The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Open source lessons learned (Interview)
Episode Date: April 28, 2017Zeno Rocha, Principal Developer Advocate at Liferay, joined the show to talk about DevRel, his open source work (clipboard.js, Dracula Theme, jQuery Boilerplate, Browser Diet, et al), and his passion ...for teaching and giving talks at conferences. Zeno also shared some really interesting stories about his first contributions to open source, how that played out, and the lessons learned along the way.
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I'm Zeno Rocha and you're listening to The Changelog. Welcome back, everyone.
This is The Change Log, and I'm your host, Adam Stachowiak.
This is episode 248, and today on the show, we're talking to Zeno Rocha,
Principal Developer Advocate at Liferay. This is episode 248. And today on the show, we're talking to Zeno Rocha, principal developer advocate at LifeRay.
We're talking about DevRel, his open source work, his passion for teaching and giving talks at conferences.
He also shares some really interesting stories about his first contributions to open source, how that played out, and the lessons he learned along the way.
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All right, we're back today. Got Zeno Rocha joining us today,
Principal Developer Advocate at LifeRay. And, you know, Zeno, I learned about you
because I was trying to reach out to folks in that space.
I was working with Sandra Pershing at Mozilla about something.
She's got going on DevRel Summit.
And Justin Dorfman said, you need to talk to Zeno.
And so here you are.
Yeah, welcome.
Welcome, Adam.
Welcome, everybody.
And so first off, the coolest name ever, Zeno Rocha.
I mean, you must get applause just when
you say your name in front of the stage or something like that it's crazy like when i'm
on a phone nobody like i i say my name nobody understands it it's not that good now what's the
i'm an american so i've got just a typical english way i say it what's's the enunciated way to say it in like your native tongue?
Yeah, so I'm from Brazil
and usually people just call me Zeno.
But Zeno is fine.
Z, whatever you want to call me.
If it starts with Z, I will answer.
You'll answer.
Okay, what about Rocha then?
Yeah, Rocha is fine.
Okay, gotcha.
So there's no there's no uh
rolling of the arno trail there no no okay all right i thought there might have been so i was
and now i'm slightly disappointed um but you got a fun history in open source though so you you know
developer advocates i mean what a what a role that's i wouldn't say underappreciated but
under understood, right?
Yeah.
There's so much work inside of a company because as companies like Liferay and others continue
to grow and start to adopt more and more technology, so to speak, right?
They become, you know, not simply just businesses.
Now they actually have software development departments that create proprietary software
and then also open source and that stuff.
Like you've got to have somebody inside the company
that knows both sides of the spectrum.
Is that roughly a crack at what a developer advocate is
to a company like Liferay?
Yeah, yeah.
I think this is a new position, right, in the market.
This is something that when I started didn't exist.
Or if it existed, I didn't know about it.
And it was like a natural progression, at least for me.
But I think nowadays we have...
It's basically like two kinds of companies that we have.
We have companies that their audience, their target market are developers.
So in that case, the way that marketing is done is completely different and they need to adapt to that certain world.
Or you have companies that their end product is not only for developers.
So let's say Facebook, it's not a company that their target audience are developers,
but they do reach out to developers and they have this open source department because they
know how important it is to reach out to developers and when they build their SDKs and those kinds
of things.
So I think that's how it always started.
I think this is a new position out there and it's starting to to grow
more and more how new is this position like i think the first time i heard the title was maybe
two-ish years back you know there's always been some sort of advocacy but
in the first time i actually heard the the actual title was maybe about two maybe three years back
is that about when you think you may
have surfaced the word as well itself yeah i'm not sure like 100 about what is how it started
but i think the first guy that had this title was a guy called guy kawasaki right so he he
yes exactly so i think he he was the one who started and I think it was like developer evangelist
or chief developer evangelist, chief evangelist, something like that.
And it's basically like, um, a position it's different.
And for a lot of time, there were like job titles that were related to that, like community
manager, you know, uh, those kinds
of things. Uh, they're on the same ballpark basically. Exactly. Exactly. So developer
evangelist, developer advocates, community manager, they're all like kind of related,
but they, they have their differences, you know, like some people don't like, uh, the name
community manager because, uh, a community and we and we can talk about any kind of community.
It shouldn't be managed by someone. Right.
So I think this is this is a title that people are trying to not use that much anymore.
They're going more towards advocate because it's like a group of people, like facilitators
to the community.
It's not like they, they, they managed the community.
Yeah.
I didn't get that memo.
I didn't know that, uh, that community manager wasn't cool anymore, I guess that it was,
so to speak.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is something that it's like a trend, uh trend in the past years, like some people starting to discuss more because now like now we're having conferences about developer relations.
So there's going to be one in San Francisco, the DevRel Summit that you just mentioned in Seattle, and you have conferences in Tokyo about that.
So I think this is like a field that is growing more and more
and it's interesting to see.
So have you been to one of these conferences yet?
No, I have no idea how they are, but I'm curious.
Yeah, I'm kind of curious too because, you know,
as I mentioned, how I came to know you better
was through a friend of the show, Justin Dorfman.
Thanks, Justin. I was talking to
him and he's played that kind of role
at Max CDN, which
is now StackPath. Now he's
at Sticker Mule.
Big fan of the changeloggers in the
community. Also running Sustain
an upcoming conference. So if
you haven't checked that out, go to sustainoss.org.
We're a part of that as well.
So if you're in that space at all about sustaining open source or advocating, I mean, so long story short, that's how I met you was through Justin and sort of peering into this world of DevRel and kind of, you know, we like to travel to conferences with our podcast called Spotlight. So if you're listening to this and you haven't heard of Spotlight yet, go to changelog.com slash spotlight.
Lots of good episodes there
that Jared and I have done
when traveling to OzCon,
All Things Open,
Node Interactive,
and potentially, you know,
some other conferences this year.
But we like to go there
and kind of pull back that hallway track
that you don't often get a chance
to record and take away
and share that with the rest of the world.
So we sort of have the
hallway track conversations you would want to have
or have heard, you know, if you were a fly on the wall, so to speak.
And so we're really interested in doing DevRel Summit with Sandra
and making that happen.
And so when I started to reach into this world a bit more
and figure out, you know, how we can make it happen,
you know, one of the people that came up was talking to you.
But, you know, I don't think we gave you a full on true introduction, though.
And I don't want to go too far into the show before we have a chance to do that.
So for those who don't know, you told us how to say your name and all that fun stuff.
That's a fun name.
But give us a snapshot who you are.
Kind of give us a bit of your history, either in this position you're in now, in this role you're in now or open source at large you know your story best help me share who you are yeah sure like uh
i'm a front-end developer by heart that's what i love doing that's what i like doing and i started
with flash as lots of people you know i remember I was like working on this design agency
and it was great. You know, at that time I loved to use Flash. It was great.
When compared to other languages, I didn't have the same satisfaction as I had with Flash.
I would like spend hours like with some languages that I was trying in the beginning,
you know, I was still in the university
and I would have to like work for hours and then compile.
And then when I see something on my screen,
it's like that black box with some message, you know.
And with Flash, I would like work for 15 minutes, compile,
and then I would see
everything like spinning around and doing all those kinds of things. So for me as a visual
human being, that was very appealing. And then at that time, I was like, HTML5 just came out.
There was a lot of people talking about it, but there's one guy in
particular, Paul Irish. And I was very inspired by that guy. I remember like just watching what
he was doing and I was like, oh my gosh, one day I want to be like that guy in Brazil or something, you know, like basically like I was very
interested in like HTML5 border plates and some other projects.
There was like a e-book or just like an online book called Dive Into HTML5.
I started translating that book.
So it was a very interesting moment.
And I started to do more experiments
with HTML5. My first one, and I'm going to send you this. You can check it out and then
you guys can see on the comments. So I made this as my first HTML5 experiment. And let me just send you.
And the idea was just like
playing around with Canvas, right?
There was like lots of
exciting technologies in HML5.
And this was one of it.
Wow.
Yeah, like playing with Canvas
and just like there was local storage.
I was playing with that.
I was playing with everything that I could see about HTML5.
But this one was very appealing to me and I was just interested about it.
So I was getting involved, looking at all this.
And my father, he always said to me like, oh, if you really want to learn something, you need to teach it.
Right. So this is a very common phrase.
Like, if you really want to learn, teach it.
If you really want to learn, teach it.
And I would hear that and I would like go to these conferences and I was like, OK, so I think I'm interested in learning HTML5 at that time I
didn't know HTML5 at all but I went I was interested about it and I saw this conference
and they had like a open call for papers so I was like okay I'm gonna submit a talk about HTML5
and they had like this huge field so I could feel my work experience. And I didn't have any work experience. I was like
at the university. I was working with Flash, but I wanted to learn HTML5. So I submitted a talk
about HTML5. I didn't expect them to accept the talk, but they did. And it was insane. Like I was super worried. I was like, oh my gosh, what I did.
I thought about giving up. I was like, why did I did this? You know, there's no reason I should
have like, there's no point in doing this. But then I was like, okay, I'm going to do this talk.
So it was super nice because I got to learn HTML5 and just understand a little bit more.
I didn't know everything about it, but I wanted to learn more.
And that really changed me.
My first talk completely changed the way I looked to the world, the way I would feel my work, my job, everything that I was doing. From one point, I was like, okay,
I was working as a freelance, getting as much jobs as I could, trying to make as much money as I
could. And when I gave that talk, everything transformed. And I was getting into open source
at the same time so everything like really transformed
in my life and I was like uh okay now I see a meaning it's not only about me it's not only
about me making money doing those kind of work you know because at least for me um opening the
code editor I don't know if you felt that way before, if you did freelance before, but just opening the code editor,
I would feel the pain.
Oh my gosh, I need to work
in this project. I don't want to work this
anymore. I need to do
X, Y, and Z in this project.
That's how it always started.
I started to give talks
and I started to get into open source.
How far back was this, this first talk you gave?
I think...
At least this moment in time.
Yeah, this was in 2011.
So I was still in the university
and I was doing, just starting to work my first job.
And that's when I submitted this talk they accepted and i gave it
and then it was like one after the other uh i really where was the talk at the talk was in
brazil uh in a city near rio and it was like an open source kind of conference. There was a lot of talks about Linux
or Ubuntu or
PHP, other
open source technologies.
Frontend was really
like, it's not like it is
today that Frontend is
super big and many people
just interested on that.
Frontend was starting, there was no
Frontend tracks in a big
conference you know but yeah they accepted and and i gave the talk and i guess to to bring some
context to to where we're trying to get to is like your first step into open source was sort of rocky
we had a call about a month or so ago you and I to kind of kick some conversations off basically about having you on
the show.
And you pointed me to this,
this project you started called jQuery boilerplate.
And it was to issue number 10 on the issues on their project.
We'll link it up in the show notes.
So if you're listening to this,
check the show notes.
But the title of this issue was sort of off-putting.
I mean,
I say sort of,
sort of tongue in cheek because it was totally not cool,
right?
This is,
it's just not the kind of issue you want to see come through your email
inbox.
Right.
And the title of this issue is everything is wrong.
So deleted all of it this way.
You can start over and do it right.
So frame that for us.
Like it was this your very first project,
you know,
what was the scenario here and
like how did this issue in particular impact you yeah so i was really like influenced by by the
success of hml5 boilerplate and i was loving jquery and i at that time i didn't have I didn't have, I didn't build a single jQuery plugin, but I was interested on it. And
some one day at work, I was like, maybe this piece of code that I'm writing, maybe I could
make this as a open source project and as a jQuery plugin. So I was looking around seeing
all the options that were out there, lots of different patterns for building jQuery plugins.
And there was no like, okay, this is the way you should go.
You know, one single pattern, at least for someone that is just starting,
like this is how you should do it.
So I was like, I should build one.
But the problem is I haven't built anything before with that,
but I was like, I was going to give it a try.
So I built this repository, my first repository on GitHub, I guess. And then I built this
pretty website and I launched it. So I launched that and in the first day there were like
10 access, like nobody really saw it, just my friends
and things like that. On the second day I sent a tweet to Smashing Magazine, that was in 2011,
and then they shared the tweet. I was super surprised, you know, I was like,
nobody's going to see this, nobody's going to like this, but I'm going to give a try. I sent the tweet and they shared the project. So on the second day, there was like
2000 people visiting. And then suddenly this project was like, boom, everybody was singing
it. And then of course I was not an expert. I'm still not an expert, but I got this pull request.
Everything is wrong, so delete all of it.
This way you can start over and do it right.
So it was very harsh, very difficult.
And I was like, yeah, that's the end.
Again, same question.
I asked myself why I did this there was no way no reason
for me to do this i should have just like stayed home doing doing other things you were an imposter
man you don't belong here you know digging into this a little further too like the the so when
you fork a repository you can you know do the work in your own in your own branch right and so the the branch
that this was done in the branch name was called reset this crap i don't know if you've noticed
that like because you mean this is your story not mine but like yeah it's even it goes even further
like the the branch they put their this reset in was reset dash this dash crap. That's crazy. Yeah, I haven't seen that.
But the interesting part of this pull request
is that I accepted, you know, it shows this close,
but I merged the commit
and I was willing to do it over again.
So I remember reaching out to adios money he was working
aol in the uk and then i was like hey i know you're very good at the things you do you know
he was doing some really good things with javascript and i just reached out to him i
sent an email to him and asked for help. And he helped me.
And we kind of like, we did that.
And then it's still like a very popular project. Even though jQuery, like not many people are using as before, but like since 2011, people have been using this and kind of worked.
That's crazy.
So jQuerybulletplate.com is the website
that i was talking about and uh you got the bullet point there you got patterns you got
generated you got guides and as you said even though jquery is sort of frowned upon now that
they prefer to do it different ways or it's just not cool anymore there's there's the web has moved
moved on most people can actually pinpoint their start into web
or javascript because of jquery and anybody who would consider them primarily an html css developer
got into javascript because of the ease and the connecting points of like mapping dom elements
you know the html classes to css classes then to jquery
javascript classes like so it's got its point there but wow so you reached out to to addy and
addy has money uh pre-google so this is this is a while back most people know him from working at
google and all the work he's done there and other work you've done with him since then but
like what was that like reaching out to somebody didn't even know, did you even
know him?
I didn't know him.
And I was very like, uh, my, my thoughts and, uh, my, my mindset is always, I'm going to
try to do this.
Uh, if it works great, if it doesn't, then that's fine.
You know?
So that's why I reach out to him.
And when I see those people, you know, they're all like very busy people, you know, like those
guys that you see on Twitter all the time doing some like crazy projects, you know, they're always
very busy. And you always imagine that they will not have time for you and that's most of the cases that's
true you know life is all about like time you know so when you give your time to someone else
like like why I'm here today talking to you you know I could be doing something else I could be
watching Netflix I could be doing whatever, anything different from that.
Work?
Yeah, work.
More open source.
Yeah, another project.
Why not?
But I think those people, they are also willing to help.
And so I think it was a good move.
I'm glad he replied.
I also think that if you are listening and if you have
someone that you really admire and you follow his or her work why not reach out
you know those people they do a lot of work on their free time they spend
weekends doing those things so sometimes just like one phrase could like change
their day so yeah we get emails every once in a while they don't they don't
happen too often but often enough that when we get them they're nice boosts of confidence back into
like okay what we're doing is actually impacting people okay what we're doing is is really being
appreciated by the people listening because other than people going to changelog.com slash community
and signing up and hopping in slack and hanging out with us behind the scenes other than people going to changelog.com slash community and signing up and hopping in
slack and hanging out with us behind the scenes other than like you're part of that too other
than people doing that like we really haven't had this personal touch to the audience who's
listened to the show since 2009 which is when this show started so we've been on air for the
better part of seven-ish years you know i mean this is even this is even more than that, isn't it? That's great.
My math is incorrect.
It's like eight-ish, right?
That's awesome.
I mean, it's been a while.
So yeah, getting that kind of feedback is awesome.
But something I don't want to gloss over
is you said that you accepted the pull request.
Yeah.
Now, I don't want to camp out there too much
if it's not worth it,
but I feel like if you accept the pull request
that deletes all of your code, that's sort of like bold to do as the person submitting the pr
but then humble on the other side to actually take it and and and say okay you're right or
whatever and actually accept the pull request that deletes all of your code and start again
like that's that's crazy.
Yeah, I think you need to think about like all the other people out there.
You know, this guy that opened the pull request, he was much more experienced than me.
And there was no reason in being just like, OK, I'm not going to do anything about it or I could delete the repo.
You know, ultimately, I wanted to help.
And how can I better help other people?
That's why I did that.
One of the repo in the first place was this bullet plate that would hopefully give someone else some bootstraps to stand up upon when doing anything new with jQuery.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
So have you ever had a run-in with the person who opened the request?
I keep saying the person because I don't want to say their name if you want to,
cause I'm not going to do that,
but you can,
we're going to lead to the issue so you can do the research on your own,
but we're not trying to flame anybody.
We're just sort of having a conversation around this moment in your time and how it's impacted your life and your story.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No,
no,
I,
I didn't have the opportunity yet,
but there's no,
like there's no time limit yeah yeah that's fine
the invitation to some degree is still open basically yeah very cool well you've done some
other stuff so we're gonna we're getting close to time for a break one thing that we use it's
probably a very small project but a cool project for you is clipboard.js we use that on changelog.com
so if you go to any
episode and you click the share button and you get that there's an overlay that comes up you get a
chance to copy any of the urls to like the url to link to it so that's one thing and then also the
embed code to embed our episodes into your blog and our medium posts or websites or whatever so we have that option so
we use clipboard js for that you got dracula theme we talked about jake where bullet put with one of
your first earlier projects browser diet and a ton of other stuff you've been involved with web
components so i just kind of want to tease some of that stuff up before we go into this break to
sort of like let the audience marinate on some things we may talk about. So awesome. We'll we'll take this break.
When we come back, we'll dive a little further into your story and some of that stuff.
So we're back.
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Our deepest thanks to Datadog for being a sponsor and now back to the show all right we're back with zeno rocha talking about this cool history you got man i love it
and for some reason people like to start things with you and issues i don't know why that's a
thing for you but that's just how it works out. Maybe that's how it is for most people.
And I'm just an idiot.
But we mentioned before the break us using clipboard.js.
And apparently this is a pretty popular repository.
16-ish thousand stars.
I mean, that's kind of popular, right?
But back in 2015, October 2015, you got this issue, which was like basically, you know, how did the repo become so popular?
Right.
In such a few days, I guess 5,000 stars in a few days.
People were essentially attributing it to other things that were not what was true, like Hacker News or somebody promoting it or whatever.
Basically, it seemed to be hacker news but then you kind of chimed in about five comments into this issue of like trying to investigate why this project was so popular or
why had why it had you know gotten so many stars 5 000 in just a few days as the issue has mentioned
and you sort of break it down uh experience credibility docs and demos timing you sort of
put things in perspective for everybody
like all this work you put into it that was unseen and as we've gone through open source
the last couple years more and more things like this become contributions that are more welcomed
obviously because that's what you need but then also um you know those who are giving those kinds
of contributions they're being thanked a lot differently,
not simply just code contributions,
but community, docs, knowing your audience,
these things you're talking through in this issue.
But this is sort of an interesting place
you find yourself in,
which is having to defend yourself in issues.
Yeah.
Yeah, basically like Clipboard.js
was a very interesting project for me because before and for a long time, I was building websites for these projects that I was participating in. you usually have code snippets, right? And those code snippets, if you want to make it good,
then you have some syntax highlights on the code snippet.
You put a copy to clipboard button on that.
So it makes it easier for people to just use that code piece.
But then at that time, the only solution was zero clipboard.
So that was what GitHub was using, for example.
It was like this Flash.
They had like a Flash file.
And the only way of doing that on the web before was by using Flash.
I remember this hack.
It was pretty nasty.
Exactly.
And required Flash.
Exactly. So as required Flash. Exactly.
So as the modern web begins to move away from it, obviously you have a feature that may or may not work.
Exactly. And I never liked the idea of using Flash on my sites, and I was always trying to avoid that.
So for many, many years, I had that feeling inside of me, like, oh, this is horrible. I don't want
to use Flash in my sites. And when I was like following what was going on on the web platform,
I noticed this new API called exec command. And I was like, hmm, that's interesting. And then I
noticed that you could do some copy and cutting. And I started to dig more.
I noticed lots of like, it was not compatible in many browsers, this API yet.
But I was like, just going through that.
So basically, like I launched the project, got super popular.
And then there was like this guy asked this question on the GitHub issue and
like everybody was replying like, oh, it's popular because of Hacker News. It's of Hacker
News, Hacker News, Hacker News. And I was like, whoa, wait a second. Like, of course,
you know, it's on the first page of Hacker News. But the only reason why it's there, it's because of X, Y, Z, you know? So I was trying to explain what is the background and why those, like, it's very easy for someone
to see, uh, like, and when, when they think about a certain person, you know, oh, I know
that person in your case, you know, me because of Clipboard.js. Some other person may know me because of something else or something else I'm going to build in six months.
You know, so it's very easy to you just see that moment in time and you just make your point about someone based on that particular thing. And I really disagree with that kind of thinking
because it's like, there's a long way,
in order to make something successful,
it's a long way, you know?
So I was basically like trying to explain, you know,
like this popular, it's reason because, you know,
one point is experience.
Because I have been doing open source for a long time,
I know what works, what doesn't work.
I have been giving talks, I have been doing open source for a long time. I know what works, what doesn't work. I have been giving talks.
I have been building projects.
So in order to build something that is easy to understand,
and this is something like building that particular project was not difficult.
It was something that you could build one that is much better than Clipboard.js for sure.
I can totally, like that's not a problem.
But how you make that in such a way that is easy for other people to consume, that's the most difficult part.
And that's what people don't understand.
So they go to GitHub, they create their thing and they hope, OK, now everybody's going to love this.
And it's not like this, you know, you need to,
I remember spending like one or two days,
like a weekend on the library itself.
And then I spent like two weeks on the, on the website
and not because the website is like complex.
Yeah.
It's not like a much different ratio, honestly.
Yeah. And it's not like the website is complex. Yeah. It's not like the website is complex. Like if you see the website, it's so,
it's ridiculous, like easy. There's no secrets at all. Like one page, there's nothing on the website.
But the way the website was built in every particular piece that I was worried about. Uh, that was, uh, one of the reasons why it was successful, you know? Uh, and also, uh, in order to make something that has a
big impact, one thing that, that helped me was also like this credibility that I have been
building for many, many years. So, uh, I have like, uh, have like some following on Twitter, on GitHub. I always
try to provide value for other people. Always. You know, there's not a single day that I don't
try to help other people. So when you do that for a long period, you start to grow that, you know,
that group of people that follow you and keep keep track of what you do you know so
i think that that was another step and like taking care of your docs and how you communicate how you
communicate your demos this is super important uh it's very easy to just throw your code out there
and expect people to just use it but if you don't have docs, if you don't explain why you created the project
in the first place, I remember spending like a lot of time just on the first paragraph of the site.
I was watching that Ted talk about start with why, and then I'm still really inspired by that.
And I tried to do everything this way.
And I was like, okay, I'm going to start my project with the why.
And then how can I communicate in a good way, you know?
And then also like the way I timed the project was also very crucial because I knew that only Chrome was supporting that particular feature.
That was it, you know, only Chrome.
So I built it and then I waited.
So I was waiting until Firefox would release that feature as well.
And I knew Firefox was going to release because I was like tracking comments on blog posts.
So I noticed like some developers saying that, oh, this is on the other
Firefox, it's on beta. So, and they talked about when they were going to release the stable version.
So I was tracking that. So when they released Firefox, I think I waited like a few days
until people would upgrade. And then I released the project.
So that was another important factor.
And also, I think just knowing who you're building things for,
it's an important aspect.
The way I communicate on Clipboard.js,
it's like I know that everybody hates Flash.
I know that everybody hates Flash. I know that everybody hates like
big frameworks and things that are slow. I know that everybody loves a simple API that it's easy.
You copy this, you know, it works. So that was what I was trying to do. And that's what I tried
to do with everything that I do. You know, it's not just put something out there. You can do this, but then you're not truly worried about others.
You're just worried about you.
You know, you really depends on what you're looking for on a project.
Yeah, I can see this now.
And I can't say that I see what you've shared just now just by looking at it.
But now that you've shared it,
it's almost like,
you know,
knowing the secret and then watching the magician again.
Yeah.
You can see,
you know,
you can see how the trick was played out right now.
I can see your why statement here at the top of the page,
which I think that's phenomenal,
but you could tell how calculated is the,
the thing that kept resonating with me as you were talking through this the story is like it seems very calculated especially when you started to describe the
the patience that you had to not only create it but then uh be ready when the world was ready to
accept it right not just one browser but now you've got the next other major browser people
use or developers use to uh you know to test their their websites against
this stuff so i mean that's that's pretty cool man i mean yeah what made what is this intuition
in you did you learn this i mean how do you how do you teach somebody some of these kind of like
meticulously calculated things that you've done here with this project in particular
yeah i think it it comes down to experience you know, like I have a guy on my team now
and he, like, he's starting to learn how to code and, uh, he's like learning all those
things.
And, uh, like, there's no way for him, even though like now he like three months after
now he knows how to code, He knows how to build things.
There's no way for him to understand all this
and do that in like in a little time
and build something that has that impact, you know,
because I know, I think that there are all those things
that you need to build on top of to get there.
And it's just a matter of like using lots of things.
Always keep looking to what other people are doing, what works for others, what don't work for others, you know, and
just your experience as a user, that's super important. So I have been using tons of libraries
for a long time. I know that you need to start with the install part so they know how they can
get and use that. I know that you need to show how you can instantiate that thing on their code,
you know? And I know that when you approach with an example, how you should approach,
what is the best example that that audience is going to get what you're trying
to communicate visually you know so i know that most of the developers they use github or they
have used github in the past so when they copy like a repo in order to clone it they always use
the github interface to copy so i know that that's a very strong example that everybody loves it. So I started
with that example. And then you keep going, you know. I know that showing the browser support
is important. I know that if there's no browser support for a particular feature, you need to
offer something because that's the first thing they're going to ask, you know? And that's because when I was giving talks about HTML5 in 2011, everybody would say,
oh, but HTML5 is only going to be ready in 2020, you know?
And I was like...
Why are you talking about this if it's not even supported?
Exactly, exactly.
So I've listened to people asking me those questions for years.
And now I learned how to answer those questions.
So I think it comes down to just the hard work.
There's no other answer.
So not only have you done something pretty cool with i am very calculated with this project but
then you've also got uh another project about losing weight but not on your body yeah uh in
the browser yeah on your sites and you know i don't know i haven't like i can see dracula coming
up in our in our list of topics to talk about dev space.
And they're all well designed.
They're well thought through.
You can definitely tell they're purposeful.
And to some out there who aim or aspire to be an open source developer, that's daunting because it's like, well, I've got to do all this work to release my open source.
I just want to share my code.
I don't want to go through all these things.
Well, if you want a project to be successful
or to reach the widest audience,
or in your case, as you've said, help people,
then you've got to put in the work.
And it seems like you've really nailed down
how to put in the work,
either by you doing the work yourself
or finding other people who care about something similar
and getting other illustrators or designers to sort of take on. you doing the work yourself or finding other people who care about something similar and,
you know, getting other illustrators or designers to sort of take on.
So you're not taking the full burden of building browser.com, for example, how to lose weight
in the browser.
So talk to me about this.
What's the story here?
Yeah.
So this one, and I think for those projects, it's interesting.
Like we talk about getting a project to be popular, right?
And what is the reason behind of it?
It's not like, oh, I want to be popular on GitHub or Twitter.
I want to have more followers.
You need to understand what is your why.
So that's what motivated me to go one step further. For browser diet,
it was exactly like this. I remember when you start with web development, usually the first
thing you want to do is, okay, I want to get things done with that language, right? So how can I just
make something work? So when you learn how to make something work,
that's good, that's fine. And then you start progressing. And I think the next step is usually
you know how something works. Now, how can I make that thing better? So for me, it was like this.
I was learning more about web performance and how I could improve my websites.
And I remember there were basically like two guides about that. So one from Google,
one from Yahoo, and that's it. So there was only those two guides and there were like those
wide pages, very long pages about something. It was very dense, very hard to read it. Um, it was not easy to consume
and maybe it was easy for like someone else more experienced, but not for me, you know,
coming from another country, you know, uh, it was not as in like my age, whatever were the reasons.
I think, uh, I wanted something that were easy to,
to digest. So I was like, okay, so I'm just trying to create, uh, just like call some friends,
see like friends that I know that care about performance, you know? And, uh, and I was like,
okay, let's try to, to build this guide. You know, like let's divide the work. You do the
performance tips for HTML. You do the work the work. You do the performance tips for HTML.
You do the work for CSS.
You do the work for JavaScript.
Let's try to break that down,
but let's try to do this differently.
So I invested a lot in how can I make this fun?
How can I make this attractive for just regular people,
not like super big experts, you know? So that's how we do it.
And we launched it. Uh, it was very fun, you know? And the thing that I'm most proud of was
like few days after, like people started to send translations, you know? Um, I launched in Portuguese
and in English. And then people like, people saw that there were more than one language.
And then they were like, oh, let's send a pull request.
So there were translations in Spanish and Polish, French, all these, like Chinese, all these languages.
And it was super nice. And the thing that strikes me the most is
not the fact... When I go to Google Analytics, I see how many people are going to the site.
Okay. So I go there and then I go to like, okay, let me check the demographics.
So it's not like... I don't feel proud about just looking to the number of people that are seen.
And I'm like, oh, I'm so nice because I made this project the number of people that are seeing and i'm like oh i'm so
nice because i made this project lots of people use it you know it's not for my ego it's more for
when i go to demographics and i see that oh there's like an access from uh madagascar you know
oh how come my work and that's crazy you know like if you think about it it's like
you close your eyes and think about it how my work reached that place you know right somebody
in madagascar right now is listening to the show exactly that's crazy yeah the the only thing about
i know about madagascar is like the lion and it's the Disney movie, right?
Right, right. It's the only thing I know.
And that's crazy, you know?
And it's just insane.
And that's what motivates me.
Like, if you do that step further, if you go a little bit,
if you try to do something more polished and you reach those places,
it's like,
it's a crazy feeling,
just crazy.
So to break down this particular page,
browser.com,
you know,
it's got headings,
does performance really matter?
So it's essentially like a single page,
not a single page app,
but there's a single page guide into basically breaking down web performance
and how to,
you know,
get the most out of your,
your web pages.
And as you said,
at that time,
there wasn't a lot of information out there.
So this was a plan to,
you know,
get more of this information to the masses.
Now,
one thing that stands out to me in the interface pretty quickly,
and I'm wondering if it was there always is the edit button that goes,
that links back to the,
this repo and get back to each thing.
So this is,
this is there from day one,
not from day one,
but it was something that I learned along the way.
Uh,
and this is something that I try to do,
uh,
on every documentation page that I write nowadays.
So this is like,
I think when you,
when you build something and if that particular content is on GitHub,
and I always try to use Markdown.
If I'm doing something that is content heavy like this,
this is a guide that each tip, if you check the source code,
each tip, it's a Markdown file.
So what is the easiest way for people to contribute with content?
It's Markdown.
So you need to use Markdown.
And then there's like a build process that converts all those into HTML blocks.
And then I put all those HTML blocks in the same page.
So I really wanted to do in such a way that if you click this edit on GitHub,
all you see is like a Markdown file.
And then you can start editing this Markdown file on GitHub, all you see is like a markdown file and then you can start editing this markdown
file on GitHub. And this is something like, as I said, you know, today, I think, and as I learn
more and more about documentation, there are a few things that needs to be done in documentation
pages that can drastically improve your project. And all you need is just put a link to it.
Yeah.
I mean, these things seem to me like invitations, right?
Each section.
So if I read this and I'm like, oh, I can add this tidbit to this to correct it.
Or even seeing the drop down select menu at the top for are you able to choose the different languages
it seems very inviting to say this isn't this is a working document this is not set in stone this is
we may have started this you know back to maybe uh we we didn't start the that's probably a bad
example i won't do that but i was gonna make a billy joel joke with we didn't start the fire
but as i started to unravel it in my head, it just didn't make any sense.
But, you know, the long story short is like you made this, but it doesn't mean that, you know, you're the only person in charge of moving it forward.
And if you have opinions or thoughts on how this can change for the better to help the masses as you're trying to do with the mission of this project, then certainly step in.
And here's your here's your single button for any tip in there to do so exactly and when you
write documentation it's hard or anything that is content heavy it's hard to know like if people
first if that's right or wrong you know so you do your best to do the right way but maybe you
missed something maybe there's a typo or maybe what you wrote is not 100 true for 100 of the cases so
having this option to edit that's super cool another thing i like is feedback so when you go to
to something and then in this site there's we don't have that but maybe you could have like uh
in the past you know there was like the thumbs up and thumbs down.
And then you just like you kind of vote and just to tell like, oh, what is the feedback for that particular section?
And I think nowadays and as I'm thinking more about this, like the project that I'm working nowadays, for example, we have that.
But I see like a trend in terms of reaction so if you see slack and someone
send it sends a message and then you have you can put like a reaction as a
emoji same for Facebook same for github and you see all those big players going
on this direction in and this is something we could apply to our open
source projects because it gives a lot of information and a much more refined feedback for everything that we're doing.
Well, unfortunately, we're up against our next break again.
So let's take a break.
When we come back, we're going to talk a bit about Dracula, which is super cool.
Theming for pretty much any code editor, Vim you know s zsh you name it terminal code editor
it's super cool i love it and then uh some cool stuff you're doing with dev space and then
potentially uh if you want to share the story around your talk engagement at erupt well we
might get into that too so hopefully we have enough time but let's break here when we come
back we'll dive into that stuff our Our friends at ThoughtWorks have an awesome open source continuous delivery
server called GoCD. Head to gocd.io slash changelog to learn more. GoCD lets you model
complex workflows, promote trusted artifacts, see how your workflow really works, deploy any version
anytime, run and grok your tests, compare compare builds take advantage of plugins and more once
again head to go cd.io slash changelog to learn more and now back to the show
all right we're back with zena rocha talking about his cool open source and this thread
through all these things is just like careful, meticulous, thoughtfulness, helpful.
You know,
those are all sort of adjectives I think of when I think about the way you
approach the project you're involved in.
And the next one on the list for us to talk about is Dracula theme or just
Dracula for short, basically.
Some may say Dracula theme,
because that's the theme they're using for their particular code editor,
whether it's Adam, Alfred, emax pigments slack i mean anywhere
you can basically apply a theme dracula is there basically what what is this project why why yeah
why why yeah so basically this one started from like a very crazy story of my life. I was like, uh, giving talks a
lot, traveling around and I was giving a talk in Germany and then I ate something, you know,
it didn't, uh, I w I wasn't feeling better. I wasn't feeling good at all. And then I got a flight to give a talk
in Spain. And then in the middle of the flight, I was feeling very bad. I ended up in the hospital
for like three weeks. It was crazy. And then at some point, like I was feeling better. I could
use my computer at the hospital. And then I was just like, just working over there.
I was happy a little bit because I had my computer.
I could communicate with my family.
And then at some point when I was in the hospital,
like I left my room for like 10 seconds, 15 seconds,
and then someone stole my computer.
It was the worst thing in the world. And then,
okay, so I had no computer, I had no way to communicate with my family, crazy story, I
know I'm gonna get there. And then I had some co workers in Spain. So they brought me a
new computer. And then I was like configuring everything from my new computer. And then I was using iTerm, I was using Sublime,
I was using all those things. And then I was like, Hmm, so I like,
now that I have like a fresh computer on my, uh,
like fresh setup and I was doing like styling all those, those softwares,
I noticed like I had lose everything that I lost all the my
configurations everything so I was like oh I think I'm gonna give a try and
start to like build a theme so I can use on all those new softwares that I'm
building that I'm stalling so I started Dracula this way and basically like I
like dark things I like building themes. I like building.
I'm not like a big fan of light colors on on code editors.
So nobody is.
I shouldn't say that, actually.
If you're out there, you're like a light theme.
Come see us after the show.
We'll we'll convince you why you shouldn't.
Yeah, that's very controversial.
I'm not going to even get that.
Yeah.
TAS versus Spaces, basically.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
But then that's basically how it started.
And it's just like a theme, you know, just a color scheme that you can use on your
on your code editor.
I started with you, the ones I used.
And I think nowadays there's like 67 or 65, around 60, um, softwares that they have themes
for Sublime, even paid softwares, which is crazy. Like I saw the other day, um, there's like a,
this new cool app for taking notes. It's called Bear. And it, in order to have themes you need to pay and then one of the paid themes is dracula crazy
what yeah it's crazy and uh but it's mit the license so they can use it that's fine
well it's not they're not paying for dracula they're paying for access to themes and dracula
is one of them yeah right that's probably yeah but yeah either way either way yeah for one uh in a hospital
and somebody steals your computer like how dare somebody ever steal your computer okay not just
yours but anybody's like that's to a hacker like that's their lifeline you you basically just stole
everything that that assuming you may back up something of course you're using git and github
so you're probably got your projects backed up.
Hopefully you've pushed all of your latest branches and whatnot.
So that's a good reason to always ship your code to somewhere else,
basically.
Yeah.
I learned two things.
One is,
so I didn't lose my projects around GitHub.
That was fine,
but I lost my talks because I didn't back up.
Wow.
So that was bad.
And the other thing.
So painful, man.
Yeah, so painful.
The most painful part was losing my stickers.
Oh, yes.
That is hard, man.
That is hard.
Especially like, so there's not many people.
I guess I shouldn't say that.
There's lots of people who put stickers on their computer, but there's not many.
Basically, if you do if you do that, right, if you put stickers on your computer, it's like a big thing to those people who do it.
I stopped doing it because I'm not mobile enough to need to make my MacBook look different than somebody else's.
So that's usually the reason.
Number one and number two is just because you want to represent yourself, right?
It's identity, you know, but those who do it, it's like, how dare you one talk about
my stickers in a bad way or to take my computer with them on it, you know, don't do that.
Exactly.
So nowadays I have like a backup of stickers so if i need to change mine uh i know
that some people they buy like covers yes their computers i used to do that but i cover put stickers
on the cover yeah yeah that was me i just didn't want to like you know sticker out the actual
macbook it was just too impressive to do which i have a different feeling about that now but whatever
yeah anyways i've turned a new leaf but this this is super cool so you pretty i have a different feeling about that now but whatever yeah anyways i've turned a new
leaf but this this is super cool so you pretty much have a a theme for everything but you didn't
do all the work to do all this did you you just sort of started the process and everybody else
just like with translating browser diet you know you just started the thing and and people came
along and and agreed with the need that that this help you were providing to the community through open source.
And how did that work?
Yeah.
So nowadays, I like if I go, I just I just went to the organization page on GitHub.
I went to teams and like there are 44 teams on that organization.
And there's basically like a theme like a team for each theme.
So like it's usually like one member or two members per theme.
But I try not to because I don't know most of the softwares.
I didn't use the softwares that people are submitting, you know, so there's no way for me to.
And just like I learned that in order to scale an open source project
you need to give power to other people there's no other way like you you're just one person so
uh so that's what i do nowadays i have the repo and that repo uh i tried we try to follow like
a pattern if you go to each repo there's like some consistency in terms of what is the readme about?
What is the structure of the readme?
You know, shows who built the theme, a screenshot of the theme, you know, like install instructions.
So there is like a pattern and we try to follow that.
But I don't like there's so many things that uh it's impossible you know and
software's change all the time so you need to update the the theme it's very hard man
maintaining things it's not easy but uh yeah i'm glad people are are using dracula yeah that's uh
it's pretty crazy man i mean there's there isn't one thing in here that sublime Adam that people don't use.
And I think what's interesting is,
is just laying down the tracks for others to follow.
And something actually that was said in one of the most recent episodes of the
change law by Kent C.
Dot,
he said,
and tell me if you agree with this.
So I'm going to quote this because he said,
and I quote,
give commit access freely and early.
The payoff is worth it. End quote. Right. And, and I quote, give commit access freely and early. The payoff is worth it.
End quote.
Right.
And and so like you've got this thing where like.
It's sort of pride, it's sort of ego.
These are some things you touched on earlier.
You didn't say pride.
I did.
But you said ego.
And there's often reasons why we we as humanity have those things.
It's because we want to retain and command control.
Right. as humanity have those things it's because we want to retain and command control right and and if we have to realize and that open source is not one person it's not an island it's an ecosystem
it's a community of people and the only way to make that possible is by i guess being a bit
vulnerable and sharing some of that control and maybe giving some of that trust
early or often to people and it's tough in a world where maybe you've been maybe you've been
wrong by somebody like like your first step into open source lead all the things do it over you
know I mean it's pretty easy to be jaded if that's how you started but you're not i don't get it you're you're an anomaly
i guess everything about open source is counterintuitive you know like we could
be spending our times doing freelance work on our free time uh and instead of making money
we are building something for free and sometimes we're spending even more time doing this,
uh,
than the other thing.
So,
uh,
same as what you,
this quote is perfect.
You know,
it's super counterintuitive.
Like we,
as human beings,
we want to have control about this thing that we just created.
There's no reason like,
because I know like sometimes they do something wrong and then you see that
and you're like,
Oh,
you know, but it, it totally pays off it's uh yeah it's it's crazy everything about open source is it's crazy i don't know how it works man yeah it's it's good though because
it's an exercise in humanity if you ask me i think that's what i've learned i came for the
code and i stayed for the people you know that's how I feel about open source.
It was just it's weird how we got here.
And I don't know.
I didn't expect this to be the path that ended up being.
That's why we're doing such crazy things.
It changed a lot of us because we care about people.
You know, we want to help people. Sure, talking to people like you on shows like this and producing podcasts and sending out emails and newsletters and doing live shows and going to conferences and doing some of the film stuff we do.
That's all fun.
But at the end of it all, the whole point of it all is touching people's lives, inspiring people, hearing people's unique stories stories and just getting in the trenches with
people you know that's that's what it's all about for us is is that um back to dracula though
dracula theme.com so if you're listening to this go there scan if your editor slash thing you want
a theme is not in that list clearly you can fork this and contribute back or create a is the process
to fork or is it to create your own repo and then do a get sub module what's the process
so nowadays since everything is like spread across repos usually like you create a new
repo you fork the template right which has everything else that you need on the readme
and then you start doing your code over there nice okay so you got an easy to find template we'll find that we'll link that up in the show notes too so that way we kind of
give one more one less step to those who are following along with this process it's a crazy
story in the hospital somebody studies your computer you find some time next thing you know
you're you're theming all the things basically. I love it.
I love it.
We're getting close to end of time.
We got about five ish minutes to go.
One, two more things we want to talk about.
I actually was technically one because you mentioned the hospital story.
But maybe that's all you want to mention about it. You tell me, but then you've got dev space.
So if anybody out there, I don't know, have you heard of this thing called GitHub?
You know, notifications, you can track people like different orgs you know lots of stuff is happening
on github and unless you're like eyeballing your email for your notifications or maybe you're
sending those things into a slack room or something like that it just sort of blends together you've
made it a way with dev space to stay up to date with what's happening on GitHub
pretty easily if you've ever used TweetDeck
or something like it, or Hootsuite even.
Very similar.
When you have columns,
you've got threads essentially that way.
Very easy to follow.
Why did you make this?
I think it was a natural step as well.
Since I was using GitHub so much and I was working with other people,
I just wanted to visualize what was going on across all these orgs, all these repos.
And that's what I built it in.
At the same time, I have been using TweetDeck for a long time.
I like the way the columns are structured i
think it's a good layout for keeping up updated with what's going on so basically replicated that
model for for for github now one thing that is is different about this versus the things we've
talked about before is what it's not open source
yet yeah oh so you got the yet in parentheses then yes because what's the reason why since uh
i'm doing so many like the the way dev space started was like i was not thinking i was only
thinking about the product and result uh and not about the code as much so but let's put
this way so i just like i wanted to put something out there i want and one of the the excuses i used
to build dev space was also i wanted to try react so it was my first project with react and all this and i was like okay i'm just gonna keep
this as a private repo for now and then when i find time i'll make this open source so
that's pretty much it so this is a web app it's not an actual native app so i'm assuming that you
may be going down the route of or at least following the conversations
happening around progressive web apps yes that that's exactly another excuse that i use for
building this i wanted to try progressive web apps and basically the way i built is if you go to your
android phone or your ios phone uh you can like add to your home screen it has
service workers all that kind of things and you can have like a app like
user experience on your phone gotcha and what's the state of that with ios for
those who haven't been tracking vwas yeah it Yeah, it's working fine on iOS as well.
Okay.
Last I checked, at least,
I wasn't sure that Service Workers was available in Safari.
Is that a new thing?
How new is that?
I'm not sure about Service Workers in particular,
but the manifest file,
which has everything you need for making that for make that work yeah it's working
have you blogged at all about some of your tribulations around this path to
to follow the pwa bandwagon basically and make dev space i haven't and i was like super into pwas
like a few months ago and i was like okay i'm gonna build this this is gonna be like a use case
you know that I can share with everybody in the end I didn't have time to to write a blog post
so since you're you kind of answered the one question the next question was going to be
until I looked into basically how to install it from uh Mac or Android now I see instructions so
then I thought well it's probably down the pwa
space versus like say electron for example any any reason why you went the pwa route versus electron
since it's a a desktop application that you want to be a mobile thing too i guess yes i all i also
started with uh so i have a local version of dev space using electron and i may like share that in
the future depends on like nowadays clipboard js is taking a lot of my free time you know everything
that uh like it's almost everything for that uh but if i find some time uh i want to share the
electron version it's working fine on
my machine but in order to share with other people you need like installers certificates for
for mac you know they're all those those boring parts that you need and once i i finish all that
i'll share so when for us book a dj was on the show a little while back right towards the
end of the show i'll link this in the show notes but you go back and listen to that near the end
of the show he has an idea he didn't wasn't very clear exactly what it was or how it would work but
basically it would take that last mile that electron makes you know building native apps on
multiple platforms pretty easy except for
the packaging part right which is the things you just described there so he has an idea
for that that he may do as a a money-making idea i suppose because he's all about passive income
and whatnot so you should follow for us if you don't already to maybe check that out but so anyways so let's get back to
the yet in in parentheses so um maybe this is a syndrome and we've only got a about a minute and
a half to go but maybe this is a syndrome where someone like you who is so thoughtful is so
caring is so meticulously planning and whatnot that they feel like they can't open source something
because of the potential backlash of the not so good code because they put so much good code out
there yeah and it's that i i feel like this is like a real pressure that you get once you start
doing more stuff uh i wish this uh and i don't think it prevents me from from doing that
like i don't i don't stop writing new projects because of that but it's it's like it's something
that uh i wish i didn't feel you know i i wish i would just put out there and if it's bad, it's bad. Set up a request.
But yeah,
it's just something that I wish I didn't feel.
The pressure is real.
Well,
you know, it's a good thing though,
right?
I mean,
it shows that you,
it shows that you put the time in,
right?
Just back to that original issue.
Like why in the world does
this repo get 5 000 stars in uh three days or whatever well it's because i put in the work
you know you weren't being boastful about it you were just being truthful and factual like i it's
it's popular because i put in the work and because you put in the work people have slightly higher
dare i say expectations of you because,
because of that. That's not a bad thing. That's not a bad thing.
Yeah. I think, uh, I, I, my, my mindset nowadays is I rather like spend one year in a project and
do something that the quality is high, something that I'm proud of, something that I'll like come
to my mom and say, Hey mom, here's a project that I built.
You know, let me let me show you then doing like 30 projects and doing things that are not good or don't work.
Or so I think this is as a as a developer, this is something I try to take take with me like quality first quality first I like
that so we're we're here at the end one last thing for me is is any closing thoughts any words of
inspiration anything that we just didn't have a chance to cover that you're like man I have got
to say this before we close out do you have have anything like that? No, no. I think like, uh, my, I, I,
like the reason why I'm doing this is I just want to, like, I hope that this helps someone. Uh,
if you're listening, you know, like, uh, like I'm not here to like, Oh, here's all the projects that
I build. Look how, how awesome I I am or just use everything that I did.
You know, that was not the goal at all. The only reason why we're here, it's because we wanted to
just like give a different perspective on how you could work or a different take. You know,
I think it's I learned so much from other people and I,
if I have the opportunity, I want to share those things that I learned. So I hope this was helpful and yeah, like I'm super glad that I'm here. Like I have been listening to the change log
for a lot of time and well, now I'm here. So thanks Adam.
No problem, man. It was, it was really fun. I'm glad. And I know we didn't get a chance to talk about this, but we'll link in the show notes
because I did catch this as I was planning for this call was it's your name dot com.
So then a road to dot com slash reminder.
And it's just a reminder to people what time means.
And I have a similar blog post I wrote after someone passed away that I kind of reflected
on what time means.
So I really appreciate you taking the time to sit down and have this conversation. Then also
the time that you spend to enrich the lives of developers out there. That's our mission.
That's your mission. And it takes time to do so. And we only get so much time. So I appreciate you
taking your time today and you, the listener, listening to this. I appreciate your time as well.
So thank you for tuning in.
And that's it, man.
Thank you so much for joining us.
It was a pleasure.
Thank you.
Bye-bye, everybody.
All right.
That wraps up this episode of The Change Law.
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Thanks for listening. Bye.