The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Finding collaborators for open source (Interview)

Episode Date: November 10, 2019

Jeff Meyerson, host of Software Engineering Daily, and the founder of FindCollabs (a place to find collaborators for open source software) joined the show to talk about living in San Francisco, his thoughts on podcasting and where the medium is heading, getting through large scale market changes. We talk at length about his new project FindCollabs, the difficulty of reliably finding people to collaborate with, the importance of reputation and ratings systems, and his invite to this audience to check out what he’s doing and get involved.

Bandwidth for ChangeLog is provided by Fastly. Learn more at Fastly.com. We move fast and fix things here at ChangeLog because of Rollbar. Check them out at Rollbar.com. And we're hosted on Linode cloud servers. Head to Linode.com slash ChangeLog. This episode is brought to you by DigitalOcean. Guess what?

DigitalOcean recently added MySQL and Redis to their list of managed databases. Their full managed databases lineup now includes the three most popular databases out there for developers postgres mysql and redis eliminate the complexity involved in managing scaling and securing your database infrastructure and instead get back to focusing on building value for your users. Learn more and get started for free with a $50 credit at do.co.changelog. Again, do.co.changelog. What's up, everyone? Welcome back. This is the Changelog, a podcast featuring the hackers, the leaders, and the innovators of software development.

I'm Adam Stachowiak, Editor-in-Chief here at Changelog. On today's show, Jared and I are talking with Jeff Meyerson, host of Software Engineering Daily, and also the founder of FindCollabs, a place to find collaborators for open source software. We talked with Jeff about living in San Francisco, his thoughts on podcasting and where the medium is heading, getting through large scale market changes. And we also talk, of course, at length about his new project, Find Collabs, the difficulty of reliably finding people to collaborate with, the importance of reputation and rating systems, and his invite to the ChangeLog audience to come and check out what he's doing and find some collaborators. Jeff, what I find interesting about your past is you've lived a lot of cool places. Austin, not far from me. I live in Houston. Chicago, which I have family in Chicago,

and Chi-Town's an amazing place. And then finally, the epicenter of all things, right? San Francisco. Seattle as well for a little bit, right? It's been the same mostly because I actually, wherever I am, I'm mostly just on the internet. It's really a matter of how's the weather and how steep is the grade of the hills that I'm running when I go for a run outside. But other than that, it's mostly just I'm on the internet. What about in terms of a podcast for those who are recognizing? Is that Jeff Meyerson's voice? Yes, it is.

Your friend from Software Engineering Daily probably recognized that voice. It's a clashing of two podcasts that are very similar and often listed right next to each other in people's favorite podcast list, which we love to see. Our name there, we love to see your name there as well, Jeff. From a podcaster's perspective, though, now you're in the Valley. You weren't always there. That's very different from us. And one thing we were talking about when we met at OpenCore Summit

and were hanging out was how you have the opportunity for a lot more face-to-face conversations than we do being remote. So I'm just curious if your location now being in the Valley, living in San Francisco, if that's changed your perspective or changed your opportunities in terms of podcasting or even in terms of the tech industry? Yeah, the reason I came here was to be closer to the things that were really emergent and at the tip of the spear. As you guys know, the world is changing in a way where now there's

interesting stuff going on everywhere and technology is infused with whatever local set of concerns there are. So like, you know, in Houston, for example, Adam, I'm sure you could go out and find oil companies and banking industries who are going through a quote, unquote, a digital transformation. There's plenty of interesting software stuff going on there. And you could ask them to point you to their new vendors, and they would have probably a wide suite of new vendors and new technologies and new design patterns that they're exploring right now because there's so much going on in software. But what I like about San Francisco is there's kind of a filter for people who come here where it's sort of hard to make it here. Like, it's expensive. It's hard to kind of, you know, elbow your way into the

right conversations and figure out kind of how things work here. But there is so much opportunity and the overall ethos of San Francisco is so welcoming. And there's such a diverse lineage of arts and culture and technology and all these different things that, you know, for somebody like me who is really addicted to just stimulus of all kinds, I haven't found any place that comes close to it. So another trend when you're talking about opportunities elsewhere or not necessarily the ethos of having to be in the valley, which was very much a press upon many entrepreneurs and technologists, like you should be in this area. We're seeing opportunity in lots of different places.

Now, another thing that we're seeing, which as a podcaster I've been tracking, is the move away from in-office colleagues to remote work. And we just had a call with Bob Martin where we were talking about the pros and cons of that. A team that's co-located, he says, will always be more productive together than a team that is distributed. That being said, we have huge personal and life advantages of remote work.

Kind of a side thing that's happening there and something I think about, I'm curious as a podcaster, Jeff, if you think about this, is the thing that remote changes for podcasters is it removes the drive time commute, which is where a lot of our audience is listening to this. In fact, if you're out there listening, you're probably in a car, you're probably on public transit, you're probably on your way to or from work.

Curious if you're thinking about that or if you're concerned that this awesome thing where people can work remote is not so awesome for us, who kind of have that commute as a time for them to listen to our shows. Bob Martin is Uncle Bob, right? Yeah. Correct. Right.

So I think Uncle Bob is hilarious, and I think he's got a lot of software wisdom. But I've got to say I can't disagree more with him on this one. And I think it makes sense that he believes that because that has been an antiquated axiom for a while, but you know, for a long time, it was just an axiom. And the reality is like, our current structure of how software is built is not going to last. This model of gigantic corporations where most people go in and do extremely boring work all day and hate their lives, despite the fact that they have the skills that they could use to build world-changing technologies from their bedroom, that's just like a market inefficiency that will erode over time. And one thing that makes that glaringly obvious

is just you guys know how pleasurable it is to work from home and live the life of a software podcaster. It is unbelievably enjoyable. You know, I wake up pinching myself every day. And my sense is that you guys have, you know, an element of that as well. It's like all you could ever want, basically. And yet we're not even like, I'm wearing my indie hackers t-shirt right now. We're not even close to the top of the totem pole of the indie hackers in terms of like how much money we're making or the kind of freedom that we truly have. Because we're all, we're on a schedule. Like we got to crank, you know. These indie hackers, they just make a business and it just like, they go to sleep and it makes money.

Most people just don't know about this movement. Uncle Bob is just wrong here. And yet you're drawn in the valley. Absolutely, because there are new things that are extremely hard to build and that make sense to co-locate for. If you're building out Databricks and you're trying to go to market

with a world-changing data engineering technology, if you're building something as novel and strange and controversial as Airbnb or Facebook, you basically need to treat your company like a military force. And you simply cannot get the level of necessary bandwidth from digital communication. And you cannot get the level of necessary bandwidth from digital communication, and you cannot get the level of kind of understanding of the discipline of your workforce or the creativity of your workforce through Slack channels, all due respect to GitLab. Yeah, I mean, you need face-to-face for a reason. It's called humanity because it's actually humanity. It requires humans. And I think as part of that, human communication has evolved

in the last 100 years because of the internet. Sorry, not even the last hundred years, last 25 or so years, really, you know. And so communication has always been in the human race face to face. You know, for a while there we had television and that was, we still do. For a while. I'm sorry. It's becoming less and less important though. It's sort of like abstracted to something else now.

On video. Then you have this advent of the telephone, maybe even say a walkie talkie. But the point is, is that human communication thrives, in my opinion, by face to face. But I'm on your side, Jeff, where I'm advocating, and I did on that show with Uncle Bob, that there's trade-offs, right?

Like if you're a distributed team, it's not going to be the same as a co-located team. And there's trade-offs on how you build that team. And as you mentioned, you don't build a Facebook or a Google or Airbnb with a co-located team in everything. You've got to have, you know, sort of this militaristic attitude and formation around the ranks so that the humans can thrive together. It's so weird to talk about humans as a human. It's weird. Anyways.

So I guess I'm not quite following you. Are you saying he's right or wrong then, Uncle Bob? Because you're saying we have to be militaristic and face-to-face, but you're saying that he's wrong about remote work. So maybe, Jeff, what you're saying is like in the short term, it's true, but over the long run, as we get more used to this kind of communication, as we get more, we see the benefits of remote work and working from home, that the trade-offs will be no longer worth it, and everybody will be working wherever they want to be because our tooling, our skills, our communication skills will all have advanced so far that there's no advantage or that the law of diminishing returns on the co-location will no longer be worth it. Maybe. We don't know. I think you're broadly correct. It's my favorite kind. No,

but like we don't really know what kinds of technology companies are going to be built in five years. And like that is one of the things I like about Silicon Valley is like whatever the weirdest technology style is, it's probably occurring in silicon valley so like drones on the blockchain right like just to you know buzzword bingo yeah some buzzword bingo that actually like it could it could make sense eventually like maybe we need a decentralized you know drone network because like only the blockchain will enable the you know necessary crowdsourced security protocols that will secure our drone force because the security problems are so difficult. Maybe, I don't know, whatever, that problem sounds difficult enough that you would want a co-located workforce who can really hash through problems quickly and effectively.

But who knows? Maybe communication will get good enough. Zoom VR or something. So let's assume a world where the benefits of remote are massive and it's become the way that developers live their lives and work. When are they going to have time to listen to Software Engineering Daily? Yeah, I mean, I kind of just operate Software Engineering Daily assuming that whatever we're going through with podcasting is a total bubble. So like, I'm basically ready for the business to die. You know, I assume it will. Okay. So you're living in a world where you assume at some point it's going

to go away. Oh yeah. Like it seems almost in the near future to you. So you know what I mean? Like you're not banking on software engineering daily as your long-term forever thing. You're sort of assuming that at some point, which, so most businesses at some point either fail, dissolve. Yeah. There's some, there's some sort of change. Like it's going to be a case, but you're saying the actual podcasting business bubble will change. I mean, maybe it's just like, this is the innovator's dilemma, right? Like you don want to put yourself as jeff bezos says in a situation where you have to throw a hail mary you don't want to get backed into a corner where your podcast literally cannot make enough money that you can you know pay for pay for your health care or something like you just don't want to get

into that situation and like yeah i'm kind of exaggerating i'm like i'm saying that um you know it's yeah it's gonna die because like probably i could get on the patreon dole if you know if all else failed but i mean i'd rather just assume i'm gonna die because i don't know if you guys know but like i used to play poker and basically the bottom dropped out of the poker market like i think most people who are in the technology industry have not lived through a significant crash. I mean, maybe the crypto people who were day trading coins. Sorry to curse, but you can bleep that.

You said Bitcoins, it's okay. I definitely did not say Bitcoins. Oh no, you can't. But yeah, I mean, so I've been through a market crash and I was not prepared for it the first time. Now I'm ready. So to answer Jared's question on what do you do with listeners, if the remote workforce is remote and not co-located

and there's no commute, your response is you have a plan B. Go do something else. Yeah. I think that's a good, I mean, you can't turn back time. I mean, things change. Right. If there's no market, there's no market. Yeah, exactly. I think my response would be, I think that they're still listening. You just have to augment and change how you deliver the message because clearly there's an interest. Otherwise they wouldn't have listened in the first place. Now they just have less time. So the interest may remain. It's just, how do you now fit in a new

time slot or less time? So we see a lot of people listening to our show, mowing the lawn, taking a run, you know, hanging out with the sleeping child on their belly or whatever, hanging out or whatever. Like there's different places where they change or they listen. So my answer is I think the commute will eventually go away completely, but I don't think we will lose our listenership. It'll just change how we reach that listenership. And I would say to that good riddance, because I would much rather have all these people get rid of that commute than like maintain our podcast.

Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. So that's like a much better, bigger win for humanity. But these are the funny and interesting things that we think about. Like, wow,

how could remote work modify what we do? And I think, yeah, you fit into where you can, and you provide value where you can. And the fact is, is that mediums do change. I mean, look at the world 15 years ago before YouTube existed. It's massively different now. And that's just like the way it is. So. I think specifically to us too, as technologist podcascasters like people who speak about software technology etc You have to ask yourself. How big of an audience do you need to make a living? You know in your case jeff you are solo In jared and i's case we're partners. So we both have you know, we're two people and families So our burden is probably a slightly heavier assuming than yours might be so

You know to answer that question, it might be, well, you might need to double your audience. You might need to only have X. Who knows what that X is? But at the same time, you also have this sort of loyalty of 1,000. So if you have 1,000 loyal followers, that's enough to some degree potentially to really kill it. But you have to ask yourself, how much do you really need?

How many listeners do you really need to thrive doing what we do in particular? Well, it's probably worth turning the camera outward or stop gazing at our navels so much and gaze at Jeff's navel. I don't know, is that a weird thing to say? Let's talk, because the thing about Software Engineering Daily, which I learned recently, Jeff, is like, it's your,

and you put out five shows a week, it's very impressive. You're cranking them out. You work very hard. You've been doing that at a sustained pace for a very long time. And it's a high quality show. And yet it's not, it doesn't seem like that's your passion. You have these other ideas, you have other projects. Today, we're going to talk about fine collabs, which is something entirely different, maybe somewhat related. So let's turn to fine collabs a little bit and say, where did this idea come from? What is it? And is it related to SE Daily at all? Or is it like just a completely different thing? So it's a, fine collabs is a solution to a set of problems that I

have been dealing with since college. And the main problem is, how do you find a collaborator who you can trust to work on a project with using the internet? So the way that this came together is, I'm a musician. And in college, I was writing a lot of music. I was composing a lot of music on the computer. I use a program called FL Studio. It's kind of like an IDE for music. And my friends are musicians. Like they, you know, they're like really good musicians, but they don't ship. I tried so many times. I was just like, hey, can you guys just like come over?

Like just my friend who's a guitarist. Can you come over and just like play some riffs? I've got a great mic set up. Like I got four hours blocked off on Saturday. I want to help you bring out your best work. We're going to write a song together. It's going to be amazing. And they always flake.

And just always. I couldn't get them to be reliable. And I just didn't understand. I couldn't understand why people did not want to actually ship. And so I have been unable to find collaborators for music. And, you know, I became a Quora power user near the end of my time in college. And Quora is amazing because they managed to gamify the question and answer process and build a reputation system around that. And so the idea of Fine Collabs is to create a reputation system around people creating projects and contributing creatively

to each other's projects in order to build this, to build your reputation. Because I built a reputation on Quora, and that was kind of the backbone. That was a bootstrap for a lot of the things I did after Quora. Quora is just a random, basically a blogging platform. And I used that to bootstrap into a lot of the things I did after Quora. Like Quora is just a random, like basically a blogging platform. And, you know, I use that to bootstrap into a lot of other things.

So like these reputation platforms are super novel. This is like a super new thing we have on the internet. The idea that you can build a public reputation. Yeah, we've got LinkedIn. Like LinkedIn is kind of this like JSON blob of reputation. But like with FineCollapse, I want to create something that's highly ordered. It's like can say here are the things i've done like i did this on saturday like i wrote software here i fixed your bug i wrote a song here i wrote the lyrics here i fixed

this production issue here like here's my backlog of stuff i've done you want to collaborate with me like i've got a good reputation so if You want to collaborate with me? Like, I've got a good reputation. So if you want to collaborate with me, you better bring a good reputation as well. I want to bring together people who are serious about their work, whether it's creative work or work work or whatever. And so that's kind of the goal of FindCollabs.

So is collaboration, collaboration, collaboration in terms of, if i'm collaborating on music is that just transferable over to collaborating on software which is transferable over to collaborating on a quilt or i don't know what other things you're going to collaborate on medical stuff or anything creative help me out here because i haven't uh i'm not very creative but like can you just say well it's a collaboration platform but maybe the things that you do to collaborate are they the same across these different niches right i mean as you guys probably know i'm pretty terrible at focusing on a specific thing and so like the initial go-to market with find collabs was

look find collabs for anything like find your collaborators for online quilt making why not right right and music and whatever and like i tried to like make all these different projects and like it kind of like some peak gain some traction but now i've kind of done you know the thing where you like you make a mistake of starting too broadly and then you really focus and you double down on the thing that works the best so obviously my best distribution channel is to software engineers so i have kind of focused find collabs into a software a platform for software engineers to collaborate on mostly open source software i love github obviously github has the linkedin problem where not the json blob resume problem but you mean Microsoft yeah well

sure whatever that's a joke no but like so that's pretty funny the GitHub problem and the LinkedIn problem are what do you do when you have too many opportunities like what do you do when there is so much opportunity in your social network that you like you can't capture it all and like with GitHub it's like an added problem because like what do you do when your social network is also an infrastructure tool like you just can't do everything that github could do like github could obviously encapsulate the functionality that find collabs has right now and you can use github to find collabs like you can find collaborators there's so much latent information on github like that's great but you know i don't see a whole lot of people like sort of finding collabs on github like i do see people like joining you know

kubernetes the kubernetes project or whatever but it's like fine collabs is really at this point focused on open source software projects um you know hence my, you know, hence my cloying to come on changelog and promote my own platform. It's a place where people can find collaborators for their open source projects. It's a matchmaking tool, a dating website for open source. Yeah. I think what's interesting is that I can't tell you where I would go on the internet to find people that I share interests with. In software, sure, it's a little easier. We have a couple of different directions.

But even when you go to a project's homepage, it's still difficult to find your way in, right? To find that they're even seeking collaborators. Sure, it's open source. You assume contributions or potential ability to become a maintainer or core team member as an opportunity just because by the nature of it. But there's no real direct conduit where in the case of something like find collabs, you're saying that there's a lot of people out there with shared interests that don't know each other that need a place to essentially gather or look for opportunities because in GitHub, it's latent. The data's there, but it's not surfaced.

And in find collabs, you're surfacing these opportunities to have shared interests and actually work together. And potentially even provide communication opportunities. Not just, hey, I like software. Do you like software? Let's make software together. But how do you do it? It seems like to me that there's a few different aspects

of find collabs today. And of course, like to me that there's a few different aspects of FineCollabs today. And of course, like all projects, it's evolving and changing. And you've even changed, probably since we talked a few months back, the aim. Because I know it was more music-focused, more broad, like you said, FineCollabs for anything you're focusing in on software. Does it seem like the reputation system itself is like the nut? That's the linchpin of FineCollabs's idea, and you're building tooling around that. But if you can provide this service of this reliable reputation system for people to work

together, then that's a hugely valuable thing. That's the long-term vision. I mean, you kind of need a lot. I mean, bootstrapping reputation system is like super hard. Airbnb, right? Airbnb in the limit is a reputation system. But obviously, like there's some bootstrapping that needs to be done because it starts with like no reputation. reputation-based home sharing platform on day one like okay well show me your reputation was well we got some photos right uh like you know no one stayed here yet no one has stayed here yet right good luck and they also have the advantage of that bootstrap process i think is much more iterative than what's collaborating on a thing because i can stay at a different Airbnb seven nights a week. I could start one week with no reputation

and by the end of the month I could have 30 reviews because each night is a new opportunity for a review. But on collaborating on software, these are long-term projects sometimes. You don't know right away if somebody is reliable or they're going to show up until maybe they showed up and they were awesome for three weeks and then week four they started to flake on you.

And so it's going to take a lot longer to build those reputations because you just have longer iterations. Yeah. It's also difficult, I would say, to quantify a reputation. What are the criteria for which people are, you know, gain this reputation? Is it simply by showing up? Is it by contributing awesome things?

Is it, you know, through pros? Is it, you know, in what way can you quantify a reputation? You know, and is it a star system? Is it a written form? Is it criticism based? Like if I collaborated with Jared and Jared flaked on me on week four, as his example showed, do I showcase Jared's, you know, reputation with me by saying he failed me and then therefore he's a failure and he will fail you as

well. My incompetence on display. Right. Like how do, how do you display reputation? What are some, well, I guess maybe less, how does fine collabs you display reputation? What are some, well I guess maybe less how does FineCollabs do it more what are your thoughts on displaying reputation? Yeah. So I think it will work similarly to how

the reputation systems we already see in place are playing out. So my favorite reputation based marketplace is Fiverr. Do you guys use Fiverr or Upwork? Heard of it. Fam marketplace is Fiverr. Do you guys use Fiverr or Upwork? Heard of it. Familiar with Fiverr.

Okay. I mean, if you're, I would heavily encourage you guys to check it out and just see what you can do with it. It's a great place to spend money. It's like, you know, I know some people like get their jollies from like impulse shopping at a mall or something i get my jollies from impulse shopping on fiverr like you can find like that's awesome game designers beats uh musicians uh like you know so i wrote an album with uh musicians from fiverr uh so like i found a bunch of like singers on Fiverr,

you know, some guitarists, like some violin. I mean, I've gotten design work, you know, that's pretty straightforward. Some software work, you know, it kind of varies like what it's good for, but like it's definitely the future, like in some ways that people are kind of underestimating. But anyway, like, you know,

when you hire a singer on Fiverr, it's a very subjective, you know, process, like even more subjective than like Airbnb in some ways. Like my typical workflow for writing that album was, you know, I would have a song written. I would have the basically, you know, the whole track written, I would sing the lyrics, and then I would send them like, basically, here's my take with my horrible, like atonal voice. Here's the lyrics written down, sing this, give it back to me. And then they would sing it, they'd give it back to me, we do a revision, you know, in most cases, like, hey, you did a few things wrong, can you like sing this like a pitch higher or something and uh and you iterate on it and then eventually like they give you a finished product

that's satisfactory and you give them a five star rating and you also give them so like fiverr has a star rating plus a review system so you know that gives you some some highly ordered like dimensionality and some some like less ordered dimensionality in the review system. And I think the reviews are optional. There's like additional like little reviews you can add. Like you can really give a lot of feedback or a little bit of feedback. So there's a wide range of amount of feedback you can give. But the net result is that they developed this reputation system that's like pretty amazing for designers and creators and

you know artists and game animators like game animators making a living on fiverr it's like quite amazing or like you know twitch like i'm the person you go to when you need to set up like your twitch channel like i'll help you with all the marketing and stuff for setting up your twitch channel like those that kind of random long tail work that you guys know as podcasters like i know as a podcaster there's a lot of random long tail work that i need help with and if i can leverage somebody on fiverr like i will absolutely pay them 30 to solve a problem that would take me five hours and sorry i'm going on a tangent here but fiverr is amazing uh and so i like fiverr a lot i clearly i love it fiverr is like it's i mean oh gosh it is the aws for people

basically okay it really is so fiverr is very under the radar This episode is brought to you by KubeCon CloudNativeCon, and you are invited to attend this flagship conference from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It's happening March 30th through April 2nd next year, 2020, in Amsterdam. This conference gathers the adopters and technologists from leading open source and cloud native communities. Use the code KCEUCHANGELOG to get 10% off your registration. Again, KCEUCHANGELOG. That's KC for KubeCon, EU for Europe, and changelog for changelog.

Or check the show notes for our special link to learn more and register and a link to the Convince Your Boss letter. Again, check the show notes for our special link to learn more and register any link to the convince your boss letter again check the show notes for our special link to learn more and register can i ask you a question real quick then on Fiverr? That relates probably back to fine collabs. Have you considered this idea of portable reputation? So if it seems like you've been able to collaborate very well on Fiverr, similar to the way you might want to on fine collabs, and one of the ways you've done that is by accessibility to talent and being able to, I guess, potentially see they've done a good job elsewhere.

They're reputable. Is there an idea where maybe there's a world where the reputation system is an API, for lack of better terms, and you can share this gig economy reputation system, FineCollabs can use it, Fiverr can use it, or is it simply just a proprietary world where you have to build your own each time? I mean, I would not be opposed to what you are describing developing. Because would it be nice to start FindCollabs leveraging that reputation model and that marketplace?

Absolutely. Or does FindCollabs simply become a feature of what Fiverr could build? No, so we have a a sign up with github right you could definitely imagine a sign up with github where you sign up with github uh into find collabs and then find collabs crawls your repositories and figures out how many like commits you've made and then it's like whoa this person is really great at contributing to software projects uh they just do a great job and they're like they're always you know you look at their like status page, it's like always green, you know, it's like straight up green, green, green. And then we could give them like a high reputation just kind of inferred from their past behavior. That could totally work. I think that would be great. I think if you take

it too far, it becomes the Chinese credit system. It's a data point, but it's not. Yeah. I can't. An indicator, not truth. A source of potential truth. Yeah, and you don't want this to be centralized into one kind of provider. But having it... I like the idea of federated rating identity. Well, I think in that kind of world,

you can't really be like Jeff M125. You got to be... You got to be you all the way, right? Totally. You can't be some inauthentic identity. You've got to be. I mean, you could do pseudonyms. Like there's some great pseudonyms on Twitter. Sure, sure.

I will give a high rating to certain pseudonym accounts. What I mean though, does this system require, so I think of it like we use Breakmaster Cylinder for a lot of our music production in fact you know everything we do is breakmaster cylinder uh music and so we know that breakmaster cylinder is what is that is that that's a platform for finding like yeah that's basically it's a person or persons we're not really sure they have this level of anonymity so breakmaster cylinder is mysterious a person yeah it's um i don't know how to describe it's a musician they're a person musician musician composer but the point is is that i guess what i was trying to drive at was

like should people on this kind of system this reputation system it would seem you don't want to attach that to an identity but but I can see how a brake master cylinder wouldn't want to be their actual name. So you have to have sort of aliases or as you said, pseudonyms. Yeah. I mean, like Banksy, I think Banksy makes a good living. I don't know how he makes a living, but, or it, or them. They.

Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. That's like brake master cylinder. Banksy makes a living by burning its own work. Right. Shredding it. Shredding it. That's right breakmaster cylinder. Banksy makes a living by burning its own work. Right, shredding it. Shredding it, that's right. It wasn't burned, it was shredded.

Shredding it, yeah. Well, I think what you're at that, that's a whole different level though. Fiverr has one of these systems. Uber has one of these systems. Amazon has one of these systems, right? Goes on and on. And I'm curious if what's happened on Fiverr

and what could potentially be a pitfall for fine collabs is happening, what's happened on Uber, where it's like anything less than a five-star rating is like death to these drivers in certain cases, right? Like they will do anything because there's like this presumption of it's not perfect. Like a four-star is really bad. And it's like, I don't know where that ethos came from, but it exists and now it's like everyone's a slave to is really bad and it's like i don't know where

that ethos came from but it exists and now it's like everyone's a slave to it is there anything like that on fiverr or like i could see where like maybe i'm a good collaborator but i had a bad day or like we just didn't get along and the person reviewed me poorly and now i got this bad reputation and it's maybe it was a personal thing because because collaboration is multifaceted. It's not like just nuts and bolts. Was it delivered on time? Was it high quality, et cetera? Have you thought about that possibility? And how do we guard against those kinds of issues?

Well, on Uber, there's a lot of drivers. And so we should have extremely high standards. And plus, it's's like people can die you know if you don't die and the ride is like safe and clean and and the driver seems like he's gotten enough he or she has got enough sleep like it's pretty easy just like yeah here's a five-star rating you know like all good, all good. If they do something wrong, that's a pretty bad sign. Like, it's a pretty well-ordered transaction. Obviously, there's subtlety, and that's why there's five stars, and you can do tipping and ratings, and, like, you know, you can write into customer service and tell them or something, you know. There's, like, all kinds of embossed

reputation reviews that you can add. Fiverr, you know, there's a much, I mean, first of all, this is like a very new domain. So like, and also in if this was an issue for find collabs, it'd be a very good problem to have, I would be very happy to work through this problem. It's kind of actually the same thing, the more that I think about it, like, if you work with a designer, and you see their portfolio, when you hire them, you see the best that their portfolio has to offer if you're not a jerk you're gonna cut them some slack you're gonna admit this is creative work like if they showed up they were reliable you're gonna give them five stars and part of the reason for that is because like most people they flake and like if somebody it's almost like if somebody doesn't flake on you

that's true you are just so grateful just so grateful because this the modus operandi of most people is just yeah i don't want to deal with that commitment i'm just gonna ghost you know it's like okay cool that's so true good luck succeeding i, that's a life hack for those listening. If you want to completely stand out from a crowd and just like set yourself apart in the world

is when you say you're going to do something, do it. You know, like don't be a flake. Like, it's amazing that the bar

is that low for success in many places. But it really, really is. Like, if we can find somebody who's reliable

and does what they say they're going to do, I know I personally will bring them business for the rest of my life. Like if we can find somebody who's reliable and does what they say they're going to do, I know I personally will bring them business for the rest of my life. Because if I can find that person, I love them because they're hard to find. So that's a very good point. And it's so true. Let me ask you guys both a question then. When you seek a collaborator, whether it's on Find Collabs or just generally, one of

the things you often ask people, especially if you have a reference is, would you work with them again? And often for me, at least my willingness to work with that person that's being referred to me, if they answer yes, is like, sure, I'll work with them if you would work with them again. But if you would say no, then I would probably say no as well. Do you think it's just that simple that if you can, if the review system is, for lack of better terms, binary in the fact that like, the people reviewing them would just say, would you work with them again? Yes or no? And if the answer is yes, then higher credibility. If the answer is no, then it's a decline in credibility. You need to have the option to not fill out a review.

So, you know, there are many contexts. Just a yes or no then? If it's just yes or no, like, would you work with this person again? I'm answering yes or I'm not answering at all in most cases. Like, because there's just a risk. Like, you just don't want to give somebody a bad rating because they could be a sociopath. Okay. It's sticky. Well, I guess what I'm trying to drive at is less the semantics around it or the mechanics you can build around it. And more like for me,

it's like, if I'm going to choose to work with somebody, it's because somebody said, yeah, I'd work with them again. And so my inclination is to work with them as well, because somebody I know and trust, or at least somebody I can perceive to know and trust, whether it's an internet friend or literal neighbor friend or something like that then my trust is extended by their willingness to work with them again well for sure saying is that you're you're saying you wouldn't say no because of uh a social fear so i'm saying like the you know if you want it the honest truth about somebody like especially if they're like a crucial hire, you have to back channel references. There's this really famous book about, well, not famous, but like pretty popular book. Like if you're trying to hire in Silicon Valley in particular,

or really anywhere, there's a really good book on hiring called, I think it's called The Who, or Who, or like The Who Test or something. And like multiple very successful entrepreneurs have referred to this book to me as like this is the way that you hire and it basically boils down to references just back channel as many references as you can everybody that is worth working with has a gigantic list of good references it's that simple and the people who only have no references or dubious references or references from people who seem sketchy like just don't work with them unless they're like like an intern or they're really young or they seem like they've

recently gone through some kind of transformation in their life and you want to take a gamble on them but like you probably don't want to put that person as like your head of sales in a 400 person organization but we're talking about is collabs, though, so it seems like small teams. Yeah. Right? So, I mean, we're not talking about head of finance at a large corporation on finding collabs. I'm not going there to get a hire.

I'm going there to find people that have like-minded interests, and if I'm somebody who's running the project or somebody who's running the collab, then I want to allow people in or disallow people in based on what, I guess, reputation? Is that it? I mean, it's not really a disallowance or an allowance. I mean, the way that it works today is you create a project and anybody can join the project. And you can kick people out. Like if you're the admin, you're the project manager, you can kick anybody out. But like the default is anybody's allowed to join like we could add permissions and whatever and like hopefully you know we will at some point

once we have demand for that kind of thing but like right now it's like you know you show up you say hey can i like jump into your music project or can i jump into your like open source compiler thing for rust like yes you know please i'm working on this by myself please help me right so so what you need is uh the marketplace as you mentioned before prior to concerning yourself with reputation so we're actually talking about reputation early and putting a lot of weight on it it seems like you're more of a matchmaker on interests yes and in the long term as you mentioned reputation is going to matter but not today because today it's almost like

hey if you're here you're here and we're going to try you out no matter what because the demand is low so this is another reason why I wanted to come on and in extreme self interest wanted you guys to interview me because it's hard for people to understand this

it's a carrot on a stick and the carrot is the long-term vision for getting a reputation for building a reputation that will help you that's a lot of like buy-in to agree to yeah um and you know frankly speaking fine collabs is in the early days and it's like hard to get people to understand this i'm doing i'm really doing my my best. I'm trying to paint a picture of a world where people can reliably find collaborators for their projects and there will be a norm of not flaking. Or if you're going to not do something, just say, hey, I can't help out right now. I'm peacing out. Sorry. Maybe next time. And that just doesn't exist today. So the carrot is for early adopters, because that's what you're trying to get

is the bootstrapped early community. Everything gets easier. It's one of those perpetual problems for entrepreneurs. Everything gets better as the network effect takes on. But until there's a network effect, it's not like the carrot that you're offering to the early adopters who are out there listening and potentially are interested,

is it's easy to build your reputation right now be correct because it's low-hanging fruit or there's just not much competition so to speak in the collaboration marketplace on fine collabs and so you can get in early build that great reputation and if and when fine collabs gets network effects then you're going to be, you're going to have a strong reputation built in. Correct. And this happened with Quora. It happens with all the new platforms.

Like the people who are early adopters and then the platform takes off, they have this huge like headstart. Yeah. You know, Quora did this thing to accelerate their growth called the top writers program where basically people who wrote a lot on the platform and wrote good answers got a big red, you know, top writer thing. Something special. Something special.

And they got their answers promoted and, you know, they got a nice fleece in the mail. They got invited to these amazing events where all the top writers were. You know, they created this form of scarcity to reward the people who were really putting in the work in developing their platform like in that level of honesty between the platform owner and the platform creator the basically the platform owner saying look you guys are building this for us like we understand that we're going to reward you that adds fuel to the fire and like i would like to do that at some point uh we kind of did that in the early days with the find collabs hackathons where basically i just like you know earned money uh by you know rewarding people for their projects on find collabs it was a little too early to do that

i would like to do other things like that but but yes i mean you get it yeah right well even based on the ratings mentioned on the home page You've got communication, projects, video, and then trust. And inside of trust, you say, as a prescription it seems, reward a great collaborator with five stars if someone is flaky and unresponsive, give them one star. Correct. It seems like to me, and now we're just riffing here, is that five stars, these kind of rating systems

are very difficult because the star ratings are so subjective. And that's why I was kind of driving out with the Uber scenario where it's like, it's five stars or bust. I've noticed that certain recommendation engines... Well, even in his copy it says that basically. Right, so some recommendation engines such as Netflix eventually moved on to like, do you like this show or not? And it's like, yes I did.

And it's kind of going back to, Adam, what you're talking about with like, would you like this show or not? And it's like, yes I did. And it's kind of going back to Adam, what you're talking about with like, would you work with this person again? Or would you recommend this collab? Like maybe just thumbs up, thumbs down is better because now I don't have to decipher what is three and a half stars. Or I know I go on Amazon sometimes

and I'll look at two products and they both have like thousands of reviews and one's at like four and a half and the other one's at four. And I'm like like what's the actual quantifiable difference there i don't know i'll go with the four and a half you know and it's like well probably nothing it's probably nothing and then of course they got the the big then it's just they got the big problems of you know paid reviews and all that kind of crap you can buy those on fiverr by the way zing well that's i i like that you're on my rift then so you're are you agreeing with me jared You can buy those on Fiverr, by the way. Zing.

I like that you're on my riff then. So are you agreeing with me, Jared? That that's sort of a system that, it keeps it simple and it's enough to understand if you do or don't want to work with somebody. But then I also understand the granularity argument because, again, going back to now Uber, and I know we're just camping out on reputation systems or on reputation systems but maybe that's just the point here is that you know there are

different aspects to that ride and like would you ride with this person again maybe it doesn't allow you to express your concerns right maybe it was like well it does for me because there was somebody i came home from in denver uh on the way to airport. I would never get in that person's car again. Sure, sometimes it's fine. But what if it's a person that you totally ride with again, but they talked a little bit too much? And you just want to dock them for, well, don't talk to me quite so much.

But it's not like it's dangerous. So maybe first class citizen. That's don't leave a rating. See, here's what's interesting. We all create these systems in our mind like i didn't even think about don't create a rating i'm like well they're asking me to review my don't create a rating is when i'm don't care i'm like yeah no i don't want to yeah well i think okay so i would put weight on the would you work again with them yes or no first and then second beyond that if i want to get into the granularity of the person

written reviews of some sort whether it's ebay style would buy again plus plus whatever you know or just some sort of narrative from the person and then i think back to the concern you had jeff was whether or not this person is a sociopath and And if they're going to hunt you down. Is that a checkbox? And get you. Uber, it's anonymized. I don't think the drivers know who is rating them what. Although, if they drive and drop you off,

and then immediately get kicked off of the Uber platform, they're going to be able to figure out whose rating resulted them in getting kicked off the platform. They could assume. And they might drive right back to where they dropped you off danger well that's why you have to lay a job so you just delay that job until the next day well we hope so how often do you think about internal tooling? I'm talking about the back office apps, the tool the customer service team uses to access your databases, the S3 uploader you built last year for the marketing team,

that quick Firebase admin panel that lets you monitor key KPIs, and maybe even the tool that your data science team had together so they could provide custom ad spend insights. Literally every line of business relies upon internal tooling, but if I'm being honest, I don't know many engineers out there who enjoy building internal tools, let alone getting them excited about maintaining or even supporting them. And this is where Retool comes in. Companies likeash brex plaid and even amazon they use retool to build internal tooling super fast the idea is that almost all internal tools look the same they're made of tables drop downs buttons text inputs and retail gives you a point click

drag and drop interface that makes it super simple to build these types of interfaces in hours not days retool connects to any database or api for example to pull data from postgres just write a sql query and drag and drop a table onto the canvas and if you want to search across those fields add a search input bar and update your query save it share it it's too easy retool is built by engineers explicitly for engineers and for those concerned about data security, Retool can even be set up on premise in about 15 minutes using Docker, Kubernetes, or Heroku. Learn more and try it free at retool.com slash changelog. Again, retool.com slash changelog.

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dot-com slash changelog again cross browser testing comm slash changelog That does speak to another difference with collaboration versus these things. We're talking a lot about products and services. Amazon's products, Fiverr is services, Uber is a service. And it's a unidirectional review. Of course, there are opportunity for like, I think an Uber driver can also mark a rider as like a problem or whatever. Yeah, they can. Review you as well.

But collaboration is inherently collaborative, right? It's in the word. Like it's bidirectional. And there's not just like this person's services were insufficient for me. So I'm not giving them my 30 bucks, or I don't think it was worth 30 bucks. This is like two people, or maybe more, five people, teaming up, melding together to create something

that they couldn't create on their own. And that's a much more, I don't know, dynamic and interwoven relationship. Harder to just review that. Don't you think jeff well i mean you you leave a star rating and then you also can like type something like you can leave like three stars and say like this person's handwriting was great but the words they were writing were incoherent you know like right but they're gonna have something to say about you as

well and maybe that oh it's bi-directional yeah bi-directional yeah so like the the project so there's like the project owner and then there's the roles. Like that's how it works. So there's basically two types of roles. There's an owner role and then there's like roles that the owner creates. So you have like the project owner who's basically like the admin and you have people who can join the role. So like if I create a project, I can be like the project manager and then I can create

like four developer roles. I create like front end, back back end like two QA roles and whenever somebody finishes their work and they decide like I'm going to leave the project now they click finish project and it's a bi-directional review. I can leave a review about you. You can leave a review about me. We can both choose to not leave reviews. One of us can leave a review. It's bi-directional and the review is a star rating plus a written review or just a star rating. I mean I know that reputation matters, but if we're speaking specifically to fine clubs, as you said before, Jeff, I don't think it quite matters just yet.

I think the nut you need to crack is the fact that there are people out there with similar interests and giving them a place to connect. And right now that's rando through Twitter, buddy, friend, whatever told me, uh, somebody recommended it's the typical word of mouth, you know, social network way that it happens. There's no place to go and say, my name's Jeff. I dig music. I'm looking for collaborators, or I'm looking to collaborate with other musicians on XYZ genre. Where do I go find these kinds of people and put my two cents in and put my talents into the pool? And there's not really, that I'm aware of at least, a place to do that. That seems to be the place where you focus your attention rather than reputation,

which sure, it does matter, but you need the marketplace first before the reputation reputation comes into play my thesis is that there is a problem with the norms so um you know on fiverr you know you're going to get paid or you're not going to get paid for your work so there's an implicit norm of actually your reward being highly correlated with how good of a job you do. But like in software, like, or in writing music with other people, like people just flake all the time. And the people who don't flake become cold play. It's like that simple. And the reason we don't have more cold. Is it that simple?

I mean, well, you might not like cold play. So like, like I go for the best mode. Yeah. I mean, how do you succeed if you're like a healthy person who has digital skills and like some small notion of what creativity might embody?

You just work. Like it's that simple. It's not very complicated. And yet we just have norms that like make it much more complicated like no i can't i gotta wait for my muse like netflix has a new show that i gotta go watch and then i gotta binge this thing yeah those are people that that don't belong in my opinion then i mean don't belong to the excuse makers in the collaboration right in the collaboration i don't think that they would uh those aren't the people I think are seeking opportunities. I would imagine that at least because, okay, if I'm a musician and you're a musician and I dig the kind of music you're doing, and I go to a marketplace where I want to find people, I want to put my, my hat into the, to the bucket, so to speak,

I'm going to show up and I'm going to want to know what the reward is. I'm going to say, well, is this a free opportunity? Is this a, you know, a social credit opportunity? Is this a get paid opportunity? And if so, let me put my application in, let me put my hat in, let me raise my flag, whatever that, you know, digital artifact is inside of fine collabs. I want to tell whomever's running that collab that I want to get involved. Right? That doesn't really exist now. Later on, reputation will matter. Yeah.

But reputation is like wisdom. It will come through experience. Right. Right? You need to have the marketplace and the reputation system will play itself out based on just doing, just showing up, just doing. If they don't, if they fl, like you say most people do, they're going to be clear that they're flakes. He's already coded the reputation system,

so it's there. It's all there. Yeah, I mean, it could take different forms and it could change over time, but that's there. What needs to be there is that matchmaking. Right, exactly. Well, really, I mean, it comes down to, I think, volume and to enough people coming in the door who are really willing and wanting to do this work. I mean, right now to enough people coming in the door who are really, like,

willing and wanting to do this work. I mean, right now we've got, like, kind of a few projects on there where the people are really cranking on the projects, and they're believers. Like, they believe in what this thing is built to do, and they're willing to, like, bear with the cold start. You know, I will shower those people with my gratitude in all kinds of ways. I think that will continue. I will continue being extremely grateful for the early adopters, and eventually it will build momentum because I think that this is something that really we need to have just better norms around. So we talked, maybe it was even before we hit record,

but we were talking about bootstrapping versus funding. Earlier on, I know we had hit record, you talked were talking about bootstrapping versus funding. Earlier on, I know we had hit record. You talked about how you did a thing, which was basically burning money, and how this is, like SE Daily is funding fine collabs in terms of development and capital. And I'm curious if you've considered saying, well, I'm in the Valley. I know a lot. I'm connected here. And I have a money problem. Because you could go the Quora route. You could do the concierge, whatever you call it. Take your early adopters and blow it out for them. Make it really worth it for them. If you had cash,

like lots of it, have you considered going out and trying to raise some money? Or are you trying to keep this all in the house house indie hack i mean maybe you know like i wouldn't mind having some more money but like speaking of norms i don't really like the norm of like you take money and then you're like subservient to the people that you take money from like if you take money for a mortgage you don't have to like send the bank monthly updates about how your house is going like it's just a stupid it's like a really stupid set of norms i think that exist around a lot of the vc stuff it's like mostly to stroke the egos of the venture capitalists and i just think it's hilarious and kind of preposterous

and you know and i don't need it like so like why sign up for that? And what does money get you? It lets you run faster. Does that even matter? This problem has existed since I was in college. It could have been solved back then. Nobody's doing it. Well, you talk about how Cora spent money on their early adopters in order to make it worthwhile for them. The hard part with a social network, which Fine Collapse essentially is, is that making value for the initial adopters. And so you could use money to do that. Like you could literally give them money or something. I mean, you could be more creative. So that's the answer to what would it get you. That's what it would get you. So I tried that. I tried that already. So I tried that already and I might

try it again. At scale though, I think is kind of where Jared's at. Blow it out. Is not, yeah, like blow it out. Like if it worked a little bit, you can get a lot more. The invention mentioned, you know, the extra flair on site, swag, you know, parties, whatever. I'm not saying that you have to take VC funding for that. I'm just saying like,

or have you thought about that process and maybe that's a route towards success? Yeah. No, absolutely. I mean, I would much rather first try like going on changelog though. Yeah. You know, like would much rather first try like going on changelog though. Yeah.

You know, like when it comes to marketing. So like the first business I built or I tried to build like after Software Engineering Daily was this business called Ad4Prize. And like Ad4Prize was basically like where another network effects business where I tried to solve the cold start problem with paid acquisition and I burned all of my money. So it's like paid acquisition is really, really, I mean, it's fun in the sense that like you see results, but you don't really know like how sustainable those results are if you subtracted the capital. It's just hilarious and very dangerous. And so, and early on, like my leaning was to do the same thing with fine collabs. So I did these, you know, fine collabs hackathons. I so, and early on, like my leaning was to do the same thing with find

collabs. So I did these, you know, find collabs hackathons. I did a couple and I, I, you know, threw some cash at the problem and you just get, you just get skewed results. Like, and that's, and that's not like, I'm not sure I'm looking for the person who is, who is motivated, you know, purely by money. Cause like, like in college, if I had find collabs, I would have been all in on this thing. I would have, I would have been all in on this thing. I would have leaned into this thing so hard because like that's what I did with Quora. I was like, I am so desperate to find people who think like Silicon Valley people because I was University of Texas, which is, you know, kind of in Austin, which is sort of like the home of lackadaisical creativity. And I mean, that's kind of changing as the tech companies are sort of like, you know,

infusing it with a little more, you know, realism about what it takes to, you know, to succeed in technology at the greatest heights. But like, I certainly did not find that in college and I was craving it and I found it on Quora. And so like if you find if the early find collabs community is these people who are just like look we're just gonna build stuff like that's what motivates us is building stuff and creativity and like money is a means to an end for building stuff so yeah i don't know so money eventually like absolutely i would love to have fine collabs paid hackathons and things like that.

So you're going the organic route for now. Admirable. It's also the route that I would tend to go as well for the same reasons as you stated about VC requirements. Are you building fine collabs on fine collabs? Like I know it's open source. Are you quote unquote dogfooding or as our friends at GitLab like to call it,

champagning where they drink their own champagne yeah uh so I have a find collabs like a help collab like it's like a collab it's called uh find collabs help and support so you can like file bugs and stuff in there my open source project though you think you could use it to find some collabs for your project? Or who's building it with you? Find Collabs? So Find Collabs, there's a developer that I work with, Sterling. Sterling Salzberg. Shout out to Sterling.

Big ups to Sterling. He is an incredible developer and designer. Please do not try to hire him away from Find Collabs, but he is amazing. No poaching so a lot of the design intuitions and the ui ux stuff and of course the engineering uh it's like a pretty well-built react app at this point is uh is sterling's magic on the subject of acquisition though are you either of you familiar with the way airbnb growth hacked early on? The photos thing?

Properties, opportunities. They actually scraped Craigslist. They didn't have an API, and that's how they bootstrapped early on to have a marketplace was people with listings on Craigslist. Craigslist did not have an API, but Airbnb used that to their advantage. And the reason why I bring that up is because it seems like,

based on your passion for Fiverr, you have the inverse of Fiverr with FindCollabs in the fact that Fiverr has a marketplace of talent and collaborators go there to find talent rather than the opposite, which is a marketplace of collaborators who desire talent to say, here's a place you come to find things within your interests. And the reward system is varied, whether it's a open source contribution free welcome to the community, or a paid opportunity,

it seems you have the inverse. Have you considered using Craigslist the way that Airbnb did and use Fiverr as your opportunity pool? Reach out to have opportunities, build a marketplace of collaborations, and allow Fiverr to just en masse come to collabs, find collabs, and just join up and collaborate. Do the thing. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of little things we could do to solve the cold start problem. There's a lot of things that are operationally intensive to do. And I'm trying to first attempt

the ones that are less operationally intensive because I have a team of basically two people. So I would love to do things like that. I would love to scrape Fiverr. I don't want to make an enemy out of Fiverr. Even personally reaching out to some of them. Let's say you've got open source opportunities. Well, then tap the talent pool within Fiverr. I don't even know if this is even legal. I don't even know if I'm suggesting you to break the law. I don't know.

We are not lawyers. What I'm trying to say is just have you considered how you can use other networks like this. Oh, sure. You know, well-aware people to say, hey, there's opportunities here. And sure, as you said before coming on this show, talking to a large software developer community like yours is an opportunity to share this idea

with like-minded people. I'm just wondering if uh if you consider that changelog is that network right like i mean you guys are the open source i mean you're the open source media company basically so you know most of these projects are open source so like i'll see how this goes you know part of my shtick is like i just don't like to spend all of my time on one thing so i kind of have like a you know a set of projects that are in a round robin queue and you know my my processor just kind of like go round robins through these different things and works on them um you know until i'm kind of you know wanting to go do something else and then i go do something

else and like i'm you know this is one of these round robin things um so like going on the change log and people learning about fine collabs and then going to do it that's like more of an async thing than like figuring out some kind of scraping mechanism or some kind of manual import mechanism for for solving the chicken and egg problem well let's let's key in quite tight then. You're speaking directly to our audience right now. Tell them what you want. How can they play a part in your success?

What do you offer them? What can they do? What do you need? So my guess is that a large proportion of the audience will find me extremely abrasive and probably will not at all be interested in the kind of creativity that I'm offering them. I doubt that.

Like high commitment creativity that you're not getting paid for on this guy's platform. That's an interesting pitch. I love it. I'm really selling it. You really are. But I mean, if it resonates with you, then like, come on, find collabs. Like I'm, I'm on there every day. You know, like I just, I, I just made a song with, um, with this guy, TD Bryant, that's, uh, he's working with us as a, as a community, uh, community manager, uh, Timothy, and he's also a rapper. So, uh, you know, I had a beat and I, you know,

I gave him a beat and he rapped over it and we found Collabs. And, you know, if you're looking for people who are ready to ship and you're ready to ship and you're sick of waiting, you know, you're sick of working on projects by yourself, you're bored with the state of your work, you know, you're looking for like the kind of creativity that the internet enables at a collaborative level rather than an individual level find collabs you know come on find collabs love it you can make a new project you can find existing projects we've put a ton of engineering work into our search engine that is just algolia basically so it's actually nothing but you can search like kind of effectively and find other projects and um yeah we got video

chat we got and it's open source too right no it is not it's not open source no it's super i thought it was open source no no no it's the hypocritical model gotcha the hypocritical model. Well, either way, I like the idea. And geez, dude, we love you, man. We think you're awesome and we'd love to find ways to support you. I sure hope the audience isn't by you like you had said they might be, but I think they'll love you just as well. I hope so. And that's awesome, man.

I hope so. Thank you for having me on. Thanks for coming on, Jeff. We appreciate it. All right. Thank you for tuning me on. Thanks for coming on, Jeff. We appreciate it. All right. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the ChangeLog. Hey, guess what? We have discussions on every single episode now. So head to changelog.com and discuss this episode. And if you want to help us grow this show, reach more listeners, and influence more developers,

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