 session of day one on the Creative Freedom Summit. I am here to welcome Pablo, CEO of PENPOTS, to the stage to share with us about the public roadmap and the secret agenda. Maureen and myself are here and we will come back on at the end of your talk to moderate any questions from the chat and I'll let you take it away. Thank you, Marie. Thank you, everyone. Thanks to the organization for inviting me. I really wanted to participate and have the chance to share some context on what we're building and what is public and perhaps what's not so public but equally or even more important than the roadmap itself. Well, I am Pablo. You can see, probably you can barely read it but there are some pointers to major social links there, my handle and my personal website. That's the only thing. So, a bit of context, since I would really like to have this talk as a self-contained talk, I think it's important for everyone to be on the same page, like what is PENPOT, why we built it and then move on to the roadmap and the agenda. The underlying agenda. So, for those of you who don't know PENPOT, PENPOT is an online design and prototyping tool that is open standards based and it's open source. It uses the Mozilla public license and it's meant for cross-functional teams. So, that means both designers and developers to be able to just design and prototype user interfaces for the most part, although in a way it's multipurpose but its big bonus comes when you're designing interfaces for software applications or devices, something like that. So, here is a screenshot where you can see that in action. You can see the user elements in a design and prototyping tool and of course I forgot to mention that it's browser based so you only need a browser. Here you can see the interactive prototyping features where you can link different actions or triggers to different parts of the prototype so you can mimic, have a mock-up of the user experience and make decisions or have conversation around that. Also, since we are open standards based, everything you can take both the visual assets but also the SVG that comes with it when there is SVG, which is almost all the time and also HTML and CSS. So, to the right pane you can see code snippets. Again, barely readable. I can share the PDF later if you want to look at it but basically everything on Pempot is both design and code at the same time and then it's important to have feedback loop as a built-in. Like if you're going to have this collaborative approach to design and prototyping, you do have to have a common system and various common thread systems in place and also perhaps it's a bit more boring and less exciting but you have to have team management, project management differentiating between what's a library of assets, a draft project, a full-fledged project but also of course have a way to contribute for those types of assets as content libraries. We have a section, public exchange of it and a selection, a curated selection of those are available in-app, so you can one-click import a UI toolkit and start working using that. So, this is what is Pempot. Now, while we build Pempot, we have to go back in time to the company that built Pempot which is Kaledos and Kaledos you would have to picture it. We founded the company back in 2011 in Spain and the company basically was a perfect blend between open source hackers and open source designers and we wanted to have this diversity within the software development ecosystem where we would have equal standing as co-writers or designers, engineers and creative people. There is a nice picture that represents that top right where you can see Esther and also Maria to the right and you can see like design and code working together. In that case, they were just enjoying one of our week-long hackathons, our Pi weeks personal innovation weeks where the whole company was and still to this day is challenged to learn new things and have fun either alone or within teams. So, we have that in July and in December and it's just great for creation and innovation and there you can see both design and code working together. I think that was a game with some dragons or something like that. Now, what we felt was wrong within our company was that the lean and agile processes were only welcoming and benefitting developers, not designers. So, everything about Scrum and Kanban and the lean principles and agile techniques were mostly defined and enjoyed by developers and designers had to just reluctantly adapt to those processes. So, we decided to create a platform an agile platform called Tyga and you can see some screenshots there below, so T-A-I-G-A. That would be the first open source, well the first agile platform regardless of its open source nature that would really welcome designers. That was back in 2015. Now, it was an immediate success within the company because we saw designers really engaging. The thing here was that we were able to achieve much closer interaction and flow between design and code just by having a project management tool that was giving equal importance to design and code. Some of you might know about Tyga and it was a great product. It's still a great product and we actually building the next major iteration what we call it Tyga Next which is going to be awesome and it's going to be part of the hidden agenda so stick with me. Now, the thing that happened with that is that it was so successful sometimes this happens, something can go too successful that designers hit a wall in the sense that their productivity with the tools that they had at hand with designers were not up to the level of workflow virtuosity that we were enjoying as teams and there was no online design and prototyping tool good enough for them in open source with nothing like that actually. So they asked to break a sacred rule and use proprietary software for the first time and they asked to use Figma to say just we need to have some way of real time collaborating having this UX, this prototyping just to be as fast as developers and to be as productive and feel joy about our work. So it's great that we have the lean process already but then our daily work our daily productivity is an issue. So we have Pi weeks so guess what? That we said okay let's do that as a temporary solution but then Juan here pictured and Andre decided to take the next Pi week and say okay let's build the open source Figma killer and just go beyond that. So you can see here a very early prototype actually that's a functional prototype it looks super dated I know but it was the seed to what is is now so the whole company conspired to at the same time that we would use temporary use to like Figma we would just build just the natural replacement and in doing so we would also bring I think much joy to the whole open source ecosystem. Now how do you execute this? You made that decision you go all in with this and you say okay but Kaledos as a company is agency is a boutique consultancy company that would work for other companies or the startups to build their technology for a fee. And even though we have these side projects like Tiger and Pempo this might not be enough bandwidth we might go super slow. That is a big issue for a tool like Pempo to be built it's very challenging you really need to have a full team devoted for a short amount of time so that you can intensify that development cycle. Anyway we decided by the end of 2019 to migrate the company from a consultancy status to an open source product status. Then we got hit by COVID but we decided that that decision would remain despite the risks and we just got our savings together pulled some seed money and some helps for angels and family and friends and all that and we kick started the new adventure. Some of you might have been present at FOSDEM 2020 so just weeks away from lockdown and where we actually presented this. So the roadmap was easy enough for the first stage like we will have to sort out the specific challenges for a tool like Pempo like we have both technical and UX UI challenges we would have to make sure that we have an open very engaged community like honestly brain community into the system making process and contributions and everything we will need to have the best onboarding experience for designers for designers and I think touch upon this strategic decision later on but suffice to say this was a great decision to make early on instead of targeting developers and then of course even though we wanted to go beyond Figma that's the biggest incumbent we needed to for some time have an overlap with the features that make that tool appealing to the designers worldwide but then question mark question mark question mark question mark you know towards relevance because we want to be relevant I mean I think it's relevance in terms of footprint in mind share in terms of being a sustainable business we want really to do this to to have a really tangible positive net impact you know net positive impact on society through technology through open source but there are some question marks there so yeah so I say so part of the process was they forced them 2020 at the time was called UX box then we had the rename process done so it was no longer UX box but we had this PEMBOD Clara here also there's a talk on force them 2022 about how we process feedback and of course forget about the dated you know the product actually evolved quite fast and then we got some ideas on what the future world map would look like so we would like to have a plugin architecture so people could integrate and extend PEMBOD to shoot their specific workflows which doesn't feel unique you know and special and want to hack into the products and the tools and use them the way they want and then invest now into specific design and developers interaction and that collaboration how does it look like it was very important for us to think about okay now we have to think about features I'm saying this because we have achieved we are releasing official launch for PEMBOD like GA and we feel comfortable saying that we have achieved this feature parity okay it's where it matters I mean it's impossible to have everything that a tool like FEMA has but where it matters we feel pretty comfortable that we have achieved that but then you have this all the milestones along the road also an easier content space where it's easier to contribute and share content and then also build Tiger's integration so that both products make this workflow between scope definition and project management and the design process seamless that's a big opportunity for us to have two out of the four tools that all digital teams use project management, design tool code management and chat two out of four to be very close very well integrated even though they might have their own personality and agency but have a nice integration and then something happened back in September we probably called that FigmaGate that some of you will recognize that by Adobe acquire Figma and we you know at Adobe acquire Figma they spent $20 billion it was huge in terms of the size of that deal unexpectedly big for the time but also it was huge in terms of the emotional distress that this caused to designers worldwide not so much for developers that probably would say that they were already expecting some of the designers had this issue I would be discussing it with journalists I would tell them like look this is the close metaphor to this is like Emperor Palpatine had just hired Princess Leia like this Figma company was sort of the rebels and they just started to be acquired so it felt wrong so you can see there's charts in terms of adoption exposure and all that and what did that change in terms of our public roadmap what you know what are the changes nothing excuse me nothing changed it was great to see that adoption it was great to see designers enjoying that onboarding experience like it felt polished it felt for them they didn't see this as an open source tool that was like imposed to them but that was not counting on them so there was no need for us to change the roadmap at all it was really it was really good to see that because when you have this intense exposure you might find that there was some killer features that you haven't even planned that people that people really need whatever people would tell us they wanted were already in development process in a way we have surveys we already have nothing changed so that was great the only thing that really changed was from like January to May and then after Adobe Figma in our onboarding surveys the relative contribution of people coming from Figma doubled you can see that there so less fewer people saying I haven't used any tool and then on the contrary a lot of people saying I'm using Figma so less people not having exposed to a design tool equal because the rest you can see between none and other we had like 50% and that dramatically decreased to just 25% and that was taken over by Figma but it was a change in demographics not in terms of any impact on the roadmap I hope you'll follow me here so speaking of roadmap is a roadmap public it is has always been we don't really are super fans of GitHub as a place GitHub or GitHub as a place to do to show your roadmap so we use TIGA so you can go to our PEMPOT project on TIGA and you can see the backlog and it is prioritized is a nice shape and then you can also sneak peek into the current sprint actually if you go now you can see what is keeping the team busy prior to the GA launch you can see all the details where people are struggling all the comments there's a lot of attention right now because we have a fixed date and we want to honor that commitment so you can go see so it's not only the roadmap but also the sprint so what's going on whether it's in the design process or already in development and of course the issues but if you go and read all that what you see is that there's some big themes that cover the public roadmap so I'm not going to comment on all of them but you would see like advanced components or everything in design should be a variable that you can tweak and then crop just have ripple effects on the whole design or have use code first layout systems like flex layout which is coming in a couple of weeks instead of just a design-centric layout that needs to be interpreted by a developer so then we will have great layouts and whatever slash you know layout system or variable form support or code options or webhooks or plugin architecture or something very dear to us which is performance we are using SVG rendering and we're using the browser and performance is always an issue it will always be an issue for a tool like this but in particular we have an advantage here that if we go we can tap into the higher limit that the browser gives you if you're using the DOM rendering portion which gives you 16 gigabytes of memory for you for the process for a tap contrary to what Figma and others are using which is the WebAssembly memory limit which is like very in a bad way I can say the runtime memory you're using for both the code and the assets but that only gives you 2 to 4 gigabytes memory because of the 32-bit address memory allocation issue that some has for now so we have an opportunity but also more challenges because if you can make your design go from 2 gigabyte limit to 16 gigabyte then you will face all the performance issues and then of course making it super easy to contribute for both content and plugins etc so this are the big things again I can share this PDF and you can go through that but it's something that you can infer from looking at the world map so now going to the hidden agenda if you look at the breakout of our demographics you will see that we have as many designers and developers actively using PEMPO and then you can see product managers and funds which is fine because decision makers are always fine to have in the mix we don't expect this to remain 1 to 1 ratio between designers and developers for a long time I think at some point that 1 to 10 developers in the world will kick in 1 to 5 we will see here but this is a nice way to express what we are after here what we are really after here so very briefly because this is a bit of a complex light that I put together but we feel that there is a problem with design at scale we don't think design has been benefiting from scaling app as other engineering practices unfortunately tools are addressing this rather on the superpowers to the individual mode which eventually commoditize either code or design we don't think that is the proper way to scale app design but also then tools that are for teams are not addressing cross functional teams workflow so I think we see this as an issue like they are not addressing the widening gap between how much design can scale up versus how much infrastructure and engineering is already scaling up that gap is just widening super fast it is an ongoing debate in terms of both types of tools for the individuals that is the commoditizing path versus the team tools not the commoditizing path but then what is about the workflow so the feature of design for us in a way you could say okay the feature of design is to finally get rid of that structural handoff bottleneck between design and code and to have that as a bidirectional relationship so it is as important to get design to code instantly as well as to have code to design instantly you know why not have this bidirectional flux and let's not have loss in translation issues and also let's not have this back and forth issue with the fear of losing control whether it's for the designer or the developer but really for us it's all about giving more power to design and designers for us the feature of design cannot be conceived without giving more power to design and more power to design means giving more power to designers not more risk of commoditizing we see trends continuously trends are saying okay we'll just override this and just keep commoditizing design to make sure that we can then correlate the scaling up in engineering and code with the scaling up in design and the sacrifice here is design design will have to be lowered down we strongly believe that in a zero sum game theoretically zero sum game we need to have developers just give away part of the power that historically they have amassed and the ideal way to do that is for them to be happy about giving away that and this has to happen everywhere in the world so we need to go every continent, every team every type of organization and making sure that there's this new culture of sharing that power struggle you know a different power struggle we call this the hidden agenda and we're making it this public the beginning of the year, last year because we want to make sure that people understand how we are positioning ourselves whatever we whatever we build for PEMPOT wherever we'll say we're like integrating with TAIGA about scope definition and design finally meeting together whatever we decide in terms of collaboration or open standards or AI or whatever we'll have to answer a very direct question who is really benefiting from this and if the answer does not include in some way designers or design itself the activity then we will say okay let's find a different way so that designers stay on top like they lead the conversation and everyone enjoys that new status quo but it's really designers that are leading the way taking everything they need to scale up their designs without any compromise or any sacrifice that they have to do so many sacrifices already put in place we have to put you know somehow the feature does not we don't like the feature where that continues to be a thing and I think that's it alright so we have two questions so far the first one is I remember there was some integration with TAIGA and PENPOT how tight is that integration now there's no such thing as an integration we plan to we have plans on integration the team management so that whatever you invite a new member of a team on TAIGA you will have that on PENPOT but then we are thinking of comment sync use the story definition being now much more visual like a use the story on TAIGA could just be a PENPOT prototype allowing designers to have more say into how scope is defined but I'm sorry if at some point someone thought that there was already some integration not at all we are redeveloping TAIGA so that we can do that and that will happen you know you will see that tangibly at some point this year so it's very exciting for us because we are doing two things at a time we are actually going at the Vanguard we are going further into the lean process we think it's a bit of innovation stagnation in the lean agile world for the past decade we are trying to push that to move the needle and at the same time merge the lean process and the design process in a way that designers really truly enjoy but it's not something you can try now it's in the works okay great and then the next question is is PENPOT fully in the browser regarding uploaded assets and works made with it so I think it's a question of what's stored in the browser versus what's local on the user's machine yeah I know everything lives in the browser and you upload things to the browser and the browser stores whatever it needs to the server and so there's a persistence layer that you can come back so regardless of the browser you're using or as long as you log in you just retrieve everything it is true that we are using Clojure and ClojureScript some part of the runtime can go to the browser or the server independently but in terms of the data they start living on a browser level but then at some point we just move it to the server there are some of course you can self-host your server and so you can have your own PENPOT instance and there are some community contributions that get PENPOT as a desktop app they just encapsulate that in a desktop you can install that on Fedora or Ubuntu or Windows or Mac and have a desktop experience that's fine for some use cases too although you lack then the real-time collaboration aspect because it's like your desktop it's just for you that way you would have both the browser experience but with the local storage I guess okay great and see we have two more so the next one is is there some visualization of changes made to the draft overtime in PENPOT no yet but that's a great concept that we're working on like how to visually have the diff and I think we are we have an opportunity here since we have the code equals design we should be able at some point to interpret through the code that has changed what that means in terms of design because I think that we don't think that designers are going to be very happy just pushing changes in that design and then knowing that that is goes into a good repository you know that is fine but it's even better if you already know the changes visually by what they represent before pushing to the repository so not blindly just pushing I mean what you see is what you get so you can push it but it's better if you already know what's it and changes we have since we go open standard we have that opportunity in terms of priority it was not a top priority before GA but it will become a top priority after GA and we have another question I guess fantastic yes one more is there a browser where PENPOT runs its best? yeah that's a frequently asked question so no wonder it came up yeah it works best on Chromium Chrome the team is working you know round the clock to make that equally snappy on Firefox but you can go to the frequently asked question and you will see like the different browsers and the different experience that you can get for now the suggested one is Chromium Chrome and then I think the next one is Firefox but it works great regardless of the browser but if you want that extra snappy experience I think for now we get that from from Chrome at some point to be honest we will need to have active conversations with different browsers I mean we are learning so much on browsers so much that we need them to work in our favor otherwise the experience will not be that's great depending on the browser so we have plans to engage with Mozilla to try and make sure that I mean please for an open source open standards platform we should have like the best best of experience on Mozilla that would be so great for the team but for now for free we get better performance on Chrome that's great and I think there's no further questions although there are some comments that works nicely in Firefox in the chat so here you go oh yeah I mean yeah well thank you very much it was a pleasure and an honor to be here and looking forward really to both force them in three weeks the whole team will be there and second our GA January 31st so yeah it's going to be big for us great year ahead looking forward to it thank you everyone for attending this talk thank you Pablo we actually have a couple of our organizers giving a presentation at FOSDEM so maybe you'll have a chance to meet them in person that was a great talk the Fedora design team uses Penpot we know we know regularly so yes thank you so much for being here I think I'm just going to make a few comments since we're closing out the end of the day but thanks again for being with us and even with jet lag oh yeah it felt okay and I got this I think it was really meant for a different person here I think it would work in space but it's fine it's a green tea I'm not complaining but yeah it was a gift from the organization thank you very much but yeah I didn't feel so much jet lag as I thought just disconnect and keep watching the final remarks okay thank you awesome thank you