devtools

Flo Merian is a developer marketer who has run successful Product Hunt launches for numerous developer tools.

Flo is also a maintainer of the Developer Marketing community and curates LaunchWeek.dev

Flo is a Product Marketer at Clerk - a user management tool 

Links:

• https://twitter.com/fmerian
• https://marketingto.dev/
• https://launchweek.dev/
• https://github.com/fmerian/awesome-product-hunt

Lu Wilson AKA todepond is one of the people behind tldraw, the infinite canvas for the internet.
Lu also has a youtube channel, todepond.
Lu also built the [hilarious] programming language dreamberd
Lu is also a researcher with Ink & Switch - an independent research lab

In this episode Lu shares how tldraw went viral again and again and again this year.

My biggest takeaways were to share your whole process and default to visual communication. 

Links:
- https://www.todepond.com/
- https://www.youtube.com/@TodePond
- https://github.com/TodePond/DreamBerd
- https://www.tldraw.com/
- https://www.inkandswitch.com/

Dennis Pilarinos is the founder of Unblocked. Unblocked allows lets you talk to your code base.

Dennis previously founded Buddybuild - a CI/CD tool for mobile developers.

In 2018, Buddybuild was acquired by Apple, and Dennis became a director in Development Technologies at Apple.

Some topics we cover:
- The story of Buddybuild and the Apple acquisition
- Why did Apple buy Buddybuild?
- Segmenting when building a tool for everyone

Links:
- Dennis' Twitter - https://twitter.com/dennispilarinos
- Buddybuild acquisition - http://tcrn.ch/2CG9s4G
- Unblocked - https://getunblocked.com/

Guest: Logan Kilpatrick, member of OpenAI’s developer advocacy team, often described as OpenAI’s first DevRel.

Highlights:

• Challenges and Growth: Logan discusses the evolution of developer engagement from GPT 3.5 to the explosive growth following ChatGPT's success. Initially faced with the challenge of generating developer interest, the release of ChatGPT marked a significant shift, highlighting the shift from awareness to scaling and improving developer experience amidst high demand and compute-intensive operations.
• Developer Experience Focus: Logan emphasizes the focus on developer experience, detailing the balance between improving platform features and releasing new models and APIs. Despite past trade-offs, the goal remains to enhance core platform functionalities and developer-friendly features.
• Decision Making and Prioritization: Logan shares insights into the dynamic and fast-paced environment at OpenAI, which requires flexibility in planning and prioritization. Key focus areas include documentation, product improvements, direct developer interactions, internal coordination, and supporting launches, especially the GPT Store.
• Impact of Documentation: Underscoring the critical role of documentation, Logan points out that effective documentation is paramount for developer success, guiding the use of OpenAI's API and models. Efforts are underway to improve documentation quality and support various user personas beyond developers.
• Developer Community Engagement: Lessons from engaging with the developer community include the need for diverse content formats and accommodating various user personas. Logan acknowledges the challenge of keeping documentation and resources updated in a rapidly evolving API landscape.
• Building a Superior Developer Experience: Logan stresses the importance of OpenAI's mission to benefit everyone and the role of the API in achieving widespread impact. The commitment to providing the best tools for developers is seen as a differentiator in the competitive landscape of AI model providers.
• Managing Attention and Feedback: Despite the challenges of being a public figure within the developer community, Logan values direct feedback for continuous improvement. Balancing public engagement with deep work, especially on documentation and launch support, is highlighted.
• Community Questions and Answers: Logan addresses questions from the community, touching on the desire for innovative applications of OpenAI technology, plans for global events, prioritizing documentation, addressing developer concerns about scaling, and sharing personal preferences for deep dish pizza in Chicago.

Rapid Fire Community Q&A:

• Innovative Applications: Logan hopes to see development of multiplayer, multimodal text-first AI assistants.
• Global Events: OpenAI is expanding its presence, including hiring in London and considering events in cities like Atlanta.
• DevRel Strategy for 2024: Focus on creating excellent documentation.
• Developer Concerns: Addressing challenges around freedom to scale and capacity constraints.
• Personal Time: Logan plans to take vacation during the end-of-year code freeze in 2024.
• Chicago Deep Dish Recommendation: Lou Malnati's and Paradise Park are Logan's picks for the best deep dish pizza.

Links:

• Logan's Twitter - https://x.com/OfficialLoganK
• Romain's Twitter https://twitter.com/romainhuet
• OpenAI https://platform.openai.com/
• tlDraw https://www.tldraw.com/
• Bloop https://bloop.ai/ 
• Joyfill https://joyfill.io/
• https://portkey.ai/
• Stripe docs https://stripe.com/docs 

This episode provides a behind-the-scenes look at OpenAI's efforts to enhance developer engagement, the challenges of balancing innovation with platform stability, and the importance of community feedback in shaping the future of AI development tools.

Show notes generated with gpt4 (using a blog post I wrote) 

Ivan Burazin is the cofounder of Daytona

What we cover:

- Scaling a 5,000 attendee conference
- How to drive change in big organizations
- Top down vs bottoms up approaches to growth

Daytona is an enterprise-grade GitHub Codespaces alternative for managing self-hosted, secure and standardized development environments.

Ivan Burazin - https://twitter.com/ivanburazin
Daytona - https://www.daytona.io/

DevCycle is a feature flag management tool.
DevCycle was founded in 2014 originally as Taplytics (an A/B testing tool) by Jonathan Norris, Aaron Glazer, Andrew Norris and Cobi Druxeman, raising $7.8m. Despite creating a million dollar business, in 2022, they raised $5m and pivoted to DevCycle.

In this episode, we cover their pivot and how they think about developer experience. 

Erik Bernhardsson is the founder of Modal Labs. Modal Labs is a tool to run generative AI models, large-scale batch jobs, job queues, and much more.

Links:
- https://twitter.com/bernhardsson
- https://erikbern.com/
- https://modal.com/

Felix is the founder of Hanko. Hanko is the Open source auth and passkey infrastructure for developers.

We talk about:
- The challenges of pivoting
- Layoffs
- The intangible goal of developer love

Check out Hanko: https://www.hanko.io/

Julien Danjou is the founder of Mergify - a tool that helps merge code safer and faster. 

Summary (auto-generated):

• How do you split your time between work and marketing? 0:00
  • Julian splits 50% of his time between building the product and the other 50% doing marketing and bringing people to the product.
  • Julian talks about mergerfi.
• Where do you start with product development? 1:23
  • The goal is to solve a problem for an engineer. They co-founded Mirchi Fi with Mary and wrote their own tool.
  • The role of time is a lot of time.
  • The importance of doing demos and showing the product around to the team, and how that has changed over time.
  • How the product is simple and there are a lot of viable options around it, but it's hard to think about all the tiny details.
• How did they get started? 5:08
  • They both started with a full-time job and moved from a platform to get up. They felt naked without any of their tools. They wanted to build their own tools.
  • They found a first rate customer, pitch.com, and then found more startups willing to use a merge request tool.
  • One of the challenges of being a bootstrapped company is that they only have two hours per week to work on the tool.
  • It is easy to not get good at making decisions when you can do everything, but in air quotes, do everything.
• How long did it take to write the first dashboard? 10:07
  • Before people started using it internally, they did most of the grunt work of writing the first version. The first version was a mvp.
  • The first dashboard they wrote was like HTML and the bootstrap framework, which was pretty bad, but it was good enough.
  • The first version of the product is the only thing that is going to be out in front of users or customers.
  • The importance of being an entrepreneur-minded person.
  • When they found the first customers, they decided not to build a company right away, but to focus on building a few hours a week into bots.
  • The real trap.
• Marketing and getting the word out. 16:00
  • The root problem is that nobody knows about you because you are not doing marketing. You have to go with the event if you have a competitor or inspire something.
  • It is easy to build the things for a year or so, especially when you are a developer.
  • Not everything works, but what works well is open source projects. For example, amazon is using lodgify on their open source project.
  • One of their biggest customers was using one of the engineer's projects on github.com, and they talk to their manager about it.
• Marketing and marketing budget. 20:30
  • Marketing is a lot of different channels that they can use, and they have tried almost everything to see if it works, and if it doesn't work, they try to future-harm.
  • They try to provide value for free to open source users and projects and are happy to do that.
  • Adding value in open source is about saving time and giving time to most open source projects using a merge tool.
  • If a company is new to open source, they need a tool to help them with a workflow tool, marketing, etc.
• How did you find out about rescue? 25:36
  • The number of people using rescue is small. There are very small projects with just one or two people mentioning it to project being run by 50 or 100 person behind.
  • The main goal is to actually work on the open source projects, not start a new one.
  • Redhat was working on an open source project with Eddie when they started. Redhat is a great leverage for building a company.
  • One takeaway for a dev tool founder, be strict about splitting 50% of your time between building the product and doing the fun stuff.

Ramiro Berrelleza, Founder and CEO @ Okteto, shares how his company transitioned from an open-source project to a category-creating commercial product and repeatable sales model. He reveals the benefits & opportunities of open source and the potential for community buy-in. Plus strategies for creating a repeatable sales model, how open source projects can guide early-stage decisions, when to begin identifying / building customer personas, prioritization strategies for engineering resources, and recommendations for early-stage hiring, especially for your first marketing hire.

ABOUT RAMIRO BERRELLEZA

Ramiro Berrelleza is the CEO and Co-founder of Okteto, the leading platform for Development Experience Automation. With over 20 years of experience in engineering, Ramiro is a seasoned professional with a passion for building developer tooling.

A visionary, Ramiro is always looking for ways to improve the software development process. He firmly believes that building modern applications is a team sport and understands the importance of removing friction from the development process. He is also a passionate advocate for building a more inclusive tech industry. With Ramiro at the helm, Okteto is well-positioned to continue to grow and shape the way companies architect development experience for their teams.

"Once you're building something commercial, the person that buys your product is not the same person that's gonna use your product and is not the same person that's gonna approve the purchase for your product. So that's already something that when it comes to distribution, when it comes to how you price it, when it comes to like how you talk about the product, that's one of the earliest things that you have to understand because if you don't understand this then you're going to start hitting all these walls.”

- Ramiro Berrelleza   

SHOW NOTES:

• Ramiro’s founder journey & the origins of Okteto (1:49)
• Why Okteto’s founders started it as an open-source project (4:06)
• The benefits & opportunities of starting as Okteto open source project (6:19)
• Transitioning from open-source to commercial (8:39)
• Embrace the community aspect of open-source (11:30)
• How the open-source community can guide early-day founder decisions (13:17)
• Ramiro’s method for identifying Okteto’s personas & its impact on GTM strategy (16:08)
• Using personas to determine what your product is lacking & how to package it (19:04)
• Building a product with the developer persona in mind (21:32)
• Which stage of the founder journey is best for identifying personas (24:30)
• How to prioritize engineering resources in the org’s early days (27:08)
• The importance of shipping a complete experience (29:39)
• Ramiro’s thoughts on the sequence of early-stage hiring (31:58)
• Qualities to look for in your first marketing hire (34:46)
• Tips for hiring someone who is transitioning from big tech to a startup (37:15)
• Why it’s worth hiring folks who can pull their own weight (39:28)
• Rapid fire questions (41:59)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• The Founders' Paradox - Aishwarya Khan Bhaduri’s book that shines a light on the illusion of progressiveness, the daunting challenges of exploitation, and the cutthroat competition that defines the start-up landscape.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Escape helps you Find and fix GraphQL security flaws at scale within your DevSecOps process

• Introduction to Tristan and Antoine. 0:00
• How did they get started in cybersecurity? 4:35
• How did you get your first few customers? 9:49
• Challenges from a product and tech point of view. 13:57
• Challenges of integration into the development process. 18:10
• How to find the right team? 22:55

Links:

• Escape.tech https://escape.tech/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=devtools-podcast
• Tristan's Twitter - https://twitter.com/TristanKalos
• Antoine's Twitter - https://twitter.com/iCarossio

Zach Goldie is a DevTools messaging consultant

• Ship code faster is an empty statement. 0:00
• How do you position yourself against the competition? 1:56
• The problem with free monitoring tools. 6:43
• Explain why fast is a good thing. 11:44
• Curse of knowledge and how to overcome it. 16:42
• The problem with copy length and word count. 21:37
• How do you know if a page is good? 27:05
• Pitching self-serve to users. 32:42

Links:
- Zach's Twitter https://twitter.com/DitchingData
- Zach's site https://www.zachgoldie.com/ 
- Benefit layers https://dx.tips/benefit-layers

Steve Krouse is the founder of Val.town - a social website where you can write and run code.

• Introduction to Val.Town's vision 0:00
  • How long it took Github to make money on Steve
  • Val Town is a social website where you can write and run javascript or typescript, run the code on servers, and see the results.
• Knocking down friction points 2:12
  • Val Town is making it so that programmers can create cool stuff without having to go through the pain of sending an email.
  • Zapier for developers is another kind of tagline that has been seen other people that you've interviewed on this podcast.
• Categorising use cases on the website. 4:45
  • Val Town recently made a list of favourite use cases and categorised them on the website. The challenge is explaining to people what it is and what it can be used for.
  • What can be made with Val.town section
• How to get people to make cool things with your tool 15:51
  • People hear about Val Town because other people are using it. The more people sign up, the more people are signing up for it.
  • Val Town has a smaller number of people who are excited about it and use it a lot, but it's not a mythical product market fit.
  • Every Thursday, the team is not allowed to work on the product. They all have to try and make Vals to go viral, which is a really fun creative day.
  • The last one that went viral was hacker news follow, which was branded as an installable script.
• How do you think about notifications? 24:30
  • Val Town is perfect for programmatic customization of notification emails, so that installing those into your account will be part of the tutorial.
  • Val is passionate about education, and it feels like that's a big challenge because there's lots of new stuff with val.
  • Medium-term ambition, build a learn to code interactive course on top of Val Town. Long term ambition is to have hundreds or thousands of Learn to Code courses on Val Town, embedded in the product.
• Future of coding meetups. 29:36
  • An interview with Brian Dougie, early at Github, and how he helped with bootcamps and how to run code with Netlify.
  • Future of coding meetup in london.
  • Managing a community is a funny thing. The people who start and manage communities are often weird people.
• Date Me Docs 35:33
  • Some people are looking for a unique snowflake, while others are sensitive and don't want attention on their date me docs.
  • The future of dating is a great exercise to go through to get clear in words about who you are and what you're looking for.

Links:
- Val Town - https://www.val.town/
- Steve's Twitter - https://twitter.com/stevekrouse

Dax Raad is building SST - an open-source framework that makes it easy to build serverless apps.

• What Is SST? 0:00
  • The theory in January was to make content that has nothing to do with SST and still convert people. Dax validated the theory within the first hour.
  • Dax tells us a little bit about SST, a framework for building applications on AWS, and how it works.
• The importance of marketing and content. 2:42
  • The focus now has to be on marketing. 
  • The top of the funnel is when someone has no idea who you are.
• Pitching the idea to his boss. 5:16
  • Dax pitched the idea and Fred Schott was immediately down. He spent a day just watching every single episode of Between Two Ferns and wrote down all the patterns of jokes.
  • He learned a lot from the first one, and is doing another one today at 230.
• How much goes into the show? 8:04
  • The original show is fully done and edits, and that is true of the one that video was made. The video was not close to what actually happened, but it was his response to the video.
  • The original is very specific and it's funny how specific the jokes are.
• The importance of having a unique angle. 10:40
  • For most companies, announcing an integration is not the most exciting thing to announce.
  • The bar is incredibly low, and the expectations are super low.
• Invest more in marketing and content. 12:35
  • They are looking to hire a comedian or someone who makes good content on YouTube.
  • They are planning a series A, and are looking for people who are talented and can help them.
• Educational vs entertaining content. 14:57
  • The only way to capture someone like you is through a different angle.
  • The theory in January was to make content that has nothing to do with SST and still convert people into trying out SST.
  • Finding an angle that is genuine for yourself.
• How he got over the hump of clickbait. 17:54
  • He went through the same hump that everyone goes through when trying to publish content on youtube.
  • He was sent a video by a guy who was very successful on youtube and he was explaining why he does what he does.
• The importance of having a good content. 20:51
  • Youtube is an amazing place. People will watch it if it's good.
• Marketing is a huge lever. 23:20
  • They are a very small company. They are able to do a lot given their small size and they are going to continue to be a small company, so they need to find ways to find leverage anywhere they can.
  • They are excited about what they can invest in.
  • Dax would love to work with someone who is good at filmmaking and editing to keep it engaging and keep it fun. He also thinks about shows that are authentic.
  • Key takeaways for anyone listening, remember that if you're building a company you do need to do marketing.

Links:
- SST https://sst.dev/
- Dax's twitter https://twitter.com/thdxr
- Between Two Nerds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I2Xep0GTQY&ab_channel=SST 

Gabriel Savit is the founder and CEO of Runway - a tool to coordinate and automate mobile app releases.

• Introductions 0:00
  • Introduction to Gabe
  • Underlying themes of runway mobile release management.
• What’s it like to work with mobile teams? 2:19
  • Challenges for mobile teams to keep tabs on.
  • The third party ecosystem problem.
  • The origin story of the team.
• The process of running a release was something that resonated immediately. Different teams set this up differently. 8:23
• What was the next step after you gathered the feedback? 10:38
  • The first round of interviews to validate the problem space.
  • How the interviews were conducted.
  • The feedback loop is not always closed.
  • The next step after gathering the feedback.
• How do you get an MVP out quickly? 15:31
  • Starting with one integration, one part of the process.
  • The first few pilots.
• How did you get your first customer to buy in? 18:24
  • Onboarding the first customer or first user.
  • Getting the first cohort involved.
  • Aligning with the overall vision of the platform.
• What is the go to market motion? 33:14
  • Go-to-market motion, demo, sync, sign up, demo.
  • Self-service, keeping the entry point open.
• What’s the future direction of the platform? 36:18

Links:
- https://twitter.com/gabrielsavit
- https://runway.team/ 

Brian Douglas - or bdougie - is the founder of OpenSauced - an open source intelligence tool. Brian was previously Developer Experience Lead at Netlify and Director of Developer Advocacy at GitHub

Summary

• Every engineer is an advocate. 0:00
• Joining GitHub with a 30/60/90 plan. 1:17
• What was the goal when you joined Netlify? 3:16
• How to get started with bootcamps. 7:53
• What are the top projects in open source? 10:52
• The bottom up strategy for adoption at GitHub. 15:22
• Netlify’s Aha moment. 21:19
• How do you get started in reaching out to community and consistently? 25:57

Links:

• https://opensauced.pizza/ 
• https://twitter.com/bdougieYO

Ruben is the founder of Windmill https://www.windmill.dev/ which helps you turn scripts into workflows and UIs in minutes 

Some of the things we talk about:

• Getting to the threshold of being useful.
• Speed is the key to success.
• The second mover advantage
• Getting early users of the product.
• Why infra is an interesting market for him.
• The challenges of being a solo founder.
• The recipe for a digital startup is to be really passionate about the project.
• Advice for founders who are building ambitious projects.
• Doing everything that no one wants to do.

You can find Ruben at https://twitter.com/rubenfiszel

Josh Twist is the founder of Zuplo, an API gateway

• Introducing Josh Twist, the founder of Zuplo. 0:00
  • Zuplo vs Azure API management.
• How do you make this fit into the developer workflow? 3:06
  • How Zuplo fits into the development workflow.
  • How to democratize API management and make it something every business wants to use.
  • Best practices for implementing API key authentication.
  • Stripe quality API out of the box.
• The power of removing friction in creating a better experience. 8:58
  • The power of removing friction from the process.
• How do you create a product that is easy for beginners but still has a powerful experience? 11:31
  • Loom is a great example of a product that exists only because it removes friction.
  • Building a product is like building a video game.
  • How to keep both the developer and the customer experience in mind.
  • The formula one analogy for designing a product from scratch.
• What’s going to go into the next generation of Zuplo? 17:27
  • How Zuplo keeps things simple and makes decisions.
• Why you have to have a lot of customer empathy and invest in tools. 19:39
  • The importance of customer empathy.
  • Why Josh made the decision to switch over to OpenAPI.
  • Killing features can be hard as a business-to-business company.
  • One chart to think about.
• The importance of partnerships and content. 24:29
  • Making videos for supabase customers.
  • Partnerships with other small businesses.
  • How Zuplo got their first customers.
• Zuplo rate limiting feature. 28:02
  • Rate limiting in Zuplo and Supabase.
  • Developers who are small-scale loving Zuplo
  • Making videos
  • Removing friction and building an 11-star experience.

Zuplo - https://zuplo.com/
Josh Twist - https://twitter.com/joshtwist

Dan is head of DevRel at FusionAuth - Auth Built for Devs, by Devs

• FusionAuth’s journey from moderation to auth provider.
  • Introduction to Dan Moore, head of DevRel at fusion.
  • Fusion's journey
  • Free to use for many users, but also a cloud offering.
• Synchronous communication vs asynchronous communication.
  • Synchronous communication vs asynchronous communication.
  • 10% of their traffic is coming from forum pages.
• No one ever searches on Stack Overflow.
• What are some of the experiments that have gone well? 
  • Efforts to promote community feel.
  • Community stories, finding out user pain points and wins.
• The importance of getting your community to know each other.
  • Getting 20 or 30 blog posts on the blog.
  • Dan's experience on Screaming into the cloud.

Dan's Twitter - https://twitter.com/mooreds
FusionAuth - https://fusionauth.io/ 

Nikolaus West is the founder of Rerun.io - Visualize computer vision.

What we discuss:

• Finding a problem to work on 
• What are some of the features that will be free and open source?
• What’s the difference between a commercial and a free service?
• The most important thing is that we’re building something that will be useful
• How to get into the minds of computer vision developers
• Why build in Rust

Rerun - https://www.rerun.io/
Niko's Twitter - https://twitter.com/NikolausWest