Screaming in the Cloud - Breaching the Coding Gates with Anil Dash

Episode Date: December 29, 2021

About AnilAnil Dash is the CEO of Glitch, the friendly developer community where coders collaborate to create and share millions of web apps. He is a recognized advocate for more ethical tech through his work as an entrepreneur and writer. He serves as a board member for organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the leading nonprofit defending digital privacy and expression, Data & Society Research Institute, which researches the cutting edge of tech's impact on society, and The Markup, the nonprofit investigative newsroom that pushes for tech accountability. Dash was an advisor to the Obama White House’s Office of Digital Strategy, served for a decade on the board of Stack Overflow, the world’s largest community for coders, and today advises key startups and non-profits including the Lower East Side Girls Club, Medium, The Human Utility, DonorsChoose and Project Include.As a writer and artist, Dash has been a contributing editor and monthly columnist for Wired, written for publications like The Atlantic and Businessweek, co-created one of the first implementations of the blockchain technology now known as NFTs, had his works exhibited in the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and collaborated with Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda on one of the most popular Spotify playlists of 2018. Dash has also been a keynote speaker and guest in a broad range of media ranging from the Obama Foundation Summit to SXSW to Desus and Mero's late-night show.Links:Glitch: https://glitch.comWeb.dev: https://web.devGlitch Twitter: https://twitter.com/glitchAnil Dash Twitter: https://twitter.com/anildash

Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at the Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud. It seems like there's a new security breach every day. Are you confident that an old SSH key or a shared admin account isn't going to come back and bite you?

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This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Redis, the company behind the incredibly popular open source database that is not the BindDNS server. If you're tired of managing open source Redis on your own or you're using one of the vanilla cloud caching services, these folks have you covered with the go-to managed Redis service for global caching and primary database capabilities, Redis service for global caching and primary database capabilities, Redis Enterprise.

To learn more and deploy not only a cache, but a single operational data platform for one Redis experience, visit redis.com slash hero. That's R-E-D-I-S dot com slash hero. And my thanks to my friends at Redis for sponsoring my ridiculous nonsense. Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Today's guest is a little bit off the beaten path from the cloud infrastructure types I generally drag kicking and screaming onto the show. where it's going. It's clear that in the future, not everyone who wants to build a business or a tool or even an application is going to necessarily spring fully formed into the world from the

forehead of some God knowing how to code. And, oh, I'm going to go to a bootcamp for four months to learn how to do it first is increasingly untenable. I don't know if you would call it low code or not, but that's how it feels. My guest today is Anil Dash, CEO of Glitch. Anil, thank you for joining me. Thanks so much for having me. So let's get the important stuff out of the way first. Since I have a long-standing history of mispronouncing the company Twitch as twetch, I should probably do the same thing here. So what is Glitch, and what does it do? Glitch is, at its simplest, a tool that lets you build a full-stack app in your web browser in about 30 seconds. And for your community, your audience, it's also this ability to create and deploy code instantly on a full stack server

with no concern for deploy or DevOps or provisioning a container or any of those sort of concerns. And what it is for the users is honestly a community. They're like, I looked at this app that was on Glitch. I thought it was cool. I could do what we call remixing, which is to kind of fork that app, a running app, make a couple edits, and all of a sudden, live at a real URL on the web, my app is running with exactly what I built. And that's something

that has been, I think, just captured a lot of people's imagination to now where they've built over 12 or 15 million apps on the platform. You describe it somewhat differently than I would. And given that I tend to assume that people who create and run successful businesses don't generally tend to do it without thought, and I'm not quite, I guess, insufferable enough to figure out, oh, well, I've thought about this for 10 seconds, therefore I've solved a business problem that you have been needling at for years. But when I look at Glitch, I would describe it as something different than the way that you describe it. I would call it a web-based IDE for low-code applications and whatnot, and you never talk about it that way.

Everything I can see that you describe, it talks about friendly creators and community tied to it. Why is that? You're not wrong from the conventional technologist's point of view. I'm of sufficient vintage. I was coding in Visual Basic back in the 90s. And if you squint, you can see that influence on Glitch today. And so I don't reject that description. But part of it is about the audience we're speaking to, which is sort of a next generation of creators. And I think importantly, that's not just age, right? But that can be demographic,

that can be just sort of culturally wherever you're at. And what we look at is who's making the most interesting stuff on the internet and in the industry. And they tend to be grounded in broader culture, whether they're on Instagram or TikTok or whatever kind of influencer you want to point at, YouTube. And those folks, they think of themselves as creators first. And they think of themselves as participating in a community first. And then the tools sort of follow. And I think one of the things that's really striking is if you look at, we'll take YouTube as an example because everybody's pretty familiar with it. They have a YouTube creator studio, and it is a very rich and deep tool. It does more than you would have had iMovie or Final Cut Pro doing 10 or 15 years ago.

Incredibly advanced stuff. And those creators use it every day. But nobody goes to YouTube and says, this is a cloud-based nonlinear editor for video production and we target cinematographers. And if they did, they would actually narrow their audience and they would limit what their impact is on the world. And sort of similarly, I think we look at that for Glitch where the social object, the center thing that people organize around our Glitch is an app, not code. And that's this really kind of deep and profound idea, which is that everybody can understand an app. Everybody has

an idea for an app. You know, even the person who's, ah, I'm not technical or I'm not really into technology. They're like, but you know what? If I could make an app, I would make this. And so we think a lot about that creative impulse. And the funny thing is that is a common thread between somebody that literally just got on the internet for the first time and somebody who has been doing cloud deploys for as long as there's been a cloud to deploy to, or somebody who's been coding for decades. No matter who you are, you have that place that is starting from, what's the experience I want to build, the app I want to build. And so I think that's why there's that framing.

But it's also been really useful in that if you're trying to make a better IDE in the cloud and a better text editor, and there are multiple trillion-dollar companies that are creating products in that category, I don't think you're going to win. On the other hand, if you say this is more fun and cooler and has a better design and feels better, I think we can absolutely win in a walk away compared to trillion-dollar companies trying to be cool. I think that this is an area that has a few players in it, could definitely stand to benefit by having more there. My big fear is not that AWS is going to launch stuff in your space and drive you out of business. I think that is a somewhat naive approach. I'm more concerned that they're going to try to launch something in your space, give it a dumb name, fail to market it appropriately, not understand who it's for, and set the entire idea back five years. That is, in some cases, it seems like they're the modus operandi for an awful lot of new markets. Yeah. I mean, that's not an uncommon problem in any category that's sort of community-driven.

So, you know, back in the day, I worked on building blogging tools at the beginning of the sort of social media era. And we worried about that a lot. We had built some of the first early tools, MovableType and TypePad. And these were what were used to launch like Gawker and Huffington Post and all the sort of big early sites. And we had been doing it a couple of years. And then at that time, major player AOL came in and they launched their own AOL blog service. And we were, you know, quaking in our boots. I remember just being kind of like pit in your stomach.

Oh, my gosh, this is going to devastate the category. And as it turns out, people were smart and they have taste and they can tell. And the domain that we're in is not one that is about raw computing power or raw resources that you can bring to bear so much as it is about can you get people to connect together, collaborate together and feel like they're in a place where they want to make something and they want to share it with other people. And I mean, we've never done a single bit of advertising for Glitch. There's never been any paid acquisition. There's never been any of those things. And we go up against, broadly in this space, people that have billboards and they buy out all the ads at the airport and all the other kinds of things we see. And they do the typical enterprise thing where they spend untold millions in acquiring the real estate to advertise on. And then about 50 cents on the message from the looks of it.

It's, wow, you spent all this trouble and expense to get something in front of me. And after all of that to get my attention, you don't have anything interesting to say. Right. You seem like the inverse of that. Or it doesn't work. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's brand awareness.

I love that game. I was a CIO, and not once in my life did I ever make a purchasing decision based on who was sponsoring a golf tournament. It never happened, right? Like I never made a call on a database platform because of a poster that was up at, you know, San Jose airport. And so I think that's this thing that developers in particular have really good BS filters. And you can sort of see through. What I have heard about the airport advertising space, and I'm not a humble cloud economist. I don't know if this is necessarily accurate or not.

But if you have a company like Accenture, for example, that advertises on airport billboards, they don't even bother to list their website. If you go to their website, it turns out that there's no shopping cart function. I cannot add one consulting to my cart and make a purchase. 10 pounds of consult, please. Right. I feel like the primary purpose there might very well be that when someone presents to your board and says, all right, we've had this conversation with Accenture, the response is not who. It's a brand awareness play on some level. That said, you say you don't do a lot of traditional advertising, but honestly, I feel like you advertise more successfully than I do with the Duckbill Group just by virtue of having a personality running the company in your case.

Now, your platform is, for the moment, slightly larger than mine, but that's okay. I have ambition and a tenuous grasp on reality, and I'm absolutely going to get there one of these days. But there is something to be said for someone who has a track record of doing interesting things and saying interesting things, pulling a, this is what I do, and this is how I do it. And it almost becomes a personality-led marketing effort to some degree, doesn't it? I'm a little mindful of that, right? Where I think, so a little bit of context and history. Glitch as a company is actually 20 years old. The product is only a few years old, but we were formerly called Fog Creek Software, co-founded by Joel Spolsky, who a lot of folks will know from back in the day as Joel on software blog

was extremely influential. And that company under leadership of Joel and his co-founder, Michael Pryor, spun out Stack Overflow. They spun out Trello. They created countless products over the years. So their technical and business acumen is off the charts. And I was on the board of Stack Overflow from really those first days until just recently when they sold. And you get this insight into not just how do you build a developer community that is incredibly valuable, but also has a place in the ecosystem

that is unique and persists over time. And I think that's something that was very, very instructive. And so when I came in to lead Glitch, we had already been a company with a sort of visible founder. Joel was as well known as a programmer as it got in the world. Oh, yes. And my public visibility is different, right? I was a working coach for many years, but I don't think that's what people see me on social media as. And so I think I've been very mindful where I'm thrilled to use the platform I have to amplify what was created on a glitch. But what I notice, it's always this person made this thing. This person made this app, and it had this impact, and it got these results or made this difference for them. And that's such a different thing than I don't ever talk about. We added syntax highlighting in the IDE and the editor

and the browser. It's just never it. Right. And I think there are people that I love that work. I mean, I love having that conversation with our team, but I think that's sort of the difference is that my enthusiasm is like people are making stuff and it's cool and that sort of is my lens on the whole world you know somebody makes whatever a great song a great film like those are all things that are exciting and the glitch communities creation sort of feel that way and also we have other visible people on the team i think of our sort of head of community jen shiffer who's a very well-known developer in her right and you know tons of people read her writing and seen her talks over the years and she and I talk about this stuff.

I think she sort of feels the same way, which is like, she's like, if I were, you know, being hired by some cloud platform to show the latest primitives that they've deployed behind an API, she's like, I'd be miserable. Like, I don't want to do that in the world. And I sort of feel the same way. But if you say this person who never imagined they would make an app that would have this kind of impact, and they're going to, I think it's just like the last couple of weeks,

some of the apps we've seen where people are, it could be Prosec. It could be like we made a Slack bot that finally gets this reporting into the right channel inside our company. But it was easy enough that I could do it myself without asking somebody to create it, even though I'm not technically an engineer. That's incredible. The other extreme, we have people that are phds working on machine learning that are like at the end of the day i don't want to be responsible for managing and deploying when i go

home and so the fact that i can do this and create is really great i think that energy i mean i feel the same way i still build stuff all the time and i think that's something where like you can't fake that and also it's bigger than any one person or one public persona or social media profile or whatever. I think there's this bigger idea. I mean, to that point, there are millions of developers on Glitch, and they've created well over 10 million apps. I am not a humble person, but very clearly, that's not me. I have the same challenge, too. Effectively, I have— we're now a 12 employee company

and about that again contractors for various specialized functions and the common perception I think is that mostly I do all of the stuff that we talk about in public

and the other 11 folks sort of sit around and clap as I do it yeah that is only four of those people's jobs as it turns out there are more people doing work here

it's challenging on some level to get away from the myth of the founder who is the person who has the grand vision and does all the work and sees all these things. This industry loves the myth of the great man or the solo legend or the person in their bedroom is a genius, the lone genius. And it's a lie. It's a lie every time. And I think of one of the things that we can do, especially in the work at Glitch, but I think just in my work overall, my whole career is to dismantle that myth. I think that would be incredibly valuable.

It just would do a service for everybody. But I mean, that's why Glitch is the way it is. It's a collaboration platform. Our reference points are, you know, we look at Visual Studio and what have you, but we also look at Google Docs. And why is it that people love to just send a link to somebody and say, let's edit this thing together and knock out a memo together or whatever. I think that idea of we're going to collaborate together, you know, we saw that, like I think of Figma, which is a tool that I love. You know, I knew Dylan when he was a teenager and watching him build that company has been so inspiring, not least because design was always supposed to be collaborative. And then you think about we're all collaborating together in design every day.

We're all collaborating together and writing in Google Docs or whatever we use every day. And then coding is still this kind of single player game. Maybe at best you throw something over the wall with a pull request, but for the most part, it doesn't feel like you're in there with somebody. Certainly doesn't feel like you're creating together in the same way that when you're jamming on these other creative tools does. And so I think that's what's been liberating for a lot of people is to feel like

it's nice to have company when you're making something. Periodically, I'll talk to people in the AWS ecosystem who for some reason appear to believe that Jeff Barr builds a lot of these services himself, then writes blog posts about them. And Amazon does not break out how many of its 1.2 million or so employees work at AWS. But I'm guessing it's more than five people. So yeah, Jeff probably only wrote a dozen of those services himself.

The rest are done by service teams and the rest. It's easy to condense this stuff, and I'm as guilty of it as anyone. To my mind, a big company is one that has 200 people in it. That is not apparently something the world agrees with. Yeah, it's impossible to fathom an organization of hundreds of thousands or a million plus people. Our brains just aren't wired to do it. And I think, so we reduce things to any given Jeff, whether that's Barr, Bezos, whoever you want to point to. At one point, I think they had something like more men named Jeff on their board than they did women, which, all right, cool, they fixed that. Now they have a Dave problem.

Yeah, I have to say that my entire career has been trying to weave out of that dynamic, whether it was a Dave, a Mike, or a Jeff. But I think that that broader sort of challenge is this, that is related to the idea of there being this lone genius. And I think if we can sort of say, well, creation always happens in community. It always happens influenced by other things. It's always, I mean, this is why we talk about in Glitch, when you make an app, you don't start from a blank slate. You start from a working app that's already on the platform and you remix it. And there was a little bit of a

ego resistance by some devs years ago when they first encountered that because like, no, no, I need a blank page, you know, because I have this brilliant idea that nobody's ever thought of before. And I'm like, you know, the odds are you're probably starting for something pretty close to something's built before. And that enabler of there's nothing new under the sun and you're probably remixing somebody else's thoughts. I think that sort of changed's nothing new under the sun and you're probably remixing somebody else's thoughts, I think that sort of changed the tenor of the community.

And I think that's something where, like, I just see that across the industry when people are open and collaborative. Like, even today, a great example is web browsers. The folks making web browsers at Google, Apple, Mozilla are pretty collaborative. They actually do share ideas together. I mean, I get a window into that because they actually all use Glitch to do test cases on different bugs and stuff for them. But you see

one Glitch project will add in folks from Mozilla and folks from Apple and folks from the Chrome team on Google, and they're working together. And you're like, you kind of let down the pretense of there being this secret genius that's only in this one organization, this one group of people, and you're able to make something great, and the web is greater than all of them. And the proof for us is that Glitch is not a new idea. Heroku wanted to do what we're doing a dozen years ago. Now everyone wants to build Heroku, except the company that acquired Heroku, and here we are. I was waiting for the next step, and it just seemed like it never happened. But you know what? I talked to those folks. They were like, well, we didn't have Docker and we didn't have containerization. And on the client

side, we didn't have modern browsers that could do this kind of editing experience, all those kinds of things. So they let their editor go by the wayside and became mostly a deploy platform. But people forget, for the first year or two, Heroku had an in-browser editor and an IDE and was constrained by the tech at the time. And I think that's something where I'm like, we look at that history. We look at also, like I said, these browser manufacturers working together were able to get us to a point where we can make something better. This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle HeatWave, a new high performance query accelerator for the Oracle MySQL database service, although I insist on

calling it MySquirrel. While MySquirrel has long been the world's most popular open-source database, shifting from transacting to analytics required way too much overhead and, you know, work. With HeatWave, you can run your OLAP and OLTP, don't ask me to pronounce those acronyms ever again, workloads directly from your MySquirrel database and eliminate the time-consuming data movement and integration work while also performing 1,100 times faster than Amazon Aurora and two and a half times faster than Amazon Redshift at a third the cost. My thanks again to Oracle Cloud for sponsoring this ridiculous nonsense. I do have a question for you about the nuts and bolts behind the scenes of Glitch and how it

works. If I want to remix something on Glitch, I click the button, a couple seconds later it's there and ready for me to start kicking the tires on, which tells me a few things. One, it is certainly not using CloudFormation to provision it because I didn't have time to go and grab a quick snack and take a six-hour nap. So it apparently is running on computers somewhere. I have it on good authority that this is not just run by people who are very fast at assembling packets by hand. What does the infrastructure look like? It's on AWS. Our first year plus of prototyping while we were sort of in beta and early stages of Glitch was getting that time to remix to be acceptable. We still wish it were faster. I mean, that's always the way. But, you know, when we started, it was like, yeah, you did sit there for a minute and watch your cursor spin.

I mean, what's happening behind the scenes, we're provisioning a new container, standing up the full stack, bringing over the code from the Git repo on the previous project. Like we're doing a lot of work left behind the scenes. And we went through every possible permutation of what could make that experience be good enough. So when we started talking about prototyping, we were at five plus almost six years ago when we started building the early versions of what became Glitch. And at that time, we were fairly far along in maturity with

Docker, but there was not a clear answer about the use case that we're building for. So we experimented with Docker Swarm. We went pretty far down that road. We spent a good bit of time there. It failed in ways that were both painful and slow to fix. So that was great. I don't recommend that. In fairness, we have a very unusual use case, right? So Glitch now, if you talk about 10 million containers on Glitch, no two of those apps are the same. And nobody builds an orchestration infrastructure assuming that every single machine is a unique stuff. Massively multi-tenant is not really a thing that people optimize for.

And also from a security posture, Glitch, if you look at it as a security expert, is a platform allowing anonymous users to execute arbitrary code at scale. That's what we do. That's our job. And so your threat model is very different. It's very different. I mean, literally, you can go to Glitch and build an app, running a full-stack app, without even logging in. And the reason we enable that is because we see kids in classrooms that are learning the code for the first time that want to be able to remix a project and they don't even have an email address. And so that was about enabling something different, right?

And then similarly, you know, we explored Kubernetes because of course you do. It's the default choice here. And some of the optimizations, again, if you go back several years ago, being able to suspend a project and then quickly sort of rehydrate it off disk into a running app was not a common use case. And so it was not optimized. And so we couldn't offer that experience because what we do with glitch is if you haven't used an

app in five minutes and you're not a paid member, you put that app to sleep. And that's just reasonable. Put the app to sleep as in toddler or put the app to sleep as an ill puppy. Hopefully the former, but when we were at our worst and scaling the latter. But that is the thing. It's like we had that moment that everybody does, which is that, oh, no, this worked. That was a really scary moment where we started seeing app creation ramping up and number of edits that people were making in those apps, you know, ramping up, which meant deploys for us ramping up because we automatically deploy as you edit on Glitch. And so we had that moment where just, well, as a startup, you always hope things go up and to the right, and then they do, and then you're not sleeping for a long time. And we've been able to get it back under control. Oh, no, I'm not succeeding. Follow me by,

oh, no, I'm succeeding. And it's a good problem to have. Exactly. Right, right, right. The only thing worse than failing is succeeding sometimes in terms of stress levels. And organizationally, you go through so much. Technically, you go through so much. You know, we're very fortunate to have such thoughtful technical staff to navigate these things. But it was not obvious. And it was not as sort of, this is what you do off the shelf. And our architecture was very different because people had looked at, like, I look at one of our inspirations was CodePen, which is a great platform in the community. Love them.

And their front-end developers are always showing off, here's this cool CSS thing I figured out, and it's there. But for the most part, they're publishing static content. So architecturally, they look almost more like a content management system than an app-running platform. And so we couldn't learn anything from them about scaling our architecture. We could learn from the MoMA community, and they've been an inspiration there, but I think that's been very, very different. And then conversely, if we looked at the Heroku's of the world, or all the sort of easy deploy, I think Amazon has half a dozen different, like, this will be easier, kind of deploy tools. And we looked at those, and they were code-centric, not

app-centric. And that looked at those and they were code centric, not app centric. And that led to fundamentally different assumptions in user experience and optimization. And so, you know, we had to chart our own path. And I think it was really only the last year or so that we were able to sort of turn the corner and have a high degree of confidence about we know what people build on Glitch and we know how to support it and scale it. And that unlocked this sort of wave of creativity where there are things that people want to create on the internet, but it had become too hard to do so. And the canonical example I think of is those of us who are old enough to remember FTPing up a website. Oh, yes. Right, to GeoCities or whatever your shared web host was.

We remember how easy that was and how much creativity was enabled by that. Yes, how easy it was, quote-unquote, for those of us who spent years trying to figure out passive versus active versus what is going on as far as FTP transfers. And it turns out that we found ways to solve for that mostly, but it became something a bit different and a bit weird, and here we are. Yeah, there was definitely an adjustment period. But at some point, if you'd made an HTML page in Notepad on your computer and you could hurl it at a server somewhere, it would kind of run. And when you realize, you look at the coding boot camps,

or even just the Teach Kids to Code efforts, and they're like, day three, now you've gotten VS Code and GitHub configured. We can start to make something. And you're like, the whole magic of this thing was when you get it to light up, you put it in your web browser, and you're like, that's me. I made this. North Star for us was always like, you go from zero to hello world in a minute. That's huge.

I started participating in one of those boot camps a while back to help. The first thing I changed about the curriculum was, yeah, we're not spending time teaching people how to use VI at that point in the 2010s. That was a fun bit of hazing for those of us who were becoming Unix admins and knew that wherever we'd go, we'd find VI on a server. But here in the real world, there are better options for that. It's just rank cruelty. Yeah. I mean, I still use it because 20 years of muscle memory doesn't go away overnight, but I don't inflict that on others. Yeah. Well, we saw the contrast. Like we worked with, there's a group called Mouse here in New York City that creates the computer science curriculum for the public schools in the city of New York.

And there's a million kids in public school in New York City, right? And they all go through at least some of this CS education. I think saw a lot of work. A lot of folks in the tech community here did. It's fantastic. And yet they were still doing this sort of very conceptual, theoretical, here's how a professional developer would set up their environment quote-unquote professional and i'm like you know what really sparks kids interests if you tell them you can make a page and it'll be live and you can send it to your friend

and you can do it right now and once you've sparked that creative impulse you can't stop them from doing the rest and i think what was wild was kids followed down that path some of the more advanced kids got to high school and realized they wanted to experiment with, like, AI and ML, right? And they started playing with TensorFlow. And, you know, there's collaboration features on Glitch where you can do real-time editing of the code with this. And they went on the forum, and they were asking questions, that kind of stuff. And the people answering their questions were the TensorFlow team at Google. Right. I remember those days back when everything seemed smaller and more compact, but almost felt like a balkanization of community.

Yeah. Where now it's, oh, if you joined that Slack team and I'm looking at this and my machine is screaming for more RAM, it's like, well, it has 128 gigs in it. Shouldn't that be enough? Not for Slack. Not for chat. No, no, no. Chat is demanding.

Oh, yeah. That and Chrome are basically trying to out-RAM each other. Exactly. But I remember the days of volunteering as network staff on Freenode when you could basically gather everyone for a given project and the entire stack on the same IRC network. So there's something magic about that, right? And it's like now the conversations are closed off in a Slack or a Discord or what have you.

But to have a sort of open forum where people could talk about this stuff, what's wild about that is for a beginner, a teenage creator who's learning this stuff, the idea that the people who made the AI I can talk to, they're alive still. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, they're not even that old. But they think this is something that's been carved in stone for 100 years. And so it's so inspiring to them. And conversely, talking to the TensorFlow team, they made these JavaScript examples, like TensorFlow.js, it's so accessible, you know?

And they're like, this is the most heartwarming thing. Like we think about all these enterprise use cases and whatever, but like kids wanting to make stuff like recognize their friend's photo and all the vision stuff they're doing around them out there. Like, we didn't know this is why we do it until we saw this is why we do it. And that part about connecting the creative impulse from both, like, the most experienced advanced coders at the most august tech companies that exist, as well as the most ranked beginners in public schools who might not even have a computer at home, saying that's their.

If you put those two things together and both of those are saying, I'm a coder, I'm able to create, I can make something on the internet and I can share it with somebody and be inspired by it. Like that is as good as it gets. There's something magic in being able to reach out to people who built this stuff. And honestly, you shouldn't feel this way, but you do. When I was talking to the folks who wrote the things I was working on, it really inspires you to ask better questions.

When I'm talking to Dr. Venema, the author of Postfix, and I'm trying to figure out how this thing works, look, I know for a fact that I will not be smarter than he is at basically anything in that entire universe, and maybe most beyond that as well. However, I still want to ask a question in such a way that doesn't make me sound like a colossal dumbass. So it's, it really inspires you. Oh yeah. It inspires you to raise your question bar up a bit of, I am trying to do X. I expect Y to happen. Instead Z is happening. And as opposed to what I find in the documentation that, Oh, as I read the documentation,

discover exactly what I messed up. And then I delete the whole email. It's amazing how many of those things you never send because when constructing a question the right way, you can help yourself. Rubber ducking against your heroes. Exactly. I mean, early in my career,

I had gone through a sort of licensing mishap on a project that later became open source and sort of stepped in it as you do. And unprompted, I got an advice email from Dan Bricklin, who invented the spreadsheet, invented VisiCalc. And he had advice and he was right. And it was, it was unreal. I was like, this guy's one of my heroes. I grew up reading about his work. And not only is he like a living, reading person, he's somebody that can have the kindness to reach out and say, yeah, you know, have you tried this? This might work. And it's, and this isn't like a living, breathing person, he's somebody that can have the kindness to reach out and say, yeah, you know, have you tried this?

This might work. And this isn't like a guy who made an app. This is a guy who made the app for which the phrase killer app was invented. Right. And, you know, we've since become friends. And I think a lot of his inspiration is work. And I think that's one of the things that's like, again, if you tell somebody starting out, the people who invented the fundamental tools of the digital era are still active, still building stuff, still have advice to share, and you can connect with them. It feels like a cheat code. It feels like a superpower. It feels like this impossible thing. And I think about

even, for me, the early days of the web, ViewSource, which is still buried in our browser somewhere. You can see the code that makes the page. It felt like getting away with something. I can just look under the hood and see how they made this page, and then I can do it too. I think we forget how radical that is, and how radical open source in general is. You talk to young creators. Glitch, obviously, is used every day by people at Microsoft and Google and New York Times. The most down-the the road enterprise developers.

But I think a lot about the new creators and the people who are learning. And what they tell me a lot is the like, oh, so I made this app, but what do I have to do to put it on the internet? And I'm like, it already is. Like, as soon as you created it, that URL was live. It all works. And they're like, but isn't there like an app store I have to ask? Isn't there somebody I have to get permission to publish this from?

Doesn't somebody have to approve it? And you realize they've grown up with whether it was the app stores on their phones or the cartridges in their Nintendo or whatever it was, they had always had this constraint on technology. It wasn't something you make. It's something that is given to you, handed down from on high. And I think that's the part that animates me and the whole team, the community, is this idea of like, I geek out about infrastructure. I love that we're doing deploys constantly, so fast, all the time.

And I love that we've taken that complexity away. But at the end of the day, the reason why we do it is you can have somebody just sort of saying, I didn't realize there was a place I could just make something, put it in front of maybe millions of people all over the world, and I don't have to ask anybody permission, and my idea can matter as much as the thing that's made by the trillion-dollar company. It's really neat to see, I guess, the sense of spirit and soul that arises from a smaller, more, shall

we say, soulful company. No disparagement meant toward my friends at AWS and other places. It's just, there's something that you lose when you get to a certain point of scale. Like, I don't ever have to have a meeting internally and discuss things like, well, does this thing that we're toying with doing violate antitrust law? That has never been on my roadmap of things I have to even give the slightest crap about. Right, right. You know, what does the investor relations person at a retirement fund think about the feature that we shipped is not a question that we have to answer. There's this joy in also having a community that sort of has come along with us, right? So we talk a lot internally about like,

how do we make sure Glitch stays weird? And, you know, the community sort of supports that. Like there's no reason logically that our logo should be an emoji of two fish, but that kind of stuff of just like, it just is. We don't question it anymore. I think that we're very lucky, but also that we are part of an ecosystem.

I also am very grateful. We're like, yeah, that folks at Google use Glitch as part of their daily work when they're explaining a new feature in Chrome. Like if you go to web.dev and their dev portal teaches devs how to code,

all the embedded examples that are these Glitch apps that are running, showing running code is incredible. When we see the Stripe team building examples

of like, you want to use this new payment API that we made? Well, we have a Glitch for you. And literally every day they ship one. It sort of goes and says, well, if you just want to use this new payment API that we made? Well, we have a glitch for you. Literally every day, they ship one. If you just want to use this new Stripe feature, you just remix this thing and it's instantly running on Glitch. Those things are incredible. I'm very grateful

that the biggest companies and most influential companies in the industry have embraced this. I don't disparage them at all, but I think that ability to connect to the person who would be like, I just want to do payments. I've never heard of Stripe. And we have this every day. Oh, yeah. They come to the glitch and they're just like, I just want to take credit cards. I didn't know there was a tool to do that.

I was going to build it myself. And everyone shrieks, no, no, don't do that. My God. Yeah. Use one of their competitors. Fine. But building it yourself is something a lunatic would do. Exactly.

Right, right. And I think we forget that there's only so much attention people can pay. There's only so much knowledge they have. Everything we say is new to someone. That's why I always go back to assuming no one's ever heard of me and explain the basics of what I do and how I do it periodically. It's no one has done all the mandatory reading. Who knew? And it's such a healthy exercise too, right? Because I think we always have that kind of beginner's mindset about what glitch is. And in fairness, I understand why.

Like there have been very experienced developers who have said, well, glitch looks too colorful. It looks like a toy. And then we made a very intentional choice at masking. Like we're doing the work under the hood. And you can drop down into a terminal and you can run whatever build script you want. You can do all that stuff on glitch. But that's not what we put up front. And I think that's this philosophy

about the role of the technology versus the people in the ecosystem. I want to thank you for taking so much time out of your day to, I guess, explain what Glitch is and how you view it. If people want to learn more about it, about your opinions, et cetera, where can they find you? Sure. Glitch.com is the easiest place. And hopefully that's something you can go. And a minute later, you'll have a new app that you built that you want to share.

And we're pretty active on all social media, Twitter, especially with Glitch, at Glitch. I'm on as at Anil Dash. And one of the things I love is I get to talk to folks like you and learn from the community. And as often as not, that's where most of the inspiration comes from is just sort of being out in all the various channels, talking to people. It's wild to be 20 plus years into this and still never get tired of that. That's why I love this podcast. Every time I talk to someone, I learn something new. It's hard to remain too ignorant after you have enough people who have shared wisdom with you, as long as you can retain it. That's right.

Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. So glad to be here. Anil Dash, CEO of Glitch, or Glitch as he insists on calling it. I'm cloud economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. Whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry comment telling me how your small team at AWS is going to crush Glitch into the dirt just as soon as they find a name that's dumb enough for the service. If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need the Duck Bill Group.

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