Console DevTools

Cloud infra, with Kurt Mackey (Fly.io) - S04E11 Jul 06, 2023

In this episode, we speak with Kurt Mackey, CEO of Fly.io. We discuss what it's like running physical servers in data centers around the world, why they didn't build on top of the cloud, and what the philosophy is behind the focus on pure compute, networking, and storage primitives. Kurt sheds light on the regions where Fly.io is most popular, why they’re adding GPUs, and the technology that makes it all work behind the scenes.

Hosted by David Mytton (Console) and Jean Yang (Akita Software).

Things mentioned:

ABOUT KURT MACKEY

Kurt Mackey is the CEO of Fly.io, a company that deploys app servers close to your users for running full-stack applications and databases all over the world without any DevOps. He began his career as a tech writer for Ars Technica and learned about databases while building a small retail PHP app. He went to Y Combinator in 2011 where he joined a company called MongoHQ (now Compose) that hosted Mongo databases which he sold to IBM, before turning his attention to building Fly.io.

Highlights:

[Kurt Mackey]: The original thesis for this company was there's not really any good CDNs for developers. If you could crack that, it'd be very cool. The first thing we needed was servers in a bunch of places and a way to route traffic to them. What we wanted was AnyCast, which is kind of a part of the core internet routing technology. What it does is it offloads getting a packet to probably the closest server, to the internet backbones almost. You couldn't actually do AnyCast on top of the public cloud at that point. I think you can on top of AWS now. So we were sort of forced to figure out how to get our IPs, we were sort of forced into physical servers for that reason. For a couple of years, it felt like we got deeply unlucky because we had to do physical servers. You’d talk to investors, and they'd be like, “Why aren’t you just running on the public cloud and then saving money later?” Then last year, that flipped. Now, we're very interesting because we don't run on the public clouds.

— [0:11:14 - 0:12:03]

[Kurt Mackey]: I think there's another thing that we've probably all reckoned with since 2011; a lot of the abstractions were wrong. As the front end got more powerful, I think we tried a lot of different things for— and what we ended up doing was inflicting this weird distributed systems problem on frontend developers. So I think that, in some ways, we just have the luxury of ignoring a lot of things that people have been trying to figure out for 10 years because we probably think that's wrong at this point. So we happen to be doing well at a time when server-side rendering is all the rage in a front-end community, which is perfect for us and nobody really cares about shipping static files around in the same way. I think it's just evolutionary. We kind of have a different idea of what's right now and can do simpler things and then we'll probably get big and complicated in 10 years and be in the same situation again.

— [0:18:25 - 0:19:11]
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Serverless databases, with Monica Sarbu (Xata) - S04E10 Jun 29, 2023

In this episode, we speak with Monica Sarbu, CEO of Xata. We start with the philosophy behind serverless databases, why developers shouldn't need to think about relational databases, search, and analytics, whether the performance hit of accessing a database over HTTP matters, and how database branching works. She also talks about Xata’s plans for a global database, the company’s focus on UI developers, and what other databases are doing wrong.

Hosted by David Mytton (Console) and Jean Yang (Akita Software).

Things mentioned:

ABOUT MONICA SARBU:

Monica Sarbu is the Founder and CEO of Xata, a serverless database built for modern development. Prior to that, she worked on an open-source monitoring solution called Packetbeat which was acquired by Elastic in 2015. She is also the co-founder of tupu.io, a non-profit initiative that offers free mentorship to women, people of color, and other underrepresented groups in the tech industry.

Highlights:

[Monica Sarbu]: The idea of a single API is that because, like I said, this scenario happens in every company out there; when they start a new web application, they need to build this data platform internally. My thinking was why [does] every company out there need to reinvent the wheel when we can provide all this functionality: database, search functionality, analytics, time series data as well, and under a single API? This was the main purpose of having a single API.

— [0:05:14 - 0:05:49]

[Monica Sarbu]: I've seen that there are so many companies out there that are building their data platform on top of Airtable and they are developers. The reason behind that was that it's easier to use, and they had– While I was speaking with so many companies, I've seen so many hacks because they had hundreds of Airtables. They were synchronizing between them because you cannot really store a lot of data in one Airtable. My idea is — especially with serverless applications — that when you're building a web application, you have most of your logic in a lambda function so you cannot really use any of these databases and services that are out there, right? So Airtable was an easy-to-use approach but Airtable was not really meant to be built as a database. I've seen that there is a huge opportunity to build something that is as easy to use as Airtable but as scalable as a traditional database and also powerful as a traditional database.

— [0:25:12 - 0:26:16]

Let us know what you think on Twitter:

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About Console

Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to.

Sign up for free at: https://console.dev

Creating Julia, with Jeff Bezanson (JuliaHub) - S04E09 Jun 22, 2023

In this episode, we speak with Jeff Bezanson, one of the co-creators of the Julia programming language and the CTO of JuliaHub. We start with the history of Julia and why it took a while to take off, the key principles behind the language, how it provides the speed of C with the ease of Python, and what it's been like running such a large open-source project. He sheds light on the original motivation for Julia, the process of creating it, and its involvement in AI.

Hosted by David Mytton (Console) and Jean Yang (Akita Software).

Things mentioned:

ABOUT JEFF BEZANSON

Jeff Bezanson is one of the co-creators of the Julia programming language, along with Stefan Karpinski, Alan Edelman, and Viral B. Shah. He is also a co-founder of JuliaHub, a company that grew out of this project. He has a Ph.D. from MIT where he worked as a research scientist and he has authored a number of academic papers on the Julia language. The intention behind the creation of Julia was to establish a language that was both high-level and fast. His work on it has earned Jeff the J. H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software.

Highlights:

[Jeff Bezanson]: You had to give up performance. That was just a law of the universe that they all learned. Then if you wanted performance, you had to use C or Fortran or something. This was just the way it was. I got introduced to that world of thinking in college and I thought it was really surprising because I knew that high-level languages could be fast. I knew there were good Lisp implementations, you had the ML family languages, there were really good high-level languages that had really, really good compilers and could be fast. And nobody seemed to be using them, which I just thought was amazing. I made it this mission to “Can we get all these people to realize that high-level languages can be fast, and they should be using a high-level language that's fast?” So [Julia] is my attempt to do that.

— [0:02:59 - 0:03:44]

[Jeff Bezanson]: People have been trying to speed up dynamic languages of various kinds for a long time. That's been one of the long-running research threads in computer sciences, starting with a language like Smalltalk, for instance. How do you make it run fast? There's a whole zoo of both dynamic and static techniques. There are some really cool stuff people have invented to take these languages that you can't necessarily statically analyze using standard compiler techniques, and yet, nevertheless, generate fast code from them. It’s a fun game to play is how do we compile these languages that are not cooperative? So that makes it a challenge, which makes it a good research problem. But to me, it's kind of annoying because why do you always have to fight the language design? So instead, I approached it from the opposite direction and said, “All right. What are all the techniques that are known and available for doing this? Then how would you design a language to make those techniques work well?”

— [0:13:18 - 0:14:12]

Let us know what you think on Twitter:

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Or by email: hello@console.dev

About Console

Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to.

Sign up for free at: https://console.dev

WebAssembly, with Matt Butcher (Fermyon) - S04E08 Jun 15, 2023

In this episode, we speak with Matt Butcher, CEO at Fermyon. We discuss the four use cases for WebAssembly, why Wasm’s sandboxed approach is so secure, whether there's any danger retrofitting other use cases onto a language that was originally designed for the web, and how limitations like the lack of full networking support are going to be resolved.

Hosted by David Mytton (Console) and Jean Yang (Akita Software).

Things mentioned:

ABOUT MATT BUTCHER

Matt Butcher is the CEO of Fermyon. He is also a software engineer, tech author, speaker, and ex-professor. Formerly a principal software development engineer for Microsoft, he led a team of engineers that built open-source tools for cloud-native computing. They were responsible for Helm, Draft, OAM, Brigade, Krustlet, CNAB, Porter, Duffle, the VS Code Kubernetes Extension, and many others. Together with a team of 10 people from Deis Labs at Microsoft, he started Fermyon, a lighter, faster, and truly serverless cloud, architected to compile and ship code as Wasm binaries.

Highlights:

[Matt Butcher]: When Luke wrote his first blog post and said, “This is for a web browser,” it was built to not be particularly web-browser specific. It really just defined a machine code format in a way to execute that format. That was what kind of drew us to it as a technology. In the core WebAssembly 1.0 specification, there's nothing in there that binds you to a web browser environment, it’s just a straight-up runtime definition. So it was fairly easy to sort of pluck out a WebAssembly runtime and drop it somewhere else. In fact, there are several different WebAssembly runtimes that are not based on the browser at all. — [0:13:36 - 0:14:13]

[Matt Butcher]: If I were thinking about writing a new database, a new high-performance, multithreaded database, WebAssembly would not be the format I would target for this, right? Because there, you want to be able to do a lot of low-level management. Every little microsecond that you can tease out of IO and process manipulation is valuable. So I don't think we'll see those kinds of highly, highly IO-intensive tasks really land in WebAssembly for years because it's going to take the ecosystem a long time to really tune up and be fine-grained enough to deal with those things without compromising on security. It is possible that maybe never will we really want to write the kind of high-performance databases or high-performance number-crunching computing kinds of systems in WebAssembly. — [0:27:57 - 0:28:44]

Let us know what you think on Twitter:

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Or by email: hello@console.dev

About Console

Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to.

Sign up for free at: https://console.dev

Why engineering sucks, with Eli Schleifer (Trunk) - S04E07 Jun 08, 2023

In this episode, we speak with Eli Schleifer, Co-CEO of Trunk. We discuss why engineering sucks, what developers can learn from how software gets built at Google and Uber, how individual developers can improve their coding experience, and why Git commit messages are useless.

Hosted by David Mytton (Console) and Jean Yang (Akita Software).

Things mentioned:

ABOUT ELI SCHLEIFER

Eli Schleifer is the founder and co-CEO of Trunk, an all-in-one solution for scalably checking, testing, merging, and monitoring code. It helps developers write more secure code and ship faster to redefine software engineering at scale. He was previously a technical lead manager and a systems architect at Uber ATG, where he led the architecture and engineering of its self-driving platform. He also lead a team of engineers and technical leads in the development of multiple products under the YouTube Director umbrella and was a lead senior software development engineer at Microsoft.

Highlights:

[Eli Schleifer]: We should trust our engineers and also understand that code is constantly – it's a living document. It's changing all the time. If something gets in that's imperfect but not terrible, that's also okay. So if you have an engineer put up a pull request, you have feedback, leave that feedback and stamp the pull request. Assuming there's trust, then the engineer is going to follow up, fix up your comments, and then land that. There's no additional cycle. If you don't stamp it, that means you're going to— you’re basically saying to this person, “I'm going to hold up your work until you show me that you can actually follow through on the things I'm asking about.” That's a level of distrust that, I think, is not good in a highly collaborative working environment.

— [0:15:48 - 0:16:28]

[Eli Schleifer]: I think this is the biggest thing between a smaller startup and a giant tech company: At a giant tech company, at the end of the year, the giant tech company comes to the employee and is like, “Tell me what you did this year and why you have this job. Tell me all the good stuff you did for us.” At a smaller company, all management knows what all the people are actually doing for you. There’s a clear visibility into what those engineers are adding and contributing to the actual company's efforts. I think the biggest thing to focus on when it gets to 200 engineers or 2,000 is: what are these people actually working on? Who's making sure that there's a director of engineering for each of these smaller groups of 30, 40 people to make sure they're actually pushing towards something that matters, that matters to the company, that's going to move the needle? And that those engineers can still feel pride in and feel like they have impact?

— [0:27:22 - 0:28:09]

Let us know what you think on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/consoledotdev

https://twitter.com/davidmytton

Or by email: hello@console.dev

About Console

Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to.

Sign up for free at: https://console.dev

Frontend platforms, with Matt Biilmann (Netlify) - S04E06 Jun 01, 2023

In this episode, we speak with Matt Biilmann, CEO of Netlify. We discuss what it was like deploying code before Netlify, whether there is about to be a fragmentation in the JavaScript ecosystem as React gets more opinionated, where state and data fit into the Jamstack model, and how you might reach developers with a new project today. You’ll hear about the evolution of Netlify’s model, the Gatsby acquisition, and how Netlify has succeeded at staying on top of the fast-changing landscape.

Hosted by David Mytton (Console) and Jean Yang (Akita Software).

Things mentioned:

ABOUT MATT BIILMANN

Matt Biilmann is the CEO and Co-Founder of Netlify, a cloud platform that helps people build, deploy, and operate websites, web applications, and web stores swiftly and with ease. He has a long history of building DevTools, content management systems, and web infrastructure. Matt has been an active participant in open source and contributed to many well-known projects, including Ruby on Rails, JRuby, and Mongoid. Since launching its private beta back in March 2015, Netlify is now used by 3.5 million developers and is one of the fastest-growing web development platforms in the world.

Highlights:

Matt Biilmann: I really believed that we would move away from that model and move to a model where we would decouple the actual web experience layer into its own layer that web teams can build and deploy independently, and hopefully much faster. But I also saw at the time that there wasn't any tooling or infrastructure or workflows around that. So early on, when we started Netlify, there wasn't even a name for this web building. We had to come up with the term “Jamstack” to describe this idea of building the web experience layer on its own and typically seeing the backend split into all these different APIs and services, like all the headless CMSs that’s really become mainstream now.

— [0:03:58 - 0:04:39]

Matt Biilmann: Right now, what we're seeing happening around generative AI is probably going to change a lot of how we interface with computers over time, right? It’s already almost at the edge where you can imagine stitching a few tools together, and you would be having this kind of conversation with a program, rather than with a human. I think as that starts to happen, that will start to massively redefine how we consume content and commerce and so on. It will probably change a lot of what it means to build a website.

— [0:17:09 - 0:17:41]

Let us know what you think on Twitter:

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https://twitter.com/davidmytton

Or by email: hello@console.dev

About Console

Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to.

Sign up for free at: https://console.dev

Devrel, with Christina Warren (GitHub) - S04E05 May 25, 2023

In this episode, we speak with Christina Warren, senior developer advocate at GitHub about all things Developer Relations (or “DevRel”). We talk about what constitutes a “typical day” in DevRel (if such a thing exists), how to get started in the field, and the types of skills needed. We also discuss how to measure success in DevRel, the importance of advocating for the user, and where exactly DevRel ends and product begins. You’ll hear about how Christina sees her role as a bridge between the community, product engineering, and the developers using the product, as well as where video fits into it all.

Hosted by David Mytton (Console) and Jean Yang (Akita Software).

Things mentioned:

ABOUT CHRISTINA WARREN

Christina Warren is a senior developer advocate at GitHub who works in DevRel, helping to connect GitHub’s developer community with its engineers. Prior to working for GitHub, she was a senior cloud developer advocate for Microsoft. With a background in journalism, she creates a lot of video content and is responsible for GitHub’s weekly YouTube show The Download, where she presents the week’s most insightful news for developers. You can find her on Twitter at @film_girl and on GitHub at @filmgirl.

Highlights:

Christina Warren: I think that developer relations should be part of product and engineering because it is a really core part of that. That said, to be successful, DevRel needs to be cross-functional so some companies have it under marketing. For their purposes, that might make sense. I think that it makes sense for it to be part of product and engineering. But I think that it's cross-functional insofar as I work with people on basically every different team at GitHub. That's one of the things that's great about GitHub is that they have a really good understanding and appreciation of the value that we can bring because we can help the product teams and the engineering teams create assets for their blog posts. We can help them with their message. We can highlight things because we are on the ground all the time. We can go, “Hey, hey. This thing happened and this is causing problems. Do we want to get ahead of this? And how can we make something better?”

— [0:15:02 - 0:15:49]

Christina Warren: The way I see my job — and I can't say this for every person in DevRel — but the way I see my job is my title is “developer advocate”, but I'm not advocating for GitHub. I'm advocating for GitHub’s users. I'm advocating for our community. That's really what I'm trying to do. Because I think that by advocating for them, that's how GitHub can be most successful. But, of course, not everybody and not every company might see it that way. They might see it as, “Oh, your only job is just to praise and talk about how great we are.” I don't see it that way. I think that to be really successful, you need to be transparent, you need to be honest, you need to be authentic. That includes when there are situations where you might screw up or when things might not be right because I think that that's what builds trust.

— [0:16:24 - 0:17:07]
Let us know what you think on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/consoledotdev

https://twitter.com/davidmytton

https://twitter.com/jeanqasaur

Or by email: hello@console.dev

About Console

Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to.

Sign up for free at: https://console.dev

Shell scripting, with Steve Lee (Microsoft) - S04E04 May 18, 2023

In this episode, we speak with Steve Lee, principal software engineer manager on the PowerShell team at Microsoft. We start with what PowerShell is and why its object-based approach is interesting, then get into what it was like open sourcing a project at Microsoft back in 2016. We discuss the transition to using GitHub and what it's like managing an open source project at scale, bouncing community with features, bugs, and requests from users, alongside Microsoft’s goals. We also talk about PowerShell and its relation to AI, before we get some insight into what we can expect from it in the near future.

Things mentioned:

ABOUT STEVE LEE.

Steve Lee is the principal software engineer manager on the PowerShell team at Microsoft. He’s been with the company since 2000 when he started out working on Internet Explorer for Unix. More recently, his team was responsible for PowerShell Core 6, the open-source cross-platform (Windows, Linux, macOS) version of the object-oriented scripting and interactive shell, developed on GitHub.

Highlights:

Steve Lee: I think the way we position PowerShell, it’s really a ‘glue language’, and not intended for developing full applications. Now, I do know that there are folks in the community who built very complex systems on PowerShell script and we’ll support them by all means, but it's not intended for that purpose. It’s really for— What we use within our team is really like, you're trying to test out some new .Net API. It's actually much faster to write it in PowerShell script with a few lines of code than running C# that you would have to compile and do that work. So it makes it very easy to test out new things, prototyping before you commit to writing critical proper development code.

— [0:08:46 - 0:09:22]

Steve Lee: Everyone probably saw how Bing and ChatGPT has integration. So that’s something— AI is on top of everyone's mind. And that is something that we've actually been looking at for a while. So I'm not sure if anyone is aware but, we had — even before ChatGPT, even before some other popup ones that came out, like Stable Diffusion and stuff like that — we were looking at AI several years ago before things were ready. And we actually have a plug-in model. So PSReadLine is a model that we use as the way to present the interactive experience for PowerShell users. And so one thing that we did back in, I think 7.1 — which should have been probably, what, two, three years ago — is we added a predictor plugin, so someone could actually build a predictor in C# and be able to present that through PSReadLine to the user.

— [0:27:27 - 0:28:13]

Let us know what you think on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/consoledotdev

https://twitter.com/davidmytton

https://twitter.com/jeanqasaur

Or by email: hello@console.dev

About Console

Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to.

Sign up for free at: https://console.dev

Creating Go with Russ Cox (Google) - S04E03 May 11, 2023

In this episode, we speak with Russ Cox, distinguished engineer and Go programming language tech lead at Google. We discuss the original motivations for Go, the principles behind the language design, what other projects can learn from how Go manages its open-source community, and what Russ would change about Go if he started again. Russ also talks about the telemetry proposal, the involvement of Google in this, and what the Go team learned from a previous alias proposal.

Hosted by David Mytton (Console) and Jean Yang (Akita Software).

Things mentioned:

ABOUT RUSS COX.

Russ Cox has been working on the programming language Go at Google since 2008 and is currently the Go project lead. He joined Google directly after completing his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. From the early days of Go when he was part of a small team, he has played a significant role in the development and success of the programming language.

Highlights:

[Russ Cox]: All the Go code in the world was in one source repository, which meant that if we did want to make some sort of major change to the way things looked or even sometimes the way things worked, we knew where all the code was that had to be updated. There were a couple of times when we were going to change something syntactically, and we thought we knew what it was going to be and how to implement it, and we said, “Well, let's go see what it looks like.” We’d get everyone to just sort of crowd around one computer, usually mine. I'd open up an editor and open up literally every single file, Go source file, in the world, then just do some global search and replace kind of things in the editor. They'd watch the files changing on the screen, and everyone would be like, “Oh, yes. That looks good.” We read it all out and [would] go back to our desks.

— [0:06:49 - 0:07:28]

[Russ Cox]: We just discovered that for the last six releases, we had this kind of bug where you couldn't actually build a Go program without an Xcode installed, totally unintended, and no one noticed. If we had any sort of telemetry or tracking of what is the build cache hit rate on things like the standard library? — Which is a continual thing that we actually do run into problems with. — What’s the hit rate on the build cache? If we knew that when we looked at how it was going and then after a new release came out, and all of a sudden, it was much closer to 0 than 100, all of a sudden, you would say, “Oh, I wonder why,” and you would look into that. But without that kind of visibility, we just can't. So telemetry really is about how do we get the information that makes us better as software developers.

— [0:28:43 - 0:29:25]
Let us know what you think on Twitter:

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About Console

Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to.

Sign up for free at: https://console.dev

Building Tools Devs Love, with Erica Brescia (Redpoint) - S04E02 May 04, 2023

In this episode, we speak with Erica Brescia, Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures, and previously COO at GitHub. We discuss what's changed since she started her first DevTools company back in the mid-2000s, how to build tools developers love, whether open source is just a marketing strategy, and what she looks for in software investments. She also sheds light on how to get a new product in front of developers, whether or not more people should be bootstrapping their companies as she did, and how to scale your marketing team as you grow.

Hosted by David Mytton (Console) and Jean Yang (Akita Software).

Things mentioned:

ABOUT ERICA BRESCIA

Erica Brescia is the managing director at Redpoint Ventures, an early-stage venture fund, investing in primarily, enterprise software with a focus on DevTools and open source. Notable developer-first companies that they have invested in include HashiCorp, Snowflake, Stripe, Twilio, and LaunchDarkly, among others. Prior to this, she spent close to 20 years as a founder and operator. She founded a company called Bitnami where she bootstrapped $1 million in funding. She was also the chief operating officer at GitHub.

Highlights:

[Erica Brescia]: If you look at the very early days of software development and open source in particular, we've gone from this real DIY kind of bespoke, “The cool thing to do is compile your own kernel,” to a focus on time optimization and “How can you build the best thing possible the fastest?” If I had to look at a theme, that's a theme that I think about a lot. It's no longer about doing everything yourself. Instead, it's about really open source and building on the work of others, right? Over 90% of software developed today is built on top of open source, and most things that you need, from a building blocks perspective, to build a new app already exist in many cases. So now it's about, “Hey, what tools are out there? How can I engage with the community? How can I learn from others? How can I participate in things whether it's Stack Overflow, or building and sharing code on GitHub, or discussing things and issues?” It's much more collaborative and intertwined. I think that allows people to build new things much more quickly.

— [0:02:51 - 0:04:10]

[Erica Brescia]: I think a lot of companies underestimate the amount of effort that is required in building a true open-source community, where you're getting folks contributing to the core of that project. That's a material investment. A good way to think about it is you're actually taking a lot of what you might traditionally spend on marketing and instead investing that in your team that supports the growth and health and engagement of this community, which is no small feat. Then you can use that to build awareness and a bottoms-up adoption of your software in a way that just sheer traditional marketing would never allow you to do. Then you can layer a sales motion on top of that.

— [0:16:23 - 0:17:12]

Let us know what you think on Twitter:

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Or by email: hello@console.dev

About Console

Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to.

Sign up for free at: https://console.dev

Dev War Stories, with Steven Sinofsky (a16z, ex-Microsoft) - S04E01 Apr 27, 2023

In this episode, we speak with Steven Sinofsky, currently a board partner at Andreessen Horowitz and previously of Microsoft. We discuss what it was like shipping code at Microsoft in the early days, what he learned from Bill Gates, how it applies to software development today, what the big Windows 8 rewrite was like, and why the Copilot AI naysayers are completely wrong. Although the software landscape has changed dramatically since Steven’s early days at Microsoft in the 80s, he shares some of the lessons he learned along the way which are still as relevant today as they were back then.

Hosted by David Mytton (Console) and Jean Yang (Akita Software).

Things mentioned:

Microsoft
Windows 8
Copilot
Cornell University
IBM
Halt and Catch Fire
Apple
Jon DeVaan
Webflow
Mythical Man-Month, The: Essays on Software Engineering
Bill Gates
“A Hard Line on Software” (Video)
Jensen Harris
Hardcore Software
ChatGPT
Bing
ChatGPT on 60 Minutes
M2 Mac Mini
MacBook Air
One Strategy: Organization, Planning, and Decision Making
Substack

ABOUT STEVEN SINOFSKY

Steven Sinofsky is an investor, a board partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a general advisor, and a self-described “person-about-town” in Silicon Valley. Shortly after he graduated from Cornell University, he became a software design engineer at Microsoft back in 1989. In his time at the company, he oversaw six major releases of the full range of Office apps and servers in his role as a senior executive. He also worked on Windows 7 and the Windows 8 rewrite as the president of the Windows division. He is a co-author of the book One Strategy: Organization, Planning, and Decision Making, as well as the writer of Hardcore Software, a Substack newsletter about the rise and fall of the PC revolution.

Highlights:

Steven Sinofsky: Bill was super interesting. He was, in a sense, this very interesting combination of business strategy, product strategy, and technology strategy. And whenever he would really push it, he was most comfortable trying to be a technology strategist. And to him, that was all about architecture. And so architecture, if you read a book like Fred Brooks, Mythical Man-Month, architecture is everything. Architecture in software is like this Nirvana.

— [0:22:37 - 0:23:08]

Steven Sinofsky: And the beauty of how Apple managed their operating system was they just didn't add a lot of features. But we had a team five times as big, adding features every release, and it was just not getting— My measure of success is not “Did we get the release done?” but “Was it making people do new things with the product?” And Windows had long stopped doing that. The ecosystem of software and hardware had probably died around 2000. And so when it came time to do Windows 8 — and obviously Hardcore Software has the whole timeline and all this stuff — but the thing we really wanted to do was take the product and build on it and all the things that were great about it, but bring it into a new era of computing from top to bottom or what we said was “from the chipset to the experience".

— [0:28:43 - 0:29:34]

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Engineering Leadership, with Meri Williams - S03E10 Aug 11, 2022

In this episode we speak to Meri Williams an experienced CTO at scaleups like Moo, Monzo, and Healx. We discuss the role of technology leadership, what engineering managers can do to help their teams, how to best go about recruiting engineers, and whether engineering performance can be measured.

About Meri Williams

Meri Williams is an experienced CTO from scaleups like Moo, Monzo, and Healx. An experienced CTO who has led and scaled technology organizations across a range of sectors including medtech, neo-banking, government, ecommerce, telco and manufacturing.

A published author, international speaker and chair (co-curator & host) of The Lead Developer conference series which has expanded from starting in London in 2015 to now running in London, New York, Berlin and Austin, Williams regularly trains the Be a Brilliant People Developer workshop to level up technologists into excellent managers & coaches.

Other things mentioned:

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About Console

Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to.

Sign up for free at: https://console.dev
Recorded: 2022-04-22.

WebAssembly, with Connor Hicks (Suborbital) - S03E09 Aug 04, 2022

In this episode we speak to Connor Hicks, Founder of Suborbital, a serverless platform powered by WebAssembly. We discuss how WebAssembly works, when you’d use AssemblyScript rather than other languages which compile to WASM, the use cases for deploying WebAssembly on the backend, and how the dev, test, build, deploy, and observability cycle works when creating code in WebAssembly.

About Connor Hicks

Connor Hicks is based in Ottawa, Canada, and is the founder of Suborbital Software Systems. Connor works primarily on security and distributed systems projects including the Suborbital family of open source projects, and formerly led research and development at 1Password. Connor is a strong believer in building security and privacy into the core of all software, and is exploring the next iteration of web service development with technologies like WebAssembly.

Other things mentioned:

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About Console

Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to.

Sign up for free at: https://console.dev
Recorded: 2022-04-11.

VR, with Elena Kokkinara (Inflight VR) - S03E08 Jul 28, 2022

In this episode we speak to Elena Kokkinara, CTO at Inflight VR, a VR platform developer for in-flight entertainment. We discuss how VR has developed over the last decade, how the body ownership illusion can make you feel like you have an entirely different physical body, whether developers can code in VR environments, and whether AR is in competition with VR.

About Elena Kokkinara

Elena Kokkinara is CTO at Inflight VR, the first company that provides a VR entertainment solution for airplane passengers. Having completed a PhD in VR and published numerous papers on VR and computer vision, she is passionate about creating new experiences for Virtual Reality users and gamers. Her scientific interest is to explore the necessary parameters to design a flight-specific VR ecosystem.

Other things mentioned:

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About Console

Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to.

Sign up for free at: https://console.dev

Recorded: 2022-04-26.

Containers & Tests, with Sergei Egorov (Atomic Jar) - S03E07 Jul 21, 2022

In this episode we speak to Sergei Egorov, CEO of AtomicJar, the company behind TestContainers, a library that helps with integration testing for containerized applications. We discuss the challenges of developing container-based applications, how to orchestrate containers for testing, the future of cloud development environments, and whether the Apple M1 chip has come too late.

About Sergei Egorov

Sergei Egorov is CEO & co-founder of AtomicJar - the company behind Testcontainers on a mission to make integration testing easy and enjoyable for developers. He is a Java Champion, an active member of the Open Source community, member of the Apache Foundation, and Reactive Foundation TOC.

Other things mentioned:

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About Console

Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to.

Sign up for free at: https://console.dev
Recorded: 2022-04-07.

Data science, with Ines Montani (Explosion) - S03E06 Jul 14, 2022

In this episode we speak to Ines Montani, co-founder and CEO of Explosion, a developer of Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing technologies. We discuss how ML and NLP work behind the scenes, how developers should think about applied NLP, the common languages and frameworks used to build ML and NLP applications, and the challenges that come with running them at scale.

About Ines Montani

Ines Montani is co-founder and CEO of Explosion. A software developer working on Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing technologies, her company Explosion are makers of spaCy, one of the leading open-source libraries for Natural Language Processing in Python, and Prodigy, a modern annotation tool for creating training data for machine learning models. In 2020, Montani became a Fellow of the Python Software Foundation.

Other things mentioned:

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https://twitter.com/_inesmontani

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About Console

Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to.

Sign up for free at: https://console.dev
Recorded: 2022-04-06

Security & Software Supply Chain, with Feross Aboukhadijeh (Socket) - S03E05 Jul 07, 2022

In this episode we speak to Feross Aboukhadijeh, CEO of Socket.dev, a software supply chain security company. We discuss the risks of using third party dependencies, how JS and NPM could improve their approach to security, whether trust in open source is eroding, and how to improve the overall security posture of your application.

About Feross Aboukhadijeh

Feross is the founder and CEO of Socket, where he's working on a new approach to open source supply chain security. Feross is the author and maintainer of WebTorrent, StandardJS, and 100s of other open source projects which are downloaded 500+ million times per month. Feross is a lecturer at Stanford University where he teaches CS 253 Web Security. Socket, the company Feross started, is auditing every package on npm to detect suspicious changes and block software supply chain attacks. Hundreds of companies use Socket to protect their software applications and critical services from malware and security threats originating in open source code.

Other things mentioned:

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About Console

Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to.

Sign up for free at: https://console.dev
Recorded: 2022-04-06.

Privacy Engineering, with Cate Huston (DuckDuckGo) - S03E04 Jun 30, 2022

In this episode we speak to Cate Huston, Engineering Director at DuckDuckGo. We discuss why developers should care about privacy, what technologies and tools are available for building privacy-driven features, how DuckDuckGo manages performance when doing lookups against tracker lists, and the full stack of privacy tools, from search to the browser to email.

About Cate Huston

Cate Huston is Engineering Director at DuckDuckGo and an advisor at Glowforge. She previously worked at Automattic, where she led the mobile, Jetpack, and Developer Experience teams. Huston admins the New-(ish) Manager Slack and writes regularly for Quartz.

Other things mentioned:

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https://twitter.com/catehstn

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About Console

Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to.

Sign up for free at: https://twitter.com/catehstn
Recorded: 202-04-14.

OSS & Investing, with Joseph Jacks (OSS Capital) - S03E03 Jun 23, 2022

In this episode we speak to Joseph Jacks, founder and general partner at OSS Capital, a venture fund specializing in open source software. We discuss why open source is such an important differentiator for all software development, the philosophy behind open source, open core, and building a community around open source software, whether open source should be the default for all software.

About Joseph Jacks

Joseph Jacks is founder and general partner at OSS Capital, a fund that invests in Open Source projects. Previously, he was co-founder and VP of Technology Strategy of Kismatic which provided services for running Kubernetes at scale for enterprises. It was one of the top 0.01% of projects on GitHub and was acquired by Apprenda in May 2016.

Jacks also founded the KubeAcademy, the parent organization of the official Kubernetes community conference KubeCon, and was the co-Founder and CEO of Aljabr which builds cloud-native data pipelines.

Other things mentioned:

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https://twitter.com/josephjacks_

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About Console

Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to.

Sign up for free at:

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Recorded: 2022-04-04.

eBPF, with Liz Rice (Isovalent) - S03E02 Jun 16, 2022

In this episode we speak to Liz Rice, Chief Open Source Officer at Isovalent, the company behind the open source eBPF product Cilium. We discuss why it’s such a revolutionary approach to developing low-level kernel applications, how BPF can be used for observability, networking and security, how developers should think about application security, and why all of these technologies are open source.

About Liz Rice

Liz Rice is Chief Open Source Officer at eBPF pioneers Isovalent, creators of the Cilium project, which provides cloud native networking, observability and security. Prior to Isovalent she was VP Open Source Engineering with security specialists Aqua Security. She is also Chair of the CNCF's Technical Oversight Committee, has co-chaired the KubeCon / CloudNativeCon and is an Ambassador for Open UK.

Other things mentioned:

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https://twitter.com/lizrice

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About Console

Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to.

Sign up for free at: https://console.dev

Recorded: 2022-05-05.

Dev infrastructure, with Guillermo Rauch (Vercel) - S03E01 Jun 09, 2022

In this episode we speak to Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, a platform for globally distributed applications. We discuss the meaning of “developer experience”, how complexity is managed to help developers get started quickly but still be able to scale multiple systems, the role of monorepos and monolithic application architectures, and how to think about globally deployed serverless databases.

About Guillermo Rauch

Guillermo Rauch is CEO of Vercel. Before starting Vercel in November 2015, Guillermo was the CTO and co-founder of LearnBoost and Cloudup, acquired by Automattic in 2013. He is the creator of several popular Node.js open source libraries like Socket.io, Mongoose and Slackin. Prior to Node.js, he was a core developer of the MooTools frontend toolkit. Passionate about open source as an education medium, he is a former mentor of an Open Source Engineering class organized and pioneered by Stanford, with students from Harvard, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, UPenn, Columbia and others.

Other things mentioned:

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https://twitter.com/rauchg

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About Console

Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to.

Sign up for free at: https://console.dev
Recorded: 2022-04-27.

Season 3 - Devtools Interviews May 25, 2022

Starting with Vercel CEO, Guillermo Rauch on 9th June 2022, in season 3 of the Console DevTools Podcast we'll be speaking to 10 interesting people currently working in devtools about a specific technical topic. Upcoming guests:

Dev Infra, with Guillermo Rauch (Vercel)
BPF, with Liz Rice (Isovalent)
OSS & Investing, with Joseph Jacks (OSS Capital)
Privacy Engineering, with Cate Huston (DuckDuckGo)
Security & Software Supply Chain, with Feross Aboukhadijeh (Socket)
Data science, with Ines Montani (Explosion)
Containers & Tests, with Sergei Egorov (Atomic Jar)
VR, with Elena Kokkinara (Inflight VR)
WASM, with Connor Hicks (Suborbital)
Engineering Leadership, with Meri Williams (LabGenius, LeadDev & Kindred)

Join David for our first episode, on 9th June 2022. In the meantime, subscribe to the Console newsletter for weekly reviews of the best 2-3 devtools.

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Developer experience, with Jean Yang (Akita) - S02E11 Mar 17, 2022

In this episode we speak with Jean Yang, CEO of Akita Software, an API observability startup, which she founded after leaving her role in academia as a computer science professor. We discussed the software heterogeneity problem, why it isn't better to rewrite in rust and how the language wars have actually been won. We also explore how the big fight today is about infrastructure and why microservices are the solution to the ever-growing complexity of software.

About Jean Yang

Jean Yang is the founder and CEO of Akita Software, a developer tools company that is bringing structure to observability. Previously, Jean was a professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Jean has a PhD from MIT, holds software tools patents from work at Microsoft Research and Facebook, and was selected as one of the MIT Technology Review's 35 Innovators Under 35 in 2016.

Other things mentioned:

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https://twitter.com/jeanqasaur

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About Console

Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to.

Sign up for free at: https://console.dev.

Recorded: 2021-11-19

Terminal tools, with Michelle Lim & Zach Lloyd (Warp) - S02E10 Mar 10, 2022

In this episode we speak to Michelle Lim and Zach Lloyd, both of Warp, a terminal designed to make developer workflows more productive. We discuss the historical significance of physical terminals, terminal emulators, pseudo-terminals and the shell. We also explore why Rust is a better technology choice than Electron for building a new terminal, why GPU acceleration matters, how it works with the macOS Metal APIs, and discuss the challenges garbage collection brings to high performance UIs.

Get early access to Warp with this special invite code: https://app.warp.dev/download/r/1CNSLE

About Michelle Lim & Zach Lloyd

Zach Lloyd is the founder and CEO of Warp, a Rust-based terminal for developers. Michelle is a software engineer who joined early on. Prior to Warp Zach co-founded SelfMade, was CTO at Time Inc., and ran the Google Sheets team at Google. Michelle graduated from Yale and previously worked at Robinhood, Slack, and Facebook.

Other things mentioned:

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https://twitter.com/michlimlim

https://twitter.com/zachlloydtweets/

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About Console

Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to.

Sign up for free at: https://console.dev

Recorded: 2021-11-02.

Designing dev products, with Ellen Chisa (Boldstart) - S02E09 Mar 03, 2022

In this episode we speak to Ellen Chisa, who was previously CEO of Dark, a programming language startup that allowed you to focus on your backend code and forget about frameworks, deployments, and infrastructure. We discuss whether that is the right way to think about coding, where no code or low code fits into the modern development stack, how developers should think about open source and the challenges of building dev tools versus getting developers to actually use them.

About Ellen Chisa

Ellen Chisa is a founder, angel investor, and engineer. She created Dark, a programming language coupled to its editor and infrastructure. Previously, she was the first employee at Lola, combining the best of technology and people for travel planning. Ellen Chisa is currently a Founder in Residence at Boldstart Ventures.

Things mentioned:

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https://twitter.com/davidmytton

https://twitter.com/ellenchisa

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About Console

Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to.

Sign up for free at: https://console.dev

Recorded: 2021-10-12.

Web standards & privacy, with Desigan (Dees) Chinniah (Tor / Ex-Mozilla) - S02E08 Feb 24, 2022

In this episode, we speak with Desigan Chinniah, previously at Mozilla, advisor to many web startups and now on the board of Tor. We discuss the evolution of web tech from websites to complex decentralized applications running on browser APIs, the competitiveness of the browser rendering engine versus the UX layer and how developers think about privacy. Does it live in browser settings, extensions or on the protocol core level?

About Dees Chinniah

Desigan Chinniah is a creative technologist. After two decades of dot-com checks in, Dees now has a portfolio of advisory roles (Ably, Coil, Replay, SEDNA, Zama) and board positions (Ushahidi, The Tor Project). He invests early into diverse and under-represented minority founders and is a mentor at Design Club, Mozilla and Seedcamp.

Other things mentioned:

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https://twitter.com/cyberdees

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About Console

Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to.

Sign up for free at:

https://console.dev

.

Dev communities, with Rosie Sherry (Orbit) - S02E07 Feb 17, 2022

In this episode we speak to Rosie Sherry, Community Lead at Orbit, a community management software company. We discuss why community is not marketing, how devrel and community are different, who owns community and what that might mean with web3 & decentralization, and what essential tools you need for managing communities.

About Rosie Sherry

Rosie Sherry is Community Lead at Orbit, a community management software company. Prior to Orbit, Rosie founded the world’s largest testing community - Ministry of Testing - and led community at Indie Hackers.

Things mentioned:

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https://twitter.com/rosiesherry

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About Console

Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to.

Sign up for free at: https://console.dev

Recorded: 2021-10-21.

Homomorphic encryption, with Rand Hindi (Zama) - S02E06 Feb 10, 2022

In this episode we speak to Rand Hindi, CEO of Zama, an open source framework for securing AI applications in the cloud. We discuss the principles behind encryption, homomorphic encryption, and programmable bootstrapping, how these technologies can ensure user data privacy, what is changing that is making them more relevant to today, and how developers should be thinking about building on new protocols from HTTP to HTTPS to HTTPZ.

About Rand Hindi

Dr Rand Hindi is an entrepreneur and deeptech investor. He is the CEO at Zama, an open source homomorphic encryption company, and an investor in 30+ companies. Prior to Zama he created Snips, the first edge-based, private by design voice solution for OEMs, which was acquired by Sonos in 2019.

He has received the TR35 away from the MIT Technology Review, selected as a "30 under 30" by Forbes, is a lecturer at Sciences Po in Paris and is an advisor to multiple companies. He was previously a member of the French Digital Council where he focused on AI and Privacy issues.

Things mentioned:

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https://twitter.com/randhindi

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About Console

Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to.

Sign up for free at: https://console.dev

Recorded: 2021-10-27.

Devtools investing, with Ed Sim (Boldstart) - S02E05 Feb 03, 2022

In this episode we speak to Ed Sim, Founder and General Partner of Boldstart, a venture investor specializing in DevTools and software. Ed has invested in developer-focused companies like Snyk, Slim.ai, and Jit Security. We discuss what engineers should think about when working on side projects, when and if they should seek out investors, how to pick the good ones, whether raising money is even needed, and what the role of open source is.

About Ed Sim

Ed is the Founder of Boldstart Ventures, a day-one partner and true believer for developer first and SaaS founders. Boldstart is a lead investor and often partners with technical founders at company formation, helping accelerate their path to product market fit.

Ed is currently a board member/observer of Snyk, Kustomer, BigID, Blockdaemon, Env0, Dooly, and Cape Privacy. Other notable day-one investments include Superhuman, Security Scorecard, and Front. Ed previously co-founded Dawntreader Ventures where he led first round investments in LivePerson (NASDAQ: LPSN), GoToMeeting (acq. By Citrix), and Greenplum (acq. EMC/Pivotal). Ed has a BA in Economics from Harvard.

Things mentioned:

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https://twitter.com/edsim

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About Console

Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to.

Sign up for free at: https://console.dev

Recorded: 2021-10-15.

Decentralization, with Brooklyn Zelenka (Fission) - S02E04 Jan 27, 2022

In this episode we speak to Brooklyn Zelenka, CTO at Fission, a decentralized app framework for the future of web apps at the edge. We discuss the relevance of blockchain to web3 and decentralized web apps, why developers should avoid managing backend servers, the challenges of doing authentication and identity with local clients, and why web browser APIs are the place to build, not the native operating system.

About Brooklyn Zelenka

Brooklyn is the Co-Founder and CTO at Fission, where her team is building the next generation of web dev tools for the future of computing on the edge - levelling the playing field for teams of all sizes.

She founded the Vancouver functional programming meetup, and is the author of several Elixir libraries including Witchcraft & Exceptional. She was previously an Ethereum Core Developer, and continues to push the broader web3 space forward with standards like UCAN auth and the Webnative File System.

Things mentioned:

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https://twitter.com/expede

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About Console

Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to.

Sign up for free at: https://console.dev

Recorded: 2021-10-26.

Observability, with Charity Majors (Honeycomb) - S02E03 Jan 20, 2022

In this episode we speak to Charity Majors, CTO at Honeycomb, an observability tool for distributed systems. We discuss why observability is based around events and not metrics, how developers should think about achieving appropriately observable systems, why Honeycomb implemented their own distributed columnar data store, and how you can delete most of your alerts by implementing service level objectives.

About Charity Majors

Charity Majors is an ops engineer and accidental startup founder at honeycomb.io. Prior to this she worked at Parse, Facebook, and Linden Labs. She is the co-author of O'Reilly's Database Reliability Engineering.

Other things mentioned:

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About Console

Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to.

Sign up for free at: https://console.dev

Recorded: 2021-11-03.

Security, with Thomas Ptacek (Fly.io) - S02E02 Jan 13, 2022

In this episode we speak to Thomas Ptacek, currently a software engineer at Fly.io and previously a co-founder at security firms Latacora and Matasano Security. We discuss the state of software security in sectors like energy and healthcare, how software developers should think about supply chain risk, and what they should do about securing their dependencies. We also explore how security threats have changed over the years, and what developers working on open source should do to improve their own security.

About Thomas Ptacek

Thomas Ptacek is a leading security researcher. Best known as one of the co-founders of Matasano Security, which was prior to its acquisition by NCC Group one of the largest software security firms in the US. Working in software security since 1995, Thomas was a member of the industry’s first commercial vulnerability research lab - Secure Networks. Thomas is currently a software engineer at Fly.io

Other things mentioned:

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https://twitter.com/tqbf

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About Console

Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to.

Sign up for free at: https://console.dev

Recorded: 2021-10-19.

Dev infrastructure, with John Graham-Cumming (Cloudflare) - S02E01 Jan 06, 2022

In this episode we speak with John Graham-Cumming, CTO of Cloudflare, a global web platform built for security and performance. We discuss the philosophy behind the idea that the network is a computer, why developers should be able to ignore the low level details of where their code runs, and the challenges of deploying data centers on Mars.

About John Graham-Cumming

John Graham-Cumming is the CTO of Cloudflare and is a computer programmer and author. He studied mathematics and computation at Oxford and stayed for a doctorate in computer security. As a programmer, he has worked in Silicon Valley and New York, the UK, Lisbon, Germany, and France. His open source POPFile program won a Jolt Productivity Award in 2004.

He is the author of a travel book for scientists published in 2009 called The Geek Atlas and has written articles for The Times, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, New Scientist, and other publications.

Things mentioned:

Let us know what you think on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/consoledotdev

https://twitter.com/davidmytton

https://twitter.com/jgrahamc

Or by email: hello@console.dev

About Console

Console is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to.

Sign up for free at: https://console.dev.

We are always on the lookout for interesting tools to feature in the newsletter, so please say hello if you're working on something new or have recently used a tool you think we'd like.

We only include things that would be of interest to experienced developers and do not accept payment for product inclusion. Read our selection criteria.

Recorded: 2021-11-24

Season 2 - Devtools interviews Dec 09, 2021

Starting with Cloudflare CTO, John Graham-Cumming on 6 Jan 2022, in season 2 of the Console DevTools Podcast we'll be speaking to 11 interesting people currently working in devtools about a specific technical topic. Upcoming guests:

Dev infrastructure, with John Graham-Cumming (Cloudflare)
Security, with Thomas Ptacek (Fly.io)
Observability, with Charity Majors (Honeycomb)
Decentralization, with Brooklyn Zelenka (Fission)
Devtools investing, with Ed Sim (Boldstart)
Homomorphic Encryption, with Rand Hindi (Zama)
Dev communities, with Rosie Sherry (Orbit)
Web standards & privacy, with Desigan (Dees) Chinniah (Tor / Ex-Mozilla)
Designing dev products, with Ellen Chisa (Boldstart)
Terminal tools, with Michelle Lim & Zach Lloyd (Warp)
Developer experience, with Jean Yang (Akita)

Join David for our first episode, on 6th January 2022. In the meantime, subscribe to the Console newsletter for weekly reviews of the best 2-3 devtools.

Follow us on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/consoledotdev

https://twitter.com/davidmytton

How do developers pick tools? (Cue & Leapp) - S01E10 Sep 09, 2021

Episode 10 of the Console DevTools Podcast, a devtools discussion with David Mytton (Co-founder, Console) and Jean Yang (CEO, Akita Software).

Tools discussed:

Cue - 0pen source data validation language)
Leapp (manage cloud access credentials)

Find more interesting tools and beta releases for developers at https://console.dev

Other things mentioned:

Let us know what you think on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/jeanqasaur

https://twitter.com/davidmytton

https://twitter.com/consoledotdev

Or by email: hello@console.dev

We are always on the lookout for interesting tools to feature in the newsletter, so please say hello if you're working on something new or have recently used a tool you think we'd like.

We only include things that would be of interest to experienced developers and do not accept payment for product inclusion. Read our selection criteria.

Recorded: 2021-08-19.

Can you rely on autofix? (Tyk & DeepSource) - S01E09 Sep 02, 2021

Episode 9 of the Console DevTools Podcast, a devtools discussion with David Mytton (Co-founder, Console) and Jean Yang (CEO, Akita Software).

Tools discussed:

Tyk - API gateway
Deepsource - automated code reviews

Find more interesting tools and beta releases for developers at https://console.dev

Other things mentioned:

Let us know what you think on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/jeanqasaur

https://twitter.com/davidmytton

https://twitter.com/consoledotdev

Or by email: hello@console.dev

We are always on the lookout for interesting tools to feature in the newsletter, so please say hello if you're working on something new or have recently used a tool you think we'd like.

We only include things that would be of interest to experienced developers and do not accept payment for product inclusion. Read our selection criteria.

Recorded: 2021-08-18.

Decentralize your tech stack (Fission & AskGit) - S01E08 Aug 26, 2021

Episode 8 of the Console DevTools Podcast, a devtools discussion with David Mytton (Co-founder, Console) and Jean Yang (CEO, Akita Software).

Tools discussed:

Fission - decentralized app backend for storage and identity.
AskGit - query git repos with SQL.

Find more interesting tools and beta releases for developers at https://console.dev

Other things mentioned:

Let us know what you think on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/jeanqasaur

https://twitter.com/davidmytton

https://twitter.com/consoledotdev

Or by email: hello@console.dev

We are always on the lookout for interesting tools to feature in the newsletter, so please say hello if you're working on something new or have recently used a tool you think we'd like.

We only include things that would be of interest to experienced developers and do not accept payment for product inclusion. Read our selection criteria.

Recorded: 2021-08-17.

Code search, dev flow & testing: Sourcegraph & Hoppscotch - S01E07 Aug 19, 2021

Episode 7 of the Console DevTools Podcast, a devtools discussion with David Mytton (Co-founder, Console) and Jean Yang (CEO, Akita Software).

Tools discussed:

Sourcegraph - code search engine.
Hoppscotch - test UI for API requests.

Find more interesting tools and beta releases for developers at https://console.dev

Other things mentioned:

Let us know what you think on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/jeanqasaur

https://twitter.com/davidmytton

https://twitter.com/consoledotdev

Or by email: hello@console.dev

We are always on the lookout for interesting tools to feature in the newsletter, so please say hello if you're working on something new or have recently used a tool you think we'd like.

We only include things that would be of interest to experienced developers and do not accept payment for product inclusion. Read our selection criteria.

Recorded: 2021-08-10.

Open source vs commercial: Appsmith & Retool - S01E06 Aug 12, 2021

Episode 6 of the Console DevTools Podcast, a devtools discussion with David Mytton (Co-founder, Console) and Jean Yang (CEO, Akita Software).

Tools discussed:

Appsmith - Open source internal tool UI builder
Retool - Internal tool UI builder

Find more interesting tools and beta releases for developers at https://console.dev

Other things mentioned:

Let us know what you think on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/jeanqasaur

https://twitter.com/davidmytton

https://twitter.com/consoledotdev

Or by email: hello@console.dev

We are always on the lookout for interesting tools to feature in the newsletter, so please say hello if you're working on something new or have recently used a tool you think we'd like.

We only include things that would be of interest to experienced developers and do not accept payment for product inclusion. Read our selection criteria.

Recorded: 2021-08-03.

Snyk Open Source (dependency security monitoring) & Security Scorecard (security health metrics) - S01E05 Aug 05, 2021

Episode 5 of the Console DevTools Podcast, a devtools discussion with David Mytton (Co-founder, Console) and Jean Yang (CEO, Akita Software).

Tools discussed:

Snyk Open Source - Dependency security monitoring.
Security Scorecard - Security health metrics.

Find more interesting tools and beta releases for developers at https://console.dev

Other things mentioned:

Let us know what you think on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/jeanqasaur

https://twitter.com/davidmytton

https://twitter.com/consoledotdev

Or by email: hello@console.dev

We are always on the lookout for interesting tools to feature in the newsletter, so please say hello if you're working on something new or have recently used a tool you think we'd like.

We only include things that would be of interest to experienced developers and do not accept payment for product inclusion. Read our selection criteria.

Recorded: 2021-07-27.

Liveblocks (real-time collaboration API) & Livekit (open source live video and audio API) - S01E04 Jul 29, 2021

Episode 4 of the Console DevTools Podcast, a devtools discussion with David Mytton (Co-founder, Console) and Jean Yang (CEO, Akita Software).

Tools discussed:

Liveblocks - real-time collaboration API.
Livekit - Open source live video and audio API.

Find more interesting tools and beta releases for developers at https://console.dev

Other things mentioned:

Let us know what you think on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/jeanqasaur

https://twitter.com/davidmytton

https://twitter.com/consoledotdev

Or by email: hello@console.dev

We are always on the lookout for interesting tools to feature in the newsletter, so please say hello if you're working on something new or have recently used a tool you think we'd like.

We only include things that would be of interest to experienced developers and do not accept payment for product inclusion. Read our selection criteria.

Recorded: 2021-07-20.

Automerge (conflict-free JSON-like data structure) & Polypane (browser testing tool) - S01E03 Jul 22, 2021

Episode 3 of the Console DevTools Podcast, a devtools discussion with David Mytton (Co-founder, Console) and Jean Yang (CEO, Akita Software).

Tools discussed:

Automerge - JSON-like data structure for concurrent writes.
Polypane - Browser testing tool

Find more interesting tools and beta releases for developers at https://console.dev

Other things mentioned

Let us know what you think on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/jeanqasaur
https://twitter.com/davidmytton
https://twitter.com/consoledotdev

Or by email: hello@console.dev

We are always on the lookout for interesting tools to feature in the newsletter, so please say hello if you're working on something new or have recently used a tool you think we'd like.

We only include things that would be of interest to experienced developers and do not accept payment for product inclusion. Read our selection criteria.

Recorded: 2021-07-13.

GitHub Copilot (AI pair programming) & Tuple (screen sharing for developers) - S01E02 Jul 15, 2021

Episode 2 of the Console DevTools Podcast, a devtools discussion with David Mytton (Co-founder, Console) and Jean Yang (CEO, Akita Software).

Tools discussed:

GitHub Copilot - AI pair programming for VS Code.
Tuple - Screen sharing optimized for developers.

Find more interesting tools and beta releases for developers at https://console.dev

Other things mentioned:

Let us know what you think on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/jeanqasaur
https://twitter.com/davidmytton
https://twitter.com/consoledotdev

Or by email: hello@console.dev

We are always on the lookout for interesting tools to feature in the newsletter, so please say hello if you're working on something new or have recently used a tool you think we'd like.

We only include things that would be of interest to experienced developers and do not accept payment for product inclusion. Read our selection criteria.

Recorded: 2021-07-06.

Waypoint (build, deploy, release) & Zellij (terminal workspace) - S01E01 Jul 08, 2021

Episode 1 of the Console DevTools Podcast, a devtools discussion with David Mytton (Co-founder, Console) and Jean Yang (CEO, Akita Software).

Tools discussed:

Waypoint - Build, deploy, and release across platforms.
Zellij - Terminal workspace manager (tabs + multiplexing).

Find more interesting tools and beta releases for developers at https://console.dev

Other things mentioned:

HCL - Hashicorp Configuration Language.
Vagrant.
Terraform.
Kubernetes.
Gitpod.
GitHub Codespaces.
tmux.
vim.
Oh My ZSH.
Fish.
VS Code.

Let us know what you think on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/jeanqasaur

https://twitter.com/davidmytton

https://twitter.com/consoledotdev

Or by email: hello@console.dev

We are always on the lookout for interesting tools to feature in the newsletter, so please say hello if you're working on something new or have recently used a tool you think we'd like.

We only include things that would be of interest to experienced developers and do not accept payment for product inclusion. Read our selection criteria.

Recorded: 2021-06-29.

Season 1 Trailer Jun 15, 2021

As software has become more important, so the demand for developers has increased. Whether you call yourself an engineer, a programmer, developer, hacker or coder, more and more organizations are building skilled technology teams to change how they achieve their mission.

Developers make big decisions, yet they face an onslaught of sales and marketing combined with an unrelenting velocity of releases to keep up with.

From open source, cloud, large public company or small startup, there has never been more choice for developers.

That's why we started Console, a free weekly email digest of the best tools and beta releases for developers. Every Thursday we highlight two interesting developer tools, saying what we like and what we don’t like.

And now we’re launching a podcast.

We'll be kicking off with our first few episodes, each no more than 15 minutes, discussing the tools featured in the Console newsletter with David Mytton (Co-founder of Console) and Jean Yang, CEO of Akita Software. Jean earned her PhD in software correctness and programming language design from MIT and then became a professor in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University before she started Akita to build the future of API observability.

So join Jean and David for our first episode, on 8th July 2021. And in the meantime, subscribe to the Console newsletter.

Follow us on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/jeanqasaur

https://twitter.com/davidmytton

https://twitter.com/consoledotdev