Derek Collison — creator of NATS and Co-founder & CEO of Synadia — joins the show to dive into the origins, design, and evolution of NATS, a high-performance, open-source messaging system built for modern cloud-native systems and part of the CNCF. Derek shares the story behind NATS, what makes it unique, and unpacks the recent tensions between Synadia and the CNCF over the future of the project.
Nathan Sobo is back talking about the next big thing for Zed—agentic editing! You now have a full-blown AI-native editor to play with. Collaborate with agents at 120fps in a natively multiplayer IDE.
Drew Wilson is back! It’s been more than a decade since Adam and Drew have spoken and wow, Drew has been busy. He built Plasso and got acquired by GoDaddy. He built a bank called Letter which didn’t work out…and now he’s Head of Design at Clerk and back to chasing that next big thing.
Kendall Miller is a bubbly extrovert who sticks his fingers in a lot of pies. He advises tech companies like FusionAuth, positions tech products like Civo & Tensorlake, organizes tech networks like CTO Lunches, and even sells whiskey & gin to tech people like us via his Friday Deployment Spirits brand. Kendall has learned a lot since he first entered the industry and he’s eager to share what he knows, and who he knows, with the world.
Beyang Liu, the CTO & Co-founder of Sourcegraph is back on the pod. Adam and Beyang go deep on the idea of “industrializing software development” using AI agents, using AI in general, using code generation. So much is happening in and around AI and Sourcegraph continues to innovate again and again. From their editor assistant called Cody, to Code Search, to AI agents, to Batch Changes, they’re really helping software teams to industrialize the process, the inner and the outer loop, of being a software developer on high performance teams with large codebases.
Kurt Mackey is back for a deep dive into what it takes to build the developer cloud. Kurt joins Adam to discuss the alliance between companies and cloud, something Kurt refers to as the “Rebel Alliance,” cloud complexity vs usability, Fly’s future with Postgres and why they’ve waited, thoughts on Neon and Supabase (Kurt shares a hot take), and our CDN saga and plan to build a simple CDN on Fly called Pipely (still a Pipedream).
Shay Banon, the creator of Elasticsearch, joins us to discuss pulling off a reverse rug pull. Yes, Elasticsearch is open source, again! We discuss the complexities surrounding open source licensing and what made Elastic change their license, the implications of trademark law, the personal and business impact of moving away from open source, and ultimately what made them hit rewind and return to open source.
Go Time co-host, Johnny Boursiquot, joins Adam & Jerod to discuss not making the (first) cut, applying Founder Mode, being a cog (or not), realizing that companies are posting fake engineering jobs & the (maybe) imminent demise of the .io TLD.
John Nunemaker joins us to share his new thesis for acquiring Rails based SaaS apps. He’s early days on his next big thing called Very Good Software and recently acquired Fireside, a podcast hosting service started by Dan Benjamin. This comes after many years since John’s acquisition of a lifetime of Speakerdeck to GitHub, which laid the foundation for these moves.
Jerod & KBall discuss a trio of goings on in/around the web dev world: Evan You’s new startup, Matt Mullenweg’s WordPress mess & Ryan Carniato’s WebComponents debate.
Tech twitter (“tech X”?) is abuzz with Paul Graham’s Founder Mode essay. How does that affect you or come into play when you’re not a founder? Does it matter at all to you, your projects & your code?
Erez Zukerman shares the story of launching the ErgoDox EZ on Indiegogo (May 2015), what it takes to create customizable ergonomic keyboards, the benefits of split keyboards and custom key layouts, repairability and longevity, community engagement, and the attention to detail required in everything they create. We talk through their keyboard lineup, our personal experience with how we mouse and keyboard…we cover it all.
We’re joined by Alya Abbott from Zulip, the open source, organized, threaded, team chat for distributed teams of all sizes. We talk about Zulip’s origins, how it’s open source, the way it’s led, no VC funding, what makes it different/better, how you can self-host it or use their cloud, moving to Zulip, contributing and being a part of the community…all the things.
Adam Jacob goes solo with Adam for an epic pod into his journey to get to System Initiative. From SysAdmin at 8 years old, to discovering Linux and working for Mom-and-pop ISPs, to open source changing his life and starting Opscode and building Chef. Buckle up. This is a different flavor of “Friends” for you. Enjoy.
Joseph Jacks (JJ) is back! We discuss the latest in COSS funding, his thesis for investing in commercial open source companies, the various rug pulls happening out there in open source licensing, and Zuck/Meta’s generosity releasing Llama 3.1 as “open source.”
Paul Copplestone, CEO of Supabase (the meme-lord himself), joins the show to take us on the journey of Supabase leading Postgres for life, and how it all starts with Postgres as the base-layer substrate for the entire Supabase platform. They’re laser focused on the drive ahead, not the rear-view mirror.
Disclosure: Adam and Jerod are angel investors in Supabase.
Birk Jernström from Polar joins the show to tell us all about the creator platform for developers: why he built it, how it works, why it works how it works, what’s in store for the future & we even give Birk some super deep UX feedback on the funding flow.
This week we’re joined by Dustin Bluck to discuss his acquisition of the well known (and beloved) Castro podcast app to take it indie-focused once again. As previous users of Castro, we were excited to dig into the details behind this popular podcast client to see what’s next, how the deal was done, a peek into the code, and where exactly this indie and creator focused podcast app can go.
Frequent guest (and almost real-life-friend) Adam Jacob returns to share his spicy takes on all the recent “open source meets business” drama. We also take some time to catch up on the state of his open source-based business, System Initiative.
This week Adam is joined by Thomas Paul Mann, Co-founder and CEO of Raycast, to discuss being productive on a Mac, going beyond their free tier, the extensions built by the community, the Raycast Store, how they’re executing on Raycast AI chat which aims to be a single interface to many LLMs. Raycast has gone beyond being an extendable launcher – they’ve gone full-on productivity mode with access to AI paving the way of their future.
This week we’re talking to Scott Chacon, one of the co-founders of GitHub, to discuss the history and future of Git and Scott’s new project Git Butler, a branch manager tool that’s aiming to improve the developer experience of Git using Git. We also touch on the contentious topic of open source licensing and the challenges of defining “Open Source”, FSL vs GPL, and more.
This week Adam is joined by Zeno Rocha — the creator of the beloved Dracula theme and Co-founder and CEO of Resend. They discuss his personal journey and the challenges of balancing work and family life, how becoming a parent has given him new perspectives and influenced his decision to start his own company, the role of citizenship and immigration in his journey, how he prepared for the Y Combinator interview, meeting Paul Graham, the challenges of sending email, and the future of Resend and the possibility of a Series A round.
Runway is an applied AI research company shaping the next era of art, entertainment & human creativity. Chris sat down with Runway co-founder / CTO, Anastasis Germanidis, to discuss their rise and how it’s defining the future of the creative landscape with its text & image to video models. We hope you find Anastasis’s founder story as inspiring as Chris did.
Adam is joined by Robert Ross, Founder and CEO of FireHydrant — they discuss Bourbon, sniffing arms, better software, leading a successful startup, scaling teams, building vs acquiring, and Adam even gets Robert to commit to watching Silicon Valley!!
