The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Open sourcing the DEV community (Interview)

Episode Date: August 15, 2018

We talk with Ben Halpern the founder and webmaster of dev.to — a community for developers to talk about software. Last Wednesday they open sourced the codebase of the dev.to platform, so we wanted to talk through all the details with Ben. We talked through the backstory, how Ben realized this could become a business, how the team was formed, their motivations for open sourcing it and why they didn't open source it from the start, the technical stack, and their vision for the future of the site.

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It's normally $300, but since you're a listener of the changelog, they're going to give you $600 instead. Even if you're not looking for a job, you can refer a friend and Hired will send you a check for $1,337 when they accept the job. As you can see, Hired makes it way too easy. Get started at Hired.com slash changelog. From Changelog Media, you're listening to the ChangeLog, a podcast featuring the hackers, the leaders, and the innovators of software development. I'm Adam Stachowiak, editor-in-chief of ChangeLog. On today's show, Jared and I are talking with Ben Halpern, founder and webmaster of Dev2, a platform for developers to talk about software. Last Wednesday, they open-sourced the entire code base of this platform. So we want to talk through all the details with Ben.

We talked to the backstory, how Ben realized this could become a business, how the team was formed, their motivations for open sourcing it and why they didn't open source it from the start, the technical stack and their vision for the future of the site. So Ben, it's a big day for you. Tell us what's going on. Yeah, so today at 1 p.m. Eastern, we open sourced the Dev2 code base for the whole community, and we are really hoping folks get as excited to take part in this project as they've sort of indicated to us every step

of the journey. But today is the big day. Today is a big day. So as we're recording this, it's August 8th, and it's about 3.15 p.m. Eastern time. So it's been OpenSource for a couple of hours. By the time you listeners are listening to this, it's a week later. But today is the big day, and so I guess we should just start by saying congratulations. Definitely.

Yeah, it's been a real journey. I kind of wish I'd thought to even open source on day one. It just didn't even cross my mind when this was just a little side project. But we took a lot of time in the past few months and weeks to really like put this on our roadmap. And we finally made it happen. Very cool. Let's back up a moment. And let's get the let's get the full story for so for those coming to this show not familiar with dev to in the dev community that you're building over there. You said it started as a little side side project can you give us a little bit of the backstory of the website and how it came to be yeah so the whole thing started as a a project i wanted to sort of um solve developer issues in one way or another but it was kind of vague it was just an idea i started with a Twitter account I called The Practical Dev. And I kind of started growing it little by little.

I started just by actually just posting programming links and things I found throughout the web and things I thought people would be interested in. I quickly realized that the more I injected my own voice and my opinions and my editorial and my humor and my jokes, the more it caught on and it really started taking off at that point. The project, the most notable sort of jokes I was telling was the O'Reilly parody covers, the book covers. That was the first, I think, major chapter in the whole story. Everything else was just kind of futzing around. Yeah, but that wasn't really like the end goal per se.

I really wanted to create valuable resources, create, sort of solve some of the problems I was actually kind of making fun of with the O'Reilly covers along the way, like the chaos, the bizarre, windy path that is a software development career, the lack of sort of consistency in some of the resources, and frankly, the lack of like tooling and actual kind of community environments and stuff like that. I just as much as programmers always find a way to solve their problems. I just didn't think that this was being done in any special way.

And I really thought we could do a little better if we kept at it. So you said you were you were doing this as a side project has since turned into not just yourself, but a team of people and a burgeoning business. So tell us that transition and kind of where it became. You mentioned the Twitter account, the practical dev, then you have the website dev.to, dev2. Um, tell us what the website started out as. I know it's been through many iterations, kind of where it's come to. And we'll get back around to the open sourcing of it at all. After we kind of understand it in holistic fashion.

Yeah. So the website really started out as, um, just like whatever I thought would be most valuable based on my resources at the time, my sort of thoughts about the future. Like the thing about a platform where people share software knowledge and just have discussions and all that stuff, it's obviously a huge chicken egg problem. So at no point did I really like try to get ahead of myself in terms of what the project could be. So the first thing that ever happened on the website was I did an interview with DHH. And I just sort of knew that if like if I emailed him, and I asked nicely, and made it pretty easy for him to say yes, that he would share some knowledge, Rails five was about to come out.

So that was the first dev two thing. And then I did a few other interviews with some open source folks. And that was kind of the first step to really sort of make this happen. But I also had a different idea at the time. I thought it might be a little more high touch, like these interviews and stuff like that. But then based on feedback, based on noticing what was going on, what people were most interested in, it really more quickly became what it is today, which is a platform for anyone to write anything about software and have a community really interact with it,

one that's really backed by a code of conduct that we really care about and enforce and really just kind of be a place that like actually feels like a community, but it's also actually quite large right now. So yeah, that's kind of like the journey on the product itself, the software. But really when it was just me, I was working on another startup that I'd been doing for a while. It was called text.com as a student textbook exchange. I was, uh, I was sort of the hired technical person to really make that happen.

And we, we had like, you know, growth and stuff like that, but, uh, it, it had issues as a business. And that's kind of when I started getting a little distracted and I was still working at that project, but, um, finding like a little distracted and I was still working at that project but finding like a little bit more interested in this other thing from time to time. That's when I sort of happened to meet Jess Lee who is the first co-founder in this organization and she came to me after through a friend after she had recently graduated from a boot camp. And she had a really interesting sort of professional background, but was really brand new to coding. And she just needed some

mentorship, some advice. And I knew her through a childhood friend that she was a mutual friend with. And it was a really, it really clicked right away. Like I felt like we got along. She was really easy to work with. And she really, as we kind of started talking about Dev2 a little bit more, she really sort of clung to some of the visions because herself as kind of a newer programmer and also a woman of color who is not necessarily part of some of the in crowds that I think a lot of software developers really don't notice because they, you know, they're part of the in crowd. So they take it for granted that like some of the, these things are pretty straightforward. Like even just simple

things, just like there's a lot of insidership in the whole thing. It's very clicky. And, uh, and it just kind of like a lot of things happen extremely organically when really perhaps they should be a little bit more organized. And because the organicness is kind of fun and natural but it also leads to a lot of just a lot of like unhealthy situations where a lot of really valuable software developers get alienated or left out and it's really just a shame so her involvement just kind of as a friend early on really turned into more like, okay, this is kind of a real thing. And it was really great because she's like so different from me. I'm extremely sort of abstract, chaotic and disorganized. And she's like totally the opposite and really helped bring order and discipline to the whole thing. Traits I really like appreciate in the process and in others, but like isn't really not what I bring to the table.

She and I worked on it for a little while while I still like, you know, worked really um on my other company at the same time but uh ultimately like kind of we were just getting so much momentum while the other thing was actually kind of like we were trying to pull it off but it wasn't like necessarily working so much at the time and what we wound up doing was uh I took the company back to the other company because I thought I'd been, you know, working hard but pretty distracted on the side project. I didn't think, I thought it was the fairest thing to do was to kind of fold it into the other company, which kind of quickly just turned into this new company, which is Dev Community Inc.

And we've been working on it ever since it's been a it's been about a year and a half since we became a real company you mentioned i guess earlier in your relationship with just the sort of discussions around vision and jared mentioned like burgeoning business and i'm thinking like what were some of the vision things you shared that got her excited and then what were some of the indicators that made you think, well, this can go from, you know, my thing I do on the side, cause I'm kind of bored with my stuff and I want to play essentially to, Hey, this could be a business and I should, you know, what were some of the vision things you shared to say, Hey, this could be a business and we should

put a lot more effort into this. Yeah. be a business and we should put a lot more effort into this. Yeah, well, you know, I always treated it like as, you know, worked my butt off trying to make the project grow, but wasn't so completely certain about all the direct, like, it seems easy for me to think back linearly at the time. But thinking back to some of my conversations I had it's very clear I like I had a lot of vision for like the purpose of the project but not necessarily how it would be organized and stuff like that and Jess and I just kind of hung out and talked a lot like it really was just like a mentorship kind of role at first and naturally just like we started talking more about dev 2 and like things you know things we were doing with

that and uh and i kind of tried to downplay things at the time because i really was super loyal to you know the people i was working with and stuff so i always made sure that people knew it was just a side project um and that's really how i felt um through and through but it was really impossible to ignore how much uh momentum the project had it's it's hard enough to it was really impossible to ignore how much momentum the project had. It's hard enough to get like your friends and family to use something you're really trying to make succeed like sometimes. Like seriously, like it's... So, as soon as I made like the login feature a thing on dev2 and didn't even like it was hidden in the footer basically, I started getting people logging in.

That was just a really remarkable thing. I've launched things that we've sat around and like, oh, where are all the people? I thought we're making something really valuable that's way better than the alternative but where are all the people? But this was such a passion project it was really clear that like we didn't have to get things perfect because we were really great at like you know having people understand like our purpose our vision our values um that was really something we sort of really put out there from day one so like either like it was something i put out there from day one and then we and then like we always just kind of like put that front and center. And then things just kind of happened.

I remember I had a conversation with Saran from Code Newbie when she lived back when she lived in New York. And I recall that she was telling me how she ran her business. And that kind of clicked into me the idea that this like really could be a business like I knew that was like a possibility I wasn't naive but it really gave me a bit of courage like she had just recently left her job to do Code Newbie full-time when I sat down to just kind of pick her brain and you know that was a moment like really early on like that just sort of helps give a sense of like, okay, this is possible.

This is like a grounding moment. And not that I was afraid of entrepreneurship. I've been doing that sort of my whole life. So I put my heart into this project so much that the last thing I wanted to do is ruin it by making it a business. Because I knew this would succeed no matter what, like if it just existed as some kind of project, like something where the scope was smaller, where the expectations were smaller. So even though I'd been an entrepreneur in some way

since I was 12, I feel like in one way or another, the notion that this could be an actual business is something I was really protective of because I thought it was such a magnificent project. And if it was gonna be a business, I wanted that to be because that's actually the best thing for the project and we didn't wanna extract value. That's just something you can do with these kind of projects and everything had to be additive. So we really have been extremely, um,

just, uh, thoughtful at each step of the way. And I think that's like, you know, our special superpowers, like we've given ourselves enough, like rope to be thoughtful with everything.

Like, um, it's easy once you start a business to be really sprinting the whole time, just trying to pay every bill, like to pay all the expenses and stuff but um just due to the nature of how this started it just the community took so well to everything at every stage uh it really was a reflection of my personal values at every step of the way you know it just happened it really like it reflected on the skills of everyone i

was involved with, like professionally, like everyone who's able to get, uh, come together and help out. Um, yeah, just timing, like the people involved,

uh, really, uh, really, really great. If you ask me, I mean, it's something I've always appreciated and noticed has been like this Ben

Halperism kind of thing in there like this sort of like uh i don't want to say weird but just different type of humor that's very clear when you hear it and you see it like your humor is very you so to speak and i don't know if that's clear to you jerry but that's super clear to me i would say it's much and i agree with you i would say that uh it's a lot like and a good author will inject their voice into their writing. And Dev2 very much, from my perspective, has reflected Ben's personality for a long time. Obviously, then that has other problems of like, okay, and how do we scale this and make it a brand that's equitable and not just Ben Halpern? And I think you've been doing that along the way, but yeah, I would say that there's a reflection of Ben's personality or humor or, you know,

geekiness. And that's, that is why people like, like the Twitter account kind of embedded it into the website. Is that something that was intentional or, uh, just happened or do you even disagree with that sentiment? No, I think that's really, I think that's definitely what's going on. Some stuff's intentional, some stuff just happens, you know. I have a background in like, a very like, multidisciplinary background, a few sort of different types of attempted careers and all in the sort of creative space. And so, like, when we talk voice, like, we know how to sort of talk about that stuff within our organization. Even though I'm a software developer, like, we have, like, documents about, like, what the Dev2 voice is. It's all super vague. It's, like, my random rant. It's, like,

I mean, I can i can like read from the document it's just like uh it's just like say this not this kind of uh things and um i still myself do most of the communication but anytime like uh we just we just you know there's there's a lot of stuff we do and anytime we have to take care of a thing, we really treat it like our... Yeah, we're really careful about that stuff. It comes through and we didn't just take that on as a business initiative. It was very natural. We recognized what people cared about and what programmers cared about in general like the good and the bad

of like certain types of ways of engaging people and little things like that so yeah it's all it's all an effort and like just being careful and nuanced and like um not sprinting too fast that you kind of lose track of these things because that's that's what happens like we don't want to be we don't want to be boring we don't want to lose uh our sense of values like that's like the whole project works because we um you know remain thoughtful about these things in the as we scale and as we grow and we try to get ahead of it when we think we like what we're doing might not scale and stuff like that it's also clear to me too the the thoughtfulness not just on what you say and how you say it or not being boring as you said

but also what you said before was making sure this should be a business which i think is a wise move because there's sometimes a side project is just fun and sure maybe it has some entrepreneurial parts to it where you there is maybe some money to be made but doesn't have to be you know a full-fledged everybody in business and i think that's kind of an interesting line to toe can you can you speak to that a bit like the the on either side of that line of like when it was a side project to now it being a business and how it how that ended up playing out for you oh yeah i mean as a side project uh i explicitly kind of like the whole thing was really a lot of clarity for me i

like i was just better at this and other things i've done before but i um from the get-go even before i even knew what it was going to be i committed to giving this 10 years to work and if it was just that's a long time yeah i, I mean, I thought like, well, I'm still gonna like programming in 10 years. I thought that was pretty obvious. And the biggest issue I had with some other projects is like, I don't know, like I didn't have such a fundamental care about them that if they didn't sort of take off quickly that like I'd keep excited about it and stuff and like I love this stuff and I can only do it if it's exciting to me. But so, yeah, like early

on when it's just a project and you have 10 years to do it, you can take like your job is to like have long walks with like an audio book in to really sort of think about like the purpose of something or like the like random little things and I sometimes took like you know two weeks to make a decision where like in a business you've kind of like this has to be done by the end of the day kind of stuff and we've also instilled that kind of values since we have been in business like sometimes we have to hurry but like sometimes we just take our time to get something right because a lot of the time the answer comes, if you guys didn't ship this in two weeks, if nobody had the effort to ship this feature, maybe we shouldn't ship this feature and stuff

like that. So we really try to lean into how we feel about certain parts of the project. Obviously, we need to fix bugs, fix vulnerabilities, fix user experience issues. But in terms of the project, we tried to instill that kind of side project kind of values. And that really only happens if it's really happening early on. But then when it came to be a business there's still like that area where like i myself am too scattered to make a lot of this stuff work there's a lot of like we have lawyers and we have uh you know all sorts of stuff and so jess um was critical there but then uh the third co-founder in the business who doesn't we don't sort of isn't as front and center sometimes but if you're part of the community you

you know him is is Peter Frank who was my partner in the other business and he really he really brings a lot of the like need to know sort of experience and just like effort in certain areas. Like he actually loves some of the stuff that, uh, I don't find I have any patience for. And, and Jess is kind of the like middle person in terms of like, uh, she writes code, but she also like sort of has a handle on, on some of the finer details, just in terms of like, like I've never spoken to our lawyers, even though I founded this like company because, uh, that's Peter's domain or Jess's depending on the context.

And, uh, you gotta like do what works for you and stuff like that. And I'm, I'm very thoughtful and careful about the actual business direction, the way we make money, the way we do this and that. But like there's a lot of heavy lifting in terms of running a business that like, thank goodness I have people who are excited about doing that kind of stuff because that's never been my thing. thing this episode is brought to you by linode our cloud server of choice it's so easy to get started head to linode.com slash changelog pick a plan pick a distro and pick a location and in minutes deploy your leno cloud server they have drool worthy hardware native ssd cloud storage 40 gigabit network intel e5 processors simple easy control panel 99.9 uptime guarantee we are never down 24 7 customer support 10 data

centers 3 regions anywhere in the world they got you covered head to leno.com slash change well to get $20 in hosting credit that's four so but we're now at a point where it's a business right it's legit obviously you're open sourcing today it's a big deal but i mean jared and i've been paying attention to what you've been doing for a long time we've talked years ago and have been to some degree involved in in what you're doing but not directly as just more so as a community not so much as one of the co-founders of course but now that it's here i mean you've you've culminated quite a community lots of traffic lots of fresh articles we link to you often through our newsletter and our news feed and stuff like that so we're very familiar with like what you're doing here and you've you've done a great job on

the community front what do you think is the secret sauce to building this particular community not community in general but this particular community i would say like you know merging kind of like fundamental human community needs with practical software development needs. And not really giving either one of those things more attention than the other one. So there's so much humanity in software development, but there's also so much like, this is exactly how we do things and it's not going to change in terms of sharing, in terms of like how we code, like we search for the answers, we search for opinions, we get consensus on like what the right framework is to use.

There's no like going off and doing your own thing without, you know, really having to like know exactly why you're doing that. So there's so much like a need for like community both a fundamental thing just for motivation and like things like that so one of our members just recently um made a post talking about how he shut down his uh his uh the language he was writing and um the community kind of was like yeah like you know this stuff they gave they gave him a lot of um support in that like shutting down a project you've been working this stuff, they gave him a lot of support in that, like shutting down a project you've been working on for a few years is a pretty big moment. And he wasn't like teaching anyone anything in that moment. But people who had been following him

were just kind of there for him. But then there's so much other just kind of, this is, we try to kind of deliver the space for people to find answers to things that are a little bit more nuanced to discuss topics which are interesting to them and may be interesting to some people we try not to like we try to um send the types of traffic to all sorts of different places and not just like the lowest common denominator of software stuff. Like we try to just be careful about the user experience, but also not to opinionate it on it because everyone kind of makes their own user experience. So the platform is really just a generic place

where people can write blog posts and engage in a certain type of threaded discussion. But we just as administrators try to really like, uh, make that happen in just the way software developers need it. Because, uh, some of the core insight early on was like,

these things happen, but in really generic ways. And there's no reason, um, we can't do it with a lot of care for the software developer experience. If you were forced to liken it to something else in terms of describing to somebody who may not know about it, even non-software things, what do you liken dev to? Is it kind of like medium but different because of this?

Is it kind of like Stack Overflow without the rules? Where does the best comparison for people who don't know about it? Yeah, the most straight up model I, for engaging right away is it's medium, but more specific for developers. And everything that's different from the platform is really is really like that, except then we kind of take it in the direction that we give people the opportunity to really build their portfolio out a little bit show off their github projects like uh so in that sense it's a bit like linkedin if linkedin wasn't full of like recruitment spam and like just friends from college who added you and you haven't really you don't really care about their like finance links and stuff like that so like right you know a little bit like uh like it's you know like a professional platform um more devoted to software developers

and stuff. But we're not too prescriptive that everyone in the world needs this right now. Hopefully it'll be so valuable someday that everyone will be on board and everything like that. But the fact that it's really centered around the content and we don't log in, wall, any of that stuff. Like, we really, it's a place where a lot of people get to contribute back to the greater software development community no matter what. So, like, the greater software development community probably lands on Dev2 through, you know, Google searches, your newsletter, Twitter, things like that. So, like, it's just kind of part of the ecosystem. And in form factor, it kind of happens the same way kind of Medium established this idea that

you can sort of host your stuff on a different platform. We make it really easy for people to host on their own blogs but then kind of cross post the dev too because that's like I think a really valuable like we try not to be we try to have a shared ownership of everything that's going on if possible and and just you know be really thoughtful about like you know this is your space and it's our space it's like a shared kind of environment and there there's a lot of like you know deep down human things going on with those ideas. It's not so much an economic exchange as much as a really complicated human exchange. But yeah, so medium for software developers in a way but with a lot of little things that just make it different.

So as you have success and as you have you have had success you start to come up against other problems and things that i start to think of where i think i'm glad i'm not in ben's shoes as as dev2 grows and your team's shoes of course is you start to deal with i mean i just thought of this because you mentioned the recruiters on linkedin well there's eventually there's going to be recruiters coming to dev2 there's going to be recruiters coming to Dev2. There's going to be spammers coming to Dev2. There'll be trolls, which usually pop up first. As all of these little social networks and forums and things become larger, I mean, Twitter's having a huge problem right now.

Of course, it's massive, right? Mainstream. But if you're software mainstream, you're still going to have a lot of people using it. Are these things you're starting to deal with or is it too small yet i mean big but not big enough where you're hitting a lot of trolls you're hitting a lot of spammers people who are generally there to create terrible content or do do mean things our sort of core differentiator as i said we sort of got really big on twitter at first so like this, we really know the Twitter sort of universe. And the, our main differentiator is that like, you know, there is any kind of moderation,

you know, compared to Twitter, like that whole kind of platform as massive as it is, it really seems like a place that didn't even consider harassment and trolling and stuff as like a problem until like the rest of the world called them out on it. It's almost too late. Well, I mean, Reddit took a hard stance for freedom of speech against moderation early on. Yeah. So, we are certainly pro-free speech in, you know, every way that's practical. But But I think some of these other platforms are a little bit naive in terms of human behavior and especially just how certain classes of people are a little bit more vulnerable or a lot more vulnerable than others. And this is a shared space and a community effort. So early on, of course, we have our code of conduct and

our values we sort of profess, but we also really took a serious technical approach to dealing with moderation in what we think is a pretty scalable way, more so than I think a lot of other people are doing it. Just in terms of when people first sign up, there's a... We purposefully make sign up only available to folks with existing social accounts. You don't really need to link anything so deeply to your Twitter or GitHub once you're on, but you actually need to come from one of those places to engage in the first place, which is a pretty low barrier. I think between Twitter and GitHub, most software developers are engaged.

And anyone who, for any good reason, doesn't have either of those accounts, we work with them. But when you sign up with an existing social profile, we have a lot of information on you. We know you didn't create this Twitter account today, because if you did, we might flag you for potential spam or potential harassment because we banned your other one. You know, like little things like that.

It's not so complicated, but we really thought about it early on. And every time we've had like an influx of more spam, we've had to kind of solve new problems, but we've also tried to get ahead of them as much as we can. But also, it's very difficult, and we change our sort of, you know, feature set subtly from time to time as we grow. Like, I don't think, and that's why we've sort of evolved. I didn't really get into it too much, but we have a whole kind of area for private messaging and small chat rooms and things like that,

which are actually kind of a really great area to have. Like, this is a smaller area for conversation and help and things like that. And it kind of, it's like a breakout room from some of the big, wide open kind of threaded conversations that might happen elsewhere on the site. So, and like, you know, I think even might happen elsewhere on the site so and and like you know i think even just like folks on the team so like there's six total people including the three founders and uh not everybody like um somebody will start building something just because it's kind of how everyone else does it and i'll kind of like have to give a make a big

fuss about how i think like we don't want to do it just how everyone else does it because that's where it leads to these like you know terrible harassing situations and um so it's it's a it's a lot of little things but there's kind of we have a technical solution we have a a form of sort of crowdsource moderation which also kind of um has a system which quickly can elevate things to the admins and it hasn't been so massive. Our scale isn't so big that we can't deal with that pretty well with the current system. It's always a real shame though when we deal with any kind of harassment. It's almost always like something gets shared to Hacker News or Reddit and there's a big influx of jerks. And it's a big influx of jerks and we it's a it's a real shame and like it's it happens

from time to time and we don't try to like create a situation where that could never happen because that's kind of like impossible but we yeah we deal with it really quickly and we don't we try to ensure that the dialogue doesn't get toxic we we really try to be diplomatic with community members who are you know good constructive community members most of the time but then like here they really like you know they really weren't respectful and like and things like that so like we we try not to make people feel like they're being policed but of course i think it's getting harder and harder and i do like kind of freak out sometimes that like uh you know it like it saddens me if anyone ever has a bad experience but at our scale sometimes people do and and but the um the core of people like really understand that like at the very least we're

trying harder than the other platforms and we always have like that's uh and that's what's hq would like to talk oh i'm being someone wants to talk to you it's hq alexa stop the office is calling me wait hold on i maybe should can we can i actually maybe answer that sure can't answer not thinking there might be something on fire. All right. Alexa, call HQ. Calling HQ. Hey, Ben, did you see our message in head up?

Yeah. Is there anything I need to do? All right, I'll try to do that right now. All right, bye. Alexa, stop. All right, bear with us here a second while Ben hacks on some fun stuff. Here's a little interlude from BMC. You're gonna love it. And we are back. And we forgot what we were talking about because reasons this is what happens when people who run websites hop on skype and talk for a while is things happen right ben

yeah um it's happening like less these days in general but today was a big you know announcement day we moved the repo over like little little things go uh we're expected to go wrong and uh you know just one of those things just one of those days well and and you know it's a small team like i don't have like a vp of engineering who deals with these you are the vp of engineering yeah that's right well when change.com goes down uh i'm the vp of engineering as well so we are very well aware of such situations. Or I shouldn't say DevTube's not down. There's just, there were issues.

Alexa had, she was having some problems. But let's continue talking. Let's turn towards the open source because we teed off the conversation around that. We haven't quite made our way back to it yet. So let's get started on that. And one thing I wanted to talk to you about it, and you mentioned in the opening

that as it started as a side project you just didn't think about it and you had wished that you had just done it from the very beginning because you probably would have done a lot of things subtly or maybe even majorly differently one thing that you did do was pre-announce open sourcing it I'm not sure how long back and then went about getting ready for it so maybe tell us your strategy there and why there was a pre-announcement and then time passed and and then went about getting ready for it. So maybe tell us your strategy there and why there was a pre-announcement and then time passed and then finally today, August 8th, the final open sourcing. Give us that story.

Yeah, so the pre-announcement was really a matter of letting people know where we stood on the issue and how excited we were about it. As soon as the things kind of started falling in place it got more and more exciting um i really felt like at every stage anytime we gave people the opportunity to have more creative control over the project that weren't like directly within so you know from my voice and it's like that kind of thing um it always uh led to kind of you know exciting outcomes in in every way so like uh we um we and we talked started talking about it because we were just excited about it and we're pretty transparent about everything we want to be doing

so if we haven't really talked about it, it's because we're not really like, you know, totally sure what our plan is. But that was like a while ago, like many months ago, and we didn't really ever kind of create a deadline. And we just, you know, kept having like new things come up new features, we had to build like new things we had to do for, for the current scale of the project. But we were still just dying to do this because it just seemed like such an exciting thing to do with the community. And we finally just kind of realized we were actually getting closer and closer to feeling like we had the capacity to manage that part of the project which um is this whole new you know thing it's a there's a lot of benefits to not um having to manage a bunch of people you know doing

uh like taking part in different ways and stuff like that. And, um, but we finally felt like we were kind of getting ready for that. And we, you know, put a date on it, uh, picked August 8th cause it's eight, eight and it's a lucky number.

Uh, and we, we worked hard. We worked with some, some outsiders to kind of audit the code for, uh, possible security vulnerabilities. We, um, to possibly come up, but you can't really rely on obfuscation when all the code's

out there. But we know that in the long run, when we are fully open, the long-term security story is really promising. So, yeah, just like at our core, it was like became such a strong part of our values. And I like just didn't think that this project was important enough to like warrant open sourcing at the time. In the future, I wouldn't really care that much about the importance of a project. But honestly, early on, it was just the Rails website I made over the holiday break one year when I wasn't doing anything else. But when things started to turn, I started to kind of get my co-founders really pumped about the idea that the community is more valuable than the code and we can really put ourselves out there and we don't have to worry that

other people can now build a clone if they wanted to with our exact code. But it's really not the code that's so special. It's the community. And the community is really what's gonna help make the code special. We really think that the future is strong because we're gonna have a lot of really talented and really enthusiastic developers in our ear and in our code base. The security aspect is an interesting, and that's something that's come up recently with developers in our ear and in our code base. The security aspect is an interesting, and that's something that's come up recently with other things, but super recent was Homebrew. There was somebody who gained access to Homebrew in 30 minutes, committed access to it via supply chain attacks, basically package maintainers having issues.

So what made you think, I mean, what made you decide to do like a security audit? I don't think we did that, Jared. Did we do that? You probably did it, but we didn't have a third party do it. And we also open sourced at an earlier stage in our software history. So Ben probably had multiple years of development going back where we had maybe six months and we had, we had, we did not open source from the very beginning from the relaunch, but we had had that in mind from the very beginning. And so there's a huge difference just in your mindset, even just like subconsciously, I believe, when you know that that's eventually going to happen. And so, yeah, our security audit was probably just me thinking through everything

and then double-checking and making sure there was nothing super stupid. And then, of course, we've had plenty of people report situations publicly, and publicly meaning through the GitHub issues and then even privately stuff they've found. And so our security has improved from it. But like you said,

there's definitely other security holes that can open up as well so yeah that's an interesting move uh bringing in an outsider to do audits ben can you tell us more about that exactly to your point like we had obviously valued security we had a lot we've had a lot of uh we we've had we have a pretty like modest bounty, and we've uncovered a lot of things that way, like little exploits in terms of our, you know, just in every little way, like how we host images maybe in certain contexts or little things. And thankfully, we've never had any major leaks or any major vulnerabilities, but little things along the way have been brought to our attention.

And yeah, the process is just to kind of deal with those as good as we can. But when the entire code base is open, we actually get much, much better at most of those kind of finding those vulnerabilities more quickly. The code gets way more eyes before it gets into the codebase. But the sort of existing code becomes possibly a little bit more vulnerable in case there's just any kind of endpoints which, you know, expose an entire database model perhaps instead of just a few columns or anything like that where the user doesn't realize this. But any JSON endpoint that tells you one extra thing that maybe is not public information. And that process is just an ongoing battle. And we didn't think like, you know, we thought that

if there's anywhere we have blind spots to, it's the like security vulnerabilities we've already written ourselves and like didn't notice or anything like that. But we, I think we, like, really paid attention to all the, like, major hotspots. Rails has a lot of, you know, convention that we follow pretty well. And we kind of, you know, we know not to run arbitrary code. And, you know, we use use white lists and not black lists like we we take it all really seriously but there's always just the unknown unknown and we uh we have a lot of friends in the community though and and uh several people were very helpful and uh i think any um any possible vulnerabilities we find in this process I think are not going to be severe.

And we will deal with them as they come. But it's just a matter of programming. And had we been open source from the get-go, yeah, this is not a process we would have had to spend so much time on. And that's really my big, damn, I we were open source um right away because we would have been much cleaner the whole way like you can't really get away with things uh just um in passing but overall like we've we got here and i um you know i'm always amazed at how successful this whole this whole project has been and how much it impacts people. So no major regrets,

but definitely I don't think I would ever closed source something in the future that didn't have a very good reason for being closed source. This episode is brought to you by our friends at GoCD. GoCD is an open source continuous delivery server built by ThoughtWorks. Check them out at GoCD.org or on GitHub at github.com slash GoCD. GoCD provides continuous delivery out of the box with its built-in pipelines,

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visit gocd.org slash changelog.og it's free to use and they have professional support and Enterprise add-ons available from thoughtworks once again go cd.org changelog Ben, one of the reasons why I asked about that time span, the pre-announcement versus the open sourcing, I was curious. My intuition was maybe there was a little bit of accountability there. Like once you announce a thing, you kind of have to do it. And open sourcing, it's not like a feature, although it can be considered one, on your product roadmap. It's the kind of thing that would just continue like, yes, we're going to eventually do it. But once you like write a blog post and make an announcement, people are then, there's this expectation of it's going to happen. So maybe there was a little bit of that in there as well. I'm curious also about the time span and bringing in the third parties for helping. Security is one aspect of being not

prepared for open source. The other aspect, which is way more personal for me, and I'm curious if it's the same for you and perhaps inappropriately like prideful is like now there's this, it's that like that dream where you're at school with your, with your clothes off, you know, and everybody's laughing at you. Is that, is that fear of, oh no, everyone's going to see my code. Was there any of that involved? Oh yeah. I mean, that, that, that has been like with me and me and the whole thing, you're totally right on this is why we pre-announced that we needed to give ourselves a deadline.

But also we pre-announced it so that we could, you know, kind of like benefit from the additional kind of mojo that would come along. So like, you know, we got a month of being able to like really like keep people updated about something that was happening soon. So, that it gave us, you know, we get to really justify this as a feature more if we get to talk about it. You know, like if it's just a private thing, then it's just like, you know, we don't derive like, you know, we can't get people excited about anything that we don't talk about. But yeah, it was about ripping off that band-aid, giving it a deadline, forcing us to really make it happen.

And then, yeah, you're absolutely right about the just exposure to how terrible a programmer we all are. It's a really terrifying feeling and I really like personally felt like I've been able to cross the barrier. Like, I just feel like I've, you know, made myself the class clown enough as a programmer like enough times that i just um can acknowledge like you know coding is hard and i don't know what i'm doing half the time um and but at the same time we have the proof that we make good stuff like we have we have a lot of really good ideas we know what we're doing. We don't have all the answers, but we have a lot of good ones. And yeah, just like that positioning, like to be ready to just go do it is totally, you know, what helps this happen. And also, this is a Rails. I know different programming languages.

I've done different kinds of development, different types of web frameworks or other kinds of programming along the way. But Rails is something I'm pretty comfortable with. I feel like I get it and I know it. And it's also very boring and old. And that's a real feature as far as I'm concerned. Like before this project, I was working with a lot of like newer technologies which was kind of exciting but you find this GitHub issue which is just like the only answer to how you can build this thing is like hope that this feature ships

like at some point this year. Right. And so, yeah, just like happy to be using some pretty boring technology. Jeff Atwood has a post about why they chose Rails for this course. And it's for a lot of the same reasons. And it's, yeah, just like a lot of the same reasons and um it's yeah just like a lot of things went into it but yeah like uh just pretty comfortable about that part like people get to see me with my pants down but um but you know it's it's part of the spectacle now it's i don't

feel like i'm i'm in my private space it's a it's a public spectacle and i'm get to put on a little little song and dance do you feel like you know you mentioned that you wish you'd maybe done it earlier do you feel like it would have changed the direction not so much of your mission as a you know platform or company or community but more so maybe the speed at which you can deliver features or the distraction or the focus. Do you feel like, given that it's been just the necessary eyes on the code base, has allowed you some level of focus,

whereas had it been open source sooner, you may have had more shiny objects and more attraction and more just distraction distractions so to speak around getting to where you're at now yeah it's hard to say that given like how much momentum we've built up and how much we've really been able to like solve our own problems as opposed to listening to all the random voices in the world um yeah it's hard to say that the alternate solution, the alternate would have been better. The interesting thing is that now that we have done this project, and I can't imagine leaving this project anytime soon to do something that has nothing to do with this community

that we've been a part of. So I'm really in this for the long haul. So when I think about like the future in terms of open sourcing from day one on things, I really put my mind, you know, I really put myself in the mindset of like, wow, we already have these thousands of friends out in the world committed to, you know, our vision, our sort of working towards our ideals and things like that. It probably was pretty okay

that things went the way they did, but we're excited for the future projects, which will just develop out in the open. Really, I think open source is so magical and I don't think people work towards the most ambitious things all the time. And I think what we're doing is pretty ambitious and doing it like through open source is just kind of remarkably cool.

I don't think the world understands all the time just how amazing it is when many, many software developers get to have a say or contribute their expertise. We're also siloed solving the same problems without talking to one another very much. And the whole thing is just going to be at the very least a fantastic project. And really when we were justifying open source to ourselves, it's like if the open source thing doesn't work out for some reason, it will be because we like crashed and burned spectacularly trying something pretty fun as opposed to like, you know, being overly concerned about the like possible downsides of being out in the open and with our pants down and stuff like that. So like we don't want to

expose our user base to any danger or anything like that. But as far as the business goes, if we put ourselves out there as maintainers of a really cool, big open source project, our worst case scenario is a spectacular failure as opposed to pittering off and not amount and not amounting to to you know anything really notable or awesome so it's uh it's easy to justify even like the worst case scenario that way let's talk about the tech for a real quick minute because i know you're downplaying rails as boring and all that i still think rails is super cool myself but i realized that the hype cycle has has moved on uh that being said you've you've written and you've talked a lot about the way that you're going about using Rails. And one thing that you've done with Dev2, which is awesome and something that we strive for,

is you made it super fast. And Rails is not known for being super fast. I'm talking about load time and performance in terms of time to first paint and all that kind of stuff. Is there interesting tidbits in the code, ways you've gone about using Rails, or things that you've written that we can link to in the notes or points in the code that we can point people to, to show how you're going about doing things that might be a little bit different than normal or are allowing you to achieve the speed that you have on page load? Yeah, so because this was a side project, so much of it was like scratching my

own itch. And I'm a very impatient internet user. In terms of like people's blog posts, if it's not loading quickly, when all I need to do is read texts on a page, like the most basic thing that shift with HTML version one, you know, it's a frustrating thing. So from the technical perspective, this project was really built around performance ideas in a lot of ways and also delivering performance around the whole world. Americans don't realize how slow the internet can be in other parts of the world because of latency. But despite that, we chose Rails, which is not built for speed as the primary use case. But what we do is Rails doesn't do a lot of the work on most page loads. So like 90% of traffic is handled exclusively at the CDN

layer. And so we deliver pages which don't have the user's sort of personal identified information on that first page load. But the additional sort of stuff is a quick asynchronous call. So like worst case scenario, you're waiting longer for your image to show up. But even that is actually cached locally in local storage. So like basically you're getting the edge cached version of pages on the site and i have written about this and i actually did a talk at rails comp on the same subject so we can put the links all that stuff and yeah it's just like a few neat tricks tricks you know but also like understanding like as a team you have to know you have these constraints you can't use the

current user method in the view in most cases because we don't send over a server-rendered view. We send over an edge-cached view. And the edge is also... So there's a few ways to do that with edge, so with VLC and stuff like that on the edge. So that's Varnish Caching language, VCL sorry and

there's a few different ways people do that and we're taking kind of the less standard way to even do that because most edge caching still kind of makes round trips home for certain information in certain cases but we just said like no we want to serve

if a thousand people are reading the same article, we don't want to re-compute it 1,000 times. You're getting it once, and when the page changes, you get the new page. And this is possible because of the services we use. So FastlyRCDN has basically... They have Instant Purge, so if we have caching issues, it's a bug on our end.

Their API is really just virtually instant, like, you know, 100, 200 millisecond cache clear. So when a user updates an article, we serve a fresh one once and then the rest of them are the cached version. And that's just the architecture that makes sense for website content-driven stuff. I'm sure all the podcasts that are doing anything right are also coming from some kind of CDN. And really, people's location, the place things are getting served from, the way they're

being cached. It's all kind of like fundamentals of computing. But I think some of this stuff gets abstracted away and then programmers kind of forget it's part of the problem. But that was never my mindset. It was like, if anything, like it's a very typical Rails app with one kind of differentiating feature, which would be the same kind of approach you would take with any framework because the big difference here is the speed of light is constant. You can't change that. So you need

to bring the code closer to the people. And people are used to doing that with purely static content. But Fastly has always been trying to push people to do more stuff this way from themselves. And I didn't coordinate with them, but I read their blog posts and it was a great idea. So I ran with it. And it's funny, people themselves really know the best use cases for their own software. And sometimes you just have to listen. And there's some really cool stuff out there. And we have the same concept with some of our other services.

We use Algolia, which is a distributed search index. So we don't host our own search because we actually have nodes distributed all over the world. So if you're in Tokyo, you're going to get a search response and a site response, both from the edge, like within milliseconds. So, you know, I do live in the U. US, so this wouldn't really be a problem for me. But at some point in my life, I became very interested in not being exclusive to the rest of the world. And from a business perspective, it just made sense to do that right away. Trying to like, trying to tack on that kind of optimization at the end,

like when you already have all your, like, so if open sourcing was tough because we had already kind of just been writing code without that in mind right away, optimizing edge caching like that would be ten times tougher if that wasn't initially your use case because you'd have to really start tearing things out and it would be really frustrating and possibly not worth it. And so, yeah, like, and the wonderful thing about being, like, the coder, the, like, you know, founder or, like, the project manager or whatever, it's, like, I didn't have to, like, convince anyone else that this was a good idea. I just had to really, you know, know in my heart that this was a good thing to like try to do and see if it

worked. And, and it really did. And like, you know, over time we've like found things that like, damn, I wish we would have like not gone so hard on this part.

Cause it made everything else harder, but like things kind of work themselves out over time and we get to like a happy medium and it's, it's just really exciting. And I, I liken it to like being a painter. So like if you had to like a happy medium and it's it's just really exciting and i i liken it to like being a painter so like if you had to like describe if you're trying to found a project and you don't know how to code or do the thing that needs to get done i feel like it's kind of like being a painter but you can't paint like trying to tell someone else like live what you want the canvas

to be but like you need to describe it instead of just doing it and early on in a project like a software developer has so much so many superpowers in terms of just being able to like take that paintbrush and do whatever they want like translate what's in their head to what's on the canvas and uh you know like i just felt like early on in the project as a business and as a project, just the fact that I could kind of work that all in myself without too much pressure and without too many external sort of obligations. I really chose a technical project that was really up my alley. I didn't try to learn a hundred new things to do this. It was like, okay, what do I actually know better than anything?

And what's kind of the most optimized thing I can do with what I know? So a lot of this was really growing up for me. I've made mistakes in the past where I chose cool technology I didn't really have a good grip on, even if it was an interesting project. And then I didn't even really have cared too much about the project material and stuff like that so like this really was just a coming together of a lot of different spaces and interests and the tech really met with the human side and and the team was great and so that's why it's worked out to this point very cool well definitely give us those

resources and we will link both of those up ben one thing that you can do now which you couldn't do previously which i've found to be very fun is when you are describing something that you're doing in software or you are doing a talk or you're trying to get somebody to add a feature whatever it is you can actually link to the line of code or the file on github and say this is exactly what I'm talking about and you no longer have to talk in the abstract about your software now that it's open source

you can actually just send them the source and it's super cool yeah and it's much easier to just do certain kinds of support in general when you always have that at your disposal even if you're not talking to the person who might need it all the time but like the fact that like

so many things can just be described that way like just like this is exactly what the problem is and and you know with the project we expect you know there'll be flies on the wall who might like anytime we describe something they might fix it but even just being able to talk about it is of course like half the battle and uh we have um we already have some folks who just go around refactoring like like all the time and the little project uh because we had uh we invited some folks in early on like in addition to the like kind of explicit auditing just to like kind of start working on stuff and it's been it's just been so cool and what we really have to get a little bit better at now is like you know describing like the path and the vision and stuff because that really is not a

strength of mine to sort of yeah now I have to kind of have a different role where I actually am trying to like describe what we're supposed to be painting a lot more yeah and And that's gonna be a challenge one that I think I'm up for and mostly I just need to take a liking to it more so than like any new skill or anything because it's a little bit sometimes feels like time away from the code. And you know, but I think I like to have fun with it. I really love hanging around the website itself. Like I spend so much time on Dev2 and it's just, yeah, the more like we can make like

the future of Dev2 like jive with like how we like to use Dev2 ourselves, and this whole meta concept of hanging out on the thing you're working on. It's all really fun. And I just can't say enough about how exciting some of these new things we're doing are. I don't really have really any sort of strong open source ties in my life I've contributed a little bit I've been a big fan of open source for a long time but like never you know had the urge to like strongly become a part of any one project because it's just not like really in my personality the same way I see it with so many community members and yeah I'm just like really excited to to see it all happen and to be able to do it full-time like I'm not very good at splitting my time in that sense and the yeah it it's just exciting things ahead.

I'd say now that we've got the understanding of why open sourcing matters to you, to your team, to the business, to the direction, that makes sense. But what about the community itself? What are you hoping for the community to attribute back? Part of the reason why you open source is not just to, hey, here's my code, take a peek.

It's more like maybe there's some reasons for you know the community to get involved or what are some of your vision or aspirations there yeah so we really think of it as like you know not really one killer reason uh it has to happen um lots of people have just been really excited to kind of like build the things they've been complaining that are missing and little little things like that, which is one part of the puzzle. But I've really been driven by certain successful open source projects, namely Linux, which I think just really has a fascinating idea of how to develop software, where people can contribute in sort of greedy ways where, you know, potential partnerships or platform sort of concepts people can really like,

if they want something to happen and we agree that it should happen in theory, we just don't have the resources for it. They can kind of help code it up so like we we have partnerships you know with our we our current um sustaining business model is is a few different things including uh we have some sponsors and some partners like we run some community contests and things like that and all of these things sometimes just need like that extra special bit of effort to really make happen. But like, you know, our core vision can't doesn't really work with that. Like,

we can't just take our minds and put them towards like building all the little features that a contest needs. But we find these people we work with have a lot of sort of willing contributors who, you know, their job is to kind of make this work. this work. How can I make this work by finding folks within my team to work with your team on the code to make it happen? That's just super-duper exciting. Then the big magical unicorn use case is people will develop ways for this application to be sort of um a little bit more generic and possibly stand up their own communities um you know not necessarily in tech but maybe like you know we don't really feel like there's just room for one but but also uh you know dev2 for music, for activism, for just news and media and stuff like that. We kind of have a sort of path that's kind of like a media organization kind of story

and we eventually settle on this platform. And there's a lot of... I think our app right now is a pretty simple Rails app we've hacked together as best we can, but there's a lot of use cases that we can build on this, and the community really actually can make this better. So what we hope is that today, this is the Dev2 code base. You can't really actually use it as a different app, but we want to support that use case in the long run. And we hope that there's a number of contributors who really contribute to that goal because that's the place where it's not for us it's for kind of the

world it's for like you're not gonna build features for dev to itself but maybe take what Dev t's platform is to maybe greater greater heights outside of dev to potentially yeah and like the features like to make these things work it's like if one other group of people, like anyone who's part of our platform, wants to build Dev2 for their activist cause or music or anything else that interests them in their lives, they immediately then have to start caring

about the quality of everything, working with us on missing features, arguing about whether something should exist or not in the concept of everything, working with us on missing features, like, you know, arguing about whether something should exist or not in the concept of the code base. And that's really cool. And there are, like, I've seen out there, there's a lot of, like, these kind of, like, community, these sort of make your own social network platforms. But none of them are meaningfully open sourced. Or if they are open sourced, they're missing the whole sort of caretaking I think we've done with this whole project in terms of, you know, molding the user experience and the code and stuff like that. So, like, when I look out there, I see a void in the universe a little bit.

But I think our goal will be to run the dev community. We are a dev platform for developers. But if there's future instances, we will be super supportive of that. Because that makes this whole thing an ecosystem. And we're not going to build necessarily an abstract framework. We don't want this to be like a spin your own, whatchamacallit, like a WordPress or anything like that. But all these things are really good guideposts for how to make software that's much bigger than yourself

and much bigger than the initial problem and just more amazing. And if we could take on the Facebooks and the Twitter of the world with a number of individual sort of decentralized but compatible social networks, so be it. It's kind of grandiose and that's why we don't really worry too much about that. But it's a use case we really want to support. And the thing about open source is it's magical. Linux really bit a huge chunk out of what Microsoft wanted to be. And Microsoft, in order to survive, had to completely adopt and become sort of the biggest proponents in the world of open source.

It's true. Yeah. I'm like a practical idealist. Like, I don't want us to be in the business of like toppling Facebook. But if a side use case is that somebody's trying, we'll say, you know, go get it. We'll support this as much as we can as long as it also, you know, helps the dev community. So, it's all just like cool stuff. It's the magic of like, you know, networks and people and all these things that like my team is interested in i'm interested in like it's just fascinating and but ultimately like it happens by people you know fixing bugs and and coming up with new ideas and like you know

refactoring some code here and there it's's a really just, it's just a process and it's hopefully boring and we don't need to like innovate at every angle. We just need to be very craftsman-like and do a good job with our work. And, you know, who knows like how big something can be when you really put in those sort of caring moments. Well, let me be the first to say it. If not the second, at least on the show, congrats on this launch. It's obviously a big deal. I think we said it first off.

But, I mean, I'm excited about it, that it's open source. I know you promised it a long time ago. Finally, it's here. You've put a lot of thoughtfulness into not only the user experience of dev tube but also the the fact that it's open source and just just stoked for you guys and i know jess was supposed to be on this call we're bummed she couldn't make it but uh make sure you say hi her for us and let her know we were we missed her yeah absolutely it's been awesome hanging out with you too and uh i hope to run into you again. We met at OSCON two years ago.

Two years ago, yeah. And yeah, a lot has happened since then. And I think ChangeLog has been really humming along and we want to like work with you as much as possible if there's anything we can do. I think now that we're open source, those kind of chats can happen a little bit more smoothly. It's all just a benefit. We want to... Yeah, absolutely. So many great open source projects and we already feel like we're... It's a few hours into our adventure, but we're so much more steeped in the whole community, in the whole sort of software world. And's um yeah it's so exciting well cool ben thank you so much for your time today congrats on open sourcing and thanks for

more importantly for coming on the show and sharing your story man it's a lot of fun going through that thank you yeah thanks so much for having me all right thank you for tuning into this episode of the changelog. If you enjoyed this show, do me a favor. Go on Twitter. Tweet about it. Go to iTunes. Leave us a rating.

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