The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - From open source to acquired (Interview)

Episode Date: January 23, 2025

Ashley Jeffs shares his journey with Benthos, an open source stream processor that was acquired by Redpanda. We talk about the evolution of data streaming technologies, the challenges he faced while growing the project, the decision to bootstrap versus seek venture capital, and what ultimately led to the acquisition. We discuss reactions to licensing changes, what it's like to have your thing acquired, the challenging yet fulfilling nature of open source work, what's next for Benthos, and what it takes to enjoy the journey.

Hey friends, welcome back. This is the change law. We feature the hackers, the leaders and those innovating in data streaming. Yes, today we're joined by Ash Jeffs. He's joining us to discuss his journey with Benthos, an open source stream processor. We talk about the evolution of data streaming technologies, the challenges he faced while growing the project, the decision to bootstrap versus seek venture capital, and what ultimately led to an acquisition by Red Panda. We discuss reactions to licensing changes, what it's like to have your thing acquired, the challenging yet fulfilling nature of open source work, what's next for Ben Thoss, and what it takes to enjoy the journey. And a massive thank you to our friends over at fly.io. Over 3 million apps have launched on Fly, and you can too. Deploy your app in five minutes.

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or if you're an open source project, Augment is free to you to use. Learn more at AugmentCode.com. That's A-U-G-M-E-N-T-C-O-D-E dot com. AugmentCode dot com. Well, we are here with Ash Jeffs, originally from Benthos, at least when we first heard of you, and now at Red Panda, and now on The Changelog. Welcome to the show. Hey, thank you for having me. You've arrived with that awesome chair. I am here in my commanding chair.

That is a commanding chair. I feel like maybe we're your subjects at this point. Gives me more authority than the hosts. Yeah. I feel like you should take charge here and just tell us what we're going to talk about. What's the show about? The camera angle is as if you're on my lap,

which was intentional. That's cute. It's diminutive. I do want to give you props because I've actually used your previous content for future content, which you might not know about. And that is this. When you were on GoTime, our Go programming language podcast, which has been retired and now lives on spiritually through fall through. Back in 21, we used to share unpopular opinions on that. You had a great one,

which was you thought that all people that take Twitter polls are idiots or something along the lines of, it was meta. Yeah. I tried to be clever about it. Like Twitter, you're trying to hack, because what we would do is we would take the opinions, put them on Twitter on a poll and find out whether or not they're actually unpopular. And so you went meta and you said, if you take a Twitter poll, your opinion doesn't matter. Nobody cares. You should go outside. Something like that.

And that was like a popular, it ended up being popular on Twitter, which I thought was hilarious. So then I took yours and I had to come up with one later because I was a guest on the show. And mine was basically, I just inverted yours. And I assumed it was a dead ringer because yours was so popular.

This one must be unpopular so i just took the opposite stance of you turns out they also agreed so it foiled my plans yeah good social experiment but we both we both yeah we both failed to have an unpopular opinion it's hard to have an unpopular popular opinion i find that it's challenging for me it's hard once you explain it yeah it's easy in the headline to actually be unpopular popular opinion. I find that it's challenging for me. It's hard once you explain it. It's easy in the headline to actually be unpopular in the poll quote, but then when you actually explain it, except for that one, that one should have been a dead ringer.

I don't know. I feel like people get it and they just want to ruin my good time. They don't want to give me the win. I think people just see my opinions and they tend to agree with them so that's why mine was popular same thing is i definitely have opinions that are unpopular but i think if i shared them in that segment i'd be very dissatisfied with just a normal oh i don't like

hexagonal architecture like if i just came with something bland then i wouldn't i would walk away from that thinking yes maybe it was an unpopular opinion, but I could have done something big. I could have done something. You did. It was big. It resonated. It got remixed. Ultimately failed, but, you know, go big.

Benefited society as a whole. That's right. But not me. Did this help you at all with your acquisition? His unpop? That's right. Yeah, actually, it was part of the materials. Yeah, when we were negotiating it,

they wanted the rights to my unpopular opinions going forward because they can't buy my prior unpopular opinions. Right. Those are yours. But now if you say one today, we're going to have to get permission. So don't get any unpopular. Only deal exclusively unpopular opinions from me on the show, please. Fair.

Well, thankfully, we've had Alex on the show before. Alex Gallego. I believe that's how you say his last name. Gallego? I just call him Alex. I just call him Alex, yeah. Had him on the podcast on Founders Talk a while back. Talked through his journey.

I don't know if you listened to that or not, Ash, but if you haven't and you're a fan of Alex, you may be a fan of Alex. That was a pretty good journey to Red Panda. Yeah, it's very counter to mine, I think, fan of Alex. That was a pretty good journey to Red Panda. Yeah. It's, it's, it's, um, it's very counter to, to mine, I think cause mine's very fumbly and clumsy and I just kind of accidentally ended up where I am. Whereas his was very, uh, up and coming. You'd be surprised.

I don't know. Well, since,. Well, since the Red Panda part, like the kind of like beginnings of Vectorize and stuff like that, then that's very like, you can tell he knew where he was going. Like he had a goal he was going to go for it. Whereas for me, it's like I didn't really know

what I wanted to do anyway. I was just doing stuff that I kind of enjoyed and then accidentally stumbling upon the next bit. It's very different, but we're quite similar in general we're kind of we've got kind of similar um backgrounds obviously he lives in a different country that is different which tends to be different experience but both your names start with a yep we've actually discussed that at length well really i don't know how long you can actually discuss that particular bit comes Comes up a lot. Anytime we're interacting with a third person,

they usually go, hang on a minute, your names? Have you realized? And then we have to go into it again. Yeah. I'm so predictable. Well, let's go way back before we get to Red Panda and Alex because there's a lot more to your stumbling around before that, right? Maybe let's talk data streaming.

I mean, Benthos is how you got there. Kafka, data streaming, I don't know. How did you get into this whole mess? So before I started Benthos as a project, I was working at a company that was just doing stream processing. So they didn't, it wasn't really word uh that they would have used at the time they would have just called it um i don't know like event streaming or something just data engineering it wasn't really a a big thing it was like like 2013 ish kind of times where kafka did

exist spark existed if i remember right everybody was was using Hadoop and saying, big data, big data. And what they were doing is they were basically selling the social media fire hoses of several social medias. And what we would do is kind of enrich the data. So there was lots of cool stuff added on top, like filtering. And customers would have their own rules. So we had gigabytes of customer rule logic to filter the fire hoses through. And then all these various rules so we had like gigabytes of customer rule logic to filter the fire hoses through and then all these various feeds that we had to fan out and there was um there was like enrichments and um like masking and these various other like stream processing concepts and they just had this like massive architecture so i had loads of time to play around with that um i was quite junior-y uh i wasn't like a full junior engineer i'd had

a job before that but i was still quite um i was green um and you know that kind of i i did consider myself to be just a junior learning the ropes but then eventually got to the point where i was kind of looking around thinking like all the services here kind of are bad for like various reasons not in terms of like they've been badly designed they were brilliant pieces of software but because the industry was so new there was loads of stuff that was just not particularly well like understood or documented back then so things like delivery guarantees were kind of a a weird concept like we had the terms at least once and things but we didn't really have um many services similar to kafka i suppose rabbit mq was another popular one at the time where you actually have proper acknowledgements and the idea of the acknowledgement being at the

source of data was kind of battling constantly against the idea of like having a high throughput, low latency streaming services. So we had like zero MQ all over the place and everything had to be super high throughput. Um, but we also consider ourselves to be like strong delivery guarantee service. Um, and it was just didn't, didn't really add up in practice or in theory. And trade-offs, right? Aren't there trade-offs? Yeah, exactly. You can't just throw things over the wire without a response, some sort of acknowledgement,

without having a compromise in delivery guarantees. But the idea of that actually being a formal understood thing, I still think people get confused about it all the time in all sorts of places. There's ways that you can have strong delivery guarantees and then ruin that by adding just some extra piece to your software or some extra thing in the pipeline that again kind of goes into the radar and you know there's like there's all these other stream processing concepts but also just the the idea of like microservices back then were quite a new thing people were working out what what does a

good microservice look like um So things like metrics logging and the way that the config spec works, all that kind of stuff. There's a lot of things being discovered and learned at that point. And then about 2015, I had enough traumas from deploying all those services that I kind of figured it would be an interesting exercise to try and solve those things in a way where you've got a piece of software that will do all the Like I would have just called it plumbing tasks in stream processing land because a stream processor tends to mean

like aggregates of data in Windows Being continuously calculated and that's the processing part. You're processing a stream, and the comparison is always to databases. So you want to process a real-time stream as if it was just a database with static data. But what we were doing was just plumbing. Like you're just reading data from somewhere, changing it a bit, and then moving it along, passing it somewhere else, and trying to do that in an efficient way. But the main difficulty, in my opinion, wasn't getting good throughput and the sort of quality

of the data coming through. It was making those services nice to actually work with. So part of that is adding in a config language that allows you to make arbitrary changes without having to recompile and stuff. So essentially the things that Logstash and similar services were already doing for the logging side of things. But in the stream processing world,

you need better delivery guarantees, better quality of service and metrics and stuff. So I was kind of experimenting with that stuff as an open source project. I was also learning Go at the time because I was using C++ up until then. And I was just messing around. I didn't have like a goal. I was just, you know, seeing if I could do it. That's awesome.

Made it open source. It didn't really do much. For about two years, I was working on it, and it didn't really... It read from Kafka or Xero and Q and vice versa. Had a few, like, brokering patterns for mixing things up. And then you could have, like, a disk buffer in there as well if you wanted it, which I didn't like, in my opinion.

Why did you do that then? So it's because I wanted to... I had this idea of like, because we had this service at where I worked where they had a disk buffer and it was basically just a bridge. We called it a bridge and it would just bridge different protocols with a disk buffer. And the idea is the disk buffer was the delivery guarantee part. That's how you guarantee that the data is resilient. But because zero and Q was almost always on one of the ends, it didn't mean anything because the zero and Q part eradicates your delivery guarantees. So it was a bit of a weird one, but you could do backfills

and stuff. It could prevent back pressure up to an extent, obviously not forever. But it did have some sort of value. And what I wanted to do was replace it. And then once I'd replaced it, we could just get rid of the buffer because it was an optional bit of config and then just show people, look, still works. It does the exact same thing. And then you get rid of this extra piece of complexity. Because it's difficult sometimes to get stuff like that approved without just being able to show it just it just works like with stream processing you can't prove something's resilient formally because we don't have the we don't have the tools or mechanisms for doing that unless you want to pay

like millions of dollars i don't know how much so it's all just like show and tell yeah exactly it's just run it and see if you explode um See if somebody calls you in a week's time saying, where's my data? It's kind of like pulling the tablecloth out and all the stuff still stays on the table. Yeah, exactly. Very impressive when it works, but when you're bad at it, you know, you just make a mess.

So I kind of just like, I put the response without other people. So I'll like whisper to the ops team, hey, you could just delete this bit of config. And then I walk away and then it's not my fault. I just gave them the mechanism for doing it yeah plausible liability so i had that just a piece of open source software okay then i got people to start using it how'd you do that part so we actually got acquired um that was the that was the data um engineering company they got

acquired by a company called Meltwater. And the idea was that we were going to be like a streaming, because we were very good on streaming. We had like a big Kafka deployment that we were managing at the time. So they kind of brought us in and we were going to be this central point for all these different globally distributed teams. And the acquisition went well. We became acquired. And we got integrated. And then... This is the business that you worked at got acquired, correct? Not Benthos, your open source thing? Yeah, yeah, not Benthos.

Because that's eventually going to, in the story, that's going to get acquired eventually too. That's what I'm trying to track. Yeah, yeah. So this was just like a pet project that I've been given permission to just do on my own time. Because nobody at the company wanted anything like that at the time. So it was just like, okay, we're happy for you to just sort of do that.

Cool. And then I was there for a while, and then I started seeing opportunities to, there were teams that were blocked on integrations with other teams, and they wanted a third team to help them bridge the gap and be the common data bus and enforce like the schemes and stuff like that. And then you're blocked on another team. So now it's like two teams that already blocked on each other. Now they're blocked on a third team. And I basically just said, hey,

why don't you like the way that it came, it weaseled its way in was just sort of proposing, hey, instead of being blocked on this third team to run this thing for you, why don't you just run this service? And everything that i baked into this project was for me because i didn't really have like a plan other than this is something that i would like to run so i wasn't i wasn't really building it for like high level people to you know see the business value in i was just building it for engineers so it's like hey don't you want to run this it has like prometheus metrics um or it can um push to like graphite stats d that kind of thing um and it's got like good delivery guarantees it's low memory usage

you can run it in kubernetes it's stateless there's like a big focus at being stateless um and then you can get it to do all these like clever things that normally would require a service that was very stateful and very um fragile and require a lot of like operational involvement. You know, hey, why don't you just run this instead? And if you don't like it, then forget about it. You know, then you can continue to be blocked on this third team. But if it does work, then, hey, you know, we can all live in peace and harmony. And you can send your data to the team, and they're unblocked, and you're unblocked, and, you know, we all win.

And that's what I became the evangelist for this open source project internally for, that was a while. I'm going to say a while, because I can't actually remember how long it was. A couple years, maybe, or what? Yeah, a couple years. Okay.

Nobody's going to fact check. No. Ten years i was there uh and they um yeah they just kept adopting it so you know we had success story success story and then and then i was allowed to i was i was still almost exclusively working in my spare time so i would do i would i would build stuff in my evenings and weekends that i knew teams would want i hadn't been asked to build it. I just kind of saw they were going, hey, this team over there, they're going to need this thing. And I just kept adding stuff to it. And what we ended up with is a service that is basically just plumbing. So it's just taking data from one place to another. But because it's so flexible and the abstractions

within it are so composed, like you can compose all these different concepts and just build, build out as complicated a pipeline as you actually need. But the, the bear like config is just so simple. Anybody can get on with it. So you can very slowly learn the concepts over time that we just ended up deleting services that were stateful, that were doing all this complicated stuff.

We were just getting rid of it and replacing it with a benthos config, and it would be fine. So there would sometimes be a concern of like, to give you a tangible example, something that might actually exist in the real world, rather than abstract concepts. Like imagine doing stream joins where you've got one Kafka topic, another Kafka topic,

and you need to join them by some common ID. And ordering isn't like, you don't know which one's going to arrive first. You could run a smart stream processing service that's got like a window, maybe you've got some sort of like window possibly that's going to be enough to cover the potential difference in timing.

And what it will do is it will just join the data by ID, and then you end up with a new feed. That's going to have state because it's inevitably going to need a disk-persisted way of maintaining everything, all the calculations that it's doing, all the aggregates that it's doing. And it's probably going to store that in S3 or something. What I would do is just say, hey, well, that join, you could just use that Redis cluster that you already have deployed and use Benfos to cache data from one of the feeds. And then the other feed, you could just treat as like the canonical feed and use that cache to obtain

the stuff that it's supposed to be joined to and when it doesn't do that because it's too it's too early and the data hasn't arrived yet you just pop it in a dead letter queue with a time delay on it and that's just config like that's just a very simple config and when you've deployed it what you have is so what you're telling the operations people, the people who actually have to get paged and wake up to play with these services when they fail, all they have is a Kafka consumer that can just be restarted because it's got delivery guarantees. So if it's having a paddy and it's not operating as it should,

you can just restart it. Or if it crashed overnight, it'll just come back online and automatically pick up where it should, replay data that it hasn't finished with yet. And then the Redis cache is just a Redis cache. You already know what that looks like. You already know what it looks like to have redundancy there and a backup and stuff. And it's kind of flipping the problem on its head, because what you're doing is you're saying that the thing that's streaming, the live feed, this thing that you want to keep low latency in,

it's very important. It's dealing with hot potatoes. That's actually stateless. And the state exists somewhere else that's kind of like your more stable components. They're not really hot. Like the Redis instances, they're not necessarily going to be hot

if you scale things out properly, depending on the use case, that kind of thing. But the idea is that now you've kind of eliminated complexity where before there was some. And there's performance implications. So it might be that by doing that, you've now spent 10 times as much money on the storage and all this other stuff.

But the ops team loves it, right? The ops team loves it. And? The ops team loves it, and you may well find that actually it works better. You might get better performance out of it because at the end of the day, it just depends on your use case. If you're just doing a very simple join, having a stateful window-based processing tool

is quite expensive for something like that. It's quite a lot of engineering mental load as well to kind of understand these systems, whereas just hitting Redis caches can be very, very cheap. People have been doing it for years, I've heard. Oh, yeah. So, I mean, it's not always going to be a winner, but when it is, you've just gotten rid of stuff

that you otherwise would have needed. And that was my in. That was your pitch. It was successful. And people loved it. And it's open source, so then I started getting other companies getting interested and started using it. I got really lucky with social media.

That's on the internet. And I managed to get a post on the go subreddit um and then that got me on the go uh go lang weekly newsletter shout out to them um and then from that somebody posted my thing on hacker news and that's the only time i've had a successful post on hacker news it was somebody else that posted it what was that that post called? Do you know? I think it was called like, it was what I was calling Bentos at the time was a dull, resilient stream processor or something. I was calling it dull, and I was describing it as boring.

So it was probably some combination of those types of words, that verbiage. So maybe not at that time, but at some point in benthos.dev's history, which now redirects to Red Panda, but if you find it on the Wayback Machine, your tagline was fancy stream processing made operationally mundane. Yeah, that was it. Yeah. So maybe that's, that may or may not have been the actual article title, but this is kind of your way of describing it as like, it's going to be boring. That was like the new generation of how I would describe it that was when i was confident enough to start

calling it stream processing and not get shut down immediately because at that point we had like examples for doing um really complicated joins and quite quite uh high level streaming concepts in a completely stateless way with fairly good performance. So at that point, I felt confident enough that I can say stream processing now and not get torn a new one. And to me, that was important. I never wanted to make claims that I couldn't back up,

whereas I can back up boring. I can back up this piece of stuff that's pretty boring all right i feel so social media splash that's got a new group of users i'm sure and because of the nature of the target audience of course hacker news is a great place to land for that but you start landing users who are like they have the problems that banthos is solving. So they become like, these are successful, large orgs, generally speaking, right? Usually. I mean, there's lots of startups that will use it

for just like a cheap way of not having to write any code to do a very basic pipeline. So it does come in with reasonably small companies quite a lot. And it's free. So there's that advantage to it for those people. Right, the price is right. But yeah, it's usually teams that are large enough that they've got these data integration problems.

I used to think that was going to be super niche because in my mind, everybody's just going to converge on some tools that they all agree, and then who cares? It all just works at that point. Everybody just, you know, communicates in whatever tech they've got on hand. Just like they enforce, we're all on AWS, they would enforce, we're all going to use this queue system

or this way of storing data. And obviously, that didn't happen. That's not what the world ended up like. So I was pleasantly surprised that the world is actually awful and lots of people have this common problem and yeah it was so the 2017 2018 era was like a very slow process of me realizing actually i might have something here um and maybe this is worth putting a bit more time into because i had i had like open source projects before that where i'd like they they had popularity but i was i was sensible enough to go

but this has no future like this this right this has gotten attention and people might be using it but i'm not gonna go any further with this by choice because like it's not it's not gonna um it's not gonna sustain me i'm just gonna end up giving away my time and because like it's not it's not going to um it's not going to sustain me i'm just going to end up giving away my time and if the project's not keeping me going then there's no real value in it whereas benthos was was both i was like having fun working on it but i was like i could kind of see that maybe this was a possible like long-term investment and i would actually be able to make a living and then eventually got to the point where i did just um jump in and say okay well i'm going to just juggle uh contracts like consulting contracts and support and live off um sponsorships and stuff so just just donations that was about

the 2020 2019 ish kind of era and that was okay like that was that was reason like i had a lot of flexibility so um i didn't have a full-time job uh i could just work whenever i wanted and i really enjoy that who doesn't right well i mean if i could go back to those days uh i might actually be tempted i love the way you emphasize it you know but the problem then is you i had so many different things going on like there's all these different contracts and now i've got all these different like bosses of various types um some of them doomed to never like earn me any income there was like procurement processes because i'm not in the us like i don't know how any of this stuff works i'm not a diplomat um i would you know have to be jumping through these procurement hoops to prove that I'm a person and I can sell you support and I'm not going to run away.

And it just it was just a nightmare, like trying trying to juggle all of these contracts. And this I had some great sponsors that was working really well. popularity of benthos at about the 2022 era was getting to the point where i couldn't cope anymore with just myself on it full-time and then a few um we had we had quite a few contributors at the time that are like the core blobs um the real the real ones uh and they they were around a lot to help in like the support channels and stuff but it wasn't it wasn't going to be enough long term we were going to end up like getting to the point where we're all burned out and i could kind of see that coming so that was about the era where i kind of realized i need to i need to stop being just a dumb immature kid on the internet i actually think about what's the what's the actual

sustainable model that would keep all of this going that's not just me clumsily uh bobbing from like one support contract to the next um i did make a good go with that which we can go into if you want but then ultimately uh it wasn't particularly successful contracting i mean no so i am i started a product so the problem that i had was that I wanted to stay bootstrapped. I was open to doing a VC round and like starting a megacorp or also joining another company and being acquired. I was open to both those things, but I wanted to try and be a bootstrap company first

because I like the idea of being able to do what I want. I like the idea of being able to not necessarily optimize for marketability. Like my vibe on the internet seemed to work really well, but I don't think anybody would have told me that, uh, from like a marketing standpoint, um, you know, having like a sad blobfish. Just to give people a picture of that, your avatar is like you making a double chin on purpose is that what that is yeah yeah it's there's there's a few variants of that on various social medias like not serious yeah there you go there it is yeah so not serious business here and the mascot is a blobfish and you know we we like the the docs were very facetious there's a lot of sarcasm in there which is good Like my like even if you've got like a professional group of people that are working on your dogs

You know, they acknowledge that but the problem is that if you it doesn't scale like if you you imagine like Microsoft saying like from now on all our documentation is gonna be sarcastic because it's funny and we like it like Everybody has to write in that same voice. Yeah, exactly. Everybody has to have the same tone. Like, it just doesn't scale. So, like, you know, I like the idea of having a really small, lean operation

and keeping it cool. So I wanted to try it, but, again, it's just the procurement process. Like, actually getting these big... Because a lot of our users are these big enterprises and they're the ones that I wanted to try and pursue because like money is great at solving problems. Well, that's the thing about like a cloud native product

is like you have the customers with the money. That's the thing that I know about cloud native is like that's where the money is in the open source world. I mean, there's a lot of companies with massive budgets for these pipelines. But the problem is I'm just some kid in the UK who, you know, I don't want to spend all day every day. Like I don't have somebody full time doing these like procurement processes and like all these contracts and stuff.

So it was just, it just doesn't scale. Like I would need to hire out, if I was it just doesn't scale like i would need to hire out if i was going to do it properly i would need to hire out real sales people real sales engineers real like all this and that i don't even know i still don't know who i would need to hire but like i made a good go of it it was kind of like a self-service i built a visual ui for benthos um Benthos Studio. And I had loads of interest. So I had loads of people contacting me saying like, we want to pay for this, like, let us do it. But then it immediately goes into like procurement. And I'm like, I'm gonna have to get lawyers. Like, I can't. That's the whole enterprise ready chasm that, that is talked about there is that,

you know, you go from how do you become SOC 2 compliant? How do you become enterprise-y? You can't be snarky or sarcastic in your docs. You've got to have proper contracts. You have to charge way more than necessary because they expect to pay a lot of money. You can't undercharge for your software because they expect to pay. What are you talking about? You want 50 bucks a month?

No, I want to pay you 5,000 at a minimum per month. I must. I'm an enterprise. Could you try going downstream to like the, you know, if it fits on a credit card, you don't have to do any of that kind of stuff, like petty cash. So that was what I was trying to do. I am also not good at marketing in that I'm very good at putting together

marketing materials, but I'm just not good at using them. So like it just goes on my YouTube channel. You just don't show anybody. Yeah, exactly. And I don't, I don't like, cause the thing is like at that level as well, it feels, it feels like begging. It feels like begging for sponsors, except this time you also get access to this web app I made. And it just feels like, um, it, to me, it just didn like um it to me it just didn't feel like enough like it didn't feel like i was doing enough i wanted to have like these serious contracts where i can see these companies are really invested in what i've built so that i feel safe whereas if i have like a thousand people like on a you know five dollar a month subscription that's great

but that's not what i would have had i would have had years and years of slowly growing the subscriber base and it it it was potential like i had enough income that i was i existed and that was a success in my books because i had the lifestyle that i wanted yeah um but the problem is then then i had kids so like then i've got to justify um daddy father why don't you work at google and i've got to explain oh well your kids ask you that kind of stuff not yet but at some point i'm gonna have to explain the expectations of our children yeah father why are we burning clang manuals to heat the house? Why couldn't you have worked at Google?

That's hilarious. It just got to the point where I was like, I can't really justify not doing anything at this point. I have to try and... What year was that? End of 2022? My kid was born in 2022, towards the end of the year. It was August time, I think. was born in 2022 towards the end of the year it was august time august time i think okay august 2022 if you can give me 15 minutes i'll go get the documentation i'll give you a definitive

answer but it was about about always get the birth certificate let's let's confirm i'm not sure i did that yet was i supposed to do that somebody was father why don't i have a birth certificate why don't i officially exist father uh i don't don't look at me i don't work at google i've been too busy trying to work at google but yeah yeah it got to the point was like i'm really enjoying the lifestyle of just spending like as much free time as i want not really having like serious obligations because i had like contracts and stuff but that was easy to keep going um it definitely wasn't like a full-time job but i was definitely working a full-time job in terms of benthos stuff and support on the on the channels and things it just it got to the point where it's like i'm this project is is going to reach a point where it's going to be

too popular amongst enterprises for other companies to ignore that they're gonna start building up like a bent or shop and then I'm at the risk of well if that team is bigger than my team and their team is more productive than my team we're just gonna lose all of our momentum like they're just gonna basically maintain a fork and I won't be able to control the direction of the project anymore or any of those things I won't get my my my something out of it so i figured well i'll just you know i'll call it now um and it just so happened in in 2024 that it really got to the point where in the data engineering industry people were taking it seriously so there was like lots of companies suddenly discovering it and realizing, oh, hang on a minute, we can get rid of Kafka Connect.

And desperately then clinging onto it, it got to the point where it was like, okay, well, I'm freaking out now because if I'm still just me, then somebody else is going to fill the void. And also I still have to support the community on the various community spaces, unless I'm just going to ignore everyone. I kind of have to support the community on the various community spaces unless I'm just going to ignore everyone I kind of have to support everyone to an extent and it's just

going to take up too much of my time I'm going to be immobile and I won't be able to do anything so I was kind of getting a little bit freaking out um and then it just so happened that it got to the point where it was like okay there's enough um there's enough uh industry kind of interest in this that we can you know we can arrange something um and then red panda reached out and they had a great plan um they came to you with a plan like premeditated so yeah i mean the whole thing is um it's a it's it makes sense it's like a bigger picture thing. Like if you're the Kafka that a company is paying for, they can't just have Kafka. They have to have connectivity to all these other things that they're doing.

And they have to have all these like annoying chores that have to happen to the data as it's coming in. So you have to be competent in more than just Kafka. So not having some sort of ownership of that aspect of the deal is just a big risk and it's a big cost because if you end up using their tools and they're using stuff that doesn't work particularly well and is annoying, then it costs a lot to support it. It's also costing them a lot to use it. Whereas if you have a tool in-house that does all those integrations, you have full ownership of how it's developed. You can add more stuff to it. You can be very clever about what you're adding

because you're fully competent. You have ownership of the people who understand the engine. Then these contracts suddenly become a lot easier because you have full competency of the entire end-to-end pipeline from wherever they're at now to wherever they want to be with your um streaming tools so it it made a lot of sense as like a partnership and i mean i've been talking to alex for years like we we've known of each other um you know he was um i considered him a friend uh for years

past in fact he got me a lot of attention at one point um because they had their big like red panda was was big on um hacker news for for a while i mean it's obviously reappeared lots and lots of times but there was like a point where i think it was their launch actually um and they got some feedback from some of their users saying like oh hey can does this work with benthos and then he um if i remember right he reached out to me about that time because we were sharing a lot of users. So we did, I think I was their first blog post. So as in their first partnership kind of a blog post. And I put it on the Benthos website as well.

And it was basically, I think we called it something like we're bringing Simple back to streaming. The famous Justin Timberlake song. The JT. You're the JT of big data. But both of us, like a mangled combination of me and Alex is this Justin Timberlake-y fellow bringing Simple back to stream processing. If you can imagine that. If you can get an AI rendering of that on the screen now, I think your audience would appreciate that. I think that's an easy button. We can imagine that. If you can get an AI rendering of that on the screen now,

I think your audience will appreciate that. I think that's an easy button. We can do that. Thank you. What I'm confused about, though, is the state of Benthos. And was it a company? Was it an open source project? You had a team. You were getting sponsorships, it seems. I'm trying to understand the context through your story and not interrupt, but it sounds like not legitimate company at this point when you were acquired. I still need to unpack what I was doing mentally. Please do. Basically, I had a company.

What were you doing? I had an actual real company. It really existed. Actually, it was a UK company, but it was basically my consulting company. So I owned all the assets. It was, you know, it was the, you know, I think we called it a few times the Benfos company, but basically it was what I was using to operate as. And, you know, I had lots of different sources. Like the thing is like people talking now still,

this will never end about like how to monetize open source. I had lots of different sources. Like, the thing is, like, people talking now still, this will never end about, like, how to monetize open source. And, I mean, the reality is, if you want to live off just building your open source, you're not thinking about what is the way to monetize open source. You're just reaching for any possible thing because all of it coming together may end up being one day enough to actually survive right but the reality is you can't just do github sponsors for example

um so that was a source of income um but that was you know just just like sponsorships for the most part it was like kind of tips almost um i wasn't sharing any foot picks so there wasn't really much of a drive um to doing it so we're talking like a few thousand bucks a month or a year. What are you talking about? I think it was, so there was, there was the point where GitHub was matching the donations. And that was also a point where lots of people were getting really excited

about it. So I think at that point it was paying my mortgage at the time. And then that meant my actual income could just go to pokemon cards but the the amount um over the years it's kind of it's kind of steadied around there i did have like sponsors that were like real sponsors people who were actually like hey we actually want to help you um so you know shout out uh derek um from snadia they They were just like, we want to help you as a maintainer of this open source that is good for the community that we're part of. And they gave me sponsorships that was enough to live off

in combination with all these other sources. That actually allowed me to tone down a lot of my support agreements at the time because they were just unruly. It was just getting too complicated. I wanted to calm a lot of that stuff down. Because again, that was the majority of my job was just supporting people and trying to get through the procurement process for these future contracts. So you're spinning plates and none of them are actually paying you yet. We did have, it was only me, but the number of maintainers we had was quite vast. So we were kind of like, if I remember right, I think that was about the point that we were kind of divvying up support contracts. So it wasn't just me taking them. I was also kind of guiding them around.

But there was a lot of, there were a lot of like general consultants in the industry that were also kind of like part of that equation i'm sure if we all banded together we could have actually done something real and made an actual company but again it's like i didn't want to jump too deep into that in case it didn't work out and then i've got to tell everybody like oops support sucks um because i don't i don't like just being a support company. And your product wasn't really taking off because of the procurement process that you described. Yeah. And so...

It was easy for European companies, but the big ones are the US companies. Right. So... Damn you, US. Fair enough. So Alex comes by he's got a plan

you guys go way back couple years at least know each other well it makes sense for Red Panda it makes sense because Ben Thoss is kind of

struggling as a business at least to find that perfect equation of all the different strings you have to pull in order to make it work without taking on money and or employees at scale what were those conversations like then is it like uh here's a plan sign on the dotted line or your lawyers talk to my lawyers or it's a whole ordeal i think technically

i'm not allowed to talk about it to talk about it and emotionally i'm not ready to talk about it but yeah i mean it's it's it's like a it's a formal process like do it doing acquisitions it's a it's a formal process like it's it's a whole thing like it's it's lawyers and paperwork and stuff because obviously you need you need to prove various things. And there's an exchange of assets and control of various. How long does that process take you? Well, it's supposed to take a long time. I think if you asked a normal procurement lawyer, then they would tell you six months, I think I was told, is how long it takes to sort something like that out.

But myself and Alex are apparently very good at procuring. And when it comes to that, and it happened very fast. I think in terms of start to finish, it was it it it gobsmacked my lawyers let's say how quickly we got it done because at the end of the day it was it just made a lot of sense um for them and it made a lot of sense for me so there's no point like dwelling on it we're not gonna like back and forth back and forth over legalese so at the end of the day however long that was 60 days days maybe, 30 days? It's probably a couple months, I'd say, to go from like— 60 days, let's call it that.

No one's fact-checking. Please don't fact-check. Okay, friends, I'm here in the breaks with Annie Sexton over at Fly. Annie, you know we use Fly here at Change. We love Fly. It is such an awesome platform and we love building on it. But for those who don't know much about Fly, what's special about building on Fly? Fly gives you a lot of flexibility, like a lot of flexibility on multiple fronts. And on top of that, you get,

so I've talked a lot about the networking and that's obviously one thing, but there's various data stores that we partner with that are really easy to use. Actually, one of my favorite partners is Tigris. I can't say enough good things about them when it comes to object storage. I've never in my life thought I would have so many opinions about object storage, but I do now. Tigris is a

partner of Fly and it's S3 compatible object storage that basically seems like it's a CDN, but it's not. It's basically object storage that's globally distributed without needing to actually set up a CDN at all. It's like automatically distributed around the world. And it's also incredibly easy to use and set up. Like creating a bucket is literally one command. So it's partners like that that I think are this sort of extra icing on top of Fly that really makes it sort of the platform that has everything that you need. So we use Tigris here at Changelog.

Are they built on top of Fly? Is this one of those examples of being able to build on Fly? Yeah, so Tigris is built on top of Fly's infrastructure, and that's what allows it to be globally distributed. I do have a video on this, but basically the way it works is whenever, like, let's say a user uploads an asset to a particular bucket. Well, that gets uploaded directly to the region closest to the user. Whereas with a CDN, there's sort of like a centralized place where assets need to get copied to. And then eventually they get sort of trickled out to all of the different global locations.

Whereas with Tigris, the moment you upload something, it's available in that region instantly. And then it's eventually cached in all the other regions as well as it's requested. In fact, with Tigris, you don't even have to select which regions things are stored in. You just get these regions for free. And then on top of that, it is so much easier to work with. I feel like the way they manage permissions, the way they handle bucket creation, making things public or private is just so much simpler than other solutions. And the good news is that you don't actually need to change your code if you're already using S3. It's S3 compatible. So like whatever SDK you're using is probably just fine.

And all you got to do is update the credentials. So it's super easy. Very cool. Thanks, Annie. So Fly has everything you need. Over 3 million applications, including ours here at ChangeLog Multiple Applications, have launched on-fly. Boosted by global anti-cast load balancing, zero configuration private networking, hardware isolation, instant WireGuard VPN connections, push-button deployments that scale to thousands

of instances, it's all there for you right now. Deploy your app in five minutes. Go to fly.io. Again, fly.io. What was your demeanor at the end? Were you over the moon? Were you going out for a steak steak dinner were you resolute were you yeah i mean i was pretty i was pretty chill thing is like i had a kid so like i wanted to go and like do all this crazy stuff i wanted to go off the rails but like my wife's like we've got a kid ash well example, what do you mean off the rails? For instance, what were a few of your ideas that she turned down?

So, you know, Las Vegas for a month. Okay. Otherwise, I don't really see the point. Going there just for a couple of days. Yeah, I could have done a Shampa's binge for a few weeks. I think I could have managed. I don't know what that is. Adam, you know what that is?

No, what is it? Let me break this down for you.ers is the champagne okay i don't know if you if you call it champers in the u.s that might be a uk thing it might be a very specific thing in the uk as well champers is this slang or is this uh it would probably classify as slang i think okay i'm gonna start calling it champers jared champers i'll crack out the champers champers binge now you don't have to you don't have to explain any further now i know what it is all right lads let's go crack out champers um so i mean that's pretty much the same idea with different objects involved right and then i just wanted to play video games thing is like day one so day one that everything was was sorted i was like

there like at the company getting stuff done. Because the thing is as well, like I had so many people wanting to have a support contract that as soon as you've got the people there to do the procurement, do the sales, do the sales engineering, do the support engineering, they're ready to go. Like you can just untap all of that money. All of these people who were just, like, desperate for, like, some sort of... So that was actually an unlock for you. Oh, yeah, yeah, 100%. I mean, it's basically... It doesn't frustrate me to know that there's, like, money on the table.

When you've got, like, support contracts, people saying, like, oh, please let us give you this money, please. Like, it doesn't really annoy me because I know that... It wouldn't annoy me either. Again, I would just compare it to like, I could just get a job at Google. Like if I wanted to make a lot of money very, very fast, I could get like a stupid.

You want your kid to be happy. Yeah, exactly. If I want my child to have a fulfilled life, then there's lots of things I could do. But I'm not going to. His father needs to work at Google. I've made my decision. I want to draw stupid blobfish pictures

and post them online. That's my job. And he'll get over that in time. Does your kid call you daddy pig by any chance? Not yet. My son calls me daddy pig. Really? And it's not a it's not a To anything with my weight. Tell a mash what daddy pig means. Do you know daddy pig? Well, do they watch Peppa Pig? That's right. Yeah. There you go. So that's why I'm daddy pig. That's like our number one export.

It's a term of endearment. Anyways. Yeah. Daddy pig. I don't know. Cause daddy pig's kind of incompetent. So, but it's,

it's a, it's always a, maybe, maybe it is not. There's an underlying. I'm going to have to be honest with you. You don't think it's a good thing? I'm going to get you. Oh, this is like an underlying criticism. I'm going to have to be honest with you. You don't think it's a good thing? I'm going to get you. Oh, this is like an intervention here.

Don't let your kid call you daddy pig, Adam. It's a term of endearment. I know it is. My ego's not shot here, man. I know my kid loves me. Let's go. They can love you but not respect you. You want to stay on this show?

I'm about to hang up on you. I mean, not if you work at Google, though. They have to respect you if you work at Google though they have to respect you if you work at Google if you work at Google and live in a van in the car park that's ultimate respect thanks dad thanks dad for this Google pen

I've interrupted the show, continue please it's alright daddy pig the goal wasn't just to get the most amount of money in the shortest space of time. And I kind of always had my head on the idea that if at any point I felt like I wasn't actually enjoying what I'm doing, then at that stage, I would just stop because it's kind of silly at that point. I'm not going to make more money from running benthos as like a almost like a i used to say like a hot dog stand on the street uh that

was kind of like the mentality i had i just want to be like small potatoes a small operation doing the thing that i enjoy um but if i didn't enjoy it i was quite happy to just walk away like i think a lot of open source developers get stuck because they they still want to work on this thing and they feel kind of like obligated to but they don't enjoy it anymore. And at that point, you're kind of trapped. But I kind of had my head on straight about that aspect of things. If I don't enjoy it, I'll just let go.

So joining Red Panda, and there's something we can tap into all these customers and stuff, it's exciting, it's great. But it wasn't like before that, I was frustrated about, oh, I just want to tap that revenue. It was more just I wanted to find like if I could have found, you know, 100 startups that were willing to pay like a nominal amount regularly to keep the project going.

And that if that were enough for me to start building the team out, then I probably would have gone for it. But I'm just not good at wrangling up the startups. There were lots of them, but it's very difficult to get them to pay a significant amount. Because you imagine a significant amount would end up being more than they're probably paying for anything else that they're doing, unless they're spending a lot on AWS. So let's talk about the stepping away part because this was like the big ramifications of the sale was like, Benthos just went away. Well, it's kind of... Effectively. Basically,

the team immediately grew. So we could actually start hiring people who were just contributors before. So we've got more people working on it. Like if you look at the contributor graph for the Connect repos, it's suddenly gone way up. The number of stuff that it has has gone way up. But there was stuff that I was already going to do that I knew was going to be annoying if it was under the guise of an acquisition. So I already wanted to split the repo out. It was one thing that we had as a plan.

So there was like the Benfos repo was everything. So it was like the enginehos repo was everything So it's like the engine which includes like a plug-in engine And all of the stuff that makes benthos what it is And then there was also all the plugins. So you imagine like Kafka plugins AWS plugins Azure plugins Rabbit and q1's, you know that's all all the various queue systems and technologies that we were integrating with, all of those were baked in the same repo. And it was getting to the point where we were regularly having to deal with the dependencies breaking because somebody would have a breaking change

and then you end up with these horrible dependency graphs where stuff no longer compiles. And I would have to then make a decision of like, am I just going to make a breaking change where I remove one of these components or am I going to have to beg these maintain going to make a breaking change where I remove one of these components or am I going to have to like beg these maintainers to like make fixes um and it was also just getting to the point where the binary was just so big that it was inevitable that most benthos users were probably going to want to have like a reduced version of it so what I was going to do um was have two separate reposts there would be like the Benfos engine and then there would be like the community,

the like official suite of plugins and you get a binary. So almost like the way that Caddy does it. It's like Matt Hull has the sort of plugin system and it is sort of dynamic. You can choose what comes into your binary. I kind of wanted the same thing, which would obviously mean they now have to exist

sort of separately um but what we decided to do as part of the acquisition was kind of like fast track that um and what we ended up doing is having the benthos so there's still a benthos repo called benthos with the blobfish so people want the blobfish that's where you find your official benthos blobfish now um that's the engine um and still being worked on so it's still the core of the new product which is red panda connect and then what red panda connect is is that's all of the plugins and extra features that we've added on top um to the core engine and that's a mixture of it's apache v2 for almost all of it and that almost is is the annoying bit that people got a bit uh angry about yeah um and then there's a couple enterprise features in this there's a

couple like plugins that are enterprise licensed so it's not fully uh apache v2 so that the enterprise ones are the snowflake connector there's a splunk one um there's a few ai connectors that we've added and a bunch of other like things that basically the idea is those are like the enterprise things that probably is just going to be people who are paying money for those products anyway. Right. So kind of an open core thing now where the core is really large. Essentially, yeah. And the engine is kind of like its own thing. So it's still MIT. So of the Bentos users back when this acquisition happened, which I think was like May of 24, is that right?

Yeah. Fact check, true. According to the blog posts are right. That's roughly true. So of the Benthos users that day, how many of those are satisfied with the Benthos core plus the Red Panda connect apache stuff um i think i think it's a mixed bag so the the there's like different groups of users so there are the users

who are just they're not like they're not really um helping to run the project they're just noisy some of them aren't even users uh people who comment on the hacker news but they haven't helping to run the project, they're just noisy. Some of them aren't even users. People who comment on the Hacker News, but they haven't really actually used it or anything like that. Right. And it's more of a philosophical thing. The concept of open source, they're not happy.

And, you know, I understand the arguments. The licensing is confusing and, you know, there's these arguments. There's a lot of FUD, which I fundamentally disagree with. But, you know, there's a lot of pole clenching because, oh, he's changed the licenses of the rug pole. But putting them aside, because I felt like there's points that are, you know, valid, some some of it was just about the surprise of all this stuff just happening in one day but obviously that's just the nature of an acquisition you can't tell people hey we're about to do this deal like it's illegal and you can't start making

the changes that you intend to make until like you're able to be public about it so there was just stuff that's that's it's just logistics like it's just a fact of of life that we had to do it kind of like as a surprise none of the core engineers were surprised because they kind of they didn't know that there was an acquisition being made but they they knew that that's what i was sort of heading towards and they knew the plan like the the splitting of the the repost stuff um so they were kind of like fine with it i think that they were a bit sad some of them are working with us now so like some of them actually got to become benthos engineers they're happy no because they have to work with me but the um that some some is a bit disappointing because they work with um competitors uh so it's a bit of a sticky relationship now but obviously you know they kind of understood why things turned like it's a bit of a sticky relationship now. But obviously, you know, they kind of understood why things turned out.

Like, it's not as if, like, Benthos was on Hacker News and then a week later I'm like, ha-ha! Bags of money I'm selling! It's like I made a good go of trying to get things going without having to reach for, like, VC funding or anything. I just wasn't very good at it. You can't fault me for that. But the... I guess I didn't try that hard.

I could have tried harder. But, you know, and then everybody else, it's just a mixed bag. So some people don't care at all. Some people just carry on using it. They don't even care about the enterprise license. They're just going to keep using it and not paying and they don't care because they didn't care before.

And then there's lots of people who will have their own custom build now and if anything they're probably happier because now they have full control over what's what's baked in and they can make sure that everything's foss and they only have the components that they're actually interested in there's a fork so warpstream made a fork almost immediately um and they called that bentos uh yes and then they um they've since been acquired by confluent um so i'm not i'm not sure what the plan is still commits going into that repo i did check on it we've had warp stream on the show they're still doing stuff something they're still doing stuff on it yeah i'm not i'm not sure but it's still mit licensed it's still basically they forked it before i did the split which is a bit awkward i was trying to convince them to fork after like

fork the mit engine after the split and then just take the plugins and separate them similar to how i'm doing from before the split because that way people could have plugins from either ecosystem and then all it is is just changing the import. They wouldn't even need to have forked the MIT engine because that could have just stayed MIT if they were concerned about licensing. But I understand their position. It's a competitor that owns the Bentos engines.

I can understand why that's not an avenue for them. But yeah, I don't know. I don't get a lot of hate because I think a lot of... It's easy to look at a Hacker hate because i think a lot of like it's easier to look at hacker news posts and see people kind of like whinging and think that that's sort of like a personal attack on the developer but i mean the idea that i'm personally just going to work on this thing and you know live a live a more modest life than if i just had a software engineering job

forever just because of moral obligations to people that i'm giving something away for free for like i think it's just it's not realistic so i don't read those comments that way and i understand that it's disappointing that an open source project that used to just be this completely independent indie project that didn't have any commercial success you know now it's been soiled yeah um but you know that's the way it is you're an indie band and you sign with a big label and you know your original fans are calling you a sellout that's just yeah this is classic i got a few he's a sellout he's a sellout and i'm like i kind of kind of can't argue against that but that is the terminology

for a seller but i don't believe that's necessarily the exact case i think that uh so did it stay the the core engine stayed mit yeah right yeah so it wasn't like a rug pull it was just an acquisition and well this is this is where a lot of these things get really complicated because i think that the the arguments you see online, whenever there's a license change, the complaints that you see from people, I'm not going to say they're robots. I'm going to assume they're people online. It's just a fundamental misunderstanding of what the license is because if I put code out like if I put a recipe out for a for a chicken nugget It's a really good one and I say like this is MIT licensed What I'm saying is you can take this recipe forever like you cannot delete this anymore

Nobody can I can't say you can't use that recipe because I am IT licensed it anybody can do anything with it What it doesn't say is as I slowly make changes to this recipe over time and I continue to work on it that you're always gonna be able to get it for free like the version that's MIT licensed is always MIT licensed it's the stuff after it that isn't MIT licensed if I do a license change and I think that the the fundamental like it I think it's like a willing misunderstanding because I think people just like to get angry about this stuff but the the misunderstanding is this idea that by changing the license for stuff that you change on top of the code base you've taken away the old code and you know people will say things like oh well code rots doesn't it so what's the

point in you know whoop-dee-doo you've left the mit license in the old version but what good is that to me well the good that it is to you is that somebody else can take ownership of it and continue working on it, which is exactly what Bento is. That's Bento doing MIT. They've taken the MIT version and have continued to work on it. But the idea that you've MIT-licensed something, so now you have to work on it for free forever, otherwise it's a rug pull is obviously not right like that's obviously

not how nobody would make open source if that was the contract they were in team like social contract or real contract doesn't matter like nobody would enter that contract willingly the idea that i'm gonna have to work on bentos forever um i'm gonna want to play video games at some point um my career on gaming is terrible right now because I don't have enough time for it. I think that this is evidence of what Stephen O'Grady's take on eventually open source was on our show, Adam, which is that nobody

wants the older versions because what you say is 100% true. That version of Bentos from April of 2024, pre-fork and sale is 100% free just like you licensed it the day you pushed that code out publicly. But people don't really want that.

They want current open source. They don't want past open source because then they have the maintainership burden of the in-between time in order to make sure that it continues to operate as they want it to or that it improves and so his point with eventually open source which is where things go open source over time like you can have the five years old from now version that's open source or maybe it's nine months is that in practice people don't really want that so it's kind of like saying it's not open source you're speaking to like the the bsl or the functional source license kind of things yeah the eventually open source licenses which is a bit of an aside um i do think a rug pull though is in the eye of the of the rug owner and so oh yeah yeah that response is like entirely emotional

and based on change of expectations and absolutely unavoidable in the case of a license change of something that's just going to happen whether or not it's justified or obviously you have you're completely in your rights both legally and uh i think morally to make the change um where i draw issues with companies that come out with open source projects raise large amounts of money based on that open source project, make large claims like this will continue to be open source. And then later on, much later on, after years and years of building goodwill, renege on that, that bothers me.

I could see where some of your users might feel rug pulled. But you know what? That's just the way they're going to feel when something changes right it would be the same like the same with just the acquisition in general like even if we kept everything exactly as it was and i joined red panda then there would be um you know they'll be upset because i mean even just from the like even if you ignore the code base for some people like just the goofy videos and like the updates and all that stuff was like a big deal to them and i mean i really enjoyed doing that stuff um and you know obviously over time i was going to have less and less time for doing that anyway um which was already the case but the you

know the idea of me then getting a real job is is disappointing because it's like this this goofball that you know we could just just come and hang out with isn't as available anymore. Well, we recently made a big change here at Changelog, Ash. I was telling you about it before the show just in December. And it was outrage. Well, I mean, there are people that legitimately love the shows that we decided we're not going to produce those shows anymore.

And I understand that feeling. I've had my favorite shows disappear and you're just like you're sad you're like oh that's too bad and of course we've talked about rug pulls a lot on the show because there's been lots of instances of people feeling this way and we had the term turned back on us for you know closing down go time and ship it and I'm just like okay if that's the way you feel then fine but in which in what world did I agree to create this free thing for you in perpetuity for you to enjoy? Like, I think a more appropriate response is I'm sad. Thanks for all the free pods you put out all the years, but that's just the way I would respond. They're completely going to respond the way that they feel. feel and on the internet everybody just types that out and you know hits submit before they probably processed the recipient and so i think your your response to the responses ash is relatively healthy don't say that you're gonna make me seem hinged

okay well please go off the go off become unhinged so i got a dartboard and every day i picked off the face of a hater we dock some people and here's one of their addresses i'm going to read it aloud but yeah i mean i kind of i had myself prepped for having to do like even even if i'd gone down the bootstrap route i knew that the tone of what I was doing was going to have to change at some point. And I was going to have to deal with people being, not angry with me. I didn't expect them to all be like lashing out, but just kind of disappointed. And, you know, trying to sort of navigate that.

Because you don't really have any way around it. It's entropy, baby. You know, nothing lasts forever. It's just the nature of nature. That's how it works. That's right. The zoom out though, I think is that, you know, it's encouraging that you could, you know, be in a place to have a skill, to have the desire to build something of value, create that value, steep that value for multiple years, find unique ways to sustain, and then ultimately find the ultimate value,

which is taking that to the enterprises that we're clawing to get not just access to the software because it was free and open source, but to do it in a way that supports an enterprise, which is through support. I mean, enterprises don't like to adopt something that they have to you know cowboy and necessarily i got told recently saying cowboys a negative term it's not a negative term just cowboys are cowboys you know i think they're talking about the dallas cowboys that's a negative term you cowboyed it for it i mean they have to cowboy without support and so you've you've landed a place that you can keep doing that which is great and also

we're um you know we actually have people being paid to work on the project for like the first time i'm not just asking contributors who've already like sacrificed a lot of their free time to you know to learn all this stuff and and get into it so once again you know can you do something for free um for the sake of this this user and that kind of thing like i didn't i didn't mind having contributors sort of orbit so like mihi was like one of our top contributors and he he enjoys working on the project just like i do but i felt this constant shame that I couldn't do something better than just, hey, isn't it great that you're working on this project with me? Yo. Meanwhile, his kids are going, daddy, why don't you have a job at Google? Why doesn't Mentos give you money, daddy?

And we're making, you know, we're adding features. At the end of the day, like if you're a Benchbox user, there's a whack load new stuff on it that you didn't have before. And some of the stuff works a lot better than it used to because we actually care now. So like, you know, there's... We actually care now. If you're like an actual user, then, you know, there's a lot there that's obviously very, very positive.

It's just that the immediate aftermath was difficult because we didn't have anything to show at that point. We were just telling people this is an acquisition. So there's no benefits to show them at that stage other than like, hey, isn't it great that those show hold of value? And then we're telling them that all these things are changing. We've done a rug pull on all these licenses. Get over it.

It's just difficult. i like it was fine i did a live stream um either the day of or the day after um just to like talk people through like what was actually changing to the repo and to be honest like most most people are either neutral they don't really care they just like as long as the software still exists they don't really care about any of this stuff because they just use it for work because they're a normal person who has a job um or you know there were people who were happy about you know the fact that there's a serious mission behind this now um this sustaining in theory um rather than just me doing it like people used to complain about the bus factor before the acquisition, which is perfectly valid. So there's like that now they no longer have to worry about.

So, I mean, I wasn't, I wasn't just, but like, I obviously understood that there was a bit of a backlash, but I could, to be honest,

I kind of enjoyed the Hacker News drama because like, I don't get opportunities to be on Hacker News much. So it was nice to just be in there like, Oh, it's Ash here. I'm the maintainer. And this is, this is my thoughts. And I'm, I know I'm going to go, oh, it's Ash here. I'm the maintainer, and this is my thoughts. And I know I'm going to go straight to the top of the comments

because I'm the person being talked about. It's like a free attention. You get attention. I don't have to do anything. Yeah. I didn't have to post it. Well, it's an alternate universe. I mean, you didn't have to be acquired.

You could have had, let me just paint maybe a potential alternate universe like rigged panda could have just been a large as they were sponsor right they could have continued in perpetuity that way or done a larger swath and left you in that indie world a not quite similar to acquisition but they could have endowed you quite well as well as others could have but at some point something would change like you had said somebody would have made their own thing they would have had a a larger team that was a benthos team and they were they would have outweighed you in capability and talent and rendered you to some degree obsolete then i could have just been the goofball like not having to do anything i did so i thought about there was there was um different like outcomes that I I planned for because the

way that I would describe the whole process because it it was chaotic I was doing all kinds of like random stuff but the way that I would describe it is I was always I was on like uh like imagine I was on I was on a hike going to some like town and that's that's all I'm thinking about is I'm just enjoying this hike going going to this town um and eventually i'll get there that's my goal but all roads lead to rome and everybody's looking at me like hey you're going to rome you know you're probably not going to get there um it's very difficult to get to rome but to me like i'm just going to this like next town or whatever but in my head i'm thinking well if i did get to rome this is what i would do and this is how like when i'm walking on my little hike this is how i know that i'm prepped enough to get to rome if it ever like got that far and it was kind of like that with this project

where there were various like outcomes that were potential candidates for things that i would have done at this stage so one would have been VC funding. That's the thing that everybody like shouts. Why aren't you doing this? And I consider that I talked to loads of VC partners, VC owners, various levels, various sizes, just to kind of get a bit of a sense of what their expectations are and what it looks like. Because I didn't know. I'm just like some guy in the UK.

So I'm not particularly exposed to any of that stuff and that would have been one option is do a vc round and then try and aim for the stars the the problem there is um it's the same with a few of these like streaming tech uh projects where i'm just one piece of the overall puzzle and the actual streaming service is like the biggest piece you're going to spend more on kafka than you are on um kafka connect uh and likewise you know flink and all these other things are kind of like additions but your your main thing is the is the core streaming technology and the storage of that usually um so like i would have had to have had that competency baked into this new startup company.

And that's not really like, that's not really in my mind. Like I'm thinking about the product side of, of Benzos. So like, I just thought it's a, it's a possibility, but there's like a big, big gap there in, in stuff. And also I wasn't a hundred percent sure if I'd want to, if I'd enjoy it, like being that kind of high up in the organization I've worked at startups but I've never been like CTO or CEO so I wasn't 100% sure I'd enjoy that I think in hindsight I would have I would have been fine I would have I would have enjoyed it maybe not with

young kids but I would have enjoyed it but yeah the other option is just band together people in the industry that could be like partners um and get them to sponsor me um and there was prior art for that because sinedia were sponsoring me and like if i had 10 sinedias um all sponsoring me with similar kind of like setups then that could have sustained me i maybe could have like hired people as well um but the problem there is just because you got one doesn't mean you can just keep repeating that. I think Sanado would definitely. Or that it's guaranteed to be there next year. And this is really hard with yearly contracts renewing.

Yeah, exactly. And when you've got 10 of them, like they're not necessarily going to see it as, as, as beneficial anymore. So they might not want to give you as much. And that's fair enough.

Like, you know, it's, it's, it's free money with no obligation. So there's um and that's fair enough like you know it's it's it's free money with no obligation so there's there's no way of like tying them to it i cannot imagine hiring somebody under those conditions and knowing that my job now is to keep this impossible task of getting people to be kind enough to to do these donations i was really lucky with snady snadyia were like amazing people that came in at like a really good time and you know I'll be forever thankful for that but I couldn't

imagine like repeating that. I don't think it would have been realistic because it's just a it's just difficult thing to kind of arrange. It's really easy to get if you've got a really popular project it is really easy to get somebody to give got a really popular project it is really easy to get somebody to give you like a sponsorship so there was um there were a couple a couple companies that gave me like a sponsorship as part of their like open source initiative kind of thing but i would need those all the time i need to have a constant feed of those happening and it's just like the amount of effort invested into doing that you might as well just have like a support company um that just sells support and then it's it's way simpler uh it's like trying to

get um trying to get sponsorships for giving uh free hot dogs away when you could just sell the hot dogs like it seems a lot easier just do that that. Yeah. It's difficult. But the other way was to just accept that, like, this life is fleeting and I can live off my current income. Why don't I just do this forever? And I think if I could just delete my family, then maybe that's the tradition I would have had. You said that way too seriously. Yeah, he did say the way too seriously. Yeah. He did say that way too seriously.

You are a unique individual. That's for sure. Right. This felt more like you're making a deal. If some villain accidentally deleted them, like not me, but I would never do that. But you know,

if that, if that were to happen, then maybe, maybe I would have just carried on. Because I did enjoy that lifestyle. Just having your sponsors and humble life and all that stuff, then it would have been fine. But it's just difficult when you've got a family and you've got to be an adult. You've got to answer those questions.

Here's a question for you, though. Did Sanadia miss the boat, the opportunity to acquire? I can't really give any i can't tell you any of that stuff it is video you could nod or make a face not not really because i think basically at the end of the day like a sort of an acquisition you can't like two companies coming together you have to have a really good plan for what you're gonna to do afterwards. And I know of founders that they, you know, they had a project, they got acquired, and then it just kind of fizzles a bit

because you don't really, you don't really have like a solid business plan. Like if your whole business doesn't hinge on that deal being a success, then it might, like, I mean, I've worked at companies that did all kinds of acquisitions and I've seen what it looks like to be acquired. And then it turns out, actually, we don't really think all that useful to us as like a business.

And we like what you're doing. We're going to let you continue doing it. And it's just it just feels like it's not it's not a great scenario for everybody involved. So, I mean, there were lots of companies that I could have spoken to and could have had some sort of deal with. I can't give details as to, I'm pretty sure I can't give details about who I talked to. I would assume I can't, even just ethically. But if that had been one of the ones on the table, then, you you know it's a scenario where you have to weigh up lots and lots of different things and part of it is how seriously do they have like a plan behind the thing that they're buying and you know

what does that look like for the next few years because you're doing an acquisition to be working there for a few years so it's like it's a very difficult scenario you just because you're super busy mates with another company doesn't mean it's suddenly going to make sense to just suddenly come together and sort of blindside. Imagine turning up to a factory and just be like, hey, you owe me now and come up with a business plan for how we're going to work together.

You're kind of forcing them into a scenario there. Yeah, for sure. What I know about Sanedia, or at least NATS, which sort of sits above NATS, it's NATS in the cloud, basically. I'm paraphrasing and botching my description of Sanadia and NATS. But from what I understand, that NATS generally tries to render Kafka obsolete.

It tries to be the better Kafka. It's got a different way of doing things. They've got Jetstream as well, which has way more overlap than the original Nats. Right. And I just wonder if it's kind of funny that they were sponsoring you. I think that they would have had to have some ambition for doing so,

not just simply generosity. Sure, Derek Collison is a great person you know running Cinedian founder of and creator of Nats all that good stuff but there had to be some motivation behind it not just simply altruistic you know an altruistic motivation to do so yeah I mean at the time um I mean we made a load of content together at the time so you know i i had a user base that overlaps massively with all of these companies so um it's not just senadia and red panda there's also i mean obviously warp stream confluent all the all the various kafka shops but also aws um azure like all these various like streaming technologies there's a huge overlap with my users and those companies

because they're using my product to integrate with with all of theirs so like there's there is a uh there is an incentive to um all kind of come together and have like a sort of shared marketing message um obviously if i did that with every company at the same time then it would kind of render them all obsolete to an extent. I mean, maybe it's not a serious game and it would be good, but yeah, there's definitely an advantage to being like... Because them sponsoring me, I was a super vocal proponent of Sanadia at the time.

I mean, I still am to an extent. Obviously, there's a bit of a conflict there now, but I'm indebted to Synedia, and I definitely felt that way at the time. And, you know, we made content together. We did all sorts of kind of shared stuff. But also, like, you know, I was working on the NATS components within Benthos at the time, and obviously them being a sponsor of mine,

I put a bit more attention to that than maybe I otherwise would have. So there is like a kind of indirect, non-contractual sort of thing going on there. But I genuinely think they're just really nice people. And, you know, this all like, like it's very difficult to prove that that's what's going to happen. Like you're going to donate to somebody

and then that's how the relation is going to play out. So they're kind of taking a risk with this whole idea. And I just think it was, you know, there's various things going on there, is what I would say. Sure. What happens after that acquisition with your GitHub sponsors? Do you just go back to them and be like, pshh! Understandably, everybody basically just immediately turned off.

Because, like, why would you? I've got a company now, and I think that's fair enough. There were sponsors that were giving me quite a lot, and some of those lasted a few months. But to be honest, my assumption was that they would all just disappear. I've closed it now because Because I feel a bit uncomfortable with people sponsoring me now because I feel like I'm monetizing the project.

So I don't really feel like it's a reasonable thing for me to go out there begging for... I mean, I know that's not what's happening. If you've got a sponsors page, you're just kind of like asking for tips. And for most people, it's nice because it's a bit of validation that somebody uses and appreciates your thing whereas i was in a position where it was an

actual like source of income so i feel a bit um conflicted about like leaving it there even if people just want to give me like a tip of the hat um i feel like you know keep keep that money and you know buy me a drink if you see me in person um but otherwise appreciate you but well where do you go from here what happens next i mean is this the end of your story yeah that's it i um yeah i'm just um i'm just gonna play video games no there's like there's tons of work i mean like as soon as i joined uh red panda there's like a mountain of stuff to to do to to get everybody um in action so like i've got i've got enough work to get on with as much as i want um i can i can chomp down

on uh but i'm not really sure like long term because basically the idea is to make myself obsolete so like to to build a team that's big enough build enough competency and i mean that's not even just happening at red panda because as a as a consequence of of um this technology being kind of uh adopted and you know proven i think is the is the uh business speak way of saying it uh because like lots of people are adopting it that maybe otherwise wouldn't without a big company behind it there are other companies that are now gaining more competency around the technology so like there's there's much more redundancy there than there ever was before um so over time it's looking more and more and more like i could just

step away and it doesn't matter the project will just keep on going whether there's like a fork war in five years time i don't know maybe maybe it does just fizzle out one day um i'm my plan is to keep on working uh at red panda on it um the team isn't anywhere near as big as i would uh eventually want it to get to so there's a lot of work there to do um eventually i will stream again because i used to do loads of like community stuff but that's kind of fizzled out a little bit uh with the little kids but um eventually i'll get back on that but yeah i don't know i could get fired just be like it's true we're done with you too much of a goofball we're done with this we're sick of it and then I don't know. But stay tuned.

Well, the future is unclear, but probably positive, unless the whole firing thing happens. The future is terrifying and unknown. And I'm here for it. Yeah. That's true. You could get fired. Unlikely, though.

I'm sure you've got a contract of sorts. Or some handcuffs to hold on to. Or hold on to you. Not really. Just a person. I can't force them to employ me. I've got to imagine that as part of the acquisition, there was some entanglement.

Yeah, but they've acquired me, so the product is theirs. So if they decide that I'm not like... So there's no work contract. There's no guarantee beyond acquisition basically i can't get details like but basically um like you know if i wasn't performing well enough i'm expandable be able to yeah i'm expendable they can get rid of me yeah um i mean i'm trying to make myself as expendable as possible that is that is almost literally my job let me go must play video games i'm unloading my brain on on lots of do not delete my family yeah that's cool you're living the dream though you

realize this right i mean you gotta be aware that you're living the dream to some degree well it's if somebody asked me like 10 years ago um you you know you're just gonna get to work on your open source project um at a company um i'd be like no this is obviously not that's not that's not really feasible um see i mean it is the thing is like when you're when you do this stuff like there's lots lots of like success stories like um obviously you had um mitchell on uh recently it's like crazy success. Those are the crazy ones. Those are the ones that are really, insanely successful. But a lot of open source developers, they start with this dream of,

one day I'll get to work on this open source forever. But the reality is, it's a great job. It's a fantastic job. But it's not as idyllic as like i wouldn't i would be sad if i'd sacrificed seven years and hadn't enjoyed that time in its own right to get to this point i would have felt like it wasn't worth it i would have just gotten the job at google but because i did enjoy those seven years, I've enjoyed the journey thus far, getting to this point. And I do really enjoy my job. It's worth doing. But I feel like it's a bit of a cautionary tale to people that like, you know, just because you've got an open source project,

and you've got like, I would rather have a therapist make me really enjoy a normal job than like, spend, spend you know seven years gruelingly working on a project that you're kind of getting a bit burned out for to get paid to work on it because i feel like a lot of this is this is completely made up it's complete conjecture so feel free to cut this from your show um but like from the from the sort of open source uh founders that i've i've met that, they're not the big ones. They're not the ones with the crazy huge success stories. The ones that are working on projects where it's not necessarily a huge hit.

They're just managing to kind of live off it. And it's much more of a grind. It's much more of a grueling process. The main theme is they just want to be able to work on whatever they want. And that's really important to them um to the point where a normal job like doesn't necessarily um sit well with them um right this is this is what they want to do so it's like there's almost like um uh and a whole nother level of motivation to continue working on this particular thing even though logic would dictate

you should just get a job you you should get a normal job. Yeah. And I feel like, you know, they're not miserable people. They're not like, they're not sad or, you know, anything like that. Like they've still got a nice, they've got a nice lifestyle. They've got a nice career. But I feel like sometimes you'd have just been happier to just get a normal job and like learn to be okay with that.

If there's like something going on there that you can't work with people. I definitely had that to an extent. I had a deep need to pick my own work and build the thing that I wanted to build, not the thing that somebody else was planning or suggesting. But I'm over that now. I'm a well-rounded person now. Just video games. I'm just thinking about that really

because I think I empathize a lot with that position because, Jared, I think you and I lamented on this to some degree in our most recent IRL where we just thought, I'll paraphrase some of the conversation to my knowledge, at least was, you know, wouldn't it just be easier just to have a job,

you know, because, Oh yeah. I've asked you that on the show before too. Because, you know, I'm, and I'm like,

are you thinking about it? I'm like, this is his resignation. I mean, I think about it. I do think about it. I don't think that hard about it. Well,

I think it's normal to fantasize about that. I think it's normal to fantasize about that up until the point of actually doing it almost because it is kind of the, I don't want to call it the easy button necessarily, but it's certainly a lot easier than the constant roller coaster of running or creating your own thing.

Because when you run or create your own thing, you are fully in charge, especially in a scenario like we are in particular, which is indie media. We literally have yearly contracts that change, if not quarterly contracts that change. So it's super challenging for us to build a business foundation beneath that. And we only get driven by previous year's data. So if the trajectory is up and to the right, we feel a lot easier pushing on the gas. But every year is a roll of the dice, basically. Like who's going to come back and love us the same

that they did the previous year? Or who's coming up new that we really can support that will support this indie media business we're building? And I think it's super normal to fantasize about this. What if I just got a real job? And then I wouldn't have to worry about any of this stuff. But then I think, gosh, I would have no or seemingly no agency over my day-to-day. I can't command my own dreams. I can't have these big ideas and then begin to execute on

them incrementally over time and tackle big problems I think are worthy of solving versus what someone else tells me their dreams are, something they think is worth being solved. And I think that's where, you know, I empathize because the easy button to some degree is just to go get a job and work on somebody else's dreams. The hard button really is to work on your own. But that is the most, in my opinion, the most rewarding. Yeah. But it also means you're on the hook.

So when things go bad. For sure. There's nowhere else to go. But at least I'm in control to some degree. On the daily, at least, to tackle my own dreams, to pursue daily, at least to tackle my own dreams, to pursue my own dreams, to identify my own dreams versus somebody else's. I think it's a, it's a grass is always greener scenario for most people. It is.

I think some people have like a, there's something going on there in their brain. They just have to. Here's the challenge. Obviously those who have regular jobs would love to have a business and those who have businesses would love to have a regular job every once in a while amen but there's also this challenge of like the grass is greener of course is a cliche because we all look across the yard and see somebody else's grass and we think it might be greener but there's also this other thing that might happen is it might actually be greener over there which is kind of what you're

saying ash is like yeah and so you have to really i mean every once in a while you gotta stop and But there's also this other thing that might happen is it might actually be greener over there, which is kind of what you're saying, Ash. And so you have to really, I mean, every once in a while you got to stop and analyze and be like, am I just assuming it's greener over there because I'm used to my grass? Or maybe I'm actually got the guy with the brown grass over here. And that's a hard thing to wrestle with. Or the grass is greener because there's affluent water being sprayed in his yard well that's the thing if you take care of your grass man you're gonna it's gonna be green you don't have to do that in the uk the grass is just always green that's just a it's just for you guys we love our clay we love our clay mounds in our gardens um yeah i was i was gonna say that like

the the concerning thing for me is when when you kind of you see people who they're they're not happy with the current situation and they're kind of like pushing on regardless like that i don't want to tell i don't want to tell people just stop like somebody's got an open source project but they're burnt out and they don't enjoy doing it anymore but they feel like they have to um it's really difficult to just tell them like you should stop what you're doing and do something else but i think that there's a lot of there's a lot of exploitation not by design but just by accident that happens um i mean it's the same with like any any other like um any other company i mean

it doesn't have to be open source. It could be somebody gruelingly working on their startup company. And, you know, it's just not working out. And, you know, there's all these other scenarios. But I think the difference is that when somebody is making open source and they're putting themselves out there, you know, they've got this project, it gets a bit of attention. And then they feel like they're kind of obligated to keep working on it there's no one there protecting them from not seeing that you know you're you're being exploited basically like these these people are never gonna pay you for what you're doing they're never going to compensate you for it and they will just keep taking you know more and more and more

if they can um not all of your users some of of them are nice people and they just can't afford or you don't have a good revenue stream or something for other reasons. But there's a lot of people out there doing a lot of work. I mean, I was one of them before Bentos. All my open source projects were, to some extent, I just worked on them for fun. But then eventually you get attention and you kind of feel like, oh, I have to do this pull request. I have to fix this issue. I have to do this release. And, you know, you're never going to get compensated for it. You're never actually going to get thanked for doing a lot of that work. So if you don't enjoy it, then, you know, ideally you need to be protected to some extent. And I think open sources is very risky because there's absolutely nothing between

you and the people that are just going to keep taking, taking, taking. And they don't know what they're doing. They don't know that they're doing that to you. They're just using your thing. They think they're doing you a favor by using your thing and interacting with you. But for a lot of these people, they're giving you their life. They're giving you their time and their energy. And they don't necessarily have the, they don't have anybody in the chain saying like, well, it's done now. Like, you know, time's up.

This hasn't become like a massive success. Or, you know, we've done enough here. We've solved the problem. Let's just walk away now and be happy with what we've made. Because it's just you and the internet. Like there's no filter. There's no gap. There's no one else. There's no daddy.

Right. I want to be their daddy. There's no daddy pig. This is me being their global daddy pig. Stop what you're doing. Or just take a break. Take a breather. Take a break. Step back. Stop working on it for a bit. What we need is some sort of a resource that's like healthy open source

habits or something so that you can have a proper relationship with your project. Yeah, but people won't read it. Well, we get a mellifluous voice to read it to them. That's right. The one who cares would listen. Have Adam read it, and we'll just send it out into the airwaves. Healthy open source.

They'll add a feature to GitHub where when you click the pull requests tab, it just asks you, are you actually enjoying this? And then if you click no, it just redirects you to Reddit. Where they know you won't enjoy anything. Okay, let's wrap this up.

A quick thank you. While we're thinking, we're thinking about thanking people or not thanking people, exploiting them for their work. But one thing you can do for an open source maintainer that you appreciate

is thank them. I want to thank our listener, Hector, for requesting that we have Ash on the show. Did you know that, Ash? This was a request of a listener to hear more from you.

So there you go, Hector. I hope you enjoyed this. You know, take it or leave it. It's all we have to offer. Thanks for dragging me out, Hector. And if you don't know that we take requests, we absolutely do. changelog.com slash request is where you can tell us what you would like to hear about on the show. Ash, is there anything left unsaid?

I'm sure there is, but anything worth saying that's left unsaid? Oh, God, please edit out anything I said that's stupid. No promises. said oh god please edit out anything i said that's stupid no promises or at least add this disclaimer of like i'm very tired i'm a very tired person in general so if i did say anything stupid just keep that in mind including lawyers lawyers don't listen to our show yeah if they do it's for evidence. Don't tell him that. We also have transcripts. I'll be on again after getting sued.

I'll get to tell you about the me getting sued story. Well, we appreciate you opening up and exposing yourself. I'm going to go have a cry. A nice private cry afterwards. Sorry. I had to do that. Last jab. No, Ash, it was good.

Thank you for sharing the deeper details of the journey, really. I mean, it's... Thank you for having me on the show. It's cool that you've been able to make it.

It's cool that you've done something so valuable that you could be acquired and you found the right path to be done that makes you happy, ultimately,

and then adds value to so many people and the contributors that have been taking care of as part of this acquisition. That's cool. It's good stuff. And now your kids might respect you. ultimately and then adds value to so many people and the contributors that have been you know taken care of as part of this acquisition that's cool right it's good stuff and now your kids might respect you that's right you haven't met him he's brutal google is renamed to red panda tell him that there you go well it's been a been a pleasure so So thank you for having me on. Thank you. Thank you, Ash.

Well, the journey for an open source project is not always a straight line. Sometimes it might even be accidental. I think in the case of Ash and Ben Thoss and his demeanor and the way he approaches things is just with a little bit of a joy and a playful nature that I think we can all appreciate. And kudos to him for getting to where he's at with Benthos, the acquisition with Red Panda,

having Alex as a good friend over the years, and all the ways this just worked out for him and for the project. Now, we do have a bonus segment for this episode for our plus plus subscribers. By the way, if you're not a plus plus subscriber, it's better. Go to changelog.com slash plus plus. It is better. Get this show ad free with bonus content and directly support us. And you can't beat that. 10 bucks a month, 100 bucks a year. Once again, changelog.com slash plus plus. And a big thank you to our friends and our new sponsors over at Augment Code. This is developer AI for real work. Check them out. Learn more at augmentcode.com. And of course, to our friends and our partners

over at flyfly.io. That's the home of changelog.com. It could be your home, too. Learn more at fly.io. And to the beat freak in residence, Breakmaster Cylinder. Those beats are banging. That's it. The show's done.

We'll see you on Friday. Thank you. quick question for you benthos was that a mentos mentos joke so it was like it was nothing the fresh maker notice my label down here is fresh maker because i'm like mentos part of the the theme people think the theme was like Deep Sea. The theme was actually just all of this is throwaway. Like any, like the name, the logo, this is all just like stuff. Oh, it's like trash. Yeah. The theme was trash. It's the bargain bin of logos and marketing materials.

So like the name, I just just I did Google search Deep Sea because I already knew I wanted like a stupid blobfish as the mascot the logo and then I just went on Wikipedia

clicked a blue link clicked a blue link this is how I do a lot of my names click a blue link and then eventually you find a word that is like

it's a word so it's something that people can say it means like it's the scientific term for like the scum at the bottom of the ocean