Hello and welcome to Priority Zero, a Lead Dev Engineering Leadership podcast. I'm your host, Scott Carey, and today I'm joined by Anil Dash. I'm going to take a deep breath before I do this part because Anil is a developer, blogger, podcaster, entrepreneur. advisor to the obama administration and now head of glitch and vp of developer experience at fastly which is through an acquisition we will probably talk about and he is also a scholar of the musician prince he lives here in new york city
Neil, thanks so much for coming on. Thanks so much for having me. Before we get started, tell me about how you became a scholar of Prince. I mean, some of this is just a function of age. I feel like any of us who were alive in the 80s, you just couldn't avoid. I mean, I think it was, you know, Michael Jackson.
and Madonna, Prince, like all these folks. And to me, actually probably for this, for your audience in particular, I love the music and I love the performance and all that kind of stuff. And this was sort of a great, you know, pop artist.
He was a real geek. He really loved the internet. He was really cutting edge at how he used technologies. Stuff that, you know, we take for granted of like, oh, you know, Taylor Swift has Taylor's version now. Like a lot of that stuff around intellectual property and ownership and distribution. He was.
experimenting with as much as he was experimenting with the music and so it was sort of like the two halves of the brain come together so I couldn't not be enchanted and then the other part I think probably pertinent to this you know is Like a lot of folks, like I found a fandom community and you find the other people. And in that case, they were later. I would find out this person I knew because we would go to a show was like.
you know, a senior exec at Google or, you know, a policymaker at the White House or like, you know, they have their other life. But they found this thing that was either resonant because of the art or that was intellectually interesting or just fun because you're in community. So, yeah, that's definitely.
the hook I've never thought of Prince as like the geeks pop star but I can see the connection oh yeah yeah music nerds for sure are like even if they're like not a fan of the music they're like I get what he was doing that's really interesting so that's cool yeah
Me and producer Justin were just talking about movies in the 80s and obviously Purple Rain being an absolute stone cold classic. All right, we're here to talk about engineering, not prints, unfortunately. Absolutely. But Anil, you've been doing this for quite a while.
I want to go all the way back. When did you get that first inkling that software was something you'd be interested in? You know, it's funny. It's another 80s story. You know, I was lucky enough. My folks are immigrants to the States and, you know, had gotten onto it. solid enough ground by the time. Where from? From India. So then from the eastern region of India. India is sort of a diamond shape or the eastern point of that estate called Odisha. And, you know, family's all still there.
They had come, my dad had come actually quite early, 1963. And so they had just gotten sort of on solid ground enough to be able to like, you know, sister, like take care of the two of us and then say like, let's get. You know, let's get them ready for life. So let's get them a computer. And so I was.
Gosh, I couldn't have been more than five or six years old and we got a Commodore computer. Classic. And actually, people talk about the Commodore 64, which I think is still the best-selling individual computer model of all time. We actually had its predecessor, a VIC-20. And the thing I try to explain to my kid or people I mentor is the entire memory on that machine was 5K. I couldn't fit my profile picture.
Yes. Into the entire machine. Yeah. And you were trying to learn, but you would boot it up and it would go right into Microsoft basic. And, you know, I think the thing that's hard to understand now where we're, you know, you're two taps away from a two gigabyte app downloading.
It's like if you didn't create software on the device, there was no software on the device. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. And so out of necessity, you know, you do the thing. And then that feeling, which I think still feels the same way when I get something to build, when I get something to compile of. I can type this in and it's going to light up and do the thing I said. And also I will have the bug that I made. You know, I made the thing and I still feel the way I felt as a kindergartner.
right which is like I can make something in the world you know and I'm not I might not have you know whatever I'm not I'm not a great athlete I can't sing I can't do the things but in this space I can make something that didn't exist before and and then eventually actually short order data commerce 64 got those other computers and got online and i think the thing people forget is before there was the web yeah there was this sort of proto internet and so being able to connect again as a kid
to local community online, downloading apps, trying, you know, we call them programs then. Connecting, like just finding ideas, being able to research things, share code, all those things. They're very, very primitive versions, but the behavior. of when I was in grade school is not substantially different from the motivation I have when I'm making something today or when I look at a project like I've been working on Glitch for years, I look at an app that pops up.
It's that same feeling. So I think that that was really instilled at an early age at the same time as I was discovering that I loved music, that I love to watch a great film, that I love to read a great book. Like this was a creative medium and you could. know the creators at that time. Yeah. And I think that's one of the other things that sort of jumps out is you would have, this is a niche reference, but I think people will get it, that the Atari video game consoles were popular with them too.
And they had, Activision was the first sort of independent publisher. And they put the names of the creators of the games onto the cartridges and into the manuals. And so my experience was... it was no different than an author of a book. It was no different than the director of a film. And so I got a view that I think a lot of people who've come up, you know, if you started a kid that's been using, that's 10 years old, has been using the modern internet their whole lives.
The idea that the tech on my phone, the apps on my laptop or whatever are made by a person who made choices is almost completely abstracted away. yeah but my introduction to it was i was connecting with these people who had made something in the way that i could make something and theirs was fancier but i can make something and that still is like the animating thing that that feels like
one of the most empowering discoveries of my life. It feels like an idea that's kind of getting momentum, this idea of like video game authors as authors. It's definitely come back into the popular, you know, I think imagination. Yeah, I think like... Like the complexity of designing and getting a video game out there is possibly not akin to even like a blockbuster movie, maybe like a Marvel movie. But yeah, it's an interesting theory.
And at what point did it go from like tinkering hobbyists to like, I could make a career out of this? Fairly quickly. Again, being the child immigrants, we had a, my folks had a side business they needed a billing system for. We'd gotten to the next Commodore, which was a Commodore 128. And, you know, it was basically duct tape and a mail merge and a very primitive office suite. I didn't have Microsoft Office yet, but I built a billing system for my dad.
You know, when I was probably in junior high school. Yeah. And. How do you learn to do it? Textbooks? Yeah. You know, this is such an interesting thing. The software had manuals. Yeah. You know, so you could read a manual for a word processor to be like, here's how to mail merge data from your spreadsheet.
And bring it in. And then a lot of trial and error, for sure. I mean, that's basic programming. Exactly. I mean, again, that hasn't changed that much. We have Stack Overflow now, but it wasn't that distinct. And so...
um and also it wasn't that advanced either right like so much value this is the thing it's hard to remember now at that time like still you're still maybe in the first decade of spreadsheets existing yeah so so much of what you're unlocking is like the basic the kind of like primitives of
consumer computation are just like a word processor exists a spreadsheet exists like we think of those as like the air we breathe yeah but when they're new so much value got unlocked by that that if you just could steer these things slightly and you know like i said you know duct tape them together yeah you can make something so that was it and then by the time i was in high school we had um there was a i saw this ad in the paper and it was somebody saying like
Basically, we help us put together computers like you get the motherboards and the chips and do what I was doing. I'm just doing this for, you know, Mojave. Yeah. And I interviewed with a guy that eventually became my first business partner. But at that time, you know, I was like 15 years old or something. And he's like, can you do this?
You know, we'll pay you this much. And I was like, look, I would do this for the same rate as flipping burgers. Right. This is way less hard and way more fun and way more interesting.
And that led down the path where they're like, oh, you can code too. I was like, yeah, I mean, of course, you know, you got to be able to do this stuff and started working on projects. And eventually that guy who hired me when I was 15 or 16, right the day after graduating high school, we started a business together.
you know, making software for some sort of vertical applications and stuff. And that was how I sort of brought what I knew about machines and computers and tech into being an entrepreneur, you know, really from a very young age. Yeah, and we'll talk about how you're adapting to life at a company the size of Fastly, but most of your career, I believe, it kind of stayed in that startup world. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that was always my default, really just out of personality and temperament.
I have a real appreciation for what they're, you know, the trillion dollar companies, there's certain things only they can do, you know, and, and, and I actually was very much a student of. At that era, it was Microsoft and Apple, right? And I would read every book and every magazine and every interview with any of them. And I still to this day, like one of my.
greatest heroes and mentors in my career has been Dan Bricklin who invented VisiCalc in the first spreadsheet. And I told him the first time I met him, like I have the articles I clipped of like, you know, here's an interview. And he's like, like, shouldn't you have been like looking at like football players or, you know?
And I just was like, I mean, I also had, like, I was reading about the, you know, who was on MTV. Yeah. But it was the same thing to me. Like, I just, I revered those folks. And what's been extraordinary to me is like, and I'm a little older, probably a lot of folks that are listening, but like, I.
have gotten to be in peer relationships with those people. And so you talk to people who are like, before you did this work, the spreadsheet didn't exist. The app for which the phrase killer app was invented. Yeah. Right. And so to have that sort of spring forth from your head, you build the thing. And at that time, they're like, you have to put it in a box and ship it to people, like all those things. But there are folks who are still working.
and still building apps and you can email them and they respond. And whether it's somebody that invented PowerPoint or like whatever you want to point to. I think that sense of accessibility and like these were really humanized people. And that they were so casual then too, right? Because if you would read an interview with Bill Gates in like 1985, it's just some guy that had a company. It wasn't like the cultural figure or whatever. Where's the kid?
Yeah. Yeah. And so as a kid, you're just like, I could do that. Yeah. Like you just, it doesn't seem like this, like you're not trying to be the richest person in the history of the world or to, you know, cure malaria. Are you just like, I want to.
I want to make something. And there are people like me who are older, but they made something. And at that time also, so much of the story was, oh, they're so young. Yeah. Right. Like Bill Gates drops out of college. Like that's the first time somebody has that story of like, you can be a teenager and make something cool. It's really touching on something because I was reading Ed Zitron the other day and he was talking about kind of the...
He wrote a big blog post about generative AI and just like kind of all the kind of nasty impacts it's going to have on the industry. But what he wasn't talking directly about, what it got me thinking about was this. And, you know, we put on conferences, lead their conferences. And so we're always looking for great speakers. And I feel like 20 years ago, you could go and find the guy that created the app that you use and get them to come on stage. And I find that.
less and less i find that we're less and less able to do that to find that person that is linked to that thing um because it's not how it's made anymore you know i think very much about um i was part of a cohort of folks that very early on adopted south by southwest as one of our big community events right and um
and i had known that conference because i had been in the music business and that was originally a like you take your band there and you hope to play a showcase and get discovered and get a record deal and all those kinds of things but the internet people I mean they literally called it South by Southwest multimedia the first year I went later they called it interactive and and and the first years we went we were practitioners so we were like
Should a website have comments? And if so, how should they work? And how might we anticipate the problems that we're covering? Those are the kinds of discussions. Or literally... CSS might be a thing, what would we do if it is? There's these topics that sound like such basic conversations, but they were about the practice. They were about the craft of building.
a site, an app, a tool, a community, whatever it was. And so they were closer to if it had been on the music side about learning to play guitar or drums. Rather than I already have a band, how do I get signed? Yes. And then what changed after Twitter took off or Foursquare was like a big hit back then was now you were taking your app there to be discovered.
and to be promoted. So the Y Combinator effect, right? Yeah, and it was definitely the acceleration of the VC based mindset of Y Combinator and all those things. But also I think it was a... a difference in why you were doing it, right? Because one of the things that was great was like, so at that era, I helped build some of the early blogging tools, like they were called Movable Type and LiveJournal, and those were very popular, kind of like the WordPress of their day, right?
And then there were people building other similar tools. So Matt Mullen was building WordPress. And there was like Ev Williams and his team building Blogger. But we all knew each other. So the idea is we were doing a thing. And you might be like, well, I have this feature and you have that. That's a competitive thing.
But the sense was we were in community and there was a set of norms around what do you collaborate on, including, and this is an old-fashioned idea, but like open standards, open protocols. There should be the ability to own your data and transfer to control your environment, do those things. But also, well, you simply wouldn't transgress against the community in certain ways. If somebody had been systematically surveilling their users and misusing their data...
you would be mortified to go to a party with them. Yes. Right. Because you would be like, that's a horrible thing that you did. Why would you do that to people? Right. And so it acted as a really great, you know, gating factor. There are a lot of.
challenges with that. That is the thing I just described that is a good social control is also if you squint at it, an old boys network of very privileged people. I'm not unaware. It's a double-edged thing. But the power of community is that you can call people in. And say, that's not the done thing. That's simply not how we act. And you can feel the social weight of ostracism. And I think so much of the shift, in addition to...
Everything is just about a performance to promote your thing. You don't want to be out there as a creator. They don't have any say. You're not in collaboration or community with people. But also so much of the radicalization of especially the sort of VC cohort. is that they have no ability to take that criticism. They're not a community of people. And so they react fairly violently. Incredibly sensitive. Right? When, at mild criticism.
Because I used to be a fairly mild critic because I would be in the room with the folks and I would be like, oh, you probably shouldn't do that. And they would act like I slapped them in the face. And I'm a much more pointed critic because I've been around longer and seen the harms in those things. But I think...
They still like the defining trait is their inability to be in community with people in a way that people are going to give you feedback. And the funny thing about that is like that's bug reports. That's basic. That's a pull request. That's the, you know, the even the like prior to GitHub, the mailing list where you say, here's a bug that I found. And can you be a person who says a bug report is a gift?
And I think that's the thing that an engineering culture understands innately, like a resilient, anti-fragile infrastructure that you want to build that's going to sustain over time or an experience that you want to build that's going to be meaningful over time. You have to see a bug report as a gift you're grateful for. You know, maybe they could be nicer about it. But like that's the piece. And I think that's the biggest change is that so people.
So I'm not surprised you have challenged finding the person that made the app because there's sort of two parts to that. One is I don't want to be accountable. I don't want to be a person who can be called in, called out for the mistakes that I make. It can be hard. I mean, I've faced lots of mostly valid criticism about, you know, app choices. I wish you hadn't done this and that, right? It's very rarely the more fundamental structural things. But I think it's also the...
There's an element of vulnerability to it. And can you choose to be confident enough and trusting enough to be vulnerable in front of maybe millions of people? Yeah. If that's how many people are using your app or your platform, if you're lucky enough to have that kind of base. I feel that every day. Like I have a platform that millions of people use. And how do I be accountable to them in the best possible way? The ideal is they should never have to think about me.
Yeah. Right. You know, like it should never be an issue. But if they do, they should be like, well, they're trying their best. Yeah. That's as good as it gets. And can you feel that way?
Yeah. And it feels like in your career, you kind of gravitated towards a few kind of domains, typically in like the music or the media and business. Did you like... do that on purpose was that because that's an area that you were kind of passionate about and you thought oh if I'm going to do this technical job I might as well do it in an area that I find interesting yeah I don't know how else to be you know I think I not I would have never fit in at well
It's a relatively new thing where I talk to like people I'll be mentoring early career and they'll say something like, I just want to work at a fang company. Okay. Yeah. Right. And I'm like, I don't like it is a category error.
Yeah. Right. Like what Netflix does in the world has nothing to do with what Facebook does in the world. Right. Or Meta or whatever. And so you're like, what is your category there? And like, well, they're tech companies. I was like, well, what company is not a tech company? Right. you know, they employ coders. That's not having anything in common, right? And so that's so intellectually confusing to me because of the way I look at it, which is like, what are the things that I am...
moved by, motivated by, almost to the point of irrationality. Like, why do I get up in the morning? Because there's things I love. I love community. I love to, you know, collaborate with people. Like when people share ideas, I love music and the arts. You know, there's things. And so...
Yeah, I mean, I worked at a newspaper, but in the newspaper, I was the tech guy helping me get the stories out. And I worked the music industry, but there I was helping me get the music out. You know, like it's sort of this like I love to be in a place of find creative people who have a unique idea in the world.
support their creativity by giving them the technology tools that they might not have because they're trying to be a musician not a technologist they're trying to be a writer and not a technologist and that's sort of the the superpower like this is the and it's very parallel to me we're talking about like I'm a New Yorker I live on the Lower East Side there's a really really part of the reason I love it so much there's a decades and centuries long
tradition of community support for the creative arts. So, you know, there are fundamental milestone moments in the birth of hip hop, the birth of contemporary jazz, the birth of punk music that all happened I'm a big indie guy. So, you know, the strikes. Exactly. And it's all within like blocks of where I'm raising my child because there's this long history. And also, you know, I live in a cooperative housing complex that like workers unions garment.
workers unions in the forties built. Yeah. You know, so there's, there's just this in the DNA of the community. We have a community garden. And anybody can plant whatever they want and take whatever they want. And it works. And it's the thing that everybody would say would never function in a city like New York. And it really does. And so I think that's like the cultural context into which I look at like.
Technology can be in dialogue with the arts and with community organizing and civic planning and, you know, safe streets and like all these other movements that that might not be immediately obvious. But like, why did so many coders we know. are like really you know evangelical about bike riding.
Yeah. Or about baking bread. Oh, good. Or about their, you know, their garden or about, you know, and like, why do we have these synchronicities of like the, the Ruby coder to woodworker pipeline? Yeah. Right. And it's because the creative arts are. the closest to the ethos we have of why we create with tech. And then there are people who are like, I looked at a spreadsheet, I found where the largest opportunity was. It said that technology was the way to do it.
coin tosses to whether I would do that or go into finance. I picked one and that was the one I picked. And like, I don't, I struggle with it. Like I don't morally judge that. Like if somebody's saying I want to provide opportunity to my family, of course that makes sense. But it is so foreign to I did this when I was broke. I did this when nobody liked it. I did this when it was painfully uncool. I did this when when when it was hard. Yeah. And and.
But it was more like I'm good at something and I'm interested in this area, so I'm going to bring it there. And also I liked the people who were doing it for similar reasons. I found to be incredibly meaningful and challenging collaborators who were intellectually honest and who would hold me accountable. Yeah. And who, when I did make a mistake, did call me out, but in a way where they wanted me to fix it. Yeah. You know, and I think that kind of thing.
It's been erased from the narrative of what tech is. Yeah. And it's hard to find a job in that, to be clear. Like, I think everybody's like, you got to do the thing that pays the bills. Like, I don't judge anybody if you're like... You're at a big company, you're like, this is what I got to do because I get to practice my craft doing this thing. And on the weekends, I built my own project. I think that's a very fair trade-off. Every great musician started with a day job, every great artist.
you know um had that thing so i don't i don't you know have a criticism of that but i think that's the thing it's like as much as possible i've been trying to craft a career and make space for others now to build careers where they get to do work they're proud of in the long term And I look back and I don't have, you know, as is going to be the case, and this is the thing I'll say, like I'm not, you know, I'm in my 40s. So like I'm older than a lot of people in tech, but I'm not like 80. Yeah.
And already, most of the lines of code I've ever written have been erased, have been replaced. Most of the designs I've done for apps have been thrown away. you know product requirements document i've ever created is in it isn't the trash in google docs right so like the it's all ephemeral yeah but i also i was at
We were talking earlier, I was at the XOXO Festival in Portland, which is like a celebration of indie culture. And I had people come up to me, I'd never met, say like, oh, he worked on this app 20 years ago and helped me start my blog. And then I made this friend and that got me to a job.
And it opened the door. And, you know, it's so meaningful. But also, here's an interesting thing. I didn't do anything with that. Like, that's a thing that they did. But they felt like the technology empowered them. And they wanted to have that dialogue. But they wouldn't have that conversation about somebody that makes their pencil. No. Right? It's because of that unique thing that tech does of feeling like I can do something I couldn't do before.
Yeah, it's not a tech thing, but I listened to this incredible podcast a couple of years ago with a writer and podcaster that I really love called Chris Ryan, who works for The Ringer, used to work for Grantland. He was on the Longform podcast and he started out as a blogger. And he basically, like you, had a huge amount of interest in two things, basketball and music. And he would just blog about basketball and music. And he was talking about how like...
He wasn't doing it for anyone but himself. But what it did was he discovered that it was a craft and he just got better and better and better at it. He didn't care about monetizing. He didn't care about how big the audience was. He wasn't doing it to get a job.
He got all those things eventually, but he was doing it because he loved it. And I think that we're kind of dancing around the fact that that might be going away a little bit. It comes and goes. This is the thing I say is I've been through a few cycles of this and I was... I was talking earlier to John Gruber, who does the Daring Fireball blog about Apple culture, and he's been doing it 20 years plus now.
And again, he's one of those people I'd helped him set up his blog in the early days to get like made the tool as the arms dealer for somebody doing that kind of work. Right. And, you know, that's 20 years ago, but also like two weeks ago, talking to Molly White, who does Web3 is going great. Yeah.
Right. And she's incredible. And the thing that they're very, very different. They couldn't be more different personalities or people or whatever. But the thing that ties them together in temperament is every day they show up. And they talk about the thing that they're a world expert on. And they go with passion and honesty. And people can see over time.
They really believe this. And I might not always agree, but I always think like this person believes this with conviction. And in so doing, they sort of shift the entire conversation about the biggest company in the history of the world. Or the biggest, you know, sort of financial bubble that's been blown up in recent years. Whatever you want to point to. And they're just a person at a keyboard. That is the incredible leverage that like if you have a little bit of technical knowledge.
And a lot of passion, the dedication to do it, you can do. And I just like, I can't stop being inspired by that. And I get to meet people like that through the work I do over the last 20 years is 25 years almost now. It's just like. giving people those tools over and over. And then the world, the window in which you're doing your best version of that work and the world is willing to see it.
They don't overlap right away. You know what I mean? You find the time when it starts to resonate. And I think of using the analogy we started talking about. I was a Prince fan. I started my blog 25 years ago. Around the turn of the century. It's literally just called Anil Dash, right? And at that time, people were like, that's so arrogant. You named it after yourself, right? And everyone knows that. And yeah, and it's like...
These things go in and out of fashion. But I started the blog and I just said it was a blog about like making culture. But I would write about, you know, Prince a little bit sometimes. At that time he had like changed his name to a symbol, was considered pretty much a has-been.
A little bit embarrassing. So I was like very trepidatious because you're like, why do you care about this? Like kind of has been 80s pop star or whatever. Right. And then by the time he passed, like about eight years ago or something.
He'd become the like kind of, you know, elder statesman of rock and roll. And people were like, oh, it's like a fun, interesting pop culture person. Like what Dolly Parton is. Somebody, everybody's like, there's some cool stories and everything I find out that's the, that person's kind of interesting. Even when you're like, I don't.
If you don't listen to Dolly Parton's music all the time, you probably still think she's really interesting culturally. And then to be the person writing about the thing, well, they went back and they're like, oh, it turns out there was 20 years of... thinking about this thing about this problem and so like it's points on the board like to the basketball analogy it's like just keep getting like as many shots take as many shots as you can yeah just keep getting points on the board as you do it
sometimes you don't even know why you are. You reveal to yourself why you are. And I think about friends that like, they take time off from their day job working in tech. to go learn a new programming language yeah right and and in any other discipline that would sound like madness no right and and i think for our cohort for the people that sort of connect around that idea it's like
I'm either honing my craft or I'm discovering a new version of me. I'm literally learning to speak a new language. And we think of the world through the lens of the languages we know. Growing up bilingual, that was really obvious to me.
And so I think there's a lot of those parts that are just, yeah, I still am so animated and excited by it. I get to watch with like Glitch, for example, every day people build apps and I get to see them and I'm like, I never would have thought of that. I never would have thought of building it that way. Or it's really simple and it's their first attempt, but what a new world they've walked into. And those things are like every bit as exciting as they were the first day I saw them.
It feels like a bunch of these themes of your career all came to a bit of a head when you met Joel. Spolsky of Trello and Stack Overflow fame and various other things but I think that kind of hitching your wagon to someone who is a creator who's so passionate about this stuff that clearly felt like a good marriage you ended up as the CEO of
That company that ended up becoming Glitch. Yeah. But tell me more about like how you met Joel and like how immediate did that kind of connection. Yeah. It's funny. The. The literal first time we met was, and this is sort of a very dated story, but I think charmingly so. Every blogger in New York City got together and we fit around two tables at a restaurant. And this is in 1999.
And Joel was there and I was already reading his blog. And it was funny because I was like, oh, that's that Microsoft guy. He had worked on Microsoft Excel. That was kind of his brand at the time. He'd been a product manager on Excel. And he and Michael Pryor had started a company called Quad Creek Software. They were a software consultancy. This has sort of been lost in the mists of time, but they were a software consultancy and they had a townhouse.
far from where we were recording this. And I went to see them and two or three of them in the office and they were just doing, you know, coding projects for clients. And I think this guy has an interesting point of view. I really... I took a lot of way of like there's an interesting rhetorical style where he would sort of go on. He had a blog, Joel, on software, which was, I think, honestly, the first big tech culture gathering spot. Like it felt like a must read.
in a way and and actually i think it's somewhat similar in being a predecessor to the like hacker news kind of vibe where it's like everybody read it you felt like you had to know it was there And fully 50, maybe 90 percent of the people were disagreeing or they're there to argue with something. Yeah. And I think he sort of had that.
You know, rhetorical sense of let me say something provocative and get you to respond kind of thing, which, you know, that that's the blog. Blogs are still like that. Right. Yeah. But that was that was sort of the beginning of that era. But but going and meeting Joel and Michael in person, they were so thoughtful and.
Michael couldn't be more opposite, like the most soft-spoken, very introverted kind of contemplative kind of person, but they were like a very yin and yang. And in short order, they built a bunch of different apps and tools. They built a... A bug tracking tool, which was sort of like a, really it was a direct influence on what became JIRA. Yeah. So like they sort of built a lot of those tools. I discovered today that they built something called Copilot.
Yes. So this is actually, and that's actually a really interesting sort of tangent story. They would do, almost every year, a cohort of interns come in, have an idea, build an app, give them a lot of space. It was almost like a little bit of an incubation model.
And a lot of those apps, if they didn't become a big success, they would let the creators take them off on their own. So Copilot was one of those, which was like a remote desktop control tool for doing tech support and those kinds of things. Probably today, the most valuable thing about it would have been the copilot.com domain. 100%. But it was, you know, like many things, it was very prescient. Like it was very much forecasting the future, but also a little like as was of there.
sort of cohort like very windows focused very wonky you know kind of thing but the tool was great it actually was still a going concern until a couple years ago and a lot of the alumni of that sort of Joel Spolsky cinematic universe are all still you know, in touch. And so fast forward a bit, they were in 2007 or so talking about like Joel had this huge audience of developers basically, you know.
The majority of devs in the world were kind of reading the stuff that he was out there sharing. And he'd built these other tools, the bug tracking tools that were popular, but they were still software, you know, in a way. And it was really obvious that the social web was coming and should.
be there for developers github didn't exist yet yeah um and i was at um in 2007 i was at the first ever event at microsoft where they embraced open source this is like a radical yeah i remember you know very antagonistic to linux and all those kinds of things and i was in a hallway with jeff atwood who had begun working with joel uh the two of them were the co-creators of stack overflow
And we were brainstorming names for this developer site, Q&A site. And I remember like a tablet, a paper that I think was from the event and Jeff and I writing names. And my thing was like, it's got to be like a shibboleth that like only coders will know. Yeah.
And I was like, what do we all know? It's like bugs and errors. It was really it. So it was a list of all these bugs. And Stack Overflow is the one that jumped out. I don't even know if that was the favorite I had of them, but it was like the one that was like...
If you know what this is, you know what it is. They're sort of in the community. And, you know, and Joel and Jeff built a really incredible team. They built the community. What was wild about it was, I mean, it was a few weeks in, there were a million developers on the site.
Like it was instant. There was that much latent need. And the thing that stood out to me now, the short version of the rest of that story is like I joined the board when they became their own independent company. I was on the board for its independent run. I represented the community on the board.
which, you know, everybody else is like venture capitalists and you have, you know, the first person from injuries and Horowitz and from, you know, all these things there. But I was meant to represent the community. And, you know, there's, I think the strengths and the weaknesses of it, you can go into depth. But I think one of the things that jumps out to me is.
All other things aside, one thing is what coders do is enormously valuable in the world. There is arguably no more highly compensated and powerful cohort of workers that has ever existed. than coders and programmers and engineers, right? Yeah, I agree. And no other cohort has ever collectively said, we are going to completely democratize access to the knowledge of doing what we do. And you're going to be able to see it. You source on it.
and share it. And GitHub came along in short order thereafter, but I think you think of these as two halves of a whole between GitHub and Stack Overflow. And there were also many predecessors. I think of the comments on the php.net website were my Stack Overflow when I was learning. But so there's lots of other examples. But if you think of like those as the, you know, the apotheosis of a certain era of these tools. And what they both were was enormous acts of community generosity.
and an ethos that was with we share how to do what we do so others can do it too because there's a joy in it and creativity in it and I think it is particularly like I was born in the States but like you know being of Indian descent South Asian descent One of the greatest drivers of equity, access, social mobility, economic mobility for the entire subcontinent has been access to the same information.
resources, technologies, as the wealthiest people in the world have. And it's still profound and meaningful to me. And it didn't have to go that way. It could easily have been paywalled. It could easily have been... You have to know somebody could easily have been an old boys network, you know, and there were.
To be clear, very clear structural problems in Stack Overflow. Everybody knows they're getting smacked down by a jerk. And I think those are things where they did make substantive efforts to try to improve it, but it's a hard problem once culture is set.
But at the same time... Moderation is a hell of a problem. And I have dealt with this at scale many times. The thing that jumps out to me is there is no widespread misinformation on the platform. There are never roving bands of Nazis. There's no hate movements. There's no... And like...
yeah that's a low bar but that is where the bar was yeah yeah right because they came up at the same time as there was reddit was being created and 4chan was taking off like yeah it could have gone another way and so like for all the weaknesses and and you know complaints It succeeded in one of the great democratizations of information access for personal and professional development that's ever existed. So it's pretty shocking. It's striking that it could happen and it's amazing that it did.
It leaves me with a lot of misgivings about how others are exploiting that base of knowledge now too. Yeah. And then how about Glitch? Like where did Glitch go? So yeah, the sort of the bookend of that story is like Stack Overflow was taking off. Joel was busy running that.
The same company, Fog Creek, kept doing the incubation, came up with Trello. And then Michael Pryor, the other partner, starts running that. And that becomes a massive, you know, millions of users, multi-hundred million dollar business. And so...
They were like, we're busy running these things. And they made another thing, right? And I saw this prototype. At that time, it was called HyperDev as a tribute to HyperCard back in the 90s on the Apple computers. I saw this prototype of what became Glitch. The technological thing, I would say, is we were just at the cusp of maturity for Docker and for some of the rich manipulation in browsers on front end.
and a couple other technologies. So there was like, and like... orchestration was a mess like there's a lot of things that were not not you got heroku starting to abstract and and and heroku had also been acquired and started to stagnate too so they get the business driver as well as the piece i mean i i have all the respect the world for heroku i mean i think if you look at
Whether it's Glitch or we get compared to Replit a lot or like any of these tools, everything that any of us were trying to do, Heroku was trying to do a decade earlier. But they were trying to do it on like old version of Internet Explorer. And, you know, they originally even had a code editor.
in Heroku at one point and they had to you know take it down so I I wrote a big piece um a few years ago about um what happened at Heroku and like you whenever I spoke to people for that piece everyone's response was always I loved Heroku and now i'm just trying to build it again yeah and so and so that wasn't the explicit goal for us but that was definitely an influence for me a lot of it was we looked a lot at again i'm dating myself but it was such a seminal work visual basic
in the 90s as a democratizer. I looked at HyperCard. We looked a lot at, for folks who don't know, so Glitch is a community where you can build an app in your browser, a full stack app. Yeah. within basically under a minute. And you don't even have to log in. You just go and you pick an app that's already there and you remix it. And then you've got a full stack running app and you can edit and tweak.
Most of those primitives I just talked about were in the original prototype. Right. And so like the idea that we were going to spin up a container in real time in the background while you click on it, like that was a really radical thing. But in that first review I saw of the prototype.
I was like, oh, well, you got to let people take the existing app and remix it. And that was in my notes, like the word remix. And I was like, and then that was the music became the animating metaphor for Glitch. Like we talk about playlists of apps and talk about remixing apps.
But that was there. And then we have the interface for Git. If you want to go back through old commits, it's called rewind. So you have a timeline, you can slide back and scrub through it. But that was all there in literally that first page of notes. Like if I look at that and that was 2016.
So eight years ago. And I think we've gotten to about a third of the things I put in the notes on that page. We were off and running pretty quickly. And so I looked at the thing. I was like, this is incredible. I can see this whole community you build around it. The social object is the app, not the code. GitHub is the code. And that's great for its thing. But that's a recipe book. I want a restaurant. Yeah. The people that actually just want to.
Do the thing. Yeah. And so we just thought a lot about like, what would YouTube for code look like? That was one of the things we talked about. And so I was excited. I was, I was really super motivated, but I'd just come out of a startup that was winding down. That was very like.
Pretty dumb tech, honestly. I was like, I don't, you know, I think take some time or whatever. And, you know, Joel was like, you know, why don't you come take a look at this thing? I was like, it's great. Good luck. I hope it was great. I'm not interested. Yeah. And, you know, it was another four or six months.
And I couldn't get the idea out of my head. Yeah, it's such a good fit for you. That's the problem is it's got that community element to it that's going to lodge itself in your brain. And I felt like we had a little bit of original sin to atone from the work on Stack Overflow, frankly. I think that...
like the first word on the Glitch homepage on launch day was like the friendly community where you'll build the app of your dreams and friendly was really intentional about sort of undoing some of that. challenge that Stack Overflow had faced, which I think was very successful. I mean, I think you talk to users and I think they independently would be like, we love the vibes. We love the colors. And they'll say friendly unprompted. Like we don't have to put that up, you know, on the...
top of the page anymore. And it's been so meaningful because it was a leap. Everybody was like, you need to have green text on a black background. you need to have the editor that you show when you do the thing and um and then we relaunched this glitch they hated the name people are like you can't name you know, a app or a community after a bug or a problem. And I was like, you know, Stack Overflow. It's like, there's some proof here, actually.
And I loved that there was a little bit of a sibling relationship of like, we're the problems, you know, where the problems live and that this is an environment where you can make mistakes. But when we launched, we literally shared an office with Trello.
Yeah. Like it was all that sort of communal. And I think, again, the accountability and the inspiration and the innovation is this being in dialogue with others. Like there's a, you squint and glitches are remakes of Trello and Stack Overflow. Yeah.
Right. And so I think that part was it. But also for me, really importantly at that time, New York City has a tech community. Yeah. And we have what was called the New York Tech Meetup originally. You can tell when Meetup started, which was one of our signature startups. And people would get together by the hundreds. But we were selling 1,000 tickets a month at $20 a pop, selling out in 10 minutes for people to come and just see pure demos. You weren't allowed to.
pitch you weren't allowed there was nothing there's no VCs on stage nothing it was just I'm a maker to your point I'm a maker I made a thing I want to show you the majority we would have students demoing you know the majority of you so that's the context in which In short order, you had Stack Overflow, you had Trello, you had Tumblr, you had Foursquare, you had Etsy, you had Kickstarter, you had Meetup, you had this whole cohort. And it was no surprise around that time that when...
In the States, we had our SOPA and people laws coming up when they needed leaders in tech to come to Washington, D.C. and say, don't put this bad law in place. It was all people from New York. They all got on a train and went down there. And Aaron Schwartz sort of leading this rally in front of our senator's office. That came from having a community conscience. Yeah.
of people saying we're accountable to each other, even though all of those at that point were multi-hundred million dollar companies. And so I think that has been lost. We don't have that now. But we know we have the seeds to do that kind of thing.
So it can happen again. I really noticed this kind of... um like green shoots of it recently in the front end world and i find that like obviously fastly which is where you work now um and um netlify as well like i've seen this kind of beginnings of like being proud of being a front-end developer yeah and there's kind of an image and there's kind of even like some cliches now but cliche is a good sign sign of a community happening i'm definitely starting to see that
happened in that world. And I feel like the acquisition of Glitch probably is a front runner of what's happening there. Yeah, very much so. I mean, I think at the time, two plus years ago when Glitch was acquired, it was not as obvious. But I think...
As you mentioned, Netlify, Purcell, I think they've all done an incredible job of being part of that broader narrative. I've been a front-end debt for most of my career, right, when I was a working coder. And even still when I do weekend projects, like that's the part I love.
It's a way of thinking, right? And for me, it's, like I said, I loved seeing it light up on that Commodore computer. And the same is true as like, you know, they hit refresh on the browser and it did the thing I wanted it to do. I think that's the closest to...
the user is the closest to the magic that a a new coder can see and it doesn't have to be like full you know i'm not ever all the caveats about react aside right yeah like this like like being able to see the thing it means a lot and so i think that entry point to like
starting closest to the visible act of creation. And then you need to have infrastructure. And to your point, you know, so Fastly acquired Glitch, you know, two years ago. And they were as almost pure a backend infrastructure company as you could be. But part of what I glimpsed at was they were, they have built this like instant platform. You can do anything instantly around the world, 150 milliseconds. And I was like, oh, well, yeah, content delivery. They're like, no, no, no, code.
or interaction. And all of a sudden, I was like, this is almost like having another primitive to work with. It's at the same level. It's like taking network, an instant network, and putting it at the same level as storage. and compute and these other things. It's where it's going. You've got Cloudflare workers. It's the direction of travel. And that just seemed so compelling. And then it's like, well, then the thing that you need to have is...
glitch level ease. Like it has to be that easy to just click a button and build something for a minute. But also I really thought there's just something interesting about introducing a new primitive to the toolkit that we all think of. Because for me personally, if I never hear a U.S. East one again, it'll be too soon. Thinking about regions.
breaks my brain because my concept of the internet was it's just everywhere so like when i made code like the first time i remember like well what do you mean the servers in new jersey right like like how what shouldn't it be on the internet right like and they're like yeah well there's a place that it goes and so it fits so much better my you know admittedly naive mental conception of like i just make this code or i make this content and it's just everywhere
And I don't have to think about it. And I think that like taking away certain levels of abstractions are really joyous. And that was definitely one of them. And so that was sort of the, you know, the entry point. There's a lot more stuff that came from that, but I think that was like a really. I don't know. It was as exciting when you discovered these other capabilities. Yeah. And now we're two years into that acquisition. You're still at Fastly. You've got a very grown-up job title there. I do.
So how has that transition been for you in terms of kind of going from the startup world to being part of a bigger organization like Fastly? It's been a lot of learning. You know, I think I had consulted and stuff over the years. I'd worked with big companies, but being inside is different. There's no question about it. I mean, I think, you know, on the one hand, you know, when I was a CEO, I could be like, let's do this, you know, and then we sort of go and do it.
I think on the other hand, it was a really good challenge to have to put intellectual rigor behind the why of why I said to do something. In many cases, maybe I'm not right on this. Because you have to make the case to people like, I don't know who you are. There's a thousand people at this company. You could be anybody. And I don't know. It's nice. I'm sure you're nice. But like, what are we doing and why?
And that was a really good counter. Like as we record this, there's a lot of hype in the VC world about like founder mode. People are talking about this a lot. And, you know, there's sort of I've been on both sides of it. Right. And and there is a founder mode that is like.
if you're lucky you get a leader who is a visionary and is clear and motivating and inspiring and they're empathetic towards users in their team and so they can galvanize people to move quickly meaningfully towards something and A founder can be a jerk who's just abusing their power and on an ego trip and doesn't want accountability to anybody and hates processes of accountability, calling them red tape and overhead. Of course. Right.
I won't call anyone out, but their initials might be EF. And my feeling is most of the people promoting the myth of founder mode are trying to get into... as unaccountable a situation as Musk or anybody else isn't, right? And, you know, for me, like I've been a founder and I've said this before, you know, I've been a CEO, I've been a founder. It's a horrible job.
I hate it. I do it because I have done it because it's the only way to get done the things I wanted to see get done. But every error I made, every mistake I made. in those roles hurt either our community or our team or both yeah and you know i think of this it's all it actually feels a little bit like being a parent i don't want to overextend that analogy but in one way in that
I can only screw this up for others. Yeah. Right. Like for me, I don't bear the worst pain of a mistake that I make. Yeah. Right. And I've said this, you know, the like. the difference between being at a big company and I try to do my best. So if I make a mistake, you know, I think somebody like you should not do that or we should fix that or whatever. And I'm lucky to have good support from my boss or my peers or whatever. Right. But I can make a mistake.
when we were a startup and everybody would lose their jobs, right? That being the last thing I thought of every night when I went to sleep and the first thing I thought of when I got up, especially in the US where it literally means whether people could have healthcare.
whether they can have children, whether they can take care of their family members. First of all, it's immoral that I had that power. It's just fundamentally wrong. It's obviously wrong. It should not be up to me as to whether somebody who happens to be... like a good go coder can have, you know, health care when they get cancer. Like that's insane. Yeah. There's a lot of CEOs that just don't think about that stuff. Well, I think they pay people so they
think they don't have to think about it. And this is why it's selected for more and more psychopathic behavior. I mean, I'm just being really honest about it. It's like, I look at like, how did they get so extreme? And it's because they get more and more isolated from that cause. But I felt that honestly, like every day.
I don't feel that anymore. Like I get to go to work and think about what can we do for our developers or what would be a cool feature to build. Or we just did actually a really good example. We did a thing called AI accelerator and it's basically you put.
gateway in front of chat gpt we make your request faster you're like yeah no kidding you take fast so you cache something you make it faster like that's that's the thing we're known for we just did a very smart semantic caching version of that but the thing about that was my approach was like
I had enough authority to say, I'm not doing like the 15th LLM that gets pitched to my inbox. I was like, my whole inbox is people like, we got one too. I'm like, I don't care. But you talk to real developers and they're like, look, there are interesting things to do with OpenAI. And the bad part is my users are watching a spinner all day. You know, I would like that to be faster. I'm like, that is like an interesting problem. That is something you can solve.
I can have the authority to say, we're not going to just chase trends. We're going to do the thing that is meaningful to people. And I couldn't do that as a startup. It wouldn't be credible, right? Because you're like, I'm not going to use some startups brand new thing and have that be.
Like they might be gone in five minutes. Of course. Right. And so like that thing was like really, really rewarding in terms of all the pieces coming together. Like we have the technology to do something unique that nobody else can do. That's always exciting. Right. So you're like, why did you invest in building this?
infrastructure so you can do something like semantic caching so it's like technologically interesting then you have the like social piece of all the smartest coders i know are like llms are interesting they've been interesting for a long time
AI hype is not at all interesting. That's kind of where the smart folks have landed. How do you tell a story where people understand how we're navigating that? That's an interesting problem space to me. Because communicating with developers is really hard. The cliche is... devs don't like marketing. It's like, that's not true. They just want you to not treat them like idiots or spam them or whatever. Right, exactly. And so you're like, but that's like an interesting intellectual challenge.
And then to get to lead a team, like if we do this, we can put it in front of millions of people. Yeah. And everybody can use it like that stuff. I'm, you know, so like those are the, those are the joys of being. at scale or yeah you know a different platform um so this is the priority zero podcast so like in your role right now um as vp developer experience like what's your priority zero what's that thing um there's
There's three parts to it, which are... That's cheating. Yeah. Well, I mean, the P0 is get every developer in the world to find value on this platform. Yeah. right but the but the pillars of that are they have to know we exist they have to know what we do and they have to be able to try it for themselves and see that it's real and what's shocking is like those two things are really hard for big organizations
But those are all in service of every dev in the world can find value in this platform that will make their job easier. Or to me, that's a nice thing. Like, okay, performance, whatever. For me, it's like... I could do a thing I couldn't do before. Yeah. Is like exciting. And for me, I'm like, I'm not, like I said, I've been a front end person. I'm not like deeper in the stack. The idea of I can push the message.
to a billion people and each one would be personalized I'm like I could never in a million years build that yeah right and it's like it's just not that's not the domain I plan and then to be like here's an API and you can do that That's exciting. Those are the parts that are really motivating. The P0 is people on the internet deserve a better experience. Most devs want to do that. Can we give them the tools to do the good thing?
Yeah, it's a very big priority zero. And I always ask people, like, how do you know when it's done? Like, how does that become not your priority zero? The problem is that's basically the mission, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, but that's also part of why I think I've been more of a startup.
and why I try to bring that strut mentality I think to some degree to this is the I'm motivated by missions like I don't like features or whatever yeah you know features come and go like I said my codes all gonna get deleted someday yeah what will be the impact of the work I have done, what will be the impact of what I've been able to enable my team to do. Those are the measures for real.
Nice. All right. And we always like to end the show on a recommendation. So is there anything you've listened to, watched, read recently that you want to recommend? Gosh, I wasn't ready for that. I got to think of... I prefer it when people aren't ready for it. I'm going to give one that's probably unexpected. There's David Ritz, who is mostly a biographer, although he's co-written some pop songs, wrote a biography of Aretha Franklin.
And he had originally done an authorized one while she was alive. And then after she was passed, he did the real one. And it is, you know, warts and all. She was a very complicated person. But. It's stunning because you have this document of an individual artist who is also a social activist. She sang at Martin Luther King's funeral. She is also an entrepreneur. She owned her own record labels in the 1970s.
And just this sort of fearless pioneer and also a really flawed person. If everybody that ever... made fan fiction up in their heads about Musk or Jobs or whoever read about Aretha Franklin instead. I think people would have a much better, purer understanding of what is entrepreneurship, what is innovation, what is
What is creativity? What is greatness? Yeah. So yeah, Dave Ritz's biography of Aretha. That's an awesome recommendation. I love that. Great. Right. And Neil, thank you so much for coming on. It was great. Thanks for having me. I'll see you again soon. Take care.
Thank you again for listening to Priority Zero, a Lead Dev Podcast. Remember, you can get us wherever you get your podcasts, Apple, Spotify. But when you do, please remember to like and subscribe so you don't miss an episode. And we hope to see you at the next one.