The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - It’s OK to make money from your open source (Interview)

Episode Date: July 22, 2020

Adam loves a good dark theme and supporting a fellow creator, and Hedy Li finished the episode we did with Nikita Prokopov covering FiraCode and reached out saying Zeno Rocha's work on Dracula deserved the same credit. _We agreed._ So we linked up with Zeno about his passion for open source, how he's changed his mind on making money with open source, his big release of Dracula Pro and the future of Dracula, and of course his new book -- 14 Habits of Highly Productive Developers. Check for a link in the show notes for details on how to get your hands on Zeno's book for free through our giveaway.

I got to imagine that somewhere along the line, and that's what we hear, you know, here on Maintainer Spotlight, is that we see people that want to support their work. And if not rewarded in certain ways, not so much just monetarily, but rewarded or appreciated, there's opportunity for resentment. And you've got to find a way to find a reward. And if it's not money or some other way, you've got to find something that sustains your soul to keep doing the creativity and making the make. Totally agree. I think when we are young, we usually, we just think about how much happiness that project brings to you. And that's a huge factor, huge variable. But yeah, as time goes by, like there are other priorities, other things you have to take care of. And if you can diversify your streams of income, right? Like, okay, I have my job. It's paying well. I'm happy. I don't want to leave my job at all.

But if I can generate new streams of income with something that I love, man, why not? Being With Your Change Log is provided by Fastly. Learn more at Fastly.com. We move fast and fix things here at Changelog because of Rollbar. Check them out at Rollbar.com and we're hosted on Linode cloud servers. Head to Linode.com slash Changelog. Welcome back friends. This is the Changelog, Local Podcast featuring the hackers, the leaders, and the innovators of the software world. We have a great maintainer spotlight episode for you today. Zeno Rocha joined us to talk about his passion for open source and how he's changed his mind on making money with open source. We also talked about his big release of Dracula Pro and the future of Dracula.

And, of course, his new book, 14 Habits of Highly Productive Developers. Stay tuned to the end of the show for details on how to get your hands on a free copy of Zeno's book through our giveaway. This special flavor of the changelog called Maintainer Spotlight is co-produced in partnership with our friends at Tidelift. Check them out at Tidelift.com. All right, let's do this. Zeno, we're back, man. Got you here. It's been years, I think.

Yeah, I don't even know how many years, but yeah, it's so good to be back. We started with Lessons Learned last time. We were talking about open source Lessons Learned. You got a really interesting story. I recall you being in the hospital or something like that, and you created Dracula. So we'll talk about Dracula, making money in open source lessons learned. You got a really interesting story. I recall you being in the hospital or something like that, and you created Dracula. So we'll talk about Dracula, making money in open source, and your thoughts on that. This Dracula Pro thing that's kicking butt out there, this book you got going on.

But yeah, so much going on. What has changed with your idea around open source? I mean, Dracula Pro is obviously a money-making thing. It's a profit thing for you. So when we talked before, you weren't really into making money with open thing. It's a profit thing for you. So when we talked before, you weren't really into making money with open source. What's changed? Man, I always hated that idea

of making money with open source. And looking back now, I think, oh my gosh, why didn't I even think about like that in the first place? I think there's always this distinction of, oh, open source is like everything free and that's it. And the opposite of that, it's, okay, let's make money, let's sell. And I always hated salespeople, that sort of thing. And what changed was actually curiosity. I think that's the best way to describe it. Back in 2019, at my regular job, my nine to 5, I wanted to learn more about sales, understand how the business worked.

I was like, yeah, I can read some books. I can try to figure out how the sales pipeline at my company works. But I think the best way to learn is by doing yourself. I looked at all my open source projects and I received like an email from Google Search Console and with all the sites that I have on my analytics and I saw there was like a million page views on the Dracula site and I was like, oh my gosh, there's something here. So I decided to take a shot on that project in particular and that's how it all got started. Like, okay, I'm going to try this sales thing work. And if it works great, if it doesn't, that's fine. I'm going to survive.

Yeah, it was pretty much like that. Well, I think people have a misconception of what sales is. I think that's why people hate sales people. There's some really bad ones out there. Sales really is just a via exchange, right? Solving problems, helping people. I think we get this sort of misconfiguration of what sales is and we're like, we don't want to be that icky person. Yeah, I think the stereotype of a salesperson is one who convinces you to purchase something

that you don't want or need. And that is where the icky comes in because it's like, stop pushing this wares on me, man. I do not want to drive this car home. I'm just here to waste an hour or whatever the context is. And so I absolutely understand that stereotype, but like Adam said,

and that's the difference between a good salesperson and a bad salesperson. A lot of times they'll say, hey, it's all about the product. If I believe in the thing, it sells itself. The best salespeople are working on the things that sell themselves because that's how you have success in sales. You can't sell something that nobody wants or that you don't believe in. Which makes sense for Dracula being, I guess, in quotes,

easy transition-free. We'll talk about the easiness of it, but a million page views to Dracula theme. Was it draculatheme.com? People want it. That's mean people want it that's pretty interesting is that in one month like for a year what's the time frame yeah that was like for a whole 2019 and i was like okay i think we can do something about it and i started thinking okay like if i were to sell this somehow how that would be i don't know about you guys but i've never seen anyone selling a code theme

before. So I was like, no, I think you might be the first one. So I was like, okay, this is going to be pretty insane. Like nobody pays for that. This is free. This is all open source. So how can I turn something that everybody uses for free into something that actually adds value? That was my whole mentality back then. That's a great question. Yeah. Yeah. What'd you land on? Yeah. So many interesting points, many interesting points. The first one was, okay, the product itself, right? What people are actually using. Like when I started Dracula, I picked some random colors that I liked and that was pretty much it. This time I was like, okay, let me truly understand how colors work.

Let me like read some books, read some papers about color theory, how to assemble different color palettes. There's so many different ways to think about this. And this is a topic that designers like a lot, right? And they know a lot about this. I didn't know anything about this, but like any programmer, it's okay, let's learn it, you know? So I started learning about that. So I was able to do something that felt good and that was mathematically appropriate and made sense. And then from there, I was trying to think, okay, how can I really cause some sort of

transformation in people's lives? Because I can do all these nice colors for your Vim, for your VS Code, for your iTerm and your Terminal, but how can that really make a difference in your life? So that's when I started thinking, okay, maybe if I put something like a book, some sort of ebook that I write, maybe this is going to add that value. So I was just trying to assemble pieces, you know, like another piece is fonts. So if I look at the most interesting fonts out there and there's a whole trend in terms of ligatures okay that's another interesting point um at the same time i was looking at apple and what apple was doing and there was pretty much two trends that i saw apple doing like one was having their pro products so airpods pro like something, anything Pro and the iPad Pro. And also they going heavily on dark mode.

So, okay. That's another interesting point. And another trigger for me, maybe it was the fact that I saw other people making money with Dracula. That was not me. So. Oh, really? What were they doing? We were doing like a keyboard with dracula keycaps and they were selling them yeah they were selling them and i think they they broke a record of sales like one of the companies they sold like more than a thousand keyboards and i was like oh my gosh like people are making serious money with dracula and i'm just here sitting around and i'm not doing it that is not me. Oh, no.

And I'm not getting a cut. Yeah. So there's a lot of triggers. You didn't email them your royalty program? No, like it was my fault. It's like MIT, so you can do whatever you want. Right. You could have written some sort of lawyer-esque thing

just to see if they'd fall for it. You know, like, by the way, you owe me the money. Yeah. Interesting. That's funny. I didn't know that part of the story that no i didn't either keyboards and other people are making money off of it yeah was it just like the logo of it or what the keyboards do differently that made them dracula keyboards just the colors and then other companies do you know the bear app the notes the note-taking app called bear yeah yeah bear yeah like a bear like the animal

so if you want to have the dracula theme there you have to pay so it's a another they have like this paywall for themes so another company making money out of that so i was okay, my turn now. My turn. So people must really love the Dracula theme. I mean, when I go into the themes for an editor, there's tons of them. I think Solarize is one I land on quite a bit. They have a light and a dark. Dracula, I see sometimes.

Everybody who talks about Dracula loves it. I've never actually given it a try. Adam, I know you're a user and even a Dracula pro person over there. What is it about Dracula? Is it just like you landed on the best colors there are? Or why do people love it so much from your perspective? What do people tell you about it, Zainab? For me, I think it's the fact that it's multi-platform,

cross-platform, and it's everywhere. When I started the theme was because I wanted to have on my terminal, on my code editor, on my browser. And I missed that unique experience. So I truly believe that there's a huge cost when you're switching context all the time. And I think by having a natural transition between different applications,

your mind is still there, right? This is one of the reasons why developers hate Jira so much. And they love GitHub issues because their code and the issues, it's one place. But if they have to switch to Jira, okay, so now I have to think about that. And Jira is not good in so many ways. Yeah, it's not the only thing they don't like about it, but point taken.

Yes. Well, maybe from a user's perspective, Adam, what is it about Dracula that... For me, I like dark themes. I like dark themes, I like Xenon. There you go, it's too easy. I happen to use editors that are supportive. You have a personal attachment to it, yeah. For Pro, though, what I think was really interesting was being able to go beyond a text editor.

And so I've got my Alfred themed in that way. So I think, if you rewind a little bit, what I like is the story, right? The idea of Dracula. And I also like Xeno, so it was easy to say, okay, well, he's got this thing. I'm sure he's been working hard on it. I've used Dracula in the past for free. Might as well find a way to support him as a maker and as a person i'm a fan of and also enjoy dracula like i i now use it in code i use it in uh you've made it really easy to use in oh my zsh

yeah i just flipped the theme installed it flip the theme and then the same with alfred so like in my in terminal in vs code and in alfred which, I guess, I don't know how to describe Alfred. If you don't know what it is, check it out. I think it's alfredapp.com or something like that. But all those things are themed with my preferred version, which was Van Helsing. That's my flavor. I like dark themes, so that's me.

Cool. So what'd you land on in terms of the pricing structure and how that works out and the details there? Because I noticed it doesn't seem like it's monthly or annually. That's a great question. I wonder why you chose that. Yeah.

So another thing that I started to pick up, when you look at your behavior as a consumer, you can already identify some patterns, right? And I think one pattern that we all have right now is having this burnout in terms of subscriptions. There's always a new subscription. There's always a monthly plan. And now we are all going to these budget apps so we can identify those missing subscriptions

that we forgot. Still not using anymore. Exactly. We're still paying it, but we don't use it. Exactly. And I was like, okay, I don't want to do subscriptions, even though I think it's the best pricing model ever. I truly believe it.

I didn't do it because I don't think it's good. I actually think it's the best, way better than what I landed. I wanted to give it a try. So I decided to set on a one-time payment and see what would turn out from that. So I first thought about two different strategies. I said, okay, let me do one application for nine bucks and I do 10 applications for 49 bucks. That was my whole idea. Because the reason why people use Dracula, besides being a nice dark theme and all that,

it's because it's cross-platform. So they ended up going to the 49 just because it has all the apps. And if someone can't pay 49, then they just go for the nine. So I thought about that. And on the day before I launched, I was talking to some

friends and he said, like, do you really think that the transformation that you want to cause on people's life, it's going to happen if you do the nine bucks? And what about the support of that? How much more support you need to provide? And do you think it justifies the nine bucks? And I thought a lot about that and I said, yeah, it doesn't. So I'm just going to go with 49. And I know it's expensive. If you live in the US, it's already expensive. But if you live in other countries, it's like super expensive. And I said, yeah, that's it. Like if you can't pay, unfortunately, that's totally fine. You can still use the free theme with more than 100 applications supported.

So I landed on that, and that was my goal. So when I launched in February 11th, and I think in the first three days, it already hit, like, I guess the first day was like already $3,000. And then first three days, $7,000. And then the first like two months, I think $20,000. And then right now I can actually check to see, to give you the most accurate number. number so from february 11th until now which is like four months something like this 46 000 in 880 dollars so that was something completely crazy like when i see these numbers i'm like okay

there's probably something wrong maybe there's a bug on the system or something yeah who wrote this system right but it's like it's something like adam said something really really nice i think people want to support makers you know yeah they truly believe that if i do my part and everybody does their part everybody with a better product so i think there's a big part of that too. I wouldn't undercut the idea of story. I mean, who doesn't want to use the variant called Blade or Morbius? I mean, when you got Dracula,

you don't just have Dracula. I saw there was a Buffy in there as well. There's Blade, Buffy, Lincoln, Morbius, Van Helsing. And I think that's just super cool. You've wrapped this emotion, this story into it. I think that's just super cool. Like you've wrapped this emotion, the story into it. I think that's where people underplay the value of story. Yeah. And even more so Baxter, like you personally, but then the story of what this is and, you know, the idea of the color concepts and stuff like that.

You know, the science behind some of these things in terms of like geometric color palettes and, you know, circle of hue and modern color theory. Like this is a lot of stuff you put a lot of real work into not that dracula wasn't like the work was really the support of the different themes as you had said you'd already just picked colors you light roll with it whereas here you've taken a more concerted effort towards color themes names story etc and like there's clearly some value here. I wouldn't undercut that, personally, so don't do that. You put some work into it.

Yeah, for sure. While we're on pricing, you mentioned how the price is expensive even in the US, but you go to other places around the world and it's exorbitantly expensive. Not even approachable for some people. I learned something recently from Quincy Larson from Free Code Camp, and he was on the JS Party podcast talking about pricing parity around the world for conference access. And there's a thing called the Big Mac Index,

which I'm not sure if either of you have heard of it, but it's pretty cool. It was done by The Economist back in the 80s, and they've been tracking it ever since. It's basically a survey or a way of tracking purchasing power parity, which is a great acronym or alliteration of different currencies around the world that using a Big Mac like McDonald's Big Mac as the reference implementations like what would a Big Mac cost in this country versus that country. And people are starting to use this to price their software differently depending on where you live, Which might be a cool idea for something like this. Especially if there's people that want to support you.

They want to have the cool Dracula Pro, but it's just priced completely out. You might end up making more money by giving access to more people by pricing it according to people's locale. I love that concept. It's probably the number one item on my to-do list. Is it really? And I even, like I already saw there's like NPM packages for the purchase parity power, the PPP concept. The PPP. Yeah. And I love that. I think like if we adopt that as a collective community, I think it's going to help tremendously. Like I'm originally from Brazil

and I know how it feels when you see like, oh, this nice product, but then it's in dollars. And when you convert it five times and now, okay, I can't have it. So then what happens? People just go and pirate that. So that's not what you want at the end of the day, right? So it's definitely...

Yeah. Well, I think it's a sign of respect too to price parity. You're right, Jared. I hadn't heard of this. I do recall Quincy referencing it, but I hadn't heard the backstory of like what the Big Mac Index is and what that represents. But I think it's a sign of respect to if you have a product and you can't afford to do that. I suppose you can't not afford to see somebody's pirating your thing if it's a digital product or something like that. But if you respect your audience enough, your global audience,

then you will consider this because, you know, you're sort of like locking them out by being just one way, you know, US-centric, I suppose. Exactly. So it's about inclusion. It's really empathy because you are just considering people that you aren't directly around. It's usually just merely ignorance or lack of thought about other people that leads us to this style of pricing. the other. I think especially when it comes to conference access, especially these virtual conferences, it's huge because the marginal cost of adding one more person to a virtual conference is pretty much zero, right? The bandwidth cost is it. And so your price with physical goods, it's harder because your cost of goods sold isn't going to go down because you're selling into that

country. Like maybe if you can manufacture it there, there's all sorts of other concerns. But with virtual goods, marginal cost of zero, you're really just missing that sale if you can manufacture it there, there's all sorts of other concerns. But with virtual goods, marginal cost of zero, you're really just missing that sale if you look at it as a sale. And that person's missing their opportunity to access your conference or to use Dracula Pro and they're going to turn to other means if they really want it.

So I think we're going to see more of it. I think it's a great thing. This isn't a show about this topic in particular, but I'm curious, how do you do it though? How do you determine where they're at and then price them appropriately? That's the hard part, probably, right? It's like translations. I don't want to translate this into a language that seems like it's native because your IP says you're in Poland or something like that and assume.

I want other things to give me that data. How do you, I suppose, do it in a way that's fair to you as well and to not let people rip you off? We'll start seeing reverse VPNs, like everybody's VPN so that they can watch Netflix from a country that's not in the United States. Now we'll be like, here, we'll give you the

VPN where you locate from this country that has the lowest purchasing power. I guess there's always the honor system, though. And that's what a lot of people operate on. Yeah, I mean they could select where they live. Especially people purchasing Dracula Pro or attending a conference like you just

honor system, where do you live? And if they're going to rip you off, then they're a jerk and they rip you off. I don't know, Zeno, how does those NPM packages work? Do you know? Is it based on their locale or just IP address? Yeah, it usually hook up on your server, they detect your IP. Based on that, they give you a certain percentage of discount that you can apply. So then you can set up, if you're connecting with some payment system, you can set up different coupons for different countries. So if you're

in Brazil, it's like, okay, 57%. If you're in India, it like okay 57% if you're in India it's another percentage so that's how it usually works but yeah you can just enable VPN and pretend you're there right yeah maybe going back into Dracula in particular so when you went away from and create my language as necessary but when you went away from which you're not really going away from the open source, is Dracula Pro building upon the MIT license? How is this based on original code licensing? How did you manage being able to sell it and do what you do and license it? How's that work?

Yeah, license is a very tricky subject. And it's not something I'm a huge expert on, to be honest. I wanted to keep the open source version and I still maintain it. I still improve it. Even today, I was reviewing a theme for Adminer. I don't know if you heard about this database manager, but anyways. And for the pro version, I tried to do something around the number of computers that you're using.

That was the thing that felt the most appropriate. So you can be using three different computers for your personal use. If you buy one copy and you share it with your whole company, you're violating the license. But that's pretty much how it works. Yeah, licenses are tricky. And it's a shame you have to be a lawyer or an expert to use them properly.

I mean, I guess you don't have to be, but you might want to know a thing or two at least. That's true. So do you consider Dracula Pro a finished product? Are you continually maintaining it? With subscription models, the idea is I continue to work on it, you continue to subscribe, value exchange continues, makes a lot of sense, scales better for the maintainer.

But if Dracula Pro is pretty much done, just sell these licenses to it, it works out pretty well for everybody. Are you still toiling away on it? No, yeah, there are a couple of ideas that I'm working on. So number one is the number of supported applications. So on the open source version that are 107, if I'm not mistaken, and on the pro version, it's only like 14 or 16, something like this. So I still have a long way to go to catch up with the open source. So I think

there's a long road over there. And in terms of how I'm going to distribute that, what I'm doing so far is trying to over deliver. That's my strategy. So I launched with like nine or eight and I'm over delivering with these new themes for free. So I just say, hey, here's a new theme for free. Here's a new theme for free. At some point, I might do some sort of extension packages, like video games in the past where you buy version one and then, I don't know, if you play The Sims. So you buy The Sims and that's the game. Okay, Sims 2.

And then now you buy the... Expansion packages. Yeah, the P.A.T.S. package. Like DLC. Exactly. So that's a one path that I could go but like

I'm okay with just expanding and keeping the price as is as well it's not something that I I'm not too worried

about that right now to be honest well one thing that you can think about and others can think about this too is when you think about sales

and so you said recurring or you're against or you want to go down that road because recurring items, for example. But that doesn't mean you can't have multiple launches, like you said, or expansion packages. Or when you expand, it's up to you to determine if there's been enough work to warrant new money from a previous buyer. So you're not selling a lifetime license, right? So to be clear with the audience buying, I don't feel like I've bought a lifetime license. I feel like I've bought, you know, the current 14 themes, you know, the variants or whatever.

But if there's like a new special variant out there, I'm like, I've got to have, you know, Killer Bob. I don't know. I'm just thinking like what other name could you have that comes off of Dracula? I don't know. Maybe Brad Pitt. Maybe Tom Cruise. Just name straight up one of the most famous movies out there ever when it comes to vampires but you know I might be

lured in to buy that because I'm like I see value there and I don't mind rewarding you with dollars so just putting it out there to think like even though you're not going down the recurring dollars route doesn't mean you can't have multiple launches or more launches in the future that's that's you know as you said with expansion packs or other ideas. I think if there's more work, more value, then it warrants new money, in my opinion. No, yeah, that's great. How does this play into your passion for open source Dracula then? So having this, how do you balance and maintain your own mind space between the two?

Are they two distinctly different things in your mind? Are they one thing? Does one feed the other? How do you share that in your mind? So when I started, I think it was like around seven years ago, something like this. And when I was in the podcast telling like the crazy story of how it started, there was a lot of moments throughout these seven years that I wasn't motivated to work on the project. And I just like, okay, I'm just going to keep this alive,

but I'm not super active. There are other moments that I was like super active, but it was like a roller coaster, to be honest. And now that I have this premium version and something that is more sustainable, it actually gives me much more energy. It justifies all the investment that I'm doing in terms of time. So when I'm working on the open source version, for me, it's like I'm working on Pro. There's no distinction on my mind. There's more distinction when there's something related to communication, marketing, that sort of thing. But this is one interesting point for all of you who are listening right now

and you have an open source project that you love, that side project that you really want to maintain, but you don't have time because of work, family, friends, all that. And when you do that, it gives you that power. It's like, no, this is working. People are using, you are being rewarded by your work. And now you can actually even spend more time. People are like super crazy about Dracula. So

maybe I can do some t-shirts and so whatever, like merch and stickers around it. So there's so many ideas and because you have that power, now you can spend more time on it so i would really recommend trying it out even though it's really hard like adding all that value that adam was mentioning man it takes so much time only on that landing page like i spend a lot of time thinking about the content you know like what is the story that i want to tell how do do I justify, like, why would someone open this and think, yes, that's for me. Yes, I'm willing to spend the money. So, yeah. Has anybody followed in your footsteps? Because you definitely broke new ground here. As you said, there weren't people selling themes. Has anybody come behind you and said,

I got a theme everybody loves and I'm going to offer a pro version? Yes. There's actually one person who reached out to me and he has a theme, it's called Shades of Purple. He didn't launch yet, so maybe, I don't even know if I should be mentioning. Maybe you're launching it for him right now. But it's a really nice theme as well and I think he's probably going in that direction. And I think other friends, they reached out

and got inspired by that idea of turning their open source projects into a paid version. You know, like I have a friend that he does a Mac application for you to block, to pretty much enter a presentation mode where you hide all your desktop apps. You block all the notifications and now there's no distractions and you can present whatever you're presenting. It's an app called Plim. And this was like something very similar, the way he structured both his offer and the landing page and all that. And we talked about how to do the pricing, what are the different variables you can think of. And yeah, it was, I think some people are starting that as well. And I think it's a great thing.

Andrew, you mentioned SolarizeJar. That's the only other theme or color scheme I can think of that's been of similar popularity. And Ethan, we had actually had him on, like, geez, way back when. When was that? Let me look real quick. 2012. March 30th,th 2012 this is episode 77 that was before zeno started dracula because he started it in 2013 yes yeah i mean i don't know anybody else like you said that's doing themes and that has that popularity hasn't converted it

and what i mean by converting it is like is there's an opportunity for whether you want to or not an opportunity for resentment? Like your time. I can just think of like how many hours Ethan must have poured into and still pours into Solarize. Not that he hasn't gotten value. And I have no idea what the full story is there. I'm not trying to speculate really or trying to assume. But just speculating is that I got to imagine that somewhere along the line.

And that's what we hear, you know, here on Maintainer Spotlight, is that we see people that want to support their work. And if not rewarded in certain ways, not so much just monetarily, but rewarded or appreciated, there's opportunity for resentment. And you've got to find a way to find a reward. And if it's not money or some other way, you got to find something that sustains your soul to keep doing the creativity and making the make totally agree i think when we are young we usually we just think

about uh how much happiness that project brings to you and that's a huge factor huge variable but yeah as time goes by like there are other priorities other things you have to take care of and if you can diversify your streams of income right like okay i have my job it's paying well i'm happy i don't want to leave my job at all but if i can generate new streams of income with something that i love man why not one of the thing that uh you've got a seems like a small passion for i. I can't tell you. You've only included four. But in Dracula Pro, you've got four hand-picked typography options. Cascadia, Fear of Code, JetBrains Mono, and Victor Mono. Now, I'm only really familiar with Fear of Code because, hey,

we have a maintainer spotlight coming out pretty soon with Nikita on that subject. It's on the feed now as this one goes out. That one will be at the previous maintainerainer Spotlight with Tonski. Nice. Yeah. In fact, I had never said the word ligature, I think, on the changelog until last Maintainer Spotlight, and we're going to probably say it again here

because ligatures are a big part of Dracula Pro, aren't they? Yeah. That's right. But you decided to include these four with Dracula Pro. What went into choosing the right typography? And side note, anything you want to share about Fear Code? Yeah. I think you like that a lot.

Yeah, no, I love Fear Code. It's actually the font that is being used on the site. And yeah, I thought that there are a lot of peripheral things around your code editor. I think a theme is one of them Fonts is another Plugins is another And I was trying to look at

Everything that composes that So when I noticed I didn't use ligatures before And I wanted to give it a try For those who doesn't know what this means It's pretty much when you have Different symbols And you use them on

your code. And the whole premise of that is that you transform those multiple symbols into just one character. So for example, if you want to do equals equals, instead of putting two equals as two characters, it combines as one character. So when you're reading your code, it's easier. That's the whole point. It's easier for you to scan, right? Of course, it depends from person to person. Some people hate ligatures. Some people love it, can live without it. That's definitely a love-hate thing.

There's some people who love it, some people who hate it, some people who are against it. We debated that quite a bit on that show too. We're like, I mean, characters replaced. Now, the good thing is that in the actual text it's just a ligature replacement not a text replacement so that's helpful and when you backspace you're getting back to original characters but it's just simply a presentation layer thing versus a replacement text thing yeah and those were the four fonts that i i found the that fit dracula

pro better and they had ligature support. I tried many, many others, but it didn't feel right. And also, like, I'm really passionate about fonts. So maybe one day we can have some Dracula Mono or something like this. I would love to collaborate on a font for Dracula. I think it would be really awesome. Well, that just shows the opportunity, I suppose, with the idea. Clearly, somebody else had already taken it that step by making keyboards themed based upon your Dracula colors. But this idea has more legs. There's an opportunity for open source to be a gateway for a maker to make money

still keep dracula pro or dracula out there open source free for all maybe potentially share a variant or somehow eventually merge the two somehow to have a free version and like a paid version i'm just saying like there's a lot of opportunity to like really take this and like you know establishing a dracula code typography or you know font face out there would be super cool it's just one more way you can like extend the super cool idea yeah i would love that man like i can't even imagine like seeing the the drop down when you select fonts and then seeing like a dracula mono. Oh my gosh. That'll be amazing. The Tidelift subscription is a managed open source subscription backed by project maintainers. If you're building applications with open source, Tidelift helps you ensure you have components that just work.

That includes comprehensive security updates, active maintenance, and accurate licensing. Tidelift helps you speed up your development, save money, and reduce risk when building apps with open source. And the best part of all, with the Tidelift subscription, you help open source maintainers like Nikita get paid for their work. Learn more and get a demo i'm actually using your language because that's what you wrote on dracula theme.com slash pro when you mentioned seven habits of highly productive developers. Now, first I want to know, is seven habits of highly anything trademarked? Because

there's another book that's really popular. It's very similar named. What are your thoughts on that? That's what I found out when I was writing it. The hard way? Yes. So now it's not seven anymore. It's 14. Double that. Oh, okay. Well, that's twice as good. I doubled that. Nice.

That's so funny. Well, anytime you're writing down habits of highly productive anything, you should just always double it, right? I mean, wouldn't that be natural? Right. So that's hilarious. So now you're at 14 habits. Yes.

When I was doing the pro, that's what I realized, right? Like, okay, I can give you the best theme in the world, the best fonts in the world, and the best code editor in the world. But even if you have all that, but you don't cultivate the right habits, then it's all for nothing, right? So that's where this whole book idea came up. But when I put this out there,

I said, yeah, I'm going to put together an ebook. It's going to be nice and that's it. But yeah, I had no idea what I was getting into. No idea. So fast forward three months later, it's been crazy three months. I have been working super hard on that. And it's, yeah, now it's out there. How many words per day? How do you gauge, I guess, daily success? Chipping away at the block, how do you gauge it? So I think lots of people, they think about the word as the objective, right?

So if I hit 10,000 words, I don't know what is the point, then now I will have a book. I didn't think about that at all. I'm like, okay, I'm going to try to put together all these things that I learned throughout my career, working with lots of good people, and let's see how it goes, right? If at the end of the day, it's a 30 pages book,

okay, that's it. If it's 100 or 200, that's it as well. So that's where my mentality is. But yeah, like writing a book is a very different beast, like from programming. But still, when I started this, my mentality was, okay, I built open source projects before. I built paid products before. I know how to ship things and sit down and do the work. So I will do the same for books. And even if it's a different type of work,

I'm just going to put a lot of effort consistently and hopefully it will be out there. And now it's ready. Did you know you had the book in you though? I mean, it's one thing to sit down and do the work and have a discipline. It's another to actually have the book in you though? I mean, it's one thing to sit down and do the work and have a discipline. It's another to actually have the book in you. Yeah, I think so. I'm not doubting you.

I'm just wondering, how do you know? How do you have that assurance? Which you only have 11 habits. You have the last three. I could have done seven, but I can't quite get to 14. I was actually, you know how I did it? I'm going to tell you how I got the 14. Okay. I first searched for 8hab how I got the 14. Okay.

I first searched for 8habits.com. That was taken. 9habits.com, that was taken. 10habits, that was free. But it was like $5,000 to buy the domain. That's not an option. 11, 12, taken or too pricey. And then 14 was free.

Okay, 14 it is. So that's what I... Wow, I love that. You're backing into your topic size. So you're like, well, I'm going to have to come with 14 in one way or the other. Yes, and I was writing, and there were certain topics that were already on my mind.

I think one that we can all relate as software engineers is how difficult it is to pick what you should learn, right? We are bombarded with tweets and messages, everything, like everybody telling you, you should use this technology, you should use that one, use that framework. Oh, React is much better than Angular. Flutter is much better than React Native. Everybody always telling you what you should do, right? And I feel like that since I started using jQuery. There was always a new framework better. There's always a new library that is better.

I tried to combine all these things that I was noticing on the market or working on the day-to-day and things from my personal life as well. I think by now I gave more than 100 presentations. And I know how that was amazing for me personally as a human being, putting yourself out there, talking to you right now. This is super hard. It's not easy to be out in the public and just opening your heart and tell all the things you feel. And it's a very difficult thing, especially for programmers.

We are all introspective. We have to deal with that. So I try to put that like, okay, if you teach things, it's going to help you. It's not going to only help the person who is listening, but it's going to help you much more at the end of the day. So trying to combine all these lessons was how I ended up with those 14 habits. 14habits.com is super cool. I'd love to find out there's some science,

some actual science around like, okay, habit creation, which we'll do some investigation. We have a show called Brain Science. We'll actually do a little investigation to this hypothesis, but it'd be cool if there was some science to say, learning 14 habits is easier than learning 10 because like that'd be cool right because habit loops and creation is one thing and there's insane science behind it but like for some reason

numbers they play into habits and we're you know the whole world is mathematical i mean it's it's all math and physics and stuff and it's like it intense. But if there's some reason why learning 14 is somehow easier than 10 or maybe even seven, Hey, nothing on Stephen Covey, but you know, maybe it's easier to do 14 versus seven or 10. I don't know.

Buy seven, get seven free. It sounds like that's right. I did hear it takes 21 days to make a habit. Was that on brain science or did i read that somewhere else i can't remember if mariel said that that's a known ism i don't know i'm sure definitely i don't know yeah i don't know that i'll have to research that too i'm gonna say because you could have done 21 habits in 21 days maybe for your next book setup there's

definitely something with like the three-week factor it's like 30 days three weeks that time frame but we'll get mariel to do some research and confirm we might even do a show is this true or not yeah mythbusters but yeah that'd be that'd be cool mythbusters in in regards to brain science mythbusters yeah pop psychology stuff so pick a few of your favorite habits here we'll uh we'll unpack them for the audience because surely some of these chapters probably float out of you as if they had already existed and all the ones you have to like chip away at what are your top habits from the book that we can discuss nice yeah that's a very nice way of putting because when i was writing that's how i felt you know there were some that were like they just they flew like so naturally

and others that I okay I have to spend much more brain energy to put this out there I think there's one that I kind of touched a little bit on this and it's around the like knowing the business side right so I think when we first start as programmers, we think like this, that the sales side is bad and it's hard to like sympathize with salespeople because all they want inside the organization is to sell, right, at any cost. So if that means adding a new feature,

if that means promising some new epic to include on the roadmap, then that's it. And we have to comply and that's all. And they don't care about our code. So as developers, we're like super protective over the quality of our code. And those people, they are the opposite, right? It's like, I don't care about the quality of the code unless it sells. And that's it. So I wrote one that is called Master the Dark Side, where I make this comparison between the light side being, okay, the engineering part and the dark side being the sales side. And I try to convince people on why it's important to know the business side of things.

And some people think that we are paid to code. And I don't think that's the case. We are paid to solve problems. If that means using code to solve those problems, great. If that's not the case, okay, then you don't necessarily have to code. That's not your job. It's not to write characters into a black screen. It's actually to solve something for real so understanding that helps you in so many different levels master the dark side i thought mastering the dark side would be another pitch for his dracula pro theme you know the dark mode that's right i thought you were going there well he kind of did mention a black code editor so it's kind of alluding to a

dracula theme potentially van helsing, maybe, I don't know. Some synergies there. Yeah. So the book is on the Dracula website. Is the book tied into the pro theme or you just buy the book? What's the relationship between the two? They're just both by Zeno? Yeah, when I started was, okay, this is only going to be inside Dracula.

And as time passed, I was putting so much energy and making like everything that i tried to do i want to do the best as possible right everybody is like that and i feel when i was doing i was like okay there's a big opportunity to just sell this this book as is because it's going to help more and that's what i ended up doing so i put it on amazon for pre-orders and that's how it is distributed now both on amazon is regular orders or for the drag clip room yeah there's a lot of stuff going into that too like how do you even get on amazon what's the first step there i just call yes call somebody bezos's number in your robodex hey can i can i get my book on your site, please? It's a whole new world that you have to learn, like this self-publishing world, because I'm not talking to a big editor. I don't have a book

agent. I don't have like a huge team of people working with me. And I feel like that can be helpful for some people, having that person every week asking you how many words uh have you finished how many words now but i was like okay i'm gonna write at my own pace and i'm gonna do this by myself because i want to learn it i want to see how it is to go to amazon and they have this program called kdp the Kindle Direct Publishing. And they have like all these sort of things that you have to fill out and put your book out there. And then there's this whole thing of identifying a book, the ISBN that you have to pay,

and you get this unique number. And you can pay like for 10 unique numbers at once or just one. And every single version of your book is a different ISPN, even from the Kindle version to the paperback version is a different identificator. And yeah, there's like so many things that when you open that Pandora box, you start to learn and like how you do revisions by yourself. Like how do you do

illustrations and how do you generate your book? Are you going to generate an EPUB or a MOBI? How you convert whatever format you used? So there's a lot of different toolings. In my case, I started writing in Markdown. And then from Markdown, I convert to EPUB using this tool called Pandoc. And then when I send to Kindle, they convert from EPUB to Mobi. So it's a whole new world that you have to learn. And yeah, it's pretty interesting. Well, the version we have is a Google Doc, though. Yeah. How's that connected?

Copy and paste. Yeah. It's nicely formatted for copy and paste. Yeah, it is. So when I start every project, every side project that I do, I try to think two things, I would say. One is, okay, what is the value that this is bringing to people? How this is going to help others?

That's my number one driver. And the second one is, how can I collaborate with other people to make this a good thing? Like, if I push it really hard, I can do this all by myself. And that's always how I feel. Like, I don't want to have blockers that I'm just stopped and now I can't move forward. I want to be able to do everything. Even if it's to do the design of my own site. I'm not a designer, but I'll give it a shot. It's not going to be the best design in the world, but I give it a shot. So that's the same for the

book. I'm like, okay, I'm going to do this book. And now I'm going to talk to people that I know and see if they can help. So I put it on Google Drive, on Google Docs, and I called my dad and I say, hey, dad, my dad is unemployed now. I said, hey, can you take a look? Let's just discuss and bounce some ideas. He's not a programmer at all, but okay. And then I put it over there so he can send some comments and we discuss. And then I talked to my sister. She knows how to draw some sketches. I'm like, hey, sister, please help me with this. And now we spend like all this time like putting those sketches.

And then I have a aunt, she's a English teacher. And I said, I'm writing this book. Can you help me review it? Make sure there's no typos. And then- Love it. Yeah, none of those people are technical at all hands on deck like okay let's do this so that's my my approach you know and i think

it reflects on the content also because i know i have some ideas from all those things that i learned but there's so many nice developers out there, like super knowledgeable. So I talked to developers from the New York Times, from Google, from Spotify, Shopify, yeah, from Apple. And I talked to those people and I said, hey, let me send you some questions about this topic that I'm writing. Give me your ideas and I'm going to format them, put it on the book. So that's another thing that you'll see like how there's one writing style and it talks about all these topics, but then there's this complement on top of that idea. Are those interwoven in the content or are those like isolated?

Here's an interview with X, Y, or Z. Yes, right now it's isolated, yeah. It's always interesting to see interviews be part of a book process and ownership of ideas and shared value and stuff like that. In some cases, he's like, I just want my name out there. In some cases, you're like, well, these are actually my ideas. Can you cut me a check? Anybody say, hey, cut me a check, Zeno?

Or they're just like, here's my ideas for free. Not yet. Not yet. No one thought about it. Maybe after this podcast. I guess the top sellers list yeah interesting

well let's hit one more habit I'm going to hit one more habit because I got one that I would love to ask you about because I didn't get a chance to read the body text yet but I did read the headline is it the 9 to 5? no don't be Mario

be Sonic let's talk about this what's that mean? that's a good one so i feel like when we connect ideas with themes that we already know in pop culture right it's always good it makes it easier to connect there's like this game that people play in parties and all the time that it's who would win in a fight. So then you pick random characters, right? So, okay, Batman versus Iron Man or Darth Vader and Thanos. So you get those random characters and you try to combine them.

So I tried to think the same way for those two characters. And I was thinking, okay, Mario, what he does all the time, he's always jumping, right? He's always like jumping from place to place and he kills the other bad guys when he jumps over them. Okay, that's interesting. And then Sonic, okay, super fast and there's like, he rolls and then he kills the other bad guys

when he just rolls over them. So I tried to think about all these developers that I met where they were just like jumping from place to place. So they worked for a year and then went to another company, worked for a year, went to another company. And then there's these other developers that they try to learn as fast as possible and they try to stay on top of whatever the trend is. And they just get things done. So that's the kind of idea, the two contracts that I was trying to give.

And my main point is that that's okay if you are the kind of person who is jumping from job to job. But there's a side effect to this, which is you're not going to be able to create deep relationships and solve deep problems. Yes, you can help. You can code.

You can solve some bugs, create some features when you're there. But when you spend like two, three years in one subject, you know, like Adam, how many years you're doing this podcast? You know? A lot of years. Man, like if you did for one year. 10 years plus. In general, 10 years for this show. Yeah.

Plus, actually more than 10 years. November this past year was our 10th anniversary. That's amazing. And like the level of comprehension that you have around podcasting as a subject, it's like unbelievable. You could do any podcast you wanted right now. And that's because you spend a lot of time doing that. So that's how I also believe that people,

when they're switching jobs very often, there's usually something connected to that where they're trying to fulfill some sort of need that they're not having. And that's not to say that, okay, if you stay on the same job for 20 years, you're doing the good thing. I also don't think that's the case, right?

You're probably just staying there. You're in your comfort zone. You don't want to step out. You're afraid of doing an interview, being rejected. So I feel like there's this parallel between Barry and Sonic. And that's what I try to put out there. We had similar, not same, but similar conversations recently with Ryan Singer on episode 399, Shipping Worth It Matters, here on the Change Log, and then also back a little bit.

I'm trying to remember the title. Did we ship that show yet? Yeah. One thing that every dev should know. Yeah, with Jessica Kerr. I was thinking about that as well. Knowledge transfer is a big problem. Knowledge transfer, story, depth.

I don't know if it made it on the show, Jerry, but I know you and I actually talked about our rough idea of what longitudinal meant and Ryan's version of it and what we thought of it I think originally was different. But just this idea that the kind of problems Ryan has solved design-wise for Basecamp, Ryan Singer for Basecamp, he's been there for the whole time. So he has this vast knowledge of Basecamp's problems. So his understanding of solving problems is so deep, whereas if you keep just jumping around, you don't get enough depth and story and experience and domain specific wisdom like he's got some specific domain wisdom around project management in relation to like what base camp problems they've solved and like you don't get that jumping around being mario is your example so totally i totally

believe on that and like if we take like the example of changelog right you know how to create an audience now come on come on we like to think so we invite xenos on we invite ryan singers i'm just kidding yeah that's part of our shtick but yeah and like you know that's so much and you know this niche mostly we know what stuff doesn't work yeah that's true yeah which is knowledge yeah that's true but that doesn't mean we know it does work yeah yeah and that yeah absolutely that that's the same with habits right like every year you know january 1st you have all this list of things that you want to be better at. And that's what you aim for. But nobody does a reverse.

And they think, what are the habits that I can just remove? And that will make me a better person this year, right? So I think like knowing what works and what doesn't work is crucial. Well, put the website of the book again and some upcoming dates for it. Any particulars around it, like its launch date, etc. How to subscribe to get notified if that's's a thing is it on amazon for sure what's what's the state yes so uh if this goes live after yeah it was july 14th the launch date of the english version and i'm also working on a Portuguese version for July 28th. That's another whole thing, like how you translate a book.

Oh, man, it's so many different things. My bad. And it's, for now, exclusively on Amazon. I'm still thinking maybe put it on other platforms, but I think I'm going to try to stick with that. I think last week I saw a new version of the Pragmatic Programmer. Remember this book? And they launched like the 20th edition of that book. And that really got me thinking because I've been selling like Dracula as an individual independent indie hacker, right? That's

what I'm doing. And I have to do all the marketing myself. I have to get the audience to that point myself. And I thought about doing the same with the book. I'm just going to put on Gumroad, sell it over there. But for how long can I maintain the audience to keep going there? And when I saw that book launching the 20th edition, I was like, man, like they were able to keep like 20 years this thing up. And it's unbelievable. It's still a super relevant subject. And they were able to distribute that throughout 20 years.

So that's why I'm picking Amazon for now. And I will try to stick with that and see how that works. I did the whole individual thing. Now let me do the whole platform and marketplace thing. Let's see which one is better. Gotcha. So 14habits.com releases on the 14th of July. Would make sense because there's 14 habits.

I don't know if that's for a reason. Is that just by coincidence? Okay. I love it. And that's for a reason. Is that just by coincidence? Okay. I love it. And July is the seventh month. Oh, 7-14. Stick it to the copyrights. Oh, man.

Steven's coming after you. Hang on now. Hang on now. Decode your dig. Congrats, though. I mean, one, I got one more question for you, but I want to give you a congrats. To do all this work, to come not just from simply an open source project, but to have a bigger idea. And I think that's what I want to do with this show, what we do here.

But like in particular with Brain Science, we want people to think differently about the problems they face and decisions they make and the way they perceive the world and the way they their mental framework. And I think that's what you've done here is you've changed your mindset towards one open source and then two just like how you can sustain and be happy like working with your dad and your sister and your family must be a joy for you for one but then two to have the extra help but to really enjoy what you do which is super cool when it comes back to let's say open source you've had a change of heart. Get some closing advice to those out there in open source that can maybe take a grain of salt from what you've done here. Some advice going away of like, you know what, if you're stuck here and you're not sustaining, here's some ways to think about it in terms of like just open source, not having to be just free, but finding a way to be rewarded by doing so. Yeah. Usually there's some things that we do and we think when we do open source and number

one is like, you want to carry that flag, the open source flag. This is open. This is something everybody can look at the source code. And that's amazing. I love that flag. I want to carry that flag with me as well throughout my whole life. I love that flag. I want to carry that flag with me as well throughout my whole life. I love that format. But I would suggest people to also think about the underlying goal. If you're putting something out there, it's because you want to help someone, right? You want someone to grab that code,

make it better, put on their own applications, and then solve a problem themselves. And you can do that with a paid product as well. Yes, there's a lot of work. You have to do support. You have to do marketing. If you do that all by yourself, it's really challenging. You have to wear lots of hats, but you learn so much by doing that. And I feel that's something that people should take away and just like, okay, don't give up. You know, the first project that you launch, nobody will care. The second one, nobody will care. The third one, now you know a little bit, maybe a hundred people will care. And then you go from there, you know, but not giving up. And I think there's so much that you learn by doing a side project. There's a ceiling

to what the opportunities and the technology that your company can provide to you. And when you spend maybe 15 minutes out of your day, you don't have to sleep at 4 a.m. Just spend 15 minutes one day, 15 minutes the other day. Try to do something by yourself. I think it's a great lesson. And like take from this podcast, you know, I love what you guys are doing. You're doing for like more than 10 years. It's unbelievable. And the value that you brought to so many people, like you transform so many different careers, right?

So if you take from that example as well bring to your own life okay how can i transform my career and my personal views is something that is going to inspire others you know if you can do that you know what's better than that you know so yeah thank you thank you for saying that we appreciate that we appreciate having on the show yeah we appreciate all the work you put into this uh this theme that i love and paid for uh this book that i will will read when i get the the final copy of it which i will pay for and uh i'm not getting for free right now just to be very clear on that which i will pay for no no no well to be very clear that i mentioned that we got a pre-version of it. We will pay for it. We support people doing awesome stuff like Zeno.

That's right. That's right. But great words of wisdom, Zeno. Thank you so much for sharing your time. It's been awesome. Thank you. Thank you, guys. Thank you, everyone.

All right. Good job hanging in there for the whole show. All the details to win a free copy of Dracula Pro and Zeno's book can be found in the show notes. Look for a link to our blog post explaining all the methods of entry and good luck to you. If you just want to give a shout out to Zeno and all the work he's done in open source, all the hard work he's put into Dracula, Dracula Pro, and every other thing he's done in open source, you can do so at changelog.com slash 405. This is episode 405, and that method is allowed. And, of course, huge thanks to our friends at Tidelift for co-producing Maintainer Spotlight with us.

Also, huge thanks to our partners who get it, Linode, Fastly, and Rollbar. We also have to thank Break Master Cylinder for making all of our awesome beats. Thanks to you for listening to the show. We appreciate you. Listen to all of our awesome beats. Thanks to you for listening to the show. We appreciate you. Listen to all of our shows via the master feed, changelog.com slash master, or search for ChangeLog Master in your favorite podcast app and subscribe.

You'll find us. Thanks again for tuning in this week. We'll see you next week. Bye.