Scaling 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.

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