The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - ANTHOLOGY — Advocating for and supporting open source (Interview)

Episode Date: November 18, 2022

This week we're taking you to the hallway track of All Things Open 2022 in Raleigh, NC. Let's set the stage, here's what we like do when we go to conferences — we setup our podcast studio at our booth where all the other vendors are and we talk to everyone we can. We give out t-shirts, stickers, pins, high fives...and it's a blast. Today's anthology episode from ATO features: Arun Gupta (VP and GM of Open Ecosystem Initiatives at Intel), long-time friend Chad Whitacre (Head of Open Source at Sentry), and Ricardo Sueiras (Principal Advocate in Open Source at AWS). The common denominator for each of these conversations is advocating for and supporting open source. Special thanks to Todd Lewis and team for inviting us to come back to ATO. We enjoyed meeting long time fans and new ones too.

This week on The Change Law, we're taking you to the hallway track of All Things Open 2022 in Raleigh, North Carolina. Let me set the stage. This is what we do when we go to these conferences. We set up our podcast studio at our booth where all the other vendors are. We give out t-shirts, stickers, pins, high fives. We're there to cover the hallway track and meet everyone we can. Today's Anthology episode from All Things Open features Arun Gupta, VP and GM of Open Ecosystem Initiatives at Intel, longtime friend Chad Whitaker, head of open source at Sentry, and Ricardo Suarez, principal advocate in open source at AWS. The common denominator for each of these conversations

is advocating for and supporting open source. A big thank you to our friend Todd Lewis and his team for inviting us to come back to all things open. We enjoy meeting long time fans and new ones too. And of course a massive thanks to our friends and partners at Fastly and Fly. Bandwidth for changelog is provided by Fastly. Learn more at fastly.com and our friends at Fly let you put your app and

your database closer to users all over the world with no ops required. Check them out at fly.io. This episode is brought to you by Influx Data, the makers of the InfluxDB time series platform. With its data collectors and scripting languages, a common API across the entire platform, and highly performant time series engine and storage, Infl series database that combines a hot compressed in-memory data store and a cold object store. Unlimited cardinality lets you slice and dice on any dimension without sacrificing performance and more options than ever to query data including native SQL support. If you want to learn more and see how the new InfluxDB engine works, sign up for the InfluxDB beta program at InfluxDB.com slash changelog. Again, InfluxDB.com slash changelog. Let's talk about Intel because when I think of Intel, I think of an industry giant.

I think of microchips. I think of Intel inside. Yes. I think of hardware. I think of an industry giant. I think of microchips. I think of Intel inside. Yes. I think of hardware. I don't think of open source much, but I guess you're changing that narrative, helping us understand what Intel does for the developer communities, for the open source community, et cetera. Yeah. No, I mean, I joined Intel about six months ago. I run the open ecosystem team at Intel.

And the funny part is I call my role as chief storytelling officer. Okay. I know Intel has done open source for over two decades, actually. We were influential in creating Linux Foundation. We are part of 700-plus open source foundation and standard bodies. For the last 15 years, we are the top corporate contributor to Linux Kernel. Really? We are among the top 10 contributors to Kubernetes.

We are among the top contributors to OpenJDK, PyTorch, TensorFlow, LLVM. These are the projects that sometimes you don't realize that Intel is contributing. Yeah. So we have always been there. So my role really here is to make sure we tell the story better. That's it. This is a challenge for many brands in tech, really.

I mean, they have such a focus on selling their product that they forget to tell their story, right? And I think that's part of the story, is you're not just the microchip manufacturer that you are and the heartbeat of most computers it's it's beyond that it's the community partner community citizen and like how are you cohesively involved i think branches forget to really tell that part of the story and they just the chief storytelling officer i think is an amazing title we should have more out there because that's kind of what marketing does but it's not their job their job is to like

help people be aware what the product is not necessarily a brand story but they kind of what marketing does, but it's not their job. Their job is to, like, help people be aware what the product is, not necessarily a brand story. But they kind of go together. How do you deal with that challenge with, like, marketing and storytelling and whatnot? Very much so. And actually, the part, and I work with our marketing team very closely. Yeah. Helping them understand that mind share is what gives you market share. Helping them build that understanding,

that funnel is very important because all along, I mean, over the 20 years, open source has only grown. And it is sort of the primary way. Open source developers are the new decision makers. You no longer go to CIOs and they say, you know what, sign a bill. If the developers are happy,

if they are engaged in the, exactly, if they're engaged in the community, if you have showed them the right skills, they're going to make the change in the organization. And most of the time, these days, developers are building their applications on a CSP. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Private Cloud, whatever, Edge. Intel is prominent across all of these,

you know, Intel architecture is prominent across all of these venues. And that's exactly what we do is we contribute to all the projects that I talked about earlier. We want to make sure that these open source communities are fully optimized and run in the most efficient manner for the developers. We just have to do a better job of storytelling.

Do you get involved in the OSPO-related matters? Like, we had Chad Whitaker on from Century earlier. He was talking about how they give back, and it's $2,000 per developer they have on their team. Now, obviously, Intel's probably got more than 2,000 developers. I don't know. How many developers does Intel have at large? Do you know?

So, Intel has over 19,000 software engineers. Wow. Over 19,000 software engineers. And. Over 19,000 software engineers. And OSPO is part of my team. So one of the teams I have is open source program office. I've actually built and ran OSPOS at Amazon and Apple. Okay. So I've built my career over the last 20 years all exclusively on open source.

So I've kind of been around for a while. Yeah. And here, honestly, the part that gets me most excited is Intel has done so much in the open source world. When I was given an offer to join Intel, I was like, what does Intel do in open source? And now I'm like getting goose bumpy moments every day as I talk to maintainers, as I talk to executives across the company.

Yeah. We just got to do a better job of storytelling. So how long have you been at Intel then? Oh, about six months now. Six months, okay. So you're getting started? Still getting warmed up. Just getting warmed up.

Just getting warmed up. So I guess the gift and the curse of a strong brand and a longstanding history is that it can be very, the gift is it's strong and it's longstanding and so you have this, you've been cemented in the mind of people. The hard part is changing that perspective. You know, we've watched Microsoft transform slowly from evil empire

into, like, open source, supporting pioneers in certain senses. Some people still don't believe that narrative. But we've seen kind of the mind of developers slowly change about Microsoft over the last five, ten years. And so I'm just wondering, like, how you attack the challenge of people who think Intel and don't think anything. We don't think about software. We don't think about open source. I had no idea that they contributed to Linux kernel and Kubernetes and all these things. And that's an awesome story. But like, how do you get that story out there and sustain it and

actually get people to realize it and change their minds? Right, and that's exactly my job. That's exactly. So I have an OSPO team, which is all on the open source compliance processes part of it. I have an events team. So this event is sponsored by Intel out of my team and my budget. We were at KubeCon last week. We're going to be at LF Member Summit next week.

I'm also part of several foundation boards. So I'm on the CNCF governing board and the governing board chair. I'm also on the OpenSSF governing board. I'm the alternate on the Linux foundation board. So really meeting our industry peers, influencing the direction, wearing like an Intel t-shirt. There you go. Whatever story I tell, as long as you're wearing that Intel brand,

it's a long journey. I'm not in it for the short run. Right. I'm a marathon runner. I'm not a sprinter. So I'm like really pacing myself and open source developers are always skeptics. I'm an open source developer myself.

I need to hear that message through my multiple channels in order to start believing it. And see it for yourself for a while, too. Exactly. So that's sort of the approach here, that we're going to start making ourselves prominent across these different channels. Why it matters, how it matters. Kathy Zhang, she is part of the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee, elected member over there.

She gave a keynote at KubeCon last week. And I think she said it well, that we want to benefit the open source community as much as open source community has benefited us. So that's sort of the party line on how I see this going. Because then you know it's a fair relationship. Symmetrical.

Do you think part of your, I guess since you've got six months in so far, do you think part of your journey and part of your challenge with Intel might be changing the inside of Intel to more better embrace open source and better understand the story? Like, is there any uphill battle within Intel you have, not just externally, like getting other developers or the open source community to understand Intel's story in open source and how you support open source? Is part of your struggle and challenge from within? I don't think so at all, actually. That makes it easier.

Yeah, no, I mean, it's the world changer. It's the game changer. Because you're so prolific and you're so embedded, you personally, I wonder if a lot of the gain and benefit is not so much just you, but you bring a lot to the table, right? You bring a lot of skin in the game, a lot of trust from past experience and how you've personally been in the training for so long. I just wonder if they're aligned. If your experience and what you bring and what Intel brings,

obviously they're big, but do they align well? Maybe that's why you took the job. No, they do. They do. They very well do, actually. And throughout my career, I've always, like, I'm a runner. So as a runner, I like doing uphill runs. I don't like downhill runs. I mean, they're required. How about flat?

Yeah, well, flat is okay. Flat is boring. Yeah, I'm an uphill runner. That's a good percent grade. I'm not much of a runner, though. Yeah, I love uphill runs. So, I mean, I really see this as an uphill run, and I'm really enjoying it.

If you hear Pat and Greg Lavender, our CTO, talk about their strategy as the company is pivoting towards software-first narrative, If you hear Pat and Greg Lavender, our CTO, talk about their strategy, as the company is pivoting towards software-first narrative, open ecosystem is front and center of the strategy. So having that top corporate alignment across the company, having a leader like Pat and Greg at the top with such a strong conviction, actually, you know, you don't have to do much.

You just have to kind of rally up people, build the strategy strategy, and say this is what we're going to focus on for the next year. So I think internal, they're always going to be naysayers, so you have to work them along, nudge them along. And I've worked at companies like Amazon and Apple, build open source narrative over there, so I'm not at all afraid in that sense. But I think it's a lot going to be,

how do we make ourselves accessible, available, transparent to the open source community so that they start believing us. Because as they say, the first person to stop fooling is yourself. But we believe in this very strongly. And we hope that passion comes across clearly to the open source community. So you've talked a couple of ways that you're supporting open source developers. One is direct committing to the projects. That's the best form of support. We actually submit code to the Linux kernel.

The other one is sponsoring events and conferences like this one. What are some other ways that Intel can support the community? Oh, yeah. Code is king in open source communities. So contributing code is the best way by which we can do that. Sponsoring events is what makes this open source thrive, because that's where you find out about it. As I said, we are part of several foundations as well.

So we continue to do that over there. We do a lot of open source mentoring. Multiple ways we engage, you know, pull request reviews, giving keynotes, you know, talking to other developers, and not just for us, but how do we make the broader open source community better? So that is sort of a personal goal of myself that I would love to do. I mean, I've been doing open source mentorship for a while. Yeah. We want to do more of it. So let's, like, as they say, the rising tide raise all the boats. Right. So I'm really looking at how can we raise all the boats together. Sure. So that's, you're still early, but what might that open source mentorship look like or manifest as, as you establish it?

We don't know yet. Don't know yet. I mean, it's very early in the cycle. Gotcha. But really the focus for now is going to be tell that story in a very authentic, very connected, very transparent way. And course correct if that story is not gelling with the developers. Like we can't go with a very strong mindset that this is our story. I'm always looking for change. You know, what is it gelling? What is it not gelling? And be able to tune our messaging, still keeping true to ourselves.

What does your team look like? What do you break down? The OSPO and other things that are involved under your role. What does that look like? How many people are involved? We don't share the number of people usually, but I have an OSPO team. That is for all typical OSPO-related functions. I have a community and a DevRel team. That maintains open.intel.com.

That's our public-facing website, blogs, et cetera, over there. And I have a team that is all focused internal strategy and alignment where we work across multiple VUs to bring them on the same page or understand what their strategy is. So a lot of internal alignment.

Gotcha. All right, belabored segue here. You're talking about telling Intel's story. That's a communication skill. Communication skills are non-technical skills. You just gave a keynote about non-technical skills and how important they are. Let's talk about that. Sure.

Yeah, well, I mean, as I said in the keynote, non-technical skills are really a force multiplier to technical skills. And in an open source community which is so globally diverse, non-technical skills are really a force multiplier to a technical skills. And in an open source community, which is so globally diverse, so inclusive, these non-technical skills are really your differentiator. Right. And in the keynote, I particularly talk about kindness and gratitude. I think as an industry, we don't do a good job of talking about kindness and gratitude enough. Yeah.

We can only be more kind, only be more gratuitous. So that's the skill I talked about and how that brings a more meaningful connection at work, how it gives you more serotonin, how it produces endorphins as a painkiller, cuts down your cortisol level, all of that. So kindness and gratitude truly has benefits at work, at your personal life. But then later today at 12.45, I'm also giving a talk which talks about three other skills. Communication, conflict resolution, and adaptability. Yeah.

Conflict is a big one. It's a challenging one. So if you're looking at a non-kindness, let's say, give me an example of a non-kindness and a way you would respond with kindness and an example of kindness and gratitude when you speak of that. How do you see that manifesting? Yeah, I mean, in a work setting, particular work setting, let's say you see a new employee join in and them struggling out,

you know, how to navigate the org or them not being able to ask a question because they feel threatened, they have an imposter syndrome, whatever it is, right? Just talk to them one-on-one. Just help them understand that, hey, you know what? I know you are new. Sometimes these things could be overwhelming. My son is a junior at UPenn. And as he did internship this year, he was saying, you know, I don't understand the org structure. So there was somebody else who helped him understand the org structure. So I think that's a simple example.

You see somebody struggling, you offer help, that, hey, I'm going to help you understand the org structure. And let's say if they are threatened to ask a question, if you are senior in the team, talk to your manager. Let's create space for these new people in the team who are early in their career. Give them that flexibility. Give them that space where they feel encouraged.

Give them that psychological safety in the team. So I think that's a very simple act of kindness. Helping somebody, let's say a person new in their career, send a pull request. Say, hey, I'm going to volunteer to do a code review. And really help them understand how code, lots and lots of examples that you can do on a day-to-day basis. So you're talking about conflict resolution,

dopamine, serotonin, these are neuroscience-related ideas and sciences, right? Very much. Do you study psychology, neuroscience? Like, how do you up your game when it comes to this background knowledge? Yeah, no, I'm a runner. So I try to run every day or lift. And one of the things that I love doing running

is listening to a lot of podcasts. So I listen to a lot of podcasts, particularly around mindfulness. There is a podcast by Dan Harris, who was an ABC News anchor for 20 years. He had a national breakdown on national TV. And he changed his career from a news anchor on Good Modern America. He runs a podcast on mindfulness.

So I listen to a lot of that. And they talk about a lot of these elements over there. Then I also listen to a podcast by Adam Grant. He's an organizational psychologist at Wharton's. And he wrote the book, Rethink. And I listened to a lot of his podcasts. And pretty much the theory and the concepts behind these podcasts is what gets me excited

that it truly is. When you start reading the study behind it, that it actually releases those hormones that makes it so much better. It's very exciting. And it's very, as they say, you know, it's a very eureka moment. Oh, I didn't realize it. It's so simple.

Right. There's a true connection. I mean, people forget they have a brain, right? We're so human, we forget that we have a brain. The brain is the most powerful organism that we have in our body. If it didn't do what it does, we would not do what we do. That's it. And if you don't have your brain, you're not you anymore.

Like you, like either maintaining it from your diet, your exercise so that you don't have dementia or get like disease that come from all these different things in life. And just, you know, over time things happen to our human bodies, but we forget that our brain is just such a critical organ that we have that we're just like, we don't think to study it. You know, we don't think to understand how it works and how we work with it. Right. You know, and how it's so much is exactly who we are.

And I think you brought up a really good point over there because oftentimes we see the signals in our body that I'm not feeling, I'm feeling lethargic or I'm gaining weight or my arms are not looking good. You can see those symptoms and start working out, physically working out. How do you recognize those symptoms for mental fatigue? So I think as much as it is important for your physical well-being, it's very equally important, I would say rather more important for your mental well-being. So feeding your mind these kind of content about general kindness, gratitude,

you know, being a nicer person. I mean, end of the day, the summary is, just don't be stupid, be a nice person. And we forget that sometimes. Right, it does simplify down. I do like the way you described the difference between technical and non-technical skills in a way that's easy to understand.

The technical skills are what we know, and the non-technical skills in a way that's easy to understand is the technical skills are what we know and the non-technical skills are who we are. We have tried and true methods for changing what we know, right? Like you put your head in a book and you read it or you go get some experience. Changing who you are can be a more difficult matter. Do you have any advice on changing yourself so that you improve your skills? Yeah think, unfortunately, over the last three, four years is where there are courses coming up where they talk about these non-technical skills, why they are critical. But there is not a whole lot of material over there. I would say my personality has changed, evolved over the last few years as I have started listening to these podcasts. So I would really encourage people to find, to start reading about it.

And sometimes you don't realize how consciously or subconsciously it starts impacting you. Like mindfulness is such an important thing. We don't realize it. We're always either ruminating in the past or being anxious about the future and spoiling our past for that. So how just being mindfully present in the current moment would really allow you to

enjoy and soak it in and move forward. I think that to me has really brought a lot of peace and calm to myself, within myself. And once you have that within you, then you're a lot nicer person to everybody else. Right. We have a podcast in our network called Brain Science and my co-host, it's on a hiatus right now, but we're actually in talks of bringing it back. Shout out to Marielle.

But she's a doctor in clinical psychology. And so I'm the layman, basically. I'm the non-neuroscience graduate and she is the doctor. And one thing we say on that show is be your own scientist. And I think what happened with you and maybe part of your shift was self-awareness. And so a lot of this question you asked, Jared, and this change of who you are, the first step to changing who you are is being self-aware of who you are. If you don't know who you are, you can't understand why you are who you are and what you're doing and stuff like that.

And so as you become more aware or self-aware of the things that perplex you or upset you about who you are or things you want to change, you can only change what you measure and you can only change that if you're aware that it exists or whatnot. So I would say that maybe part of your change was the fact that you became more aware of knowledge and more self-aware of how you mirror image from that knowledge. This is what neuroscience says I am from a brain perspective, a personality perspective. This is the knowledge out there, and this is who I think I am. And through that, you're like, well, this is who I want to be. And maybe through your running and self-awareness, you probably have tons of time to think when you're running, right? So when you're running, you're listening, you're reflecting, you're retrospectiving,

you know, all these things. How long do you run generally? Anywhere from half an hour to hour and a half every day. That's a lot of time to think. Yeah, well, and I think, Adam, you brought up a really good point because if you can't measure it, if you don't know what needs to be fixed,

as they say in software, the hardest problem is to find the bug. Right. Once you know the bug, then you can debug it rather quickly and get the solution out. So I think,

I would say two people that probably know you the best and can give you good advice, controversial ones, your partner and your boss. Yes. And be very open

and receptive to their feedback. Don't go with a judgmental mind. Whatever they say, listen in, soak it in, and see what needs to change. Because that'll make your work life happy. That'll make your work life happy and home life happy. That's where you split. That's all happy right there.

This concept of being your own scientist though is this concept of curiosity. If you're not curious who you are and what you are then how are you gonna reflect the world you know how you're gonna be a participant in community a participant in your workplace in your family and your friend groups whatever like you'll be maladaptive as Mary L says she doesn't like say bad she doesn't like say negative she likes a maladaptive you know if if you don't have this idea of curiosity and this ability to say, this is, you know, the be your own scientist, like be curious and sort of like self-document

who you think you are and then reflect on that. It's kind of like journaling, things like that. You hear this advice a lot. It's almost painfully cliche, like to say, well, you know, the way to get better is be self-aware and to journal and things like that. And it's like, I know that advice, but it truly is true. Like if you know who you are, it's easy to understand who you are and to change if you don't like that reflection. Absolutely. And look yourself in the mirror. Yeah.

You know, physically you see, I don't like myself physically, but you can't do that mentally in a mirror. So look in a mental mirror. And I think your spouse and your boss are probably the best mental mirror on how you're operating. Right.

Because they have the right perspective, at least. Yeah. Probably check in with your parents, too. They know you pretty well, depending on your age. Yeah, it depends, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, I think the parents' thing is

they will never give you a critical feedback. With boss and spouse, they'll give you a critical feedback, which is what you need. Right. So you mentioned the tease for later. So no one listening to this show right now is here at this conference, so they can't go at 1145 and listen to your talk. But you mentioned conflict resolution, which I think is key, and adaptability. Can you kind of unpack just a little tease to what you're going to talk about? Absolutely. When you think about conflict resolution, I think one of the biggest things in conflict resolution is how do you separate task conflict

versus personality conflict? You know, we are all aware of the Peter Druckmann's model of forming, storming, norming, performing. I'm not familiar with that. Oh, okay. I'm not either. So there is a Peter Druckmann's model that if you are building a new team,

there are four stages. Forming, storming, norming, and performing. Forming is when the team is coming together. Storming is when you're trying to understand what everybody's roles and responsibilities are. Norming is when you really start like gelling with each other and performing is you're performing at the top notch. Four stages, right? So they say in the early stages is a lot of personality conflicts because you don't know the people. Oh, yeah. And less about task conflict. But as you go towards more advanced stages,

personality conflict goes away and it's all become task conflict and that's what makes your team performing. That's what allows you to be more productive because I am able to look through you as a person and say, you know what, the problem is in the task, not in the person. So I think that's a very important element

about differentiating between task conflict and personality conflict. That's what I'm going to talk about in that particular one. On the adaptability side, you know, they talk about, is the survival of the fittest. That's the Darwinian theory. But if last three years have they taught anything, is survival of the most adaptable.

And there have been studies done again. I think there's a talk by one of the doctors on TEDx. She talks about studying 10,000 living organisms, one thing that keeps them alive. And this is not humans, living organisms, plants, trees, et cetera. Adapt. Adaptability. Yeah. That is fundamental. Resilience, adaptability, they cetera. Adapt. Adaptability. Yeah. That is fundamental.

Resilience, adaptability, they're synonymous in some ways. Absolutely. Absolutely. So I'll talk about that element on how adaptability at work. Like schedules change, teams change. Right. We were just talking about that with regard to artists and generative AI and where it's like you can't go and change the fact of the reality

that this stuff exists. Artists need to adapt and coders, as code generation becomes better and better and better, software developers are going to have to adapt, move up the value chain, right?

Exactly. And artists are doing that. So like either adapt or you die, right? Yeah, I mean, there's a book which talks about who moved my cheese. Oh my gosh. I'm just about to mention that. So like either adapt or you die, right? There's a book which talks about Who Moved My Cheese.

I'm just about to mention that. He said first, I was going to talk about that book. We've mentioned that book obviously. You have to read it. I love it. It's what, an hour or two maybe? It's a short guide. Everyone who deals with change,

which is every human being, should read or at least read the summary of that book because it's such a good book to understand change. You have to adapt. And in that book, Spencer Johnson makes a quote. He says, if you do not adapt, you become extinct. Yeah, there you go. That's exactly what is true. We have seen what happened to Blackberry, Blockbuster,

you know. Right. Steven Spielberg. This guy was rejected by USC Cinematic Arts School, and now they have a building in his honor. Oh, wow. Michael Jordan. He was cut from his freshman high team, or sophomore high team. We know who Michael Jordan is.

Right. So, I mean, if these people would not have adapted, they would be nowhere. Yes. You can't just sulk and cry. Right. And, you know, it are, if these people would not have adapted, they would be nowhere. Yes. You can't just sulk and cry. Right. And, you know, it's okay to sulk and cry. Right, but then get up and change. And change.

Exactly. And the last, the first skill that I talk about is communication. And in that, we talk about how it is important to do mindful talking and reflective listening. I know it is super important that when you're talking to somebody, there's an intent and there's an impact. Are those two aligned? Because there could be several factors around you by which the other person may not be hearing it well. Are you doing it well?

And then the second part is the reflective listening. Am I listening to you as opposed to, I mean, as Stephen Covey said, most people listen with an intent to reply back as opposed to understand the point of view.

Right. They're waiting for their turn to talk. Right. And they think, oh, can I finish my sentence? I almost cut you off there.

I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. No, but that's what it is. I had to do it. My bad. No, no, no. It's all good. But I think we do that.

We do that as podcasters often because we do this every day. So we listen to a lot of people and we have to respond. But we also have this pressure to be smart on these microphones, to have a point to say, to say it eloquently and to be heard. And sometimes you don't listen very well because you're just kind of like. You want to bring up the cheese book. Exactly. Or plausible science or something.

There's a question lingering in your mind. Precisely. Imagine the person is talking before. And it's harder to make the conversation good, though, too. Correct. I mean, in everyday conversation, you're not on a microphone. It's not recorded and played back to thousands and thousands of people all over the world. So you don't have that pressure.

But in our case, specifically, we do have that pressure. So we do want our shows to be well-received and light and a good narrative, a good story arc to the thing too. We have an agenda of sorts. Agreed. We have to maintain. No, I agree. Completely agree.

I mean, imagine somebody is talking for 45 seconds. You listen to the first 15 seconds and then the question is lingering in your mind. You have not paid any attention for the next 30 seconds. Yeah. That's not mindful talking or reflective listening. It's hard to hold on to that question but still continue forward. Put a notepad.

Write down the question. Because oftentimes you are wanting to jump in with the question because you think you'll forget the question. Have a notepad. Get out your phone. Put in a note that I want to ask that question. You can always come back to the context. Speaking of notes, I do that in my brain when we talk.

So I have this virtual notepad that I write a question on or write a note on, and that one is conflict resolution. I'm going to go back to this thing that we were talking about there because one thing with conflict that's interesting is that, and you mentioned with this, what is the… Peter Druckmann's model. Peter Druckmann's model. Forming, storming, norming, and performing.

Right. So as part of that, that initial stage, right, I imagine it kind of like a puzzle, right? When you put a puzzle piece together into it, it doesn't always perfectly go in. You kind of have to like shift it. And so what happens is you go from disconnection to connection. And conflict usually happens when you're disconnected, right? You become disconnected. So I want to kind of go back to that point.

I've been meeting. So I just wanted to hold on to this question. I've been holding on to that. So I want to use your point to go back to that if we could. Thank you. And I think I was reading a story about Wilbur Wright brothers on how they created the first plane. And in that story, I was reading about conflict resolution, that these two brothers had only task conflict. They would fight with each other like hell, but on a task. End of the day, they will still sit down together,

have a beer, and that's how they came up with the plane. Is that right? That's a good story. There are so many stories where conflict resolution is a key. It seems like their ability to do that has to have something to do with disconnecting from the task at hand, like their personal identity.

Because you can actually not like my idea or the way I'm, my process and say, that's a bad process. Here's a better one. And I can take that and I can adapt and change and agree with you. Or I can say, well, that's my idea or that's my process. And so you're attacking my process. Therefore, you're attacking me. Right.

But what happened though, was at the end of the day, they went back together and had that beer. Right. The connection. They remained connected. Well, they were brothers, right? So when you disconnect, you don't have communication. So you walk away or they walk away assuming he's stewing, they're stewing, I'm stewing, whatever.

Right. So much assumption and it's not true. And when you come back together and you say, well, let's continue this day or this beer, like you remain connected, you remain united in your efforts of whatever it might be. It's the act of connection that brings us back together and resolves conflict. It does. It does. And I think it's a lot harder in this Zoom world where as long as the discussion is over, you just shut the laptop down.

It's like, I'm just walking out of here. Right. No. Or text communication is even harder, right? Yeah, exactly. Because I remember, I think KD, who used to be a Warrior, who joined San Francisco Golden Gate Warriors team. Kevin Durant. Kevin Durant.

Yeah. So he sent a message to his teammate when he was leaving OKC Thunder over a text message. He said, hey, I'm leaving the team. Ouch. Dude, you were the star player of OKC Thunder for so many years. You can't do that kind of stuff disconnected. Yeah. Face to face. Pissed off.

Of course. So I think if we realize these are day-to-day situations, day-to-day things that we can always do better. Well, it seems like one of the skills of communication is picking the right medium for communication, right? True. His message

there would have probably been much better received personally. Yeah. Because it's important, right? And he picked the wrong medium for communication, and that delivered his, I don't know, lack of care. It itself was a message, the fact that it was a text message. Yeah. And so that's such a struggle sometimes,

is like knowing when do I put the texting down and pick up the phone, or when do I hop off the phone and drive over to their house. The Wright brothers had two things going. They were brothers, which means they had a connection, but also they were sitting right with each other. Difficult for us in the digital age, like you said. Well, I think one thing I would recommend is put yourself in the recipient's shoe. Yeah.

Empathy. Would you like, exactly. Yes. Would you like to be in that position that somebody texted you? I'm leaving. My five-year-old friend where we are competing in the court every day together, practicing every day together, and texting me. How would you feel it?

Right, right. So have that empathy, and that goes a long way. Yes, yes. Well, we can't invite everybody to your talk, but you do write on a blog for Intel, so it's open.intel. Do you blog? Is that where the blog is at? That's right. I didn't invite everybody to your talk, but you do write on a blog for Intel. So it's open.intel. Do you blog? Is that where the blog is at?

That's right. I didn't pay attention to the link. I saw the page. I didn't pay attention to the URL I was going to. So open.intel has your post and other posts from your team there. Great. I'm sure this talk you're giving will be on YouTube as part of All Things Open.

Yeah. Where else can people catch up with you or pay attention to your journey at Intel? Yeah, my Twitter handle is the best, Arun Gupta, one word. That's where I tweet prolifically. I try to. So catch me there. My DMs are open.

I think Brian was talking about it. I'm a servant leader here, so reach out to me. I'm happy to talk about anything, literally anything around the world. Well, I can attest to your DMs being open because I just DMed you earlier this morning and here you are. Right, right. It works, that's how it works.

Literally within an hour, we made this happen. How cool is that? That's where the opportunities are sitting. Yeah, yeah. Well thanks so much for joining us. It's been awesome. Thank you so much, it was awesome. Thank you for having me. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Square.

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Again, changelog.com slash square. Again, changelog.com slash square. so chad it's uh it's been a while man yeah it's been a few years i missed you it's been a few years you're one of my favorite people here you know for real come on stack yeah for real come on now you're making me blush this is a moment right you're making me blush you see that this is a reunion this is why it's a podcast and not a video. So you can't see me blushing. This is a reunion. I think it's special, too. I've been watching what you've been doing this century. Found it. I'm happy that you're there.

Thank you. I'm happy for all the hard work you put out there, regardless of the road it took and how it ended. Yeah. You were always a hard worker. You always had a good heart in the mix. And we need more people like you out there doing the work. For real. And I'm happy you're here.

Well, like I was just saying before we jumped on the mics, you know, it was probably, it was 2017. I was here two years. I forget if it was like 16, 17 or 17, 18. But, yeah, I remember the last time I saw you guys here, you had just launched a new brand. Yeah. Because I don't want to say that you guys were scrappy, but you were scrappy at the beginning. Yeah. You know what I mean?

And then you came out with the changelog brand. You had like, at the beginning. Yeah. You know what I mean? And then you came out with the changelog brand. You had like, you really invested in it. You know what I mean? And took it to the next level and was like, all right, these guys are like, they mean business. That's fair. They're going to do it. But that was like five years ago.

You know what I mean? That was like. Yeah. Maybe more. Yeah. 2016 was the new brand. Yeah. Is that what it was?

Yeah. So that was probably it. 2016, we're here. It was October. Yeah. We literally were just launching it. Yeah. I think the website was maybe live a day, maybe a week.

It was not long. The website was the last thing. And we had the thin banner only, not this big banner behind us. Yeah. We had a thin one, and it just said, like, Hacker to the Heart. Hacker to the Heart. Yeah. Because we are.

I love it. Hacker to the Heart. For sure. So how many podcasts do you guys have now? Can you even keep track? You just like... Yeah, you lose them underneath the couch cushions at this point. Yeah, exactly.

Right. We do five weekly shows. Oh, yeah. That podcast. Oh, yeah. Five weekly. Wow. So we got to one a day, but across different podcasts.

Not like the change log five times a week. It's like little verticals. That was our move. It's worked out pretty well because we have a lot more voices, a lot more diversity in the topics, everything. It was just us two doing five shows a week. I have more burden to share, too. If we try to do five shows

a week and do all the work, it would never work. Of course. You got to scale it up. Open source is a community of communities yeah i mean it's an interesting thing to think about the open source community and what it means you know it's like people have different takes on it but i like what you guys are doing you're like you've got the umbrella but then you've got like the different like you said the voices in it exactly bring. I think it works pretty well. Obviously, there's sub-communities that we don't serve because you have to add another podcast to do that.

You've got to find the right person to partner with. There's lots of things to do to get that done. But at the same time, we're doing what we can. Right. I love it. We're reaching the communities we reach. And like you said, we have kind of the umbrella. The changelog is always going to be for everybody.

Yeah. How's the community around it? communities we reach. And then, like you said, we have kind of the umbrella. The changelog is always going to be for everybody. Yeah. And so. How's the community around it? Because I remember you were launching, like, the Slack and the other stuff like that and the website with it. Slack's still great. I mean, it's active every day. There's a lot of people every day.

You didn't jump to Discord? You're still on Slack? We did not. We're on that fence because it's a struggle. You didn't go back to IRC yet? We did not. We've had a few people tell us to go to IRC. Yeah.

Of course. It's a struggle because it's hard to switch. You know, so Slack doesn't keep us with features necessarily. They keep us with pain to move. Yeah, right. Of course. And, like, you're going to lose people in that movement. Yeah.

You know, and Slack is well known. Yeah, yeah. And a lot of people use it. So it's like, well, you you know I know you all have a Slack we have a Slack other brands we work with have a Slack so it's like

how do you choose where to put your your community real time messaging basically you know we want to be more open source aligned

we want to be more community focused aligned but it's hard to make that switch when that's true right we're so embedded we have the Zulip or the Mattermost. It's almost worth just paying for it, really.

We would entertain a community partner who would be like, we're sponsoring the community Slack or the community, whatever that might be. I find a way to do that. And that way it's like X per month and then maybe we profit a little bit, but maybe just kind of surplus more or less to cover like higher months because Slack will go up or down based upon usage. We pay you guys, right? As a Sentry sponsor?

Yeah. Sentry sponsors, right? Yeah. Yeah. I hope so. Yeah. Good. For sure.

No, we love you guys. We love you too. Are you using Sentry? Yeah. I use it a couple times a week. Okay. Elixir, Phoenix. Every Monday for sure.

Every Monday. I think I saw it. You're getting into the Phoenix stuff? Yeah. It's nice. I've been on it. I mean getting into the Phoenix stuff? Yeah. It's nice. I mean, we've been on it ever since 2016. Really? I don't really have any complaints.

I'm slow to adopt the new stuff. They got a lot of new stuff in the Phoenix world with LiveView and a lot of the new component stuff. Okay. But I'm just, we deployed it in 2016 and just keep working on it. We're going to do a redesign here soon and probably rethink some of our stuff. So that was pretty early. Yeah.

We were the only open source Phoenix app for a while that you could actually look at and see how to build one. Kind of soup to nuts. That was in production. Now there's a handful of them. Plausible is a good one. Plausible. Plausible, yeah. I like Plausible.

Yeah, they're awesome. So what's new with you? Century, man. How long has it been? You've been there nine months? So I've been in Century for two years. Two years. Believe it.

Believe it. You've been hiding then. Okay. So maybe like nine months ago you came out of the woodwork. Here's the story. Here's the story. So after Get Tip Gratipay, that wound down at the end of 2017. I thought it was Get It.

Well, that was a huge controversy. That's why I didn't go anywhere. Okay. We can figure out how to pronounce it. I digress. Okay. Continue. Get tip.

Get it. Gratipay. Yeah. So wound that down at the end of 2017. And then had a little bit of rebuilding year in 2018. And then I went to work as an engineering manager at a security company called Proofpoint for a couple of years. 2020. 2020. November 2020 is when I started at Sentry. And I came in as an engineer on the open source team. Okay. Cause Sentry, as you guys know, but somebody ends up listening to this,

Sentry started life as an open source side project in 2008, way back. All right. So Kramer, 70 line Django plugin, you know, and it was just a community open source side project for years. Didn't start commercializing it until 2012. That happened on Heroku. I don't want to say RIP Heroku, but Heroku and, you know, $5 a month plug in on Heroku. That's where I started using it. Okay. And then what? Let me fast forward. 2012 commercialized, 2015 raised funds, 2016 came out, hey, we're a startup now. And so now we're at 300 people, right? Fast forward. I joined, we were at like 130 and I joined as an engineer on the open source team helping do

release management around Sentry so people could still run it themselves and then that evolved, so I was there for a year as an engineer and then stuff kind of shifted the fellow I was working with, he moved on my boss changed what he was doing and that's when I started the OSPO at Sentry, so I was there

for a year as an engineer and then said hey let's start a true OSPO and they said alright why don was there for years as an engineer, and then said, hey, let's start a true OSPO. And they said, all right, why don't you run it? So now I'm head of open source for a year. So it's been a year, right? Yeah. Yeah, today's November 1st, right? It feels like nine months in my brain, but I think 12 months is probably more accurate

that I've seen you be out there more. Well, and the thing that kind of put me out there was the funding stuff, right? I think that's what we're getting to. It's like, yeah. So a year ago, yeah, published this thing about Sentry's funding of open source software, which had always been there, but was kind of disorganized. And so a year ago is when we really got organized and put together a right proper program around funding open source. So that was a year ago. And then last year, excuse me, last week, we just announced the second go-around of that. So Century's committed, and we're doing it again. Last year, we did 155K.

This year, we did 260K. We're kind of tracking our growth as a company. So yeah, man, having fun. That's cool. It's great. So funding's a big part of it. But Century, our whole product is open. So a lot of what I'm working on now

is helping our engineering culture scale to still have those conversations on GitHub, still have those discussions. You know, because we've got like 100-plus engineers. It's really about helping Sentry engage with our user base, with the open-source community, with the developer community on those open source channels, primarily GitHub.

Excuse me, listen to me, GitHub. Primarily GitHub. You know what I'm saying. Well, you know, when you say get, you think tip. You know what I'm saying? I don't blame you. I made it. But shout out to Charlie Shangaco,

who is still running Liberapay. Do you guys remember this? Forked Gratapay. When Gratapay went down, he forked it, like the business and the code, because it was an open company, right? So he forked it and is still running with it, Liberapay. So it's still out there.

You can still fund some free software folks on Liberapay. That's cool. Keeping the dream alive. Liberapay. I didn't know that. When you talk about the Sentry stuff, you talk about it from a numbers perspective. So far, how do you talk about it from an impact level?

I know you talk about community and engagement, but how do you get specific with the impact of dollars in open source? I know that's been a big issue for you your whole career. So how do you quantify it there? Yeah. So I think with Sentry specifically, you know, we're trying to do breadth and depth. We're trying to give some folks a really significant amount of money, $10,000, $20,000, right? $5,000, $10,000, $20,000. And then we're also trying to go broad, let's say. Like we poll our employees and say, hey,

what are the projects you like? We try and give at least a little something to everybody, you know what I mean? To try and grow it from both sides. But really, when we look at, like, a lot of people say impact in funding, and there's this idea in open source funding that it's like, well... Who cares? No, what I want to say is, like, the string's attached, right? It's like, so I'm going to give this money, and then what are you going to do with it? You know, I'm going to follow up and, like, well, did you do more pull requests? Like, what was the impact? Yeah.

And the way we think about it, the way I think about it is like, look, I already got value from you. Here's a free gift right back. Well, yeah. Because you gave me the free gift. Like, we spent this past year building on, like I was talking to Josh, like came up to me from TypeScript ESLint, right? It's like, yeah, we've been getting value of TypeScript ESLint all year.

Right. And this is giving back for that value that we receive. So, you know, he asked me, he's value that we've received. So, you know, he asked me, he's like, what can we do to, you know, to thank you or whatever? It's like, just keep doing what you're doing. You know, it's like no strings attached, like keep, keep doing it. You know, and if we stop using your stuff, then we'll stop paying you, right? It's like, I appreciate that perspective because it's very much more on the, just appreciation side than it is on any sort of quid pro quo or any weirdness that

goes on. It's like, no, this is for you. I already got my value. Because it can get weird, right? It can. Like if you bring money in and some folks don't want the money and that's fine. Right. You know, go back to this idea of open source community and the different ways to slice it. Like I do think of the open source community having a commercial aspect and having a community aspect. Right. And a community supported aspect a community-supported aspect, right? So some folks don't want any money. That's fine, right? Some folks like Sentry,

we think of ourselves as building open source software. We're doing it commercially, right? But then there's this community-supported open source, part of the open source community. So I think of it as one community with these different aspects to it. And Sentry, we see ourselves as part of the community, and so we're trying to take care of that community-supported,

that part that's depending on that, do right by the community. How do you determine numbers? How do you... First principles. Since you run the Ospo... Ospo, yeah. Ospo, yeah.

I don't know why I said... Osprey. Ospo. So you run Ospo, right? How do you interface with the business side of Sentry? Now, of course, developers started the organization, so it's a little easier, but not all Ospos will have the luxury you have in a dev-oriented organization, right? But how do you say, give us this much money to put back?

How do you quantify dollars? Sure. Is there some sort of like 10%, is it a tie? How do you think about it? Yeah. So again, I'm super lucky because, you know, David Kramer and Chris Jennings, the founders of the company are, you know, all in on open source, right? So they're setting that tone from the top. And Sentry, again, open source is a core part of our company identity. It's where we locate ourselves. We're a commercial open source company. We think of ourselves as an open source company. Okay. That said, I actually did some napkin math towards the end of Gratapay. Get it.

I tried to think about it from a first principles approach of what is fair, right? There's all this talk about fairness and companies making all this money off the backs of open source labor it's like all right so time out like let's have the conversation what is fair what like what would be an amount that you saw a company giving and you as part of the community side of open source community supported side would be like yeah all right that's cool that's fair number we came up with i came up with at the time, that Sentry has picked up with, is $2,000 per year per developer employed at Sentry. Okay?

Let me unpack that. That was a lot right there. Yeah, please say that again or something. So $2,000 a year. And the thinking is like, all right, how do we value this? There's a few different ways to value it. Here's how we're going to think about it.

What we're doing is making our developers more productive. Because if that open source software didn't exist, what would we have to do? Write it ourselves. Write it ourselves, right? Write it ourselves or pay somebody else for it, right? Right. So, kind of, you know, maybe put some links somewhere if this goes anywhere. But, like, yeah, that's what we ended up with. It was like looking globally at all

right what's the making some bunch of assumptions what's the amount that our developers like you know what's the amount by which their productivity is increased because of the open source software that they have available and that yeah the number we came up with was two thousand dollars a year right that that's the increase in their productivity now you can argue that you can. You can differ. But the point is, let's have that conversation to say, first principle is like, what is fair? So let's start from that. And so, you know, we did 155 last year. You know, so last year was like, all right, we got 75 devs. We got 2000 bucks a pop. 150 is our budget. Now we figure out how to spend it as a separate thing, right? And so this year set the budget, you know, a while ago, but yeah, we put it at 260.

So it's roughly in line with our growth as a company, but it's pegged to 2,000 per engineer on staff. Does that answer your question, Aaron? Yeah. It does. I mean, because a lot of what's happening with OSPOS is burgeoning. Like, it's new, so new organizations are taking this more seriously, taking the principles of giving back to open source more seriously. And as you see more and more folks like you guys be examples to follow, you've got to think, what's the science?

How do I determine my number? Is it per the money we make? Is it revenue? Is it a tithe? Is it 10%? How do we quantify the dollar amount? And I think that's a good number because you do base it on engineers. Obviously, I can't think of one engineer who would develop anything and not use open source. So obviously,

there's a touch point there. So that's a key metric, right? You wouldn't say, well... Come up with something, right? Yeah. It's something that somebody can adopt pretty easily. Okay, 2K, maybe it's like, okay, we can't do 2K, but we'll do 1K. But we'll base it on engineers. We have 50 engineers, this is 1K, $50,000. So that's how we think about it. Again, different ways you could. You could do a percentage.

10 would be high of, well, it depends on what you do it. Yeah. So that's how you set the budget side. And then there's how you divvy it up, right? And what I like here is we're getting better and better tools, right? Like, you remember five years ago, six years ago when we were talking, you're like, did GitHub sponsors, did that even exist? You know what I like here is we're getting better and better tools. You remember five years ago, six years ago when we were talking, did GitHub sponsors, did that even exist? You know what I mean?

Open Collective, barely. Barely, yeah. GetTip, Gratapay was winding down. Some others, Liberapay was coming up. Patreon was still pretty early days. But now we've got GitHub sponsors. We've got Open Collective. And what I love now is these new platforms,

thanks.dev, so shout out to thanks.dev and to StackAid, two new platforms that we did pilots with for this year's Sentry funding programs. We use, we do our foundations, right, like direct payments to Python Software Foundation and Open Source Initiative and different. But then we use these four platforms to give out these uh

donations to kind of the long tail right um anywhere from yeah like six seven thousand dollars for the year down to like a hundred bucks for the year right the long tail again going back to that depth and that breadth and what enables that is these platforms um and so open collective and github sponsors are kind of that I want to call it the first generation, and maybe Githip was like the zeroth generation or something. There's even older ones too, right? Pledgy. Shout out to Pledgy.

You remember that one? Pledgy, yeah. They were integrated into GitHub. They had a partnership with GitHub where they were like in the sidebar. You remember that? Good old days. Old school, right? Yeah.

Guess who else was integrated onto GitHub? Uh-oh. We were. GitHub.com slash explore. the GitHub? Uh-oh. We were. GitHub.com slash explore. No. Explore or trending? Tell me a story. Explore.

Explore. Tell me a story. The early days. This is way, way early days. So our RSS feed of our podcast was live. It would take the RSS and turn it to HTML on Explore in the sidebar. GitHub, they changed. I mean, Microsoft. GitHub, they changed.

Funding Microsoft. I don't know more of that. That was before Microsoft's days. We're a 20th century. It makes sense. They grew up. It was fun. It was great. It was fantastic.

It made sense. That's awesome, man. Here's a fun little sidebar then. Last year, we did our funding program. Then we did a follow-up virtual event with half a dozen maintainers, and it was hosted by myself and Jessica Lord. Shout out, Jessica, the PM for GitHub sponsors, right? Yep. And here's the funding I'm trying to get to.

Am I going to tell the story? Yeah. Sentry's creative director, founding creative director, he's no longer there. Did great work. He came from GitHub because Chris Jennings, one of our founders, came from GitHub, brought Cameron with him. And so Cameron invented the Octocat. Is that right? Yeah.

Nice. And then ended up at Sentry, like did all the Sentry stuff. Now has moved on. And so when we went to do this event together, we were like, hey, GitHub, we want to do artwork that includes the Sentry, like, you know, character and Mona, the Octocat, like in one artwork. And at first they were like, yeah, no, we don't do that. And then, you know, we had some conversations. And long story short short you can go on

you know we'll put the link in or whatever but yeah that artwork made it out to the light of day so we got a little Sentry

GitHub collab a collab so yeah nice you know just a moment it's not the feed right

where it's like evergreen but just like a little little moment anyway that stuff's fun right we've done some collabs over the years with them we had Jessica Lord on the show

yeah yeah I mean really look Devin Zugal say again oh yeah that stuff's fun right we've done some collabs over the years with them we had Jessica Lord on the show yeah yeah I mean really look Devin Zugal say again we did a show with Devin when sponsors first launched okay

and then we did a show with Jessica Lord when she took over I just think it's so awesome to see now it feels like status quo right now it feels like

GitHub sponsors which is awesome right it's like now we've got that baseline and now what I'm seeing with ThanksDev and with Stackade is like next level, which is just what we need. We need to keep moving it forward, you know,

figure out how to make it easier for companies like Sentry. Like I'm doing a lot of grunt work to make this work. The easier we can make it for companies, like you said, like find those simple. All right, here's the simple story. Here's the right amount. You know, here's how you get it to the right dependencies, like the simpler we make it I mean what I want to see is like I don't want

Century to be out front like oh good job Century, you have this great program I want it to just be like, of course, like everybody does this it has to be normal, you know what I mean? That's where we're going to really have that I mean this is kind of getting back to what you were asking about impact and how we think about impact you know, some of it is, yeah, the impact on the projects themselves right now.

But look, let's be honest. Like, $260,000 isn't actually that much. You know what I'm saying? Like, it's a lot, but it's not a lot. When you look at, you know, the OpenSSF that has, like, $5 million, you know, like, here you go, right? Like, the larger the fangs and everybody everybody like microsoft they're able to do these larger dollar amount things but relative to the size of their company that's what we look at right and feel good about what we're doing is that like have you ever thought about if more organizations

that made sense now like maybe really dev focused organizations yeah took on this idea of 2K, 1K per. Do it, man. Let's do it. Yeah. You know, what would happen? Like have you ever quantified that number? I mean, in the sense that I started from that to get to the 2K, to be like, well, here's the value and here's the number of, you know, here's the, again, this is a few years ago I wrote this thing. But like here's the size of the tech industry worldwide and here's the 22 million

software developers in the world or whatever right like do that division so from that point of view starting there um but yeah bottom up it's like every year we just need like spotify uh just put out a program you know what i mean right did you have them on did you talk to to pair from spotify not about that yeah so so they. So they did a thing. I saw even Chrome just did like, well, what? GitHub did half a million earlier this year. And then Chrome has half a million for web frameworks. $44 billion.

That's how much it would be if it was... $22 million times $2,000 each? If it was $2,000 times 22 million developers across the world. It sounds about... Yeah, because that's how I was thinking of it. $44 billion. How big, yeah, because I was thinking of it as like. I had to do the math, I'm sorry. No, I appreciate you.

I appreciate you. I appreciate you. Because if you think about, think about it this way. The open source, the community supported open source ecosystem, community. Think of it as like another sleeping tech giant. Okay? You got how many tens of thousands working for Microsoft, for Meta now, I guess, Apple, Amazon. The open source community is like another tech giant.

Right. Right? So look at how much revenue do those tech giants bring in and use that as a benchmark for the revenue that the open source, like, the value that the open source communities bring into the world? Yeah. That's the way to think about it. Yeah, I guess it's kind of good, too, to put that. Yeah. You put that money back in the hands of the, you know, the maintainers and the creators and whatnot.

You guys want something controversial? Mildly controversial? Please. Sure. There's a discount. There's a discount. The flip side of this is there's a tax. And it's not the same for everybody, but when you average it out, there's people that will work on open source software for a lot less than you would need to pay them to work on your proprietary software.

Right. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. So I think that factors into it, to be honest, right? It's like, and this was me, because you remember when I was doing Gidip. I pronounced it that way for you. Thank you. When I was doing Gidip.

Like, I was there on the platform. I swear you said Gidip originally. I'm sure I did. You're right. I'm probably on tape with you saying Gidip. Yeah, I think so. We'll go back. We'll go back.

If we have it, we're going to put it here right now. The archives, yeah. So we're here today to talk about sustaining open source. Can you help us talk about that, Chad? Oh, my heavens. Absolutely. All right. So Chad Whitaker is my name.

Gidip is my game. Gidip.com is a website which primarily right now is being used by open source developers and the companies that love them. And it's a crowdfunding site where you can go and you can set up a dollar a week or three dollars a week as a gift to someone whose work you love and admire and are inspired by yeah like i was working for not very much money really hard on get it because i loved it because the intrinsic motivation the passion passion, you know what I mean? And I think like that, that there's something there. We don't need to focus on that, but it's like, yeah, well, what I think that means is that there's a way to make this work.

Let's bring it back around to this. I think that we can actually get to the dream and the dream is for, again, going back to that idea of there's an open source community, there's a commercial open source side, there's a side that doesn't want any money at all, but then there's that community supported portion. We can make it work. We can make sure that those folks in the community supported open source, you know, part of open source, that they get what they need. You know what I mean? That they get their, is it $70,000, $80,000, $100,000 a year?

Enough for the health insurance, you know what I mean? Like, that's what we're trying to get to is the careers, right? To be like, kid coming out of school is like, I see a viable option. Jessica talks about this from GitHub, right? Like, I see a viable option to go into open source as a career on that community-supported level. I think we can get there. Maybe not next year, but we keep chipping away. to go into open source as a career on that community supported level. Yeah. I think we can get there. Maybe not next year, but we keep chipping away, you know, and it'll tip.

We've got to hit that tipping point. And it's predicated on the fact that your organization uses that open source. So you said if you stop using X, you stop giving X. You just move your budget somewhere else. And it's not because you don't value their work anymore. It's because you literally don't use their work anymore. Yeah, which basically is not valuing their work anymore, but not in the sense of a personal thing. You know what I mean? Yeah, exactly.

That's what I mean by that. Yeah. Is that the work is still valued, but you're not using it anymore. So organizationally, you're not valuing it. So therefore, the dollars you put into the OSPO funding bucket, whatever it's called, now gets allocated to the projects you are using so that if you know, if you have users, you should have funding. Yeah. I mean, jQuery.

Somebody's still using jQuery. A lot of people are using jQuery. It's only like 83% of websites a couple years ago. That's fine, man. There's different parts of the tech curve. Yeah. I think we can figure it out. There's still a lot of work to do.

Appreciate you guys helping with the story. Yeah, to the road ahead, for sure, man. I'm glad to have you back on to explain it because, seriously, we missed you. Yeah, thanks, man. I saw you pop up nine months, 12 months ago, and I was like, whoa, there's Chad. We're working at Century. He's back. And by the way, you all probably know this.

Century's one of our sponsors. We love them. But I was like, wow, there's Chad working at Century. That's awesome. And we love Century. And we use Century. And it's amazing. Heck yeah.

We appreciate you guys too, man. Good to see you, Chad. Thank you. Thank you. Love you guys. Love you too. All right. Love you.

Love you. Wrapping it up? Yeah. All right. That's it. Cool. Cool. It's wrapped. so

so This episode is brought to you by Retool, and they have a private beta ready for you to check out. This is the fastest way to now build native mobile apps for your mobile workforce. There is no complex frameworks anymore or tedious deployments. You can build mobile apps with what you already know, like JS and SQL. This is all in the browser, no code or what they call low code. Join the wait list. Head to retool.com slash products slash mobile.

The link will be in the show notes. Again, retool.com slash products slash mobile. You guys are making my whole year doing this. You seriously are, man. You're making our year by saying that. No, but I'm being sort of genuine. This is like, you guys just absolutely kill podcasting. Thank you, man. We aim to please.

So we're here at All Things Open. We got Ricardo. Ricardo, yeah, that's right. How do you say it last name, Ricardo? It's Suedas. Suedas. It's a Spanish name, but it's actually from Galicia. So I often, when I go to Portugal, I get excited, right? Because they think it's a Portuguese name, but it's actually Spanish.

So Suedas. Suedas. Suedas. Not a very common name. No, I've never seen that one before. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So open source, AWS, what do you do? Tell us.

Hi, everyone. Well, listen, first of all, I just want to say a massive thank you for inviting me onto here. This is a real dream come true for me. But what I do is I- We love having listeners on. Sorry? We love having listeners on. Having listeners on the show is the best.

Yeah, exactly. So what I do is I've been working in open source for over 20 years and more recently I joined AWS as a developer advocate. And so what I try and do is I try and act as the voice of the open source developers internally. And I hope I try and do is I try and kind of act as the voice of the open source developers internally. And I hope I try and make AWS the best place to run open source technology. So a lot of the time I spend speaking with builders, we call builders people actually do the hands-on stuff.

So that could be a maintainer. It could be someone just, you know, doing some documentation for a project or actually just running it. Right. And then really excited about how they've run it in a specific way. I want to share that with everyone. So I do a weekly newsletter and I do a bi-weekly Twitch show where we try and get some of that energy out so more people can know about these open source projects. Is this all internal?

No, it's external. So the Twitch sessions is external, the newsletter is external, and I try and feature the projects that people create. And they fit in lots of different categories, right? But a lot of them are developer experience. So AWS is a great tool for building stuff on, right? But sometimes people want to make things simpler,

so they build an open-source project that solves a lot of problems, right? Right. And so I see a lot of that. I see a lot of these really cool projects that then people uh love using so a good one uh from a guy called australia emk uh he created this tool open source tool called former 2 and that allows you to from your console reverse engineer cloud formation scripts through through a through a gui tool right is that right yeah yeah so it's it's tools like that, right? Every week, I'm amazed, right? Because I do a weekly newsletter, and I

feature these in my weekly newsletter, and I'm always blown away by the creativity, the passion that these people have. Well, you do what we do, basically, but you do it for AWS, and we do it for open source at large. Or, I guess, software at large, right? I mean, but there is no

trench we don't dig in, you know? You can't do it and put it out there. Yeah. And that's why I love your large, right? I mean, but there is no, there is no trench we don't dig in, you know? You can't do it and put it out there. Yeah. And actually, and that's why I love your podcast, right? Because every week, right, I get to know about a new different open source project or an insight that I didn't know about before. And it's not always just about the project, right? What I learned from you guys is the stuff around actually how you build the project, what the inner workings of it, the things that you don't necessarily think. But when I speak to customers, right,

they want to know how this stuff works. Yeah. And increasingly, I'm quoting stuff from your podcast. What? Yeah, yeah, seriously. That's awesome. That's a way to do it, Jared. Yeah, totally.

That's a lot of pressure. I'm going to have to start saying quote-worthy stuff more often. Oh, yeah. Well, you win some, you lose some. Quote me on that. But, I mean, I got a question for you, right? You've been doing it for a long, long time, okay? And every week you keep the energy, you're just as enthusiastic.

So how do you do it? What is it that makes you kind of like get up and think, yeah, we're doing another changelog? I got it, man. Go ahead. You got to love the game. Yeah. If you love the game, it's easy. Yeah got it, man. Go ahead. You got to love the game. Yeah. If you love the game, it's easy.

Yeah, totally, man. You know what I mean? No, that's cliche to say, but if you do love the game, even if you get tired a little bit, you can still kind of show up for the most part. But if you love the game, you kind of come at it and you enjoy it and you find like you do with new passions, you see what people are making and you get like their energy gives you energy, you know. The world of software is just, like, always, always changing.

So, like, every single year, it's kind of the same but kind of different. You know what I mean? It's the same in the fact that it's technology and it's movement, it's innovation. But it's like, what's going to be big this year? Generative AI? Was it Web 3? Well, maybe not. You know, it's like, you know.

Web 5 now. Web 5. Platforms. No ops, you know what I mean, no ops required. A lot of things like that, automation happening. So, I mean, every year, every six months, it's always something new, always something changing. So that sort of like constant change kind of keeps me going personally. Yeah, yeah. What about you, Jared? What keeps you? Yeah, I would say mostly it's the people.

You know, how can you not get excited to talk to somebody who's wicked smart and, like, passionate and driven and interesting person who's doing something in the world? It's hard not to be excited about that each and every week. Of course, sometimes, you know, some days are easier to do it than other days, and some days we're like, especially a week where we're doing, like, J.S. Party and maybe we're doing a backstage, and it's like, how many podcasts can I record this week? Right, right. And by Friday we're kind, especially a week where we're doing like J's Party and maybe we're doing a backstage and it's like,

how many podcasts can I record this week? Right, right. And by Friday we're kind of like. And then ship. Yeah, and then ship as well. And then ship too. But it's hard because the thing is, I mean, I do my weekly newsletter. I've been doing it two and a half years, right?

And I know how hard it is sometimes just to get up and just go through it, right? Yeah. But you've been doing it for more than two years, right? So that takes something, right? 13 plus years. 13 plus years. 13 plus years. And what I like as well is that I like how you interject within the people you have and the stories you tell, the stuff you're doing with your own sites, right? And you say, oh yeah, yeah, we're doing this way. We tried this and we tried that way and we found this work. So what should we do? And I think that's the key to a good podcast, right? Is asking the right

questions and you just know how to do it. And I think it's because you're practitioners. You do this stuff, right? That's exactly the thing. One of the things that my fears as a podcaster about software is that I will turn into a guy who only asks questions and not a guy who actually does stuff. And so we build software. We're developing things, and we can actually call to mind things that we were doing earlier that day or that week or challenges we're having, and you can't really fake that. And so if we quit writing code and we quit building stuff and we just talk to people,

well, you lose a bit of your edge. And so I found that in the university. A lot of the teachers there lost their edge. You know, my best professor when I was in school was the guy who was adjunct and he taught databases at night because he was out there in the field building databases all day. He couldn't teach during the day because he was doing databases. And then he came and taught us. And I was like, this guy knows his stuff versus the guy who theorizes and is smart and eloquent but doesn't actually build databases all day. He was my best teacher and so I was like,

okay, there's something to this. We need people who are out there doing the stuff, talking about the stuff. It's so much more beneficial. Yeah, that's a good point. In the trenches. Yeah, in the trenches for sure. But it's hard though, right?

Because a lot of people, I mean, that's a good example because I know in my past, right, when I was doing training courses, I didn't do many of them. But the difference between a good one and a bad one was one that just basically went through the process, right? The other one, when you ask questions as well, yeah, I do training three days a week, but two days I'm doing consulting or actually doing this stuff. And then they actually bring back some of their work into the training, right? So it makes everything real and relevant, right? And actually, I'm doing a lot of stuff with students at the moment because I'm very passionate about education. I used to do a side hustle of running a school.

Okay. Not technology, though, just mainstream school. Sure. Because I kind of like try to kind of, in the UK, it's very hard for a group of kids who fall through the gaps and they end up nowhere. So my school was for that kind of group of kids that fell through the gaps. But they were lovely kids. They just needed a bit more support that a normal school can give you.

And one of the things I'm doing with students is teaching them open source. Nice. It's interesting because I speak to customers and they have a very wide knowledge of open source, right? But there's few that do it really well and know their stuff. The vast majority that, you know, in the middle somewhere. But too many just don't know anything, right? So what we're trying to do is go in and teach, you know, kids, students age 18 over, trying to give them some of the important, you know, baseline.

And also starting from the history, starting from the past, you know, what is copyright? Where did open source come from? You know, what was the Free Software Foundation? So that they don't end up in a situation where they're making poor choices, right? Yeah.

Because you see that a lot. I see that, I sometimes see projects and they make some schoolboy errors, right? When it comes to the licensing or how they think about community and all this kind of stuff, right? So that education thing is really important to me at the moment. So I'm spending a lot of time with that.

And even though I'm doing that in AWS, I don't really touch about AWS much. It's more generic, open source, right? Right. But it's cool. It's really cool. Very cool. So tell us real quick as we close up, tell us your newsletter, the Twitch stream,

like how can people connect with that stuff? Yeah, so I'm on Dev2 under the AWS. So unfortunately, I don't have a very friendly URL I can share with you. But if you just Google AWS open source, you should find the newsletter. And the show we do every other week, it's on Fridays and it's twitch.tv.aws.

So I'd love to see some of the ChangeLog family come along and check it out. Yeah, for sure. And again, thank you a lot, guys. This has really made my week.tv.aws. So I'd love to see some of the Changelog family come along and check it out. Yeah, for sure. For sure. And again, thank you a lot, guys. This has really made my week. We appreciate it. We're happy to talk to Ricardo, so thank you for talking to us.

Thank you. All right. Oh, my God. That is just mind-blowing. Is that it? High five, dude. That's it. The show's done.

Thank you for tuning in. It was a blast being at All Things Open and an even bigger blast meeting fans, new and old, and everywhere in between. Again, a big thanks to Todd Lewis and team for having us at All Things Open. We appreciate the invite. Of course, big thank you to our friends and partners at Fastly and Fly. Also to Brakemaster Cylinder. Those beats are banging.

All right, that's it. This show's done. Thank you for tuning tuning in we will see you on monday Thank you. Bye.