 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders around the globe, these are Cloud Native Insights. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, the host of Cloud Native Insights. When we launched this program, we talked about how do we take advantage of the innovation and agility that's in the cloud. And of course, one of the big components that we've talked about for many years on theCUBE is how do we empower developers? And developers are helping change things. And I'm really happy to welcome to the program first time guests that help build many of the tools that developers are very well familiar. So Tom Preston Warner, he is the co-founder of Chatterbug. He is the creator of Redwood JS. We had an early episode, the Jamstack Netlify team. He's also on the board for that. And we'll talk about those pieces. People might know him via check him out on Wikipedia. GitHub, he was one of the co-founders as well as held both CTO and CEO roles there. I could go on, but Tom, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. All right, so let's start there. Tom, you know, when I live in the enterprise space, how do you take advantage of new things? One of the biggest challenges out there is let's go to something new, but let's do it the old way. And we know that that really doesn't take advantage of it. You know, I think back to the older, some of the older technologies, it's like, well, you know, if I talk to people that are riding horses, what do they want? You know, well, I want faster horses, not, you know, let's completely change things. I was hearing a stat that, you know, back in the early days of cars, we had like 30% of them were electric cars and now it's 1%. So what's old is new again, but I digress. As I mentioned, you know, GitHub of course is, you know, such a fundamental piece when we look at in the technology space over the last decade, you know, Git in general, GitHub specifically, of course, has created so much value, engaged, you know, just millions and millions of developers and transform businesses. Take us back a little bit and, you know, like to get your philosophy on, you know, building tools, how do you do it? How do you think about it? And what's inspired you? Yeah, I think it goes a long way back to just wanting to build things for the community. One of the first big projects I worked on was called Gravatar. And I remember laying in bed, staring at the ceiling, just trying to think up some idea that would contribute to what we then called the blogosphere. And I came up with an idea for avatars that would follow you around and I coded it up and I got it out to a few bloggers and they started using it. And it caught on and it was really, it really introduced me to this idea that no matter who you are or where you come from or what your background is, you know, I grew up in Iowa. Things are very different there. And with the internet and the ability to code, you can impact the world in really significant ways. And so it follows on from there. And I think GitHub is an extension of that desire to really put things into the world that will be useful for people and knowing that if you have the ability to code and especially with the advent of web applications as a common tool, there's such power in that. You have global reach, you just need a computer and the ability to code and you can create these things. And GitHub kind of became that. It was just, it started out really as a side project and I hope that someday it would be able to support me to work on it full-time. But we started building it just because we wanted it to exist. And that's most of what I work on is just ideas that I want to exist in the world. Yeah, it's been one of those great trends to watch at, you know, there were certain technologies that used to have to be a nation state or, you know, one of the global 50 companies to take advantage of it. Now tools like GitHub making it so that, you know, the smallest company or even the individuals can participate in communities, can create and build. You know, the building is such an important theme. So let's fast forward a little bit if we would. I mentioned Netlify and Jamstack. You talked about the blogosphere. That team is helping to really reinvent how we think about the web. You know, it's real time, it's high-performance and, you know, we need to be able to get that to where everybody is. So, you know, back in the early days, web pages, you know, relatively static and, you know, had certain criteria and now, of course, you know, edge devices and the global population change things. So, you know, you've been engaged in, you know, huge supporter of that project and that'll lead us towards the Redwood discussion. So maybe bring us as to how you got involved there and what got you excited. Well, like you said, everything old is new again. And I think that's true in fashion. It's also true in technology in a lot of ways. And the Jamstack really is taking these old ideas where the web started, taking files and just serving them as static files. And it's super fast and it's extremely secure. This is how the internet started and now we've sort of come full circle but we've added a lot of really nice things and workflows on top of that. And so my journey into the Jamstack, I suppose started more than a decade ago when I started working on a project called Jekyll that's a, I called it at the time a blog aware static site generator. So you would write your blog articles and you would run it through Jekyll and that would take your markdown, you'd write your articles in markdown and it would combine them with a, some kind of a theme that you would have and that would output static pages that represented your blog and then you could serve those from any kind of static blog serving system. GitHub has one built in called GitHub Pages. And so we ended up adopting Jekyll for GitHub Pages. So everything that you put up on GitHub Pages would be run through Jekyll and so it was a really natural place to put your blog. And so I had a blog post, one of my blog posts using Jekyll was called blogging like a hacker. And it was this idea that you don't need WordPress. You don't need to have a database somewhere that's hackable, that's gonna cause you security problems, all the WordPress admin stuff that constantly is being attacked. You don't need all that. You can just write articles in flat files and then turn them into a blog statically and then put those up to serve them somewhere, right? And so when I say it like that, it sounds a little bit like the jam stack, right? That's not how we thought about it at the time because it was really hard to do dynamic things. So if you wanted to have comments on your blog, for instance, then you needed to have some third-party service that you would embed a component onto your blog so you could receive comments. And so you had to start gluing things together. But even then, again, that sounds a little bit like the jam stack. So it's all of these ideas that have been evolving over the last decade to 15 years that now we finally have an entire tool chain and adding Git on top of that and Git-based workflows and being able to push to GitHub and let someone like Netlify can pick those up and publish them. And you have all these third-party services that you can glue together without having to build them yourself, all of the billing things. Like the ecosystem is so much more advanced now and so many more bits are available for you to piece together that in a very short amount of time, you can have an extremely performant site capable of taking payments and doing all of the dynamic things that we wanna do. Well, many, I should say, many of the dynamic things that we wanna do. And it's fast and secure. So it's like the web used to be when the web started, but now you can do all the modern things that you wanna do. Yeah, you're giving me flashbacks for remembering how I glued disgust into my Tumblr instance when that was rolling out. That's what I was referring to, disgust, yeah. Yeah, so absolutely. You talk about there's just such a robust ecosystem out there and one of the real challenges we have out there is people will come in and they say, oh my gosh, where do I start? And it's like, well, where do you wanna go? There's the paradox of choice. And that, I believe, is one of the things that led you to create Redwood. So help explain to our audience, you created this project Redwood. It's related to Jamstack, but I'll let you explain what it is and why it felt needed. Yeah, Redwood is a response to a couple of things. One of those things is the JavaScript world as everything has evolved in tremendous way in all kinds of ways. And almost entirely positive, I think. The language itself has been improved so much from when I was a teenager using view source and copy pasting stuff into some random X files fan site. To now, it's a first class language I can compete with everything from a ergonomics perspective. I really enjoy programming in it and I come from a Ruby on Rails background and now I'm very happy in JavaScript. That was not true even five, seven years ago. So JavaScript itself has changed a lot. Along with that comes NPM and the whole packaging universe of availability of modules. So most of the things that you wanna do, you can go and you can search and find code that's gonna do those things for you. And so being able to just pull those into your project, so easily, that is amazing, right? The power that that gives you is tremendous. The problem comes in when, like you said, you have the paradox of choice. Now you have not just one way to do something, but you have a hundred ways to do something, right? And now as a developer and especially as a new developer, someone who's just learning how to build web applications, you come into this and you say, all you see is the complexity, just overwhelming complexity and every language goes through this, they go through a phase of sort of this Cambrian explosion of possibilities as people get excited and you see that the web is embracing these technologies and you see what's possible. Everyone gets excited and involved and starts creating solution after solution after solution oftentimes to the same problems and that's a good thing, right? Like exploring the territory is a good and necessary part of the evolution of programming languages and programming ecosystems, but there's comes a time where that becomes overwhelming and starts to trend towards being a negative. And so at Chatterbug, which is a foreign language learning service, if you wanna learn how to speak French or Spanish or German will help you do that. As part of that work, we started using React on the front end because I really love what React brings you from a JavaScript and interactivity perspective, but along with React, you have to make about 50 other choices of technologies to use to actually create a fully capable website, something for state management. You gotta choose a way to do JavaScript or sorry, CSS. There's a hundred things that you have to choose and it seems very arbitrary and you go through a lot of churn. You choose one and then the next day an article comes out and people raving about another one and then you're like, oh, that one looks really nice. Grass is always greener. And so Redwood is a bit of an answer to that or a response to that, which is to say we've learned a lot of things now about what works in building with React, especially on the front end. And what I really wanna do is have a tool that's more like Ruby on Rails, where I come from having done years and years of Ruby on Rails is what GitHub was built with. And Ruby on Rails presents to you a fully capable web application framework that has made all the choices or most of the choices, many of the important choices. And the same is kind of missing in the JavaScript, TypeScript world. And so when I saw Netlify come out with their feature where you could commit the code for a Lambda function to your repository. And if you push that up to GitHub, Netlify will grab it and they will orchestrate deploying that code to an AWS Lambda so that you can run business logic in a Lambda but without having to touch AWS because touching AWS is another gigantic piece of complexity and their user interfaces are sometimes challenging, we'll say, that that then made me think that here finally is the ability to combine everything that's awesome about the Jamstack and static files and security and this workflow with the ability to do business logic. And that sounded to me like the makings of a full stack web application framework. And I kept waiting for someone to come out and be like, hey, ta-da, we've glued this all together. And here's your thing that's Rails but for the Jamstack JavaScript TypeScript world and nobody was doing it. And so I started working on it myself and that has become Redwood JS. It's one of the things that excited me the early days when I looked into serverless was that low bar to entry. I didn't have to have a CS degree for five years of understanding a certain code base to be able to take advantage of it. Feels like you're helping to extend that. I believe it's one of your passions, helping with Chatterbug and the like, helping people with that learning. What do you feel is the state out there? What's your thoughts about kind of the future of jobs when it comes to this space? I think the future of jobs in technology and especially software development is, I mean, there is no better outlook for any profession than that. I mean, this is where the world is going. More and more of what we want to accomplish we do in software and it happens across every industry. I mean, just look at Tesla's, for instance, right? You think about automobiles and the car that you owned 10 years ago. And you're like, I don't know. I know there's a computer in here somewhere but I don't really, either the software for it is terrible. And you're like, when was the last time you actually used the navigation system in your car, right? You just turn that off because it's so horrible. And then Tesla comes along and says, hey, what if we actually made all this stuff useful and had a thoughtful interface and essentially built a car that where everything was controlled with software? And so no cars are basically software wrapped in hardware and the experience is amazing. And the same is true of everything. Look at how many things that your phone has replaced that used to be physical devices. Look at manufacturing processes. Look at any element of bureaucracy. All of this stuff is mediated by computers. And oftentimes it's done badly but this just shows how much opportunity there is speaking of like governmental websites, right? You go to the DMV and you try to schedule an appointment and you just have no confidence that's gonna work out because the interfaces feel like they were written 15 years ago and sometimes I think they were written that long ago but there's so much, there's still so much improvement to be had and all of that is gonna take developers to do it unless we figure out how to get AI to do it for us and there's been some very interesting things lately around that angle. But to me, humans will always be involved and so at some level, humans are telling machines what to do whether you're doing it more or less directly and having the ability to tell machines what to do gives you tremendous leverage. Yeah, we're big fans. If you know Eric Bonjolson and Andy McAfee from MIT, they are very adamant that it's the combination of people plus machines that always will win against either people alone or machines alone. Tom, right now we're in the middle of a global pandemic. They're financially, there's a lot of bad news around the globe right now. I've talked to many entrepreneurs that said, well, a downturn market is actually a great time to start something new. You're an investor, you've helped build lots of things. We talked a lot about lowering the bar for people to create and build new things. What do you see some of the opportunities out there if you had to recommend for the entrepreneurs out there? Where should they be looking? I'd say look at all of the things in your life that have become challenging because where there's challenge, where there's pain, there's opportunity for solutions. And especially when there's a big environmental change, which we see right now with COVID-19, obviously has changed a lot of our behaviors and made some of the things that used to be easy, made those a lot harder. And so you see certain segments of the economy are doing extremely well, namely technology and things that allow us to do interviews like this instead of in person. And so those industries are doing extremely well. So you look at the stock market in the United States and it's very interesting because while much of the country is suffering, the people that are already wealthy are doing very well and technology companies are doing very well. And so the question for me is, what are the opportunities that we have, leveraging technology and the internet to where we can create more opportunities for more people to get people back to work, right? I think there's so much opportunity there. Just look at education. Like the entire concept of educating kids right now, and I have three, so we feel this very much, it has been turned on its head. So you see many people looking for solutions in that space and I think that's as it should be. When things get challenged, when our normal daily experience is so radically changed, there's opportunity there because people are willing to change more quickly in a crisis, right? Because you need something like any solution. And so some choice is going to be made and where that's happening, then you can find early adopters more easily than you can under other circumstances. And so in economic downturns, you often see that kind of behavior where these are crisis moments for people. You have an opportunity to come in and if you have something that could solve a problem for them, then you can get a user where that may have not been a problem for a person before. So where there is a crisis, there is always opportunity to help people solve their problems in different and better ways to address that crisis. So again, it goes back to pain, you know, and it doesn't have to be the pain from a crisis. It could be a pain from anything. Just like with GitHub, it was hard to share code as developers. Like there was too much pain. And this was, we started it in 2008 right after the housing crisis. It was unrelated to that, but it turns out that when you start a company when the economy is depressed in a certain way, then at least you can look forward to the economy getting better as you are building your company. Well, Tom Preston Werner, thank you so much for joining. Pleasure talking with you. Appreciate all of your insight. Absolutely, thanks for having me. I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you for joining this episode of Cloud Native Insights. Thank you for watching theCUBE.