model, a dying, industry, and it breathes new life into it, and it slows down our adoption of renewables. And it takes – basically, it vastly increases our risk of transforming our environment to a place where it’s going to kill people to go outside, whether it’s due to the extreme heat and humidity, or the extreme cold, because the natural conveyor belt that used to exist has kind of collapsed, or it’s sometimes collapsing.

Preethi Kasireddy: Yeah, sure. That’s a great question. I’ll be honest, one of the things that I’m always excited by are problems that are not figured out, and blockchain is definitely one of them in the sense that there is this amazing technology that got created, but the actual applications and use cases have yet to be created, and there’s so much room for creativity and innovation. I’d say that’s one of the main reasons why I’m so attracted to this industry… Because I naturally have the entrepreneurial spirit, I wanna solve unsolved problems, and that’s one of the reasons why I’m gravitating to it. But at a more fundamental level, I think the technology itself is super interesting.

I think earlier you were saying how blockchain is interesting as a digital currency… I’d go a little bit further than that and say I actually don’t get excited by digital currency per se, because digital currency is just one application of the blockchain. There’s so many other applications that I think have potential that haven’t been created yet, and I’m more excited about those applications. In my opinion, it’s really hard for the current currency system in any nation – for example, take the U.S. For cryptocurrency or digital currency to replace fiat currency, that would take a lot. The government has a really tight control over the monetary policy and I just don’t see what benefits digital currencies provide today that would make people switch over, that would make the government friendly to this, and so forth… Because in the end, what digital currency is - it’s completely decentralized, completely open, completely censorship-resistant, which is not something any government really wants.

So for me, I’m more excited by what else blockchain enables. At a fundamental level, blockchain is a decentralized technology where it’s maintaining a ledger of transactions or basically state changes, and the state changes are cryptographically secure because they are maintained by something called the consensus process. This consensus process in Bitcoin or Ethereum is called proof of work, where a bunch of miners are there and they run a bunch of complex computations to validate these transactions, and they get paid for validating this blockchain. So the entire chain is decentralized, it’s trustless, because there’s no need to trust any central party to maintain this database or this ledger, and then it’s completely censorship-resistant because you can’t have really any central authority trying to censor it… And it’s completely secure, because it’s cryptographically secure. So with those primitives you can do just so much on top, and that’s kind of what I’m excited by.

Gavin Wood: So what the Coinbase and other exchanges (there are actually a few of them) do is they essentially perform a bridge between the current, legacy world of value, of money, and the sort of new crypto world of value. They allow you to buy and trade Ether for fiat currency, and they have a foot in both domains. Now, the developer, once he figures out what they want to do with this shared computer, the developer will probably take some Ether - because you need Ether to pay for computation on the shared computer - and start coding up what will effectively be the backend.

What we normally think of as being something that sits on a server, that has maybe a database attached, that provides services to multiple clients, that’s basically the logic that’s gonna be moved onto the Ethereum computer, the Ethereum blockchain. And at that point we start coding a contract, which is just a piece of software; it’s almost like an object. If you’re talking C++ programming, it’ll be like a class; if you’re talking Rust programming, it’ll be a struct… It’s basically an object with some functions that can do some stuff. That will be uploaded to the Ethereum network with a small payment of Ether just to sort of pay off the maintainers of the network, the miners; then it will sit there until someone wants to interact with it. Then it’s up to the developer to write the frontend; this is basically the same sort of technologies JavaScript, CSS, HTML… It’s just that the Java – sorry, the JavaScript… [laughter] The JavaScript can…

Baruch Sadogursky: There were and still are a lot of efforts in trying to do that… And it looks like - this is from our experience as well; we tried to come up with – again, back a couple of years ago when Go Modules only appeared, we heard this vision of “Hey, we will have some kind of a network of central module registries that will communicate with each other, trying to establish whatever truth really is, and make sure that the rest of them are not allowed”, and everything. This is where we actually started Go center. That was one of those registries. But with time, in a matter of the next years, somehow this vision morphed to “Hey, Google will maintain this central module repository, and whatever Google says is the right thing, is the right thing.” So this is where the usability of Go Modules kind of disappeared, because there was no more alternatives to whatever golden modules Google will give you.

But then it was a very useful experience for us to really try and evolve this idea of negotiating what’s [unintelligible 00:17:34.25] And I would say there are now two most important aspects of this system. The first is how do we know which module is the right module, in terms of “Hey, I have two of them, they’re named the same, they have the same version, but their checksum is different. Which one of them is lying, and which one of them is authentic?” That’s the first one. And the second is chain of custody of those modules that we decided they are the right ones. So I decided this module is authentic, and we can talk in a second why… And then, okay, how do I make sure that what I have now in my machine is really the same module, and the papertrail of the decision that it was the authentic module is actually preserved and cannot be hacked?

[18:30] That brought us to envisioning a system that everybody will be able to use in order to guarantee those two, and it’s called Pyrsia. Actually, Pyrsia - that’s an interesting story of the name… It’s actually a system that ancient Greeks used to convey messages with flames between each other. So this is why you have the torch.

The idea is a decentralized P2P network that will provide a consensus of what modules are authentic, and then make sure that they cannot be tampered with, with some kind of blockchain-backed ledger. I know that we lost two thirds of the audience right now, after I mentioned blockchain, but whoever stayed - you did the right thing; it has nothing to do with cryptocurrencies or Web 3.0. It’s just a ledger that you cannot tamper with; that’s the interesting part of it over there.

So basically, what we say is “Okay, everybody now can build modules from source, and publish them wherever they like.” The system will communicate and decide if that’s the golden build by comparing it to the build that the original producer of this module creates. Let’s say I have a library now that I wanna publish, and I create a build that because it’s my library, I know is the right build. Now, everybody can have their own CI producing the same module from my sources, because my sources are obviously open source; as long as the build produces the same result, your end result is as good as mine.

Now, we record it, so no one can hack into that and pretend that another result is the right one, and then we distribute it through a P2P network, because now we don’t care where it comes from, as long as we can guarantee that it’s the right results. So now Natalie builds it on her machine, and she’s behind a firewall and the connection to whatever central repository [unintelligible 00:20:36.12] but you see the next door, in the same intranet with her, in the same company, and as long as we verify that the build that Natalie produced is as good as this golden one that was produced by the original maintainer of the library, you can use whatever she built without downloading it again, outside of the firewall, and getting tons of approvals and whatnot.

So this looks like, from our perspective, the solution to some of the supply chain issues, because it guarantees the authenticity, and it protects the supply chain itself, because we verify on your machine that the package you have is exactly the package you need to have, regardless of where it actually came from. And you also have this network of the Go registry, npm registry, JFrog Artifactory, Maven Central, you name it, the sources that provide infrastructure for massive distribution and scale… And again, we don’t need to trust them in terms of “Are they giving us the right packages?” because we can verify ourselves. And also, in case they are down, we can also rely on the P2P network to get the modules in case they are not available.

Mitchell Cohen: So there’s two parts to that answer… One is that we’ve been through several changes in user behavior on the web, in relation to their own privacy, security and digital identity, and we’ve always succeeded by adapting how 1Password works to how people actually think about their identity online.

[01:00:12.00] The first big transition was from an app to the web, and then to mobile, and then wanting it to become a collaborative sharing experience on the service… And now we’re seeing another transition to passwordless, for a lack of a better term. And we want to be there too, because we don’t wanna be telling people “Here is what you have to do to be productive, to be secure online.” We want to help them do it the way they already want to. So obviously, we’ve done a lot to make sure that biometrics are a first-class feature of 1Password, so that – it used to be all about what we used to call your master password, and now that’s like a minor detail. Most of the time you’re not even thinking of that password; you’re interacting with us through the biometric interfaces on your device, and we keep sort of making that more central to the experience.

Beyond that though, we also are very interested to see how people are using passwordless services and SSO, as you mentioned, Amal, blockchain services for identity. And we wanna help them do that, because the one thing that we’ve seen that will always be true is there are all of these services competing for people’s one true identity, but we’re always gonna be there as kind of the source of truth for all these things you have to keep track of and pay attention to to keep yourself secure online. We’re gonna be a safe place for you to store and use and interact with those services.

Mitchell Cohen: So there’s two parts to that answer… One is that we’ve been through several changes in user behavior on the web, in relation to their own privacy, security and digital identity, and we’ve always succeeded by adapting how 1Password works to how people actually think about their identity online. The first big transition was from an app to the web, and then to mobile, and then wanting it to become a collaborative sharing experience on the service… And now we’re seeing another transition to passwordless, for a lack of a better term. And we want to be there too, because we don’t wanna be telling people “Here is what you have to do to be productive, to be secure online.” We want to help them do it the way they already want to. So obviously, we’ve done a lot to make sure that biometrics are a first-class feature of 1Password, so that – it used to be all about what we used to call your master password, and now that’s like a minor detail. Most of the time you’re not even thinking of that password; you’re interacting with us through the biometric interfaces on your device, and we keep sort of making that more central to the experience.

[01:00:05.24] Beyond that though, we also are very interested to see how people are using passwordless services and SSO, as you mentioned, Amal, blockchain services for identity. And we wanna help them do that, because the one thing that we’ve seen that will always be true is there are all of these services competing for people’s one true identity, but we’re always gonna be there as kind of the source of truth for all these things you have to keep track of and pay attention to to keep yourself secure online. We’re gonna be a safe place for you to store and use and interact with those services.

Mikeal Rogers: [01:16:04.26] First of all, coming back to that, differentiating between problems that are current technical limitations versus things that we actually have an incentive to solve… Everyone has an incentive to reduce the energy consumption. It is only a cost center. And if you look at what’s happening broadly in blockchains, we have figured out how to get the energy cost down. Those algorithms exist, they’re implemented in several chains… Ethereum is planning on moving to one of them, so Ethereum will be on one of these that uses significantly less energy…

It is totally unclear to me how and when Bitcoin would ever do something like this… So Bitcoin may be just always using this much energy, and maybe that’s the downfall of the protocol. Maybe that’s why people stop using it at some point, if they can’t make that migration… But I think if you’re looking at the ecosystem overall and the technology overall, we’re already moving past that particular problem, and we’re getting the energy consumption much closer to just what you use in cloud computing and mobile and stuff like that.

I don’t know when your first computer was, but mine had a power supply the size of about 20 iPhones, and it consumed about as much power I think as 20 iPhones maybe, for a fraction of the compute. That went down, and this is all just kind of coming down over time.

Yasir Ekinci: Yeah. My dad actually was a miner when he was younger. I don’t mean like “and then he grew up”, but he was actually in the mines, down in the pits… And he used to – yeah, he’d come home and he looked like he was wearing eyeliner, or guy liner, because he’d have like soot in his eyes, and stuff. Obviously, it’s not showered out properly, but… Yeah, he sort of looked like a seventies rock kind of glam star. It was great.

Adam Stacoviak: Right? Because that impacts your ability to give talks, and stuff like that, or show up on podcast… Like “What do you do?” “I’m an Oracle Data Miner.” “No, what do you do?” “That’s my title.” “Okay.” “That’s me. I do that.”

Justin Searls: But beyond a certain point, cognitively, we can only carry around so many in our heads. Like, if I’m talking to James about this and he doesn’t even remember writing that thing… Like, what we’ve seen when you take that to the extreme in npm is how critical security audits have become… Because all it takes is like a domain name expiring, or somebody coming along and buying a package from somebody else, and then like secretly injecting a cryptocurrency miner, or a keylogger or something… Taken to its extreme, what you’re really doing is you’re creating a chain of trust with a whole bunch of strangers. And you’ve got to be mindful of the fact that if you’re effectively opening yourself up to everyone, you could never hope to audit at all. Hopefully, GitHub Copilot will be security-scanning everything and it’ll catch most of the stuff. I would still never feel comfortable if I didn’t feel like I could get my arms around it, and look at every single one of my dependencies and have some idea of who maintained it, and what it was, and what it did.

Jarred Sumner: Yeah. No, he’s great. Probably what he’s referring to, I’m guessing, is that we don’t have an implementation of something like npm audit in Bun, which sort of is the thing that’s like – there are 42 security vulnerabilities in your dependencies, or whatever. That’s what it logs. We don’t implement that right now. But on the other hand – so yes, that is a feature that is missing. But on the other hand, we also don’t run post install by default for dependencies, which is very good for security, because this is a very common attack vector that normally, if you want to get a Bitcoin miner on somebody that, then you compromise a package, and then you do a post-install… That’s usually the attack vector, is like post install scripts, or something.

Jerod Santo: So where’s the BTC miner val? That’s my question.

Paul Smith: It was acquired by MSNBC in, I think, 2011. It was actually part of NBC News, because we had that news angle. Nowadays people take, I think, for granted things like NextDoor, and Facebook Local News about their neighborhood. So we were kind of one of the early pioneers of that. We sold the company, and kept working on it for a little bit… But we did some interesting things on Everyblock. In fact, one of the things I’m most proud about is we built our own map stack.

So at the time, if you remember back in 2006-2007, JavaScript engines and browsers were starting to get faster, Google Maps popped on the scene, and it was suddenly “Oh, you can do these native desktop app things in your browser’ for the first time. And in fact, Everyblock kind of came out of this idea, of sort of like a Google Maps mashup of taking Google Maps and then using its API and slapping data points on it. And when we started the company, we thought it would be great, since that’s going to be such a central part of this - you want to be able to look at a map of your neighborhood, drill into your block, see where news is happening… And when I say news, I’m talking about maybe your block is mentioned in the news, or maybe a building license has been issued, or a restaurant inspection, or things like that. Public records, crime information… And we would aggregate all that and put that onto a map.

So Google Maps was great, but we wanted to have control over the look and feel, and user experience, so we built a map stack from the ground up, using sort of open geospatial tools at the time, OpenLayers, Mapnik, some other tools like that, and then kind of combined that with a Django app server we were using to pull the data out of the database, and then present that on the browser. We worked with a great designer, Wilson Miner, to kind of come up with their own palette and design for the maps themselves, which - I thought they looked really beautiful. So it was a way of visualizing the data, and I think it was a pretty interesting accomplishment. And now, you’ve got things like Mapbox, and there’s just a lot more flexibility when it comes to sort of the in-browser custom map and geospatial experience.

Jack Dorsey: We learned a lot from the solar platform, such that Cash App is going to do something similar. And TBD is entirely a platform. That’s its only reason to be and to exist. So we’re definitely on the track, and we wanna make sure that we’re building more and more platform-type things forever more. Everything that we do in the future should have platform elements.

We’re building a Bitcoin wallet and a Bitcoin miner - we’re building it so that it’s open source; all the code will be available, and the hardware design will be available. Everything about it will be completely open for any developer to use. They don’t need to build on top of it, they can just steal all the code and the idea and just build whatever they want.

Liz Rice: [58:13] Yeah. And then on the security side - so Falco was probably the first security project, certainly in the CNCF, that was using eBPF. This project from my former colleagues at Aqua called Tracy… And then in Cilium we have a sort of Cilian family, we have a sub project called Tetragon, which is allowing you to create low-level security primitives almost in Yaml form, and apply them to your Kubernetes cluster. And you can do really cool things with Tetragon. I get a bit overexcited about this, because if your kernel is modern enough, you can not just detect that something is potentially malicious behavior, a process is opening the wrong file, or connecting to a cryptocurrency miner, or whatever malicious thing that you’ve detected - you can kill that process synchronously from within the kernel. And what that means is the process gets killed - to me it’s not like you have to go and tell somebody and then eventually your process gets killed… It’s happening right there and then, and it stops the attack before it happens… Which is super-fun to demo. I love it.

Gerhard Lazu: We could do. Or a Bitcoin miner. [laughter] We could. It’s there, we’re paying for it… But you know, to be honest, the reason why this is exciting is because we can spin up on-demand, and we can have maybe more than four CPUs. We only chose four CPUs because of the cost. It just hits the balance nice. But if we could use 16 CPUs on-demand, that would be a lot better. And with Fly machines we can, because they spin up so quickly… You don’t wait minutes for it to come up.

Gerhard Lazu: Exactly, you have to know. So it took me few weeks to understand how this crypto miner got in our infrastructure. I will not say where… [laughter] So what happened - those secrets that were committed to the repo, they were encrypted. We didn’t know. And this crypto miner appeared on this VM, with root privileges because of the key; there was the private key, an SSH key. If you have that, you can SSH into the VM, as root, set up whatever you want, and off you go.

[34:20] It was a very small DigitalOcean VM, so there wasn’t like any reason to run a crypto miner, but you know, people do it… I mean, not even a GPUs… Come on. Anyways, people do that, like a throttled CPU, 100% for weeks, and we couldn’t explain what the hell is going on. And then after a few weeks, we realized how the leak happened. And it was encrypted secrets. We had committed them, the key was leaked, we didn’t know, the private key was discovered, someone SSH-ed, they set up their crypto miner, and there you go. Good luck figuring out how that happened.

Jack Dorsey: We learned a lot from the solar platform, such that Cash App is going to do something similar. And TBD is entirely a platform. That's its only reason to be and to exist. So we're definitely on the track, and we wanna make sure that we're building more and more platform-type things forever more. Everything that we do in the future should have platform elements.

We're building a Bitcoin wallet and a Bitcoin miner - we're building it so that it's open source; all the code will be available, and the hardware design will be available. Everything about it will be completely open for any developer to use. They don't need to build on top of it, they can just steal all the code and the idea and just build whatever they want.

Shawn Wang: Well, first of all, I’m not the most informed person on security. Probably Feross would be a better person to talk to about this… I’m not optimistic or pessimistic. I’m just kind of neutral on it. I don’t think it’s like a focus of anyone, apart from Feross, who is the founder at socket.dev. [laughter] And his approach is “Let’s just audit everything and give you ten different reports telling you that–” And we have some of these automated audits as well. It’s not clear exactly how venture funding was gonna affect this either way. Obviously, you can have people who are paid better to maintain these repos, but supply chain attacks happen in perfectly well-funded companies as well. It’s not just like someone’s acting out in open source… Which has happened repeatedly, and just puts a Bitcoin miner in a repo, or something like that.

I think it really has to be fixed at the runtime level, or the toolchain level. Deno has an attempt at doing this by locking down the permissions. People are realizing, unfortunately, that it’s just not that useful. You’re just gonna enable all the flags anyway. So it has to be per-module, and as far as I know, nobody’s tackling that, except for a company that I’m hopefully invested in, that might be trying to solve that issue. But it’s kind of an open question right now. I’m not aware of anyone else really tackling sort of per-package permissioning and just reinventing the npm ecosystem. For better or worse, the npm ecosystem is what we have, and therefore the security defaults that they choose - which is none [laughs] - we inherit those decisions.

Feross Aboukhadijeh: Yeah. So that’s one example. But there was another example before that in November, and another one in October of last year… This seems to happen nearly monthly now. In October and November it was Coa, RC and UAParser.js that were compromised. They had a Monero miner added to the package, as well as some malware that stole passwords on Windows from over 100 different programs on Windows, and also the Windows credential manager… So if you were unlucky enough to install one of those packages during the period where the bad version was on npm, then you would be compromised; you would have lost all your passwords, and you’d need to reset everything, and install your keys, and everything like that.

And UAParser.js is depended upon by React Native. So these packages had a lot of dependencies. Each of those three I mentioned had 30 million downloads a month each. So we’re talking seriously popular packages that were compromised. And the UAParser one, just as an example - that one has 7 million downloads a week, and has three million GitHub repos that depend on it.

Jerod Santo: Bitcoin miner…

Paul Smith: It was acquired by MSNBC in 2011. It was actually part of NBC News… Because we had that news angle. Nowadays people take for granted things like Nextdoor, and Facebook, local news about their neighborhood. So we were kind of one of the early pioneers of that… And we sold the company, and kept working on it for a little bit, but… We did some interesting things on EveryBlock. In fact, one of the things I’m most proud about is we built our own map stack.

At the time, if you remember back in 2006-2007, JavaScript engines and browsers were starting to get faster, Google Maps popped on the scene, and it was suddenly like “Oh, you can do these native desktop app-like things in your browser for the first time.” And in fact, EveryBlock came out of this idea of sort of like a Google Maps mash-up of taking Google Maps and then using its API and slapping data points on it.

And when we started the company, we thought it would be great, since that’s gonna be such a central part of this – you wanna be able to look at a map of your neighborhood, drill in to your block, see where news is happening… And when I say news, I’m talking about maybe your block is mentioned in the news, or maybe a building license has been issued, or a restaurant inspection, or things like that. Public records. Crime information. We would aggregate all that and put that onto a map.

So Google Maps was great, but we wanted to have control over the look and feel, and users experience… So we built a map stack from the ground-up using open geospatial tools at the time. OpenLayers, Mapnik, some other tools like that, and then kind of combine that with a Django app server we were using to pull the data out of the database, and then present that on the browser.

We worked with a great designer, Wilson Miner, to kind of come up with our own palette and design for the maps themselves, which - I thought they looked really beautiful. So it was a way of visualizing the data. It was a pretty interesting accomplishment.

Now you’ve got things like Mapbox, and there’s just a lot more flexibility when it comes to the sort of in-browser custom map and geospatial experience.

Suju Rajan: Building off of the standardized version of us looking at the data that we have… Daniel, exactly to your point, we do have a notion of what a member embedding needs to look like. The data for LinkedIn comes from LinkedIn profiles. So in this sense, understanding that “Hey, this particular member has a – in that space, it looks like people who are in this technical industry, in this location, and here are the sorts of jobs that they apply to”, as much as we can represent them in that member embedding space.

Likewise, we have things that are on the job and they’re inside as well; someone asking for a data miner, maybe because they were under a rock, is also still asking for an AI scientist, so how can we bring that job embeddings view into it.

And in some senses, being able to scale this. Because if you think about where – there was an earlier question of “What are the different services in which we have AI?” There is the search aspect of it, and we also organically recommend jobs to people - something that we call instant jobs, where you want to be the first to apply… So members actually sign up for alerts, to say “Hey, the moment you see a job come into our system, then send me an alert right away.” So we need this to be high, high, high precision, as an example.

Then on the flipside, on the recruiter search as an example, it’s all about matching members to get jobs. So we’re trying to build this notion of what we call these two-tower embeddings, which represent the member side and the job side, and bring that together along with more near-line and real-time features, to sort of then personalize it to what that particular member is also looking for, to do ad matching.

Of course, if it’s on the search angle, then you also have the query context that comes into play. On the recommendation side it’s a lot more just based off of your activity signals, and so on and so forth. We try to infer intent, to be able to make those recommendations.

But to your point - yes, on the underlying surface we do have these embeddings, and we are going to be writing a blog post pretty soon about this particular data layer in our talent solution systems.

Adam Stacoviak: I was thinking about the last 100 years, because I’ve found this interesting… My hometown where I grew up was a coal miner town. I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania… And very common for the idea of a company house to be a thing. A coal mining plant would establish its routes, have its company there, they’d have a company store, they’d have a company house, the entire neighborhood essentially is owned by the company, and the employees get a house for free, or paid for by their wages/work…

Jerod Santo: Or inject your cryptocurrency miner and harvest the world… [laughs]

Nick Nisi: Some things that I’m pretty excited about are Eleventy – I am excited to check that out, and I just wanted to tell you that… And I really get excited every time I get a new LetsEncrypt email about my certificate expiring, and then we’re having to go figure out how to do that again… And I’m like “I should just rewrite everything and throw it on Netlify right, and be done with this whole charade”, because I don’t actually know how to manage a server, as is obvious by me having to shut down a Bitcoin miner that started up online at some point.

Adam Stacoviak: Adam, you’ve mentioned before about certain people who have used Tachyons and had an experience… You started this thing four years ago, and at that time people thought you were a little crazy for doing it, and over these years the trend has gone the way of Tachyons, essentially. Now, the people that have used this, at least based on Tachyons.io - Daniel Eden, Ian Storm Taylor, a favorite of mine, just because Wilson is so smart and had one of the most prolific talks at the Build Conference at least five years back - Wilson Miner…

These are not unknown or uninfluential designers. These are really influential people who have said phenomenal things. Let’s not leave off Dustin Senos… So these are people that have given you quotes; I’m assuming you’ve got the right to say they said these things, so having known who they are and their influence in the design space, continue on that path of like who’s used it and how they feel about it.

Eric Holscher: Well, I think one of the big ones is that it came out of a newspaper, right? And the people that created Django were journalists, and English majors, and really people that valued the written word, right? They really were good writers and they really valued that part of the world. I think coming out of a newspaper really does enforce that editorial power. I think really in many communities the values of the founders get set early and then they attract people who agree with those values, and then it just builds over time.

Both Adrian and Jacob were two of the co-founders along with Simon Willison, and Wilson Miner, who did the admin, he was the designer. They all really cared about that set of values, so I think the community just picked it up and ran with it from there.

Adam Stacoviak: Mineral water that gives you a physical and a digital uptick.