Adam Stacoviak: …similar to the way a noisy neighbor is on a VPS?

Adam Stacoviak: It’s very similar to the VPS analogy, where you might be on a virtual private server, you maybe have some noisy neighbors, to use your example, but if you can go beyond that, maybe you get your own dedicated virtual private server where you’re not sharing, you’re not in shared resources, you have your own dedicated… That seems like a very similar analogy. So if you get that from that world, then you will get that in the database world that you’re creating.

Jerod Santo: Yeah. It’s like for any application there are N concerns that must be taken care of, like Gerhard said. These things have to happen. Your DNS has to happen. Your certificates have to happen. And every application has its own number N. Maybe yours is 100; it’s a pretty simple application. Maybe somebody else’s is 1,000 things, or 1,200 things. Whatever it is. And the more of those you can take off your plate and onto your hosting provider’s plate is just a win. It makes it more achievable for you to manage less, and then to manage more.

[16:13] And if you were just building your own Kubernetes deployment on top of a VPS, or on top of something that’s not LKE or a Kubernetes engine, there’s a whole bunch of things that you have to take care of now, that you’d rather not, because maybe it’s not your domain expertise, maybe it’s just a huge time sink. And the more they can do, probably better than you can do it, the better off you are.

Guy Podjarny: I’m even gonna talk about this a little bit in the context of the Akamai acquisition of Blaze. At a high level, what happens is big companies - every company; we do this now at Snyk as well - increasing (once again) to a certain size, you start tiering the employees in terms of seniority. You want to do this because the market operates this way, and that allows you to get salary benchmarks across different companies of a certain size…

So if you’re a smaller company, you might have five tiers; you might have a junior person, and you kind of progress up to your top-tier individual contributor, you might have individual contributor and manager tiers, and they would somewhat overlap… But you tier somehow. Now, because it’s different people, different roles, different salaries, very different, each of these tiers does have typically a fairly broad salary range, and other sort of compensation bits… But there are other pieces that are attached to it. And moving from tier to tier is a bigger deal than getting your salary adjusted within the tier.

Larger companies - there’s a magic number of ten, if you look at IBM, and I think Google is like that… Generally, there’s these ten tiers. Tech roles are oftentimes – the minimum is like a four, and maybe one and two are the temp receptionist or janitorial roles, things that are a little bit outside the technology operation of the company… But then within those ten tiers – and then you have executives, and executives is a little bit of a different tier.

So when a big company buys a small company, you have these things - you have VPs, you have directors… A VP in a company of 20 is very different than a VP in a company of 20,000. It’s not the same type seniority that you expect in the scope of responsibility. So there’s a matching exercise that happens during the acquisition, of deciding “Okay, this person who’s a VP here, or is a director here - what are they? What is their real seniority?” And there’s a paycheck element to it, and I think that got a lot of focus in early conversations… But there’s also an importance around your career trajectory, in terms of like that banding is very important.

[19:59] So if I was to try to condense this, so the guidance is, in the moment of acquisition, that’s not the most important thing. You’re trying to figure out “Would your team have a good home? What’s the responsibility of the team over time in the acquiring company? Would you be successful, would people be happy?” And of course, there’s the financial terms of the deal itself… So this bit, of like when you look at the team, what tier they’re in, like your comp - you think about the different people’s comp… But the tiers are generally not as discussed. But it’s just to say that the individuals, if you put them in a band, when they’re kind of at the top end of that salary range, and they round it down, then it’s harder for them – once they’re inside the company, it’s harder for them to get bumped up to that next tier, that maybe it might have been earlier on.

Jerod Santo: [01:16:13.17] Is that just a VPS, or who’s hosting your Postgres?

Denise Yu: So for the last few years – okay, so it’s kind of a funny story why I started doing sketch notes in the first place… Back in 2018, maybe end of 2017, I worked at Pivotal in London. And if you were a member of the tech community in London around that time, most people know Pivotal as the office that will host anything… [laughter] We will host any meetup, we will buy you pizza, we will let you drink our beer… Just say the word, and if there’s an employee who can be here physically to host it, then our space and our food and drinks are yours. A lot of my friends knew this fact, and they would bring their meetups [unintelligible 00:36:47.01] the person hosting them.

So one day, my friend said “Hey, there’s this sketchnoting community. Do you wanna host them?” and I said “I have no idea what that is, but that sounds great. Bring them over. We’ll get pizza.” So they came, and I actually ended up attending quite a few sessions. We hosted probably 3-4 sessions, and it was really cool.

I always drew things when I was a teenager. My favorite thing to do to procrastinate doing homework was to draw anime characters when I was growing up… But I hadn’t drawn for a very long time, and it was something that I had forgotten how much I enjoyed, until I started doing the sketchnoting meetups again… So a couple months after that, in early 2018, I did a product management rotation at Pivotal, and one of the things I had to do for my job was to push out lots and lots of communication… And I found that sometimes I would send an email to either all of R&D, or just a couple of other teams, and my emails would say “Breaking changes in our API. Be aware of this”, and people would miss the email. It would get filtered away, and they would never see it, and then a few weeks later someone would come to me and say “Hey, my thing broke”, and I was like “Yes, I told you this was going to happen. You just didn’t read my email.”

So I started an experiment - I started sketchnoting my announcements instead of writing them in email, and engagement rate went through the roof. I was having VPs respond to my email, and I was like “I didn’t even know this guy was on this mailing list, but that’s cool…”

So I found that that was a really powerful way to get people to look at things that you were saying… And I liked also the frequency of people coming and saying “My thing is broken.” That went down a lot after I started doing this, which was great; that was my intention.

Isaac Schlueter: That’s an interesting question, actually. It really was a process of elimination, given the mission that I had, and the goal that I had, of keeping the registry up. The entire npm experience, the npm community - it really depends on this registry service being there to provide all the packages, and all the metadata and everything that people are publishing and installing. And we got to a point near the end of 2013 where the way that that was running was clearly not scaling to the size of the community.

It started out as just a CouchDB instance on my own personal VPS, and then this company offered to provide/donated infrastructure for it to work, and then that grew into the point where they could no longer support it, and it was starting to fall over. We had some pretty massive periods of downtime near the end of 2013, and my thought process there was, “Okay, what are the options? What do people do to fund things?”

I could fund it myself, that was one possibility, but I’m not unfortunately independently wealthy…

Anthony Eden: So we had these VPS‘es that were super-underpowered. We were not ready to do this. But it worked out from the beginning, and then at that point folks were like “Oh, why don’t you do the registration side of it?” Because I actually didn’t want to do the registration side at first. They’re like “Everything else is terrible.” I said “Okay, I’ll take a look into it.” I found a way to do that, and by October I had launched the initial registration support.

Kelvin Omereshone: Oh, it is – anyway you can run nodeapp.js, literally, you could deploy it there. So I have people deploying on VPS‘es. [unintelligible 00:30:15.11] So I want to work on more – so anyway you can run nodeapp.js, literally, I’m not even kidding, you could deploy the Boring Stack app. So I’m thinking that’s almost like every hosting provider out there that supports Node.js. So wherever you want to deploy. It’s so simple, it’s so easy. Because Sails is that simple, there’s not much orchestration needed. Just nodeapp.js, your app is live, in wherever you’re deploying.

Paul Biggar: Yeah, and that’s the advantage. To give you a couple of the reasons that people like Dark… One of them is this thing that we call deployless. It’s an instant deploy of any code that you ride. And obviously, that sounds dangerous, right? We perhaps have memories of writing PHP in 2001, where it just didn’t work to edit it in Vim on these shared VPSes that we had at the time… So Dark is designed around this. It’s like, [unintelligible 00:05:56.17] it has to be impossible to have syntax errors… And that’s where the editor comes in. So the editor is the thing that enables that. But in most editors you can have syntax errors, you can type whatever the hell you like… So Dark’s editor is a structured editor, which doesn’t allow invalid syntax, and it significantly reduces the amount of times that you can introduce problems by typing. So that’s a place where you have an editor, and you have a language, and they enable the deployless thing. That just wouldn’t be possible without having the editor, the infrastructure and the language being all part of the same thing.

Kat Marchán: Yeah… Literally, a mode in npm that drops concurrency massively and then makes sure to stream everything, so you have very low memory usage for npm, which is great for people running on constrained VPS’s.

Brian Ketelsen: Oh, that’s nice. Linode was one of the first VPS’s as I stood up many years ago, probably 10 or 11 years ago now, and I really enjoyed using it for a long time.