The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Programmable infrastructure (Interview)

Episode Date: June 27, 2018

Jerod Santo is riding solo talking with Kurt Mackey, co-founder of Fly. He talked to him about his work at Ars Technica, his prediction on tabs being a fad, and Kurt being a founding member of MongoHQ, which was later renamed to Compose and acquired by IBM. Jerod also talked to him about lighthouse scores, performance, and an interesting program Fly is instituting to compensate open source project maintainers.

Bandwidth for Changelog is provided by Fastly. Learn more at Fastly.com. We move fast and fix things here at Changelog because of Rollbar. Check them out at Rollbar.com and we're hosted on Linode servers. Head to Linode.com slash Changelog. This episode is brought to you by Airbrake. Airbrake is full stack real-time error monitoring. Get real-time error alerts plus all the information you need to fix errors fast. And in this segment, I'm talking with Joe Godfrey, the CEO of Airbrake, about taking the guesswork out of rollbacks. So imagine a developer has found a serious problem and they're trying to figure out what to do, whether to roll back yes or no. And if they roll back, what do they roll back? You know, because they may have released 10, 20 or even 50 new commits that day and

they're just not 100% sure which commit caused the problem. That's exactly where a tool like Airbrake comes into play. So instead of guessing and trying to figure out, well, this one seems like it's the code that's most likely to be related to what's happening. And first customer reported about 2 o'clock, so maybe it went out a little bit before that. Airbrake has this great tool called the Deployment Dashboard that literally will show you every single revision, who did the deployment, and it will show you which errors were tied to each deployment. So you can pretty quickly figure out, aha, this error started happening only after this code was deployed.

And by the way, it will also tell you which errors were fixed. So that if you go ahead and roll back a revision or try to put out a fix or a bug, you can then look and say, did it actually get fixed or is it still happening? And do I need to take different action? I just know from my experience, we spent a lot of time guessing about what to do and a lot of time arguing about whether those guesses were any good or not. And I would have loved to have just had some real anecdotal evidence that proved, no, this bug was caused by this release. We're going to fix it real quick based on all the information that rate gives or we're going to roll it back and we're not going to guess and roll back a whole day's worth of work just to make sure we by this release. We're either going to fix it real quick based on all the information that rate gives, or we're going to roll it back.

And we're not going to guess and roll back a whole day's worth of work just to make sure we catch this bug. All right. Check out airbrake at airbrake.io slash changelog. Our listeners get airbrake for free for 30 days, plus you get 50% off your first three months. Try it free today. Once again, airbrake.io slash changelog welcome back everyone you're listening to the changelog a podcast featuring the hackers leaders and innovators of open source i'm adam stachowiak editor-in-chief of changelog on today's show jared went solo talking to kurt mackie co-founder of fly we talked with kurt about his work at artist technica his prediction that tabs would just

be a fad when mozilla released with tabs way back in the day he was a founding member of monga hq which was later renamed to compose and acquired by ibm the programmability of infrastructure time to first bite lighthouse, and the importance of performance, his thoughts on raising money to build something, and JavaScript at the edge, and the behind the scenes of building the Fly platform. All right, Kurt, so you're with Fly, previously with Mongo, is it Mongo HQ,

which was renamed Compose? That's right. And before even that was Ars Technica, way back in the day. So take me back to Ars Technica, what you're up to there, because that's a publication that I really admire and respect. And then tell us how you got to be co-founder of Y.I.O. from journalists at Ars Technica. I actually was always a wannabe writer.

So I actually, in college, so this was like 1999, 2000, I started writing what I could for ArtStyle. And again, it was just a hobby. It was a really ugly site. Just we were kind of doing it for fun. The hot article at the time was like how to overclock your dual Celeron. That's how I did it for like maximum performance. And one of them was like Aliens vs. Predator. Anyway, old school game stuff.

It was cool. And so like I actually, I wrote a little bit for the site, including I remember reviewing the first version of Mozilla with tabs. And I'm very proud of myself for in the review being like, I don't know why anyone would bother to use tabs. I think this is just a fad. It's not going to happen in browsers. Yeah. So that was just, I was spot on with that one as far as i can tell that's uh that

reminds me of the guy from slash dot you know his initial take on the ipod was you know how lame it was yeah exactly he never lived that one down now you've managed to escape you know the the history of saying tabs were useless until now you just brought it right back up and i did i think i hedged a little bit because at the time Windows had just released the like they collapsed the taskbar buttons. And so I was like the OS has tabs was kind of my general back off. Anyway, it was funny. It was it was a I'm very proud of that one. But anyway, I never I'm not as good a writer in terms of like actually regularly producing content as I want to be. So I started I started just working on the technical portions of ours, like writing code for them.

Did like image hosting for subscribers at one point. And it was just a fun way to work on really interesting projects. And then ultimately ended up writing a lot of like content management stuff. I tried to start a company to build a content management system with ours, the only customer. And that didn't work, but I could just continue working for them.

It actually became a real gig when Connie and I acquired the company in 2008. And then I worked there as an actual employee for three years. And it was a very interesting experience. Actually, a lot of what I'm working on now is from problems and frustrations I had even 10 or 11 years ago at Mars. So it's kind of a fun full circle story there. Your last couple articles here, the recent stories by Kurt Mackey as according to your author page, still on Ars Technica was a IE nine preview.

Six was available now with a secret beta UI. Oh, I think I was at a WWDC when I was writing that one. There's probably a picture of a scan, which is it a scan sandwich. It's my author picture too. Yes, it is scan which.com was a fantastic that's blog that's spectacular link and show notes for people who

want to check out the scan which and then i phone in motion messaging on windows phone 7 so this feels like uh you know i guess it was eight years ago but it feels like even further because how fascinating it is in our industry right yeah windows phone 7 wow i wonder what phone i was using at the time probably a palm palm trail was my favorite phone i don't know if i ever reviewed that one so you were an early adopter on the smartphone palm pre sorry i was way off the palm pre the one with the slidey keyboard and the the magnetic charger thing did that have web os on it that's the one yeah oh yeah i never had i was straight from flip phone to iphone i didn't i didn't get the original iphone i got the second one iphone 3g and i've

never i've never even tried anything else but i know a lot of people were huge on web os it was very cool it's i think actually you can see pieces of it everywhere now if you look close enough either because people copied them or just they made really smart decisions that everyone else kind of got to at some point. So you left Ars and you started, according to your Ars bio, a MongoDB hosting, which we now know as Compose, was MongoHQ for years. Is that the right name? Yeah, Compose. MongoHQ, yeah. So we started.

I actually, MongoHQ existed. I was a very early customer and then joined up with Ben and Jason at Y Combinator. So I quit to go to Y Combinator, ended up doing MongoHQ with them. And then that was the next five years of my life, I think. That's what that worked out to. It was a lot of fun. We basically started as a MongoDB hosting company at a very interesting time because all these people were trying out this hot new database that helped them ship stuff faster. And one of the things I learned about

devs is like, it's actually really frustrating to be able to write something locally and to not be able to show it to people. So like mini production, I made air quotes when I said that. Air quote, mini production. And so like, I think we got think we ended up just capturing this wave of people who wanted to publish applications that were using MongoDB on the back end. And no developer wants to run a database. So it was a very natural thing to try out. We ran at one point like 150,000 free databases for people. Ultimately, we killed the free databases because we learned that free database users were never going to pay us money for anything. There was no upgrade path from those people.

They just stayed there. Yeah, not even was there a path. Like the people who wanted the free data, what we learned for databases specifically was the people who will pay you money will pay you at the beginning if it's cheap enough because like 15 bucks a month just isn't that big a deal um and the people who refuse to pay you money are probably never going to change their mind yeah that's kind of the downfall of the freemium model is that the the free people who you think are growing those opportunities for upgrades are a rarely going to upgrade if ever like you found out and b they tend to be the most uh needy customers in terms of

support which is not my experience. I've never ran a SaaS, but that's what I've heard. No, they are definitely. They're the loudest on Twitter. One other problem we ended up having is we'd direct, we'd basically send everyone to try out MongoHQ with a free database, and the reality of it was it really wasn't even our best experience. We were better off giving people a free month on the actual paid product

because it represented all of the things we'd be doing for them instead of how i did imagine get a subpar product so i learned a lot about freemium there i'm mildly cynical about it now i have strong opinions on how i would like to do freemium interesting because of it yes so we might get to that but let's let's talk about this next move so you you left uh mongohq slash compose and now you're co-founder of fly.io so tell us about that decision in your life and then the opportunity that you had with fly we um so we sold composed ibm in 2015 uh and i made it eight months at ibm and I learned I'm not a big corporate guy. And quit and had just this giant list of stuff that I kind of wanted to try. Because it's interesting, I quit that job and didn't really have a thing to focus on and ended up trying out a lot of other stuff.

Like I started taking improv classes, which I still do. It was great. Really? But yeah, yeah. So I had this, but I needed something to work on. And it wasn't even necessarily a money i mean obviously we need income but that was what i really needed like emotionally was like a project um and so a friend of mine named jerome and i and jerome worked at compose we're just going through ideas and at that point i'd sworn off infrastructure i

was like now i'm gonna do it again to do something entirely different. And we had one infrastructure idea. Yeah, exactly. Did you try anything else? Was there any other random things that you did that maybe didn't stick? I tried racing cars because I'd always wanted to and I had time. And that was fun, but it didn't like scratch any creative itch. It's a very mechanical.

Oh, yeah. Like to go faster on the track is do the same thing right every time and not a lot of creativity there unless i did like rally cars because going off roads a lot more unpredictable and you slide around and do stuff but it was still just it didn't it wasn't fulfilling in the way that i think i was looking for the improv helped because that was creative but yeah i think i know i also tried being a full-time parent i have four kids so i spent three months as a full-time father and that was plenty for me i was fully content done that yeah like i really enjoyed it i'm glad i did it i'm not a full-time parent forever what about financially so you mean these are all i mean full-time parent obviously is

is part of a household but in terms of things that bring in finance i mean the rally car thing the improv thing these were just these were hobbies or these were like creative endeavors but was was fly like your next effort at financial success or were there things in there false starts before that it really we don't have any other starts we had a lot of ideas um some for things like helping parents control screen time other things that probably really hard to make money with. But the farthest, I think the farthest we got on any of that stuff was, was mainly like writing out the idea,

kind of trying to determine if it'd be useful. One of the reasons we would fly is actually went and talk to, I decided it'd be a good idea to go talk to our previous investors just to keep the relationships warm, just in case we ever wanted to raise money. And a lot of them actually were, I was just talking through ideas and we actually had several people offer to invest purely on the basis of the one like fly, basically the one infrastructure idea we had.

And I was like, that's an interesting stuff. That's a, that's a big shortcut, save a lot of money and just be able to do something. I feel like that was fortunate and we probably won't ever get that experience again, but we basically got a, an easy round of money out of it which is never something that happens

was there any like uh question marks like that's almost too easy like could this be like sometimes it's like if it's if it's too easy you know something's too good to be true it probably is but are there ever like doubts that maybe like how is this going so well because so many people struggle to get there at all yeah so. So, um, I'd gotten pretty, I think I have a relatively healthy take on fundraising, which I didn't really have doubts about it too easy. Cause like fundraising isn't actually a sign of anything. It's like a thing you can use to, to do good stuff, but it wasn't, it was like, well, now we've raised money and now we've got to actually get to work was kind of my mindset. Uh, but it is, it has been a really fascinating learning experience

to like deliberately build a product from scratch underneath a round of money and get it launched instead of everything else I've ever worked on has been, I want to say like accidentally successful, but what it's really been has been a hobby. I spent a lot of time on that then became a business because people wanted it to be. And it was a, it was a lot less, um, intentional, I guess I should say. And so it's been really fascinating to learn how to build a company from scratch without already having a product basically. Yeah. It's been a lot of fun.

So that's all the doubts than that really did that. Gotcha. So what's the, what are the pitch look back, back then around fly that, what were you telling people you were solving? What was the problem space and um we so one of the a lot of this actually came out of condi nast and one of the basically the way i was explaining this to people was there's a a layer of the internet that developers don't have apis for which is kind of the load balancing slash proxy layer uh it's like cNs work at that layer, but you don't really have the ability to control your CDN.

Load balancers work at that layer, but like other than setting up a load balancer or maybe a REST API in Amazon, you can't change how it behaves. And so the way I was pitching this was like all internet infrastructure will ultimately be a programmable environment because you need that level of control

to apply basically business metrics to your infrastructure. So one of the really fascinating things, we were right about how we were pitching this. I didn't know the exact metric at the time, but one of the things we've learned is companies now used to track time to first bite religiously. So when they were setting up a new service, they'd like time to first bite religiously so when they were setting up a new service they'd track time to first bite for any request that was made to their

application and try and optimize that and that was a very technical metric but it didn't really mean anything to like business people or sales people or like execs at a lot of these companies right and then what we found is that there's like lighthouse scores, which is the Chrome app performance tool. Yeah, it's meaningful now. Yeah, it's very meaningful. They buy that like a good lighthouse score equals money. And one of the really interesting things we've come across is like, cool, you can actually program at this layer to improve the lighthouse score. And it actually it's weird because it matches what the very broad thing we were pitching.

But it's not exactly how I expected to end up making a business out of it it's just it's a bit crazy how i mean i just think about that and i think the reason why they are convinced that that is meaningful now even though it's always been meaningful in terms of uh end users right right per se performance and all those things a we have metrics and we have like the blog, you know, the articles and the probably case studies written by Amazon talking about, you know, how much money they lose with every second or millisecond. And then we also have the other big player,

which is Google with the stick of Google search results, right? So like, as soon as they say now speed matters in your SRE or your ranking, your page rank, now it's like it changes everything. It does. It really does. And like we were using those 10 years ago at Condé Nast, we were beating the speed drum using those same quotes from Amazon, those same quotes from Google. So, yeah, Google's basically put that stake in the ground of speed matters. We're going to apply it to speed rankings. But they've also simultaneously given people this score that is indicative of what they expect the user experience to look like. And previously, we've used lots of tools to track stuff over time.

And it's that leap between what this tool is telling us and what we actually think users experience has always been too big. And now it's very easy to... You go to any Gatsby generated site that's scoring a lighthouse 100 and you click on a link on that site and everyone's like oh yeah that was really fast exactly that actually matches what i'm seeing so now it's it's more apparent to you know the business side of businesses that this is something worth investing in but back when you're giving the pitch it probably was still somewhat of a hard sell but you weren't selling necessarily

the speed you were selling i guess the malleability of CDNs or the programmability of infrastructure. Yeah, speed is actually a really good thing to solve at this layer. But yeah, what we've ended up building now is kind of a global application platform. And the idea is like people should write JavaScript once and they should deploy it and they shouldn't worry about where in the world it's running. It's really well suited for proxy level problems. It's really well suited for people who want to build CDMs. It's really helpful for speeding things up,

but we're hoping it's actually just an interesting take on application architecture and deployment and what we think the future of building apps is going to look like. This episode is brought to you by DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean is a cloud computing platform built with simplicity at the forefront. So managing infrastructure is easy. Whether you're a business running one single virtual machine or 10,000, DigitalOcean gets out of your way so teams can build, deploy, and scale cloud apps faster and more efficiently. Join the ranks of Docker, GitLab, Slack, Hashicorp,

WeWork, Fastly, and more. Enjoy simple, predictable pricing. Sign up, deploy your app in seconds. Head to do.co slash changelog. And our listeners get a free $100 credit to spend in your first 60 days. Try it free. Once again, head to do out and actually build a thing. Give us the timeline here. So it's 2018, June.

You have a product out there. Where were you and how long did it take? And, you know, where was the actual fundraising versus building the company and getting to a place where you are now? We finished. We finished, air quotes again. We finished fundraising right at the beginning of 2017. And at that point, it was finished. Like, we need to stop this.

This is not things we spend time on anymore. It's time to get to work. It only took about like a month, really, because like I said, it wasn't intentional. It obviously didn't need the money because I wasn't asking for it. Like, I've learned the best way to pitch investors is ask them for advice and mean it. Like, just all you want from them is advice. And sometimes the money comes. It is a very interesting thing to see. So we raise money really quickly.

And then we sat down to start building and we had some we had some ideas for kind of the very smallest thing we could give to customers. One of the one of my I have this really I get really anxious without like building things in stealth. There's so many startups that are in stealth mode that never ship anything or they make big promises but never get customers. And I just I really, really like the feedback from customers or users or people seeing your stuff. It's it's nerve wracking to put things out there, but it's less comfortable for me to not have something out there because i just don't it's it's hard to wake up every morning and be like i'm just gonna work on this thing but nobody can see it was very important to me which is kind of goes back to the mongo hq thing a little bit it was like it was important for me the people that we could put an app with a database up really fast so we um we spent and it was at the end of April in 2017, we actually launched our first service. And all it really

was, was a way for people to combine applications on the same host name. And we actually have one hostname.com with like a Lord of the Rings inspired cartoon with it. But the idea was, well, you have your app and you have your blog and you have your marketing site. And it's actually really kind of a pain to put all those things under like fly.io instead of blog.fly.io that's a fact so instead of subdomaining which is what you end up doing to have completely disparate applications hosted on the same domain you're providing a way that you could use you know subdirectories basically or paths instead of that all combined together but have completely separate infrastructure for each one there's no coupling at all between the implementations correct and a lot of the paths

could just be third-party hosting services so like your ghost pro blog could be on slash articles which is exactly how ours is now your github pages site could be on the root and your rails app could be on the root if you're logged in it was kind of, that was the extent of the service at the time. That's useful. It was useful. It was actually a very, and so like startups have a myth. And when we go back and tell our founding myth, what it'll be was like, we needed to launch the service so we could build the platform underneath it. Which is, it was never quite that clear in our minds.

That's what we were doing, but it's, that's how it kind of worked out. So we got a lot of people using that. We ultimately expanded it to let people add a whole bunch of custom host names to their app and that was useful for people running like a blogging service or anything else it was very difficult to issue a thousand ssl certificates for your customers and customers have started demanding even github pages at the time didn't do ssl and everybody wanted it right um so we we ended up i mean running about several thousand domains on that platform on that on that service uh and serving you know several hundred million requests per month on top of it um and never

charged for it we actually launched with pricing but hadn't built billing yet and as we looked at it we thought well this is a this is a cool thing to give people, but it's not really the product we want them to pay for. It wasn't like a good enough product, we didn't think. So that was at the end of April. And then in April of 2018, we actually launched the application runtime. So it took a year basically of running this for people

and then building what turns out to be a custom javascript runtime from scratch and then getting that deployed to actually launching that for customers so that's pretty fast i think and uh things probably felt slower for you as you're the one you know toiling away but uh it's like pretty quick moving now we were joking before we started hitting record that things move very fast in this industry. And just to get a little bit of the inside baseball on this particular show, we first started talking in March, late March. And now it's late June or almost late June. And a lot has changed, even with your website.

Even while I was talking with, I think, Christina getting this show set up, I was at your website uh even while i was talking with i think christina getting this show set up i was at your website and she's like actually hit refresh because we just deployed a whole new version like the brain's different so things move very fast i actually even noticed since then um on your home page there's a big there's a big button now it says javascript at the edge and then right next to it in this orange pill which i actually didn't catch at first which is strange it says open source um which to me is new so let's talk about what fly is today um how you guys describe it because it's a bit nebulous i think a lot of these infrastructure platforming startups uh are nebulous like you're not sure but but you know, the tagline right now is JavaScript at the edge. And then there's your open source tag.

And then it says fly is a global JavaScript runtime that makes apps faster. You can optimize images, pre-render, cache partials, and more. So I get a little bit of that. I understand what I can do with it. But how do you describe it to folks who are like, what's fly? What are you telling? Well, so there's two stories. And one of the things I've learned doing this is like, we have the story for what I would call the investor class, but that doesn't always mean investors. It really just means people who think about the world and care about where

like technology is going. And so one of those stories is we're building a global application runtime because we don't think that people should have to worry about where things are deployed. We think people will be better off if they just write code and run it and it does what it wants or it does what they want.

And it's resilient and it's fast for people wherever in the world they are because nobody builds a startup targeting just people in Chicago anymore like they used to. You're almost global by default when you launch software now. So that's the big vision and that's the pitch to investors. And that's the like this really aspirational thing that if we look like

that in 10 years, then we built kind of what we expected to. One of the but one of the things I learned even in the last couple of companies was like, customers don't care about the big vision. They, they really want to know how to apply this to their problems right now. Right. And it's fair. It's, it's like partially because it's easy to sell a big vision, but like it's, it's hard to know when to use new technology even. Yes. And so, and this is, this is extra interesting because the last successful company, we were posting databases that people already knew about. There was no point when someone would go, I don't understand what you do. They'd go, I don't know what Mongo is.

And we'd say, then you probably shouldn't even be looking at us. But if they knew what Mongo is, they understood what the product was and scratched an itch they had right then. Building a platform like this is interesting because you end up having to build the platform. It's a little bit like building an operating system, I think. It can do a lot of different things. And we think, I think. It can do a lot of different things, and we think it's a good way to do a lot of different things. But what we end up having to focus on for customers, just by necessity of how much time we can spend in the store,

we can tell, well, is one or two things that are very valuable to them. So right now, the most valuable thing we can help people with is improving app performance. And it just means speed. means lighthouse scores so that's the story um we've sort of iterated to on the website we still find ourselves people like the word edge like devs like hot new technology we had it uh that's kind of funny because i i actually have a negative reaction to the word edge no it's not because of the browser it's definitely in there but um just because everybody is using it now um like we're just recently at microsoft build and microsoft's

talking about the intelligent edge and so a lot of like the the aws's right the azure's like edge everything's edge all of a sudden oh yeah so i get like i get negative buzzword reactions where i'm like yeah if i start hearing a word too much even if it's fine word i don't have any problem with the word it just starts to be like yeah another edge come on guys come up with something fresh i have i have the exact same i have the exact same feeling uh and what's funny is at one point our site said the serverless edge, which probably would have just made your head explode. Yes. And what's really fascinating to me is like for you, that's true. For me, that's true because we're like immersed in this stuff. I think a lot of people, like especially devs, some of the larger companies we're talking to, like they're actually

really drawn to serverless because they feel like it's this interesting thing. They're really drawn to edge because they feel like it's this interesting thing. And it's one of the few places where like the language works for customers and and for investors. Yeah. So I think like we're going to keep changing that just depending on who's doing what. And at some point we'll know what people respond the best to. But sure. That's the other fun thing about devs is like 10 of them will like something and 90 won't or, you know, another seven will like something else. And so until we can get the site to say exactly what people are thinking all the time, we'll just keep changing. Right. Exactly. Until the machines just know.

Yeah. Customize based on what I've responded to previously. And some all the GDPR might stop us from getting that done. But anyway, heading upstream there, you said something very interesting and that resonated with me coming from somebody who's you know you're you're you're providing you're building a platform or runtime right a thing where i use it i don't have to worry about any of the other stuff besides what my code does and hit a button and the world gets it as a customer investing like well i'm saying investing buying hosting or buying infrastructure either as a service or like going out and buying hardware is a very big decision for us and um you never know what's going to happen right so a lot of startups disappear and like the worst thing that

happened is that my infrastructure disappears or you know I'm, I'm not this way. Maybe I like, I deathly hate IBM and I love Mongo HQ, but then IBM buys Mongo HQ. And now my database is with the company that I've been despising privately. You know, so like, especially with devs, we get very emotional about certain things and, and it seems like it'd be really hard sell because to get me to either move or to try something new in a serious way that's not like a throwaway application um that's a really hard sell so what are your thoughts on that it is um and so we that's actually part of the reason we open source the runtime um so there's there's a lot there like i think devs expect what they're building on top of to be open source at this

point yes node is open source the browsers are open source like it's rare for think devs expect what they're building on top of to be open source at this point. Yes. Node is open source. The browsers are open source. Like it's rare for individual devs to pick something that's not open source to use. And that's actually makes a lot of sense because like a little bit like you said, it's I'm investing in a tool. It would make no sense to learn how to even like carpenters would not learn a nonstandard tool if they could help it. And open source is the closest thing I think we have to standard tools. So we made it open source partially because we thought people expected that, partially because we're devs and that's how we expect things to be.

And a lot to kind of give people some comfort that if we vanish or you just don't like us or you want to go a different way than we're going, you can take this and run it yourself. It's not easy. Like you're not, it's not easy to spin up servers all over the world and get this going, but it's doable. Like it's there. And if all else goes to, to, to heck, it, it can, it can be really, it can be done and you're relatively safe in that respect. Um, but we also like one of the interesting things that I've come across is I expected that to be a lot bigger part of the story to like bigger customers. And it's really not.

When we talk to bigger companies, they're primarily concerned about SLAs and data and like who owns data and support agreements and all of these things. And they're very, there's a little bit of like they have to sort of check the box that this is like open source checks a box for them. And I think maybe default defaults in the different mindset. But for the most part, they really just don't. They want something that solves a problem for them that they don't have to think about. And so this is when it comes back to we improve Lighthouse scores. What they want is to improve their Lighthouse scores. And if we can do that and we can prove it, which we can, they are usually they're not really worried about where this is going to go because they just want better Lighthouse scores.

It's a problem they need to solve. And so we've been a little lucky because I think just selling infrastructure to companies is really hard. Yes. But selling a business improvement takes a lot of those questions. It just doesn't matter anymore. Interesting. And so, yeah, a lot of the work we need to do is to get developer mindshare underneath, but the actual selling of the product is it's going incredibly well, shockingly.

Awesome. So tell us about the open source side. You say it's open core. So tell me exactly from your perspective what that means and the nitty gritty of what what is open source, what's not, what have you. So open core for us means you can run, so basically you can run the app in one place as if it were running on our service. The parts of the service that are open source are the parts that are easy to distribute. So the way you get started with Fly is you npm install at fly slash fly and off you go.

And so everything that it takes to do that is open open source what's not open source is things like managing thousands of certificates not and that's not really for a business reason as much as it's like just not easy to extract into a package like that for us at this point i think at some point we'll do it we have a distributed caching mechanism that is again like difficult to extract an open source. And so what we found is that I think the bar for open sourcing stuff is actually like a little bit higher than it is to just build it and run it. You can build a dirty service by patching to get stuff together and keep it running and no one ever cares. But there's a certain, at least, and this might be pride talking, like there's a certain level of kind of quality and portability and installability that we want to have in the open source bits.

And so we find that like what is open source and what isn't is more a function of what we can package up nicely for people than any kind of business decision. And so like basically, like distributed cache is an open source, but they're the local one that works just fine. We have distributed data storage coming at some point that's not open source, but works fine locally. And then you can't do SSL locally. And that I expect would come someday. Local and open source are kind of the same in our particular world. Gotcha. So I'm looking at the open source repo here, which is also in the notes for y'all listening out there. And I'm excited to find, you know, your own avatar here with,

you know, 36,000 lines of code or 19,000 deletes, like 118 commits. I mean, you're in the thick of it here. Yes. I, I would much rather build stuff than sell stuff.

Usually it's to the point where I, we could, Jerome and I could easily just build things and never have a functional company. If we weren't careful about like the decisions we were making. And that's, that's my, like my happy weeks are the weeks that I'm, I'm like talking to devs on Slack and not talking to big companies and doing pull requests and shipping features. Like that's when I feel the best.

So it's quite fun. And even like I've gotten to do talks about embedding JavaScript at various JavaScript meetups. And that's like, that's great fun. I'd much rather do talks about embedding JavaScript at various JavaScript meetups. And that's like, that's great fun. I'd much rather do deeply technical stuff than like, you know, write a white paper for a VP of something. It's a big company to read. Yeah.

So it's a, I don't know if I've done anything this week, but next week I will. Well, I see the only person that you're behind on the contributors list is Jerome. So it's a, it's a bit of a battle that you're losing. But how do you balance that? How do you know when to put the code editor down and say, I got to go take this investor meeting or I have to go sell something? You know, that's a good question. I don't have it. I don't actually have a good system for this.

It's a lot of like sort of gut feeling. And like every startup, depending on the day, I'm either super excited about what's happening or I'm worried that we're not going to kind of get over the next hump. There's always a next hump, but our next hump is to build a sustainable company out of what looks like a really good start. And so if I'm obsessing over the hump, I will go come up with ways to try and get more customers. And if I'm really, really happy with like, like if we just landed a big customer, I might go back, I might reward myself for writing code. One of my happy balances I've found is like, I can spend a lot of time writing, just fly apps and then showing them to people. And that's, it's a little bit of double purpose because I'm both user number one and it's, it's helping people

learn what they can do with the platform. Um, so that's really, that's my airplane time. When I have to fly somewhere, I ended up writing a bunch of example apps. So I think my last commits were actually like three example apps on an airplane ride when I didn't have any Wi-Fi. That was my fun bit. Awesome. Yeah, I did find one example app that I thought looked pretty cool, which was FlyGit, which is raw Git on top of Fly.

Was that, do you have your hand in that one or is that somebody else? I did. I did. Actually, a lot of our, we ended up using, we ended up consuming a lot of files from our repository and injecting them other places. So if you ended up, if you go to our doc site, which is flat at IO slash doc slash apps, it's just our readme. And what we do is we pull that markdown uh down and render it and put it

into our our normal looking site um so we do a lot with mixing and matching content from get so fly get is the basis for a lot of that and and we've taken bits and pieces of that and used them elsewhere very cool so while i'm staring at the repo i have one last question down here 70 typescript uh this yes do you have you have opinions on typescript you'd like to share oh yeah it's types it's 70 and trending up is it uh yeah we're uh it's it's more and more typescript um and for i really like typescript i've always really liked types and i used to be a pretty heavy uh windows dev i used i did a lot F sharp, which if you've ever done F sharp, you have to like types

or you don't do F sharp. And there's a lot of that stuff that's trickled into TypeScript. And I feel like, I don't know, we both really like TypeScript because it's easy. It's much easier to reason about. One of the things we had to implement

for this runtime was a, so we're basically implementing browser APIs because they work really well for our use case and browser APIs tend to be really well designed, the modern ones. So like fetch and request and response are just a really nice API to give to people. The request and response both have bodies

that can be streams or array buffers. I mean, there's a whole bunch of different things that those bodies could be. And one of the body mix-ins I implemented was first in JavaScript, and it just got overwhelming because I couldn't reason about what was actually happening

throughout that big mess of JavaScript. And TypeScript made it about a thousand times easier to understand what we were dealing with and how. The only thing that we've found that, and there's nothing TypeScript can do about this, I don't think, but since we do write a library and a lot of our customers use JavaScript, you can still send untyped garbage into TypeScript

and you don't have any guarantees that what the compiler just said is happening is actually what's coming through. And it's not so bad. It's just a thing that's always sort of in the back of our minds when we're making APIs. If we expect an object in a certain format, we still have to validate that at runtime or it's it's not going to go well i see so you i love typescript right you can't since you're consuming somebody else's code that their data their data structures yep exactly but yeah typescript's great we're huge fans um we've looked at um you've probably seen ryan doll's Dino. Yes.

In fact, we had another show on our network. It's called JS Party, which is all about JavaScript. We had a TypeScript party a couple weeks back on that show. And then we also had, we record live on Thursdays. And we actually had a section. It's kind of a three-segment show. And one of our segments was all about his talk at JSCon. Oh, yes.

Kind of just reacting to the 10 regrets he has about Node and then his new thing. Yeah. What's interesting watching him do that is we've sort of converged on similar ideas. Like TypeScript was one of them. Things like the browser APIs, making it so your code runs in a jail that can't do anything except one specific fetch function. It's all very fascinating. of jail that can't do anything except what you one specific like fetch function is always all very fascinating but like i i like that dino is natively typescript and we've thought about how

to make fly natively typescript for developers instead of just ourselves too 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, advanced traceability, and value stream visualization. With GoCD, you can easily model, orchestrate, and visualize complex workflows from end to end with no problem. They support Kubernetes and modern infrastructure with elastic on-demand agents and cloud deployments. To learn more about GoCD, visit gocd.org slash changelog. It's free to

use and they have professional support and enterprise add-ons available from ThoughtWorks. Once again, gocd.org slash changelog. so we discussed the big picture of what fly does today what you're trying to do eventually you know how you talk about it with investors how you talk about it with potential customers or current customers developers where do you put it in the landscape so a lot of our listeners and myself included like i understand there's other products out there doing similar things um some of them are nebulous what they do some are very obvious um you know you have your netlifies your zeit nows your you know your kind of last generation platforms like heroku then you also have you mentioned serverless you got your lambdas and there's just lots of different options out there where does fly fit in and if if you do

ever have the question of like you know how does it compete or where does it you know differentiate how do you address those those other people out there building similar things um so netlify we're actually pretty decent friends with them um netlify is a company that if we'd reversed who started when i think you would have built Netlify on top of Fly. So Fly is, I think, a good platform for building a Netlify-type service, which is just – there's definitely overlap just because I think if you're targeting developers, you end up doing kind of 5% to 10% of the same things that everyone else is doing. But Netlify is a really good possible customer. Zyte is really fascinating. They write some genius code. I feel like Zyte is a better Heroku.

I should say more modern Heroku because it's actually still really difficult to make something better. Heroku is still really good. I don't know. The developer experience, the way it just works is all kind of still amazing. I think if a sales force hadn't bought them, it could be a really interesting alternative to select them. Assuming it stayed alive and going bigger to the Amazon and Google Cloud and Azure part of the world. The people we get most often asked about and compared to is Cloudflare because they have service workers. And Cloudflare service workers look a lot like fly apps because I think it's a natural API to implement

for the types of stuff we're doing. The big difference we have with Cloudflare, and I tend to, investors ask this one a few times, is AWS is like a fully programmable data center. You don't ever call a salesperson to turn on a server or something else for you at AWS. And previously, there were less programmable data centers, places like Savas, places like Verizon, AT&T, all these guys, Equinix sold space and power for people. Cloudflare, I feel like, is a slightly older generation of a similar problem we have.

So like they have, whereas we have an API for like creating a WebP image out of any other image to serve it up to the right kind of browser. They have a button you check to turn on WebP. They put these service workers in the middle so you can script some stuff. And there's a fairly decent set of things you can solve with Cloudflare that you could potentially solve with Fly2 or vice versa. But it's, I think we're kind of a, we're like developer first all the time. There's like no part of anything we do that we want to hide from an API effectively, instead of this being a smaller bit of a much larger stack. So like you can see that part, you can see that because we're open source. We also have local testing, so you can write and run and test apps locally. And which means it works on like a continuous deployment process, which is an interesting thing because one of the people

we initially thought we were competing with was Fastly because Fastly is a great company that builds really cool stuff and is kind of the, I think the pinnacle of what a CDN should do. And one of the complaints we kept hearing from customers of Fastly, and there weren't many complaints, everyone was pretty happy with them, was I'm terrified that I'm going to change something and break my whole site. I'm a developer, I'm used to this whole development process, I'm used to writing

tests, I'm used to having some level of comfort when I make changes that they didn't give them. So that's kind of how compared to those guys, I think we're much more like the application level, developer first, developer all the way thing. I think more broadly, we're probably competing with anyone who wants you to write new code on top of them,

like Firebase, any of those people. But it's such a broad thing. It's like the people we're talking to customer-wise aren't going to compare us to Firebase usually. It's just like kind of all trying to go the same direction. Gotcha. So you mentioned your open source. Another thing that you're doing, which is super cool. And I want to hear more about is that you are giving equity somehow to open source authors, people who are providing, I assume specifically the tools that you're using to build fly. Tell me about that. First of all, who thought of that?

How's it going? How is it? Or just tell me all about it. I actually haven't heard that before. And I think it's a super interesting way to support the people who are, you know, you're building your platform on top of. So the genesis of this is I have very complicated feelings about open source and large companies. I think a lot of times large companies produce open source for somewhat good reasons,

but it's somewhat anti-competitive too. So like Facebook creates React, open sources it, everybody builds React, and that's now that everyone's basically learned Facebook's platform, so Facebook can now hire more devs. And it also is incidentally, it's kind of killed any ability for a company to build like a front-end framework from scratch and make any money off of it. It's a very interesting dynamic, I think.

There's like an echo in here because just a couple of shows back, we had Zed Shaw on the show. Oh, yes. That show, if you want to listen to it, it's called Corporate Interests and Developer, something like that. I've probably read everything he's written about that.

So I wouldn't be surprised. You wouldn't be surprised but um he's very convinced and and i think rightly so with regards to the specific thing he says which is that um corporations are using open source to commoditize their compliments which is really what you just said there like it'd be very difficult for somebody to build a front end UI framework and make a business on top of it because React is free and open source. And exactly. And so that's like Monopoly 101 if you take economics, it's like what you do anyway. Anyways, so I just I'm just hearing like very similar things continue. One other interesting thing we noticed and we saw this at Compose, because we hosted Redis.

So there's a fair amount of hypocrisy here because we were basically running open source databases and making money doing it. But when we were raising money, when we ended up getting, like, we were trying to write a B round and then we sold the company. Instead, we kept coming across Redis Labs, who was pitching themselves as like the home of Redis, which I always thought was kind of interesting because they took this open source project, they forked it, and then were claiming like kind of commercial. They called themselves, it wasn't the home, it was the commercial stewards of Redis, which I was like, that's really odd. Like a guy wrote Redis. It's really great software. Right. Uh, it's interesting that all of the money to be made from Redis is going to, you know, VMware compose the Redis labs to, to now Google and like Google has done their Redis offering Microsoft. Uh, so he's basically built a software that is ultimately worth in the billions of dollars.

I would bet just if you were able to put a dollar value on Redis, it wouldn't, it wouldn't be surprising to find out it's worth more than a billion dollars um and so like i i've always been a little bit wary of of exploiting people who build things like redis for for like their own edification just to build something cool for people and give it away it's like the most pure open source there is didn't redis labs hire him though i mean they gave him they did so that's that's something it's a job yeah i don't think he built a dude you know it's it's it is it's but it's like i think if you were to do the math they're getting a deal basically almost because i know what startups will give give like kind of the technical superheroes they try and hire for that and i don't think it's never commenced it's never commenced right with what value they're bringing is that you don't believe it is we don't know we

don't know the details of salutary's deal with redis labs but we know he did go there on his own you know volition so it's not like well after vmware hired him for the same reason it's like yeah he worked for vmware for a while and then he went and worked for redis labs he might he might still be at redis labs i don't know he is he, yeah. And I have no reason to think he's unhappy with it. I just think, like, structurally, it looks like an unfair portion of the world to me that these people build these things that are so amazing. And people like me would swoop in and create a company out of it because that's what we're kind of wired to do is create companies

instead of just create really great open source. So do you feel bad about, like, how MongoHQ went down then? Oh, no. Actually, I'm not sure I'm supposed to say this but i don't care the uh we weren't making very much money off of redis it was a cool thing to host and we did it because we liked it but it never was a very commercially successful thing for compose okay uh but we also like we launched it shortly it was like right before we sold ibm too it just it was like neat this is cool we just launched it so So I don't

for that reason, I don't particularly feel bad about making money off MongoDB because they made money off MongoDB as well. So that's the... We actually tried to make RethinkDB like I think there was one like RethinkDB I think

we were helpful for because they kind of needed this story of someone will run this for you and they weren't going to build it themselves. But like I said, it does sound mildly hypocritical because I think most of the good stuff that happened to me has happened in the bags of open source. Right. Anyway, so that's the long-winded way of saying for this company, we basically just had this idea at one point is like we should we should give um equity grants to open source authors of tools that we really uh get value out of and it's interesting because startups give equity grants to people all the time if if you're a startup and you go hire an executive recruiter up to like hire you a vp of marketing that recruiter

is going to get uh some fractional percent ownership of your company because that's just the way that basically business people negotiate this stuff. And like a lot of startups have advisors who literally are just answering emails and doing nothing else of value for a company that have equity grants. And so we basically just looked at it and was like, you know, the open source authors are every bit as advisory as these advisors so we started um used just the normal advisor paperwork to create an advisor agreement we took out a lot of non-compete stuff because it wasn't that kind of relationship yeah but um it was a standard advisor agreement with just the same kind of

shares that i have just a smaller percentage so we've offered it to uh four people at this point are you able to share like what the projects are or is that like all uh that's relatively private only because i don't know i haven't really asked them if we can tell people who they are if they or not but it's uh you might be able to guess one or two go look go look at your package.json and we can probably figure it out. Or listen to this. Right. So is this a deal where you just contact them? You're like, hey, I'm using your stuff. I'd love to just give you some equity.

Yeah, it weirds them out at first. Like we actually had to send two emails to one person because I think it sounded like spam. Yeah. Because it's just so far out of any email they're expecting to get. And they're all super excited about the idea. We had one turn us down because they thought it might be a kind of a conflict of interest for them based on what else they're doing. But we had,

but they were generally like, this is great. Like, I'm really glad you did this. It's a, it's a, it feels pretty good. It's a nice,

I think it's a nice thing to do. And if the company, if fly is super successful, it's, it's never going to matter in terms of like, right much we've given up and if fly fails it still doesn't matter so it's a relatively easy thing once you get over that mental jump so here's a another radical idea but maybe you thought of this one it sounds actually less radical when i say it out loud but like you raised a whole bunch of money and it was really super easy.

Like giving them equity, I think it's a cool idea. And I think it's way better than zero, which is what most people out there are doing, which is why we have this problem that we're in of, you know, the sustainability problem. But Zed would say, just give me the cash, man. Like, give me some, why don't you just give them some money? If you have, you have funding, this is development that you would otherwise have to build yourself right you could give them a a percent of what it costs you in labor to build or times time wasted building out these dependencies you know did you consider just like you know throwing them a bone we did we actually tried uh i think zed might be i don't know if he's unique or just not everybody is like that.

But we have found the open source authors we talk to either don't need money, like they just aren't wired that way. They don't, they're, one of them I know is actually really comfy. And so like money is just not going to change anything for that person. Right. But the the other the other flip side of that is a lot of them value their independence in a way that I think just getting paid for for like it being it being just structures as a strength, no strings attached grant. You're going to try and do that. But generally you'd like make I don't know. Generally, it seems like there's strings attached, even if there's not. And so we're actually very clear with the open source grants is like this is for what you've already done we don't expect you to do anything as a result of this um but money is it it's it's money is an interesting thing with with uh sometimes people aren't motivated by it and i'm actually i see i would take the money

if i were a successful open source author i'd be very sad about this but money right but for for the ones we talked to i've i i guess it's not surprising but like they're the equity is a more interesting thing to them than yeah then i guess and it sort of makes sense like if you if the money's not going to change your life um yeah right then like the equity at least there's the hope it might at some point i don't know i think it's definitely a case-by-case basis because i mean so i've been doing contract work for years uh you know basically contract software for hire and you know when you when you're in that circumstance you have a lot of people that want to offer you equity instead of cash you know right and so it's like be my technical co-founder blah blah, blah, blah. And my answer to them is like, I'm running a business here and I got a family to feed.

And like, I, I, I would love to help you build your idea, but I don't want to take on all the risks that you're taking. Like I will, I will take the cash now for the work done. And then you can have all the upside later. Like if it's amazingly awesome, I made a bad decision, but I need the cash to put food on the table. And so then there's other people who may be like, if I was just independently wealthy or like you said, comfy enough and be like, I believe in the project, then I might say, you know what? I'll work for equity or.

And so, like, it's super case by case and super, I guess, it is. It is. But and, you know, like talking about this, I realize I don't think we've offered you in a money grant with the same like this is absolutely no strings attached. We don't expect you to do anything like we have for the equity. Right. Like my my knee jerk is like I'm actually curious what someone would say. But my other knee jerk is like it's actually mildly difficult to do that without tax consequences. Equity is actually a really simple thing to give somebody at this stage because there's no the company according to irs income things is basically not worth anything so you pay your

12 cents for shares or whatever and it's just a relatively so it is very interesting discussion of the money versus equity for sure and it is mildly surprising how different people are yeah absolutely and then then and especially on the receiving side for them which is why you know organizations like open collective exist and why these problems are trying to provide like some people aren't set up to receive money as donations and so like you can't they'll be like nah it's just it's way too much of a headache for me to even accept whatever it is you're offering uh because of you know where they're their governmental situation and so um there are orgs like open collective that will act as a non-profit on the behalf of other individuals

and so then you can send you can filter it through open collective um making things easier but it's definitely not you know a utopian situation like yeah we're not there yet in terms of like making making this an easy transaction for people right exactly so i mean i guess we're in a situation where the the equity like it hasn't played out yet we haven't seen a fly as a huge success and can uh can eventually sell those off for some decent cash but is this in terms of how far you've taken it so far is this a model that you think you'd love to see other startups do? Has it been, I mean,

it sounds like it's been pretty well received by the people that you've contacted for the one who has a, who has a conflict of interest. But I guess my question is like, is this a model to follow or not? I think it is. I think it's a, I think,

um, so one of the things I like about it for us is I think it's a good thing to be thoughtful about. So just the act of doing it, I feel like makes you think pretty hard about where you're getting value. And, and it like, I,

I, I feel more comfortable with my life when I can reckon with like how privileged I am to be doing what I'm doing and how lucky, like we could just go raise a round of money and just, yeah, not, not a lot of people can do that. Um, and so it's a, I think it's probably just a really good mental exercise, but I also think, I think if you, if you're at all worried about like the kind of the

concentration of tech power and you're worried about the commoditization of open source, it's a, if, if every, if every like startup that went through Y Combinator and raised around the money was giving open source authors a little bit of chunk of their, their, their money, I think you'd be creating a lot of wealth over time for the people that are kind of building the backbone of what we're all doing. So, yeah, I agree 100%. And then I, when I started to think about it, then I'm like, you know what, by, I feel sorry for the startups, you know, like, especially the Y Combinators. Cause like, what's a 20 grand and some training. It's like, I know they're going to raise after

that. But like even that, the number one reason why startups die is because they run out of money, you know, and of course, maybe they run out of money for different reasons. Maybe it's not viable. Maybe they can't manage it, whatever the reason happens to be competitive pressures. But there's lots of companies who aren't running out of money, right? They're printing money. And like, if they were involved, even at a very small percentage, I think we asked that shot, like what percentage would make sense that you'd be happy. You'd sleep well at night. If, you know, he was talking about the specifically the huge tech companies would give, you know, to their, their dependencies. It wouldn't take much as a percentage to really raise the level of a lot of

people's lives who are out there writing software, you know, in the open source space. So no, it wouldn't. I think it's a, it's, and like I said, it feels free. There's like, there's the actual cost to us to do this is it's mostly, it's mostly an imaginary cost is like, if we're huge and successful, it will cost us some money. But at that point, don't care.

And like every startup, there's a very good chance that it won't cost anyone anything because it's like we won't actually be able to succeed. So I also don't care. All right. Anything else, Kurt, before I let you go? It's been a very fun conversation.

Anything else you want to chat about? No, I think we covered it all. It was a fun talk. I like talking about JavaScript and open source, so this is a good diversion from work today. I'm working on JavaScript and open source. Happy to divert you, and we thank you so much for your time and love sharing that bit about what you're trying to do,

giving these authors some equity and hoping that works out to their benefit as you benefit from them. So that's a very cool idea. I'm interested to hear how that goes over time. And listeners out there, if you know anybody else who is doing that as a startup or as a small business or heck, as a large business, providing, you know, funding or support for the software creators that they rely upon to get that money,

let us know. We love to hear about these situations. We like to, you know, promote companies that we think are doing good in the space. So thank you for flying all you're doing there. And let us know, listeners, who else out there is supporting the open source community. All right, Kurt, thanks so much. It's been lots of fun. Yeah, thanks a lot. Thank you for tuning in, everybody.

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