How to Make Money at Open Source - RUBY 593

Ruby Rogues

Our original panel podcast, Ruby Rogues is a weekly discussion around Ruby, Rails, software development, and the community around Ruby.

How to Make Money at Open Source - RUBY 593

Transcript


Charles Max_Wood:
Hey, welcome back to Ruby Rogues. This week on our panel, we have Valentino Stohl. The end.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
Hey now.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
I'm Charles Max Wood from Top End Devs, and this week we have a special guest, Victoria Melnikova. Did I get anywhere close to saying it right?
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
That was perfect. That was perfect.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Oh,
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Hi everybody,
 
Charles Max_Wood:
I sometimes
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
it's great to be here.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
anyway.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
You did fine.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Do you want to introduce yourself real quick, let people know who you are and why we're so happy to have you here?
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah. Hi, my name is Victoria. I work at Evil Martians, probably one of the best, you know, development teams in the world. We create various dev tools, commercial open source and just many great things. I personally lead business development, so my official title is head of new business at Evil Martians.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
So that's a little overview.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Very cool. So, yeah, we got you on to talk a little bit about a couple of things. One is I think we found you through the Dev Propulsion Labs that you put together, the video came out a few weeks ago, and you talked about building communities around products, but you've also got this article in TechCrunch talking about commercializing open source, and I think we're gonna start there. Do you kind of want to set the stage for us here? a lot of places to go from, and I think since you've kind of thought about this and written about this, you probably set us up pretty good.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah, yeah, maybe I can set the stage a little bit and tell you about Evil Martians first,
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
because I feel like that's the kind of preface for all of this. So basically we are a team of about 15 engineers. We're fully remote and historically we've been known for our contribution to Ruby on Rails kind
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
of community. But in general, you know, open source is a big part of our belief system. We heavily rely on the principles of open source, like transparency, community, co-creation, things like that. And ultimately we want to make the world better, like one product at a time. You know, it's kind of like our internal motto. And basically we work with 20 to 30 startups a year. It's mainly technical startups at growth stages. And we found that our sweet spot is actually developer tools and commercial open source. for open source, you know, as a philosophy, commercial open source kind of ties really well with that. So at some point, we kind of found ourselves in a position where we accumulate information about developer tools, about commercial open source, how to do it right, and how to make it successful from day one. So at some point, I came up with an idea to create successfully launched commercial open source projects. And we thought that it's an area that not many people know about, not many people talk about that. And actually not many people believe that open source can be commercialized, because it's kind of like a controversial topic. It should be available for free. Like how do you make money off of that? So eventually, organically, we kind of arrived at a place where we want to share over the years and that's how the article came about. So yeah, that's kind of me setting the stage. I can go a little bit into detail about commercial open source, like what it is, what does it mean, like how do you get there? Those are kind of the topics that I'd be happy to discuss with you guys. So, yeah, that's kind of me setting the stage. I can go a little bit into detail about commercial open source,
 
Valentino_Stoll:
Yeah, I'm curious about that. How do you define commercial open source outside of just, you know, a company making money off an open source project? I mean, it's got to be more than just that, right?
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
And how do you, what
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
down.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
led you to like, oh, this is the holy grail?
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Well, I want to just jump in here for a second because I think it's interesting that, you know, we see people get into open source for a variety of reasons. You know, sometimes they want to contribute to the community. Sometimes they use it to get kind of a staff developer position at some company that's using their open source. You know, they kind of make their name, you know, people donate or sponsor them on GitHub. And so, Anyway, it's not this completely foreign idea, but then you get into some of the services out there that you can pay for and they've got some open
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Mm-hmm.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
source basis, right? They started as open source, so they released an open source version of their software. And yeah, they build these huge companies on them that make quite a bit of money. And so that's what I'm curious about is, yeah, what are the stages like and what are to that.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah, I want to kind of start from the ending of my article, which is kind of like a go-to guide. How do you launch a successful
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
commercial open source? Because I feel like that's a very interesting topic. And basically, I mean, developers want to solve problems, you know, and when you find a solution to a problem that actually exists, it makes you happy, you know,
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Yeah.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
but it makes other people happy as well. Like, the that they experienced is being solved. So I think the key to a successful commercial open source or actually any open source product is discovering the real pain point. And typically it happens during a project, you know, you're creating something, you run into an issue and you come up with a solution to it. So if you happen to come across something like that, it's probably a good place to discover whether it could become something bigger. how do you discover that? You talk to other engineers. You see what is this a problem they also experiencing? So you go on Twitter, you go on Hacker News, you explore what's in Quora or some other places, what do people say about this
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
problem? And if you find that this is a common problem that doesn't have an adequate solution to it, you create one. And the best part about it, it can exist outside of your project that you initially designed it for, because then you kind of isolated and create a product out of that. So if you have that product mentality, if you have that startup kind of approach of creating solutions to real problems people experience, then you're on the right track.
And then once you kind of define that, there is a way to make it actually commercial. And how do you make it commercial? You start working on it, If it was a real product, you know, a separate like commercial product, you devote time to it, let's say 10 hours a week is your commitment and you set adequate goals for yourself. What do you want? Do you want to get stars on GitHub? Do you want to get adoption? Do you want people to talk about this product? And you kind of, it's kind of like setting smart goals, you know, something measurable, something adequate. amount of time. And let's say you give yourself three months, 10 hours per week, you set certain goals, and you try to achieve it. You speak with other engineers, you get feedback, etc. etc. That's how you grow an open source project. And at some point, you can, you know, understand like what do people actually need. You can kind of define what could be the core of this open source that could be forever free, you know, something like, for example, if I translate to Martian projects,
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
products that we've created, let's take Image Proxy. Image Proxy is an image optimization tool. It optimizes images on the fly. So image optimization is something that we will forever offer for free. It's an open source tool. But then we have some additional features that we can charge for, because they take a little bit more work, they take a little bit more configuration, whatever it could be. So once you define that core, Then you can create a legend page, you can define what could be those additional paid features and try selling them,
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
see what people are ready to pay for it, other people that are ready to
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Right.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
pay for it. Because a lot of the times successful open source projects solve very niche problems and people are experiencing such big pain that they are ready to pay for it.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Right.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
At the same time, there are some big, let's take post-CSS, it's a very famous kind of but it's actually free forever. It's gonna be forever free because it's viewed as a part of the ecosystem. Like nobody thinks of it as something that you should pay for, right? So there is that very, I'm again coming back to the idea that solving a real niche problem is actually the key to success. So if you're able to define that, you're able to meet your goals, you know, the metrics you set of you're able to get paying customers, like people that are actually willing to pay for it.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
You're doing really well. You're probably on the way to success. And then you can play with different monetization strategies. You can play with different pricing because you own the project. You know,
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Right.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
you can kind of decide what's happening with it afterwards. And then if you think about it, like that whole idea of commercializing open source, There is nothing to be ashamed of because you're competing with SaaS, you know, you're competing with other projects that are well financed. Most of the time they have, you know, they're VC backed, they have raised rounds and they're able to hire a team that can outcompete your project. So at the end of the day, it's about delivering a better product, you know, and kind of providing resources for your team to create something that's able to compete. with, you
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
know, VC backed competition, basically. And at the end of the day, you're making your product better, you know, and that's what matters. So even though open source is about the free, you know, good that is shared by community, there is a reason why, you know, it requires resources, you know,
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Yep.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
and monetizing open source is one of the sustainable ways to do it.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I've seen a couple of different models of this, like Sidekick, for example,
 
Valentino_Stoll:
I was gonna say
 
Charles Max_Wood:
which
 
Valentino_Stoll:
that.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
is something that most Rubyists are pretty familiar with. Yeah, right? And yeah, you can get Sidekick, I think it's Pro and Sidekick Enterprise. And
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Mm-hmm.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
right, you get added features, but Sidekick is useful. It does a great job.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Exakt.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
Yeah, I used Sidekick for years without paying. And now I work at a bigger company that pays for Sidekick Pro. And
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Yep.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
it makes a lot of sense. And
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
I was going to comment about Mike Perums, like, because that's where I first remember even the term commercial open source, right? Where he was there and he had this project and he wanted to work on it all the time. And he just started a new gem with a new feature that lots of people were, you know, creating and just made it integrated
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Right.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
and people paid for the small amount that he started with. And now it's just like, it makes so much sense. And the core product is just small and super focused and anything extra is, you know, you can build it. Go ahead. And
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Yep.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
I think that makes a lot of sense. I guess my biggest concern always is like licensing. It seems to be like the night
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
And what's your approach to that? And how do you maybe put those worries
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
down.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
behind you while you're trying to commercialize them? I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah, we just have professionals to do it, you know,
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Bye. Bye.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
they're legal professionals that do it really well. And I mean, I'm a big believer in kind of like mastering what you do best, you know, so I'm not gonna, you know, take on this huge responsibility of trying to figure out licensing myself when I can hire somebody who can do it really well, you know, so, and I think that there are so many professionals out there that that can do it for a reasonable to potential losses that you can
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Thank you. Bye.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
have from it. So and right now, I mean, I know that ImageProxy, for example, has the MIT license and it works really well for us. And yeah, I have not much to say about licensing
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Well...
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
in general, but I would advise you all
 
Valentino_Stoll:
Consult a professional.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
to seek legal help.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Right,
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
but it seems like there are two things because when Valentino said licensing, what I was thinking was, how do you manage all of the licenses, right? So the subscriptions
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
or, you know, that maybe they buy a lifetime license or something like that. And then
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
usually there's some kind of logic in the code that says, you know, you got the pro version, I'm gonna validate your license before I run anything, right? And so, you know, is there a system that helps you manage that kind of a thing? Or, because yeah, I'm not going to write the license agreement myself. I'm going to hire an attorney. But
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
for the rest of it, yeah, it's like, okay, how do I manage all this stuff so that it's like, you know, your license is no longer valid. The software no longer works.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah, there are ways to track whether people are using, like for image proxy, for example, there is licensed server that
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Right.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
sees whether people are using Pro version adequately. So there are ways like engineering mechanisms to make sure that it's not being abused.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
And of course you want to make sure that you, probably at early stages, it might happen and you will not even know about that,
 
Charles Max_Wood:
great.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
because one of the things about open source commercial open source as well is you lack analytics. You actually don't know how many people use your project. We don't know the real number of people using image proxy to date. We don't know the exact number of people using Post-CSS. We can predict that it's millions, but we don't know. So there are certain things that you can employ to make sure that you being abused and eventually you will get there but I feel like at initial stages just adoption you know is probably more important you know so yeah I don't know if I answered your question but I tried
 
Charles Max_Wood:
kind of know it's fine. I mean, one way or the other, you're either gonna build it or buy it. And I was just wondering if there was like some commercial product out there that was like, hey, we manage software licenses for companies. Or... I mean, I'm not sure if it's just like, I'm not sure if it's just like, I'm not sure if it's just like, I'm not sure if it's
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
just like, I'm not sure if it's just like, I'm not sure if it's just like, I'm not sure if it's just like, I'm not sure if it's just like, I'm not sure if it's just like, I'm not
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
sure if it's just like, I'm not sure if it's just like,
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah, yeah, I wish.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Ha.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
I mean, there are ways to do it. And if you think about like, let's say Image Proxy, it has an annual subscription
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
model. So every year you just renew your license. And I think for us it works really well, especially, you know, at early stages of a commercial product, because it's easy to, you don't have that many customers, right? You can do it manually. You don't even have to use like any
 
Charles Max_Wood:
right.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
advanced software to do bidding or whatever you use Stripe, you issue your invoices. It's pretty manageable.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Yeah.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
As you grow, of course, you have to adapt and you have to explore new... It becomes a real business, so it could be a department right
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm,
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
in that area in the future.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
right
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
But if we talk about early stages, there are ways to promote yours and sell your software through marketplaces like Amazon Marketplace or Google Cloud Marketplace, which is a bit tough to get into. like purchase a lot of storage, you know, to do
 
Charles Max_Wood:
All right.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
that.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
All right.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
But there are ways to kind of securely promote your product and still get revenue from that. And sometimes, like for example, AppSumo is something where you sell like a
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Thank you.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
lifetime
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Thank you.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
subscription for a very low price, which also, you know, it could help at early stages for adoption, because people get to know about your product, they get to use your product. And fortunately, community is so vocal. If they like something, they will talk about it, you know, and it could bring you many more customers down the line. So you kind of weigh different options and see what works best for you. If we talk about like monetization strategies, there are a few actually. So the most basic one in open source is donations,
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Right.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
right? You get sponsors, you get people that are just paying you money because they love your product. And, you know, but in reality, it's not much. I actually gave an example of like Posse Assess. In a year, it gets about $12,000 in donations, which is not that much. It's not even enough to sustain one person building it. I'm not talking about a team. So it's pretty tough to do that. But then you have other kind of strategies, which could be consulting and support, when you basically need the author of the open source to help you and help you, you know, run it on your specific project. Then you have the sauce approach, which is a little bit more self sustained,
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
I want to say. And yeah, you just have to experiment with it and see what works best for you.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
Would you say that that's a project by project basis? Or have you found like building a framework around specific pathways is better?
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
It's interesting because we don't have that much experience. So we're talking about dozens of projects, right? It's not hundreds.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
So it's really hard to say, but any cable, for example, another project of ours, it's also a commercial open source. It runs on the consulting and support basis, because it's so configurable, you have to have a niche specialist help you install it. Image Proxy on the other hand is pretty self sustainable. So, yeah, I don't know. I don't have an answer to that. It's kind of varies by project, I wouldn't say. I think it's a good question. I think it's a good question. I think it's a good question. I think it's a good question. I think it's a good question. I think it's a good question. I think it's a good question. I think it's a good question. I think it's a good question. I think it's a good question. I think it's a good question. I think it's a good question. I think it's a good question.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Yeah, I think, you know, where you're talking about some of these dev tools, like any cable, it, you know, it looks like it's more infrastructure based that you're doing
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
setup on. So yeah, I think that falls more toward, like you said, the setup or support. And
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
I've seen other companies and other people do the same kind of thing. TideLifts, one that comes to mind that, you know, they basically hire the people who are And so
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
they're getting paid for their time that they spend helping people get it running and set up. And that's the service, right? That's how they get paid. But
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Exactly.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
then you've got others, like you said, the SaaS setup, one that comes to mind there is discourse, right? So
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yep.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
I've set up discourse on I don't even know how many servers, right? I've built plugins for people and, you know, it's cool software. But... you know, if you don't want to hassle with maintaining your own server or hiring somebody like me to keep an eye on it for you, then it might be worth $100 a month for the base package at Discourse.org, right? And so
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Mm-hmm.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
that's how they make their money. And it makes a lot of sense, right? Because at the pricing
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
down.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
that they're offering, I mean, $100 a month's way cheaper than hiring somebody like me.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I mean, if we talk about like any cable, for example, specifically, it's a scalable WebSocket infrastructure for Rails
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
apps. Like that's a tough thing to crack, you know,
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Yeah.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
but if you think about like how it translates to your, like how it translates to revenue, it brought over $1 million of consulting
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Yeah.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
revenue for Eagle Martians. So it works very much in hand with what we do as a consultancy, you know, as a web development shop.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
So for us this model works really well. Whether if you take image proxy, I think the most kind of common scenario is when we do something specific for enterprise clients, but not so much for just, you know, pro version, because it's like it's good out of the box. Like
 
Charles Max_Wood:
All right.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
people just take it and run with it. So, yeah.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Yeah, very cool. So let's say that I have some genius idea for some app that I, you know, or some open source that I want to build, right? So it's, you know, I don't even know what I would build, right? But let's just say that I'm going to build something. How do I start evaluating and saying, OK, do I want to go the donations route? Do I want to go the
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Mm-hmm.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
pro product route? Do I want to go with the installation of maintenance? You know? a contract client route or hosted as a SaaS route, like how do you start to figure that out and how do you validate that it's actually even going to work and make you any money?
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah, that's an interesting question. So first of all, I think, as I mentioned before, kind of like startup mindset very much applies here. So having that product mindset will help. So getting feedback in cheap ways is your best friend.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
You know, the more feedback you receive, the faster you can act on it, the better for your product. So I would say that technical marketing and. You know, like a developer community are your best friends in this. So right now it's very popular approach to build in public.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
And people are very, they want to take part in this, they want to comment
 
Charles Max_Wood:
All
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
on
 
Charles Max_Wood:
right.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
how it's going. So growing that fan base or just people that want to solve this problem together with you is really important. And when you see that response from your audience, It could be GitHub stars, it could be just people being very active on your Twitter, people being active and committing
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
like PRs or whatever it is. If you see that there is demand, probably it's time to consider monetization. You can try, there is no right answer here. You have to try many different things. Once again, you have to run it in fast iterations that don't cost you much. Hey, I'm thinking about launching this feature, but it's going to be paid. It's not going to be free. Would you guys be willing to spend five bucks on it? Just actually getting real opinions from people that are using your product. And I think that's the best way to kind of evaluate whether it's possible to monetize at all. Because, I mean, chances are it's not possible. Sometimes it happens. Sometimes it happens like that. and actually make money off an open source. And then you're just stuck in the donations world, which is not the worst thing either, especially when you grow a big community and the community is kind of self-sustaining the product. So yeah, it kind of varies case by case. And I think when you find that product feed, you actually know because there are people demanding more. Like they want to get better features, they want the app to be more performant, whatever it is, you know, and if you're able to work with that feedback, you should be able to find a way to monetize the project itself.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
You know this, this makes me think a lot about like maintenance of a project. Like a lot of open source projects just like get created. Even if they become popular, they just like fall out from people lack, you know, lack of maintenance. And to me, that's
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
been one thing that's saved, you know, a lot of projects or even helped convert them into like commercialized opportunities is that they were well maintained.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
And people like to sport things that are well maintained have very little issue working with all the time. Me personally,
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm
 
Valentino_Stoll:
I'll go and if I'm selecting a project, I'll look to see how well it maintained it is right away. Because
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Yeah.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
I know that's what I'm going to have
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Mm-hmm.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
to do. And Evil Martians is great because I know most of those are going to be very well maintained. And I can go in and use it. And it does. It helps me think about Evil Martians for, oh, hey, we need this product. Let's just hire them to get in and set it up right. Because we know they would because they know what they're doing. shows. And I mean, outside of consulting even, I feel like if you have an open source project and it's well maintained, I feel like you would get more donations from having done
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Mm-hmm.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
that and notoriety. And I feel like that kind of does seem to be like a trigger for projects to get that funding flow. And I'm curious though,
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
For sure.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
how do you get there? How do you not
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Mm-hmm.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
it to a point of, okay, it's a well-oiled machine, like, you know, it's gonna work itself out and now we can, like, get there, right? And like, when do you just say, okay, well, I'm gonna kill this project?
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Hmm.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah, that actually makes me want to segue to the depth propulsion labs because that's something that we touched on there because like burnout in the open source world is real, like
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Yeah
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
people are burning out, you know, it's it's a tough job to have. And especially so I want to say that when you have that kind of like that project that moves you, you know, moves you every day, like you wake up thinking about it, like how you're going to make it better, how you want to talk about it. It's a good sign. You can always kind of bring up leaders in your community that will be helping you, you know, because like you can basically raise champions in your community that would be educating younger guys. And this way it's going to become like this perpetual machine, you know, where People are always contributing, people are always trying to sustain the project. And I think it's very important to identify signs of burning out early on. Like the earlier, you know, about it the better. And sometimes it's a good idea to just take it behind the barn and like kill it, you know? Because it's not going to do any good to you, it's not going to do any good to anybody if it's too difficult, you know? And I find that a lot of the times people are too afraid to do it and it takes forever and in the end it still happens, you know. So I'm a big believer that you should be passionate about what you're doing and that's going to be like the key success, you know, the key to success in this situation. But also just growing your developer community around your project and making sure and actually being prepared for a situation where when your community wants something different than you. You know, so in the deaf propulsion labs, we had this conversation about burnouts and how to manage community. And one of the ideas was you have to be kind of like a good parent to your community when you don't project your desires onto it, but you allow it to kind of bloom and flourish on its own and try to achieve their own goals. And you're kind of like standing aside and just supporting them through the process and guiding them to make the product better in the end. So yeah, burnout is real. You have to be very kind of mindful of how you feel, where you're at with the project. It helps to have a strategy. It helps to have measurable metrics. It helps to monetize as early as possible because it's gonna be motivation, you can hire a team, a professional team that can help you in this path. So just keep your head clear, stay inspired, talking to your audience is going to help.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
You know, you talked about AppSumo and I forget his last name, but the guy that used to run it, Noah, I don't know if he still does,
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm
 
Valentino_Stoll:
but he used to have these workshops where you would go
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Noah
 
Valentino_Stoll:
and
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Kagan.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
you know, Kagan. He had these workshops where you'd go and you would try and sell something that you came up with on Craigslist. And you would basically just like put an ad up and cold call people with your service that didn't exist yet and see if you got anybody to buy it,
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Ha ha ha.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
you know?
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
That's a
 
Valentino_Stoll:
It
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
good
 
Valentino_Stoll:
was
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
strategy.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
just a way to get you to thinking, is it viable? Would anybody seriously pay for it?
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Can I explain to
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Mm-hmm.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
somebody why they want it?
 
Valentino_Stoll:
Exactly.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Ha ha ha!
 
Valentino_Stoll:
I never did it personally, but I just heard this feedback from people where they had gone through it, and they were just like, it's incredible just trying to sell something because you realize immediately whether or not it's sellable. If
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Right.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
you're talking to somebody and they instantly don't get it, not a market fit, at least for that kind of person that you're talking to. And if
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
you've targeted that person as the person that you think is gonna fit, then, well, let's abandon this thing, right? And then at least you haven't done anything. You've just made a Craigslist ad, right?
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah, that's actually a good idea to test your hypothesis in a very cheap and fast way. And Twitter is great for that actually, but Craigslist could
 
Valentino_Stoll:
Maybe
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
work too.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
not. I'm too old. Twitter is definitely helpful. Yeah,
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Mastodon.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
mast it on.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Right?
 
Valentino_Stoll:
But yeah, I'm wondering if there's any different ways that you guys do testing out Market Fit or have different strategies like that, where you think you have an idea for something that you want to start working on. Like how do you choose? Like do people like engineers at Evil Martial Arts already have these ideas and they're ready just to start working on it? Or is it more of like a longer process of, all right, let's see what things evolve and then we'll jump on it when the opportunity is right.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah, I feel like I find that there are two different situations happening. The first one is when there is an actual problem on an actual project and we have solved that successfully. So ImageProxy, one of those. And at that time, we were working on this big project for eBay. There were a lot of like resizes and, you know, just images that needed optimization. And we felt that nothing on the market solves the problem in an adequate way. we created this thing and it works wonders. And we know in our hearts that it's a very performant tool, but it's also useful. It's great. It's great for any product with user-generated content. And that's one scenario. And it's very sustainable, organic, great. The other one is a little bit different when, so we have, let's take the OKLCH situation, right? We have Andrei Sitnik who is, I think, one of the best front-end engineers in the world, right? And he can predict certain trends. He sees certain new technology arising and he can, because he has so much knowledge and he sees many projects, he knows what's going on, he can anticipate the wave. And with OKLCH colors, anticipated it before it was available in browsers, you know, and it's what I call like pushing the envelope, you know It's kind of like running on the edge of technology and just being there before everybody else and that one is a tricky spot because You can't really know for sure that it's gonna play out, you know You know It's 50 50
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
actually, you know, it might not play and you have to be ready for that so in this situation And I think that now OKLCH is getting more traction. And it's kind of like since it was launched in CSS, it's become more popular. But in the beginning, it was a tough job trying to raise awareness of that. So I feel like in general, it's kind of two things. One, when you just create a very performant and great tool and you can share it with everybody. And the other one is when you're trying to create something new. and there was nothing before. And that one is a tricky one.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Yeah, it's interesting talking about, because I've done that on some stuff, right, where I had an idea. I mean, I didn't capitalize on it, but I had an idea, you know, working on a client project or something like that, where it's like, hey, I've solved this problem like nine times, right? So, there's,
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Mm-hmm.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
you know, there's some space
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Mm-hmm.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
out there for it, right? All I have to do is put it in terms of the client, you know, needs and then go, hey, you know, here's a shortcut, just use my code. running at the edge of technology, you know, being out there in front. I mean, yeah, sometimes that works out really well, you know, if you've got a good eye for how things are going. But even then, sometimes
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Mm-hmm.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
somebody will come in at the last minute with a completely different solution. And, you know,
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
the whole industry turns and you're like, well, I was ready for you to go here instead. So, yeah, I can see that being a
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah,
 
Charles Max_Wood:
little scary.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
that's, it is scary. And a similar thing was with variable fonts. Like we were also kind of like promoting it heavily before it was a thing
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
in Figma, for example. But you know, you have to be ready for, like it takes a certain type of character to feel great in that situation, you know, because you're dealing with extremely high levels of uncertainty
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Right.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
and you have to be kind of like sure in yourself, confident that you are doing the right thing, you know? And it's a tough job. It's a tough job.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Yep.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
Yeah, I was going to say, my biggest fear is creating something and then, oh, some big company just comes out with the same thing. And, you know, Sabasha is
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
my whole thing. But I mean, that brings me back to your whole dev propulsion labs and like kind of building communities, right? Because I mean, that definitely is
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
what has kept Rails alive all these years really is like that building of the
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
community around it.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Yeah.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
Because I mean, there's been so
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
many other frameworks, you know, that are, similar that you know could have competed and just fell out over the kind of lack of you know community and people supporting it. So I was super interested when I saw like the building community communities aspect.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Right.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
And
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
so like how do you like overcome that fear of okay like my community building is going to be effective enough that I'm not going to need to worry about whatever else else comes and competes with it. And I can still feel confident that
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Mm-hmm.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
I'm still doing something that I can be excited about, right? Like, I feel like that's one thing
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
everybody with burnout faces is, okay, like just defeatism, right? Like I've been defeated. Like, sure, like I have people using this, but are they using it? Like, do I have the community around me still like, and sure you might get one off
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
like pull requests or something like that, but how do you like continue to like feel excited for that community? and like keep that going.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah. So I'm going to take a step back here a little bit and I want to talk about Dev Propulsion Labs as a phenomena, like what it is, and then I'm going to dive into your question. So basically, as I mentioned before, we kind of found ourselves in a position where we have accumulated a bunch of knowledge about developer tools. And we thought it's a great opportunity to start sharing the content, because many of our clients kind of run into the same problems we're like, okay, but we have this knowledge and maybe we can use some social media or whatever platforms to kind of spread the word. And the first topic that came to mind about developer tools was of course community building.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Thank you. Thank you.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
And basically what we did is we invited DevRail and some other, like Andre Sidnik in this case, to talk about what they do in their commercial product. you know, to make sure that their communities are sustainable and they're actually helping business and not the other way around. And I have kind of like a selection of best practices, so I'd be happy to share those. I think that one of the biggest must-haves is only starting community when you are ready to commit to it, because a community is not something that you It's people, they have expectations, and they have things to say, and developer communities are vocal not only in a positive way, but also in a negative way. When something goes wrong, everybody talks about it, maybe even more so than when they're happy about something.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
One of the best practices is to start a community when you're ready to show up and to act on feedback. Right? So it's almost like a full-time job, and ideally it is a full-time job, you know. So they're like special people that can take care of a community in a very kind of sustainable way. Another thing is that you can give your community a voice in decision-making, so you can implement certain mechanics to allow your community to move your product forward. So you might have a roadmap. have something that they need. So you need to have those tools to collect feedback and actually process it and create something on top of it. Another thing is break in barriers to participation because I feel like in many communities, senior developers, senior engineers are very praised. And newer engineers are a little bit shy. So if you have a safe space for younger, less experienced engineers to speak up to experiment to propose something you're on in a much better place than if it was otherwise
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Hmm.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
right because you are kind of like. You can't heavily rely on seniors all the time you must have like fresh you know ideas. And just fresh energy in your community flowing. seniors eventually, you know, so it's kind of like this launch in this perpetual engine that will be sustaining your product, your project, like for a long time.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
So just real quick, I'm curious
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah,
 
Valentino_Stoll:
what that looks like,
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
yeah.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
because I feel like that is done wrong in so many projects. Because
 
Charles Max_Wood:
I handed so many companies.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
yeah, sure. I mean, it's a common one for sure, where how do you let new feedback make its way in without being like, well, that's not the direction we wanna take with every single request. So, yeah, I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah, I mean, you have to take all the feedback with a grain of salt. And as I mentioned before, you do have your product roadmap, right? Like you have a certain strategy for your product most of the time. So not necessarily, like, users' feedback doesn't necessarily define what's the next step in the product is, you know, we can ask Docker to just do everything for free. It's not something that they're going to do, you know? So I think a very, like, it takes a skill of all, uh, Deverell, you know, to make sure that people are rewarding for their feedback, but don't necessarily think that it's going to, yeah, you know, like it's about setting expectations in a way, like you're always under promise and over deliver. And that's, I feel like the recipe for success in many industries, not just in developer tools, you know, but making sure that the expectations are aligned, making sure that you're delivering on your words. promise something, you actually
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Thank you. Thank you.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
deliver something. You know, having that commitment, having that transparency in your building, like, you know, now as I mentioned, it's common to build products in public, but having that transparency and like true connection, like, look guys, we're doing our best, we're trying to make this product better, we have these ideas, like, help us, you know, make it help us kind of like execute on those, you know. And I feel like that's a perfect scenario when your community becomes your partner in a way, you know, and helps you achieve your goals instead of like being in a way of it. And there's some ways to kind of, you know, incentivize people to do that, like, I don't know, collectibles, plushies, like all kinds of ways, or even, you know, having that really nice open source item on your resume. those could be really nice rewards
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
for, you know, leaders in your community. So, yeah, another important thing is kind of not allowing community to become toxic and, you know, being able to kind of identify toxicity and eliminating it early on, I feel like it's super important. And yeah, just being transparent in terms of good news, news, you know, because you have to like, it's not all rainbows and puppies, like sometimes things, you know, are hard. And I think that people actually love it when you share your hardships
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
as well as your wins, you know, because we're all human at the end of the day will make mistakes. So just kind of like own up to it and you'll be fine.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Um, can
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
So,
 
Charles Max_Wood:
I say something about that
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
yeah.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
last point? Because I've seen this with
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
a lot of stuff that I've done. I mean, granted, I've done some things that really ticked people off, right? And I've gotten blowback for it. But, uh, a lot of times if it's just a struggle, Hey, this didn't go the way that I expected this didn't work out the way that we wanted it to. We're, you know, we promised you we'd deliver this and then we haven't done it yet. Um,
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
people are really good. I mean, you know, you get the couple of people. it for whatever reason, they're just ticked off and they're, you know, I just figure they're having a bad day, right? And so, you know, I was the person that got blasted, right, when they had that bad day
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Mm-hmm.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
or bad week or they're going through something. But the vast majority of people, they're pulling for you, they're excited to be involved. And if you can explain, hey, look, you know, yeah, you know, it wound up taking me, I mean, even if it's just it wound up taking me longer to do than I thought it would, right?
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
even, you know, I had a pet die or something. People are great and they'll pull for you, right? As long as you keep them apprised of what's going on and
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Mm-hmm.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
deliver, you know.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah,
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Anyway.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
yeah. Yeah, I mean, I totally agree. Yeah. And you know, sometimes like, it's interesting because I had two people mentioned the same community to me as one of the most accepting.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Thank you. Bye.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
They talked about Astro community and they said that it's such a welcoming and nice community, like they just go there to hang out. And that's how you want your space to feel, you know, like everybody feels great. So I feel like we have something to learn from any like from our competitors even in terms of how they're running their products and their communities, you know. So yeah, creating that welcoming environment, safe environment, diverse environment, those are really important things for communities as well.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Yep.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah. And I feel like Ruby, I mean, as Valentina mentioned, Ruby is one of those places where it's a pretty tight-knit community, you know, people know each other. It's not that big of a community. It's kind of niche. So when you're active in it, you become noticeable real fast. And, you know, especially when you're building something cool in public and you're doing it in a very authentic way, I feel like that's authenticity is also something that's really important. Like, Martians really love SuperBase
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
and I feel like SuperBase nail
 
Charles Max_Wood:
It's
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
it.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
cool
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Like
 
Charles Max_Wood:
tech.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
they do tech marketing so well,
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Yeah.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
so well. Like the memes and the articles, like all of it is so good. And actually Paul is going to be at our next Deaf Propulsion Labs, which is going to be on tech marketing specifically,
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Oh nice.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
you know? So, yeah. And also we'll have Brad from Fly.io and Salma from Netlify.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
So it's really like a star team to cover this topic, you know? So, yeah, there is a lot more in the pipeline. We want to uncover different areas of developer tools. One of them is going to be documentation, which is like definitely a hot topic that we need to, you know, talk about. But yeah, we've got great things in the pipeline.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Yep.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
Yeah, it's really awesome. I love seeing all the, I mean, the big companies on there that are contributing, it's great. I mean, you're really organizing something. I think it's gonna prove very valuable for a lot of people. And so, yeah,
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Hopefully, that's
 
Valentino_Stoll:
I'm
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
the
 
Valentino_Stoll:
looking
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
goal.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
forward to more
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
for sure. And if anybody listening out there hasn't watched this first episode and you're thinking about building a product around developer tools, you gotta check it out. It's really great. There's so many things I picked up from
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
building communities But I hope I get to try out on some of my open projects.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah. Yeah, it's, you know, one of the goals of this project for us was to generate value for the community, you know, because it's important for us to create open source projects, but it's also important for us to share knowledge. Maybe some of you have read our blog, which is called Martian Chronicles. You know, our engineers write a lot of technical articles, great source of information, you know, there's a ton of on Ruby specifically, but also on other frameworks. And we take it very seriously, you know, just creating great content. So Deaf Propulsion Labs is the new one, the new generation of martial content. And that's it for today. Thank you for watching. I hope you enjoyed this video. I'll see you in the next one. Bye. Bye. Bye.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Yep. All right, well, was there something else that you wanted to talk about or?
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah, I just have a little announcement, so to say. So we're launching OKLCH Color Picker and Converter on Product Hunt next week. And it's something new that we're trying out. The tool itself was created by Andrei Sitnik and Roman Shamin. Roman is our head of design. He actually created Martian Mono.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
It's available on Google Fonts. It's a great font to use in your utilities. So they came together and they created this awesome tool that allows you to use OKLCH colors in browsers. So we are very excited about this launch and we'd be happy to see some support on Product Hunt, get those uploads on the new tool. And you know. Andrei is doing a really big job just educating about OKLCH
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
on his Twitter, so check it out. If you don't know what it is, I think it's going to be the new standard of color on the web, so it's time to get educated on that technology.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
Yeah, you know, I had never heard of this before. Do you want to just give us a quick, like, TLDR of what it
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Yeah.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
is?
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah, basically, OKLCH is a system, like a color space that's adapted to human eye, because, you know, color is kind of picked intuitively, you know, in the spectrum. And OKLCH is kind of like a math approach to it, where you can see different... Let me actually get specifically what it is. Like, there are three... Lightness, chrome, and hue are the different factors in the color, and you can actually mathematically derive precise colors that would have the same contrast or live in the same kind of harmonious family. You can create like accent and danger colors that would have high contrast and would live in the same color palette. So it's a tool that designers and front end devs can use in their day to day life instead of RGB or hex colors. and that I a little bit more precise and allow for better accessibility. So yeah, that's the gist of it.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
Yeah, I mean, as somebody who's
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Cool.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
worked with red, green, blue for the longest time, I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking that there's got to be a better way. And I mean, this is really cool. I've always
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
wanted to be able to truly use the hue and saturation from CSS.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
And it's always just been
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
confusing. So I mean,
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
I'm excited to see where this goes. I'll be using it for sure. with stuff.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah, you should check it out. It's kind of unique because it's not like a regular 2D space of color. It has the 3D thing. And actually, like OKLCH unlocks like 30% more colors on new displays. So on Retina, you have 30% more color. You know, so it allows for like more vibrant, like more precise hues. It's the P3 gamut. All of those color words that, you know,
 
Valentino_Stoll:
Yeah, this 3D
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
yeah.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
map is super fun to play
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Yeah.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
with. Ha ha ha.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Yeah, there's definitely plenty to play with on the tool.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
Yeah.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
I just have to say that my artistic ability leaves me in a space where I couldn't pick the right color to save my life. So. So.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
That's why you can use math, you know, you can just
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Yeah.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
do mathematical,
 
Valentino_Stoll:
Yeah, you know, it's funny.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
precise calculations.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
And in a lot of like, you know, Raspberry Pi things where you have an LED and you wanna like guess the color of the light, it's always math, but it's always like, okay, well, we have this, you know, hue and then it just goes off the RGB and then that's how you calculate it. That's like,
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
really, you shouldn't be bit shifting, you know, red, green, blue. There's
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
like better math
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Right.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
that you could do to get the right color out of it.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Yep.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
interested
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
to play on there and see how it works.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah, we'll be sharing the product hand page on Twitter on the 6th of April, I think. And there will be some very clear examples of how to use it. So I think those would be really go to for many engineers. So I think that's it. I'll see you in the next video. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
Cool.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Cool. All right, well, I think this kind of opens us up to the self promo segment of the show where it's, hey, what are you working on that people should know about? This sounds like a pretty cool tool. Anything else you're working on that people should know about? I'm just gonna go ahead and do a little bit of that. I'm gonna go ahead and do a little bit of that. I'm gonna go ahead and do a little bit of that. I'm gonna go ahead and do a little bit of that. I'm gonna go ahead and do a little bit of that. I'm gonna go ahead and do a little bit of that. I'm gonna go ahead and do a little bit of that.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
No, I'm going to San Francisco next week. I'm going to the Global Conf from the startup grind. I don't know if you guys know about it. So if any of your listeners are there, drop by, say hi. I'd be happy to meet you guys in person.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
cool. So is Evil Martians going to be there or are you just going on your own?
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Just
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Okay.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
me. Just
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Cool.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
me.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Valentino, what are you working on that people should know about?
 
Valentino_Stoll:
I'm working on storing embedding calculations for OpenAI's embedding. I'm working on churning basically through a bunch of data to try and gather context over just prompt engineering, injecting context into prompts, which is how I've currently been using it. So it's super cool stuff where you can basically, if you're not familiar, chat GPT is what I'm talking about. And instead of providing like a page worth with context about what you wanted to do. You could just use some calculations that you've previously calculated to help lead it toward where you want it ultimately to go. And
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Wow.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
super interesting stuff. So if you want to play around with that, check it out. There's a Paul Graham's essay on where
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Mm-hmm
 
Valentino_Stoll:
somebody made a chat bot to ask Paul Graham anything based on his essays.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
I
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Interesting.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
love
 
Valentino_Stoll:
And
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
that.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
so
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
I
 
Valentino_Stoll:
they
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
love
 
Valentino_Stoll:
fed
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
that.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
it, yeah,
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
I want to see that.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
They did embedding calculations on all his articles and then now you can find your way and talk to Paul Graham. It's pretty funny.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
We love Paul Graham's essays. He's the best. He
 
Valentino_Stoll:
Yeah,
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
just nailed
 
Valentino_Stoll:
super
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
it.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
cool.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Wow.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Yeah.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Chagy Pity is kind of scary. Like it's fascinating to the point when you're like, I just, I'm just speechless, you know?
 
Charles Max_Wood:
I'm just waiting
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
So
 
Charles Max_Wood:
for
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
good.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
the singularity that is. All the new content out on the web was AI generated and so it is now feeding off of itself. Anyway. So, yeah, that's it. I'm gonna go ahead and do some more of the stuff. I'm gonna go ahead and do some more of the stuff. I'm gonna go ahead and do some more of the stuff. I'm gonna go ahead and do some more
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
of the stuff. I'm gonna go ahead and do some more of the stuff. I'm gonna go ahead and do some more of the stuff. I'm gonna go ahead and do some more of the stuff. I'm gonna go ahead and do some more of the stuff.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
Thank you. Bye.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Just infinite loop
 
Charles Max_Wood:
That's
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
of
 
Charles Max_Wood:
right.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
charge-upity, yeah.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
It's not getting smarter. It's just getting more. Anyway,
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
 
Charles Max_Wood:
so stuff I'm working on, I have a couple of things I just want to put out there really quickly. One of them, we've talked to Amir Rajan about building games on this show on JavaScript Jabber. We talked about Phaser and building games in the browser. But my son is really getting into video game development. He wants to do more stuff with like the user. Unity engine and stuff like that. And the other thing, so there were like three things that kind of lined this up and I'm gonna try and keep this short, but one of the other ones is, is I get asked probably on a weekly, semi-weekly basis why we don't have a video game development podcast. And so I have decided that I am going to fix that for everybody. And then of course then I can just get asked, why don't you have a better video game development podcast? But that'll be a different issue. What I'm doing for the show, just to kick it off, and I'm probably going to start a panel show like this one as well. But initially I'm just going to do a show with just me. Now I am not a proficient game developer, but my friend Jason is, and he has a course, he has a, what is it like a two or three month bootcamp on how to build a video game. And he actually walks you through the process, and at the end you have a functional video game. Now you all build the same game, but, you know, the things using Unity and C-Sharp. So if you go buy his course, go to topendevs.com slash game dev, you can do that with or without the dash. It'll take you to where you can buy his course. And then if you buy the course, you can join the Topend Devs Hub and there will be a link on the website. That's something I'm updating this week. And we're gonna have weekly calls and work through the boot camp together, okay? Now I kind of get that some people are gonna move faster and others, but we'll get on and you know if I'm ahead of you, I'm happy to answer questions. If I'm not, then I can ask Jason and he can you know help me help you, but I kind of don't want to do this just in a vacuum and feel like I'm you know going off on some random direction. So anyway, if you want to do game development, go sign up. If you use the code, and this is the code he gave me, this is not the code that I asked him for. If you use the code JavaScript 5, you'll get 20% off of the bootcamp. And yeah, just use that top end devs link to get it. And then, yeah, just join the hub and we will join in the fun. The other thing that I'm working on is I am working on so that I get people getting on for coaching. And typically what they're doing is they feel like they're stuck, right? They're a junior developer. Most of the time, junior to mid-level developer, they feel like they don't know how to move ahead. either to get paid more, to get more recognition, to work on more fulfilling stuff. You know, their boss is awful. I mean, all kinds of reasons, right? But the other thing is, is it's like, okay, so what do I need to learn? What do I need to be doing in order to grow and get ahead? Well, I have a system for you. So I'm starting a new podcast on that too. It's going to be Catapult Your Coding Career. And I'm going to release three episodes a week. They're going to advice that works for juniors and seniors. The other is going to be for junior developers who are stuck. And the other one's going to be for senior developers who are kind of going, okay, what's next? And we'll put that out every week. And then I'll have some premium content for that too, just like I will for the game dev stuff. And so if you want to get more, you can get more. But yeah, those are the things that I'm launching right now. So
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Sounds pretty awesome.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
it'll be, it'll be way So I'm looking forward to it. I love talking to people about this stuff and then I guess the last thing is is the book club Starting next week. We're reading Darren Hardy's the compound effect and so That's just how you do small steps that compound into large changes Work for you. So anyway, like I said, I was trying to keep it short and I failed Let's do picks Valentino. You have some picks
 
Valentino_Stoll:
Yep. So my pick is an Evil Martians blog post, which I just, I thought this was hilarious and kind of wildly brilliant at the same time. But it's basically a way to like, bend Ruby so that it can read and execute Go code using Ruby Next, which was just a really well how to execute what would be otherwise compiled go code. But really more interesting to me was how to use Ruby Next, which is a way to take advantage of features that are coming in future versions of Ruby with older versions of Ruby that you're using. And it was really interesting. And I think everyone would get a kick out of this. So I would go check that out. And I guess my second one is I got Lasik, which so far has
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Thank you. Bye.
 
Valentino_Stoll:
incredible. So I recommend that if you're a candidate and able. So far pretty mild of a process, but yeah, that's it for me.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Awesome. I'll jump in with my picks. I've got a few of them. So the first one is... I always do a board game. This one is a board game and it's tile placement. It's called Between Two Castles. It's a Mad King Ludwig game. There are a couple of them, but this one, what you do is you're actually between two castles. So you're building a castle on your right and a castle
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Thank
 
Charles Max_Wood:
on your
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
you. Bye.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
left. And so is the person next to you all the way around. So basically the way that it works is you're collaborating with a person on your left to build the castle on your left. You're collaborating with a person on your right to build the castle on your right. and you want to build them as big as possible, right? And so you look at the tiles in your hand, you take two, you assign one to one castle, one to the other castle, and then you get points based on what they're next to, or what they're connected to, or what they're in the same column as, or the same row as, or all kinds of stuff. And anyway, it's a really, really fascinating game. The way you win is, or is Whatever the score is of your second highest castle, right? So your worst castle is the one that is your score. So if you and the person on your right built the best castle, then the other castle that you have is your score and the other castle that he or she has is their score. And so it gets really interesting because effectively what you wanna do is build up both castles as high as possible so that you have the second place castle as your worst castle. castle in the game is going to get knocked out for both people that built it. So, it just made for an interesting play dynamic because usually you're trying to either do the best or, you know, sabotage other players or things like that. And there really isn't any of that. What it really boils down to is, is can I keep the parallel focus of both castles, you know, throughout the whole game and make it really pay off. So anyway, I really enjoyed that. Another pick that I have is my wife and I have been watching Star Trek Picard and I don't know if I really love it because it has all the characters that I've loved for years or if it's actually good writing I think it's some of both. You know I don't know that the plot is always like mind-blowing they really do a good job of pulling in the nostalgia from the old series, from next generation, from Voyager. I think they've had some characters from Deep Space Nine, and they've got some new characters in it too. And so it's been kind of fun and interesting to watch. So yeah, so I'm going to pick that. And Then the last pick that I have is, and this is for Valentino,
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Thank you. Thank you.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
it's Corey Hart's Sunglasses at Night. And so I'll put a link to the YouTube video so that you can all watch it. Cause yeah, he's wearing sunglasses cause he got his LASIK and I just, my brain keeps playing it in my head and I think it's funny. So, anyway, Victoria, what are your picks?
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
So I have two. The first one is running. I did my first 5k last Saturday and I didn't even know I could do that. And I did my second on Sunday and I was like, yep, I can
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Wait,
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
do
 
Charles Max_Wood:
you
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
that.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
did two?
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
So I did two in a row,
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Wow.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Saturday and Sunday. And I think I can run, which is surprising to me. So I'm gonna start doing more of that. I really like that. I also had a very scenic route. It was right by the ocean, you know, in Lisbon. So it was lovely. So I'm gonna try some of that in San Francisco. We'll see how it goes. And my second pick would be The Bear, this TV show that
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Mm-hmm.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
I watched recently which I loved. It's about this chef that inherits a sandwich shop in Chicago and he's trying to make something great out of it. It's an emotional one but it's very cinematic, great vibes. Just loved it.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Yep. So I, I went on a couple of trips to San Francisco when I was training for my marathon in 2019. And yeah, just running along the bay is really cool. In fact, it got really cold
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Mm-hmm.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
one of the times. I actually wound up stopping and buying a hoodie on my way back cause I was freezing. Um, but it's also really fun. If you can wind up over by the Golden Gate Bridge and just run as far across as you want and run back. Um, so yeah, I recommend that you do that. If you're in San Francisco and you're getting out for runs, you definitely should just just run along the bay There's plenty of stuff
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
to see that way
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Yeah. I'm kind of excited to go to San Francisco because you know there is a red bridge in Lisbon and there is a red bridge in San Francisco
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Right.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
so I'm actually bridging the bridges
 
Charles Max_Wood:
There you go.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
and I'm excited about that.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
All right, well, let's go ahead and wrap it up. Thanks for coming, Victoria. This was really fun.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Thank you guys, I felt welcomed, I felt home.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Nice.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
It was great.
 
Charles Max_Wood:
Yeah, also recommend people go watch that video for the Dev Propulsion Lab. And, uh, yeah, until next time, folks, max out.
 
Victoria_Melnikova:
Thank you.