The Swyx Mixtape

Audio Source: https://share.transistor.fm/s/d717f16d

Follow Julia Che's work on Openess, her new open source funding/community startup.

Topics Discussed
 
in sequential order, but timestamps arent available bc the audio has been cleaned.

Transcript

swyx: [00:00:00] I was recently on the building openness podcasts with Julia Che. Julia is building a startup to solve open source funding and build open source communities. This is her first time doing a podcast interview, so there is a little bit of awkwardness here, but I thought it went off relatively well. We talked a little bit about learning in public, being a GitHub star and building developer community. 

So here it is! 

Julia Che: [00:00:26] Swyx I am so excited to chat with you today. Thank you so much for agreeing to do this inaugural interview of this podcast. You're my, literally my very first guest ever on the show. So I couldn't be more delighted, honestly, So you have a pretty strong following of dev community on Twitter.

And so they know who you are, but for others who might not have come across you before, can you share an overview about yourself, who Shawn Swyx Wang is and what you're currently up to? 

 swyx: [00:00:55] Sure. And thanks for having me. It's it's an honor to be considered and I'm happy to help launch your podcast, which is pretty exciting.

I'm Shawn. Aye. Work at Temporal is head of developer experience. And I'm originally from Singapore. Mostly work in New York previous career in finance, where I did everything from currency derivatives to treating GameStop in, shorting it and actually making money. But I transitioned to finance transition to tech at age 30, and then essentially did a bootcamp.

And since then I've been, I've worked at Netlify AWS and now at Temporal on the side, I do quite a bit of community work. So I used to be the moderator of our stature, BRGs, which is the subreddit for reactive Oliver's the largest JavaScript framework. And that, that grew from like something like 40,000.

When I joined to over 200,000 now  I recently left that to run my own paid community, which I run for my book. And that's available at learninpublic.org as well as a, another framer community, just cause I like it. But this time starting from zero, I literally started to, I think we just hit like 9,000 or something like that.

And we're going to launch our third conference this month. So, yeah. I like community stuff. I like blogging. Happy to talk about any of that. 

Julia Che: [00:02:10] Awesome. Yeah. I mean, you're a very active member in the open source community. You're even a good pub star. So I'd love to know what that means.

And furthermore, what open source means to you? 

swyx: [00:02:23] Honestly, it's just. Beta test slash super user program. Just like a lot of companies have like some kind of recognition for people who are  maybe prominence users. Also, they give you some swag. So this microphone that I'm using is what I'm good hub. And yeah they give you events, look at some of their upcoming features and it can ask you for feedback.

So it's a little bit of a status in recognition in exchange for some work, but every one of us love give up, get up so much that we don't mind. Cool. 

Julia Che: [00:02:54] And so what do you find appealing about open source and what makes you want to participate? 

swyx: [00:02:58] The source is one of the things that make makes tech.  So different from every other industry.

Particularly, I came from finance, sorry, let me turn off my discord because it's going to do that maybe in a few minutes. Well, opensource makes sets, sets tech apart from every other industry because we share so much. So there are two, there are a few benefits coming out of that. One is that we have to duplicate work a lot less.

Like we can just stand on the shoulders of giants a lot faster. And And build faster, in theory, the practice is that it's very messy, but in theory, if you find the right things that you can reuse, that you can use them forever and it's totally free and you can inspect the source, you can change it.

It's a really wonderful thing. The second thing is that you actually get a lot of scrutiny over the highly used open source. And I think some of the, I don't know who said this, but. No sunlight is the best disinfected. Whenever people write software there's bound to be bugs, especially security holes.

And when and more people looking at it, the better. So that's a very strong reason to open source. But me personally, coming into the industry, I think that the personal reason is that it's a great way to learn because that the code is a source of truth. And you can literally just open up the code and read what, what goes on under the hood.

Not a lot of people do it, but every time I do it, I find I learned something new and it really is a reliable way to level up very quickly. So I think I owe a lot of that. It's open source. Like when I. Was in finance. A lot of the way that we used to learn was like you go to college, you learning some textbook and then you pass some CFA exam and then you try to work on your investment thesis or your pricing model, and that's proprietary.

And you do not share that with any other banks or hedge funds.  And I realized that's fine, but it's very zero sum. We have to look at things like I win only if you lose.  Whereas in tech it's a fundamentally more positive somewhere. I can give the way my what I, my secrets are the things that, the thing I spent millions of work on and not only do I not lose, I might actually win from like getting more reputation or getting contributions from the external community or even.

Increasing my reputation as a  an employer. So people want to come work with us based on the work that we've, that we do internally. This is an example actually, of something that happened recently, Figma is a very popular designed tool. Their CTO, Evan Wallace actually started working on a build tool in his three-time called yes.

Build. And it's just such a high quality. Tool that actually, it definitely increased my own perception of what it's like to work at Figma because if the CTO does this for fun, imagine what it's like working with him on a real thing at work. So it's that, there's definitely a marketing angle to it. 

Julia Che: [00:05:34] And so that is that indicative of a shift that's happening within open source and. What are your thoughts on the present state? What that shift is and what the future possibly is of open source? 

swyx: [00:05:47] That's such a huge question. You cannot possibly have a good answer to that. I'm sure. Open source used to be a more stick it to demand type of thing.

Very famously. Unix was a very closed source, licensed operating system. And Linux was started just to clinic because they didn't want to pay for your next.  And I think that really, that culture, we persist in some way today, but now there's a lot of corporatization of open source. Like open source is my business model and try to create some funding around it.

That's by the way that's what the company I work at. Does we have an open source framework anyway, trying to monetize that by doing a cloud hosted offering, but that's a normal way. Any different from elastic search or Mongo, DB, or name any other  open-source company. Yeah. And then, and now that, it's so established, I think that a lot of people will try to.

Really like open source, which is not a thing that used to happen. So, which I think is a positive, because a lot of people will be screened out by the traditional hiring processes. Like you have to go to a recognizable university or you have to right. Pass the right interviews. No, but what if they actually wrote software that you already use?

Like yeah, you should hire them. So, so yeah, I think it's a positive, like it. 

Julia Che: [00:06:57] Cool. Cool. So based on your experience, what are two or three of the biggest pain points you face as a developer in opensource? 

swyx: [00:07:06] Well, that's interesting, based on experience, what are the two or three of the biggest pain points I faces as a developer in open source?

The first one is definitely that documentation internal documentation is pretty lacking. So when I. Try to want to contribute. There's not really a map. You just have to figure your way out around there's a movement towards documenting the architecture and the design principles. So there's a blog post or movement called architecture.md where they want you to rate your sort of overall organizing principles for contributors.

But I only see. Two or three people actually do that. The vast majority just have they're caught out there and they just assumed that you'd still be in the deep end and you just figure it out. So it's, so the learning curve is just pretty hard. And then I think the other thing is just making it worthwhile because a lot of the times I look at a lot of open source projects out there.

I'm very, I admire them.  But they're never going to pay me anything. So it's literally just doing stuff for fun. And I can think of a couple other things that I can do for fun. That would pay stuff. So I would, I'm more inclined to go do that. So that's definitely me as an indie hackers type mentality where.

I definitely am more focused towards trying to try to do interesting things and get paid for it as compared to someone who just does things purely for intellectual fulfillment. And that's fine too. That's like, if I never had to worry about money ever again, I would do that. Cause I just, I love ideas and I love like, Hey, this thing should work.

How come? No one's done it. And then I just go do it. And then it, and it blows everyone's minds. That, that, that seems like a wonderful way to spend time. Unfortunately, I, I'm still very much in trying to Pay my loans more so, so I'm not there yet, but I would like to be someday. So I think funding.

Yeah, I think it's my, 

Julia Che: [00:08:56] so what are your thoughts about these two sort of monetizing models? One would be the GitHub sponsors or Patrion, and then two is that hacker one bug hunting, bounty source type of program. 

swyx: [00:09:10] Well, hacker one is successful. So a way for them, particularly how they keep people anonymous, which is very important to have your culture.

 But that's only you focus on security, right? So, and a lot of the times it's very scoped when you set up a bug bounty program and the real surface area of your attacks. Sorry, the real attack surface area of your company is completely on scope. It's like people can pull you in a thousand different ways.

 Then talking about GitHub sponsors. I don't like it. I don't think it's right. I think it's Becky.  And a lot of times it's developers paying on a dual buckets to the open source developers. When it really should be the companies that employ them. Why should the, why should developers be paying on the dual pockets after tax as well?

Which is sorry. So yeah, I mean, I think it's a, well, it's a nice move. I'm not gonna, heat on that. I think GitHub that he's doing something is better than not doing anything. And they also matched donations for the first year, but I'm not sure it solves anything.

Julia Che: [00:10:06] Okay. Yeah. Thanks for your thoughts on that.  So with regards to learning in public, you've written extensively about learning in public. Can you share your thoughts for our listeners on what it means to learn in public and why this has become such a significant part of your process and your work?

swyx: [00:10:23] Yeah. So learning and public is this idea that the vast majority of our lives we've been conditioned to learn in private all the way from a formal education. Even to the way that we learn at work it's very much like, go through courses try to skill up to yourself and then execute that there's no.

Recognition of the value of putting stuff out there. And when I look back at my own career that the most positive, higher return on investment things that I did were things where I learned in public. So literally writing up notes on whatever I just learned or writing notes to myself from three that's six months ago.

And it's not this idea that you should broadcast every single waking moment of your life. We're not talking about becoming the Kardashians but the default is 0% public. And I think that people and developers in particular are not at all well served by having things zero by default. So I was mainly just encouraging people to go from zero to five or 10% public.

So the vast majority of the time, you're still going in private. And what happens to it when you're learning in public are quite a few things which are very similar and tied into opensource which is for example, you you put your, when you write your stuff up when you write up your knowledge or rehash it in certain way and put it in your own words, you retain more, right.

And that's the value. It's a valuable thing in and of itself. Even if you, if no one else read it, you still win. And then I really like, I'm really a fan of. Single-player games. The second thing is if other people read it they're very incentivized to spot mistakes because that's how the internet works.

When someone on the internet is wrong, you're cheating. You're just crawling over broken glass to go fix that. And lastly I think it really helps for people who are working on the thing. So let's say I used to do a lot of writing on reacts and now I wrote about the react library. You can bet the core team of reacts developers are reading it because they want to know how, what the external perception is.

And if they, if I get a right then I'm helping to amplify their voice because I have something that they don't have, which is a beginner's mind. The, if they've lost the ability to relate or understand what it's like to come into something fresh. So you can provide a lot of value for other people, but mostly I pitched learning in public as a selfish thing.

Don't do it out of the goodness of your heart, do it because you genuinely believe this is the best way to learn do it because you've learned faster this way. And you grow your brand, your network, your skills all at the same time. And when you survey the menu of other possible things you could be doing in order to learn and grow your professional skills, this is by far the clearest and most effective way to do that.

And you can do it sustainably for a very long period of time. 

Julia Che: [00:13:01] I love that. I really do. I would love to do it more myself 

swyx: [00:13:05] while you are with the podcast. Yeah. 

Julia Che: [00:13:09] My first podcast interview. Yeah. So you know what to share and what not to share. I saw on one of your most recent newsletters that you talked about deep work versus learning in public.

And so is learning in public. Something that you've been maybe rethinking lately with that newsletter, or where would you go with that with regards to deep work and learning in public from a personal perspective? 

swyx: [00:13:30] Yeah, that's a great question. And thanks for picking up on that in the newsletter.

I think the newsletter is definitely the main, closest thing to like a public journal where I just. Right. What I'm going through every week and enough people find it useful that I just keep going for now. I never really know when these things end, but I enjoyed the journey, it's not about the destination.

So the idea, the problem comes when. Because learning in public is very tied to feedback. Like the whole goal 

is 

swyx: [00:13:54] that to establish this vicious or virtuous cycle of feedback loop, right? You put something out and get feedback and you improve it. Maybe you're wrong, maybe you're right. You just get encouragement or you get an indication of where to improve and you just keep going and going.

And the whole idea is that, that, that loop is a lot faster than if you did it by yourself.  The problem comes when you try to have a feedback loop that is too fast and you're constantly, you're putting out you're tweeting something and then you're constantly refreshing the, see the number of likes that it gets.

That's completely pointless. There's no point to doing any of that. So, there's a conscience, you should try to do some deep work and some amount of that means that you should ignore. The the people around you or the people trying to give you feedback? I think the two of them are not necessarily at odds because you can just, have long checks, deep work, and then and then share it and interact with your leaders and your peers and your mentors.

And then go back and go back to the deep work cycle all over again. But the work is done something new to me. I don't struggle with it because I do multitask a lot. And I think that I've lost some ability to focus for long periods of time. So I'm trying to get back more into the 

habit 

swyx: [00:15:03] of deep work and cutting out some of the more noisy parts of learning in public that haven't been so useful to me.

So it's definitely a balance there's definitely ways to do. Then any public badly. For example, if you pretend show yourself to be an overnight expert.  I'm definitely, always in favor of being more authentic. I like the idea that the way that Andy Matsu shuck, who's a former we ask what's team member, but I think now he's like an independent researcher and just general writer and thinker.

He calls it working with the garage door up. So you can be working on your stuff in the garage, and really deep into it. And you just leave your door up. So you're not really looking at whether people are looking at you or not, but some might someone might be learning from what you do.

And that's a nice analogy. I'm not sure how well it translates because your behavior just changes. Right. So when you know, people could be looking at you. So for example, I used to live stream on Twitch when I was writing and I found that was very distracting because I would be trying to narrate whatever was doing or I'd be checking the comments to see if anyone was like responding so that I could respond to them in times that they will stick around more.

And that's all very.  Secondary to just writing the damn thing. So,  so I think there's ways to do deep work and learn in public. Right? And you have to think about what makes you want. 

Julia Che: [00:16:13] And so what are your thoughts on creators who feel as though they become enslaved to their own systems?

For example, as it relates to creating content on a schedule and constantly having to draw out creativity from yourself on that on that system schedule that you create for yourself. Wow. 

swyx: [00:16:31] Good question. Is that a fear or is that a, I don't know. I F I feel like, so I think people approach it as in a few ways.

Sometimes the use that as a crutch or a certain, they use that as a mental barrier to prevent them even getting started in the first place.  But then also I do see that people after, a couple of years of doing this stuff And so both are, so on the one on one side I'm supposed to tell you, no, it's bullshit.

Just do it, see what happens. And then on the other side, I need to be very sympathetic and go like, yeah, burnout is real and you got to take care of yourself and just take a break and come back. And at some level I think that's a, that's where I've landed. I have been studying a lot of creators and it seems like the sustainable humans schedule is once a week.

 And you do that for a hundred times in terms of consistency. And you work your way up towards some level of quality where you figure out your voice, your creative pursuits your your favorite topics. And after that, whatever, paying your dues you're welcome to. Lessen Slack off on the consistency and just work on quality based on your inspiration.

So, the model I have for this is well, but why, which is Randall when roles thing? I think no, Tim urban, Tim Mervyn. And he used to, he actually did a couple of interviews where he laid out. The process he used to get started, which is literally consistently post every single week for two years.

And once he got only once he got to some level of readership, then he let himself come and go as in terms of creative output. So now you'll see entire months where he doesn't pause anything and that's fine because he's working on stuff. He's gained the trust of readers. People still pay him on his Patrion, even though they don't get anything from him.

And that's a wonderful place to be in. A lot of people don't, they'll get there though. So you are a slave to your  that's not your slave. You are beholden to your schedule a bit especially for people who are like, in the middle rungs of like just getting, going and like making a promise to their subscribers.

I especially see this from like sub stack authors, writing these newsletters. If you sold a one-year subscription, you have to write for a year. And they're like, Oh, what if they anxious? Hadn't done anything this week. No, suck it up. You'd just gotta write it. So for those people, I say that just, this is a idea of weighing in my mind, try to live your life in high definition.

And what I mean by that is that there's a lot of joy in life. There's a lot of interesting stuff in life that we just skip because we try to live life fast. Slow down a little bit and notice that the cool, interesting. Beautiful things and write about it and talking about it. Like there's a lot of ideas that just come up in casual conversation, a lot of stories that can be told that haven't been told, just because you take them for granted slow down and, go over them again and realize that this is interesting to someone.

And you can tell it because not everyone knows about it and Yeah, I think it's very reasonable to come up with at least one idea a week. So w the challenge I've set for myself currently is Ivy mixtape, where I come up with a podcast or audio snippet once a day. And if you put that, put yourself through that which in the finance, what we call idea velocity like the process or the discipline to just come up with, Hey, this is a story.

Hey, this is a cool thing we can write about to come up with something like that every single day. Then once a week is walking the park. 

Julia Che: [00:19:40] Cool.  So how important is it to build a brand as a developer? 

swyx: [00:19:46] How important is it to build a brand new developer? That's interesting. I personally, yeah, it's only important.

It's minorly important. It's not it's not the be all end all. And nobody likes the person who was all about building they're building up their own brand.  But it is vitally important that everyone that matters to you that you want to potentially want to work with knows that you exist and knows who you are and is when you can do and wants to work with you.

There's this fuel rungs of. Of the, with the brand building, right. First, get that to know that you exist second, getting to know what you do. Third, get them to want to work with you. Once you're there, then you'll have all the opportunities that you ever want in your life. And you can start building event because what's the point of being super famous.

Everyone would just want to tell you what to do, or, govern your life in some way. So a lot of people, when they get to a certain level of recognition, just stop. Because they realize that there, there are pitfalls to more reach as well. So I'm not there yet. I will be, and I can see it because I have friends who are already way past that.

And it's a struggle because first, you want to get noticed for the stuff that you do. So you do, you didn't want to have some sort of reach. But too much. And then it starts to become a liability. And there definitely there's a lot of cases in celebrity culture that have documented that.

Julia Che: [00:20:59] Cool. Yeah. I'd love to switch up a little bit and talk about your article that you posted on dev Tio with regards to the developer's journey. As a funnel, can you explain this for our listeners? 

swyx: [00:21:11] Ah, so this is about the community builder thing. Yeah. So, I work in developer relations for another fine AWS, and now I help to manage developer relations people.

And  it's very closely tied to marketing, right? Like the whole point that you hire these people is to better communicate to developers than traditional marketers, because you are a developer yourself and the. Traditional way of viewing these things as a marketing funnel, which is very similar to the process.

I thought about there's top of funnel and there, one is they haven't heard of you. Second is like the one is they don't even know they need you, or they're not even aware of their problems. So you've got to make them aware of the problem. Second is you've got to educate them about like the number of solutions that are available in their space.

And third is you've got to sell them on why you're the best. Something like that. They should give you money now,  that's a traditional marketing and sales funnel. And that, I think that's where that a lot of marketing functions in tech companies are set up, which is fine.

There's nothing wrong with it. I think there's Well, what we're trying to do is create a more human approach to that alternative to that where you don't necessarily know sometimes because a lot of times when you do, when you. Structure these things in such a linear fashion, then when you end up doing is making everything very transactional to the point where, when I was going to conferences, I would be asking for everyone's name tags and signing up and asking for their emails and putting them into our CRM so that we can follow up and all that bullshit.

And it was, it made our conversation very strained and artificial because I wasn't, I clearly didn't care about them and he goes to care about making them my number, go up. And it's very ineffective because the bicycles are so fricking long in tech. I can hear about a thing and I would just decide to not, and this is literally what I do for new technology.

So I'll hear about an Utelogy I'll say. All right, cool. Very good. Roughly get what it's about. And then I sit on it for a year. Right. Just to see if it sticks around. If, because if it doesn't stick around, then I w I'm not gonna waste my time. But if I'm still hearing about it a year later, then I'll go try it out.

So show me a compensation or evaluation process that. It is evaluated over a year. None. Right. Everyone wants instant ROI preferably within the quarter. Just doesn't happen. So, so, I think that there's a lot of effort towards breaking out of this traditional marketing performance marketing role, because that's what you do in e-commerce.

That's fine. E-commerce like, yeah, you want to sell handbags or a shave or I don't know. That's what you do with that. That's great quotes, but if you want to sell. Tech developer technologies where like they'll be working with you for years. It's a much longer cycle and it's more relationship based and sometimes people can the word that comes to mind is orbit because the company that sort of made this started this movement, it's called aura.love.

And so instead of modeling it as a funnel, they call it orbits. Like sometimes the people coming closer to orbit, sometimes they come out, it's no longer a linear thing. It's just more based on where they are in their lives. And and the only thing that you try to do is bring people closer.

And, but you don't really beat yourself up if they floated away for whatever reason, And I think that's a very healthy way to do these things. And it also means to me, which I didn't really write about and then vocals, I also means to me that you should have some empathy for how people feel about your competitors as well.

Like, if your marketing funnel is just about you, then you're serving yourself and really you should be serving your customer, your intended target audience or intended user. Understanding what they need and sometimes recommending them to do other things. If your yours tool is not their best solution, right.

You're not trying to cram your stuff down people's throats. So I think that's what the, sorry, this is a very long winded answer to say. I think the funnel is very linear and transactional way of doing things very yeah, finite some very, a very finite game and. The S the cycle or the orbit or whatever we were calling.

This is the alternate is the opposite. We want to play infinite games with on a relationship based basis. And to understand it from the perspective of a customer, not from the perspective of the company. 

Julia Che: [00:25:14] Yeah, I love what orbit's doing. I'm following Rosie or we're following each other on Twitter and just starting to get to know each other through that.

Have you used orbit and what are your thoughts on tools such as these for not only community building, but also open source? In 

swyx: [00:25:29] general? Yeah. So I've used Oregon forest spout society, youth just like as an open source thing.  Well, it's good for, getting numbers. Which that's the thing like a lot of developer relations professionals are existential concerns right now is just with justifying their cost to the people that pay their money.

So it's a valuable thing to justify ROI and have numbers and track growth over time. And all you want is just tries to go up into the right  That's great. I just wish that there were, there was more that it could do. Obviously they're working on this, it's still pretty early days. But yeah, like, instead of just telling me who my highest reach or increased change in in, in love, developer love and is what they call it.

Just tell me, give me suggestions, like, Would this is, are these two developers, interested in the same things, but they don't know about each other. Okay, great. Like, tell me to make the intro and myself as the community manager, I can go out and meet the intro.

A lot of that is gonna be locked up in a basically manually done by the community manager, just holding everyone's interests and profiles in their heads. But really you could, make the suggestions out of that. I don't, there's a lot of things I'm sure they've thought about this way more than I have.

Right now I just look at it as an analytics tool, but what I would really like for it to become a suggestions or like, idea, generation tool of like stuff that we could do with our community. 

 Julia Che: [00:26:47] Yeah. So what are your thoughts on diversity, equity and inclusion? The Eni and open source.

swyx: [00:26:52] In opensource. Wow. Okay. The baseline is that partially people, nobody knows who you are. You're if you're just a username on GitHub.  So on that level, if you want, nobody can really discriminate against who you, unless you show who you are. That's a very, that's a very first cut answer. The more realistic sort of social economic reason  I hesitate to mention this is that a lot of people will contribute to open source only do they do it because they have the time and the resources will do it.

So a lot of others don't therefore the people who learn faster during an open source are the ones who are already privileged. Therefore if you hire.  And you look at someone with an open-source track record and you look at another person with, without an open-source track record you may be accidentally biasing against someone who just straight up, just didn't have the background to do it, or it didn't have the friends or didn't have, or whatever.

There's any number of reasons to to not get involved in opensource. And that's completely fine. I mean, we need to be aware of that when hiring but otherwise, That Al a bunch of caveats. Okay, well, this is very unfair and in some ways open-source is also very unfair but compare it to a world in which open-source did not exist.

And we ha in tech hired the exact same way as every other industry, including finance opensource creates opportunities that did not exist before. And that should be celebrated.

Julia Che: [00:28:12] So at openness which is a startup that I'm exploring and building right now. Yeah, we're exploring how to help open source devs to do more of what they love. And so where do you think open source devs could maybe use a helping hand?

swyx: [00:28:25] Where are you open source, devs, helping hand. Wow. I have a very small, and I don't know if like a bit, this is the biggest answer or not. But it's just the first one that comes to mind because I have a investment in this space. So a triaging issues. When when you open source something you take on.

 Not just, you're not just responsible for the code and you're also not suddenly responsible for every single user who comes in and demands a bit of your time. Whether or not it's default for holding your software wrong  or is actually something that's an issue in your software that you need to fix.

So, I do think that a lot there's no culture of like a separate triage system that gets on the maintainers to figure out the priority level of the thing. And it's just a lot of work. And actually a lot of people just refuse to open source stuff just because they don't want to handle all that stuff.

They just want to quietly ship and it's completely fine. It's just, that, that means that a lot of stuff does not get open-source then that could have been if only we had a better. Contribution or triaged culture.  So one of the things in which I'm personally interested in a front end space is to decrease the cycle or make it a lot less of a burden.

And so we replay that IO is a company that basically spun off from Firefox, from Mozilla and essentially they're recording apps in the browser, so that People can create bug reports very easily in play, and the developers can play them back to exactly spot what went wrong. So instead of like typing and describing what you did, just send a replay and people can step through the code themselves.

And that's a very nice deterministic way to fix bugs in triage and prove that you actually faced this bug. So, but in, in larger open source, I actually, I've actually named this idea before.  Which with with Henry Zhu who runs babble and it's this idea called maintainers, not MD or like this, the separation or maintain or concerns, because right now a maintainer is expected to be full stack.

They have to handle everything from start to finish community all the way down to code. And probably we could split that up and probably we can make them limited term because. Something that's super annoying as well, is that there's no end of term, once you take up a responsibility, you're stuck with it until you just vaguely walk away and there's it's perceived as a chore rather than an honor.

I like it to be an honor. So the model that I think about is actually the social clubs of like our parents' generation, where. It, they might, vote in like a president or a treasurer and they would all have distinct jobs and they will all hold it for a certain term, right. For six months or a year.

And you can just go like, yeah, I was president of this club from like 2016 and 17, and here's the next president and the next president. And. And it's nice, a nice limited term of responsibility. It's it's sectioned off. So not like it's not one person that's handling the whole thing. And I think we could do that in open source.

I haven't really, ever really like, meet any noise about this idea, but I think it's interesting. I think we should try it. 

Julia Che: [00:31:18] That actually plays into the next question quite well. Is. How does governance play into the future of open source and why, and how is it growing as a field of interest?

 swyx: [00:31:28] I mean, it's, I don't know if it's growing. I think it's always been important.  I think bad governance certainly can make me choose not choose the projects. W despite everything else being great about it. Ultimately open-source ultimately software as an expression of values.

And if you fundamentally disagree with the values of the people running this project, you will eventually disagree with the court as well. Cause it would just encode the values over time.  Yeah, so, having, welcoming inclusive value is important. And don't know what else to say about that.

I, I, there's and the ones that say, like, how do you communicate with your users when you release projects? How long were you going to support things? And back port security fixes and stuff like that. You're doing all of this. There's 101 things that you would like to promise to people, and then you're in limited time and your resources.

So, so you have to let some things go. And it's a very difficult conversation because people don't want to let go of their pet topic, like, and and so everyone's making their own trade offs in various ways. I don't know if we can improve upon that, but that's just the way I see things.

Cool. 

Julia Che: [00:32:30] And so what is one of your favorite open source projects right now? 

swyx: [00:32:36] Huh spell it is my, so one of my favorite open source projects just cause I'm working on the community side of it. And I am friends with the creator and it's just a very interesting in the independence framework that is doing extremely well against a much, much larger competition.

And I like, I like seeing the underdog perform. And I also love when I read the code, how simple it is. And I think.  So sometimes we get too wrapped up in complexity that we don't see that there's an alternative that is good enough. And I definitely see salt in that way. Pushing back against the complexity of some of the software that we've created for ourselves and saying like, yeah your thing is great, but you may not need it.

 And yeah, just, I love that kind of story. 

 Julia Che: [00:33:20] I'd love to ask you a personal question about Hawker markets in Singapore, if you don't mind. Yeah, when I was there, I became, yeah.  When I was in Singapore, I became really quickly obsessed with Hawker Martin because obviously food is the food is amazing and then the price point is even better.

But what have you tried the Michelin star stalls? And please tell me about it. 

swyx: [00:33:40] I've tried it once. There's a very long line, obviously, this guys that's one of the first street food stalls ever get a Michelin star.  But it's like not that different from what you normally get from non Michelin starred restaurants.

So this restaurant is randomly got picked by whoever. So I don't really care about, some random, critic's opinion that, they're just all generically, like quite good because the formulas. Pretty well-known and I appreciate that. So, my, my thesis around this whole thing is that food is the great equalizer and seeing the same in society because rich people and poor people eat the same things and they don't pay very much for it.

And that's wonderful. 

Julia Che: [00:34:17] Yeah, that was what I loved about it, as well as people go for the food and the enjoyment and it brings people together, which is the best part about it. Okay, thanks for humoring me about that. So what would you recommend to devs that may want to get more involved in open source?

And what's the best way to start, 

 swyx: [00:34:33] Start with something that you already use, because then you already have a lot of familiarity with that project and you feel a satisfaction when you've made a contribution and you see it in, in the day-to-day use of your own work. So, so don't. Don't do the thing where someone opensources a hot new project that you haven't used and you try to contribute to that.

But you just won't have empathy and you not gonna stick around anyways. So don't even waste your time. Don't waste their time as well. But yeah. Start with something that you already use and and always check with them on your direction first, before filing the pull request because a lot of people do drive bipole requests and that actually increases maintainer stress because they know they have to say no to you or massively change your work because they, you never checked with them in the first place.

It's very impolite.  Yeah. Th there is an etiquette that you learn, when you first get started that. Maybe someone should write down then probably if you already have, but you just have to learn it after a few rounds was doing it.  And I think, yeah, no, it doesn't have to be code as the other points that I always give people.

So people always want more documentation. And even if you want to code, you don't have to contribute to quote code. You can write tests and there's never enough tests and people always want to increase more coverage of their code or replicate or reproduce the bugs that are people.

Our reporting, just like the triage issue that we talked about earlier. So all of these are contributions that are very valid and you can work your way towards landing a PR in, in, in the core code. But yeah, I do highly recommend that people get into it. It's possible to over-commit. So, be fast to, to just say like, okay, I've been off more than I can chew.

I need to, put this down or give this out to someone else. The worst thing is to take up responsibilities. Like I'll be in charge of that and then to drop the ball because other people are relying on you. So don't do that. And then just everyone does it, everyone over commits.

So just recognize when you've done it and just go back and just getting like, yeah, I've taken on too much. 

Julia Che: [00:36:22] Do you think there's space in the community of open source for. Non-developers or yeah, non-technical folks. 

swyx: [00:36:29] Yeah. We have we have a couple in a small society court core organizing team.

And yeah they're there for the people. It's a very nice community and they can do project management. They can do event organizing. They can talk about like,  the marketing and the blog posts and the YouTube tutorials. There's so much there's in fact, like the court is the smallest part of what it takes to run a successful community.

So yeah, if you want to do that's great. It's just I think it's very rare because as a developer, like if you're not a 

developer, 

swyx: [00:37:01] What are you really you don't really use the. The tool that you're supporting in the first place. So why are you there? You just, yeah, you just genuinely like the people but you could be doing any number of other things.

Like, I don't know, like gardening, like astronomy, that's the same level of connection there. 

Julia Che: [00:37:17] Yeah. For myself, it's. My brother was an open source developer. And yeah, so I had that little bit of osmosis, like 20 years ago. And then more recently I've been consulting and  in this space a little bit more anyway, we won't go too much into that. It's your interview here? 

swyx: [00:37:33] No is fine. I like that people share their perspectives and yeah, I mean, I don't what the motivations of other people are. I just, I just have my own lens of things and it'll really think about scent too much time thinking about what other people are motivated by.

Yeah. 

Julia Che: [00:37:47] Okay. So where can we find where can we find you online? Sorry. Right. I'm gonna ask that again. Where can we find you online and learn more about what you're learning in public? 

swyx: [00:37:56] Sure. So I always send people to my site now, six.io. It's got all the links to everything else, if you ever need it.

And I, I do have a weekly newsletter that you can subscribe for more thoughts. I always love to share the best of what I read in other people as well. And yeah I think if anything, I hope to encourage people to go through the same journey that I did because it's really changed my life.

And I wish that people would try it out just to see what it can do for them. 

Julia Che: [00:38:22] Well, thank you so much for your time.