Episode description

Shawn Wang (aka swyx) is the founder of smol.ai (AI news curation), and the cohost of Latent Space (popular AI Engineer podcast).

Plus, Shawn started the AI Engineer movement with his essay Rise of the AI Engineer and organized two incredible AI engineer conferences in the past twelve months - AI Engineer World's Fair and AI Engineer Summit

And Shawn has angel invested in DevTools like Airbyte, Railway, Supabase, Replay.io, Stackblitz, Flutterflow, Fireworks.ai while running the DevTools angels community.

Besides this, Shawn curates DX.tips (DevTools magazine) and in a past life wrote the Coding Career handbook, championed learn in public, cofounded Svelte Society and was previously Head of Developer Experience at Temporal, and a Developer Advocate at AWS and Netlify.

Also, before this, Shawn had a very successful career in investment banking, trading, building data pipelines and performing quantitate portfolio management. I think this brings him a very unique perspective - I've always admired his ability to zoom out and see the big picture and the trends.

Even though Shawn is now all-in on AI, he's still one of the go-to authorities on DevTools go-to-market.

As you can tell, Shawn is someone I deeply admire. So I'm glad he came back.

What we discuss:

• Organizing the AI Engineer Conferences
• Rise of the AI Engineer
• Intentionality and principles (yes we even talk about Alcoholics Anonymous)
• The AI CEO
• Invisible deadlines
• Ilya believing in AGI more than most people at OpenAI
• Are developers going to be obsolete? 
• Thor convinced swyx to invest in Supabase
• Building DevTools that work well with LLMs
• Angel investing in DevTools - why and how
• Is DevRel dead?
• How to hire DevRel
• Why DX.tips exists

Links:

• Rise of the AI Engineer https://www.latent.space/p/ai-engineer
• Latent Space Podcast https://www.latent.space/
• swyx's Twitter https://x.com/swyx
• swyx's website https://www.swyx.io/
• swyx's LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/shawnswyxwang/
• smol.ai https://smol.ai/
• DevTools Angels https://github.com/sw-yx/devtools-angels
• DX.tips https://dx.tips/
• DevRel's Death as Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon https://dx.tips/zirp 
• AI Engineer Summit https://www.ai.engineer/summit/2023
• AI Engineer World's Fair https://www.ai.engineer/worldsfair
• Coding Career Handbook https://www.learninpublic.org/
• Shawn's previous appearance on Scaling DevTools https://podcast.scalingdevtools.com/episodes/swyx 
• Eisenhower Matrix https://asana.com/resources/eisenhower-matrix
• Thor from Supabase https://x.com/thorwebdev
• Solaris AI coworking space in SF https://www.solarissf.com/
• Browserbase https://www.browserbase.com/
• Indent https://indent.com/ and Fouad https://x.com/fouadmatin
• How to do hackathons https://dx.tips/hackathons
• How to do conferences https://dx.tips/conf-guide
• How to hire DevRel https://dx.tips/mailbox-first-devrel-hiring
• Climbing the ladder of abstraction with Amelia Wattenberger https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAy_GHUAICw

Check out the Enterprise Ready Conf from WorkOS https://enterprise-ready.com/