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Speaker 1: Sign up now at Patreon dot dot NetRocks dot com. Hey,
Speaker 1: welcome back to dot net Rocks. I'm Carl Franklin and
Speaker 1: Amateury Cavil and Dylan Beatty is with us. You can
Speaker 1: you can jump in anytime Dylan during this.
Speaker 2: Hello friends, tell people listening to us on the internet,
Speaker 2: how are you all doing out there?
Speaker 1: We will give you a formal introduction after all this
Speaker 1: stuff that we do at the beginning, starting with the
Speaker 1: show number year. So this is episode two thousand and
Speaker 1: two and two let's talk about what happened in two
Speaker 1: thousand and two.
Speaker 2: Congratulations on two thousand episodes, by the way, thanks buddy,
Speaker 2: thank you. That is a significant milestone. Well done.
Speaker 1: And this is a kind of a strange numbers show
Speaker 1: because two thousand and two is the year of the
Speaker 1: first dot net rock.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we are fully entering recursion now.
Speaker 1: And it dawns on me that we really only have
Speaker 1: twenty four more of these. What happened in the year.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, it's because there's certain group people are like, please,
Speaker 3: don't do this anymore, and it's like, you know it'll end.
Speaker 1: Guarantee you.
Speaker 3: We're not going to predict the future, right.
Speaker 2: Come on, you got to do that. You got to
Speaker 2: be like, listen, this is on predictions for twenty thirty two.
Speaker 3: Here you go.
Speaker 1: But a couple of other things happened in two thousand
Speaker 1: and two, like the euro Yeah, congratulations, Dylan, that affects
Speaker 1: you personally.
Speaker 3: Not anymore.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that's right, not anymore. Where are you now?
Speaker 2: We have no right now. I'm in the UK, I'm
Speaker 2: a home and a break from tradition, I'm.
Speaker 1: In my house. Yeah, okay, great.
Speaker 2: And I do have a lot of euros, a whole lot.
Speaker 2: I during the whole kind of COVID lockdowns, I sorted
Speaker 2: out all the loose change that came back from all
Speaker 2: the trips, and I had one hundred and eighty seven
Speaker 2: euros in cash, about half of it in coins wow coin.
Speaker 2: So I went to Tallinn and I went to the
Speaker 2: Depeche Mode cafe and I spent eighty five euros and
Speaker 2: coins playing pinball.
Speaker 1: Awesome, glorious day. It's almost as great as sleeping to
Speaker 1: ten thirty. There you go, all right, So other things.
Speaker 1: The US went into Afghanistan in March, some other warry
Speaker 1: type things.
Speaker 3: They didn't know they'd stayed for twenty years.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well they figured. You know, hey, the Russians left
Speaker 1: tail between their legs. Yeah, went so well for them.
Speaker 1: East Timor gained independence. There were some riots in India
Speaker 1: in Gujarat. The International Criminal Court was established. Let's see
Speaker 1: the stars outbreak begins in China in Guangdong.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, we won't figure that out till later. Right.
Speaker 1: Switzerland joined the UN. Yeah, how about that? A Winter
Speaker 1: Olympics Salt Lake Winter Olympics are held in Salt Lake City.
Speaker 1: Brazil wins the FIFA World Cup in South Korea and Japan.
Speaker 1: Hollie Barry became the first black woman to win Academy
Speaker 1: Award for Best Actress. It took her till two thousand
Speaker 1: and two.
Speaker 3: It's kind of nuts.
Speaker 2: Do you know what she did with that Academy award
Speaker 2: is she took it with her when she went in
Speaker 2: person to collect her Golden Raspberry Award for Catwoman, and
Speaker 2: she walks out on the stage and she gets a
Speaker 2: golden Razzie in one hand and her actual oscar in
Speaker 2: the other hand.
Speaker 3: Legend, legend.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Star Wars two, Attack of the Clones is released.
Speaker 1: If you hadn't had enough of jar Jar Banks, here's another.
Speaker 3: One in episode two. That's right, and that's a feature.
Speaker 3: You see him, but he never speaks.
Speaker 1: Tongue got cut out or something like that.
Speaker 3: I think they figured out that that that whole voice
Speaker 3: characterization was a mistake.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and just never had him speak. Yeah, good, I
Speaker 1: hated that guy. All right. Let's talk about the top
Speaker 1: ten movies. The Bourne Identity Signs, Chicago Ice Age, Die
Speaker 1: Another Day, Men in Black two because he didn't get
Speaker 1: enough of Men in Black and Men in Black one.
Speaker 3: Well, I don't even remember Men in Black one.
Speaker 1: Spider Man, Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets. And finally,
Speaker 1: the top grossing movie of two thousand and two is
Speaker 1: The Lord of the Rings. The Two Towers, absolutely the
Speaker 1: second one. It's awesome. Yeah, that's where Gollum really looks
Speaker 1: awesome in that one. Okay, Well, that's enough of that, Richard.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about science and tech start in space.
Speaker 3: In space in in February of two thousand and two
Speaker 3: is the first time they used a new quest airlock
Speaker 3: without the space station there. I've been brought in in
Speaker 3: July of two thousand and one, and they're starting to
Speaker 3: assemble the space station. So there's lots of spacewalks in
Speaker 3: two thousand and two, more than there had been in
Speaker 3: any other time. They'll hold a number keep going up.
Speaker 3: There are five different Space Shuttle missions. Four of them
Speaker 3: are all bringing stuff to the space station. The S
Speaker 3: zero trusts crew rotations, the S one trust, the P
Speaker 3: one trust like building in the building. But the one
Speaker 3: exception is in March where Columbia, who could not get
Speaker 3: to the space station because she was overweight, does go
Speaker 3: for the Hubble servicing mission, which also had five spacewalks
Speaker 3: in it. So this is the only satellite to ever
Speaker 3: get major servicing was Hubble. Right, it's kind of a
Speaker 3: maging what they did. So five spacewalks of two astronauts
Speaker 3: each spending something like forty hours of total work, and
Speaker 3: they put in new solar panels, a new power system,
Speaker 3: and to set a new sensor. It's just a complete
Speaker 3: upgrade Tubble.
Speaker 1: You know, I recently saw online picture of Neptune that
Speaker 1: was taken with Hubble next to a picture of Neptune
Speaker 1: that was taken with a JW. James Webb, you know,
Speaker 1: James Webb telescope, and the difference that you can see
Speaker 1: rings around Neptune.
Speaker 3: Oh sure, well Hubble. Hubble is optical and James Webb
Speaker 3: is infra red, so you're seeing different frequencies and they're
Speaker 3: colorizing it to make them look similar. But it just
Speaker 3: shows that not the optical range is not always the
Speaker 3: most necessary. And as much as we all adore Hubble,
Speaker 3: and it's definitely on its last legs. Again, there's a
Speaker 3: whole debate about whether it's worth servicing it or not.
Speaker 3: The Nancy Grace Romans satellite's about to go up, which
Speaker 3: is also in the high infra red near optical range,
Speaker 3: but has and has a similar size mirror, but such
Speaker 3: so much better electronics that will observe one hundred times
Speaker 3: more space than Hubble in the same amount of time. Wow.
Speaker 3: So just you know, texts come a long way. Also
Speaker 3: based on an old spy satellite.
Speaker 1: Now, if we could just get a telescope that would
Speaker 1: show us what dark matter is. I think that would
Speaker 1: be us. We're trying to figure that out. That's one
Speaker 1: of Mission Nancy Grace Roman's missions, so we're working on
Speaker 1: it a couple other space things. In two thousand and two,
Speaker 1: after the Challenger disaster, the Air Force had pulled out
Speaker 1: of the Space Shuttle missions pretty much entirely, and they
Speaker 1: started what they called the New Evolved Launch Vehicle System.
Speaker 1: And in two thousand and two both those rockets fly
Speaker 1: for the first time, the Atlas five and the Delta four,
Speaker 1: which today are both retired. This is when they began
Speaker 1: also a first flight for the new European rocket at
Speaker 1: the time, the area En five. It was so big
Speaker 1: it actually would carry two satellites at a time, which
Speaker 1: means when the first flight failed catastrophically, it lost two
Speaker 1: satellites instead of one. Wow.
Speaker 3: And let's see what else in April SpaceX, Yeah, we'll
Speaker 3: get there. In April, we get our last messages from
Speaker 3: Pioneer ten. You know, we always talk about the Voyager missions,
Speaker 3: which are way you know now passed out of the heliopause,
Speaker 3: but Pioneer ten was actually ahead of them and launch
Speaker 3: in seventy two. The Voyagers were in seventy seven and
Speaker 3: it was firsting to go to Jupiter. It only had
Speaker 3: one hundred and fifty five watts of RTG power, but
Speaker 3: by two thousand and one was down to sixty five
Speaker 3: wow in it radio finally packed it in while it
Speaker 3: was eighty astronomical units about twelve billion kilometers away from Jeez,
Speaker 3: and you're right. In May, this pseudo billionaire at the
Speaker 3: time named Elon Musk forms a company called SpaceX after
Speaker 3: he was unable to buy a deneeper rocket from the
Speaker 3: Russians to do his Green Mars mission. He figured he'd
Speaker 3: just try and do it himself. Last time I looked,
Speaker 3: still hadn't flown anything to Mars.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: Also in May, the Mars Odyssey orbiter does the first
Speaker 3: sensing of actual water ice deposits on Mars. We've always
Speaker 3: seen that there were white poles on Mars and the
Speaker 3: presumption that they were frozen carbon dioxidecause the air pressure
Speaker 3: is so low. But there's also water ice there as well. Yeah, Okay,
Speaker 3: over on the computing side, yeah. In August, the first
Speaker 3: episode of dot netX polishes a guy named Pat Hines,
Speaker 3: who we consider are Lucky Rabbit's foot first on most
Speaker 3: of our shows, back all of our shows. I think
Speaker 3: yeah is out there. This is of course, it's actually
Speaker 3: a slow year for comput because it's two thousand and two.
Speaker 3: In the dot com boom has ended, the bust is
Speaker 3: on full force. It's not a lot going on. But
Speaker 3: it's also the year that the Phoenix browser is released.
Speaker 3: So this is actually the Mozilla community, which was formed
Speaker 3: by Netscape in ninety eight just before they were acquired
Speaker 3: by AOL, and a bunch of those folks built their
Speaker 3: first built. They wanted an open source, independent browser in
Speaker 3: the legacy of Netscape, but not Netscape. They called it Phoenix,
Speaker 3: which they weren't allowed to do because there were a
Speaker 3: company called Phoenix, so they renamed it the following year
Speaker 3: two Firefox.
Speaker 2: Well, first they renamed it the fire Bud because and
Speaker 2: then someone else said you can't use that either it's
Speaker 2: an embedded database. And there there's a fork of Firefox
Speaker 2: from way back then. Well, you could basically you could
Speaker 2: pick an element and an animal and it just changed
Speaker 2: it every time, so you could be like earth oh
Speaker 2: or ice, weeezl or.
Speaker 3: Whatever you like.
Speaker 1: Those are commands in Rockstar the language.
Speaker 3: Also speaking of AOL, they had that was the year
Speaker 3: they announced that they were going to integrate AIM and ICQ.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 3: So the great messenger conflicts of the early two thousand.
Speaker 3: So ICQ I think was pretty much the first out
Speaker 3: in ninety six and got acquired by AOL in ninety eight,
Speaker 3: like because AOL was buying everything back then. They had
Speaker 3: made their own messaging service in nineteen ninety seven, and
Speaker 3: so now they had two. They figured, you know, five
Speaker 3: years on they try and put them together. I remember
Speaker 3: that's all back.
Speaker 2: It does seem you used to run astonishing, you know,
Speaker 2: with the big gift of hindsight that AOL, the company
Speaker 2: who gave away the CD ROMs at the gas station,
Speaker 2: bought Time Warner. Yeah, like Warner Brothers, Time magazine, that
Speaker 2: conglomerate the gas station CD people bought them. Yeah, because
Speaker 2: that was they were the biggest hitter in that fight
Speaker 2: at the time. And the AOL Time one became a
Speaker 2: thing and then they went, I actually about the whole
Speaker 2: AOL Nah, you're good.
Speaker 1: Oh well, so we used to use a program called
Speaker 1: trillion for messaging back. Yes, I don't know if it
Speaker 1: was after that, but it was around that time after
Speaker 1: where it had three different you know, messaging platforms.
Speaker 3: Because the rest remember it was also yeahoo messenger and
Speaker 3: MSN messenger.
Speaker 2: It was yeah who messenger, There was MSN, there was ICQ,
Speaker 2: there was it had an io C client. Uh go
Speaker 2: one real old school. Yeah. Trillion was great.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, crazy, Yeah, I know at first version of
Speaker 3: trillion is two thousand, so wow, it was way back there. Last,
Speaker 3: but not least, a guy named Reid Hoffman forms a
Speaker 3: company called LinkedIn. Wow, in December, not a lot going
Speaker 3: on in the hardware side, So I'll just bring up
Speaker 3: the two things that I found from two thousand and two.
Speaker 1: Well, wait a minute before you move on to hardware. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's one big thing you forgot. What's that dot Net
Speaker 1: was released to manufacturing in two thousand and two.
Speaker 3: You know, you're right, it was absolutely It was after
Speaker 3: almost a year delay for security fixes.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So I remember going to the UK headquarters in Reading
Speaker 2: that year with a couple of the guys I was
Speaker 2: working with at the time, and just we got in
Speaker 2: the car, we drove up there. We're like, hey, what's
Speaker 2: this dot net thing? And they're like, this is c
Speaker 2: shop and this is web forms and this is wind forms.
Speaker 2: And then they gave us the Visual Studio dot Net
Speaker 2: like Preview three release on a stack of DVDs and
Speaker 2: we all took it back to work and we're like,
Speaker 2: this is the future. And yeah, it eventually caught up.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, and you know you're you're you're right,
Speaker 1: Richard about the end of the dot com boom, and
Speaker 1: that's why the Moniker dot net was so you know,
Speaker 1: this is the next thing, right right, yeah, all right,
Speaker 1: hardware go for it.
Speaker 3: Only a couple one was the Handspring Trio. So back
Speaker 3: in ninety eight, they the guys who made Palm, they
Speaker 3: got acquired by three com, so they bailed, They took
Speaker 3: their money and they ran. They didn't want to work
Speaker 3: for three com and they but they did license the
Speaker 3: Palm os that they had developed back from three Com
Speaker 3: and immediately set about to make PDAs, though Palm had
Speaker 3: their own PDAs, And in two thousand and two they
Speaker 3: released their first one was called the Trio ninety with
Speaker 3: one hundred and sixty one hundred and sixty display and
Speaker 3: a keyboard on it but no phone. Later they'd make
Speaker 3: the Trio one eighty, which would have GSM wu WO
Speaker 3: and they would only last a year because within a
Speaker 3: year three Com would come back and buy them. So
Speaker 3: it's like we took our money from selling to you,
Speaker 3: made another thing and you bought us again. Good deal
Speaker 3: for them. But it's the PDA twitches and last but
Speaker 3: not least, the Rumba by I robot. So this idea
Speaker 3: had been rattling around since the eighties, but in nineteen
Speaker 3: ninety nine sc Johnson kicked it a bunch of funding,
Speaker 3: I guess because of the dot com boom to build
Speaker 3: this robot. It was a vacuum that could avoid obstacles
Speaker 3: and stairs, not dog poop.
Speaker 1: And old Hansman was the first one to post videos
Speaker 1: of his room. But he was so happy about it.
Speaker 1: So and you know, designed to go under beds and
Speaker 1: things like that. It was very low and lean and
Speaker 1: so forth. It made great cat videos for sure. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: they're much more advanced now like current Gen ten's are
Speaker 1: impressive devices. But yeah, that's when that started. We have
Speaker 1: a rumber and Kelly has my wife has a habit
Speaker 1: of naming everything George, so it was Rumba George. And
Speaker 1: she had a little beagle, stuffed beagle who she called
Speaker 1: puppy George. And she put Puppy George on Rumba George
Speaker 1: and took a video of it driving around the house
Speaker 1: and it was the coolest, stupid but cool. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: can't believe I wasted that thirty seconds on that little story,
Speaker 1: but I'm sorry, LRD, I apologize, all.
Speaker 3: Right, That's what we got her instrum.
Speaker 1: So we got two.
Speaker 2: Two, we got we got two more. Two very important
Speaker 2: cultural milestones from two thousand and two. The first gay
Speaker 2: in the Battlefield franchise Battlefield nineteen forty two. That was
Speaker 2: two thousand and two, and I remember it because everyone
Speaker 2: I know was hooked on that game for about six months.
Speaker 2: Wow online clan play. It had the best gameplay mechanics
Speaker 2: of I think any like you know, deathmatch style online
Speaker 2: shooter and the other one. It was the first audio
Speaker 2: Slave record, and this being dot net Rocks, I thought
Speaker 2: we should get just a little bit of rock and
Speaker 2: roll in there, because very cool. When we're not talking
Speaker 2: about Rockstar today, we're talking about something else. But yeah,
Speaker 2: Audio Slave two thousand and two one of the great
Speaker 2: kind of crossover supergroups of that generation.
Speaker 3: So cool.
Speaker 1: All right, So before we start talking to Dylan about
Speaker 1: what he thinks we should talk about, let's do better
Speaker 1: no framework, roll the music.
Speaker 3: Awesome, what do you got?
Speaker 1: Well? By now people listening to dutnet rocks this should
Speaker 1: be old news. But in case you haven't heard, you
Speaker 1: can now use your your own LLLM models and gethub
Speaker 1: co pilots cli. Whereas before you could only go through
Speaker 1: their network. Right getthub network. So now you can bring
Speaker 1: your own apikey and guess what it supports Olama, which
Speaker 1: is using the open AI protocol.
Speaker 3: Nice.
Speaker 1: I have a big Olama machine sitting right next to me,
Speaker 1: blinky lights, You're going local, You're going I'm going local.
Speaker 1: So I tried it. It works by Jeff Fritz and
Speaker 1: I did an episode of Code It with AI episode
Speaker 1: twenty seven where I demonstrated it, and man, is it fast?
Speaker 1: And I'm using a quin coder thirty billion library nut
Speaker 1: library model on it. Just really fast and really good. However,
Speaker 1: I found that it fell down a little bit when
Speaker 1: asked to do things that required a little more architecture
Speaker 1: and thought and wouldn't figure those things out. But really
Speaker 1: really good. And I'll tell you a little story that
Speaker 1: I told on that show. The first time I ran it,
Speaker 1: I noticed that when after I hit the enter key
Speaker 1: on the prompt I hear this high pitched wine, babe?
Speaker 1: What the heck is that? As soon as the text
Speaker 1: came back, it stopped and look at my uninterruptible power
Speaker 1: supply that it's plugged into. And the UPS was basic
Speaker 1: equally saying, ah, I can't take that power train. Oh wow,
Speaker 1: So yeah, they caused my UPS to freak out. And
Speaker 1: granted it's a small UPS, but yeah, plugged it right
Speaker 1: into the wall, no problems.
Speaker 3: So you need a bigger UPS.
Speaker 1: So now it's not about tokens or you know, requests, it's.
Speaker 3: About power and I have Now you've got the power problem.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well but I've got a roof full of solar panels,
Speaker 1: so I'm not at all worried about It's going to
Speaker 1: be a good summer. Let's put it that way. And
Speaker 1: you know, get get hub Co pilots raising their price
Speaker 1: in June. This is the perfect time for me to
Speaker 1: put more cycles into the local LM. Nice, that's it,
Speaker 1: all right, who's talking to us?
Speaker 3: Richard grabbed a comment off show nineteen ninety nine and
Speaker 3: the one we called how We Beat the Wine two
Speaker 3: K Bug, Yeah, which came out really nicely, and Rob
Speaker 3: Howard had this nice comedy, says Hi, guys, great show.
Speaker 3: It was good to take a trip down memory lane
Speaker 3: and hear the war stories. My own experience was nowhere
Speaker 3: near as exciting as your guests. For my customers, I'm
Speaker 3: sure they felt it was just as important. People were worried, right,
Speaker 3: it had been hyped up a lot. I ended up
Speaker 3: on the phone at eleven pm Australia time on New
Speaker 3: Year's Eve and that would be some of the first
Speaker 3: time zones to roll over, right, yeah, with one client
Speaker 3: talking them through a last minute emergency system wide backup.
Speaker 3: What a one hour before rollover? These people look crazy, Yeah,
Speaker 3: because you know they wanted it just in case. I
Speaker 3: was able to getting through the process and feeling a
Speaker 3: little bit calmer, was still enough time to watch the
Speaker 3: Sydney fire works, fun times beautiful, you go, yeah, I
Speaker 3: love it, you know. It's just I'm just great to
Speaker 3: reach out remind people that we did a thing back
Speaker 3: then and get some feedback from that. So ready to hear.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much. You good to hear from Rob,
Speaker 3: Yeah for sure, so Rob, thank you so much for
Speaker 3: your comment. Copy of music co Buy is on its
Speaker 3: way to you. If you'd like a copy of music.
Speaker 3: Co buy I write a calm on the website at
Speaker 3: dot netroocks dot com or on the facebooks. We publish
Speaker 3: every show there, and if you comment there and I
Speaker 3: read it on the show, we'll send your copy of music.
Speaker 1: Go buy music to code by of course, Still Going
Speaker 1: Strong twenty two tracks, twenty five minutes each, designed to
Speaker 1: keep you in this state of flow while you're writing code.
Speaker 1: Many many, many happy customers. All right with that, let's
Speaker 1: introduce this guy who we've been talking to kind of casually.
Speaker 1: Dylan Beattie is a consultant software developer and international keynote speaker.
Speaker 1: He's been building web apps since the nineties and works
Speaker 1: primarily on Microsoft dot Net, hddp APIs ux design and
Speaker 1: distributed systems. Dylan lives and works in London, and when
Speaker 1: he's not writing code, he plays guitar and writes songs.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, he also came up with that language called
Speaker 1: rock Star, which you heard about in previous versions of
Speaker 1: the episodes of Rocks where he was here. Welcome back, Dylan, Hey,
Speaker 1: it's great to be back. Yeah, what are you up
Speaker 1: to these days?
Speaker 2: Well, most immediately like right now, talking to you guys
Speaker 2: earlier this afternoon, I was porting a bunch of web
Speaker 2: code from next js to Astro, hanging out with Rendall,
Speaker 2: doing live streams about claud code and getting up and
Speaker 2: running with AI building the odd MCP server and dot
Speaker 2: learning about CSS and all of the amazing things that
Speaker 2: that can do now. And yeah, it's worse than the
Speaker 2: problem of focus in tech is worse than ever because
Speaker 2: the number of shiny things just keeps going up and
Speaker 2: up and up.
Speaker 1: And you know what, the finest memory.
Speaker 3: Have such good add tools.
Speaker 1: You know, the finest memory I have of doing things
Speaker 1: with you, Dylan, was when we were all in Oslo.
Speaker 1: I think it was with Rendell and Richard and I
Speaker 1: and you did a sort of a show that was
Speaker 1: like a quiz show based on QI Yep, which I
Speaker 1: had never heard of. At the time, I had never
Speaker 1: heard of QI and now I've binged watched every episode.
Speaker 1: It's like my favorite British production.
Speaker 2: There is definitely a very a very English kind of
Speaker 2: panel game that folks who have grown up here or
Speaker 2: you know, listen to a lot of BBC Radio and
Speaker 2: BBC TV stuff, are familiar with. And you know, we're
Speaker 2: always the latest one. We've been talking about is you've
Speaker 2: seen the last one laughing yes, where Yeah, So we're
Speaker 2: wondering would that work as a conference panel, Like you
Speaker 2: get a couple you obviously you've got to pick you know,
Speaker 2: people you know are going to have a good time
Speaker 2: with it. But you have a panel of four people
Speaker 2: on stage. The audience is can ask the questions, no holdspot,
Speaker 2: and if you laugh, you're out and somebody else gets
Speaker 2: up and takes your spot.
Speaker 1: What I liked about that show we did is it
Speaker 1: was very Hollywood Squares in that the contestants got to
Speaker 1: see the questions before beforehand and make up funny answers.
Speaker 1: Yeah right, and that it was just hysterical. Anyway, No
Speaker 1: more about that.
Speaker 2: Good time, So go to another one of those one
Speaker 2: of these days.
Speaker 3: In a while.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: We could even do it online.
Speaker 3: Yeah right.
Speaker 1: So use what Works.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so this is what we're going to be talking
Speaker 2: about today is a thing that a bunch of us
Speaker 2: has been working on. So we'll start with the headline.
Speaker 2: There is a website at use what works dot org
Speaker 2: where a bunch of people are swinging by and they
Speaker 2: are there is a manifesto there that you can sign,
Speaker 2: and there's about I think thirty five people now have
Speaker 2: swung by and taken a look at that, and this
Speaker 2: is has basically emerged from over the last I mean
Speaker 2: a long time. You know, I've spent many years talking
Speaker 2: about open source and free software and licensing and just
Speaker 2: all of these kind of complexities of this idea of
Speaker 2: there are programs on the Internet that you can run
Speaker 2: without having to give anybody any money, and how, you know,
Speaker 2: all the one how did we get there? Because this
Speaker 2: is an amazing thing that you know, we have used
Speaker 2: to build some astonishing products and platforms and services, and
Speaker 2: but once you start doing this at any significant scale,
Speaker 2: you start to realize that there are actually all kinds
Speaker 2: of different ways that these models can break down. And
Speaker 2: so this came out of a a lot of people
Speaker 2: over the last year or two have been kind of
Speaker 2: standing up and doing talks about, you know, what does
Speaker 2: the future of open source look like? And the news
Speaker 2: stories that I think started people looking into this were
Speaker 2: the ones that end up on Reddit with people talking
Speaker 2: about an open source rug pull, and perhaps I think
Speaker 2: the most high profile one was probably reddis And you know,
Speaker 2: Reddis was a really interesting case study because they built this,
Speaker 2: you know, fantastic high performance key value store, really really
Speaker 2: useful building block for creating high performance cloud systems. And
Speaker 2: they basically gave it away for free. And you know,
Speaker 2: you could, you could pay them in all kinds of
Speaker 2: ways for maintenance and supporting that kind of thing. But
Speaker 2: if you didn't want it, you didn't have to. And
Speaker 2: you know, to simplify the whole thing enormously, what happened
Speaker 2: is companies like Amazon turn around and go, oh, well, yeah,
Speaker 2: if you want reddis, we'll run reddis for you for
Speaker 2: fifty bucks a month, hundred bucks a month, whatever. Just
Speaker 2: you put your master card in and here is your
Speaker 2: connection string, and there go, you've got a redesting in
Speaker 2: the cloud.
Speaker 1: So radis is free, but if you want to integrated
Speaker 1: with our cloud system, it's going to cost you a
Speaker 1: little money.
Speaker 2: Yes, So this is this is what reddis did in
Speaker 2: the first instance, and they weren't the only one. And
Speaker 2: you know, I'd absolutely kind of see the reasoning behind
Speaker 2: it is they go, well, look, you're you're absolutely free
Speaker 2: to integrate reddis into your own product unless the only
Speaker 2: thing your product is doing is selling our product to
Speaker 2: your customers. Doing that, you can't do that anymore.
Speaker 1: That sort and skimming, right, Yeah, it's you know, hey,
Speaker 1: how would you like to buy this glass of water? Yeah?
Speaker 1: For five bucks? Yeah.
Speaker 2: And eventually the people who are given out the free
Speaker 2: water are like, you've got a trillion dollars and we don't,
Speaker 2: and that's not right. And you know, I think a
Speaker 2: part of it is, hey, we'd also like a trillion dollars.
Speaker 2: But another part of it is nobody should have a
Speaker 2: trillion dollars, especially not if they're can by selling free stuff. Right,
Speaker 2: And so reddis did a two to two and a
Speaker 2: half years ago they said, right, we're changing our license.
Speaker 2: It's not completely you know, free as in free beer anymore.
Speaker 2: And this caused a massive backlash and you know, the
Speaker 2: press and the media picked up on it, and social
Speaker 2: media picked up on it, and you know, all kinds
Speaker 2: of people. Microsoft, I believe it's Garnet. Microsoft Garnet was there.
Speaker 2: I think it was called was there? Like it's a
Speaker 2: drop in reddest compatible clone. So if you're running reddicin
Speaker 2: as you're and you don't want to pay for it,
Speaker 2: you use this one instead. Some folks took the last
Speaker 2: reddis code base that had been released before the license
Speaker 2: change and they forked it and they went, well, hey,
Speaker 2: we've we got this thing and this one's free. And
Speaker 2: then a year later Reddis turn around and went, actually,
Speaker 2: you know, we're going to go all the way in
Speaker 2: the other direction, and reddis is now released under the
Speaker 2: I believe it's under the GNU General Public License, which
Speaker 2: is basically the one that says, hey, you can use this,
Speaker 2: but if you touch it, you're going to show everybody
Speaker 2: what you did, right, which in a way is even
Speaker 2: more effective to trent to companies like you know, Amazon
Speaker 2: and Google Cloud, because they're like, well, we're not going
Speaker 2: to open source our you know, metrics and dashboards and
Speaker 2: billing systems that we used to charge people for the
Speaker 2: free software, so maybe we should pay for a license.
Speaker 2: And you know, this is this is one incident there's been.
Speaker 2: We had a great session in the London Donet user
Speaker 2: group last year with Mike James from Avalonia who's talking
Speaker 2: about the same you know problem of a sustainability and
Speaker 2: they got a team of engineers working on this. You know,
Speaker 2: incredibly powerful, incredibly capable. It's an open source drop in
Speaker 2: replacement for WPF effectively. You know, there's there's more to
Speaker 2: it than that. But if you've got a company who've
Speaker 2: got expertise and investment on WPF, and now you need
Speaker 2: to go across platform. You want to be able to
Speaker 2: run on Linux, mac Os, those kinds of things. Microsoft
Speaker 2: has never offered a really compelling migration path for desktop
Speaker 2: applications on non Windows platforms. You know, wind Forms are
Speaker 2: still out there. Wind Forms are still kicking. It's still,
Speaker 2: i think the best UI framework they have ever shipped.
Speaker 2: But you know, WPF is a little bit long in
Speaker 2: the tooth. The Maui Wing Ui, all these different things
Speaker 2: that all kind of they were all going to be
Speaker 2: the future, and then they all weren't the future. And
Speaker 2: now there's Blazer, and if you want Blazer on the desktop,
Speaker 2: you put a browser in an electron app. And meanwhile,
Speaker 2: you know, Mike and his team are out there with Avalonia,
Speaker 2: going well, actually we're just going to solve the problem.
Speaker 2: But it's quite expensive solving the problem, and so you
Speaker 2: should probably give us money if you're using this to
Speaker 2: run your business. And you know, there are multiple examples
Speaker 2: of this kind of thing going on.
Speaker 1: To bring it back to what we use what works
Speaker 1: the big picture, here is the paragraph that's right right
Speaker 1: on the front page. Organizations should generally use existing, proven,
Speaker 1: and sustainable solutions to common problems rather than developing, maintaining,
Speaker 1: and running their own. In other words, use open source projects,
Speaker 1: right yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: Well as long as they're maintained, right, Like, yeah, I
Speaker 3: get that Microsoft Research spun off Garnet and basically gave
Speaker 3: you reddis without all licensing constraints. But are they keeping
Speaker 3: it up? Like that's always the question. We don't go
Speaker 3: in for open source software, going for maintained software.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this actually you hearing you read that, I need
Speaker 2: to merge a pr on this because there's been some
Speaker 2: discussion about replacing existing software with established In that specific paragraph,
Speaker 2: because I think it was Udi Dehan pointed out that
Speaker 2: software can come into existence overnight and resistence is no
Speaker 2: indicator of quality but establishment, you know, community and some
Speaker 2: continuity around it. But you know what we started doing
Speaker 2: so around probably September October last year, a whole bunch
Speaker 2: of folks working in and around open source, and a
Speaker 2: lot of them from the dotnet space because a lot
Speaker 2: of us have you know, very strong networks in that community,
Speaker 2: you know, sort of started chatting to each other and
Speaker 2: being like, should we put something together that is maybe
Speaker 2: just a little bit more structure than a whole bunch
Speaker 2: of people giving conference talks about the same things and
Speaker 2: doing podcasts about the same things. And I came up
Speaker 2: with this idea of you know, like all the good names,
Speaker 2: we came up with about fifteen, and then we went
Speaker 2: for the one where we could get the dot org
Speaker 2: and all the social media handles.
Speaker 3: Right, So the best name is the one you can
Speaker 3: actually get the content for us.
Speaker 2: Yes, but you know, conversation has been around what are
Speaker 2: the what are the the first point where somebody goes
Speaker 2: down a path which is going to lead to one
Speaker 2: of these scenarios that we all think we should try
Speaker 2: to avoid as an industry, right, And so one of
Speaker 2: them is, you know, maybe counterintuitively, it's going out to
Speaker 2: companies and going you should pay money for free software.
Speaker 2: And you know that as my time as an engineer
Speaker 2: and as a tech lead and a CTO, getting budget
Speaker 2: for free software was always you know, it was not
Speaker 2: a pleasant experience. And partly I think it because it
Speaker 2: cuts orthogonally to the reason a lot of people got
Speaker 2: into development in the first place. Is we want to
Speaker 2: build stuff. We don't want to have budget meetings and yeah,
Speaker 2: yeah there, you know, with your team one morning and
Speaker 2: you're going through, okay, what's in the sprint and somebody's like, ayeah,
Speaker 2: authentication and you're like, well, we could find one, and
Speaker 2: oh but that one costs money so we'd have to
Speaker 2: have a budget meeting for it. Or we could use
Speaker 2: that one up, but that one's really complicated and there's
Speaker 2: a learning curve. Yeah, we could just build our own.
Speaker 2: You know, how hard can it be? Use the name password,
Speaker 2: password reset? Okay?
Speaker 4: And then yeah, well do you are you finding are
Speaker 4: you finding that with the in the new AI coding
Speaker 4: landscape that you know, where you have teams and agents
Speaker 4: and stuff and squads.
Speaker 1: That more people are considering building their own stuff that
Speaker 1: they're paying for now because they have this power.
Speaker 2: Yes, I mean it's uh, it is not my experience
Speaker 2: on this has been going for a lot longer than
Speaker 2: AI has been a viable way to deliver software. Uh,
Speaker 2: And I see, I'm gonna go on. I'm here. I
Speaker 2: see no reason to believe that AI is fundamentally going
Speaker 2: to solve all the problems that we didn't solve with
Speaker 2: structured programming, and we didn't solve with functional and we
Speaker 2: didn't solve with object orientation, and we didn't solve with scrum,
Speaker 2: and we didn't solve with that child, and we didn't
Speaker 2: solve with canban and and and cloud. And you know,
Speaker 2: the challenges are still there, and the challenges are around,
Speaker 2: you know, the confidence in what is being deployed into production,
Speaker 2: and that's something I got to say, you know, whether
Speaker 2: whether by a coincidence or a causation causality, the uptime
Speaker 2: of some of the major providers in this space, the
Speaker 2: kind of numbers we've been trying to get away from
Speaker 2: for decades. You know, we're talking like uptime that doesn't
Speaker 2: have any nines in anymore, because it's like eighty seven
Speaker 2: percent a lot across the past three months, and it's
Speaker 2: not just the AI platforms themselves. I think we're starting
Speaker 2: to see some kind of knock on effects of that.
Speaker 2: But you know, I think the point here is that
Speaker 2: the act of creating the first working prototype or the MVP,
Speaker 2: the minimum viable product for a piece of software that
Speaker 2: is often relatively easy. You know, most developers I know
Speaker 2: could build a login system in a couple of days
Speaker 2: if all they care about is user name, password. Was
Speaker 2: the password right or wrong? Yeah, fine, okay, cool, and
Speaker 2: then the like, we need a password reseid, Well, that's easy,
Speaker 2: we'll bolt in a SMTP relay. We'll send an email
Speaker 2: for that thing and it's done. And then you know
Speaker 2: the but if you get something off the shelf that
Speaker 2: does this, they're like, well, yeah, we have two factor, Yeah,
Speaker 2: we have a worth two you want login with Google,
Speaker 2: login with Microsoft, login with LinkedIn, login with whatever we
Speaker 2: got that. You know, like, what's a timing attack? You
Speaker 2: don't know what a timing attack is. And you've built
Speaker 2: your own password security all right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I hope you're not protecting anything important withs that,
Speaker 5: And you know the I think the difficult thing is
Speaker 5: that the you get a level of expertise.
Speaker 2: If you have built your own security system as I
Speaker 2: have done, and you have supported it in production over
Speaker 2: a number of years as I have done, you learn
Speaker 2: a lot more than you would just getting one off
Speaker 2: the shelf and plugging it in. Sure, but the biggest
Speaker 2: lesson of all is that you should have just got
Speaker 2: one off the shelf and plugged it in.
Speaker 1: Right, let's take a break. I think it's a good
Speaker 1: time and we'll be right back after these very important
Speaker 1: messages and we're back. It's Dot at Rocks. I'm Carl Franklin.
Speaker 1: That's my buddy Richard Campbell, Hey, and our buddy Dylan
Speaker 1: Beatdi is here talking about using what works. Hey, hey,
Speaker 1: making sure that I guess it's you know, do a
Speaker 1: cost benefit analysis.
Speaker 3: Of well, you know, the joke here is it takes
Speaker 3: long enough to understand a problem well enough to know
Speaker 3: it's a hard problem. Yeah, you know, it's easier to
Speaker 3: just stay ignorant in some ways.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so you know, the the angles at which
Speaker 2: we sort of came at this whole use what works thing,
Speaker 2: you know, one of them is, let's see if we
Speaker 2: can create a critical mass of you know, case studies
Speaker 2: and supporting material for people who are about to have
Speaker 2: that conversation, you know, team leads and tech leads who
Speaker 2: are about to go to that boss or go to
Speaker 2: that CFO and be like, we need money for free software,
Speaker 2: and here are the reasons why. And yeah, it's free,
Speaker 2: but it's not free for us because we're making fifteen
Speaker 2: million dollars a year and we should be passing, you know,
Speaker 2: paying some of that forward into the ecosystem which allows
Speaker 2: us to be here in the first place. And part
Speaker 2: of it is, you know, encouraging the developers who are
Speaker 2: working on this stuff and reinforcing. Yeah, it's great fun
Speaker 2: building your own relational database. You'll have a blast, but
Speaker 2: you can't take it with you, and you are going
Speaker 2: to be more in demand as an engineer if you
Speaker 2: know how to get a database off the shelf and
Speaker 2: set it up and tune it and optimize it. And
Speaker 2: you know, what's your do you understand that your rotational
Speaker 2: backup strategies? And do you know that in SQL light
Speaker 2: if you just copy the dB file, if you're using
Speaker 2: right ahead locks, that's not actually going to back up
Speaker 2: your database. And you know, those are the skills which
Speaker 2: are transferable, and it's maybe cuts to a sort of
Speaker 2: you know, an interesting is dichotomy The word it's one
Speaker 2: of those words I keep meaning to look up a
Speaker 2: lot of us folks, you know. I my degree is
Speaker 2: in computer science. They didn't teach me to use anything.
Speaker 2: They teach me. Taught me how to build software out
Speaker 2: of raw algorithms, you know, which is a little bit
Speaker 2: like you know, expecting physicists to design apartment building gave
Speaker 2: you a pair of chromium and users to put the
Speaker 2: zeros in ones on the disk in the right or
Speaker 2: and you know the I think that the difficulty here
Speaker 2: is that a really valuable engineer is one who has
Speaker 2: reams of knowledge that they know they shouldn't apply at
Speaker 2: work until they absolutely have to. And that means pretty good.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: One, you're going to be spending a lot of time
Speaker 2: learning stuff that you should not be then going and
Speaker 2: doing in your job.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 3: You know, I teach.
Speaker 2: I teach distributed systems, And one of the things I
Speaker 2: say to folks at the beginning of day one is,
Speaker 2: look everything I'm going to show you. You do not
Speaker 2: go back to work next week and do this. This
Speaker 2: is stuff that you play with and you learn how
Speaker 2: it works, you familiarize yourself with the patterns. But also
Speaker 2: I'm going to teach you what other the signs. It's
Speaker 2: time to think about doing this for real, right because
Speaker 2: you know, if you start doing this stuff then just
Speaker 2: just for fun or just because it looks good on
Speaker 2: your CV, you're going to leave behind a legacy of
Speaker 2: software which is way harder to maintain than it really
Speaker 2: needed to be.
Speaker 3: And you sometimes complexity is necessary, and when it isn't,
Speaker 3: don't introduce it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and if you can, you know, the complexity is there,
Speaker 2: but somebody out there will have tackled that complexity. And
Speaker 2: you know, whether you're you know, container orchestration, or you're
Speaker 2: building message queueing software, or you're building APIs or MCP serves,
Speaker 2: any of this kind of stuff, you know, the one
Speaker 2: if you're the developer, don't just be like, yeah, I'm
Speaker 2: just going to build my own, because you probably will,
Speaker 2: and you know, you may even get a nice little
Speaker 2: bonus for the amount of money you saved by not
Speaker 2: buying it. But sooner or later that thing is going
Speaker 2: to need more, more maintenance. It'll stop being fun, and
Speaker 2: then after that it'll start being a problem. And then
Speaker 2: after that you're going to be the one who's sat
Speaker 2: there at the office at three o'clock in the morning
Speaker 2: because there's a new GDPR data retention compliance deadline coming
Speaker 2: up and the only way to do it. So but then,
Speaker 2: you know, the other perspective on all of this is
Speaker 2: the journey that a lot of the open source maintainers
Speaker 2: themselves have been on from Hey, I made a cool
Speaker 2: thing at work and I think it might be useful.
Speaker 2: I'll put it on GitHub. Yeah, I got a new release,
Speaker 2: I got a new feature, I got pull requests, I
Speaker 2: got people are helping me. This is awesome. Yes, of
Speaker 2: course it's free. It's under the GPL or the MIT
Speaker 2: or you know, the Apache license. And then it gets
Speaker 2: to the you know, the point, and this happens a
Speaker 2: lot of oh maybe this could make some money. I know,
Speaker 2: I'll sell maintenance contracts, all right, now I have twenty dollars.
Speaker 2: Oh but now the people who gave me twenty dollars
Speaker 2: think that I should be doing exactly what they want
Speaker 2: for their very very specific use case because they gave
Speaker 2: me twenty dollars, and that's not really how this works.
Speaker 2: And so, you know, encouraging the second somebody out there
Speaker 2: is like, I have some code, I have a solution
Speaker 2: that I think might be useful to other people. Is
Speaker 2: that's the point where you're like, what is this going
Speaker 2: to cost in the end?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: And you know, when I go public with this thing,
Speaker 2: am I just gonna yeah? Yolo GPL. Everyone loves the
Speaker 2: go New Public License because Linux is awesome, and yeah,
Speaker 2: you know it is. But also a lot of companies
Speaker 2: with deep pockets have got it where it is today,
Speaker 2: and unless you are in touch with those people and
Speaker 2: have access to their pockets, you're gonna end up creating
Speaker 2: a situation where something which may become a you know,
Speaker 2: vital part of somebody else's infrastructure is the thing that
Speaker 2: you do for fun on your weekend, right And at
Speaker 2: that point, that's when the sustainability just becomes a real,
Speaker 2: you know, a situation. None of us, I think, wants
Speaker 2: to be on any side of of either. You know,
Speaker 2: you're like, well, we got fifteen developers up and running
Speaker 2: on this thing last year because we thought it wasn't
Speaker 2: going to cost any money, and now it's gonna be
Speaker 2: five thousand dollars per developer per year. And that's a
Speaker 2: hard conversation to have because if you're the one who
Speaker 2: went for it because it was free, Now you're like.
Speaker 1: Are there any success stories of popular open source packages
Speaker 1: being sponsored by companies with deep pockets that depend on
Speaker 1: them and don't want them to go away?
Speaker 2: So there are the one that I know off the
Speaker 2: top of my head that is sort of specifically probably
Speaker 2: still here because of a single sponsorship deal is Avalonia.
Speaker 3: Yeah. We just had them on talking about that and
Speaker 3: they've got a huge pot.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, so that they had one major corporate sponsor
Speaker 2: who was like, look, we basically we need your thing
Speaker 2: to keep going so that we can keep going, and
Speaker 2: we're happy to support that. And you know, there have
Speaker 2: been numerous examples over many, many years of companies that
Speaker 2: have done, like you know, a one time grant or
Speaker 2: a one time donation or some kind of short term sponsorship.
Speaker 2: But sponsorship is very fickle, and the consensus that seems
Speaker 2: to be emerging slowly is that if big companies with
Speaker 2: a lot of money want to use your thing, you
Speaker 2: just need a way of selling it to them, not donation,
Speaker 2: you know, trying to get your company to donate money.
Speaker 2: A lot of them they don't have a form for that,
Speaker 2: Like there is there is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's the first item on the budget that gets
Speaker 1: cut when when times are tight.
Speaker 2: But you know, you got to somebody and like, look,
Speaker 2: here's how it works. We can put the whole team
Speaker 2: on this, probably take us six weeks to do it,
Speaker 2: and then we're on the hook for a week's worth
Speaker 2: of maintenance every three months for the rest of the
Speaker 2: life of the company. Or we have a support agreement
Speaker 2: with these people and it costs you five thousand bucks
Speaker 2: a year or whatever. It costs. Put it on the spreadsheet.
Speaker 2: That's what it's going to cost. We're going to pay them,
Speaker 2: they're going to look after us, and that's how the
Speaker 2: thing is going to go. And you know, the other
Speaker 2: sort of interesting aspect to a lot of this is
Speaker 2: how stringent a lot of these these you know, open
Speaker 2: source projects that have now incorporated or embraced a commercial aspect.
Speaker 2: I remember one of the first ones that I know
Speaker 2: about to do this was a thing called service Stack,
Speaker 2: which went from being I think BSD licensed to being
Speaker 2: like a hybrid license in twenty fourteen. And so that's
Speaker 2: you know, that's twelve years. That's ancient history in open source.
Speaker 2: And yeah, they switched it. They said we can't give
Speaker 2: this away for free anymore. And the guy who uh
Speaker 2: demis Bellot, who sort of created and ran it, he said, look,
Speaker 2: we're not going to send lawyers out. We know who
Speaker 2: you are, we know that you're running it without a license.
Speaker 2: We have better things to do than try to hunt
Speaker 2: you down. But the people who are you know, doing
Speaker 2: the right thing, either through their conscience or because they're legal,
Speaker 2: team is like, ah, no, no, no, no, no, come on.
Speaker 2: That has made it a you know profitable, sustainable, there's
Speaker 2: got people on board their ship and features and they're
Speaker 2: doing great. And the interesting case. I'm always interested, you know,
Speaker 2: if something interesting is happening today, I'm like, did anyone
Speaker 2: do this five years ago, ten years ago? Do we
Speaker 2: have any precedent for what this looks like long term
Speaker 2: other than like, look at the crystal ball and try
Speaker 2: to predict the future. And when service stack went commercial,
Speaker 2: they forked it. A bunch of people on the internet
Speaker 2: were like, well, we're going to take the last version
Speaker 2: that was BSD licensed or MIT licensed and we'll fork
Speaker 2: it because you can do that because the license says
Speaker 2: you can take this version of the code and do
Speaker 2: whatever you like with it. You know, you can even
Speaker 2: you can turn it into a product, and you can
Speaker 2: sell it as long as you don't take our names
Speaker 2: off the license, and you know, as long as you're
Speaker 2: acknowledge authorship. And then service Kit was like, you know,
Speaker 2: three months of great excitement about yay, software should be free.
Speaker 2: And what happened is the same thing happens every time
Speaker 2: is all the people who are serious and are prepared
Speaker 2: to put their hands in their pockets, they go with
Speaker 2: the upstream fork and all the people who think they're
Speaker 2: entitled to a free lunch. And by the way, you've
Speaker 2: got to do this and this and this and this
Speaker 2: and this, because that's what our project needs. They go
Speaker 2: with the fork, and so very very quickly the fork
Speaker 2: will find itself inundated with support requests from people who
Speaker 2: are never going to be prepared to support, or sponsor
Speaker 2: or otherwise contribute to the maintenance of what they go.
Speaker 1: Oh, and that's the problem, right. Sponsorship usually comes with
Speaker 1: strings attached, and companies that spend money in this way
Speaker 1: often consider themselves you know, well, you're going to do
Speaker 1: this for us because we give you money. And it
Speaker 1: could also be at the exclusion of their you know,
Speaker 1: their competition. So it gets really dicey when you start
Speaker 1: to take money. You have to if you want to
Speaker 1: keep it, you have to play by the rules.
Speaker 2: I think there's also always been an implication with sponsorship
Speaker 2: and donations, picularly that the people providing the money are like, well,
Speaker 2: we're not paying you to use the software because we
Speaker 2: could have done that for free, right, So we're giving
Speaker 2: you money because we want to be special, we want priority,
Speaker 2: we want you to listen, right, And you know, I
Speaker 2: don't think that's necessarily premeditated. But there's a hey, this
Speaker 2: is working well for us, let's let's sling them a
Speaker 2: couple of bucks. And then later you're like, oh, well, yeah,
Speaker 2: it would be good if it would do this, and
Speaker 2: we did give them all that money. Yeah, and so yeah,
Speaker 2: And it's like I said, the whole thing is about
Speaker 2: looking at these different perspectives on the problem of open
Speaker 2: source sustainability.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: One of them is from the folks who are maybe
Speaker 2: they have a successful project out there and they're thinking,
Speaker 2: do I need to you know, switch my licensing basis
Speaker 2: or how can I get this to start paying for itself.
Speaker 2: Some of it as the folks who aren't there yet
Speaker 2: but they're thinking about releasing something. Some of it is
Speaker 2: the developers and the tech leads. Some of it is
Speaker 2: business owners and you know, encourage a more holistic understanding
Speaker 2: of the total cost of ownership of all this stuff.
Speaker 2: And it it's getting some traction.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: I think it's a it's a topic which a lot
Speaker 2: of people have been circling around for a long while now,
Speaker 2: and it's I think that you know, to me, the
Speaker 2: biggest thing that happened is open source was great when
Speaker 2: you were downloading it and running it on your three
Speaker 2: eight six and your four eight six and your penteum
Speaker 2: and then yeah, but you know, cloud came along and fundamentally,
Speaker 2: you know, moved the needle in terms of how you
Speaker 2: make money out of software. Sure, and you know, when
Speaker 2: when you can charge people to run it, the question
Speaker 2: of who gets paid to write it becomes very very
Speaker 2: murky indeed, and that I think is the sort of
Speaker 2: the instigator of all of these questions which a lot
Speaker 2: of us out here are now grappling with and seeing
Speaker 2: what all this looks like.
Speaker 1: A lot of questions, not a lot of answers.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's simple, but it's like, it's not like we
Speaker 3: didn't have enough to do. The more software that can
Speaker 3: be maintained by others, profumalarly with some level of support,
Speaker 3: the better off we are. It's always going to cost
Speaker 3: less than doing it yourself.
Speaker 2: I mean, there's a there's a mantra which I've heard
Speaker 2: lots of people. The formulation that I enjoy, because I
Speaker 2: think I came up with it was if you can't
Speaker 2: sell it by it right, and you know, if you
Speaker 2: have a bunch of bunch of engineers on your team
Speaker 2: who could be building the thing that your company sells,
Speaker 2: or you know, it's not necessarily thing your company sells.
Speaker 2: There are folks out there working in nonprofits, you know, charities,
Speaker 2: humanitarian organizations, but there will be a reason why that
Speaker 2: organization exists. There is a change that you want to
Speaker 2: make in the world, and if you are adding GDPR
Speaker 2: compliance to your home brewed logging system, you're probably not
Speaker 2: getting any closer to that the objective that got you
Speaker 2: all there in the first place. Yeah, and you know
Speaker 2: that's a you look at all the things that you
Speaker 2: could be building. You like, right, which ones? Which ones
Speaker 2: are the what Chris woodruff Woody, He goes, what's the
Speaker 2: secret source? What's the thing that nobody else is doing
Speaker 2: that If we get it right, we are going to
Speaker 2: be successful. We're going to solve more problems. We're going
Speaker 2: to cure more malaria, We're gonna shift more units. Whatever
Speaker 2: it is that you're trying to do in the current
Speaker 2: financial year. What's going to move that needle?
Speaker 3: Yep, that's going to that's going to make the biggest
Speaker 3: difference out only. Yeah, I think we always underestimate all
Speaker 3: the other work we have to do too. Right, like,
Speaker 3: it's easier to gnaw on the log in problem than
Speaker 3: it is to law on the whole problem in front
Speaker 3: of you.
Speaker 2: It's also, you know, I will admit to this as
Speaker 2: readily as anyone else. It is tremendously good fun reinventing
Speaker 2: the wheel, that's sure, you know, sure as a as
Speaker 2: a developer, I think certainly me and I know a
Speaker 2: lot of other folks that I've worked with over the years.
Speaker 2: Our happy place is when we understand the requirements and
Speaker 2: we just get to sitt in, you know, write code
Speaker 2: and build screens and build tables and you know, create stuff.
Speaker 2: And the best set of requirements in the world is
Speaker 2: one where someone else has already done all the hard
Speaker 2: work of figuring out what does it look like, how
Speaker 2: does it work, how long can the passwords be? What
Speaker 2: happens when you click this button? And you know, there's
Speaker 2: the number of folks out there who have you know,
Speaker 2: they've they've built Tetris as a learning exercise.
Speaker 1: Right, well, a couple couple of shows ago, I don't know,
Speaker 1: four or five we the better know a framework was
Speaker 1: a site that had build your own X and it
Speaker 1: had all of these things for learning how to write code.
Speaker 1: These tutorials for how to build your own oh and
Speaker 1: the list was huge. Yeah, you know, build your own
Speaker 1: database was one of them, of course, And you don't
Speaker 1: do it because you want a free database at the end.
Speaker 1: You do it to learn how to write code, and
Speaker 1: by doing that you understand how these things work.
Speaker 2: It's very cool and I think that's a you know,
Speaker 2: incredibly valuable one. It aligns strongly with the idea of
Speaker 2: code as a craft, which is getting a lot of
Speaker 2: attention at the moment because there's a you know, ground
Speaker 2: swell of opinion going out. Code doesn't matter anymore. LLLM
Speaker 2: writes it, LLLM reviews it, if it's good, goes to production,
Speaker 2: you never look at it. It doesn't matter if it's if
Speaker 2: it's messy. And you know, the leak recently of I
Speaker 2: still haven't quite worked out did the clawed code thing
Speaker 2: actually get leaked or did they leak the prompt or
Speaker 2: did they leak the debug tables or something. But I
Speaker 2: recall reading some commentary from people going this is not
Speaker 2: very good, and you're like, well, it is very good,
Speaker 2: because you know, I mean, they're losing more money than
Speaker 2: they're making, but they are bringing in a lot of money,
Speaker 2: and a lot of people are using it, a lot
Speaker 2: of people are very excited about what it can do.
Speaker 2: So by a you know, a comfortable set of metrics,
Speaker 2: the code here is is probably not the certainly not
Speaker 2: a deal breaker for it. But how much better could
Speaker 2: it be if it wasn't like that? Yeah, but no
Speaker 2: the idea because the other thing, you know, it's obviously
Speaker 2: this is a show about AI. It's a show about sustainable.
Speaker 1: Openly, all shows are about AI lately, Pan avoid the topic.
Speaker 3: It's actually I.
Speaker 2: Think it was you, Carl, I remember many years ago
Speaker 2: talking about Cloud said something like technology is interesting for
Speaker 2: three months when it's brand new, and then for three
Speaker 2: months when when people are making money with it, and
Speaker 2: in between it's just a lot of people getting excited
Speaker 2: about the same thing all over again. And it feels
Speaker 2: to me like we we've had the three months where
Speaker 2: it's new, and now there's a sort of little bit
Speaker 2: of all right, let's wait and see what is going
Speaker 2: to be the groundbreaking and you know, to me, it's
Speaker 2: putting AI in things is not exciting. I want to
Speaker 2: see something fundamentally new that we couldn't have built without
Speaker 2: these engineering capabilities and it's a yeah, interesting times. But
Speaker 2: one thing that I'll see a lot of folks talk
Speaker 2: about is that if companies go down the road of
Speaker 2: using coding assistance instead of junior developers, then we are
Speaker 2: drying up the pipeline because where are the next generation
Speaker 2: of seniors and architects going to come from? And you know,
Speaker 2: you look at the crafts like you know, furniture, instrument building, carpentry,
Speaker 2: all those kinds of things. People do it by creating
Speaker 2: work pieces. They build a chair just like thousands of
Speaker 2: millions of chairs have been built before. They do electrical installations,
Speaker 2: They build guitars, they build banjos, and you know, I
Speaker 2: think that legitimacy for that as a way of honing
Speaker 2: one's capabilities and experience as a developer. Yeah, build tetris.
Speaker 2: You're not gonna be able to sell it. Somebody already
Speaker 2: did that, but you will learn a lot in the
Speaker 2: course of doing it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if not about programming, then about geometry.
Speaker 2: Yes, you'll learn about wall kicks, which are the point
Speaker 2: where everyone thinks, I know how Tetris works. And they
Speaker 2: get in and they got the balls falling, the blocks
Speaker 2: falling down the pit, and then go left and right
Speaker 2: and they can rotate it. And then they get one
Speaker 2: up against the wall and they got to rotate it.
Speaker 2: They're like, oh, now that's not right. That's not how
Speaker 2: it was on the game boy, and then they go
Speaker 2: down the rabbit hole.
Speaker 1: So it'd be a good way to teach math. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, So what else can we talk about before
Speaker 1: we sign off? Here a few minutes left, So.
Speaker 2: You know, I guess on the use what works thing?
Speaker 2: I would love people to go and check that out.
Speaker 2: There's a whole bunch of us. It's not my thing.
Speaker 2: It was that thing that happens with you know, these
Speaker 2: sort of projects where I think about fifty people said yes,
Speaker 2: this sounds fantastic, let's do it, and then you know,
Speaker 2: forty of them got busy with other things, and there's
Speaker 2: now a critical mass of about maybe a dozen kind
Speaker 2: of checking in as and when they can and moving
Speaker 2: things forward and sharing their own ideas. But you know,
Speaker 2: I guess it's it's a little bit like old dot
Speaker 2: net was back in the day. If this sounds like
Speaker 2: something you have been grappling with, we would love for
Speaker 2: you to come and you know, join us under this
Speaker 2: rallying cry and tell us you know what works for you,
Speaker 2: what doesn't work for you, Do have anything we can
Speaker 2: help you with? Do you have anything you can help
Speaker 2: us with. Do you have a great idea or a
Speaker 2: case study or something that you'd like to get out there,
Speaker 2: And there's any way we can use this network to
Speaker 2: amplify that message and get more folks tuning into it.
Speaker 2: And you know, and if you think this is completely
Speaker 2: the wrong approach and not something we should be doing,
Speaker 2: we'd love to know why you think that. Yeah, so
Speaker 2: you know, head on over if you like it, to
Speaker 2: sign the manifesto because a big list of names always
Speaker 2: looks nice, and yeah, we're open. We got a bunch
Speaker 2: of you know, Gethub issue tracking plugged in there and
Speaker 2: get Hub discussions is on there. Nice, and we would
Speaker 2: love to know what people think about the whole the
Speaker 2: whole wider question of how do we get a how
Speaker 2: do we get to a point where if you've got
Speaker 2: a great idea for a useful piece of software, you
Speaker 2: can put it out there in the world and know
Speaker 2: that when the time comes, it'll be able to pay
Speaker 2: the bills and you know, eventually hand over to somebody else.
Speaker 2: That's the other big question with a lot of these,
Speaker 2: you know, small but critical open source projects. Right is
Speaker 2: if the one person who has been doing almost all
Speaker 2: the work for whatever reason does not get up tomorrow
Speaker 2: and want to do more of that than what, you know,
Speaker 2: what's the continuity for all the folks who are relying
Speaker 2: on it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, good stuff, Dylan. It's been great talking to you
Speaker 1: as always.
Speaker 2: Hey, it's always a pleasure.
Speaker 6: Absolutely, and we will talk to you, dear listener next
Speaker 6: time on dot net for products.
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Speaker 1: back to show number one, recorded in September two thousand
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Speaker 3: You got a jam.
Speaker 5: Vans and