 Back here live at the Velocity Conference, this is siliconangle.com's theCUBE. This is our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise, and this is the Velocity Conference. Again, our motto four years ago when we started SiliconANGLE was where computer science meets social science. That, in essence, sums up this show. You have DevOps meets UX design, everything in between. This is what is being defined as the modern infrastructure, the preferred developer experience, which then enables ultimately the best user experiences. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joined on this day with Jonathan LeBlanc, who's the head of developer evangelism of North America from PayPal. Welcome to theCUBE. We'd love to get not only domain experts, CEOs, entrepreneurs in theCUBE, or tech athletes as we call them, but anyone who's out there kicking the tires with developers, helping developers, who also have written code, and you're one of those unique guys, right? You have that triple threat. So give us a sense of what's happening here at Velocity. I want to come in and ask some specific questions about some of the epic tweets that have been flowing around from your talk. Sounds good. So a lot of what I've seen about Velocity, it's amazing to see so many wide-ranging topics on performance or really just best practices. That's what I've been noticing here. And in some of the office hours that I was at, it started with just talking about API design, but going into wide realm topics like data mining and principles behind that. It's really amazing how you start with the overall sense of performance, and that leads you down some really nice paths to just whole other realms. Because you have such intelligent people all combined together. My co-hosts usually here, Dave Vellantes in New York, because he's got to get down to the MongoDB event on Friday, always says, is it a generalist or a specialist? And we see in other disciplines, especially in IT, the need for the generalist, or troubleshooting comes from a software generalist. But yet, what's happening is that you're seeing integrated stacks, or you're seeing different stacks, no one stack for any particular application. So generalist versus specialist, it's not that anymore. It's everyone is a both, it's a general specialist. The full stack engineer is the new front-end engineer. Yeah. The full stack engineer is the new front-end engineer. And that's really where it's going. So let's talk about what you're seeing at the conference. You mentioned on one of your tweets was 100 milliseconds in performance can be a shift of millions of dollars for customers. What do you mean by that? Yeah, so definitely when you have a five-minute keynote, you're hitting on some key points now, but there's a clear basis for this. So really what I mean by just a shift in latency is that when you have overall latency coming back from an API design, where you're incurring several hundred milliseconds of delay from an API that you're leveraging off of, what that relates back to is user-perceived latency. So as the user perceives latency on the system, let's say they're buying a series of products and they're trying to check out and it looks like the system's just shutting down or taking a lot longer than it should. You start to see user drop-off and that's what we've seen a lot over or companies that have built on top of APIs where if you have a slot on your system, you lose users. And as you lose users, those are directly related by all back to direct monetization, direct money loss. I mean, latency is a huge deal. I mean, we're seeing it and we cover also some of the converged infrastructure markets like where you got storage and you got flash and Solid State has certainly changed in the game, but that's not new to some of the cutting edge developers. But Node.js has introduced something really interesting. You saw a JavaScript really get at the time two years ago and we covered the Node summits. One of our first years we had theCUBE was our first season, Node Summit. No one's ever heard of the Node Summit. It's like, what is Node? But what that did was it opened up some headroom for JavaScript developers and what that did is brought a lot of creativity. What's your take of that? And do you see other examples where this creativity is being extended? Absolutely, first of all, Node.js right up my alley and definitely something that I've been working on for quite a while, started with my Yahoo days prior to me joining PayPal when I was working with some of the other evangelists there, Tom Uscroucher who wrote one of the first Node books with O'Reilly up and running with Node and really focusing on some of those Node concepts. Now, since I joined PayPal, there's been some interesting projects going on there. Hasn't been full-scaled, but there's pockets of people like myself that love working on these newer technologies, newer languages that are out there. It scares off a lot of people that it hasn't hit a 1.0. It scares off a lot of overall companies where you're going to that level. But then you have eBay building out products like Qlioql.io to be a data mashup engine for APIs. That mechanism is reminiscent of other projects like YQL on the Yahoo stack or FQL on the Facebook stack for its own data, just a simple querying language system. Yeah, it's like bring your own stack to work kind of thing. Isn't it? Exactly. Like, you know, B-Y-O-S and beer too, if you're going to bring your own beer. Of course. And the developers like it too. Yeah, beer is the number one. Actually, beer and tea, we found through our social data mining application that we built is that the preferred drink of choice for developers is beer and tea. Together? No, no, you're either one. I don't know. Maybe in the morning tea if you can sort of throw it. We didn't get into the other vices of developers, but beer and tea, they're a little bit polarized. And there are a lot of dads too. So just kind of, you know, add some free valuable market research out there. Absolutely. But, you know, this stack conversation is really relevant because that is a trend of DevOps, right? You know, building something and creating that stack is really the integration story because it used to be, hey, that group did that over there. I did that over there. That UX team, well, you know, that's not really plugged in. So there's a people issue. Right. There's also just integration. The confluence of what DevOps became, which was, you know, operations and developer. But now you stand that out for the UI with mobile. It creates much more of a different dynamic. What are you seeing with that extension? So DevOps we've covered, it's pretty well documented what that means. But you add UX into that. This trade-off, so people holistically looking at the design criteria of these systems, small scale, which then, and or large scale, that usually wasn't the norm. So what are you seeing there? So what I'm seeing personally on the front of realm or on the UI realm is a proliferation of JavaScript projects coming out that have to do with everything from overall visualization frameworks to things like D3JS, for instance, for visualizing data. You have mechanisms like Bootstrap coming out, of course, on the UI front. Then you get some nice lightweight approaches for on the UI side, for really building out kind of a data UI separation, but in a lightweight approach like mustache templating. That's one of my favorites, because it's so lightweight, where you can just dump in a lot of data from your overall server infrastructure into your front end and keep them separate at the same time. I'm seeing every project known to man coming out on JavaScript, where my Twitter stream is just filled with 20 new JavaScript projects every day. And that's really what you're seeing. And I think Node.js has really given a little bit of lifeblood back into the JavaScript community. Did you see your live scripting session? Did you see what they're doing? Or are they doing live scripting? I love that. Did you see that? Who was the woman that was doing that again? I think it's Natalia, I think. Hold on, let me find out who it is. I mean, she's the one tweeting it. Yeah, yeah, I have those tweets from her. And they've just been amazing. That's the first time that anyone's ever done something like that for me. And I plan on printing them out and putting them in my cube at work, because they're just amazing. It is yours right there. I love that one. And it's great because she captured all of the main key points of the talks. Yeah, whoever's doing that live sketching, they got to say that's brilliant. Keep doing it and send the images to SiliconANGLE, our cube team. We'll put them up on the live stream, because it's really awesome. I love illustrates, I love pictures. Very sticky, very viral. Absolutely. So shout out to the live, live, live. And I think she got my head shine very nicely. Nice eyebrows. I appreciate that. Okay, so getting back to the system layering. Okay, this summarizes your whole talk, right? But one of the things that encapsulates legacy systems was kind of a key theme. Obviously through the live sketching, we see that. But let's talk about legacy, right? Because you mentioned that in PayPal, right? There's always the NAE series. I don't want to say NAE series in the sense of blocking innovation. They're ops guys. I want to see 1.0 baked out a little bit. So there's that level of hurdle. Has that hurdle dropped over the years and what is accelerating from the bottoms up? Because you always have that top down, bottom up, and then meeting the middle. This community obviously is growing very rapidly, organically. So organizations are going to start to see more rise. So what do you see that bar? What's the hurdle for adoption? Sure, absolutely. So when I first started in the industry and people were working with a lot of the surface-side infrastructures, you would have the people that were engineering these systems in kind of a closed box where they would just do it based on pragmatic approaches to API design. They would do it just because it was the proper way to do it in building out the perfect system for themselves and for their company. But that was the time when I first started working in developer evangelism and what I was seeing was we were trying to work as a bridge within the companies and they would typically put us on the back burner. Now within PayPal, we're really seeing those different changes in the industry where the evangelism teams, the bridges into the company are becoming a cornerstone towards all the effort that's being done and in doing so, developers are becoming the cornerstone. What the development community wants to see from an API that leads to the redesign of the API, that leads to our roadmap, it leads to all the changes in the industry. So our developer community, the people that are building on our APIs are the ones who are driving our APIs. You know, I got to just say, I mean, one of the things you know, us geeks talking about, well you're more geekier than I am but you're encoding away, I've encoded in years but the API service layer is the future. This is the fastest way to do things. It's the way to build the Lego block model. Everyone wants that the dream, you know, frameworks is to have things work great, cohesively and decoupled, right? So you know, that's system architecture 101. So let's take this to another level. So consumer side, no problem. Everything's cranking along, all the pioneers and web ops and dev ops are cranking up, Facebook, Google, Twitter, all the web scale companies. Let's go back to the IT guys. You know, go back 15 years, corporate IT's just not been an innovative marketplace. I mean, they're cutting people, you know. Out source to help desk is first goes. Then you got, you know, they got four guys who were project managing and then no real resources. And now all of a sudden, boom, cloud, mobile. Elastic resources like Amazon, like environments and APIs. Now there's an effort to rebuild more developers. So unlike the mainframe days when you had the spaghetti code developers, just pumping out tons of code and no documentation for job security, you know, the old story, you now have the ability to really ramp up. So there's a lot of focus on IT to do this right now. So from a rebooting perspective or reinvention of IT, what do you see? What would you share with folks out there watching? Either CIOs or head of development in some, you know, insurance company, corporate enterprise where they want to be more like PayPal. I mean, PayPal's their own IT, so you have some insight into that. But these companies don't have the DNA to just turn up dev ops or turn up agile with mobile and web. And this... So that's a challenge. So I want to ask you your perspective on that. Your advice to those guys. Absolutely. So I've shared with a lot of people here and this is something that I've dealt with a lot over the years. And it's a specific reason why I'm a heavy advocate for open source projects and contributions. Because the people behind a lot of these open source projects or even these open projects take Speedy for instance, you know, on the Google side, you know, it's an attempt to change things towards a more lazy centric web where your main focus is towards reducing latency. And, you know, things like that or on the open source software realm working with OAuth or, you know, OpenID Connect, working with these mechanisms on an open source realm gives developers without those resources the leg up to actually build out something comprehensive, build out something really innovative in the industry and current. Because they have all the developer resources from many different companies all contributing back to these because they feel passionately about it. Yeah, but the problem with open source on the IT, there's no problem with open source, we're big advocates of open source, don't get me wrong. Scale out commodity hardware and scale out open source has changed the industry. But now you start to get into compliance issues, right? You know, you work in PayPal, you know a little about that. But IT guys, ANC compatibility for Hadoob, I got to, these are things that just aren't, that's a wide space, small little, no one's proactively doing that. So you start to see corporate guys having to get involved. So there's a mandate there. Absolutely. But still that needs faster. That needs to happen faster. It's a foundation. Open source is a foundation. That's what it gives you. It gives you the starting blocks to build upon. And that's how it should always be treated because there's no silver bullet in any industry. It's always going to be a series of trade-offs and when you're building out any product. And I also got to say, you said you're into social technologies. One, we're obviously doing our own social platform that we've built hasn't been released yet. But, you know, OAuth is amazing, right? I mean, OAuth really adds a lot of value when you want to come in and get credentials and provide a personalized user experience. And then, you know, back to node, you know, you got the server-side ability to do low-latency IO-centric things and then you need context. So OAuth has been a great thing there. What other areas do you see in the social space that's really compatible with cloud and mobile? What technologies are out there that you see or you're watching? So a lot of my round besides in social or around the same focus around data personalization and data mining. It's a scary topic out there because the problem is it's an intellectual pursuit. It's not necessarily a problem of itself, but you have a lot of people that are finally taking a lot of the data that has been mined over the years and they're saying, well, can I actually build a personalization engine for someone based on this? Can I actually learn X or Y about a person based on this massive quantity of data, these terabytes of data that I have? And the short answer is most of the time, yes. And the problem is that that's... It's early days too. I mean, this whole prison thing's blown out of all. It's blown out of proportion at two levels. One, the Fourth Amendment is really legit. We need to protect that. But at the same time, it's early days, big data. And I was in New York and all this above unprismed. I'm like, if you could give up all your mail for a year and everyone snoop you, would you do that and take back to Twin Towers? Everyone says yes. So there's weirdness around, okay, big data's early. We need to watch the government's certainly going to have transparency there. Policies, Fubard, beyond, you can even imagine these policy makers don't know anything about tech. So that's a problem, right? And the Fourth Amendment needs to be preserved. So again, too controversial for me to even come in to talk about other than saying those things. But that is a big issue. The data, personal data. So this is something that I've actually been talking about at several conferences in the past. I talk about data mining, but whenever I talk about data mining and personalization, it always comes back to a simple topic. Just because you can do it doesn't mean you should. There has to be, since it is an intellectual pursuit, we lose face with that we're actually focusing on human beings here. And we're focusing on some core integral parts of who they are as people that they might not want to expose. And that's the problem just because- A scientist works on a nuclear weapon doesn't make them evil, but they're intellectually satisfied by the pursuit of excellence in science, yet the destructive nature of that is an example. That's your point. That is my point, yeah. Data mining is at that infancy now where there's going to be a lot of mistakes made in the industry before there's any sort of regulations or standards in the workplace. I totally align with you on that. We're on the same page, Jonathan. Share with the folks out there at coordinates. Obviously, you're a real great thought leader in that area as well as doing some great work for PayPal. Share with the folks, your Twitter address and the blog and whatnot. Everything basically, all my accounts online are under JC LeBlanc, my last name, L-E-B-L-A-N-C. You can find me on Twitter, Slideshare a lot of my previous videos. So basically everything's on there. My site address is JCLeBlanc.com. My blog is at NakedTechnologists.com. And that's where you can find basically everything on me. We have your card, so we will get you back on SiliconANGLE. We have a morning, we have a Skype program. We bring people in. We'd love to get your thoughts. Great thought leader. Real big contribution to open source. And again, you're doing great work. We really appreciate your time coming on theCUBE. This is SiliconANGLE.com's theCUBE. Go to SiliconANGLE.com for all the news stories around tech. We go in deep dive, go to wikibon.org for free research. We are open source content. We run no advertising on our site other than promoting the velocity events that we go to at theCUBE. We're all data driven as we say. So this is theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.