Scaling DevTools

Karl Clement is the founder of https://codeowners.com/ 

CODEOWNERS is the single source of truth for code ownership.

Summary

• Introducing Karl 
• Code ownership
• What are the types of people that are implementing code Code Ownership
• How to find and reach platform engineers.
• What are some of the key metrics that organisations are looking for to measure the value of their tooling?
• Dora metrics
• Mean time to resolution, MTTR
• What is Backstage and how has it been used?
• Improving the developer experience with Backstage.
• Backstage implementation is essentially a signal that a company is willing to invest in the organisation but the developer experience as a whole, which is great
• Backstage implementation is a signal of investment in the organisation.
• How venture capital can help with product development.
• If you’re building a product in a space that no one else is in, you are reducing your odds

Alan Shreve is the founder & CEO of ngrok. 

ngrok is a simplified API-first ingress-as-a-service that adds connectivity, security, and observability to your apps in one line

What we cover:

• Creating a simple experience for users.
• Designing for the 90% use case vs. the 10%.
• How did the idea for ngrok emerge?
• How the first iterations of the product came about.
• The internal struggle to create simple interfaces.
• How do you test your library design?
• One of the best ways to test library design.
• Amazon's one-click checkout.
• Chasing simplicity vs complexity in a complex system.
• Product processes to help chase simplicity.
• How does NGrok measure and track user growth?
• Time to value, kpi, time to value.
• Empowering developers to do their jobs.
• How does a hobbyist use case expand into a commercial use case?
• How do you think about the problems that ngrok solves?
• How do you get an application online with minimal configuration?
• What’s the takeaway for other developers or founders?

Links:
- ngrok: https://ngrok.com/
- Alan's Twitter: https://twitter.com/inconshreveable
- Thanks to Danger Casey https://twitter.com/CaseySoftware for organising this
- swyx article https://www.swyx.io/self-provisioning-runtime
- Joel Spolsky talk https://mixtape.swyx.io/episodes/elegant-software-joel-spolsky 

Fred Schott is the founder of Astro.build and the Astro technology company. 

Astro is the all-in-one web framework designed for speed. Pull your content from anywhere and deploy everywhere, all powered by your favorite UI components and libraries.

Snowpack is a lightning-fast frontend build tool, designed for the modern web. 

Before this, Fred founded Snowpack 

• What is Astro and what is it doing? 0:00
  • Fred introduces himself and talks about astro.
  • Fred explains what astro is and what it does.
• What’s changed in the web over the last 10 years. 2:20
  • The last decade has been defined by full stack javascript.
  • Astro is a server-first HTML rendering.
• Astro’s unique model of building an open source company. 4:51
  • Building a sustainable company around an open source project.
  • The astro technology company model.
  • How Fred got started in open source.
  • What Fred worked on before astro.
  • How Fred got started in open source software.
• Pika was the first project that I really sunk my teeth into. 11:15
  • Pika was the first project Fred really sunk his teeth into.
  • Building snowpack and
• Why is it so bad to create a slack channel for your open source project? 14:00
  • Stop creating slack communities for open source projects.
  • The importance of community
• What it’s like at the beginning of an open source project. 16:26
  • The first users are essential for an early-stage open source project.
  • The power of responding quickly to feedback from the community.
  • The first version of astro
  • The spirit of open source and the importance of licencing code.
• The importance of having fun working on something that’s your own. 22:29
  • The drive to just build it.
  • The importance of having fun working on free software.
  • The psychology of over-architecture.
• The importance of dog-fooding and how to use it. 26:13
  • Dog fooding projects, how to build a tool for someone to use by seeing what they are doing.
• How do you get people to use the tool if they’re not already using it? 29:16
  • Finding a real use case for snowpack.
  • How to approach feedback from users.
  • Using a Github repo to test new changes.
  • Prioritising what to work on.
  • Death by 1000 paper cuts.
  • The importance of listening to users for feedback.

Links:

• Fred's Twitter https://twitter.com/FredKSchott
• Astro https://astro.build/
• Snowpack https://www.snowpack.dev/
• 5 Things I Learned Building Snowpack to 20,000 Stars https://dev.to/fredkschott/5-things-i-learned-while-building-snowpack-to-20-000-stars-b9d
• 6 More Things I Learned Building Snowpack to 20,000 Stars (Part 2)
  https://dev.to/fredkschott/5-more-things-i-learned-building-snowpack-to-20-000-stars-5dc9

Anh-Tho is the founder of Lago https://www.getlago.com/ 
Lago gives you open-source metering and usage-based billing

Jamie Barton is a DevRel Engineer at Grafbase https://grafbase.com/ and the host of https://graphql.wtf/

Pranay Prateek is the founder of SigNoz - Open Source Observability with Traces, Logs and Metrics in a single pane.

Topics covered:

• How SigNoz has grown to 12k stars
• How did you get started with the open source model? 
  • And have there been any teething challenges. 
  • Apart from growth, have there been any other benefits?
• What is the path to monetization (question from Utpal Nadiger)?
• Could you talk about your technical writer program? 

Links:

• SigNoz https://signoz.io/
• Pranay's Twitter https://twitter.com/pranay01?s=20

Adam DuVander is an expert in developer marketing and the author of two books: Developer Marketing Does Not Exist and Technical Content Strategy Decoded. 

In this episode, we dive deep into the world of developer marketing, specifically focusing on early-stage companies building tools for developers and how to create engaging content for your audience.

What we cover:

• Adam's journey from journalism to developer marketing
• The importance of developer marketing for early-stage companies and its role in product growth
• Identifying your target audience and understanding their pain points
• How to create content without directly promoting your product, yet staying relevant to your target audience
• The concept of becoming a media company within your niche and providing value through content
• The importance of engagement metrics over vanity metrics for early-stage companies
• The Jedi Developer Mind Trick: how to showcase the value of your product without directly promoting it, especially for early-stage companies
• Examples from successful early-stage companies like LogRocket and Stoplight
• How to measure the success of your content and know if it's working for your early-stage company
• Tips on choosing the right topics that resonate with your audience and relate to your product
• Adam's new book, Technical Content Strategy Decoded

Buy Adam's new book here 

Rob Moore is the CTO and founder of Churnkey - a tool that reduces churn for you automatically.
 
What we cover:
- Developer documentation
- How Rob buys tools
- How Rob discovers tools
- Go slow & build good things
- How Churnkey works

References:
- Rob's twitter https://twitter.com/robmoo_re
- Churnkey https://churnkey.co/
- Super docs super.so 

Ant is the founder of Supabase. Supabase is the open-source firebase alternative and has gone from zero to 47,000+ GitHub stars in a matter of years. 

What we cover:
- Ant's Egyptologist dream
- How the Launchpad book showed Ant that building a company is possible
- Product Market Fit is always just a pivot away
- How to talk about Supabase?
- Differences between pre-PMF and post-PMF
- How Supabase stay on top of and prioritise huge volumes of product feedback
- How Supabase positions itself to hobbyists/startups and bigger enterprise companies - DX and scalability.
- Supabase's Twitter strategy
- Trial & error in marketing
- How does Supabase measure marketing?
- Spaced repetition in marketing
- Databases are very sticky
- The future of Supabase
- The difficulties of hiring non-technical people (supabase is hiring!)
- Why Supabase over other tools?
- Is Ant a Liverpool fan?

Links & Resources:
- Ant's Twitter
- Supabase's Twitter
- Supbase
- Supabase jobs
- The Launchpad book
- Kuba's breakdown of Supabase's marketing strategy
- swyx (I can't find the exact tweet)
- Amjad - we think in years

Josh is a Navy Seal turned founder of Uffizzi. Uffizzi provides environments as a Service and works with open source projects like Backstage.

Topics
- Pivoting between ideas
- Working with open source projects to improve products and build credibility

Links:

• Uffizzi
• Josh's Twitter