Podcasts about Godforsaken

1. The Son of God Revealed (51-54) 2. The Son of God Forsaken (40-50) 3. The Son of God Buried (55-61)

Psalm 22 [according to the Deer of Dawn (don't worry- you'll get that joke later)] is not a happy ditty. It is the song of a hopeless singer, crying out to a God who doesn't seem to be there. Which seems like kind of a weird thing to include in a book of scripture about that God, but there you go. But this psalm is particularly famous, as it was quoted by a pretty famous guy, at a pretty famous moment. This week on Data Over Dogma, we're looking at the words Jesus chose to say just before he died. Why, of all the scriptures that he had access to, did he quote this bleak, hopeless lament? Or was the psalm written as a prophesy? A foretelling of Jesus' untimely end? Then, speaking of the death of Jesus, we're going to talk about a peaceful area in Israel next to an ancient burial site. They call it the Garden Tomb, and many believe it to be the actual place where Jesus was laid after his death. Was it? For early access to an ad-free version of every episode of Data Over Dogma, exclusive content, and the opportunity to support our work, please consider becoming a monthly patron at: https://www.patreon.com/DataOverDogma      Follow us on the various social media places: https://www.facebook.com/DataOverDogmaPod https://www.twitter.com/data_over_dogma Hey! Don't forget to pre-order Dan McClellan's upcoming book The Bible Says So Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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A new MP3 sermon from Sovereign Grace Reformed Baptist Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: Has God Forsaken His Promises To Israel? Subtitle: Romans Speaker: Steve Marquedant Broadcaster: Sovereign Grace Reformed Baptist Church Event: Sunday - AM Date: 7/28/2024 Bible: Romans 10:16-21 Length: 44 min.

**Member Episode** Become a Member at TWOPCT.comThe Expedition is a journey into thoughts, opinions, ideas, observations, studies, facts, figures, etc.Good ones, bad ones, insightful ones, dumb ones, and ones you can use to live better.It's a roundup of all the worthwhile stuff I've encountered in the last month. The Expedition is a bit of an island of misfit toys. But, hey, the greatest journeys are winding.This month, we're covering:Numbers on:Who commits suicide and why.The amount of pushups that reduces heart disease risk.Money, marriage, and happiness.Who wins marathons.How changing the speed of videos impacts information retention.The truth about expensive treadmills.How much time we spend online.A wild and clever three-part challenge.A fun read about ChatGPT and its propensity for bullshit.A thought-provoking read on a surprising source of a hidden health threat.How to survive—and thrive—this Godforsaken heatwave.A wild map on weight changes.A tough, fantastic workout I did while traveling recently.An important parting quote.An even more important parting question.For full access, become a Member at TWOPCT.com

Send us a Text Message.What happens when relentless suffering makes you feel forsaken by God? In this deeply moving episode, we explore Kristen's poignant journey through severe health issues. Despite enduring constant pain, Kristen's unwavering commitment to praise God amidst her trials offers a compelling testament to the power of faith. She opens up about her battles with doubt and despair, reminding us that even in the depths of suffering, there's room for gratitude and hope for eventual healing.Drawing inspiration from the biblical story of Job, we delve into how hardships can lead to a profound intimacy with God. This episode emphasizes shifting our perspective to recognize and be grateful for even the smallest blessings, and to understand that challenges do not negate God's promise or presence. We also discuss the enemy's tactics and encourage listeners to stay steadfast in their faith, surrendering their struggles to God for both physical and emotional healing. Concluding with a heartfelt prayer, this episode aims to renew your strength and belief that through God's power, any obstacle can be overcome. Tune in and share this message of hope with those who need it most. Support the Show.

PASTOR WILLIAM'S BOOKS: https://www.amazon.com/stores/William-Shifflett/author/B005H0F1GG Disagree, agree, or have a question: Contact us through the contact page on our website; http://www.biblebulldog.com Matthew 27:46 - And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” “Even in His agony Jesus was still praying.” When life strikes Jesus, in His humanity, the hardest what comes out of Him is what is in Him. It is the Word of God. When someone suffers, do you find out what is on the inside of them? What can Christians learn from this? Is Jesus' cry, a cry of unbelief? Do Christians need to feel the weight of Jesus's suffering? “Jesus did not just feel forsaken He was forsaken.” Jesus did not cry out “My God, My God, why do I feel forsaken by You?” Jesus was forsaken. As a sinner, is that my only hope to be saved? Is it a serious sin to diminish the sufferings of Christ in any way? “God the Father could not bear to look at the sin or His Son.” Does God hide His face from the one He forsakes? “God did not let Jesus rot in the grave.” Matthew Henry writes: “Christ, by dying, has taken out the sting of death. He has made atonement for sin; he has obtained remission of it. Death may hiss therefore, but it cannot hurt.” “God will forsake sinners, but He will not forsake you if you will come and meet Jesus Christ at the cross. How does someone meet Jesus Christ at the cross? --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/biblebulldog/message

DateApril 7, 2024SynopsisIn this episode, we explore the story of Jesus appearing to his disciples on the road to Emmaus after his resurrection. You'll learn:How the disciples were feeling hopeless and confused after Jesus' death and the discovery of the empty tombThe significance of Jesus entering a "God-forsaken" place on the cross and defeating death, showing that God is with us even in the darkest momentsHow Jesus revealed himself to the disciples in the breaking of bread, causing their hearts to burn with renewed hopeThe importance of community in celebrating the good news of Easter and supporting each other through the highs and lows of faithThis message will encourage you to find hope in the resurrection, knowing that because of Jesus' victory over death, there is no place or situation that is beyond God's presence and redemption.ReferencesScripture: Luke 24:13–35About The Local ChurchFor more information about The Local Church, visit our website. We're also posting good stuff on Facebook, Threads, and Instagram, too. Feedback? Questions? Comments? We'd love to hear it. Email Brent at brent@thelocalchurchpbo.org.To invest in what God's doing through The Local Church and help support these podcasting efforts and this movement of God's love, give online here.

The post Sermon: Godforsaken appeared first on First Baptist Church.

by Brooks Simpson | From the Series: Receiving the King | Scripture: Mark 15:33-39 Download Audio

Where was God on Good Friday? Was he standing at a distance punishing Jesus? Was he turning his back on Jesus at his weakest moment? When Jesus spoke his last words, "My God, my God why have you forsaken me?", what was happening? Perhaps the key to understanding this world-altering mystery is found 1000 years before Jesus spoke those last words.

When in doubt, MOVE OUT! That's what Amy and Liv are yelling at our main character Kat. Join us for the chilling conclusion as we finish out this saga of a scary story series from Reddit. You can follow us on FB/IG/TikTok/YouTube @GirlsGoneSpooky and email us your scary stories at girlsgonespooky@gmail.com. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/girls-gone-spooky/support

Guillermo Rauch, Founder and CEO of Vercel, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how he decided to focus on building a front-end tool that is fast, reliable, and focuses on the developer experience. Guillermo explains how he discovered that Javascript was the language that set online offerings apart, and also reveals the advice he gives to founders on how to build an effective landing page. Corey and Guillermo discuss the effects of generative AI on developer experience, and Guillermo explains why Vercel had a higher standard for accuracy when rolling out their new AI product for developers, v0. About GuillermoGuillermo Rauch is Founder and CEO of Vercel, where he leads the company's mission to enable developers to create at the moment of inspiration. Prior to founding Vercel, Guillermo co-founded LearnBoost and Cloudup where he served the company as CTO through its acquisition by Automattic in 2013. Originally from Argentina,Guillermo has been a developer since the age of ten and is passionate about contributing to the open source community. He has created a number of JavaScript projects including socket.io, Mongoose.js, Now, and Next.js.Links Referenced: Vercel: https://vercel.com/ v0.dev: https://v0.dev Personal website: https://rauchg.com Personal twitter: https://twitter.com/rauchg TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I don't talk a lot about front-end on this show, primarily because I am very bad at front-end, and in long-standing tech tradition, if I'm not good at something, apparently I'm legally obligated to be dismissive of it and not give it any attention. Strangely enough, I spent the last week beating on some front-end projects, and now I'm not just dismissive, I'm angry about it. Here to basically suffer the outpouring of frustration and confusion is Guillermo Rauch, founder and CEO of Vercel, but also the creator of Next.js. Guillermo, thank you for joining me.Guillermo: Great to be here. Thanks for setting me up with that awesome intro.Corey: It's true, if I were talking to someone who looked at what I've done, and for some Godforsaken reason, they wanted to follow in my footsteps, well, that path has been closed, so learning a bunch of Perl early on and translating it all to bad bash scripts and the rest, and then maybe picking up Python isn't really the way that I would advise someone getting started today. The de facto lingua franca of the internet is JavaScript, whether we like it or not, and I would strongly suggest that be someone's first language despite the fact that I'm bad at it, I don't understand it, and therefore it makes me angry.Guillermo: Yeah, it's so funny because it sounds like my story. And my personal journey was, when I was a kid, I had a—I knew I wanted to hack around with computers, and reverse engineer them, and improve them, and just create my own things, and I had these options for what programming language I could go with. And I tried it all: PHP, Perl, [Mod PHP 00:02:12], [Mod Perl 00:02:13], Apache, LAMP, cgi-bin folders, all the whole nine yards. And regardless of what back-end technology I used, I encountered this striking fact, which was… the thing that can make your product really stand out in a web browser is typically involving JavaScript in some fashion. So, when Google came out with suggestions as you would type in a search box, my young kid Argentinian brain blew up. I was like, “Holy crap, they can suggest, they can read my mind, and they can render suggestions without a full page refresh? What is that magic?”And then more products like that came out. Google Docs, Gmail Chat, Facebook's real time newsfeed, all the great things on the internet seemed to have this common point of, there's this layer of interactivity, real-time data, customization, personalization, and it seems uniquely enabled by the front-end. So, I just went all in. I taught myself how to code, I taught myself—I became a front-end engineering expert, I joined some of the early projects that shaped the ecosystem. Like, there was this library called MooTools, and a lot of folks might not have heard that name. It's in the annals of JavaScript history.And later on, you know, what I realized is, what if front-end can actually be the starting point of how you develop the best applications, right, rather than this thing that people, like, reluctantly frown upon, like yourself. I mention that as an opportunity rather than a diss because when you create a great front-end experience, now the data has proven you run a better business, you run a more dynamic business, probably are running an AI-powered business, like, all of the AI products on the planet today are using this technology to stream text in front of your eyes in real time and do all this awesome things. So yeah, I became obsessed with front-end, and I founded this company Vercel, which is a front-end cloud. So, you come here to basically build the best products. Now, you don't have to build the back-end, so you can use back-ends that are off the shelf, you can connect to your existing back-ends, and we piggyback on the world's best infrastructure to make this possible, but we offer developers a very streamlined path to create these awesome products on the internet.Corey: I have to say that I have been impressed when I've used Vercel for a number of projects. And what impresses me is less the infrastructure powering it, less the look at how performance it is and all the stuff that most people talk about, but as mentioned, I am not good at front-end or frankly programming at all. And so, many products in this space fall into the very pernicious trap of, “Oh, well, everyone who's using this is at least this tall on the board of how smart you are to get on the amusement park ride.” So, I feel that when I'm coming at this from a—someone who is not a stranger to computers but is definitely new to this entire ecosystem, everything just made sense in a way that remarkably few products can pull off. I don't know if you would call that user experience, developer experience, or what the terminology you bias for there is, but it is a transformational difference.Guillermo: Thank you. I think it's a combination of things. So, developer experience has definitely always been a focus for me. I was that weird person that obsessed about the CLI parameters of the tool, and the output of the tool, and just like how it feels for the engineer. I did combine that with—and I think this is where Vercel really stands out—I did combine that with a world-class infrastructure bit because what I realized after creating lots and lots of very popular open-source projects—like, one is called Socket.io, and other one called Mongoose—DX, or developer experience, in the absence of an enticing carrot for the business doesn't work. Maybe it has some short term adoption, maybe it has raving fans on Twitter or X [laugh], but at the end of the day, you have to deliver something that's tangible to the end-user and to the business.So I think Vercel focusing on the front-end has found a magical combination there of I can make the developer lives easier. Being a developer myself, I just tremendously empathize with that, but it can also make more profit for the business. When they make your website faster and render more dynamic data that serve as better recommendations for a product on e-commerce or in a marketing channel, I can help you roll out more experiments, then they make your business better, and I think that's one of the magical combinations there.The other thing, frankly, is that we'd started doing fewer things. So, when you come to Vercel, you typically come with a framework that you've already chosen. It could be Next.js, it could be View, [unintelligible 00:07:18], there's 35-plus frameworks. But we basically told the market, you have to use one of these developer tools in order to guide your development.And what companies were doing before—I mean, this almost seems obvious in retrospect, that we would optimize for her certain patterns and certain tools—but what the market was doing before was rolling out your own frameworks. Like, every company was, basically—React, for example, is a very popular way of building interfaces, and our framework actually is built on top of React. But when I would go to and talk to all these principal engineers that all these companies, they were saying, oh yeah, “We're creating our own framework. We're creating our own tools.” And I think that to me now feels almost like a zero interest rate phenomenon. Like, what business do you have in creating frameworks, tools, and bespoke infra when you're really in the business of creating delightful experiences for your customers?Corey: What I think is lost on a lot of folks is that if you are trying to learn something new and use a tool, and the developer experience is bad, the takeaway—at least for me and a lot of people that I talk to is not, “Oh, this tool has terrible ergonomics. That's it's problem.” Instead, the takeaway is very much, “Oh, I'm dumb because I don't understand this thing.” And I know intellectually that I am not usually the dumbest person in the world when it comes to a particular tool or technology, but I keep forgetting that on a visceral level. It's, “I just wish I was smart enough to understand that.”No, I don't. I wish it was presented in a way that was more understandable and the documentation was better. When you're just starting out and building something in your spare time, the infrastructure cost is basically nothing, but your time is the expensive part in it. So, if you have to spend three hours to track down something just because it wasn't clearly explained, the burden of adopting that tool is challenging. I would argue that one of the reasons that AWS sees some of the success that it does is not necessarily because it's great so much as because everyone knows how it breaks. That's important.I'm not saying their infrastructure isn't world-class—please, don't come at me in the comments on this one—but I am saying that we know where its sharp edges are, and that means that we're more comfortable building with it. But the idea of learning a brand-new cloud with different sharp edges in other areas. That's terrifying. I'd rather stick with the devil I know.Guillermo: Exactly. I just think that you're not going to be able to make a difference for customers in 2023 by creating another bespoke cloud that is general purpose, it doesn't really optimize around anything, and you have to learn all the sharp edges from scratch. I think we saw that with the rise of cloud-native companies like Stripe and Twilio where they were going after these amazingly huge markets like financial infrastructure or communications infrastructure, but the angle was, “Here's this awesome developer experience.” And that's what we're doing with Vercel for the front-end and for building products, right? There has to be an opinionated developer experience that guides you to success.And I agree with you that there's really, these days in the developer communities, zero tolerance for sharp edges, and we've spent a lot of time in—even documentation, like, it used to be that your startup would make or break it by whether you had great documentation. I think in the age of frameworks, I would even dare say that documentation, of course, is extremely important, but if I can have the tool itself guide you to success, at that point, you're not even reading documentation. We're now seeing this with AI and, like, generative AI for code. At Vercel, we're investing in generative AI for user interfaces. Do you actually need to read documentation at that point? So, I think we're optimizing for the absolute minimal amount of friction required to be successful with these platforms.Corey: I think that there's a truth in that of meeting customers in where they are. Your documentation can be spectacular, but people don't generally read the encyclopedia for fun either. And the idea of that is that—at least ideally—I should not need to go diving into the documentation, and so many tools get this wrong, where, “Oh, I want to set up a new project,” and it bombards you with 50 questions, and each one of these feels pretty… momentous. Like, what one-way door am I passing through that I don't realize the consequences of until I'm 12 hours into this thing, and then have to backtrack significantly. I like, personally, things that bias for having a golden path, but also make it easy to both deviate from it, as well as get back onto it. Because there's more than one way to do it is sort of the old Perl motto. That is true in spades in anything approaching the JavaScript universe.Guillermo: Yeah. I have a lot of thoughts on that. On the first point, I completely agree that the golden path of the product cannot be documentation-mediated. One of the things that I've become obsessive about—and this is an advice that I share with a lot of other startup founders is, when it comes to your landing page, the primary call to action has to be this golden path to success, like, 2, 3, 4 clicks later, I have to have something tangible. That was our inspiration.And when we made it the primary call to action for Vercel is deploy now. Start now. Get it out now. Ship it now. And the way that you test out the platform is by deploying a template. What do we do is we create a Git repo for you, it sets up the entire CI/CD pipeline, and then at that point, you already have something working, something in the cloud, you spent zero time reading documentation, and you can start iterating.And even though that might not be the final thing you do in Vercel, I always hear the stories of CTOs that are now deploying Vercel at really large scale, and they always tell me, “I started with your hobby tier, I started with free tier, I deployed a template, I hacked on a product during the weekend.” Now, a lot of our AI examples are very popular in this crowd. And yeah, there's a golden path that requires zero documentation. Now, you also mentioned that, what about complexity? This is an enterprise-grade platform. What about escape hatches? What about flexibility? And that's where our platform also shines because we have the entire power of a Turing-complete language, which is JavaScript and TypeScript, to customize every aspect of the platform.And you have a framework that actually answered a lot of the problems that came with serverless solutions in the past, which is that you couldn't run any of that on your local machine. The beauty of Vercel and Next.js is we kind of pioneered this concept that we called ‘Framework Defined Infrastructure.' You start with the framework, the framework has this awesome property that you can install on your computer, it has a dev command—like, it literally runs on your computer—but then when you push it to the cloud, it now defines the infrastructure. It creates all of the resources that are highly optimal.This creates—basically converts what was a single node system on your computer to a globally distributed system, which is a very complex and difficult engineering challenge, but Vercel completely automates it away. And now for folks that are looking for, like, more advanced solutions, they can now start poking into the outputs of that compilation process and say, “Okay, I can now have an influence or I can reconfigure some aspects of this pipeline.” And of course, if you don't think about those escape hatches, then the product just ends up being limiting and frustrating, so we had to think really hard about meeting both ends of the spectrum.Corey: In my own experimentations early on with Chat-Gippity—which is how I insist on pronouncing ChatGPT—a lot of what I found was that it was a lot more productive for me to, instead of asking just the question and getting the answer was, write a Python script to—Guillermo: Yes.Corey: Query this API to get me that answer. Because often it would be wrong. Sometimes very convincingly wrong, and I can at least examine it in various ways and make changes to it and iterate forward, whereas when everything is just a black box, that gets very hard to do. The idea of building something that can be iterated on is key.Guillermo: I love that. The way that Vercel actually first introduced itself to the world was this idea of immutable deployments and immutable infrastructure. And immutable sounds like a horrible word because I want to mutate things, but it was inspired by this idea of functional programming where, like, each iteration to the state, each data change, can be tracked. So, every time you deploy in Vercel, you get this unique URL that represents a point-in-time infrastructure deployment. You can go back in time, you can revert, you can use this as a way of collaborating with other engineers in your team, so you can send these hyperlinks around to your front-end projects.And it gives you a lot of confidence. Now, you can iterate knowing that before things go out, there's a lot of scrutiny, there's a lot of QA, there's a lot of testing processes that you can kick off against this serverless infrastructure that was created for each deployment. The conclusion for us so far has been that our role in the world is to increase iteration velocity. So, iteration speed is the faster horse of the cloud, right? Like, instead of getting a car, you get a faster horse.When you say, “Okay, I made the build pipeline 10% faster,” or, “I brought the TLS termination 10% closer to the visitor, and, like, I have more [pops 00:17:10],” things like that. That to me, is the speed. You can do those things, and they're awesome, but if you don't have a direction—which is velocity—then you don't know what you're building next. You don't know if your customers are happy. You don't know if you're delivering value. So, we built an entire platform that optimizes around, what should you ship next? What is the friction involved in getting your next iteration out? Is launching an experiment on your homepage, for example, is that a costly endeavor? Does it take you weeks? Does it take you months?One of the initial inspirations for just starting Vercel and making deployments really easy was, how difficult is it for the average company to change in their footer of their website is this copyright 2022? And you have—it's a new year. You have to bump it to copyright 2023. How long do you think it takes that engineer to, A, run the stack locally, so they can actually see the change; deploy it, but deploy to what we call the preview environment, so they can grab that URL and send [it to 00:18:15], Corey, and say, “Corey, does it look good? I updated [laugh] I updated the year in the footer.”And then you tell me, “Looks good, let's ship it to production.” Or you tell me, “No, no, no, it's risky. Let's divide it into two cohorts: 50% of traffic gets 2022, 50% of traffic gets 2023.” Obviously, this is a joke, but consider the implications of how difficult it is and the average organization to actually do this thing.Corey: Oh, I find things like that all the time, especially on microservices that I built to handle some of my internal workflows here, and I haven't touched in two or three years. And okay, now it's time for me to update them to reflect some minor change. And first, I wind up in the screaming node warnings and I have to update things so that they actually work in a reasonable way. And, on some level, making a one-line change can take half a day. Now, in the real world, when people are working on these apps day-in and day-out, it gets a lot easier to roll those changes in over time, but coming back to something unmaintained, that becomes a project the longer you let it sit.Part of me wishes that there were easier ways around it, but there are trade-offs in almost any decision you make. If you're building something from the beginning of, well, I want to be able to automatically update the copyright year, you can even borderline make that something that automatically happens based upon the global time, whereas when you're trying to retrofit it afterwards, yeah, it becomes a project.Guillermo: Yeah, and now think, that's just a simple example of changing a string. That might be difficult for a product engineering in any organization. Or it may be slow, or it may be not as streamlined, or maybe it works really well for the first project that that company created. What about every incremental project thereafter?So, now I said—let's stop talking about a string, right? Let's think about you're about an e-commerce website where what we hear from our customers on average, like, 10% of revenue flows through the homepage. Now, I have to change a primary component that renders on the hero of the page, and I have to collaborate with every department in the organization. I have to collaborate with the design team, I have to collaborate with marketing, I have to collaborate with the business owners to track the analytics appropriately. So, what is the cost of every incremental experiment that you want to put in production?The other thing that's particularly interesting about front-end as it relates to cloud infrastructure is, scaling up front-end is a very difficult thing. What ends up happening is most front-ends are actually static websites. They're cached at the edge—or they're literally statically generated—and then they push all of the dynamism to the client side. So, you end up with this spaghetti of script tags on the client, you end up accumulating a lot of tech debt in the [shipping 00:20:56] huge bundles of JavaScript to the client to try to recover some dynamism, to try and run these experiments. So, everyone is in this, kind of, mess of the yes, maybe we can experiment, but we kind of offloaded the rendering work to the client. That in turn makes me—basically, I'm making the website slower for the visitor. I'm making them do the rendering work.And I'm trying to sell them something. I'm trying to speed up some processes. It's my responsibility to make it fast. So, what we ended up finding out is that yes, the cloud moved this forward a lot in terms of having these awesome building blocks, these awesome infrastructure primitives, but both in the developer experience, just changing something about your web product and also the end-user experiences, that web product renders really fast, those things really didn't happen with this first chapter of the cloud. And I think we're entering a new generation of higher-level clouds like Vercel that are optimizing for these things.Corey: I think that there's a historical focus on things that have not happened before. And that was painful and terrible, so we're not going to be focusing on what's happening in the future, we're going to build a process or a framework or something that winds up preventing that thing that hurt us from hurting us again. Now, that's great in moderation, but at some point—we see this at large companies from time-to-time—where you have so much process that is ossified scar tissue, basically, that it becomes almost impossible to get things done. Because oh, I want to make that—for example, that one-line change to a copyright date, well, here's the 5000 ways deploys have screwed us before, so we need to have three humans sign off on the one-line change, and a bunch of other stuff before it ever sees the light of day. Now, I'm exaggerating slightly, just as you are, but that feels like it acts as a serious brake on innovation.On the exact opposite side, where we see massive acceleration has been around the world of generative AI. Yes, it is massively hyped in a bunch of ways. I don't think it is going to be a defined way that changes the nature of humanity the way that some of these people are going after, but it's also clearly more than a parlor trick.Guillermo: I'm kind of in that camp. So, like you, I've been writing code for many years. I'm pretty astonished by the AI's ability to enhance my output. And of course, now I'm not writing code full time, so there is a sense of, okay because I don't have time, because I'm doing a million things, any minute I have seems like AI has just made it so much more worthwhile and I can squeeze so much more productivity out of it. But one of the areas that I'm really excited about is this idea of generative UI, which is not just autocompleting code in a text editor, but is the idea that you can use natural language to describe an interface and have the AI generate that interface.So, Vercel created this product called v0—you can check it out at v0.dev—where to me, it's really astonishing that you can get these incredibly high quality user interfaces, and basically all you have to do is input [laugh] a few English words. I have this personal experience of, I've been learning JavaScript and perfecting all my knowledge around it for, like, 20 or so years. I created Next.js.And Next.js itself powers a lot of these AI products. Like the front-end of ChatGPT is built on Next.js. And I used v0 to create… to basically recreate my blog. Like, I created rauchg.com, I deployed it on Vercel, but every pixel of that UI, I handcrafted.And as we were working on v0, I said okay, “I'm going to challenge myself to put myself back in the shoes of, like, I'm going to redesign this and I'm going to start over with just human language.” Not only did I arrive to the right look and feel of what I wanted to get, the code that it produced was better than I would have written by hand. Concretely, it was more accessible. So, there were areas of the UI where, like, some icons were rendered where I had not filled in those gaps. I just didn't know how to do that. The AI did. So, I really believe that AI will transform our lives as [laugh] programmers, at least I think, in many other areas in very profound ways.Corey: This is very similar to a project that I've been embarked on for the last few days where I described the app I wanted into Chat-Gippity and follow the instructions, and first, it round up point—sending me down a rabbit hole of the wrong Framework version that had been deprecated, and whatnot, and then I brought it all into VS Code where Jif-Ub Copilot, it kept switching back and forth between actively helpful, and ooh, the response matches publicly available code, so I'm not going to tell you the answer, despite the fact that feature has never been enabled on my account. So yeah, of course, it matches publicly available code. This is quite literally the React tutorial starter project. And it became incredibly frustrating, but it also would keep generating things in bursts, so my code is not at all legible or well organized or consistent for that matter. But it's still better than anything I'd be able to write myself. I'm looking forward to using v0 or something like it to see how that stacks up for some of my ridiculous generation ideas for these things.Guillermo: Yeah, you touched on a very important point is, the code has to work. The code has to be shippable. I think a lot of AI products have gotten by by giving you an approximation of the result, right? Like, they hallucinate sometimes, they get something wrong. It's still very helpful because sometimes it's sending you the right direction.But for us, the bar is that these things have to produce code that's useful, and that you can ship, and that you can iterate on. So, going back to that idea of iteration velocity, we call it v0 because we wanted it to be the first version. We still very much believe there is humans in the loop and folks will be iterating a lot on the initial draft that this thing is giving you, but it's so much better than starting with an empty code editor, [laugh] right? Like, and this applies, by the way to, like, not just new projects, but I always talk about, like, our customers have a few really important landing pages, key pages, maybe it's the product detail page in e-commerce, maybe it's your homepage and, like, your key product pages for a marketing website. Maybe it's where—and the checkout, for example, extremely important.But then there's a lot of incremental UIs that you have to add every single day. The banner for [laugh] accepting cookies or not, the consent management dialog. There's a lot of things that the worst case scenario is that you offload them again to some third-party script, to some iframe of sorts because you really don't have the bandwidth, time, or resources to build it yourself. And then you sacrifice speed, you sacrifice brand fidelity. And again because we're the front-end cloud, we're obsessed with your ability to ship UI that's native to your product, that is a streamline, that works really well. So, I think AI is going to have a significant effect there where a lot of things where you were sending someone to some other website because you just didn't have the bandwidth to create that UI, you can now own the experience end to end.Corey: That is no small thing. A last question I have, before we wind up calling this episode is, there was a period of time—I don't know if we're still in it or not—where it felt like every time I got up to get a cup of coffee and came back, there would be three JavaScript frameworks that launched during that interim. So, Next.js was at 1.1 of those when someone got up to get a cup of coffee. But that's shown a staying power that is, frankly, remarkable. Why? I don't know enough about the ecosystem to have an opinion on that, but I noticed when things stand out, and Next does.Guillermo: Yeah, I think it's a number of factors. Number one, we, as an industry I think, we coalesced, and we found the right engine to build our car. And that engine became React. Most folks building UI today are choosing React or a similar engine, but React has really become the gold standard for a lot of engineers. Now, what ended up happening next is that people realized I want a car. I want the full product. I need to drive. I don't want to assemble this freaking car every single time I have a new project.And Next.js filled a very important gap in the world where what you were looking for was not a library; what you were looking for is a framework that has opinions, but those opinions are very in line with how the web is supposed to work. We took a page from, basically, the beginnings of the web. We make a lot of jokes that in many ways, our inspiration was PHP, where server rendering is the default, where it's very expressive, it's very easy to reach for data. It just works for a lot of people. Again, that's the old [stack 00:30:03] in the olden days.And so, it obviously didn't quite work, but the inspiration was, can we make something that is a streamline for creating web interfaces at scale? At scale. And to your point, there's also a sense of, like, maybe it doesn't make sense anymore to build all this infrastructure from scratch every single time I started a project. So, Next filled in that gap. The other thing we did really well, I think, is that we gave people a universal model for how to use not just the server side, but also the client side strategically.So, I'll give you an example. When you go to ChatGPT, a lot of things on the screen are server rendered, but when you start doing interactions as a user, that requires for something like you'd say, “Hey Dali, generate an image.” That stuff requires a lot of optimistic UI. It requires features that are more like what a mobile native application can do. So, we can give folks the best of both worlds: the speed, interactivity, and fluidity of a native app, but we had those, sort of, fundamentals of how a website should work that even Perl and PHP had gotten right, once upon a time. So, I think we found that right blend of utility and flexibility, and folks love it, and I think, yeah, we're excited to continue to help steward this project as a standard for building on the web.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time to talk about a lot of the genesis of this stuff and how you view it, which I think gives us a pretty decent idea of how you're going to approach the evolution of what you've built. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?Guillermo: So, head to vercel.com to learn about our platform. You can check out v0.dev, which we'll be opening broadly to the public soon, if you want to get started with this idea of generative UI. And myself, I'm always tweeting on X, twitter.com or x.com/rauchg to find me.Corey: One of these days we'll be able to kick that habit, I hope [laugh].Guillermo: [laugh]. Yeah.Corey: Thank you so much for being so generous with your time. I appreciate it.Guillermo: Thank you.Corey: Guillermo Rauch, founder and CEO of Vercel, and creator of Next.js. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry, insulting comment that will be almost impossible for you to submit because that podcast platform did not pay attention to user experience.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business, and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started. Vercel: https://vercel.com/ v0.dev: https://v0.dev Personal website: https://rauchg.com Personal twitter: https://twitter.com/rauchg TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I don't talk a lot about front-end on this show, primarily because I am very bad at front-end, and in long-standing tech tradition, if I'm not good at something, apparently I'm legally obligated to be dismissive of it and not give it any attention. Strangely enough, I spent the last week beating on some front-end projects, and now I'm not just dismissive, I'm angry about it. Here to basically suffer the outpouring of frustration and confusion is Guillermo Rauch, founder and CEO of Vercel, but also the creator of Next.js. Guillermo, thank you for joining me.Guillermo: Great to be here. Thanks for setting me up with that awesome intro.Corey: It's true, if I were talking to someone who looked at what I've done, and for some Godforsaken reason, they wanted to follow in my footsteps, well, that path has been closed, so learning a bunch of Perl early on and translating it all to bad bash scripts and the rest, and then maybe picking up Python isn't really the way that I would advise someone getting started today. The de facto lingua franca of the internet is JavaScript, whether we like it or not, and I would strongly suggest that be someone's first language despite the fact that I'm bad at it, I don't understand it, and therefore it makes me angry.Guillermo: Yeah, it's so funny because it sounds like my story. And my personal journey was, when I was a kid, I had a—I knew I wanted to hack around with computers, and reverse engineer them, and improve them, and just create my own things, and I had these options for what programming language I could go with. And I tried it all: PHP, Perl, [Mod PHP 00:02:12], [Mod Perl 00:02:13], Apache, LAMP, cgi-bin folders, all the whole nine yards. And regardless of what back-end technology I used, I encountered this striking fact, which was… the thing that can make your product really stand out in a web browser is typically involving JavaScript in some fashion. So, when Google came out with suggestions as you would type in a search box, my young kid Argentinian brain blew up. I was like, “Holy crap, they can suggest, they can read my mind, and they can render suggestions without a full page refresh? What is that magic?”And then more products like that came out. Google Docs, Gmail Chat, Facebook's real time newsfeed, all the great things on the internet seemed to have this common point of, there's this layer of interactivity, real-time data, customization, personalization, and it seems uniquely enabled by the front-end. So, I just went all in. I taught myself how to code, I taught myself—I became a front-end engineering expert, I joined some of the early projects that shaped the ecosystem. Like, there was this library called MooTools, and a lot of folks might not have heard that name. It's in the annals of JavaScript history.And later on, you know, what I realized is, what if front-end can actually be the starting point of how you develop the best applications, right, rather than this thing that people, like, reluctantly frown upon, like yourself. I mention that as an opportunity rather than a dis because when you create a great front-end experience, now the data has proven you run a better business, you run a more dynamic business, probably are running an AI-powered business, like, all of the AI products on the planet today are using this technology to stream text in front of your eyes in real time and do all this awesome things. So yeah, I became obsessed with front-end, and I founded this company Vercel, which is a front-end cloud. So, you come here to basically build the best products. Now, you don't have to build the back-end, so you can use back-ends that are off the shelf, you can connect to your existing back-ends, and we piggyback on the world's best infrastructure to make this possible, but we offer developers a very streamlined path to create these awesome products on the internet.Corey: I have to say that I have been impressed when I've used Vercel for a number of projects. And what impresses me is less the infrastructure powering it, less the look at how performance it is and all the stuff that most people talk about, but as mentioned, I am not good at front-end or frankly programming at all. And so, many products in this space fall into the very pernicious trap of, “Oh, well, everyone who's using this is at least this tall on the board of how smart you are to get on the amusement park ride.” So, I feel that when I'm coming at this from a—someone who is not a stranger to computers but is definitely new to this entire ecosystem, everything just made sense in a way that remarkably few products can pull off. I don't know if you would call that user experience, developer experience, or what the terminology you bias for there is, but it is a transformational difference.Guillermo: Thank you. I think it's a combination of things. So, developer experience has definitely always been a focus for me. I was that weird person that obsessed about the CLI parameters of the tool, and the output of the tool, and just like how it feels for the engineer. I did combine that with—and I think this is where Vercel really stands out—I did combine that with a world-class infrastructure bit because what I realized after creating lots and lots of very popular open-source projects—like, one is called Socket.io, and other one called Mongoose—DX, or developer experience, in the absence of an enticing carrot for the business doesn't work. Maybe it has some short term adoption, maybe it has raving fans on Twitter or X [laugh], but at the end of the day, you have to deliver something that's tangible to the end-user and to the business.[unintelligible 00:06:33] Vercel focusing on the front-end has found a magical combination there of I can make the developer lives easier. Being a developer myself, I just tremendously empathize with that, but it can also make more profit for the business. When they make your website faster and render more dynamic data that serve as better recommendations for a product on e-commerce or in a marketing channel, I can help you roll out more experiments, then they make your business better, and I think that's one of the magical combinations there.The other thing, frankly, is that we'd started doing fewer things. So, when you come to Vercel, you typically come with a framework that you've already chosen. It could be Next.js, it could be View, [unintelligible 00:07:18], there's 35-plus frameworks. But we basically told the market, you have to use one of these developer tools in order to guide your development.And what companies were doing before—I mean, this almost seems obvious in retrospect, that we would optimize for her certain patterns and certain tools—but what the market was doing before was rolling out your own frameworks. Like, every company was, basically—React, for example, is a very popular way of building interfaces, and our framework actually is built on top of React. But when I would go to and talk to all these principal engineers that all these companies, they were saying, oh yeah, “We're creating our own framework. We're creating our own tools.” And I think that to me now feels almost like a zero interest rate phenomenon. Like, what business do you have in creating frameworks, tools, and bespoke infra when you're really in the business of creating delightful experiences for your customers?Corey: What I think is lost on a lot of folks is that if you are trying to learn something new and use a tool, and the developer experience is bad, the takeaway—at least for me and a lot of people that I talk to is not, “Oh, this tool has terrible ergonomics. That's it's problem.” Instead, the takeaway is very much, “Oh, I'm dumb because I don't understand this thing.” And I know intellectually that I am not usually the dumbest person in the world when it comes to a particular tool or technology, but I keep forgetting that on a visceral level. It's, “I just wish I was smart enough to understand that.”No, I don't. I wish it was presented in a way that was more understandable and the documentation was better. When you're just starting out and building something in your spare time, the infrastructure cost is basically nothing, but your time is the expensive part in it. So, if you have to spend three hours to track down something just because it wasn't clearly explained, the burden of adopting that tool is challenging. I would argue that one of the reasons that AWS sees some of the success that it does is not necessarily because it's great so much as because everyone knows how it breaks. That's important.I'm not saying their infrastructure isn't world-class—please, don't come at me in the comments on this one—but I am saying that we know where its sharp edges are, and that means that we're more comfortable building with it. But the idea of learning a brand-new cloud with different sharp edges in other areas. That's terrifying. I'd rather stick with the devil I know.Guillermo: Exactly. I just think that you're not going to be able to make a difference for customers in 2023 by creating another bespoke cloud that is general purpose, it doesn't really optimize around anything, and you have to learn all the sharp edges from scratch. I think we saw that with the rise of cloud-native companies like Stripe and Twilio where they were going after these amazingly huge markets like financial infrastructure or communications infrastructure, but the angle was, “Here's this awesome developer experience.” And that's what we're doing with Vercel for the front-end and for building products, right? There has to be an opinionated developer experience that guides you to success.And I agree with you that there's really, these days in the developer communities, zero tolerance for sharp edges, and we've spent a lot of time in—even documentation, like, it used to be that your startup would make or break it by whether you had great documentation. I think in the age of frameworks, I would even dare say that documentation, of course, is extremely important, but if I can have the tool itself guide you to success, at that point, you're not even reading documentation. We're now seeing this with AI and, like, generative AI for code. At Vercel, we're investing in generative AI for user interfaces. Do you actually need to read documentation at that point? So, I think we're optimizing for the absolute minimal amount of friction required to be successful with these platforms.Corey: I think that there's a truth in that of meeting customers in where they are. Your documentation can be spectacular, but people don't generally read the encyclopedia for fun either. And the idea of that is that—at least ideally—I should not need to go diving into the documentation, and so many tools get this wrong, where, “Oh, I want to set up a new project,” and it bombards you with 50 questions, and each one of these feels pretty… momentous. Like, what one-way door am I passing through that I don't realize the consequences of until I'm 12 hours into this thing, and then have to backtrack significantly. I like, personally, things that bias for having a golden path, but also make it easy to both deviate from it, as well as get back onto it. Because there's more than one way to do it is sort of the old Perl motto. That is true in spades in anything approaching the JavaScript universe.Guillermo: Yeah. I have a lot of thoughts on that. On the first point, I completely agree that the golden path of the product cannot be documentation-mediated. One of the things that I've become obsessive about—and this is an advice that I share with a lot of other startup founders is, when it comes to your landing page, the primary call to action has to be this golden path to success, like, 2, 3, 4 clicks later, I have to have something tangible. That was our inspiration.And when we made it the primary call to action for Vercel is deploy now. Start now. Get it out now. Ship it now. And the way that you test out the platform is by deploying a template. What do we do is we create a Git repo for you, it sets up the entire CI/CD pipeline, and then at that point, you already have something working, something in the cloud, you spent zero time reading documentation, and you can start iterating.And even though that might not be the final thing you do in Vercel, I always hear the stories of CTOs that are now deploying Vercel at really large scale, and they always tell me, “I started with your hobby tier, I started with free tier, I deployed a template, I hacked on a product during the weekend.” Now, a lot of our AI examples are very popular in this crowd. And yeah, there's a golden path that requires zero documentation. Now, you also mentioned that, what about complexity? This is an enterprise-grade platform. What about escape hatches? What about flexibility? And that's where our platform also shines because we have the entire power of a Turing-complete language, which is JavaScript and TypeScript, to customize every aspect of the platform.And you have a framework that actually answered a lot of the problems that came with serverless solutions in the past, which is that you couldn't run any of that on your local machine. The beauty of Vercel and Next.js is we kind of pioneered this concept that we called ‘Framework Defined Infrastructure.' You start with the framework, the framework has this awesome property that you can install on your computer, it has a dev command—like, it literally runs on your computer—but then when you push it to the cloud, it now defines the infrastructure. It creates all of the resources that are highly optimal.This creates—basically converts what was a single node system on your computer to a globally distributed system, which is a very complex and difficult engineering challenge, but Vercel completely automates it away. And now for folks that are looking for, like, more advanced solutions, they can now start poking into the outputs of that compilation process and say, “Okay, I can now have an influence or I can reconfigure some aspects of this pipeline.” And of course, if you don't think about those escape hatches, then the product just ends up being limiting and frustrating, so we had to think really hard about meeting both ends of the spectrum.Corey: In my own experimentations early on with Chat-Gippity—which is how I insist on pronouncing ChatGPT—a lot of what I found was that it was a lot more productive for me to, instead of asking just the question and getting the answer was, write a Python script to—Guillermo: Yes.Corey: Query this API to get me that answer. Because often it would be wrong. Sometimes very convincingly wrong, and I can at least examine it in various ways and make changes to it and iterate forward, whereas when everything is just a black box, that gets very hard to do. The idea of building something that can be iterated on is key.Guillermo: I love that. The way that Vercel actually first introduced itself to the world was this idea of immutable deployments and immutable infrastructure. And immutable sounds like a horrible word because I want to mutate things, but it was inspired by this idea of functional programming where, like, each iteration to the state, each data change, can be tracked. So, every time you deploy in Vercel, you get this unique URL that represents a point-in-time infrastructure deployment. You can go back in time, you can revert, you can use this as a way of collaborating with other engineers in your team, so you can send these hyperlinks around to your front-end projects.And it gives you a lot of confidence. Now, you can iterate knowing that before things go out, there's a lot of scrutiny, there's a lot of QA, there's a lot of testing processes that you can kick off against this serverless infrastructure that was created for each deployment. The conclusion for us so far has been that our role in the world is to increase iteration velocity. So, iteration speed is the faster horse of the cloud, right? Like, instead of getting a car, you get a faster horse.When you say, “Okay, I made the build pipeline 10% faster,” or, “I brought the TLS termination 10% closer to the visitor, and, like, I have more [pops 00:17:10],” things like that. That to me, is the speed. You can do those things, and they're awesome, but if you don't have a direction—which is velocity—then you don't know what you're building next. You don't know if your customers are happy. You don't know if you're delivering value. So, we built an entire platform that optimizes around, what should you ship next? What is the friction involved in getting your next iteration out? Is launching an experiment on your homepage, for example, is that a costly endeavor? Does it take you weeks? Does it take you months?One of the initial inspirations for just starting Vercel and making deployments really easy was, how difficult is it for the average company to change in their footer of their website is this copyright 2022? And you have—it's a new year. You have to bump it to copyright 2023. How long do you think it takes that engineer to, A, run the stack locally, so they can actually see the change; deploy it, but deploy to what we call the preview environment, so they can grab that URL and send [it to 00:18:15], Corey, and say, “Corey, does it look good? I updated [laugh] I updated the year in the footer.”And then you tell me, “Looks good, let's ship it to production.” Or you tell me, “No, no, no, it's risky. Let's divide it into two cohorts: 50% of traffic gets 2022, 50% of traffic gets 2023.” Obviously, this is a joke, but consider the implications of how difficult it is and the average organization to actually do this thing.[midroll 00:18:41]Corey: Oh, I find things like that all the time, especially on microservices that I built to handle some of my internal workflows here, and I haven't touched in two or three years. And okay, now it's time for me to update them to reflect some minor change. And first, I wind up in the screaming node warnings and I have to update things so that they actually work in a reasonable way. And, on some level, making a one-line change can take half a day. Now, in the real world, when people are working on these apps day-in and day-out, it gets a lot easier to roll those changes in over time, but coming back to something unmaintained, that becomes a project the longer you let it sit.Part of me wishes that there were easier ways around it, but there are trade-offs in almost any decision you make. If you're building something from the beginning of, well, I want to be able to automatically update the copyright year, you can even borderline make that something that automatically happens based upon the global time, whereas when you're trying to retrofit it afterwards, yeah, it becomes a project.Guillermo: Yeah, and now think, that's just a simple example of changing a string. That might be difficult for a product engineering in any organization. Or it may be slow, or it may be not as streamlined, or maybe it works really well for the first project that that company created. What about every incremental project thereafter?So, now I said—let's stop talking about a string, right? Let's think about you're about an e-commerce website where what we hear from our customers on average, like, 10% of revenue flows through the homepage. Now, I have to change a primary component that renders on the hero of the page, and I have to collaborate with every department in the organization. I have to collaborate with the design team, I have to collaborate with marketing, I have to collaborate with the business owners to track the analytics appropriately. So, what is the cost of every incremental experiment that you want to put in production?The other thing that's particularly interesting about front-end as it relates to cloud infrastructure is, scaling up front-end is a very difficult thing. What ends up happening is most front-ends are actually static websites. They're cached at the edge—or they're literally statically generated—and then they push all of the dynamism to the client side. So, you end up with this spaghetti of script tags on the client, you end up accumulating a lot of tech debt in the [shipping 00:20:56] huge bundles of JavaScript to the client to try to recover some dynamism, to try and run these experiments. So, everyone is in this, kind of, mess of the yes, maybe we can experiment, but we kind of offloaded the rendering work to the client. That in turn makes me—basically, I'm making the website slower for the visitor. I'm making them do the rendering work.And I'm trying to sell them something. I'm trying to speed up some processes. It's my responsibility to make it fast. So, what we ended up finding out is that yes, the cloud moved this forward a lot in terms of having these awesome building blocks, these awesome infrastructure primitives, but both in the developer experience, just changing something about your web product and also the end-user experiences, that web product renders really fast, those things really didn't happen with this first chapter of the cloud. And I think we're entering a new generation of higher-level clouds like Vercel that are optimizing for these things.Corey: I think that there's a historical focus on things that have not happened before. And that was painful and terrible, so we're not going to be focusing on what's happening in the future, we're going to build a process or a framework or something that winds up preventing that thing that hurt us from hurting us again. Now, that's great in moderation, but at some point—we see this at large companies from time-to-time—where you have so much process that is ossified scar tissue, basically, that it becomes almost impossible to get things done. Because oh, I want to make that—for example, that one-line change to a copyright date, well, here's the 5000 ways deploys have screwed us before, so we need to have three humans sign off on the one-line change, and a bunch of other stuff before it ever sees the light of day. Now, I'm exaggerating slightly, just as you are, but that feels like it acts as a serious brake on innovation.On the exact opposite side, where we see massive acceleration has been around the world of generative AI. Yes, it is massively hyped in a bunch of ways. I don't think it is going to be a defined way that changes the nature of humanity the way that some of these people are going after, but it's also clearly more than a parlor trick.Guillermo: I'm kind of in that camp. So, like you, I've been writing code for many years. I'm pretty astonished by the AI's ability to enhance my output. And of course, now I'm not writing code full time, so there is a sense of, okay because I don't have time, because I'm doing a million things, any minute I have seems like AI has just made it so much more worthwhile and I can squeeze so much more productivity out of it. But one of the areas that I'm really excited about is this idea of generative UI, which is not just autocompleting code in a text editor, but is the idea that you can use natural language to describe an interface and have the AI generate that interface.So, Vercel created this product called v0—you can check it out at v0.dev—where to me, it's really astonishing that you can get these incredibly high quality user interfaces, and basically all you have to do is input [laugh] a few English words. I have this personal experience of, I've been learning JavaScript and perfecting all my knowledge around it for, like, 20 or so years. I created Next.js.And Next.js itself powers a lot of these AI products. Like the front-end of ChatGPT is built on Next.js. And I used v0 to create… to basically recreate my blog. Like, I created rauchg.com, I deployed it on Vercel, but every pixel of that UI, I handcrafted.And as we were working on v0, I said okay, “I'm going to challenge myself to put myself back in the shoes of, like, I'm going to redesign this and I'm going to start over with just human language.” Not only did I arrive to the right look and feel of what I wanted to get, the code that it produced was better than I would have written by hand. Concretely, it was more accessible. So, there were areas of the UI where, like, some icons were rendered where I had not filled in those gaps. I just didn't know how to do that. The AI did. So, I really believe that AI will transform our lives as [laugh] programmers, at least I think, in many other areas in very profound ways.Corey: This is very similar to a project that I've been embarked on for the last few days where I described the app I wanted into Chat-Gippity and follow the instructions, and first, it round up point—sending me down a rabbit hole of the wrong Framework version that had been deprecated, and whatnot, and then I brought it all into VS Code where Jif-Ub Copilot, it kept switching back and forth between actively helpful, and ooh, the response matches publicly available code, so I'm not going to tell you the answer, despite the fact that feature has never been enabled on my account. So yeah, of course, it matches publicly available code. This is quite literally the React tutorial starter project. And it became incredibly frustrating, but it also would keep generating things in bursts, so my code is not at all legible or well organized or consistent for that matter. But it's still better than anything I'd be able to write myself. I'm looking forward to using v0 or something like it to see how that stacks up for some of my ridiculous generation ideas for these things.Guillermo: Yeah, you touched on a very important point is, the code has to work. The code has to be shippable. I think a lot of AI products have gotten by by giving you an approximation of the result, right? Like, they hallucinate sometimes, they get something wrong. It's still very helpful because sometimes it's sending you the right direction.But for us, the bar is that these things have to produce code that's useful, and that you can ship, and that you can iterate on. So, going back to that idea of iteration velocity, we call it v0 because we wanted it to be the first version. We still very much believe there is humans in the loop and folks will be iterating a lot on the initial draft that this thing is giving you, but it's so much better than starting with an empty code editor, [laugh] right? Like, and this applies, by the way to, like, not just new projects, but I always talk about, like, our customers have a few really important landing pages, key pages, maybe it's the product detail page in e-commerce, maybe it's your homepage and, like, your key product pages for a marketing website. Maybe it's where—and the checkout, for example, extremely important.But then there's a lot of incremental UIs that you have to add every single day. The banner for [laugh] accepting cookies or not, the consent management dialog. There's a lot of things that the worst case scenario is that you offload them again to some third-party script, to some iframe of sorts because you really don't have the bandwidth, time, or resources to build it yourself. And then you sacrifice speed, you sacrifice brand fidelity. And again because we're the front-end cloud, we're obsessed with your ability to ship UI that's native to your product, that is a streamline, that works really well. So, I think AI is going to have a significant effect there where a lot of things where you were sending someone to some other website because you just didn't have the bandwidth to create that UI, you can now own the experience end to end.Corey: That is no small thing. A last question I have, before we wind up calling this episode is, there was a period of time—I don't know if we're still in it or not—where it felt like every time I got up to get a cup of coffee and came back, there would be three JavaScript frameworks that launched during that interim. So, Next.js was at 1.1 of those when someone got up to get a cup of coffee. But that's shown a staying power that is, frankly, remarkable. Why? I don't know enough about the ecosystem to have an opinion on that, but I noticed when things stand out, and Next does.Guillermo: Yeah, I think it's a number of factors. Number one, we, as an industry I think, we coalesced, and we found the right engine to build our car. And that engine became React. Most folks building UI today are choosing React or a similar engine, but React has really become the gold standard for a lot of engineers. Now, what ended up happening next is that people realized I want a car. I want the full product. I need to drive. I don't want to assemble this freaking car every single time I have a new project.And Next.js filled a very important gap in the world where what you were looking for was not a library; what you were looking for is a framework that has opinions, but those opinions are very in line with how the web is supposed to work. We took a page from, basically, the beginnings of the web. We make a lot of jokes that in many ways, our inspiration was PHP, where server rendering is the default, where it's very expressive, it's very easy to reach for data. It just works for a lot of people. Again, that's the old [stack 00:30:03] in the olden days.And so, it obviously didn't quite work, but the inspiration was, can we make something that is a streamline for creating web interfaces at scale? At scale. And to your point, there's also a sense of, like, maybe it doesn't make sense anymore to build all this infrastructure from scratch every single time I started a project. So, Next filled in that gap. The other thing we did really well, I think, is that we gave people a universal model for how to use not just the server side, but also the client side strategically.So, I'll give you an example. When you go to ChatGPT, a lot of things on the screen are server rendered, but when you start doing interactions as a user, that requires for something like you'd say, “Hey Dali, generate an image.” That stuff requires a lot of optimistic UI. It requires features that are more like what a mobile native application can do. So, we can give folks the best of both worlds: the speed, interactivity, and fluidity of a native app, but we had those, sort of, fundamentals of how a website should work that even Perl and PHP had gotten right, once upon a time. So, I think we found that right blend of utility and flexibility, and folks love it, and I think, yeah, we're excited to continue to help steward this project as a standard for building on the web.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time to

In this laughably dark episode, we take a deep dive into the Book of Isaiah chapter 34. Ready your barf bags as we navigate through the raging seas of God's wrath, spewing out death and destruction left, right, and center. Seriously, if God had a mood ring, it would be flashing red and black like a rave in Hell. We analyze the God-given calamities and, spoiler alert, we aren't buying them as signs of divine rage.Now, strap yourselves in as we take a sharp turn into the political lane. Yes, we're going there - Trump's authoritarian admission. Brace yourselves, folks, this ride gets bumpier. Next, we delve into the biblical depiction of slaughter, destruction, and the highly suspicious specific mentions of animal killing and star extinction. Honestly, if you're not questioning this stuff, we've got a holy water-infused cocktail to sell you.In an attempt to lighten up this Godforsaken episode, we turn to the peculiar mentions of Lilith, demons, and our feathered friends in Isaiah 34. We try to make sense of the divine chaos, comparing it to Twin Peaks - because why not? The Bible could do with a dash of Lynchian weirdness.Finally, we wrap things up by discussing the fascinating concept of brood parasites (yeah, you read that right), preview our upcoming Q&A Saturday, and a Sacrilegious Book Club. You can expect more of our signature irreverent commentary and good old-fashioned atheist fun. So buckle up, and let's continue this wild ride through the rollercoaster of biblical contradictions and eccentricities.One more thing, remember, we didn't write the Bible, we just roast it. Tune in, and let's keep the blasphemy going!Join us on DISCORD: https://discord.gg/8RwwMrb5zKSkip the ads by joining Acast+ https://plus.acast.com/s/6331d364470c7900137bb57dThank you for stopping by Sacrilegious Discourse - Bible Study for Atheists!Check out these links for more information about our podcast and merchandise:Our Homepage: https://sacrilegiousdiscourse.com/Help support us by subscribing on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/sacrilegiousdiscourse Join Acast+ to enjoy our podcast adfree! https://plus.acast.com/s/sacrilegiousiscourse. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Greg McDaniel - 11/26/23

Listen to one of the sermons from our Sunday morning services.

Listen to one of the sermons from our Sunday morning services.

Has God Forsaken Us

Darius, Anna, and Hayes have a conversation today about suffering and feeling separated from God, inspired by a comment that Darius said in our last episode. Join us as we talk about Psalm 22 and the parallels it has with Jesus's time on the cross.

Uncover the veiled mysteries of the ancient biblical monarchy in “Godforsaken: A King Like the Nations.” Journey with us as we delve into the labyrinth of time, challenging widely accepted narratives and uncovering hidden truths subtly inscribed by ancient scribes. Traditionally, the monarchy of Israel has been viewed as the pinnacle, the golden age of […]

Earlier this week on Trinity Sunday we pondered the mystery that God reveals God's self in three co-equal persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We tapped into the wisdom of the early church and thought together about God's love as the energy and motivation for all God does in creation, redemption, and even in judgment. We will continue to ponder God's triune nature this week in part two of that homily, as we think about the way in which God's unique nature enables him to join with us in our suffering, brining transformative hope to situations that would otherwise be Godforsaken. As we said last week, the triune nature of God is deep mystery but what it reveals about God's character brings us joy and hope.

God, Forsaken of God A message preached by Pastor Mike Henry at Royal View Baptist Church. Worship Guitar - 100 Beautiful Hymns - Instrumental - Peaceful Gospel Music --- Used by the permission of the artist Josh Snodgrass

Sermon for Palm Sunday - April 2, 2023 | Preaching text: Matthew 26-27

69th message in a sermon series through the gospel of Matthew.

Jersey is a driving state. Listen to any Springsteen song and you'll remember this state romanticizes cars. We spend a lot of time in them. And we spend a lot of time listening to our precious robots, the GPS.But here at NJITW, we are firm believers that we mustn't let man succumb to the evil machines! And we happen to have a secret weapon, our own Bonadooch, who has worked many early mornings in every Godforsaken corner of this state.In this episode we put it to the test: who knows directions better? The GPS? Or Bonadooch off the top of his head? Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chuck is out, Danny is in. Steve and Quigz discuss the Philadelphia Flyers' GM change from Fletcher to Briere, possible candidates for team president, Sean Couturier's return to skating, and more as we continue marching to the end of this godforsaken season. Follow us on Twitter: @Flyperbole @ryanquigz

Chuck is out, Danny is in. Steve and Quigz discuss the Philadelphia Flyers' GM change from Fletcher to Briere, possible candidates for team president, Sean Couturier's return to skating, and more as we continue marching to the end of this godforsaken season. Follow us on Twitter: @Flyperbole @ryanquigz Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's Lance's “favorite” Sunday: Spring Forward Sunday. And ironically, today he's talking about rest. He tells the story of the Israelites, alone in the desert, feeling thirsty and Godforsaken, and how they had forgotten how they were provided for. When we are in our wilderness places, that is an opportunity that God will use to point to Him. In the miracle of the water from the rock, God reminded the Israelites that they were not alone. God was already there with them. We need to seek God on the mountaintop and the valley. Exodus 17:1-7 fmhouston.com

Lead Associate Pastor, Rich Sylvester, gives a message from Nehemiah 13:4-22 as we continue in our Annual Focus titled, "Restoration."

Trapped underground surrounded by Eyelash Bats, the crew fights not only their foes, but possibly their own friend... We also announced our newest feature coming soon, ‘Echos of the Adial', an after show where the team talks and reflects on the recent episode! - Due to the improv nature of The Dungeon Boiz podcast and other RPG content on our channels, some themes and situations that occur in-game may be difficult for some to handle. This podcast is intended for mature audiences only. Content warnings for this episode include: Foul Language, Creepy Imagery and Sounds, Death, Smoking, Drug Reference, and Mature Themes - Find more Dungeon Boiz content here: https://linktr.ee/TheDungeonBoiz

About AlexAlex is the Chief Product Officer of Twingate, which he cofounded in 2019. Alex has held a range of product leadership roles in the enterprise software market over the last 16 years, including at Dropbox, where he was the first enterprise hire in the company's transformation from consumer to enterprise business. A focus of his product career has been using the power of design thinking to make technically complex products intuitive and easy to use. Alex graduated from Stanford University with a degree in Electrical Engineering.Links Referenced:twingate.com: https://twingate.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Sysdig. Sysdig secures your cloud from source to run. They believe, as do I, that DevOps and security are inextricably linked. If you wanna learn more about how they view this, check out their blog, it's definitely worth the read. To learn more about how they are absolutely getting it right from where I sit, visit Sysdig.com and tell them that I sent you. That's S Y S D I G.com. And my thanks to them for their continued support of this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Honeycomb. When production is running slow, it's hard to know where problems originate. Is it your application code, users, or the underlying systems? I've got five bucks on DNS, personally. Why scroll through endless dashboards while dealing with alert floods, going from tool to tool to tool that you employ, guessing at which puzzle pieces matter? Context switching and tool sprawl are slowly killing both your team and your business. You should care more about one of those than the other; which one is up to you. Drop the separate pillars and enter a world of getting one unified understanding of the one thing driving your business: production. With Honeycomb, you guess less and know more. Try it for free at honeycomb.io/screaminginthecloud. Observability: it's more than just hipster monitoring.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. This promoted episode is brought to us by our friends at Twingate, and in addition to bringing you this episode, they also brought me a guest. Alex Marshall is the Chief Product Officer at Twingate. Alex, thank you for joining me, and what is a Twingate?Alex: Yeah, well, thanks. Well, it's great to be here. What is Twingate? Well, the way to think about Twingate is we're really a network overlay layer. And so, the experience you have when you're running Twingate as a user is that network resources or network destinations that wouldn't otherwise be accessible to you or magically accessible to you and you're properly authenticated and authorized to access them.Corey: When you say it's a network overlay, what I tend to hear and the context I usually see that in, in the real world is, “Well, we're running some things in AWS and some things in Google Cloud, and I don't know because of a sudden sharp blow to the head, maybe Azure as well, and how do you get all of the various security network models of security groups on one side to talk to their equivalent on the other side?” And the correct answer is generally that you don't and you use something else that more or less makes the rest of that irrelevant. Is that the direction you're coming at this from, or do you view it differently?Alex: Yeah, so I think the way that we view this in terms of, like, why we decide to build a product in the first place is that if you look at, sort of like, the internet in 2022, like, there's one thing that's missing from the network routing table, which is authentication and authorization on each row [laugh]. And so, the way that we designed the product is we said, “Okay, we're not going to worry about everything, basically, above the network layer and we're going to focus on making sure that what we're controlling with the client is looking at outbound network connections and making sure that when someone accesses something and only when they access it, that we check to make sure that they're allowed access.” We're basically holding those network connections until someone's proven that they're allowed to access to, then we let it go. And so, from the standpoint of, like, figuring out, like, security groups and all that kind of stuff, we're basically saying, like, “Yeah, if you're allowed to access the database in AWS, or your home assistant on your home network, fine, we'll let you do that, but we'll only let you go there once you've proven you're allowed to. And then once you're there, then you know, we'll let you figure out how you want to authenticate into the destination system.” So, our view is, like, let's start at the network layer, and then that solves a lot of problems.Corey: When I call this a VPN, I know a couple of things are going to be true. One, you're almost certainly going to correct me on that because this is all about Zero Trust. This is the Year of our Lord 2022, after all. But also what I round to what basically becomes a VPN to my mind, there are usually two implementations or implementation patterns that I think about. One of them is the idea of client access, where I have a laptop; I'm in a Starbucks; I want to connect to a thing. And the other has historically been considered, site to site, or I have a data center that I want to have constantly connected to my cloud environment. Which side of that mental model do you tend to fall in? Or is that the wrong way to frame it?Alex: Mm-hm. The way we look at it and sort of the vision that we have for what the product should be, the problem that we should be solving for customers is what we want to solve for customers is that Twingate is a product that lets you be certain that your employees can work securely from anywhere. And so, you need a little bit of a different model to do that. And the two examples you gave are actually both entirely valid, especially given the fact that people just work from everywhere now. Like, resources everywhere, they use a lot of different devices, people work from lots of different networks, and so it's a really hard problem to solve.And so, the way that we look at it is that you really want to be running something or have a system in place that's always taking into account the context that user is in. So, in your example of someone's at a Starbucks, you know, in the public WiFi, last time I checked, Starbucks WiFi was unencrypted, so it's pretty bad for security. So, what we should do is you should take that context into account and then make sure that all that traffic is encrypted. But at the same time, like, you might be in the corporate office, network is perfectly safe, but you still want to make sure that you're authorizing people at the point in time they try to access something to make sure that they actually are entitled to access that database in the AWS network. And so, we're trying to get people away from thinking about this, like, point-to-point connection with a VPN, where you know, the usual experience we've all had as employees is, “Great. Now, I need to fire up the VPN. My internet traffic is going to be horrible. My battery's probably going to die. My—”Corey: Pull out the manual token that rotates with an RSA—Alex: Exactly.Corey: —token that spits out a different digital code every 30 seconds if the battery hasn't died or they haven't gotten their seeds leaked again, and then log in and the rest; in some horrible implementations type that code after your password for some Godforsaken reason. Yeah, we've all been down that path and it's like, “Yeah, just sign into the corporate VPN.” It's like, “Did you just tell me to go screw myself because that's what I heard.”Alex: [laugh]. Exactly. And that is exactly the situation that we're in. And the fact is, like, VPNs were invented a long time ago and they were designed to connect to networks, right? They were designed to connect a branch office to a corporate office, and they're just to join all the devices on the network.So, we're really, like—everybody has had this experience of VPN is suffering from the fact that it's the wrong tool for the job. Going back to, sort of like, this idea of, like, us being the network overlay, we don't want to touch any traffic that isn't intended to go to something that the company or the organization or the team wants to protect. And so, we're only going to gate traffic that goes to those network destinations that you actually want to protect. And we're going to make sure that when that happens, it's painless. So, for example, like, you know, I don't know, again, like, use your example again; you've been at Starbucks, you've been working your email, you don't really need to access anything that's private, and all of a sudden, like, you need to as part of your work that you're doing on the Starbucks WiFi is access something that's in AWS.Well, then the moment you do that, then maybe you're actually fine to access it because you've been authenticated, you know, and you're within the window, it's just going to work, right, so you don't have to go through this painful process of firing up the VPN like you're just talking about.Corey: There are a number of companies out there that, first, self-described as being, “Oh, we do Zero Trust.” And when I hear that, what I immediately hear in my own mind is, “I have something to sell you,” which, fair enough, we live in an industry. We're trying to have a society here. I get it. The next part that I wind up getting confused by then is, it seems like one of those deeply overloaded terms that exists to, more or less—in some cases to be very direct—well, we've been selling this thing for 15 years and that's the buzzword, so now we're going to describe it as the thing we do with a fresh coat of paint on it.Other times it seems to be something radically different. And, on some level, I feel like I could wind up building an entire security suite out of nothing other than things self-billing themselves as Zero Trust. What is it that makes Twingate different compared to a wide variety of other offerings, ranging from Seam to whatever the hell an XDR might be to, apparently according to RSA, a breakfast cereal?Alex: So, you're right. Like, Zero Trust is completely, like, overused word. And so, what's different about Twingate is that really, I think goes back to, like, why we started the company in the first place, which is that we started looking at the remote workspace. And this is, of course, before the pandemic, before everybody was actually working remotely and it became a really urgent problem.Corey: During the pandemic, of course, a lot of the traditional VPN companies are, “Huh. Why is the VPN concentrator glowing white in the rack and melting? And it sounds like screaming. What's going on?” Yeah, it turns out capacity provisioning and bottlenecking of an entire company tends to be a thing at scale.Alex: And so, you're right, like, that is exactly the conversation. We've had a bunch of customers over the last couple years, it's like their VPN gateway is, like, blowing up because it used to be that 10% of the workforce used it on average, and all of a sudden everybody had to use it. What's different about our approach in terms of what we observed when we started the company, is that what we noticed is that this term Zero Trust is kind of floating out there, but the only company that actually implemented Zero Trust was Google. So, if you think about the situations that you look at, Zero Trust is like, obvious. It's like, it's what you would want to do if you redesigned the internet, which is you'd want to say every network connection has to be authorized every single time it's made.But the internet isn't actually designed that way. It's designed default open instead of default closed. And so, we looked at the industry are, like, “Great. Like, Google's done it. Google has, like, tons and tons of resources. Why hasn't anyone else done it?”And the example that I like to talk about when we talk about inception of the business is we went to some products that are out there that were implementing the right technological approach, and one of these products is still in use today, believe it or not, but I went to the documentation page, and I hit print, and it was almost 50 pages of documentation to implement it. And so, when you look at that, you're, like, okay, like, maybe there's a usability problem here [laugh]. And so, what we really, really focus on is, how do we make this product as easy as possible to deploy? And that gets into, like, this area of change management. And so, if you're in IT or DevOps or engineering or security and you're listening to this, I'm sure you've been through this process where it's taken months to deploy something because it was just really technically difficult and because you had to change user behavior. So, the thing that we focus on is making sure that you didn't have to change user behavior.Corey: Every time you expect people to start doing things completely differently, congratulations, you've already lost before you've started.Alex: Yes, exactly. And so, the difference with our product is that you can switch off the VPN one day, have people install a Twingate client, and then tomorrow, they still access things with exactly the same addresses they used before. And this seems like such a minor point, but the fact that I don't have to rewrite scripts, I don't have to change my SSH proxy configuration, I don't have to do anything, all of those private DNS addresses or those private IP address, they'll still work because of the way that our client works on the device.Corey: So, what you're saying is fundamental; you could even do a slow rollout. It doesn't need to be a knife-switch cutover at two in the morning where you're scrambling around and, “Oh, my God, we forgot the entire accounting department.”Alex: Yep, that's exactly right. And that is, like, an attraction of deploying this is that you can actually deploy it department by department and not have to change all your infrastructure at the same time. So again, it's like pretty fundamental point here. It's like, if you're going to get adoption technology, it's not just about how cool the technology is under the hood and how advanced it is; it's actually thinking about from a customer and a business standpoint, like, how much is actually going to cost time-wise and effort-wise to move over to the new solution. So, we've really, really focused on that.Corey: Yeah. That is generally one of those things, that seems to be the hardest approach. I mean, let's back up a little bit here because I will challenge—likely—something that you said a few minutes ago, which is Google was the first and only company for a little while doing Zero Trust. Back in 2012, it turned out that we weren't calling it that then, but that is fundamentally what I built out of the ten-person startup that I was at, where I was the first ops hire, which generally comes in right around Series B when developers realize, okay, we can no longer lie to ourselves that we know what we're doing on an ops side. Everything's on fire and no one can sleep through the night. Help, help, help. Which is fine.I've never had tolerance or patience for ops people who insult people in those situations. It's, “Well, they got far enough along to hire you, didn't they? So, maybe show some respect.” But one of the things that I did was, being on the corporate network got you access to the printer in the corner and that was it. There was no special treatment of that network.And I didn't think much of it at the time, but I got some very strange looks and had some—uh, will call it interesting a decade later; most of the pain has faded—discussions with our auditor when we were going through some PCI work, and they showed up and said, “Great. Okay, where are the credentials for your directory?” And my response was, “Our what now?” And that's when I realized there's a certain point of scale. Back when I started as an independent consultant, everything I did for single-sign-on, for example, was my 1Password vault. Easy enough.Now, that we've scaled up beyond that, I'm starting to see the value of things like single-sign-on in a way that I never did before, and in hindsight, I'd like to go back and do things very differently as a result. Scale matters. What is the point of scale that you find is your sweet spot? Is it one person trying to connect to a whole bunch of nonsense? Is it small to midsize companies—and we should probably bound that because to me, a big company is still one that has 200 people there?Alex: To your original interesting point, which is that yeah, kudos to you for, like, implementing that, like, back then because we've had probably—Corey: I was just being lazy and it was what was there. It's like, “Why do I want to maintain a server in the closet? Honestly, I'm not sure that the office is that secure. And all it's going to do—what I'm I going to put on that? A SharePoint server? Please. We're using Macs.”Alex: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So it's, we've had, like, I don't know at this point, thousands of customer conversations. The number of people have actually gone down that route implementing things themselves as a very small number. And I think that just shows how hard it is. So again, like, kudos.And I think the scale point is, I think, really critical. So, I think it's changed over time, but actually, the point at which a customer gets to a scale where I think a solution has, like, leveraged high value is when you get to maybe only 50, 75 people, which is a pretty small business. And the reason is that that's the point at which a bunch of tools start getting implemented a company, right? When you're five people, you're not going to install, like, an MDM or something on people's devices, right? When you get to 50, 75, 100, you start hiring your first IT team members. That's the point where them being able to, like, centralize management of things at the company becomes really critical.And so, one of the other aspects that makes this a little bit different terms of approach is that what we see is that there's a huge number of tools that have to be managed, and they have different configuration settings. You can't even get consistency on MDM is across different platforms, necessarily, right? Like, Linux, Windows, and Mac are all going to have slight differences, and so what we've been working with the platform towards is actually being the centralization point where we integrate with these different systems and then pull together, like, a consistent way to create those authentication authorization policies I was talking about before. And the last thing on SSO, just to sort of reiterate that, I think that you're talking about you're seeing the value of that, the other thing that we've, like, made a deliberate decision on is that we're not going to try to, like, re-solve, like, a bunch of these problems. Like, some of the things that we do on the user authentication point is that we rely on there being an SSO, like, user directory, that handles authentication, that handles, like, creating user groups. And we want to reuse that when people are using Twingate to control access to network destinations.So, for us, like, it's actually, you know, that point of scale comes fairly early. It only gets harder from there, and it's especially when that IT team is, like, a relatively small number of people compared to number of employees where it becomes really critical to be able to leverage all the technology they have to deploy.Corey: I guess this might be one of those areas where I'm not deep enough in your space to really see it the same way that you do, which is the whole reason I have people like you on the show: so I can ask these questions directly. What is the painful position that I find myself in that I should say, “Ah, I should bring Twingate in to solve this obnoxious, painful problem so I never have to think about it again.” What is it that you solve?Alex: Yeah, I mean, I think for what our customers tell us, it's providing a, like, consistent way to get access into, like, a wide variety of internal resources, and generally in multi-cloud environments. That's where it gets, like, really tricky. And the consistency is, like, really important because you're trying to provide access to your team—often like it's DevOps teams, but all kinds of people can access these things—trying to write access is a multiple different environments, again, there's a consistency problem where there are multiple different ways to provide that, and there isn't a single place to manage all that. And so, it gets really challenging to understand who has access to what, makes sure that credentials expire when they're supposed to expire, make sure that all the routing inside those remote destinations is set up correctly. And it just becomes, like, a real hassle to manage those things.So, that's the big one. And usually where people are coming from is that they've been using VPN to do that because they didn't know anything better exists, or they haven't found anything that's easy enough to deploy, right? So, that's really the problem that they're running into.Corey: There's also a lot of tribal knowledge that gets passed down. The oral tradition of, “I have this problem. What should I do? I know, I will consult the wise old sage.” “Well, where can you find the wise old sage?” “Under the rack of servers, swearing at them.” “Great, cool. Well, use a VPN. That's what we've used since time immemorial.” And then the sins are visited onto yet another generation.There's a sense that I have that companies that are started now are going to have a radically different security posture and a different way of thinking about these things than the quote-unquote, “Legacy companies.”—legacy, of course, being that condescending engineering term for ‘it makes money—who are migrating their way into a brave new world because they had the temerity to found themselves as companies before 2012.Alex: Absolutely. When we're working with customers, there is a sort of a sweet spot, both in terms of, like, the size and role that we were talking about before, but also just in terms of, like, where they are, in, sort of like, the sort of lifecycle of their company. And I think one of the most exciting things for us is that we get to work with companies that are kind of figuring this stuff out for the first time and they're taking a fresh look at, like, what the capabilities are out there in the landscape. And that's, I think, what makes this whole space, like, super, super interesting.There's some really, really fantastic things you can do. Just give you an example, again, that I think might resonate with your audience quite a bit is this whole topic of automation, right? Your time at the tribal knowledge of, like, “Oh, of course. You know, we set up a VPN and so on.” One of the things that I don't think is necessarily obvious in this space is that for the teams that—at companies that are deploying, configuring, managing internal network infrastructure, is that in the past, you've had to make compromises on infrastructure in order to accommodate access, right?Because it's kind of a pain to deploy a bunch of, like, VPN gateways, mostly for the end-user because they got to, like, choose which one they're connecting to. You potentially had to open up traffic routes to accommodate a VPN gateway that you wouldn't otherwise want to open up. And so, one of the things that's, like, really sort of fascinating about, like, a new way of looking at things is that what we allow with Twingate—and part of this is because we've really made sure that the product is, like, API-first in the very beginning, which allows us to very easily integrate in with things, like, Terraform and Pulumi for deployment automation, is that now you have a new way of looking at things, which is that you can build a network infrastructure that you want with the data flow rules that you want, and very easily provide access into, like, points of that infrastructure, whether that's an entire subnet or just a single host somewhere. I think these are the ways, like, the capabilities have been realized are possible until they, sort of like, understand some of these new technologies.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friend EnterpriseDB. EnterpriseDB has been powering enterprise applications with PostgreSQL for 15 years. And now EnterpriseDB has you covered wherever you deploy PostgreSQL on-premises, private cloud, and they just announced a fully-managed service on AWS and Azure called BigAnimal, all one word. Don't leave managing your database to your cloud vendor because they're too busy launching another half-dozen managed databases to focus on any one of them that they didn't build themselves. Instead, work with the experts over at EnterpriseDB. They can save you time and money, they can even help you migrate legacy applications—including Oracle—to the cloud. To learn more, try BigAnimal for free. Go to biganimal.com/snark, and tell them Corey sent you.Corey: This feels like one of those technologies where the place that a customer starts from and where they wind up going are very far apart. Because I can see the metaphorical camel's nose under the tent flap being, “Ah, this is a VPN except it doesn't suck. Great.” But once you wind up with effectively an overlay network connecting all the things that you care about within an organization, it feels like that unlocks a whole universe of possibility.Alex: Mm-hm. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think you hit the nail on the head there. Like, a lot of people approach us because they're having a lot of pain with VPN and all the operational difficulties they were talking about earlier, but I think what sort of starts to open up is there's some, sort of like, not obvious things that happen. And one of them is that all of a sudden, when you can limit access at a network connection level, you start to think about, like, credentials and access management a little differently, right?So, one of the problems that well-known is people set a bastion host. And they set bastion host so that there's, like, a limited way into the network and all the, you know, keys are stored in that bastion host and so on. So, you basically have a system where fine, we had bastion host set up because, A, we want limited ingress, and B, we want to make sure that we know exactly who has access to our internal resources. You could do away with that and with a simple, like, configuration change, you can basically say, “Even if this employee for whatever reason, we've forgotten to remove—revoke their SSH keys, even if they still have those keys, they can't access the destination because we're blocking network access at their actual device,” then you have a very different way to restrict access. So, it's still important to manage credentials, but you now have a way to actually block things out at a network level. And I think it's like when people start to realize that these capabilities are possible that they definitely start thinking about things a little bit differently. VPNs just don't allow this, like, level of granularity.Corey: I am a firm believer in the idea that any product with any kind of longevity gets an awful lot of its use case and product-market fit not from the people building it, but from the things that those folks learn from their customers. What did you learn from customers rolling out Twingate that reshaped how you thought about the space, or surprised you as far as use cases go?Alex: Yeah, so I think it's a really interesting question because one of the benefits of having a small business and being early on is that you have very close relationships with all your customers and they're really passionate about your product. And what that leads to is just a lot of, sort of like, knowledge sharing around, like, how they're using your product, which then helps inform the types of things that we build. So, one of the things that we've done internally to help us learn, but then also help us respond more quickly to customers, is we have this group called Twingate Labs. And it's really just a group of folks that are outside the engineering org that are just allowed to build whatever they want to try to prove out, like, interesting concepts. And a lot of those—I say a lot; honestly, probably all of those concepts have come from our customers, and so we've been able to, like, push the boundaries on that.And so, it just gave you an example, I mean, AWS can be sometimes a challenging product to manage and interact with, and so that team has, for example, built capabilities, again, using that just the regular Twingate API to show that it's possible to automatically configure resources in AWS based on tags. Now, that's not something that's in our product, but it's us showing our customers that, you know, we can respond quickly to them and then they actually, like, try to accommodate some, like, these special use cases they have. And if that works out, then great, we'll pull it into the product, right? So, I think that's, like, the nice thing about serving a smaller businesses is that you get a lot of that back and forth to your customers and they help us generate ideas, too.Corey: One thing that stands out to me from the testimonials from customers you have on your website has been a recurring theme that crops up that speaks to I guess, once I spend more than ten seconds thinking about it, one of the most obvious reasons that I would say, “Oh, Twingate? That sounds great for somebody else. We're never rolling it out here.” And that is the ease of adoption into environments that are not greenfield because I don't believe that something like this product will ever get deployed to something greenfield because this is exactly the kind of problem that you don't realize exists and don't have to solve for until it's too late because you already have that painful problem. It's an early optimization until suddenly, it's something you should have done six months ago. What is the rolling it out process for a company that presumably already is built out, has hired a bunch of people, and they already have something that, quote-unquote, “Works,” for granting access to things?Alex: Mm-hm. Yeah, so the beauty is that you can really deploy this side-by-side with an existing solution, so—whatever it happens to be; I mean, whether it's a VPN or something else—is you can put the side-by-side and the deployment process, just to talk a little bit about the architecture; we've talked a lot about this client that runs on the user's device, but on the remote network side, just to be really clear on this, there's a component called a connector that gets deployed inside the remote network, and it does not have to be installed on every single destination host. You're sort of thinking about it, sort of like this routing point inside that network, and that connector controls what traffic is allowed to go to internal locations based on the rules. So, from a deployment standpoint, it's really just put a connector in place and put it in place in whatever subnet you want to provide access to.And so you're—unlikely, but if your entire company has one subnet, great. You're done with one connector. But it does mean you can sort of gradually roll it out as it goes. And the connector can be deployed in a bunch of different environments, so we're just talking with AWS. Maybe it's inside a VPC, but we have a lot of people that actually just want to control access to specific services inside a Kubernetes cluster, and so you can deploy it as a container, right inside Kubernetes. And so, you can be, like, really specific about how you do that and then gradually roll it out to teams as they need it and without having to necessarily on that day actually shut off the old solution.So, just to your comment, by the way, on the greenfield versus, sort of like, brownfield, I think the greenfield story, I think, is changing a little bit, I think, especially to your comment earlier around younger companies. I think younger companies are realizing that this type of capability is an option and that they want to get in earlier. But the reality is that, you know, 98% of people are really in the established network situation, and so that's where that rollout process is really important.Corey: As you take a look throughout what you're seeing customers doing, what you see the industry doing as a result of that—because customers are, in fact, the industry, let's be clear here—what do you think is, I guess, the next wave of security offerings? I guess what I'm trying to do here is read the tea leaves and predict what the buzzwords will be all over the place that next RSA. But on a slightly more serious note, what do you see this is building towards? What are the trends that you're identifying in the space?Alex: There's a couple of things that we see. So one, sort of, way to look at this is that we're sort of in this, like, Third Wave. And I think these things change more slowly than—with all due respect to marketers—than marketers would [laugh] have you believe. And so, thinking about where we are, there's, like, Wave One is, like, good old happy days, we're all in the office, like, your computer can't move, like, all the data is in the office, like, everything is in one place, right?Corey: What if someone steals your desktop? Well, they're probably going to give themselves a hernia because that thing's heavy. Yeah.Alex: Exactly. And is it really worth stealing, right? But the Wave One was really, like, network security was actually just physical security, to that point; that's all it was, just, like, physically secure the premises.Wave Two—and arguably you could say we're kind of still in this—is actually the transition to cloud. So, let's convert all CapEx to OpEx, but that also introduces a different problem, which is that everything is off-network. So, you have to, like, figure out, you know, what you do about that.But Wave Three is really I think—and again, just to be clear, I think Wave Two, there are, like, multi-decade things that happen—and I'd say we're in the middle of, like, Wave Three. And I think that everyone is still, like, gradually adapting to this, which is what we describe it as sort of people everywhere, applications are everywhere, people are using a whole bunch of different devices, right? There is no such thing as BYOD in the early-2000s, late-90s, and people are accessing things from all kinds of different networks. And this presents a really, really challenging problem. So, I would argue, to your question, I think we're still in the middle of that Wave Three and it's going to take a long time to see that play through the industry. Just, things change slowly. That tribal knowledge takes time to change.The other thing that I think we very strongly believe in is that—and again, this is, sort of like, coming from our customers, too—is that people basically with security industry have had a tough time trying things out and adopting them because a lot of vendors have put a lot of blockers in place of doing that. There's no public documentation; you can't just go use the product. You got to talk to a salesperson who then filters you through—Corey: We have our fifth call with the sales team. We're hoping this is the one where they'll tell us how much it costs.Alex: Exactly. Or like, you know, now you get to the sales engineer, so you gradually adopt this knowledge. But ultimately, people just want to try the darn thing [laugh], right? So, I think we're big believers that I think hopefully, what we'll see in the security industry is that—we're trying to set an example here—is really that there's an old way of doing things, but a new way of doing things is make the product available for people to use, document the heck out of it, explain all the different use cases that exist for how to be successful your product, and then have these users actually then reach out to you when they want to have more in-depth conversation about things. So, those are the two big things, I'd say. I don't know if those are translated buzzwords at RSA, but those are two big trends we see.Corey: I look forward to having you back in a year or two and seeing how close we get to the reality. “Well, I guess we didn't see that acronym coming, but don't worry. They've been doing it for the last 15 years under different names, so it works out.” I really want to thank you for being as generous with your time as you have been. If people want to learn more, where should they go?Alex: Well, as we're just talking about, you try the product at twingate.com. So, that should be your first stop.Corey: And we will of course put links to that in the show notes. Thank you so much for being as forthcoming as you have been about all this stuff. I really appreciate your time.Alex: Yeah, thank you, Corey. I really appreciate it. Thanks.Corey: Alex Marshall, Chief Product Officer at Twingate. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with a long angry ranty comment about what you hated about the episode, which will inevitably get lost when it fails to submit because your crappy VPN concentrator just dropped it on the floor.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

VOD Roulette returns with a new episode, recorded near July 4th and full of fireworks literal and figurative! Nathan and Bill are joined by two greats in the PG alumni category; cohost Seth Dombach, who crewed the cast with Nathan for a number of years, and returning guest and horror enthusiast Brian Scott, a true champion of the cast on social media!  In this episode we each pick one film and let the PG community suggest titles for the fifth.  This episode the hosts picked Zombie Nightmare, Fog Island, The Wind, and Mind Warp. Chosen from the FB page, from a suggestion made by Amanda Lee, we also cover Godforsken from 2022. So get ready for found footage shenanigans, Adam West cashing a paycheck, demons of the lonely prairie, murky murder mysteries, and Bruce Campbell going up against mutants and the Tall Man himself.  I give you, VOD Roulette! Enjoy! miss this episode, and check us out at all the places below:  www.phantomgalaxy.podbean.com Twitter: @fantomgalaxy You can also find us on Facebook at: The Phantom Galaxy Podcast  Also come check out the Phantom Galaxy FB group and join the conversation! You can also contact us and share your recommendations for show topics and stuff to review (books, beer, movies, whatever!) or leave us a Phantom Rant at Phantomcasts@gmail.com  Other places to find Bill:  https://letterboxd.com/billhorrorguy/ https://landofthecreeps.blogspot.com/ Other places to find Brian Scott: https://phantomgalaxy.podbean.com/e/phantom-galaxy-thanksgiving-movies/ https://phantomgalaxy.podbean.com/e/phantom-galaxy-christmas-extravaganza-2021/ https://fatherandsonwatchhorror.com/podcast/2021/10/30/ep-93-rob-zombies-halloween-1-amp-2 A few previous episodes featuring Seth Dombach https://phantomgalaxy.podbean.com/e/episode-28-stephen-king-goes-to-hollywood-carrie/ https://phantomgalaxy.podbean.com/e/phantom-galaxy-19-twin-peaks-between-two-lodges/ https://phantomgalaxy.podbean.com/e/casting-the-bones-episode-1 https://phantomgalaxy.podbean.com/e/phantom-galaxy-30-days-of-halloween-part-3/  

This special bonus episode is only for the truly deranged souls who want to listen to the BONUS EXTENDED full quiz on if you're ready to become a parent.  TAKE THE QUIZ: https://www.thequiz.com/are-you-ready-to-be-a-parent/ --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/dinky-podcast/support

The only road you've got, is the road you're on now. So whether you're a word of faither naming it & claiming it, or a new ager making all the right affirmations, denial is only going to take you so far. The holy path, the sacred path, doesn't entail pretending, but rather attending to where you actually are. #theroadawayfromgod is out today, wherever books are sold!

In this special episode, Dinesh examines a very old question that no one seems able to answer: Why would a good and benevolent God allow so much evil and suffering in the world?  Dinesh argues that traditional answers, such as evil doesn't really exist, or God always brings good out of evil, don't really work. Drawing on one of his earlier books, Dinesh offers a comprehensive and daring answer, one that covers both natural evil--the evil effects of natural calamity and disease--and also moral evil, the evil done by humans. This is Christian apologetics in the characteristic Dinesh vein. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jesus was forsaken by His Father on the cross, all so that those who choose to follow Him would never be forsaken themselves. We still experience struggles and suffering in this life, but Christ's sacrifice put us into right relationship with our Father Who will never abandon us and Who will walk with us through every trial we face.

On this week's episode, MB and Terry chat Exploited, Godforsaken, Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road, X (again), and Roh!Follow Mary Beth, Terry and the Podcast on Twitter.Spotify now has a rating system, so please take a moment to go rate us there. And please give us a rating and review on iTunes. It really helps us out with the algorithms. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

About PeterPeter's spent more than a decade building scalable and robust systems at startups across adtech and edtech. At Remind, where he's VP of Technology, Peter pushes for building a sustainable tech company with mature software engineering. He lives in Southern California and enjoys spending time at the beach with his family.Links: Redis: https://redis.com/ Remind: https://www.remind.com/ Remind Engineering Blog: https://engineering.remind.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hamiltop Email: peterh@remind101.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Today's episode is brought to you in part by our friends at MinIO the high-performance Kubernetes native object store that's built for the multi-cloud, creating a consistent data storage layer for your public cloud instances, your private cloud instances, and even your edge instances, depending upon what the heck you're defining those as, which depends probably on where you work. It's getting that unified is one of the greatest challenges facing developers and architects today. It requires S3 compatibility, enterprise-grade security and resiliency, the speed to run any workload, and the footprint to run anywhere, and that's exactly what MinIO offers. With superb read speeds in excess of 360 gigs and 100 megabyte binary that doesn't eat all the data you've gotten on the system, it's exactly what you've been looking for. Check it out today at min.io/download, and see for yourself. That's min.io/download, and be sure to tell them that I sent you.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Vultr. Spelled V-U-L-T-R because they're all about helping save money, including on things like, you know, vowels. So, what they do is they are a cloud provider that provides surprisingly high performance cloud compute at a price that—while sure they claim its better than AWS pricing—and when they say that they mean it is less money. Sure, I don't dispute that but what I find interesting is that it's predictable. They tell you in advance on a monthly basis what it's going to going to cost. They have a bunch of advanced networking features. They have nineteen global locations and scale things elastically. Not to be confused with openly, because apparently elastic and open can mean the same thing sometimes. They have had over a million users. Deployments take less that sixty seconds across twelve pre-selected operating systems. Or, if you're one of those nutters like me, you can bring your own ISO and install basically any operating system you want. Starting with pricing as low as $2.50 a month for Vultr cloud compute they have plans for developers and businesses of all sizes, except maybe Amazon, who stubbornly insists on having something to scale all on their own. Try Vultr today for free by visiting: vultr.com/screaming, and you'll receive a $100 in credit. Thats V-U-L-T-R.com slash screaming.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn and this is a fun episode. It is a promoted episode, which means that our friends at Redis have gone ahead and sponsored this entire episode. I asked them, “Great, who are you going to send me from, generally, your executive suite?” And they said, “Nah. You already know what we're going to say. We want you to talk to one of our customers.” And so here we are. My guest today is Peter Hamilton, VP of Technology at Remind. Peter, thank you for joining me.Peter: Thanks, Corey. Excited to be here.Corey: It's always interesting when I get to talk to people on promoted guest episodes when they're a customer of the sponsor because to be clear, you do not work for Redis. This is one of those stories you enjoy telling, but you don't personally have a stake in whether people love Redis, hate Redis, adopt that or not, which is exactly what I try and do on these shows. There's an authenticity to people who have in-the-trenches experience who aren't themselves trying to sell the thing because that is their entire job in this world.Peter: Yeah. You just presented three or four different opinions and I guarantee we felt all at the different times.Corey: [laugh]. So, let's start at the very beginning. What does Remind do?Peter: So, Remind is a messaging tool for education, largely K through 12. We support about 30 million active users across the country, over 2 million teachers, making sure that every student has, you know, equal opportunities to succeed and that we can facilitate as much learning as possible.Corey: When you say messaging that could mean a bunch of different things to a bunch of different people. Once on a lark, I wound up sitting down—this was years ago, so I'm sure the number is a woeful underestimate now—of how many AWS services I could use to send a message from me to you. And this is without going into the lunacy territory of, “Well, I can tag a thing and then mail it to you like a Snowball Edge or something.” No, this is using them as intended, I think I got 15 or 16 of them. When you say messaging, what does that mean to you?Peter: So, for us, it's about communication to the end-user. We will do everything we can to deliver whatever message a teacher or district administrator has to the user. We go through SMS, text messaging, we go through Apple and Google's push services, we go through email, we go through voice call, really pulling out all the stops we can to make sure that these important messages get out.Corey: And I can only imagine some of the regulatory pressure you almost certainly experience. It feels like it's not quite to HIPAA levels, where ohh, there's a private cause of action if any of this stuff gets out, but people are inherently sensitive about communications involving their children. I always sort of knew this in a general sense, and then I had kids myself, and oh, yeah, suddenly I really care about those sorts of things.Peter: Yeah. One of the big challenges, you can build great systems that do the correct thing, but at the end of the day, we're relying on a teacher choosing the right recipient when they send a message. And so we've had to build a lot of processes and controls in place, so that we can, kind of, satisfy two conflicting needs: One is to provide a clear audit log because that's an important thing for districts to know if something does happen, that we have clear communication; and the other is to also be able to jump in and intervene when something inappropriate or mistaken is sent out to the wrong people.Corey: Remind has always been one of those companies that has a somewhat exalted reputation in the AWS space. You folks have been early adopters of a bunch of different services—which let's be clear, in the responsible way, not the, “Well, they said it on stage; time to go ahead and put everything they just listed into production because we for some Godforsaken reason, view it as a todo list.”—but you've been thoughtful about how you approach things, and you have been around as a company for a while. But you've also been making a significant push toward being cloud-native by certain definitions of that term. So, I know this sounds like a college entrance essay, but what does cloud-native mean to you?Peter: So, one of the big gaps—if you take an application that was written to be deployed in a traditional data center environment and just drop it in the cloud, what you're going to get is a flaky data center.Corey: Well, that's unfair. It's also going to be extremely expensive.Peter: [laugh]. Sorry, an expensive, flaky data set.Corey: There we go. There we go.Peter: What we've really looked at–and a lot of this goes back to our history in the earlier days; we ran a top of Heroku and it was kind of the early days what they call the Twelve-Factor Application—but making aggressive decisions about how you structure your architecture and application so that you fit in with some of the cloud tools that are available and that you fit in, you know, with the operating models that are out there.Corey: When you say an aggressive decision, what sort of thing are you talking about? Because when I think of being aggressive with an approach to things like AWS, it usually involves Twitter, and I'm guessing that is not the direction you intend that to go.Peter: No, I think if you look at Twitter or Netflix or some of these players that, quite frankly, have defined what AWS is to us today through their usage patterns, not quite that.Corey: Oh, I mean using Twitter to yell at them explicitly about things—Peter: Oh.Corey: —because I don't do passive-aggressive; I just do aggressive.Peter: Got it. No, I think in our case, it's been plotting a very narrow path that allows us to avoid some of the bigger pitfalls. We have our sponsor here, Redis. Talk a little bit about our usage of Redis and how that's helped us in some of these cases. One of the pitfalls you'll find with pulling a non-cloud-native application and put it in the cloud is state is hard to manage.If you put state on all your machines and machines go down, networks fail, all those things, you now no longer have access to that state and we start to see a lot of problems. One of the decisions we've made is try to put as much data as we can into data stores like Redis or Postgres or something, in order to decouple our hardware from the state we're trying to manage and provide for users so that we're more resilient to those sorts of failures.Corey: I get the sense from the way that we're having this conversation, when you talk about Redis, you mean actual Redis itself, not ElastiCache for Redis, or as to I'm tending to increasingly think about AWS's services, Amazon Basics for Redis.Peter: Yeah. I mean, Amazon has launched a number of products. They have their ElastiCache, they have their new MemoryDB, there's a lot different ways to use this. We've relied pretty heavily on Redis, previously known as Redis Labs, and their enterprise product in their cloud, in order to take care of our most important data—which we just don't want to manage ourselves—trying to manage that on our own using something like ElastiCache, there's so many pitfalls, so many ways that we can lose that data. This data is important to us. By having it in a trusted place and managed by a great ops team, like they have at Redis, we're able to then lean in on the other aspects of cloud data to really get as much value as we can out of AWS.Corey: I am curious. As I said you've had a reputation as a company for a while in the AWS space of doing an awful lot of really interesting things. I mean, you have a robust GitHub presence, you have a whole bunch of tools that have come out Remind that are great, I've linked to a number of them over the years in the newsletter. You are clearly not afraid, culturally, to get your hands dirty and build things yourself, but you are using Redis Enterprise as opposed to open-source Redis. What drove that decision? I have to assume it's not, “Wait. You mean, I can get it for free as an open-source project? Why didn't someone tell me?” What brought you to that decision?Peter: Yeah, a big part of this is what we could call operating leverage. Building a great set of tools that allow you to get more value out of AWS is a little different story than babysitting servers all day and making sure they stay up. So, if you look through, most of our contributions in open-source space have really been around here's how to expand upon these foundational pieces from AWS; here's how to more efficiently launch a suite of servers into an auto-scaling group; here's, you know, our troposphere and other pieces there. This was all before Amazon CDK product, but really, it was, here's how we can more effectively use CloudFormation to capture our Infrastructure as Code. And so we are not afraid in any way to invest in our tooling and invest in some of those things, but when we look at the trade-off of directly managing stateful services and dealing with all the uncertainty that comes, we feel our time is better spent working on our product and delivering value to our users and relying on partners like Redis in order to provide that stability we need.Corey: You raise a good point. An awful lot of the tools that you've put out there are the best, from my perspective, approach to working with AWS services. And that is a relatively thin layer built on top of them with an eye toward making the user experience more polished, but not being so heavily opinionated that as soon as the service goes in a different direction, the tool becomes completely useless. You just decide to make it a bit easier to wind up working with specific environment variables or profiles, rather than what appears to be the AWS UX approach of, “Oh, now type in your access key, your secret key and your session token, and we've disabled copy and paste. Go, have fun.” You've really done a lot of quality of life improvements, more so than you have this is the entire system of how we do deploys, start to finish. It's opinionated and sort of a, like, a take on what Netflix, did once upon a time, with Asgard. It really feels like it's just the right level of abstraction.Peter: We did a pretty good job. I will say, you know, years later, we felt that we got it wrong a couple times. It's been really interesting to see that, that there are times when we say, “Oh, we could take these three or four services and wrap it up into this new concept of an application.” And over time, we just have to start poking holes in that new layer and we start to see we would have been better served by sticking with as thin a layer as possible that enables us, rather than trying to get these higher-level pieces.Corey: It's remarkably refreshing to hear you say that just because so many people love to tell the story on podcasts, or on conference stages, or whatever format they have of, “This is what we built.” And it is an aspirationally superficial story about this. They don't talk about that, “Well, firstly, without these three wrong paths first.” It's always a, “Oh, yes, obviously, we are smart people and we only make the correct decision.”And I remember in the before times sitting in conference talks, watching people talk about great things they'd done, and I'll turn next to the person next to me and say, “Wow, I wish I could be involved in a project like that.” And they'll say, “Yeah, so do I.” And it turns out they work at the company the speaker is from. Because all of these things tend to be the most positive story. Do you have an example of something that you have done in your production environment that going back, “Yeah, in hindsight, I would have done that completely differently.”Peter: Yeah. So, coming from Heroku moving into AWS, we had a great open-source project called Empire, which kind of bridge that gap between them, but used Amazon's ECS in order to launch applications. It was actually command-line compatible with the Heroku command when it first launched. So, a very big commitment there. And at the time—I mean, this comes back to the point I think you and I were talking about earlier, where architecture, costs, infrastructure, they're all interlinked.And I'm a big fan of Conway's Law, which says that an organization's structure needs to match its architecture. And so six, seven years ago, we're heavy growth-based company and we are interns running around, doing all the things, and we wanted to have really strict guardrails and a narrow set of things that our development team could do. And so we built a pretty constrained: You will launch, you will have one Docker image per ECS service, it can only do these specific things. And this allowed our development team to focus on pretty buttons on the screen and user engagement and experiments and whatnot, but as we've evolved as a company, as we built out a more robust business, we've started to track revenue and costs of goods sold more aggressively, we've seen, there's a lot of inefficient things that come out of it.One particular example was we used PgBouncer for our connection pooling to our Postgres application. In the traditional model, we had an auto-scaling group for a PgBouncer, and then our auto-scaling groups for the other applications would connect to it. And we saw additional latency, we saw additional cost, and we eventually kind of twirl that down and packaged that PgBouncer alongside the applications that needed it. And this was a configuration that wasn't available on our first pass; it was something we intentionally did not provide to our development team, and we had to unwind that. And when we did, we saw better performance, we saw better cost efficiency, all sorts of benefits that we care a lot about now that we didn't care about as much, many years ago.Corey: It sounds like you're describing some semblance of an internal platform, where instead of letting all your engineers effectively, “Well, here's the console. Ideally, you use some form of Infrastructure as Code. Good luck. Have fun.” You effectively gate access to that. Is that something that you're still doing or have you taken a different approach?Peter: So, our primary gate is our Infrastructure as Code repository. If you want to make a meaningful change, you open up a PR, got to go through code review, you need people to sign off on it. Anything that's not there may not exist tomorrow. There's no guarantees. And we've gone around, occasionally just shut random servers down that people spun up in our account.And sometimes people will be grumpy about it, but you really need to enforce that culture that we have to go through the correct channels and we have to have this cohesive platform, as you said, to support our development efforts.Corey: So, you're a messaging service in education. So, whenever I do a little bit of digging into backstories of companies and what has made, I guess, an impression, you look for certain things and explicit dates are one of them, where on March 13th of 2020, your business changed just a smidgen. What happened other than the obvious, we never went outside for two years?Peter: [laugh]. So, if we roll back a week—you know, that's March 13th, so if we roll back a week, we're looking at March 6th. On that day, we sent out about 60 million messages over all of our different mediums: Text, email, push notifications. On March 13th that was 100 million, and then, a few weeks later on March 30th, that was 177 million. And so our traffic effectively tripled over the course of those three weeks. And yeah, that's quite a ride, let me tell you.Corey: The opinion that a lot of folks have who have not gotten to play in sophisticated distributed systems is, “Well, what's the hard part there you have an auto-scaling group. Just spin up three times the number of servers in that fleet and problem solved. What's challenging?” A lot, but what did you find that the pressure points were?Peter: So, I love that example, that your auto-scaling group will just work. By default, Amazon's auto-scaling groups only support 1000 backends. So, when your auto-scaling group goes from 400 backends to 1200, things break, [laugh] and not in ways that you would have expected. You start to learn things about how database systems provided by Amazon have limits other than CPU and memory. And they're clearly laid out that there's network bandwidth limits and things you have to worry about.We had a pretty small team at that time and we'd gotten this cadence where every Monday morning, we would wake up at 4 a.m. Pacific because as part of the pandemic, our traffic shifted, so our East Coast users would be most active in the morning rather than the afternoon. And so at about 7 a.m. on the east coast is when everyone came online. And we had our Monday morning crew there and just looking to see where the next pain point was going to be.And we'd have Monday, walk through it all, Monday afternoon, we'd meet together, we come up with our three or four hypotheses on what will break, if our traffic doubles again, and we'd spend the rest of that next week addressing those the best we could and repeat for the next Monday. And we did this for three, four or five weeks in a row, and finally, it stabilized. But yeah, it's all the small little things, the things you don't know about, the limits in places you don't recognize that just catch up to you. And you need to have a team that can move fast and adapt quickly.Corey: You've been using Redis for six, seven years, something along those lines, as an enterprise offering. You've been working with the same vendor who provides this managed service for a while now. What are the fruits of that relationship? What is the value that you see by continuing to have a long-term relationship with vendors? Because let's be serious, most of us don't stay in jobs that long, let alone work with the same vendor.Peter: Yeah. So, coming back to the March 2020 story, many of our vendors started to see some issues here that various services weren't scaled properly. We made a lot of phone calls to a lot of vendors in working with them, and I… very impressed with how Redis Labs at the time was able to respond. We hopped on a call, they said, “Here's what we think we need to do, we'll go ahead and do this. We'll sort this out in a few weeks and figure out what this means for your contract. We're here to help and support in this pandemic because we recognize how this is affecting everyone around the world.”And so I think when you get in those deeper relationships, those long-term relationships, it is so helpful to have that trust, to have a little bit of that give when you need it in times of crisis, and that they're there and willing to jump in right away.Corey: There's a lot to be said for having those working relationships before you need them. So often, I think that a lot of engineering teams just don't talk to their vendors to a point where they may as well be strangers. But you'll see this most notably because—at least I feel it most acutely—with AWS service teams. They'll do a whole kickoff when the enterprise support deal is signed, three years go passed, and both the AWS team and the customer's team have completely rotated since then, and they may as well be strangers. Being able to have that relationship to fall back on in those really weird really, honestly, high-stress moments has been one of those things where I didn't see the value myself until the first time I went through a hairy situation where I found that that was useful.And now it's oh, I—I now bias instead for, “Oh, I can fit to the free tier of this service. No, no, I'm going to pay and become a paying customer.” I'd rather be a customer that can have that relationship and pick up the phone than someone whining at people in a forum somewhere of, “Hey, I'm a free user, and I'm having some problems with production.” Just never felt right to me.Peter: Yeah, there's nothing worse than calling your account rep and being told, “Oh, I'm not your account rep anymore.” Somehow you missed the email, you missed who it was. Prior to Covid, you know—and we saw this many, many years ago—one of the things about Remind is every back-to-school season, our traffic 10Xes in about three weeks. And so we're used to emergencies happening and unforeseen things happening. And we plan through our year and try to do capacity planning and everything, but we been around the block a couple of times.And so we have a pretty strong culture now leaning in hard with our support reps. We have them in our Slack channels. Our AWS team, we meet with often. Redis Labs, we have them on Slack as well. We're constantly talking about databases that may or may not be performing as we expect them, too. They're an extension of our team, we have an incident; we get paged. If it's related to one of the services, we hit them in Slack immediately and have them start checking on the back end while we're checking on our side. So.Corey: One of the biggest takeaways I wish more companies would have is that when you are dependent upon another company to effectively run your production infrastructure, they are no longer your vendor, they're your partner, whether you want them to be or not. And approaching it with that perspective really pays dividends down the road.Peter: Yeah. One of the cases you get when you've been at a company for a long time and been in relationship for a long time is growing together is always an interesting approach. And seeing, sometimes there's some painful points; sometimes you're on an old legacy version of their product that you were literally the last customer on, and you got to work with them to move off of. But you were there six years ago when they're just starting out, and they've seen how you grow, and you've seen how they've grown, and you've kind of been able to marry that experience together in a meaningful way.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Cloud. Counting the pennies, but still dreaming of deploying apps instead of “Hello, World” demos? Allow me to introduce you to Oracle's Always Free tier. It provides over 20 free services and infrastructure, networking, databases, observability, management, and security. And—let me be clear here—it's actually free. There's no surprise billing until you intentionally and proactively upgrade your account. This means you can provision a virtual machine instance or spin up an autonomous database that manages itself, all while gaining the networking, load balancing, and storage resources that somehow never quite make it into most free tiers needed to support the application that you want to build. With Always Free, you can do things like run small-scale applications or do proof-of-concept testing without spending a dime. You know that I always like to put asterisks next to the word free? This is actually free, no asterisk. Start now. Visit snark.cloud/oci-free that's snark.cloud/oci-free.Corey: Redis is, these days, of data platform back once upon a time, I viewed it as more of a caching layer. And I admit that the capabilities of the platform has significantly advanced since those days when I viewed it purely through lens of cache. But one of the interesting parts is that neither one of those use cases, in my mind, blends particularly well with heavy use of Spot Fleets, but you're doing exactly that. What are your folks doing over there?Peter: [laugh]. Yeah, so as I mentioned earlier, coming back to some of the Twelve-Factor App design, we heavily rely on Redis as sort of a distributed heap. One of our challenges of delivering all these messages is every single message has its in-flight state: Here's the content, here's who we sent it to, we wait for them to respond. On a traditional application, you might have one big server that stores it all in-memory, and you get the incoming requests, and you match things up. By moving all that state to Redis, all of our workers, all of our application servers, we know they can disappear at any point in time.We use Amazon's Spot Instances and their Spot Fleet for all of our production traffic. Every single web service, every single worker that we have runs on this infrastructure, and we would not be able to do that if we didn't have a reliable and robust place to store this data that is in-flight and currently being accessed. So, we'll have a couple hundred gigs of data at any point in time in a Redis Database, just representing in-flight work that's happening on various machines.Corey: It's really neat seeing Spot Fleets being used as something more than a theoretical possibility. It's something I've always been very interested in, obviously, given the potential cost savings; they approach cheap is free in some cases. But it turns out—we talked earlier about the idea of being cloud-native versus the rickety, expensive data center in the cloud, and an awful lot of applications are simply not built in a way that yeah, we're just going to randomly turn off a subset of your systems, ideally, with two minutes of notice, but all right, have fun with that. And a lot of times, it just becomes a complete non-starter, even for stateless workloads, just based upon how all of these things are configured. It is really interesting to watch a company that has an awful lot of responsibility that you've been entrusted with who embraces that mindset. It's a lot more rare than you'd think.Peter: Yeah. And again, you know, sometimes, we overbuild things, and sometimes we go down paths that may have been a little excessive, but it really comes down to your architecture. You know, it's not just having everything running on Spot. It's making effective use of SQS and other queueing products at Amazon to provide checkpointing abilities, and so you know that should you lose an instance, you're only going to lose a few seconds of productive work on that particular workload and be able to kick off where you left off.It's properly using auto-scaling groups. From the financial side, there's all sorts of weird quirks you'll see. You know, the Spot market has a wonderful set of dynamics where the big instances are much, much cheaper per CPU than the small ones are on the Spot market. And so structuring things in a way that you can colocate different workloads onto the same hosts and hedge against the host going down by spreading across multiple availability zones. I think there's definitely a point where having enough workload, having enough scale allows you to take advantage of these things, but it all comes down to the architecture and design that really enables it.Corey: So, you've been using Redis for longer than I think many of our listeners have been in tech.Peter: [laugh].Corey: And the key distinguishing points for me between someone who is an advocate for a technology and someone who's a zealot—or a pure critic—is they can identify use cases for which is great and use cases for which it is not likely to be a great experience. In your time with Redis, what have you found that it's been great at and what are some areas that you would encourage people to consider more carefully before diving into it?Peter: So, we like to joke that five, six years ago, most of our development process was, “I've hit a problem. Can I use Redis to solve that problem?” And so we've tried every solution possible with Redis. We've done all the things. We have number of very complicated Lua scripts that are managing different keys in an atomic way.Some of these have been more successful than others, for sure. Right now, our biggest philosophy is, if it is data we need quickly, and it is data that is important to us, we put it in Enterprise Redis, the cloud product from Redis. Other use cases, there's a dozen things that you can use for a cache, Redis is great for cache, memcache does a decent job as well; you're not going to see a meaningful difference between those sorts of products. Where we've struggled a little bit has been when we have essentially relational data that we need fast access to. And we're still trying to find a clear path forward here because you can do it and you can have atomic updates and you can kind of simulate some of the ACID characteristics you would have in a relational database, but it adds a lot of complexity.And that's a lot of overhead to our team as we're continuing to develop these products, to extend them, to fix any bugs you might have in there. And so we're kind of recalibrating a bit, and some of those workloads are moving to other data stores where they're more appropriate. But at the end of the day, it's data that we need fast, and it's data that's important, we're sticking with what we got here because it's been working pretty well.Corey: It sounds almost like you started off with the mindset of one database for a bunch of different use cases and you're starting to differentiate into purpose-built databases for certain things. Or is that not entirely accurate?Peter: There's a little bit of that. And I think coming back to some of our tooling, as we kind of jumped on a bit of the microservice bandwagon, we would see, here's a small service that only has a small amount of data that needs to be stored. It wouldn't make sense to bring up a RDS instance, or an Aurora instance, for that, you know, in Postgres. Let's just store it in an easystore like Redis. And some of those cases have been great, some of them have been a little problematic.And so as we've invested in our tooling to make all our databases accessible and make it less of a weird trade-off between what the product needs, what we can do right now, and what we want to do long-term, and reduce that friction, we've been able to be much more deliberate about the data source that we choose in each case.Corey: It's very clear that you're speaking with a voice of experience on this where this is not something that you just woke up and figured out. One last area I want to go into with you is when I asked you what is you care about primarily as an engineering leader and as you look at serving your customers well, you effectively had a dual answer, almost off the cuff, of stability and security. I find the two of those things are deeply intertwined in most of the conversations I have, but they're rarely called out explicitly in quite the way that you do. Talk to me about that.Peter: Yeah, so in our wild journey, stability has always been a challenge. And we've alway—you know, been an early startup mode, where you're constantly pushing what can we ship? How quickly can we ship it? And in our particular space, we feel that this communication that we foster between teachers and students and their parents is incredibly important, and is a thing that we take very, very seriously. And so, a couple years ago, we were trying to create this balance and create not just a language that we could talk about on a podcasts like this, but really recognizing that framing these concepts to our company internally: To our engineers to help them to think as they're building a feature, what are the things they should think about, what are the concerns beyond the product spec; to work with our marketing and sales team to help them to understand why we're making these investments that may not get particular feature out by X date but it's still a worthwhile investment.So, from the security side, we've really focused on building out robust practices and robust controls that don't necessarily lock us into a particular standard, like PCI compliance or things like that, but really focusing on the maturity of our company and, you know, our culture as we go forward. And so we're in a place now we are ISO 27001; we're heading into our third year. We leaned in hard our disaster recovery processes, we've leaned in hard on our bug bounties, pen tests, kind of, found this incremental approach that, you know, day one, I remember we turned on our bug bounty and it was a scary day as the reports kept coming in. But we take on one thing at a time and continue to build on it and make it an essential part of how we build systems.Corey: It really has to be built in. It feels like security is not something could be slapped on as an afterthought, however much companies try to do that. Especially, again, as we started this episode with, you're dealing with communication with people's kids. That is something that people have remarkably little sense of humor around. And rightfully so.Seeing that there is as much if not more care taken around security than there is stability is generally the sign of a well-run organization. If there's a security lapse, I expect certain vendors to rip the power out of their data centers rather than run in an insecure fashion. And your job done correctly—which clearly you have gotten to—means that you never have to make that decision because you've approached this the right way from the beginning. Nothing's perfect, but there's always the idea of actually caring about it being the first step.Peter: Yeah. And the other side of that was talking about stability, and again, it's avoiding the either/or situation. We can work in as well along those two—stability and security—we work in our cost of goods sold and our operating leverage in other aspects of our business. And every single one of them, it's our co-number one priorities are stability and security. And if it costs us a bit more money, if it takes our dev team a little longer, there's not a choice at that point. We're doing the correct thing.Corey: Saving money is almost never the primary objective of any company that you really want to be dealing with unless something bizarre is going on.Peter: Yeah. Our philosophy on, you know, any cost reduction has been this should have zero negative impact on our stability. If we do not feel we can safely do this, we won't. And coming back to the Spot Instance piece, that was a journey for us. And you know, we tested the waters a bit and we got to a point, we worked very closely with Amazon's team, and we came to that conclusion that we can safely do this. And we've been doing it for over a year and seen no adverse effects.Corey: Yeah. And a lot of shops I've talked to folks about well, when we go and do a consulting project, it's, “Okay. There's a lot of things that could have been done before we got here. Why hasn't any of that been addressed?” And the answer is, “Well. We tried to save money once and it caused an outage and then we weren't allowed to save money anymore. And here we are.” And I absolutely get that perspective. It's a hard balance to strike. It always is.Peter: Yeah. The other aspect where stability and security kind of intertwine is you can think about security as InfoSec in our systems and locking things down, but at the end of the day, why are we doing all that? It's for the benefit of our users. And Remind, as a communication platform, and safety and security of our users is as dependent on us being up and available so that teachers can reach out to parents with important communication. And things like attendance, things like natural disasters, or lockdowns, or any of the number of difficult situations schools find themselves in. This is part of why we take that stewardship that we have so seriously is that being up and protecting a user's data just has such a huge impact on education in this country.Corey: It's always interesting to talk to folks who insists they're making the world a better place. And it's, “What do you do?” “We're improving ad relevance.” I mean, “Okay, great, good for you.” You're serving a need that I would I would not shy away from classifying what you do, fundamentally, as critical infrastructure, and that is always a good conversation to have. It's nice being able to talk to folks who are doing things that you can unequivocally look at and say, “This is a good thing.”Peter: Yeah. And around 80% of public schools in the US are using Remind in some capacity. And so we're not a product that's used in a few civic regions. All across the board. One of my favorite things about working in Remind is meeting people and telling them where I work, and they recognize it.They say, “Oh, I have that app, I use that app. I love it.” And I spent years and ads before this, and you know, I've been there and no one ever told me they were glad to see an ad. That's never the case. And it's been quite a rewarding experience coming in every day, and as you said, being part of this critical infrastructure. That's a special thing.Corey: I look forward to installing the app myself as my eldest prepares to enter public school in the fall. So, now at least I'll have a hotline of exactly where to complain when I didn't get the attendance message because, you know, there's no customer quite like a whiny customer.Peter: They're still customers. [laugh]. Happy to have them.Corey: True. We tend to be. I want to thank you for taking so much time out of your day to speak with me. If people want to learn more about what you're up to, where's the best place to find you?Peter: So, from an engineering perspective at Remind, we have our blog, engineering.remind.com. If you want to reach out to me directly. I'm on LinkedIn; good place to find me or you can just reach out over email directly, peterh@remind101.com.Corey: And we will put all of that into the show notes. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.Peter: Thanks, Corey.Corey: Peter Hamilton, VP of Technology at Remind. This has been a promoted episode brought to us by our friends at Redis, and I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry and insulting comment that you will then hope that Remind sends out to 20 million students all at once.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

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