Console DevTools

In this episode, we speak with Kurt Mackey, CEO of Fly.io. We discuss what it's like running physical servers in data centers around the world, why they didn't build on top of the cloud, and what the philosophy is behind the focus on pure compute, networking, and storage primitives. Kurt sheds light on the regions where Fly.io is most popular, why they’re adding GPUs, and the technology that makes it all work behind the scenes. Hosted by David Mytton (Console) and Jean Yang (Akita Software). Things mentioned: Ars TechnicaY CombinatorMongoHQServerCentral (now Deft)MiamiNAPAWSThe Everything StoreVercelSimon WillisonDjango datasetChatGPTNvidiaFirecracker VMNomadPhoenixLiteFSSQLiteHacker NewsElixirDeno FreshRemixM2 MacBook Air Nvidia A100 GPU ABOUT KURT MACKEY Kurt Mackey is the CEO of Fly.io, a company that deploys app servers close to your users for running full-stack applications and databases all over the world without any DevOps. He began his career as a tech writer for Ars Technica and learned about databases while building a small retail PHP app. He went to Y Combinator in 2011 where he joined a company called MongoHQ (now Compose) that hosted Mongo databases which he sold to IBM, before turning his attention to building Fly.io. Highlights: [Kurt Mackey]: The original thesis for this company was there's not really any good CDNs for developers. If you could crack that, it'd be very cool. The first thing we needed was servers in a bunch of places and a way to route traffic to them. What we wanted was AnyCast, which is kind of a part of the core internet routing technology. What it does is it offloads getting a packet to probably the closest server, to the internet backbones almost. You couldn't actually do AnyCast on top of the public cloud at that point. I think you can on top of AWS now. So we were sort of forced to figure out how to get our IPs, we were sort of forced into physical servers for that reason. For a couple of years, it felt like we got deeply unlucky because we had to do physical servers. You’d talk to investors, and they'd be like, “Why aren’t you just running on the public cloud and then saving money later?” Then last year, that flipped. Now, we're very interesting because we don't run on the public clouds. — [0:11:14 - 0:12:03] [Kurt Mackey]: I think there's another thing that we've probably all reckoned with since 2011; a lot of the abstractions were wrong. As the front end got more powerful, I think we tried a lot of different things for— and what we ended up doing was inflicting this weird distributed systems problem on frontend developers. So I think that, in some ways, we just have the luxury of ignoring a lot of things that people have been trying to figure out for 10 years because we probably think that's wrong at this point. So we happen to be doing well at a time when server-side rendering is all the rage in a front-end community, which is perfect for us and nobody really cares about shipping static files around in the same way. I think it's just evolutionary. We kind of have a different idea of what's right now and can do simpler things and then we'll probably get big and complicated in 10 years and be in the same situation again. — [0:18:25 - 0:19:11] Let us know what you think on Twitter: https://twitter.com/consoledotdev https://twitter.com/davidmytton Or by email: hello@console.dev About Console Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to. Sign up for free at: https://console.dev

In this episode, we speak with Monica Sarbu, CEO of Xata. We start with the philosophy behind serverless databases, why developers shouldn't need to think about relational databases, search, and analytics, whether the performance hit of accessing a database over HTTP matters, and how database branching works. She also talks about Xata’s plans for a global database, the company’s focus on UI developers, and what other databases are doing wrong. Hosted by David Mytton (Console) and Jean Yang (Akita Software). Things mentioned: Xatatupu.ioElasticPlanetScaleQuicker serverless Postgres connectionsCloudflare WorkersAirtableXata ChatGPT integrationApple Mac ABOUT MONICA SARBU: Monica Sarbu is the Founder and CEO of Xata, a serverless database built for modern development. Prior to that, she worked on an open-source monitoring solution called Packetbeat which was acquired by Elastic in 2015. She is also the co-founder of tupu.io, a non-profit initiative that offers free mentorship to women, people of color, and other underrepresented groups in the tech industry. Highlights: [Monica Sarbu]: The idea of a single API is that because, like I said, this scenario happens in every company out there; when they start a new web application, they need to build this data platform internally. My thinking was why [does] every company out there need to reinvent the wheel when we can provide all this functionality: database, search functionality, analytics, time series data as well, and under a single API? This was the main purpose of having a single API. — [0:05:14 - 0:05:49] [Monica Sarbu]: I've seen that there are so many companies out there that are building their data platform on top of Airtable and they are developers. The reason behind that was that it's easier to use, and they had– While I was speaking with so many companies, I've seen so many hacks because they had hundreds of Airtables. They were synchronizing between them because you cannot really store a lot of data in one Airtable. My idea is — especially with serverless applications — that when you're building a web application, you have most of your logic in a lambda function so you cannot really use any of these databases and services that are out there, right? So Airtable was an easy-to-use approach but Airtable was not really meant to be built as a database. I've seen that there is a huge opportunity to build something that is as easy to use as Airtable but as scalable as a traditional database and also powerful as a traditional database. — [0:25:12 - 0:26:16] Let us know what you think on Twitter: https://twitter.com/consoledotdev https://twitter.com/davidmytton Or by email: hello@console.dev About Console Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to. Sign up for free at: https://console.dev

In this episode, we speak with Jeff Bezanson, one of the co-creators of the Julia programming language and the CTO of JuliaHub. We start with the history of Julia and why it took a while to take off, the key principles behind the language, how it provides the speed of C with the ease of Python, and what it's been like running such a large open-source project. He sheds light on the original motivation for Julia, the process of creating it, and its involvement in AI. Hosted by David Mytton (Console) and Jean Yang (Akita Software). Things mentioned: Telescoping Languages by Ken KennedyJulia: Dynamism and Performance Reconciled by DesignDonald FischerChris Rackauckas: "A Julia Library for Neural Differential Equations"RR: Record and Replay FrameworkDell XPS laptop preloaded with UbuntuABOUT JEFF BEZANSON Jeff Bezanson is one of the co-creators of the Julia programming language, along with Stefan Karpinski, Alan Edelman, and Viral B. Shah. He is also a co-founder of JuliaHub, a company that grew out of this project. He has a Ph.D. from MIT where he worked as a research scientist and he has authored a number of academic papers on the Julia language. The intention behind the creation of Julia was to establish a language that was both high-level and fast. His work on it has earned Jeff the J. H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software. Highlights: [Jeff Bezanson]: You had to give up performance. That was just a law of the universe that they all learned. Then if you wanted performance, you had to use C or Fortran or something. This was just the way it was. I got introduced to that world of thinking in college and I thought it was really surprising because I knew that high-level languages could be fast. I knew there were good Lisp implementations, you had the ML family languages, there were really good high-level languages that had really, really good compilers and could be fast. And nobody seemed to be using them, which I just thought was amazing. I made it this mission to “Can we get all these people to realize that high-level languages can be fast, and they should be using a high-level language that's fast?” So [Julia] is my attempt to do that. — [0:02:59 - 0:03:44] [Jeff Bezanson]: People have been trying to speed up dynamic languages of various kinds for a long time. That's been one of the long-running research threads in computer sciences, starting with a language like Smalltalk, for instance. How do you make it run fast? There's a whole zoo of both dynamic and static techniques. There are some really cool stuff people have invented to take these languages that you can't necessarily statically analyze using standard compiler techniques, and yet, nevertheless, generate fast code from them. It’s a fun game to play is how do we compile these languages that are not cooperative? So that makes it a challenge, which makes it a good research problem. But to me, it's kind of annoying because why do you always have to fight the language design? So instead, I approached it from the opposite direction and said, “All right. What are all the techniques that are known and available for doing this? Then how would you design a language to make those techniques work well?” — [0:13:18 - 0:14:12] Let us know what you think on Twitter: https://twitter.com/consoledotdev https://twitter.com/davidmytton Or by email: hello@console.dev About Console Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to. Sign up for free at: https://console.dev

In this episode, we speak with Matt Butcher, CEO at Fermyon. We discuss the four use cases for WebAssembly, why Wasm’s sandboxed approach is so secure, whether there's any danger retrofitting other use cases onto a language that was originally designed for the web, and how limitations like the lack of full networking support are going to be resolved. Hosted by David Mytton (Console) and Jean Yang (Akita Software). Things mentioned: OpenStackKubernetesDockerHelmThe Illustrated Children's Guide to KubernetesMicrosoftSingleStoreShopifyVMwareFermyon SpinFermyon CloudWizerwasm-optMacBook ProDell Ultrawide MonitoriPad ABOUT MATT BUTCHER Matt Butcher is the CEO of Fermyon. He is also a software engineer, tech author, speaker, and ex-professor. Formerly a principal software development engineer for Microsoft, he led a team of engineers that built open-source tools for cloud-native computing. They were responsible for Helm, Draft, OAM, Brigade, Krustlet, CNAB, Porter, Duffle, the VS Code Kubernetes Extension, and many others. Together with a team of 10 people from Deis Labs at Microsoft, he started Fermyon, a lighter, faster, and truly serverless cloud, architected to compile and ship code as Wasm binaries. Highlights: [Matt Butcher]: When Luke wrote his first blog post and said, “This is for a web browser,” it was built to not be particularly web-browser specific. It really just defined a machine code format in a way to execute that format. That was what kind of drew us to it as a technology. In the core WebAssembly 1.0 specification, there's nothing in there that binds you to a web browser environment, it’s just a straight-up runtime definition. So it was fairly easy to sort of pluck out a WebAssembly runtime and drop it somewhere else. In fact, there are several different WebAssembly runtimes that are not based on the browser at all. — [0:13:36 - 0:14:13] [Matt Butcher]: If I were thinking about writing a new database, a new high-performance, multithreaded database, WebAssembly would not be the format I would target for this, right? Because there, you want to be able to do a lot of low-level management. Every little microsecond that you can tease out of IO and process manipulation is valuable. So I don't think we'll see those kinds of highly, highly IO-intensive tasks really land in WebAssembly for years because it's going to take the ecosystem a long time to really tune up and be fine-grained enough to deal with those things without compromising on security. It is possible that maybe never will we really want to write the kind of high-performance databases or high-performance number-crunching computing kinds of systems in WebAssembly. — [0:27:57 - 0:28:44] Let us know what you think on Twitter: https://twitter.com/consoledotdev https://twitter.com/davidmytton Or by email: hello@console.dev About Console Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to. Sign up for free at: https://console.dev

In this episode, we speak with Eli Schleifer, Co-CEO of Trunk. We discuss why engineering sucks, what developers can learn from how software gets built at Google and Uber, how individual developers can improve their coding experience, and why Git commit messages are useless. Hosted by David Mytton (Console) and Jean Yang (Akita Software). Things mentioned: Mythical Man-MonthGoogleUberBitTorrentGit commit messages are uselessWarpSlackLinearVisual Studio CodeMacBook Pro M1 ABOUT ELI SCHLEIFER Eli Schleifer is the founder and co-CEO of Trunk, an all-in-one solution for scalably checking, testing, merging, and monitoring code. It helps developers write more secure code and ship faster to redefine software engineering at scale. He was previously a technical lead manager and a systems architect at Uber ATG, where he led the architecture and engineering of its self-driving platform. He also lead a team of engineers and technical leads in the development of multiple products under the YouTube Director umbrella and was a lead senior software development engineer at Microsoft. Highlights: [Eli Schleifer]: We should trust our engineers and also understand that code is constantly – it's a living document. It's changing all the time. If something gets in that's imperfect but not terrible, that's also okay. So if you have an engineer put up a pull request, you have feedback, leave that feedback and stamp the pull request. Assuming there's trust, then the engineer is going to follow up, fix up your comments, and then land that. There's no additional cycle. If you don't stamp it, that means you're going to— you’re basically saying to this person, “I'm going to hold up your work until you show me that you can actually follow through on the things I'm asking about.” That's a level of distrust that, I think, is not good in a highly collaborative working environment. — [0:15:48 - 0:16:28] [Eli Schleifer]: I think this is the biggest thing between a smaller startup and a giant tech company: At a giant tech company, at the end of the year, the giant tech company comes to the employee and is like, “Tell me what you did this year and why you have this job. Tell me all the good stuff you did for us.” At a smaller company, all management knows what all the people are actually doing for you. There’s a clear visibility into what those engineers are adding and contributing to the actual company's efforts. I think the biggest thing to focus on when it gets to 200 engineers or 2,000 is: what are these people actually working on? Who's making sure that there's a director of engineering for each of these smaller groups of 30, 40 people to make sure they're actually pushing towards something that matters, that matters to the company, that's going to move the needle? And that those engineers can still feel pride in and feel like they have impact? — [0:27:22 - 0:28:09] Let us know what you think on Twitter: https://twitter.com/consoledotdev https://twitter.com/davidmytton Or by email: hello@console.dev About Console Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to. Sign up for free at: https://console.dev

In this episode, we speak with Matt Biilmann, CEO of Netlify. We discuss what it was like deploying code before Netlify, whether there is about to be a fragmentation in the JavaScript ecosystem as React gets more opinionated, where state and data fit into the Jamstack model, and how you might reach developers with a new project today. You’ll hear about the evolution of Netlify’s model, the Gatsby acquisition, and how Netlify has succeeded at staying on top of the fast-changing landscape. Hosted by David Mytton (Console) and Jean Yang (Akita Software). Things mentioned: ReactShopifyJavaGatsbyNext.jsWordPressSolidJSPlanetScaleNeonRuby on RailsAstroMastodonNostrMacBook ABOUT MATT BIILMANN Matt Biilmann is the CEO and Co-Founder of Netlify, a cloud platform that helps people build, deploy, and operate websites, web applications, and web stores swiftly and with ease. He has a long history of building DevTools, content management systems, and web infrastructure. Matt has been an active participant in open source and contributed to many well-known projects, including Ruby on Rails, JRuby, and Mongoid. Since launching its private beta back in March 2015, Netlify is now used by 3.5 million developers and is one of the fastest-growing web development platforms in the world. Highlights: Matt Biilmann: I really believed that we would move away from that model and move to a model where we would decouple the actual web experience layer into its own layer that web teams can build and deploy independently, and hopefully much faster. But I also saw at the time that there wasn't any tooling or infrastructure or workflows around that. So early on, when we started Netlify, there wasn't even a name for this web building. We had to come up with the term “Jamstack” to describe this idea of building the web experience layer on its own and typically seeing the backend split into all these different APIs and services, like all the headless CMSs that’s really become mainstream now. — [0:03:58 - 0:04:39] Matt Biilmann: Right now, what we're seeing happening around generative AI is probably going to change a lot of how we interface with computers over time, right? It’s already almost at the edge where you can imagine stitching a few tools together, and you would be having this kind of conversation with a program, rather than with a human. I think as that starts to happen, that will start to massively redefine how we consume content and commerce and so on. It will probably change a lot of what it means to build a website. — [0:17:09 - 0:17:41] Let us know what you think on Twitter: https://twitter.com/consoledotdev https://twitter.com/davidmytton Or by email: hello@console.dev About Console Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to. Sign up for free at: https://console.dev

In this episode, we speak with Christina Warren, senior developer advocate at GitHub about all things Developer Relations (or “DevRel”). We talk about what constitutes a “typical day” in DevRel (if such a thing exists), how to get started in the field, and the types of skills needed. We also discuss how to measure success in DevRel, the importance of advocating for the user, and where exactly DevRel ends and product begins. You’ll hear about how Christina sees her role as a bridge between the community, product engineering, and the developers using the product, as well as where video fits into it all. Hosted by David Mytton (Console) and Jean Yang (Akita Software). Things mentioned: GitHubMicrosoftThe DownloadSouthern California Linux Expo / SCALELinuxAzureChatGPTChatGPT and Whisper APIsCommit AI2021 M1 MacBook Pro2020 iMac ABOUT CHRISTINA WARREN Christina Warren is a senior developer advocate at GitHub who works in DevRel, helping to connect GitHub’s developer community with its engineers. Prior to working for GitHub, she was a senior cloud developer advocate for Microsoft. With a background in journalism, she creates a lot of video content and is responsible for GitHub’s weekly YouTube show The Download, where she presents the week’s most insightful news for developers. You can find her on Twitter at @film_girl and on GitHub at @filmgirl. Highlights: Christina Warren: I think that developer relations should be part of product and engineering because it is a really core part of that. That said, to be successful, DevRel needs to be cross-functional so some companies have it under marketing. For their purposes, that might make sense. I think that it makes sense for it to be part of product and engineering. But I think that it's cross-functional insofar as I work with people on basically every different team at GitHub. That's one of the things that's great about GitHub is that they have a really good understanding and appreciation of the value that we can bring because we can help the product teams and the engineering teams create assets for their blog posts. We can help them with their message. We can highlight things because we are on the ground all the time. We can go, “Hey, hey. This thing happened and this is causing problems. Do we want to get ahead of this? And how can we make something better?” — [0:15:02 - 0:15:49] Christina Warren: The way I see my job — and I can't say this for every person in DevRel — but the way I see my job is my title is “developer advocate”, but I'm not advocating for GitHub. I'm advocating for GitHub’s users. I'm advocating for our community. That's really what I'm trying to do. Because I think that by advocating for them, that's how GitHub can be most successful. But, of course, not everybody and not every company might see it that way. They might see it as, “Oh, your only job is just to praise and talk about how great we are.” I don't see it that way. I think that to be really successful, you need to be transparent, you need to be honest, you need to be authentic. That includes when there are situations where you might screw up or when things might not be right because I think that that's what builds trust. — [0:16:24 - 0:17:07] Let us know what you think on Twitter: https://twitter.com/consoledotdev https://twitter.com/davidmytton https://twitter.com/jeanqasaur Or by email: hello@console.dev About Console Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to. Sign up for free at: https://console.dev

In this episode, we speak with Steve Lee, principal software engineer manager on the PowerShell team at Microsoft. We start with what PowerShell is and why its object-based approach is interesting, then get into what it was like open sourcing a project at Microsoft back in 2016. We discuss the transition to using GitHub and what it's like managing an open source project at scale, bouncing community with features, bugs, and requests from users, alongside Microsoft’s goals. We also talk about PowerShell and its relation to AI, before we get some insight into what we can expect from it in the near future. Things mentioned: MicrosoftPowerShellOpenSSHUnixLinuxWMIWinRMDMTFPhysical Computer System ViewWS-ManAzure.NetPowerShell GalleryVisual StudioPythonGitHubPesterChatGPTDoug FinkeVisual Studio CodePowerShell Team blogABOUT STEVE LEE. Steve Lee is the principal software engineer manager on the PowerShell team at Microsoft. He’s been with the company since 2000 when he started out working on Internet Explorer for Unix. More recently, his team was responsible for PowerShell Core 6, the open-source cross-platform (Windows, Linux, macOS) version of the object-oriented scripting and interactive shell, developed on GitHub. Highlights: Steve Lee: I think the way we position PowerShell, it’s really a ‘glue language’, and not intended for developing full applications. Now, I do know that there are folks in the community who built very complex systems on PowerShell script and we’ll support them by all means, but it's not intended for that purpose. It’s really for— What we use within our team is really like, you're trying to test out some new .Net API. It's actually much faster to write it in PowerShell script with a few lines of code than running C# that you would have to compile and do that work. So it makes it very easy to test out new things, prototyping before you commit to writing critical proper development code. — [0:08:46 - 0:09:22] Steve Lee: Everyone probably saw how Bing and ChatGPT has integration. So that’s something— AI is on top of everyone's mind. And that is something that we've actually been looking at for a while. So I'm not sure if anyone is aware but, we had — even before ChatGPT, even before some other popup ones that came out, like Stable Diffusion and stuff like that — we were looking at AI several years ago before things were ready. And we actually have a plug-in model. So PSReadLine is a model that we use as the way to present the interactive experience for PowerShell users. And so one thing that we did back in, I think 7.1 — which should have been probably, what, two, three years ago — is we added a predictor plugin, so someone could actually build a predictor in C# and be able to present that through PSReadLine to the user. — [0:27:27 - 0:28:13] Let us know what you think on Twitter: https://twitter.com/consoledotdev https://twitter.com/davidmytton https://twitter.com/jeanqasaur Or by email: hello@console.dev About Console Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to. Sign up for free at: https://console.dev

In this episode, we speak with Russ Cox, distinguished engineer and Go programming language tech lead at Google. We discuss the original motivations for Go, the principles behind the language design, what other projects can learn from how Go manages its open-source community, and what Russ would change about Go if he started again. Russ also talks about the telemetry proposal, the involvement of Google in this, and what the Go team learned from a previous alias proposal. Hosted by David Mytton (Console) and Jean Yang (Akita Software). Things mentioned: PlanetScaleRust vs. Go: Why They’re Better TogetherProposing Changes to GoGopherConThe Go Programming Language and EnvironmentSurviving Software DependenciesDick SitesUnderstanding Software DynamicsStanford Seminar - Making the Invisible Visible: Observing Complex Software DynamicsMacBook ProMac miniThinkPad X1 with LinuxA Tour of the Acme EditorThe Web is a Customer Service Medium ABOUT RUSS COX. Russ Cox has been working on the programming language Go at Google since 2008 and is currently the Go project lead. He joined Google directly after completing his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. From the early days of Go when he was part of a small team, he has played a significant role in the development and success of the programming language. Highlights: [Russ Cox]: All the Go code in the world was in one source repository, which meant that if we did want to make some sort of major change to the way things looked or even sometimes the way things worked, we knew where all the code was that had to be updated. There were a couple of times when we were going to change something syntactically, and we thought we knew what it was going to be and how to implement it, and we said, “Well, let's go see what it looks like.” We’d get everyone to just sort of crowd around one computer, usually mine. I'd open up an editor and open up literally every single file, Go source file, in the world, then just do some global search and replace kind of things in the editor. They'd watch the files changing on the screen, and everyone would be like, “Oh, yes. That looks good.” We read it all out and [would] go back to our desks. — [0:06:49 - 0:07:28] [Russ Cox]: We just discovered that for the last six releases, we had this kind of bug where you couldn't actually build a Go program without an Xcode installed, totally unintended, and no one noticed. If we had any sort of telemetry or tracking of what is the build cache hit rate on things like the standard library? — Which is a continual thing that we actually do run into problems with. — What’s the hit rate on the build cache? If we knew that when we looked at how it was going and then after a new release came out, and all of a sudden, it was much closer to 0 than 100, all of a sudden, you would say, “Oh, I wonder why,” and you would look into that. But without that kind of visibility, we just can't. So telemetry really is about how do we get the information that makes us better as software developers. — [0:28:43 - 0:29:25] Let us know what you think on Twitter: https://twitter.com/consoledotdev https://twitter.com/davidmytton https://twitter.com/jeanqasaur Or by email: hello@console.dev About Console Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to. Sign up for free at: https://console.dev

In this episode, we speak with Erica Brescia, Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures, and previously COO at GitHub. We discuss what's changed since she started her first DevTools company back in the mid-2000s, how to build tools developers love, whether open source is just a marketing strategy, and what she looks for in software investments. She also sheds light on how to get a new product in front of developers, whether or not more people should be bootstrapping their companies as she did, and how to scale your marketing team as you grow. Hosted by David Mytton (Console) and Jean Yang (Akita Software). Things mentioned: BitnamiRailwayZedHacker NewsDaggerXataY CombinatorReflectChatGPTMacBook ProYeti MicrophoneLG UltraWide MonitorsMicrosoft Ergonomic KeyboardABOUT ERICA BRESCIA Erica Brescia is the managing director at Redpoint Ventures, an early-stage venture fund, investing in primarily, enterprise software with a focus on DevTools and open source. Notable developer-first companies that they have invested in include HashiCorp, Snowflake, Stripe, Twilio, and LaunchDarkly, among others. Prior to this, she spent close to 20 years as a founder and operator. She founded a company called Bitnami where she bootstrapped $1 million in funding. She was also the chief operating officer at GitHub. Highlights: [Erica Brescia]: If you look at the very early days of software development and open source in particular, we've gone from this real DIY kind of bespoke, “The cool thing to do is compile your own kernel,” to a focus on time optimization and “How can you build the best thing possible the fastest?” If I had to look at a theme, that's a theme that I think about a lot. It's no longer about doing everything yourself. Instead, it's about really open source and building on the work of others, right? Over 90% of software developed today is built on top of open source, and most things that you need, from a building blocks perspective, to build a new app already exist in many cases. So now it's about, “Hey, what tools are out there? How can I engage with the community? How can I learn from others? How can I participate in things whether it's Stack Overflow, or building and sharing code on GitHub, or discussing things and issues?” It's much more collaborative and intertwined. I think that allows people to build new things much more quickly. — [0:02:51 - 0:04:10] [Erica Brescia]: I think a lot of companies underestimate the amount of effort that is required in building a true open-source community, where you're getting folks contributing to the core of that project. That's a material investment. A good way to think about it is you're actually taking a lot of what you might traditionally spend on marketing and instead investing that in your team that supports the growth and health and engagement of this community, which is no small feat. Then you can use that to build awareness and a bottoms-up adoption of your software in a way that just sheer traditional marketing would never allow you to do. Then you can layer a sales motion on top of that. — [0:16:23 - 0:17:12] Let us know what you think on Twitter: https://twitter.com/consoledotdev https://twitter.com/davidmytton https://twitter.com/jeanqasaur Or by email: hello@console.dev About Console Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to. Sign up for free at: https://console.dev

In this episode, we speak with Steven Sinofsky, currently a board partner at Andreessen Horowitz and previously of Microsoft. We discuss what it was like shipping code at Microsoft in the early days, what he learned from Bill Gates, how it applies to software development today, what the big Windows 8 rewrite was like, and why the Copilot AI naysayers are completely wrong. Although the software landscape has changed dramatically since Steven’s early days at Microsoft in the 80s, he shares some of the lessons he learned along the way which are still as relevant today as they were back then. Hosted by David Mytton (Console) and Jean Yang (Akita Software). Things mentioned: MicrosoftWindows 8Copilot Cornell UniversityIBMHalt and Catch FireAppleJon DeVaanWebflowMythical Man-Month, The: Essays on Software EngineeringBill Gates“A Hard Line on Software” (Video)Jensen HarrisHardcore SoftwareChatGPTBingChatGPT on 60 MinutesM2 Mac MiniMacBook AirOne Strategy: Organization, Planning, and Decision MakingSubstack ABOUT STEVEN SINOFSKY Steven Sinofsky is an investor, a board partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a general advisor, and a self-described “person-about-town” in Silicon Valley. Shortly after he graduated from Cornell University, he became a software design engineer at Microsoft back in 1989. In his time at the company, he oversaw six major releases of the full range of Office apps and servers in his role as a senior executive. He also worked on Windows 7 and the Windows 8 rewrite as the president of the Windows division. He is a co-author of the book One Strategy: Organization, Planning, and Decision Making, as well as the writer of Hardcore Software, a Substack newsletter about the rise and fall of the PC revolution. Highlights: Steven Sinofsky: Bill was super interesting. He was, in a sense, this very interesting combination of business strategy, product strategy, and technology strategy. And whenever he would really push it, he was most comfortable trying to be a technology strategist. And to him, that was all about architecture. And so architecture, if you read a book like Fred Brooks, Mythical Man-Month, architecture is everything. Architecture in software is like this Nirvana. — [0:22:37 - 0:23:08] Steven Sinofsky: And the beauty of how Apple managed their operating system was they just didn't add a lot of features. But we had a team five times as big, adding features every release, and it was just not getting— My measure of success is not “Did we get the release done?” but “Was it making people do new things with the product?” And Windows had long stopped doing that. The ecosystem of software and hardware had probably died around 2000. And so when it came time to do Windows 8 — and obviously Hardcore Software has the whole timeline and all this stuff — but the thing we really wanted to do was take the product and build on it and all the things that were great about it, but bring it into a new era of computing from top to bottom or what we said was “from the chipset to the experience". — [0:28:43 - 0:29:34] Let us know what you think on Twitter: https://twitter.com/consoledotdev https://twitter.com/davidmytton https://twitter.com/jeanqasaur Or by email: hello@console.dev

In this episode we speak to Meri Williams an experienced CTO at scaleups like Moo, Monzo, and Healx. We discuss the role of technology leadership, what engineering managers can do to help their teams, how to best go about recruiting engineers, and whether engineering performance can be measured. About Meri Williams Meri Williams is an experienced CTO from scaleups like Moo, Monzo, and Healx. An experienced CTO who has led and scaled technology organizations across a range of sectors including medtech, neo-banking, government, ecommerce, telco and manufacturing. A published author, international speaker and chair (co-curator & host) of The Lead Developer conference series which has expanded from starting in London in 2015 to now running in London, New York, Berlin and Austin, Williams regularly trains the Be a Brilliant People Developer workshop to level up technologists into excellent managers & coaches. Other things mentioned: MooMonzoHealxKindredDriveCate HustonDORA metricsreMarkableMacBook AiriPad ProLet us know what you think on Twitter: https://twitter.com/consoledotdev https://twitter.com/davidmytton https://twitter.com/geek_manager Or by email: hello@console.dev About Console Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to. Sign up for free at: https://console.dev Recorded: 2022-04-22.

In this episode we speak to Connor Hicks, Founder of Suborbital, a serverless platform powered by WebAssembly. We discuss how WebAssembly works, when you’d use AssemblyScript rather than other languages which compile to WASM, the use cases for deploying WebAssembly on the backend, and how the dev, test, build, deploy, and observability cycle works when creating code in WebAssembly. About Connor Hicks Connor Hicks is based in Ottawa, Canada, and is the founder of Suborbital Software Systems. Connor works primarily on security and distributed systems projects including the Suborbital family of open source projects, and formerly led research and development at 1Password. Connor is a strong believer in building security and privacy into the core of all software, and is exploring the next iteration of web service development with technologies like WebAssembly. Other things mentioned: SuborbitalWebAssemblyOne passwordWordpressBytecode AlliancewasmtimeRustGoShopifyCargoTrunkTinyGoSwiftOpenTelemetryHashicorp NomadGoReleaserCaddyElgatoVS CodeDiscordNotionFirefoxMiroLet us know what you think on Twitter: https://twitter.com/consoledotdev https://twitter.com/davidmytton https://twitter.com/cohix Or by email: hello@console.dev About Console Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to. Sign up for free at: https://console.dev Recorded: 2022-04-11.

In this episode we speak to Elena Kokkinara, CTO at Inflight VR, a VR platform developer for in-flight entertainment. We discuss how VR has developed over the last decade, how the body ownership illusion can make you feel like you have an entirely different physical body, whether developers can code in VR environments, and whether AR is in competition with VR. About Elena Kokkinara Elena Kokkinara is CTO at Inflight VR, the first company that provides a VR entertainment solution for airplane passengers. Having completed a PhD in VR and published numerous papers on VR and computer vision, she is passionate about creating new experiences for Virtual Reality users and gamers. Her scientific interest is to explore the necessary parameters to design a flight-specific VR ecosystem. Other things mentioned: Inflight VRUnityUnreal EngineOculusCaveHTC FlowPicoLet us know what you think on Twitter: https://twitter.com/consoledotdev https://twitter.com/davidmytton https://twitter.com/redarahel Or by email: hello@console.dev About Console Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to. Sign up for free at: https://console.dev Recorded: 2022-04-26.

In this episode we speak to Sergei Egorov, CEO of AtomicJar, the company behind TestContainers, a library that helps with integration testing for containerized applications. We discuss the challenges of developing container-based applications, how to orchestrate containers for testing, the future of cloud development environments, and whether the Apple M1 chip has come too late. About Sergei Egorov Sergei Egorov is CEO & co-founder of AtomicJar - the company behind Testcontainers on a mission to make integration testing easy and enjoyable for developers. He is a Java Champion, an active member of the Open Source community, member of the Apache Foundation, and Reactive Foundation TOC. Other things mentioned: DockerKubernetesGoogle Cloud RunHerokuJosh WongTwelve-Factor AppWeb AssemblyScaffoldBuildpacksKO for GOLocalStackLambdaDynanoDBQuarkusGitHub Code SpacesMacBook Pro M1NotionLet us know what you think on Twitter: https://twitter.com/consoledotdev https://twitter.com/davidmytton https://twitter.com/bsideup Or by email: hello@console.dev About Console Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to. Sign up for free at: https://console.dev Recorded: 2022-04-07.

In this episode we speak to Ines Montani, co-founder and CEO of Explosion, a developer of Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing technologies. We discuss how ML and NLP work behind the scenes, how developers should think about applied NLP, the common languages and frameworks used to build ML and NLP applications, and the challenges that come with running them at scale. About Ines Montani Ines Montani is co-founder and CEO of Explosion. A software developer working on Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing technologies, her company Explosion are makers of spaCy, one of the leading open-source libraries for Natural Language Processing in Python, and Prodigy, a modern annotation tool for creating training data for machine learning models. In 2020, Montani became a Fellow of the Python Software Foundation. Other things mentioned: ExplosionspaCyProdigyTensorflowHugging Face PythonCypressHyperSlackLet us know what you think on Twitter: https://twitter.com/consoledotdev https://twitter.com/davidmytton https://twitter.com/_inesmontani Or by email: hello@console.dev About Console Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to. Sign up for free at: https://console.dev Recorded: 2022-04-06

In this episode we speak to Feross Aboukhadijeh, CEO of Socket.dev, a software supply chain security company. We discuss the risks of using third party dependencies, how JS and NPM could improve their approach to security, whether trust in open source is eroding, and how to improve the overall security posture of your application. About Feross Aboukhadijeh Feross is the founder and CEO of Socket, where he's working on a new approach to open source supply chain security. Feross is the author and maintainer of WebTorrent, StandardJS, and 100s of other open source projects which are downloaded 500+ million times per month. Feross is a lecturer at Stanford University where he teaches CS 253 Web Security. Socket, the company Feross started, is auditing every package on npm to detect suspicious changes and block software supply chain attacks. Hundreds of companies use Socket to protect their software applications and critical services from malware and security threats originating in open source code. Other things mentioned: SocketWebTorrentStandard JSnpmJSTypescriptPrettierDependabotMacBook Pro M1Studio displayLogitech mouseLet us know what you think on Twitter: https://twitter.com/consoledotdev https://twitter.com/davidmytton https://twitter.com/feross Or by email: hello@console.dev About Console Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to. Sign up for free at: https://console.dev Recorded: 2022-04-06.

In this episode we speak to Cate Huston, Engineering Director at DuckDuckGo. We discuss why developers should care about privacy, what technologies and tools are available for building privacy-driven features, how DuckDuckGo manages performance when doing lookups against tracker lists, and the full stack of privacy tools, from search to the browser to email. About Cate Huston Cate Huston is Engineering Director at DuckDuckGo and an advisor at Glowforge. She previously worked at Automattic, where she led the mobile, Jetpack, and Developer Experience teams. Huston admins the New-(ish) Manager Slack and writes regularly for Quartz. Other things mentioned: DuckDuckGoAutomatticSmart EncryptionTracker radar1PasswordDuckDuckBotVisual StudioGlowforgeMacBook Pro M11PasswordSpotifyLet us know what you think on Twitter: https://twitter.com/consoledotdev https://twitter.com/davidmytton https://twitter.com/catehstn Or by email: hello@console.dev About Console Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to. Sign up for free at: https://twitter.com/catehstn Recorded: 202-04-14.

In this episode we speak to Joseph Jacks, founder and general partner at OSS Capital, a venture fund specializing in open source software. We discuss why open source is such an important differentiator for all software development, the philosophy behind open source, open core, and building a community around open source software, whether open source should be the default for all software. About Joseph Jacks Joseph Jacks is founder and general partner at OSS Capital, a fund that invests in Open Source projects. Previously, he was co-founder and VP of Technology Strategy of Kismatic which provided services for running Kubernetes at scale for enterprises. It was one of the top 0.01% of projects on GitHub and was acquired by Apprenda in May 2016. Jacks also founded the KubeAcademy, the parent organization of the official Kubernetes community conference KubeCon, and was the co-Founder and CEO of Aljabr which builds cloud-native data pipelines. Other things mentioned: OSS capitalGitHubSourceForgeSignalRichard StallmanSatoshi NakamotoLinus TorvaldsGitHubGitLabRed HatRodeSony A600Let us know what you think on Twitter: https://twitter.com/consoledotdev https://twitter.com/davidmytton https://twitter.com/josephjacks_ Or by email: hello@console.dev About Console Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to. Sign up for free at: https://console.dev Recorded: 2022-04-04.

In this episode we speak to Liz Rice, Chief Open Source Officer at Isovalent, the company behind the open source eBPF product Cilium. We discuss why it’s such a revolutionary approach to developing low-level kernel applications, how BPF can be used for observability, networking and security, how developers should think about application security, and why all of these technologies are open source. About Liz Rice Liz Rice is Chief Open Source Officer at eBPF pioneers Isovalent, creators of the Cilium project, which provides cloud native networking, observability and security. Prior to Isovalent she was VP Open Source Engineering with security specialists Aqua Security. She is also Chair of the CNCF's Technical Oversight Committee, has co-chaired the KubeCon / CloudNativeCon and is an Ambassador for Open UK. Other things mentioned: IsovalentBerkeley labDave ThalerKubernetesFirecrackerLambdaM1 MacbookVS CodeLet us know what you think on Twitter: https://twitter.com/consoledotdev https://twitter.com/davidmytton https://twitter.com/lizrice Or by email: hello@console.dev About Console Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to. Sign up for free at: https://console.dev Recorded: 2022-05-05.