Tess Rinearson: Yeah, totally. Or an onion that’s too small, or a carrot that has two legs, or all these things that make something inappropriate for a grocery store, but they’re still totally edible and delicious. I kind of got into this when I was living - this is also a cliché - in Berkeley, and my roommate in Berkeley has a food startup, and he’d bring home these big boxes of these “ugly” vegetables. So I was like, “Okay, great. I’m gonna sign up for this”, but they only deliver between midnight and six in the morning, and I live in a part of San Francisco where if someone leaves a box of vegetables on the steps outside the apartment building, it will be gone in like 15 minutes.

So the solution that the company suggests is that you give - this is turning into a very long backstory - a key to your building to them. And I was like “Yeah, I work at crypto… I don’t feel good giving a key that I can’t rotate to some company.” So I was like “Oh, I know… I will write a code into my callbox app”, so that if someone comes up, dials a number and then puts in the code within ten seconds, the Twilio app plays back a dial tone that I found online that matches the right, you’re supposed to press nine, so it plays the tone for nine back to the buzzer, and the buzzer unlocks the door. So I can get deliveries in the middle of the night without getting woken up.

This will be a problem when the person delivering the vegetables does not enter the code in time and then I get a phone call anyway. But until that happens, that’s my grand plan. So that’s what I’ve been doodling around with lately.

Song: [04:47]

One day I asked my teacher, What use is math to me?

She answered: When you’re older, someday my boy you’ll see…

There’s a world of computer systems out there

Full of valuable data and not secured with care

And you can make a fortune in ransomware…

With a little bit of math!

It’s called encryption,

Just a little bit of math,

Cause a conniption;

Lock the data, hide the key;

They’ll pay up eventually,

It’s all just math.

Ransomware is big now

Because it’s organized.

You can buy it as a service

And sell it for a prize.

There’s a whole world of tempting targets to hack -

Governments, hospitals, schools to attack

And they pay up in Bitcoin, hard to trace back…

It’s all just math!

We call it crypto - just a little bit of math.

No need to tiptoe,

Hackers whisper, don’t be nervous,

We take pride in customer service…

Well then I told my teacher, I’m feeling terrified;

How can we protect ourselves from all this cybercrime?

She said, “Don’t click weird links, or use “password123”.

Make offline backups, invest in security.”

And that’s when I realized how screwed we might be…

Just do the math!

So many systems.

If they all took a bath,

Wouldn’t we miss them?

Next time there’s no meat or water or gas,

And we slide a little closer to the day of wrath

You can blame IT, or some Russian sociopath,

But personally, I blame math.

Jerod Santo: Well, I can tell you the rabbit hole I’ve gone down trying to fix it, which is that basically our Twitter Auth has been offline ever since then… Which so far only Mat Ryer seems to know about, so maybe he’s the only one who uses Twitter Auth on a regular basis… Because he’s always like, “I can’t sign into the website.” And I’m like, “Dude, just put your email address in there and we’ll send you a magic link.” And he’s like, “Oh, you can do that?” Anyways… He really likes Twitter Auth. We offer GitHub Auth and Twitter Auth. Well, we did offer Twitter Auth for a while, until we upgraded to Erlang 24… And this crypto HMAC error happens deep inside of the ueberauth_twitter library that we use. And it’s a difficult situation, because it basically – I don’t know if “segfault” is the right word, but it just crashes the interpreter altogether. This is not a nice stack trace, and everything. It’s deep down in there, but what it’s saying, this crypto HMAC error, is not exactly the problem, I don’t think… But it’s very difficult for me to debug, because I have to debug it from inside of ueberauth_twitter, the package. And that package doesn’t handle the situation gracefully at all; it handed up the stack to me in order to debug… And I can’t actually repro in dev.

So that’s as far as I’ve gotten… I’ve found out what the problem is. I think it’s when it’s passing in an empty session cookie, for some reason, and it’s trying to HMAC an empty string, if I recall correctly… It’s hairy down in there, but actually, it’s just navigating the debugging which has made me not be able to fix it… So what I do is every couple of weeks I go check their repo and see if they’ve cut a new release, and then I upgrade, and I’m like, “Please, have it fixed…” and then it still doesn’t work. Because I don’t even know what issue to open at this point. It’s such a small use of our website, and I’m pretty sure most of those things hitting that error are just robots hitting that route; they’re not people.

So I haven’t fixed it, I haven’t opened an issue yet… I hope that somebody just upgrades the thing and it goes away. Maybe – is Erlang 25 out yet? I don’t know… What changed, Gerhard? What’s going on in there? Because I can’t figure it out quite yet.

Anurag Goel: Exactly. Anyway, slight tangent… So yeah, so not having any of those emails, and having a work email makes sense. But we also have a lot of people using Render for specific things while working at large companies. We have people who have signed up with Meta.com, and we have Alibaba.com, and all these other… Even Amazon and Google… These are paying customers. People have signed up with their work email, who are not actually running a large thing from Google or Amazon on Render. It doesn’t make sense to do that. But they’re using – so these might be like data scientists, who want to run something in Python and they just can’t get the support they need from their DevOps teams. And this is very common in large companies, where you have enterprises where their main application is handled by the DevOps team, but then people want to build other things, whether it’s data scientists, or sales engineers… Even marketing engineers, they want to do stuff that they want to put out in the world, they want it to have a URL that other people can access, and they just don’t get the support that they need from DevOps, because DevOps couldn’t be bothered, and they’re a bottleneck, because they have all these other needs that they need to fulfill from the main application. So we get a lot of people like that.

But fundamentally, the people who we’re most excited about today are early-stage startups, because Render is a great fit for them. When you’re a startup, you want to move fast, and you want reliability, and Render gives you both of those things.

And then the second sort of serious customer segment is what we call tech-enabled businesses. So tech-enabled businesses are those where the core competency isn’t actually software. What they’re doing is something like they’re building a mortgage CRM, or they’re a law firm and they need technology to achieve a specific goal. Or they are in some cases also like a crypto company that needs something specific, and they need to host it online. But they’re not in the business of hiring DevOps engineers. They might not even be able to hire DevOps engineers. And so they are very, very happy with what Render and products like Render provide.

And then I think we’re increasingly seeing what I was talking about earlier, where there are these teams within larger companies that end up using Render because it gives them the same speed of iteration, velocity. We also just launched things like SSO, and SCIM…

Paul Vixie: I think that that problem would be avoided. Earlier I talked about how in the early days of the web we didn’t have crypto that was fast enough to support – the crypto hardware fast enough to support HTTPS, and so we just sort of didn’t do it… Until you needed it, and then you bought some hardware to assist you with that. And nowadays, I’m thinking about a number of different NIC vendors who make PCIe x16 cards that you can stick into your server, that will do a lot of the offloading for you. Check sum computation, segmentation, reassembly, and so forth.

[00:42:05.27] Now, if you need to operate at 100 gigabits a second, or coming now soon 400 gigabits per second, if your CPU has got other things to do than shoulder every octet through the bus, then you can get a very smart NIC, and driver support for it, and - you know, as we all know, Moore’s Law will continue giving us its annual gift, and the time will come when you don’t need that hardware anymore, and you’re just doing that with your CPU, because you have so many cores, so much cache, and so forth.

So I think any protocol, in order to succeed at all, would have to be the kind of thing – it’d be very difficult in the short term. But in the long run, it’ll just be the way everything works. And so I don’t see that hardware support is going to be called for in any of this. What will be called for is some hard decisions. I mentioned earlier that fragmentation kind of doesn’t work, and it got worse on IPv6. It worked a little bit in IPv4. It doesn’t work at all now. And packet size [unintelligible 00:43:14.10] on our WiFi is Ethernet cells. [unintelligible 00:43:18.20] And that is 1500 octets. And I knew one of the people whose name was on the Ethernet patent. He was my mentor at a mini computer company back in the late ‘80s. His name is David Boggs. And I had an opportunity to listen to him talk about the old bits, talk about being at Xerox and inventing Ethernet, and [unintelligible 00:43:45.20] And so I’m in a position to know secondhand that the intent was the packet size would continue to grow, so that as we got faster at networking, we would also get larger packets. And he was genius in a lot of ways, in this and every day, but his idea about this was every time the clock rate gets you 10x, in other words you go from 10 megabit to 100, to 1000, to a gigabit, or I guess a gigabit to 10 gigs, and so forth - every time you get 10x o’clock, you should probably give about a third of that to packet size, so that the number of packets in a given unit time doesn’t also go 10x. Your packet count and your packet size each go about a square root of 10 [unintelligible 00:44:39.00] And had we been doing that all this time, a lot of things would be simple, that are currently very hard. We certainly wouldn’t hear that fragmentation didn’t work if the packets we could send had gotten larger over time. But they didn’t. And the reason they didn’t is that the Ethernet market relies on backward compatibility. When somebody adds 10 gigabit networking to their office network, they don’t make everybody switch at once. They just say “New ports will be 10 gigs, but the old ones will still be one gig, and we’re going to run a network bridge, a layer two bridge to connect the old one to the new one.” And that won’t work if the packet sizes on the new ones are so big they can’t be bridged backward to the one that made the market exist in the first place.

So Ethernet is effectively trapped at 1500 octets for all time to come. Yes, a lot of us have turned on what we call jumbograms, so 9100 bytes, which turns out to be a very convenient size [unintelligible 00:45:44.00] So if you’re running jumbograms, your NFS is going to be faster, your [unintelligible 00:45:53.15] is going to be faster… Everything you do is gonna be faster. You just can’t use that when talking to people outside your own house, or your own campus. Because there’s no way to discover whether your ISP can carry packets that big, or will at the far end.

[00:46:11.03] So because we don’t have that, because we didn’t do what Boggs inevitably thought was the intelligent obvious thing that everybody should do, give one third of your [unintelligible 00:46:20.29] to packet size, anything we do with DNS in the future is going to have to take that into account. And that in turn means we’ll be making the assumption “Well, I guess we could probably send about 1,400 bytes plus room for all the headers and stuff that was added”, and now we’ve gotta find a way to connect several adjacent packets together, so that we can do essentially application-level fragmentation. Or else we’ve got to deal with the handshake overhead. So I predict, knowing the IETF culture as I do, if we start now, then within no more than four years we will come to an agreement on that sinful issue.

Michael Quigley: So zero trust started with this – I mean, I’m exactly sure when it started, but it sort of became popular with this concept that came out at Google called BeyondCorp. So they started this big initiative, and I don’t remember the exact timeframe. I want to say it might have been maybe – let’s call it a decade ago, or something like that… Where they had this BeyondCorp initiative, and it was about not considering the difference between LANs and WANs. Kind of like where you are in terms of physical security being related to how your network security is postured. So a lot of times a while back we would have configured access to things by “I’m in a corporate office” or “I’m in some physical location where I’ve got a specific network access to something.” Zero trust was sort of about getting rid of that concept, and going to “It doesn’t really matter where you’re physically located and what your underlying network is”, and treating the security posture differently than that. So using certificate authentication, and crypto, and things to strongly identify whoever’s using your network resources; like, actually securing them that way. So that was sort of the genesis of the zero trust concept.

Gergely Orosz: Because there was a fast-forward for a while, where the whole world was locked down, and digital became a lot more important… But I think a good example that I think of, and I have a bit of insight into, is this company Hopin. Hopin is this video events company; so they do digital events. And they were founded in 2019, so a year before the pandemic. They raised I think like a few million dollars of funding, and then the pandemic started, and right as the pandemic started, they raised a bigger funding, to scale the scene, because it seemed okay; like, digital events will now be a thing, because there’s a lockdown… And they saw huge demand in both 2020 and 2021 for their solution.

I actually organized – you could organize online conferences with their tool. And I actually helped organize a digital conference, I think it was the fall of 2020, or something like that… Because it was lockdown, I didn’t have anything to do, and I was like “Let me do this.” And we looked at vendors, and we chose Hopin in the end; I think we paid like a couple thousand for their license, or whatnot… They had this licensing. And we ran the event, and it was a success, and people liked it… But what I noticed is – and then the company kept raising more money, and at some point they were valued at 7.8 billion, or something; I think that was the peak, as I recall. And this was like two years into the founding of the company.

And then what happened is – well, first of all, just from my personal perspective… I’m not gonna represent all their users, but I just really got burned of digital events. Like, I went to a couple of these digital-only conferences, and after a while I just started hating it. I was doing Zooms all day, every day… So I just didn’t want to go there. And as soon as the world started to open up, I’ve just been to my first proper conference. I love the normal conference format, and I would not – okay, maybe I would jump on to watch a video online, but I don’t think it’s really important.

And then with this company, Hopin, they saw their growth just first stall… And the thing that might save the company is they actually bought a bunch of different companies. They bought StreamYard, which is a streaming company, and they bought a few other video streaming companies… And what I’ve heard from people who work there is their events revenue, their flagship thing is just going down, because it’s really hard to sell right now. People just don’t need a digital-only solution anymore.

And my point is, they’re a bit of an outlier, but they’re a typical pandemic company, where it seemed the whole world would change, a lot of money went into there, and if the whole world would have changed and we would now be doing a digital-only conference, it would make sense, because they would probably be market leaders… But the world has gone back, and I think we’re seeing this backswing a lot of times.

I’ve seen a chart about e commerce adoption, where it spiked, and it did look like it’s jumping up ahead by 5 years or 10 years, but then it came back, and now we’re just on that normal growth. So this growth is back to where it was before, which means that everyone who expected that in 2022 or 2023 you’re gonna have similar growth as 2021 just over-hired, and now they’re all correcting, because – well, because also, don’t forget, there’s a second part here, which is not just the COVID is shrinking, but the interest rates are up, which means it’s a lot more expensive to borrow any sort of money, which a lot of tech companies had been doing… So they can’t borrow money, so they need to rein in their costs if they’re not profitable.

[14:29] And those are just a few things. We’re not going to be able to figure out exactly what’s happening, but the pandemic was – it’s just so strange, because for the rest of the world… Take an industry like hotels, or hospitality, right? You’re kind of working in a hotel, or managing a hotel… The pandemic was terrible, right? You got shut down, you had no revenue, you were trying to survive. For tech, it was the opposite. It was amazing, and it was great that time, because we had more jobs, more money… There were people quitting, because they – people had a lot of options, and it was a great time to be in tech. Now it’s the opposite. If you work in hospitality, things are great. More and more people are traveling; it’s going up. You’re gonna get more – hopefully, you’re gonna be earning more, getting more tips, whatnot. And now in tech it’s the opposite. It’s just not great if you’re in tech.

I mean, it’s not great to see the news… This is impacting people. There’s a question of how many people are really impacted in the sense of not just being laid off, but not finding a job. And I think that’s where we’re gonna see a long tail effect, or like a double down. People who are software engineers, experienced engineers who are being laid off at well-known companies - I think it’s hard. I don’t want to trivialize this. But they will have options to work somewhere. It might not be as great though as their current company in terms of maybe culture, or compensation, or both. But they will have options.

The problem is that all of this will trickle down. We’re now seeing thousands of really competent software engineers being on the market, so startups are really happy, these banks are really happy… I have some friends at Uber, former friends, who… I used to work – one of my first jobs was at JP Morgan, in London, an investment bank… And at the time, I really liked that job, because it was one of my early jobs, and it was a great place to be… But when I got my next job at Skype, I just realized JPMorgan was totally not a tech company. And I was so happy to finally work at a tech company, and I said i would never go back to a place like JPMorgan.

Uber also had a really good engineering culture, in the sense that it was one of the best places I worked at… And now I have some friends and colleagues who work at JPMorgan; and I talk with them and I say, “Dude, why did you kind of take a step down?” And he told me “So here’s the thing… Two things. First of all, it’s just really, really stable. They have super-profits. I get all my compensation in cash. None of that stock going up and down, and mostly down. Second of all, they actually want to create a tech culture, and finally, they can hire the people into this; they have a lot of these greenfield projects where it’s full of – they have ex-Facebook, ex-Google, ex-whatever people, and it’s actually pretty good.”

So I think the world is changing a little bit, and people are realizing that pre-IPO companies, or even any form of companies that give you stock - it has a massive risk. So traditional wisdom the past 10 years was if you are a publicly-traded company, you get like half of your compensation, if you’re a senior engineer or staff engineer, half of your composition in base salary, and the other half in equity, and that’s great, because equity will always go up. Well, equity for some companies has collapsed by let’s say 70% or 80%. And I talked with people who on paper they were earning $500,000 in Silicon Valley, and now it just went down to like 350k or 300k. And they’re saying “What should I do? Should I interview somewhere else? But now there’s fewer jobs… Or should I just stick it out?” There’s no good answer. But the point is, now you’re really seeing those banks - one of the reasons that people are going to these banks is they might pay, let’s say, for a similar skill, maybe they pay 350k or 400k, or less, or more; it doesn’t really matter. But it’s fixed. It just doesn’t move. And the people who I know who have families, and they just want stability, they’re like “You know what - it’s a good trade-off. It’s a rocky time, I’m gonna sit it out here.”

[18:09] And you know what - it’s kind of nice, because now those companies can hire people who would have never considered working there. So we might see the industry transform a little bit from the unsexy companies becoming a bit more sexy, and the sexy companies… Let’s give an example - Coinbase. Coinbase was such a hot company to go on and work for a year ago. They’re doing crypto, and if you’re into that - I’m not that much into it, but again, they’re doing something really interesting in that space, trying to give new financial instruments… And they were paying really, really good. Like, they were giving ridiculous stock packages to people who were accepting it. And now the company is not doing that great, the space is kind of – it’s unclear what the future will be, and their stock is not doing that great… So that company, or some of these hot startups have just gone from being one of the best places to work at, to “Oh, it’s a risky place.” We’ll see if they’ll be able to grow. And I’m not just talking about Coinbase, I’m just talking about the hot companies in 2021.

Peer Richelsen: It’s very early days, yeah. It’s literally ground zero, and we were awarded with Product of The Day, I believe 400 up votes, and one of the tweets actually went viral with more than 250,000 impressions, and I think like 900 comments, and I don’t know how many hundreds of retweets.

To put it in a nutshell, we built an integration, and there’s many integrations. We have Zoom integration, and other integrations, that is Web3-compatible, which means you can request ownership of a certain token as a matter of verification to book someone’s time. I, myself, I’m in the Orange DAO, which is the Y Combinator, like the unofficial Y Combinator DAO, the Decentralized Autonomous Organization that is investing in other YC crypto projects. So it’s a mix of like a VC firm, but very decentralized. There’s no single CEO or president. Everyone can vote on proposals, and it’s settled on a blockchain. And we have our own token, which is the Orange token. And now what I’m doing is I can publicly send a link on Twitter or in the discord of the Orange DAO or on a public website, and only people from the Orange DAO who own the same token can book my calendar. And that’s amazing for office hours, for group calls, but even for sales meetings or some other stuff where you need a certain gate, and you don’t want to have everyone book your time.

Jerod Santo: Yeah, not too bad. Preethi, one thing that – you’re doing a great job, by the way, of educating Adam and I as we go here, because we’re very much crypto and blockchain laymen, as we said… But I think that speaks to what you’ve been up to for a while now, which is actually how we came across you, and how many people online who know you know you, is because as you got started in software engineering, slightly before that post in 2015, and here we are, two years later from that you’ve taught and you’re written and you’ve helped people learn along the way. Can you tell us what’s the impetus for that and about some of the things that you’re doing with Ask Preethi, and with Between the Wires, and all the good stuff you’ve been putting out for people to learn alongside you?