“I don't have money, but I do have a very particular set of ~skills~ connectors” — Ashley Jeffs

This show is sponsored by you, the listener. Stick around till after the news to hear more about that. This is Cup of Go for our June 7, 2024. Keep up to date with the important happenings in the Go community at about 15 minutes per week. I'm Jonathan Hall.

And I'm Shay Nehmad, and I'm really hoping nothing important in the Go community is gonna happen between the 6th 7th Yeah. Because we're actually recording to this, on 6th.

Recording a date early because I'm traveling. I'm in a different time zone right now.

And a different mic.

And a different mic.

I I catch that all the time in other podcasts where people switch up their setup, and I'm, like,

that's not your voice. Do you have

a podcast that you listen to for long enough that you recognize, you know, the sounds in the room and what

Yeah. And then a few of the especially if they do a live recording, you know, on location somewhere, it's very different sound.

What's your number one podcast? This is not a show. We're gonna get into there's super interesting news. But what what's your number 1 podcast? Just hours.

I don't know. I've I've actually mixed up a lot lately. The one I'm listening to right now is called Your First Million. And it's about a cup it's a couple of, entrepreneurs talking about and interviewing other entrepreneurs to make money.

Cool. Your first million. That's such a American sounding It

sounds a lot more egotistical than I think it really is. It's actually kind of a cool shot. It sounds really like like, startup bro type thing. I don't I don't think it really is. Anyway, let's talk about Go.

Yeah. Let's get into Go.

So last week, we mentioned that Go 122.4 and 121.11 were about to be released. They have been. So, this included 2, security fixes. The first one was mishandling of corrupt central directory record in zip files. So if you're using zip files, be sure to upgrade and the other is related to net IP unexpected behavior from the is method.

Sounds like you do. I know of a of a tool that uses a zip as a Go dependency, the GitHub, CLI. Because the bug I fixed was in zip files. So I don't know. Maybe we should really I really was on top of upgrading the CLI when my version came out. And ever since then, every time we're on GH and the they command that it's like, oh, upgrade you with brewing. Like, no, I don't think I will. So I might.

But, yeah,

you know, new security releases always good to upgrade. You should stay on the latest patch always. Right? The there's no reason to not upgrade patches in, Go Miners as you need to worry about a little bit, right, when you upgrade from

Yeah. Right.

Like, the latest upgrade, broke the in it, imports and whatever. But also edge cases. Right? It's pretty stable. It's a pretty stable language.

It is.

But you don't need us to remind like, convince you that, oh, zip file. I need to check if I have zip just upgrade. Nothing bad's gonna happen. It's like arguments with my kid. Like, give it up. But I don't I'm not using it right now. So what does it matter? Just give it up.

Let's talk let's talk about a couple of proposals.

Yeah. So for a future, you know, patch release that includes a security fix, although this might be, you know, something that may wait for a minor version, There's a proposal here from Neil, Damien Neil, to add some safer file open functions to OS. You know, there's a big class of vulnerabilities around files. I think the most common one is, you wanna serve files from your HP server, and then someone asks for the dotdot backslash.backslash.backslash.backslash passwords cat file and your etc password, I mean. And, you know, you travel outside the intended location that you wanted to serve the files from.

Yeah. I do think it's justified. I also agree with your sort of knee jerk reaction that you why do we need to add more variant to those in our library? But I think this is justified.

The thing that's killing me is, alright, someone's gonna do open, and then someone's gonna oh, it's open. They've written Go, like, 5 years, and they try to open a file, then someone's like, oh, no. It's, open in now. Like Mhmm. Why would you change it? Even if it's justified, it feels like a frustrating transitionary period. Right?

Definitely. And and I don't I don't think we're gonna be in a place where we can, like, deprecate with GoVet, for example, the old ones because they're still definitely relevant for certain certain cases. So it's not nearly as clear cut as just stop using the old one and use the new ones now, which is gonna kinda be unfortunate, but that that's reality.

Yeah. And and by the way, it's not like operating systems offer everything out of the box. Like, Windows for, I think, for delete file does not have delete file at or delete file beneath it. So it is going to have to be a pure go implementation using the, you know, other capabilities that the operating system, or, you know, Windows file system API, exposes today. And, you know, I ended up being on, sure, let's go ahead with this.

Mhmm.

So link in the show notes if you wanna dive into it.

So if that one wasn't full of enough, nuance, let's talk about another proposal.

Yeah. This one's technical, but I I think it's interesting as well.

Yeah. So the, you may recall that, presumably in Go 123, unless something drastic happens, they have to revert it. We're going to have the ability to range over function. So you can create a function with a certain signature that that can be fed into a for loop, a for range loop to iterate over the return values of this function. And so there's a new proposal. How shall we say?

I think it like categorizing it as a new proposal is not as relevant as just as imagine someone in your, work Slack. There's there's a channel called big refactor whatever, and someone or it'd be huge ass new feature, and someone's like, wait, new thread. We need to discuss this specific sub feature.

Because That's really weird.

The whole Range Rover fun thing is a really big issue. I'm not sure even most people understand it or like it or or they're not sure where they use it. And then people get into it, get, you know, I've been writing with it for a while, and it's working really well. The discussion here is about a specific implementation detail of, let's imagine you're, ranging over the seek, right, the sequence Yeah. Yeah. Which is, let's, range over a map, Right? And get they have keys and values.

Right. So your your function returns

2 keys.

The value. And then you call it multiple times, and you get multiple copies of your multiple instances of key value pairs.

And I remember discussing this on the show and being like, damn. They say other than the fact that the type is called seek 2 with the with the number 2 in it, which is just fugly, there's I had no issues with it. Like, I couldn't think of a problem. But, as stuff happens in software development, the team has been using this for a while. Right?

And the reason this is a problem is because by convention, and this is already true with the slices of maps, you can emit the second variable, right? But if you only want the keys in your map, you just say for key, both equals range map, and you just get the keys and you don't get the values.

But for functions, obviously, that doesn't work because you have to do let's say you wanna ignore the error, which, by the way, in a in a function that you iterate over kinda makes sense, you know, because you expect the iterator to finish if it's, EOF.

It's very context specific, I think. In some cases, you might wanna ignore the error. In some cases, you don't.

And it's it's mostly it's it's mostly frustrating having to write, you know, I explicitly ignore in some places. The way you ignore the return values in go is you assign them to underscore. Right? So in your range expression, you assign the arrow to an underscore. Now that doesn't sound so bad and honestly, it it really isn't.

I think I I would be in favor of requiring the explicit underscore. Oh, honestly, I'd be in favor of that in all cases, even for maps and slices that we have today. Of course, they're not gonna make that change. But

Yeah. Because that's gonna piss off

a lot of people. Yeah. I I I think more explicit is better. Less

I've never I've never written, like, you know, slightly more explicit code, and have been like, oh, I really regret that time invested. It just never happened to me.

Exactly. And there have been times when I've done 4 k comma blank equals whatever, and then my linter or whatever tells me I have to remove that. I'm like, okay. I guess I will since you told me to, but I wish I could leave it there because it it's more it's more explicit. Yeah. I'm in favor of this

I'm gonna do it, but I don't like it.

Right.

This this whole episode, I don't know if this is just because we're both kinda, tired out of our our minds, but this whole episode just sounds like quotes from my daughter. I'm gonna do it, but not because I'm happy about it. Yeah. So this proposal is new. Again, it's part of a whole big thing.

I like cool links.

Our channel, the ad break is really soon, so I'm gonna plug it, quickly. Capago, kebab case on the go for Slack, has been home for really interesting links and and discussions and and jokes and japes. And, Peter and Links. And Peter, has been listening to the show and actually been listening to me, which is interesting. Funny decision.

Yeah. Yeah.

I assume they even have an Uber, like, developer podcast, just assuming. But maybe we need to find it. So they, started tackling, flaky tests. Just, you know, for our listeners who maybe aren't familiar with the term, what are flaky tests, John?

Well, they're tests that that don't they aren't consistent. Yeah. Is that is that a fair way to put it? They aren't consistent?

I I would categorize them as the devil, but, you know, to each their own. So it's basically tests that fail randomly, and then let's break down randomly into okay. So they break down if you run them in the incorrect order. They break down statistically because they rely on on the some DB residue or something that has to do with time or something that has to do with undefined behavior. Right?

I think in some cases, it's feasible, for some I mean, I actually have a few flaky tests I deal with on a regular basis. I I have a pretty strong idea why each one happens, that they've been happening long enough, but I've I've built that knowledge. Mhmm. When I'm faced with a brand new flaky test, often it does require an investigation to to determine that. And I'm I imagine an LLM could could help in many cases to help, you know, pinpoint that.

I'm not sure. I just have a feeling, like, it's slightly too complicated for just shoving it to do chat gpt and asking it why it's flaky. But maybe if they have their own, like if they're at the point of developing and training their own models, then maybe. But I'm not sure.

I don't know. We'll see. I mean, it wouldn't have to it wouldn't have to solve even a large percentage of them to be helpful. If it if it could point you to the right answer for 10%, that's that's the big value.

The the problem I have is if the other 90% is, like, pointing you towards a solution that ends up wasting your time because it looks correct, but it's not really. That would be helpful. Anyway, their numbers at the end are also staggering. They're like, quote, in the Go monorepo, we are steadily detecting around a 1,000 flaky tests. And I'm like,

what? That's horrible.

And then you finish reading it, and it says, quote, out of 600,000 in total. That's so many tests.

A lot of tests.

This is a texti company. Right? Anyway, so thanks a lot for sharing this link. It was super interesting to me. I also it was, you know, how you know a link is really good? The time between you took you to read it and the time you sent it in work Slack. For me it was almost instant. So thanks a lot, Peter. Keep keep them coming, man. We really like your contributions in the channel.

One last story that was, brought to us by the channel, the same channel.

Sounds like a cult, the channel. The greater good.

So I I found a different article talking about the same story, though. But the the headline is Red Panda Acquires Bentos expand its end to end streaming data platform. Bentos, as you may recall, is a data streaming platform. We've interviewed the creator of it on the show before. But, you know, the the biggest surprise to me here was that Red Panda is an actual thing and not just a made up, you know, logo. You know what a red panda looks like?

The animal? Yeah. I've seen one up close. It almost bit my, my nose off

Wow.

In a zoo so one time. They're really cute.

Like, I would have thought it was a Firefox mascot if, somebody hadn't told me otherwise. But, yeah, they look really cute.

They're also, like low maintenance zoo animals. My mother-in-law told me because she used to work in a zoo.

I'll keep that in mind next time I open a low maintenance zoo.

Yeah. I can't imagine you're running high maintenance one. So what's up with this article, man? This sounds like huge news. Do you know any way anything about it? Can you can you grok it, figure it out?

Yeah. So, like, I don't know. One of the most interesting things here, other than the fact that Red Pandas are real and they're cute, is that as a result of this announcement of this acquisition that Red Panda is acquiring Bentos, a new team has come out to fork Bentos. It's it's like Terraform all over again.

Terraform and OpenDoFu. Right? Yeah. I think I I tried to read about it. There's a lot there's a lot of nuance here. It's not like Yeah. All of Penthouse got bought, and then everything got forked. We need to dive deeper here.

I'm kinda con well, I honestly, I find it kinda confusing. I I I wonder if if so we can get an expert. Oh, you know what? I think I have actually Jeff's on my speed dialer here. Maybe we could get him on the show.

Do the speed dial mobile. Welcome to our ad break. We have, Ashley on hold here, so I'm gonna rush really fast. If you wanna help sponsor the show like the rest of our beautiful, beautiful, members on Patreon, we would love for you to do it. This show is a hobby, but it's pretty expensive.

Listen, I told you not to call me at this number again. Next time, there's gonna be consequences.

This is an emergency, Ash. We know this is the never call you on this number line, but the people need to know about red pandas. Wait, that's not the oh, red panda. Oh, oh, wait.

There's only 1.

Yeah. Hello, Ash.

Hello.

Thanks for taking my call Hello, Willow. Even though this is this is the wrong number, The red phone. When when we're done

with the call, can you, return this briefcase with this phone to the president? No. So welcome, Ashley Jeffs, also known as Jafail, online. For the people who don't know you, can you briefly present who you are?

So I'm that guy what did the, blobfish, Bentos open source project thing. You may if you're in the ghost space, you might also know me from my project called Gabs, and there's another even less popular one called Tunny. I've got a few few few fingers in various open source pies in the Go space, all with rather silly logos. But obviously, the more successful one is is Bentos, which is an open source stream processor, and that's all written in Go. Yummy. Yum. Yum.

Yum. Mhmm.

And that's pretty much I do lots of YouTube stuff. People might know me from that because I've got I actually have content that's not related to my various open source projects, but it's related to code sometimes. So people might know me from that, but probably fewer. Cool. But you can find me on there and Twitter and all the other places.

We'll have links

here to all

that in the show notes.

And if you're a long time listener, you may remember we had Ash and, Mihai on the show, like, I don't know what it was a year ago.

Probably. Let me look it up.

That I think about it. Damn, that was that that was long ago, man.

Are you gonna sound bite all the stupid stuff I said?

That's a really good idea. We might ask, Filippo to edit all that stuff in. So a lot has changed since, that last recording we did, since that last interview, and we need to talk about it. What do you think about my new tattoo?

It's not a blobfish, so I'm not interested.

So the big news this week, obviously, is everybody on both sides of the aisle, agree that your code is great, and, Ventas got acquired by Red Panda, now it's called Red Panda Connect. Like, there's a thing called Red Panda Connect, and there's still the Bentos open source library. And we wanna talk about that and try to understand what happened. We wanna congratulate you, by the way, 1st and foremost.

Thank you.

Dude, that's great. That's a really, really good move. Red Panda, by the way, in my opinion, this is just my opinion, really good stewards of open source stuff, really cool guys. So, you know, this would have been a different tone if this was, like, IBM. But, not if we have listeners than IBM. Not not, like

They're they're actually I would say they're not doing a bad job with Ceramic. I actually think the changes

I'm trying to think about a company that I really wanna, like, name and shame in in terms of so then I thought about it a bit some more, then let's steer away from that specific part of the conversation. I don't know. If Saudi Aramco Nukes Tech.

Yeah. Exactly. Seal Club Inc, if they brush them I wouldn't have been No.

They're doing really well with their open source libraries.

They they actually built the pprof. I'm sure. So anyway, congrats about that. We

We really

wanna get into it and what happens in the future. But just in case someone, you know, wants to understand this news but doesn't know what Ventas really is. And they we don't wanna send it back to old episodes. Can you give, like, a one minute summary of what this open source project is and why is it so big?

I can't promise 1 minute. Basically, what we had so for about 10 years, I've been working on this open source project. It's a stream processor. If you don't really know what that is, it's basically something that reads from message queues and things like Kafka and your NATs and RabbitMQ, that kind of stuff. And what I built is a sort of engine for doing all that stuff with the decorative config.

Pretty fresh.

Yeah. So are you gonna stay on the team? Will you be still working there, or are you going to the Bahamas now and you're done?

No. I'm staying I'm staying on it. I don't have to, but I'm staying I'm sticking around. I mean, my my intention now is to build out enough people who so there there's, like, lots of different groups of people that I can I can create, I can spawn? So there's obviously people who just are able to support Red Panda Connect users. Red Panda Connect is a lot, so I'm I'm starting to shorten that to, rednecked. Just the the red at the beginning and the necked at the end. Redneck. Alright.

We need we need Jeff Foxworthy on here now.

Yeah. I can hear the the radio, ads already. Right? Like, banjo twang. Welcome, y'all.

Shout out to all my, southern US friends.

Do you know I I have to do do this. Do you know that, in old Unix I'm not sure if it's Unix or Linux, but really old distributions. Redneck was a language. Like, you could install it in English, like Spanish, French, Hebrew, like whatever, Russian, and redneck. Not as a joke. 1 of the engineers was a redneck and it'll be like, yep. Nope. Because in the I'll look that up.

There's a screenshot here I found. In 1998, Red Hat had redneck as a language option.

Yeah. Yeah. Red.

Oh, okay.

It could happen.

Damn. That means I can't I can't trademark it. But, yeah, anyway, so I'm I'm trying to I'm I'm building out people who can help support. Because right now, it's the developers who work on the Bentos ecosystem, and they they are also in the questions channels, the Discords, the Slacks, answering all the questions. And most of the time, you're you're you're basically consulting for free.

We're not

gonna spend half an hour every morning answering some random consulting questions. So the idea is we're gonna expand the number of people who can help, just generally help, and understand the the service. Then we're expanding the people who can work on it. Because right now, there's lots of people who've contributed features on top of the engine. So people who are adding, like, fields to connectors and documentation and a new connector here and there.

I really love the the the, like, student listening to the show being, like, the guy who just sold his 10 year project to a reputable streaming company. Like, no. I'm not a professional.

My family are like, did you did Ash, did you sell the blobfish? Is that what's happened?

So

They they didn't get

any Yeah.

So I'm curious. Before this acquisition, how much of your time was dedicated to this? Was this full time for you?

Yeah. Well okay. So full time is so the the public face of what's happening, right, is a fraction of my time spent on the project as a whole because what I'm having to do to survive is spin all these plates, not just for my current income, but also, like, trying to figure out what am I gonna do in, like, a year? And what what Mhmm. What am I gonna live off in a year's time?

Just because of

that? Working on Benfoss Studio, which is like a complete closed source, spin off thing, which is basically a visual UI for it, which I like, that was bay that was my big plan for the neck. For for essentially this year and last year was to try and monetize that. But, again, it's it's the procurement that ends up killing me.

So now that the acquisition is done, are you employed by Red Panda? Or okay.

Yeah.

And

Yeah. So I'm

badge and everything? Company badge, company uniform?

Company badge yet. I got a laptop.

Oh, there you go.

Damn. I'll

just fight my way into a physical office. It's everything. But, yeah, I've I've got a a official title. I'm Connect technical

lead. Alright.

So I'm I'm running the the project to to continue, you know, working on this thing, expanding the team, expanding the resources. And then, like, I'm still gonna be doing the pull request features, all that stuff.

So from one day to the next, the main thing that changed was who pays your salary. Yeah. But but over the coming months, you're building a bigger team to help offload a lot of those tasks.

But but also all that time I was spending on trying to, like, essentially solve next year's income Mhmm. I no longer have to spend any time on any

of that.

I've now got a there's a sales team that I can hand stuff over to. There's, you know, there's sales engineers that I can liaise with, and, you know, I don't have to worry about any of that stuff now. That's great. So, I mean, that's that's freed up a huge amount of my time. Obviously, I've just joined this company, and I'm getting all of them up to speed.

Awesome. That's nice. We're laughing because, the the fire was just scared. Yeah. The thumbs up and

Yeah. And do you see a difference or I guess, what differences do you see between stewarding, you know, a herd of open source cats developers, in trying to direct this sort of open source chaotic energy versus, you know, a team, in a company that, like, has a purpose. I'm trying to abbreviate the the title as well. So your rednecktied, your Red Petna Connect technical leadership is probably a lot more I get that you've only been there a week. Maybe that's an unfair question.

there's gonna be aspects of it. Yeah. So there there's obviously gonna be, like, enterprise features that we're gonna wanna have, to unblock customers and, you know, the the usual business y stuff. Those are obviously gonna be things that we're gonna try and fit in on a deadline. There's also gonna be open source features that we're I mean, same same applies.

to do

the stuff. But if it was something that was good for the project, there's been times where that's that's been the relation we've had. So it's it's kind of like having employees light.

Mhmm.

And as long as you're respectful and everybody is kind of on the same page, then, you know, that's that's kind of what you're doing. So I guess you're kind of like it it's the training wheels version of running a team where you're using, you know, motivation and mission to get that sort of stuff done. Whereas now I can just say, money next week or now.

So I I wanna talk a little bit about the acquisition. So Red Panda bought Bentos. Did you approach them? Did they approach you?

I've known Alex for, like, 5 years. There there was other suitors. It was kinda funny because any anybody following my movements for, like, 2 2 months ago, I think it was, I was at I was at Kafka Summit hanging out with the WarpStream guys at their booth. And then, you know, I'm, like, spending a week in San Francisco. And everybody anybody that I'm interacting with online can just track my movements to see what's happening.

You don't need to answer this. I mean, I'm gonna speculate. I'm pretty sure I'm right on this. The reason you chose Red Panda is because of their logo. It's an animal. And that is, with the Bentos eat ethos of animal logos.

They kind they kind of fit. I've already so there's obviously been loads of fans making, mashups of the 2 logos. In terms of in terms of mascot to, to blobfish ratio, it's actually pretty good, I would say. Definitely good. Better than better than any of the other candidates because, I mean, cute mascots is hard to get anyway. Obviously, the red panda is very cute.

Yeah. We wouldn't know because we knocked it out on the park, like, the first first try, but I assume for other people it's hard.

Same. I just slapped a plodfish together. It's been the same for, like, 10 years. But, yeah, it's it's a good brand. It fits fits very well with my brand vision, I think is what they say. The brand ecosystem. The cine I keep saying the cinematic universe of blobfish. It kinda fits.

The VCU.

They cut yeah. They they're compatible.

And, you know, the the acquisition basically means, you know, some people have been worried about, wait, acquisition, does that mean all the open source work is going away? You mentioned that the core is saying MIT license, which basically, you know, if you don't wanna get into the legalese means open source and you don't have to worry about it too much because it's not the Red Hat license where it's copy left. And some of the plugins are enterprise, which makes sense, you know, Red Panda have to sell something. And the rest of it is Apache 2. Now Apache 2 is kind of a new kid on the block.

No. That is is Apache v 2 is just basic I mean, it's basically MIT with a bit more legalese around it. So, I mean, you can do whatever you want. AWS could take all of that if they wanted to.

Oh, really?

Don't AWS. Yep. Apache 2 is,

the people from, AWS on the on the on the podcast. You know

what I mean? At least Tell them no. Don't a actually, no. Go ahead. Go to town. Take take all the connectors, I think. Yeah. So the the the move so, basically, the move from MIT to Apache 2, I don't know why. I was fine with it because it's basically the same license. MIT is obviously more is is less wording, so you you have even fewer protections, like, for what you're sharing.

You're paying for it multiple times over because your data's getting leaked.

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Of the week. Or maybe they're making money from that. I don't know. Maybe you get a kickback if you take it away. I don't know what joke. Don't you hear me?

Insurance companies are the one pocketing all the the difference. Trust me. Cyber insurance.

Guess. Yeah. But, yeah, that that's the mentality. Obviously, we're we're already working on expanding them. I mean, peep people were, obviously hyper aware on the day of, well, you've just relicensed enterprise on something that was MIT, which is a 100% correct.

on that, I would have to go and fish out, the with the Splunk server.

Right? Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Because I can't I can't run And there's no there's there's not really a lot of tooling for I think there is, like, a a VM you can run now. But I I remember at the time somebody was asking me about it. I was like, I can't I can't do anything for you. Sorry. But, yeah, obviously, now we've got the resources. But, yeah, so there's there's 2 two components that have been enterprise licensed.

What's the use case for, like, I get why you would want all the processors because I don't see them as, like, super heavy and you oh, suddenly, I have protobuf. Suddenly, I just I wanna start playing on the blah blank, whatever. But why would you need all the inputs and outputs? Like, I can't imagine a system that gets I don't want to imagine a system that has Cassandra, Discord, the Twitter, SQL, Mongo, and HDFS as the inputs.

I just, like, please tell me my website.

So the I think the the the main reason is, so I've got a bit of insight into this. But, basically, when when you're a company that's big enough, you've got teams all over the world that have all grown independently. So they all they all use different tools and services. Some of them came in through acquisition. So they, you know, they they made all these decisions before they were part of the company.

Yeah. Wow. With all the dependencies on, like, I assume the core engine is, like, you know, kinda tiny.

Yeah. Yeah. I think I think it is. I think it's pretty small.

So you mentioned It

is all the client libraries. Specifically, AWS is pretty big.

I saw you have, Azure. I remember I really hope you don't have to ever do as part of, you know, a client to deal whatever the, Microsoft Graph API as an input. Because let me tell you, man. They just took the entire c sharp codebase, and I don't know what they did do it. They, like, transpiled it into Go, and their Go package is, like, 2 and a half gigs if you add it to your build.

Oh, yeah.

Internal Red Panda integrations. I don't know. Is the studio, like, getting a front, like, you know, it's gonna be front and center, the UI stuff? Like, what's going on? What's the what what are Bento's, fans, should look forward to now that you they don't have to worry about you, you know, ending up on the street?

There's, so console is another product we got. It's open source, Red Panda console. That is already able to give you a an editor with autocomplete for Pentos configs.

Damn.

So they've been they've been working on that at the same time that, you know, we were working on the, repo split. There's also tooling around. We're probably gonna take Studio and just, like, break it up into bits because there's lots of problems that I solved with Studio that will probably fit in different places better than than just having one central thing. But, yeah, I mean, we're definitely gonna start moving, some of that good stuff out into better kind of, like, tools that we can give people. But, I mean, the the console, editing experience is is is like, people have been asking me for autocomplete for years, and I I basically just put my hands up and said, I'm I can't do it.

I'm really excited when you said performance because the the the moment you say, okay. My thing is stable enough. And when I say my thing, I mean, your business and both, like, both your business and your project are stable enough that I can, like, I just wanna come to work one day and profile it and make it better. Yeah. That that means that it's actually providing so much value for so many people that humanity has, like, okay, little funny man, sit in your box and make it better.

think blog posts. I'm pretty small. I'm pretty small. You need to meet me at a summit. I think you'll tower over me.

I'm a pretty tall guy. Yeah.

I like it that way. I don't like being in

the middle. Tall Jonathan is, but I'm gonna find out in 2 weeks. Oh, come

to Amsterdam. Okay.

Let's hang out. Well, actually I'm

actually not far.

No. Not too far. Oh. What?

Off the record, we're gonna we're gonna course you to to come. What's wrong?

What do you

One last question about the, you know, Red Panda stuff. You, said you knew these guys, like, before, and they actually sponsored a project and and things like that. Like, where did you meet them? Just through Bentos, or, you know, did you go to high school with these guys?

No. I didn't go to school. The, the I mean, you you end up just kind of, like, mingling through, like, blogs and stuff. So I I remember when Red Panda was announced, publicly. It was it was when it was, like, fresh, and my immediate reaction was, I can finally run Kafka integration tests.

I said,

oh, no. That's almost 5 years ago. Yeah. But back when I was a little and back when I was a little kiddo, yeah, I I didn't really have any, like, interaction with the the the bigger, more established tools because, you know, I was kind of like this organic developer driven. I didn't really have any, like, corporate presence.

I heard someone say that's the only thing they're good for.

No. Not me.

No. No. No.

I wouldn't say that.

I wanna ask one question that might be a little bit sensitive. The day after the announcement, warp stream announced that they had forked Pentos. I don't wanna go into too many details there that their announcement was, I don't know, a little bit adversarial. What are your thoughts? And I'll just leave it open like that.

So the like I said, that month was a bit wild. Obviously, I was hanging out with WarpStream. I still I I like all the WarpStream people, personally. They're in a difficult spot because so I think, essentially, the big the big thing that happened is people discovered that Kafka Connect is bad. It's like a it's like a product to sell.

Mhmm.

And the beauty of it is there's an MIT licensed core engine. And if you fork all the connectors and put whatever license you want on it and support it however you want, it will compile with that engine, and other people can pull components from either. So they they could mix and match any vendor's connectors. That was always the plan from from the technical perspective, but what they've chosen to do is do, like, a monolithic fork of the whole thing. So they they have a monolithic repo right now, which is just everything in one thing, which isn't decentralized.

I think the we had a Ohad on the show from env0 and I think from sort of the other side of the of the fort. Right? They, Infzero and some other companies, were the people who forked Terraform into, OpenTofu. Now this is obviously not the same because, Terraform was monolithically open source and then monolithically source available, and this is a lot more open sourcey than that. Like, Red Panda Connect is a lot more open source than, Terraform is right now, for sure.

Yeah.

But I think, like, with Open Tofu, we're seeing, you know, in a few we still need to let it cook for, like, a year or 2 until we finally see see the results. But overall, I think it sort of stresses out, the core developers, like the actual people, like you said, in the gnarly bits to make sure that their side of the fork is really good. Basically, competition 101. Yeah.

Competition.

It's and in the long term, it's not like these two projects are gonna live side by side for 15 years now, and, you know, we're we're gonna invest a ton of time into both of them. It's gonna get lost. It's not it's not the case. Right? So I think I sort of agree with you that it's kinda mad just because I saw the, announcement.

Yeah. Exactly. It's it's difficult because it's like you've got the competition side, The fragmenting of the sort of ecosystem around it was probably gonna happen anyway because I think that there was, like what I predicted was gonna happen was people who were just they they cannot tolerate, a company running a project, especially one that has to make money and is part of the capitalist system. So it's like they they have a a problem with that, and, you know, I I was expecting people to have kind of, like, community forks. And they're they're kind of there to keep the project honest.

You know

what I mean? It's like it's not really that we're gonna diverge. We're not gonna do a bunch of changes that means we've completely diverged from your other project, but it's more just we're gonna keep this thing here, and it's gonna be known in the community as, like, you know, the the project x. It's just some extra thing that people are aware of. And the idea is that if Red Panda ever became bad stewards, then this is the thing that people could just flock to.

They might not knock you out of the park with features.

Well, yeah. Like, obviously, I can I can just keep slapping on features and pull requests and stuff, which is obviously the intention anyway? But the the thing I would personally be scared of, as the you know, this is kind of like my baby is is the idea of just willy nilly stripping out stuff from the engine in the name of, you know, benchmark numbers and just rolling out features from, like, a competitive standpoint and basically racing to the bottom of you you essentially eliminating guarantees. Because there's there's stuff in the Benthos engine that I know is critical for the 2 AM pages. So, like, the delivery guarantees that Bentos has is completely unnecessary for a product that you're putting out there and giving to people.

Yeah. Right.

Maybe it'll work out.

So, Ash, you're actually, the first repeat interviewee that we have, that's gonna get both questions, stumper questions. Last year our stumper question was, what feature would you reap out from Go, and what, feature would you steal from another language? When we ended up with a full feature list on both columns, we were like, okay. We need to rephrase this. And I'm actually interested to know when you started learning Go, what was difficult or surprising for you?

No. So I was I was a c plus plus kid. Did a bit of c sharp, and then went back to c plus plus, and then Go. And that was pretty much it from that point onwards. It was about I think it was about 2016. No. It's actually must have been early. No. It was probably 2014, Maybe 2013 I started using Go. You can look at because it so that library I've got, Tunny, that's pretty much I made that immediately when I started learning Go.

1st commit, March 23, 2015, but the copyright is 2014.

That's probably I probably,

Copied it

over from somewhere else. Rebased it or something? Yeah. Yeah. 2014 is probably about maybe the end of 2014. Let's find this out. We need this right now.

This is not this

is not that good of a code, I have to say, like, first, first commit from 2015. So, when you came in to go, what was, like, difficult for you to to grok and and wrap your head around? Or maybe what was surprising for you?

The thing I didn't like was, lack of some slash enums slash union types, whatever people want. Like, depending on your language is what you'll know it has. But it was it was that because, I wanted to do JSON parsing, and I found it really weird that it it has to pull things out into, you know, generic maps and generic arrays rather than, like, a some type where you can make it more explicit because that's just what I was used to. And then I found it really weird that, like, if you've got a generic map, why is there no syntax for just walking it? That blew my mind because it's like, this seems like everybody's gonna hit this.

the bootstraps.

Yeah. Make yourself a library for it.

Write another for

it. Generics.

I think a lot of that's finally coming in 1.23.

Yeah. If you're, the new ASH joining, you know, to go right now 10 years later, you'll get the Range Rover funk and all this, generics nonsense, and you can build

it up. Nonsense.

I don't know. Russ Russ needs to keep himself busy somehow. You know? You need another connector on top of your 220 connectors, and Russ needs a seek 3 iteration.

I'm moving on to Zig.

There we go. That'll solve all the problems. Yep.

Ash, thanks all for coming, man. Again, Thanks

for taking our call.

Yeah. For taking our call.

Never again.

Not on this number.

I'll I'll burn this on after we hang up.

I've only had this SIM for a week.

Again, I really wanna congratulate you on this, you know, we can dive into the technical details and and what happened, what's gonna happen, whatever. But I think a congratulation is in order. You mentioned somewhere doing this interview, an end of a journey, and I really, really feel, this marks a big, stone in your journey. I don't know if it's the end of it, but it's a really, really cool one. And I think it's a really big success story for open source and people who work on open source and, you know, have some sponsors and and are thinking about long term what they can do, can really look into your just tireless work on this well, I don't know if tireless, but very

I was very lazy at times.

Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, like, relentless, dude. Working on the same project with the same, tone for many, many years, and having just this recognition. By the way, both the fork people and red red panda people and just random people on Hacker News, every nobody's like, yeah, but maybe the engine's not good. Everyone no. Asher's code is pretty great. Right?

And the logo's good. Everybody unanimously loves the logo.

Yeah. For sure.

More so than the engine.

Well, it's less gnarly. You know what I mean? It's cuter. So we just really wanna congratulate you, man.

Well, thank you for having me on. It's been great.

Do it again next week

to solve a business.

Yeah. Next next question.

No. Thank you. I think I'm done.

Alright. Thanks a lot, Ash.