Podcasts about Xamarin

Mitchell Green is the Founder and Managing Partner of Lead Edge Capital. Mitchell has led or co-led investments in companies including Alibaba, Asana, Benchling, ByteDance, Duo Security, Grafana, Mindbody, and Xamarin, among several others. In Today's Episode We Discuss: 04:31 How Bessemer Taught Me The One Golden Rule of Investing 06:48 Why AI Infrastrcture is the Worst Investment to Make 08:51 Why it is Comical to think there will be $BN one person companies? 09:26 WTF Happens To The Cohort of SaaS Companies With Slow Growth, Not Yet Profitable and $50M-$200M in Revenue 16:12 What is the Biggest Problem with the IPO Market 23:24 When is the Right Time to Sell in VC and How a Generation F******* it Up 27:37 Biggest Advice to Smaller Emerging Managers 40:13 The One Question That Tells You if a Business is Good 43:01 Why LPs are More Important than Founders 45:03 One Question Every LP Should Ask Their VCs 46:03 Why TikTok Does Not Matter to ByteDance and It Is a Screaming Buy 51:30 Why We Drastically Underestimate the Power of Chinese AI? 55:18 Why Social Media is the Most Dangerous Thing in Society 01:00:07 Quick Fire Questions  

Ready for a migration story? Carl and Richard talk to Nathan Westfall about his experiences moving an application for school buses from Xamarin Forms to Blazor. Nathan describes the interplay between a tablet on the bus for the driver, cloud services in AWS, and parent smartphones. The discussion dives into the advantages of Blazor on the client from a server resources perspective when dealing with hundreds of thousands of parents, plus being compliant with all of the rules and expectations of a public service sector product. Great insights on how to make apps people use every day!

Ready for a migration story? Carl and Richard talk to Nathan Westfall about his experiences moving an application for school buses from Xamarin Forms to Blazor. Nathan describes the interplay between a tablet on the bus for the driver, cloud services in AWS, and parent smartphones. The discussion dives into the advantages of Blazor on the client from a server resources perspective when dealing with hundreds of thousands of parents, plus being compliant with all of the rules and expectations of a public service sector product. Great insights on how to make apps people use every day!

James Montemagno is a Principal Lead Program Manager for the Developer Community at Microsoft. He has been a .NET developer since 2005, working in a wide range of industries including game development, printer software, and web services. Prior to becoming a Principal Program Manager, James was a professional mobile developer and has been crafting apps since 2011 with Xamarin. In his spare time, he is most likely cycling around Seattle or guzzling gallons of coffee at a local coffee shop. He co-hosts the weekly development podcast Merge Conflict mergeconflict.fm.   Topics of Discussion: [:36] Jeffrey introduces the concept of .NET Aspire and highlights its integration with Azure DevOps and .NET ecosystem tools. [2:51] The evolution of .NET mobile and desktop development since 2005. [4:45] An overview of .NET Aspire and its focus on simplifying app development and infrastructure orchestration. [11:45] How .NET Aspire supports both local development and cloud deployment. [16:24] Integrating DevOps automation for Azure deployments using bicep templates and Azure Developer CLI (azd). [25:30] Generating infrastructure manifests and deploying them with Azure Developer CLI. [32:51] Configuring Azure resources like Redis Cache for development and deployment scenarios. [35:11] Simplifying cloud deployment for developers using Azure Container Apps. [39:37] Polyglot support in .NET Aspire projects, allowing integration with Python, JavaScript, and more. [44:50] Plans to integrate development tunnels to streamline mobile app testing.   Mentioned in this Episode: Clear Measure Way Architect Forum Software Engineer Forum Programming with Palermo — New Video Podcast! Email us at programming@palermo.net. Clear Measure, Inc. (Sponsor) .NET DevOps for Azure: A Developer's Guide to DevOps Architecture the Right Way, by Jeffrey Palermo — Available on Amazon! Jeffrey Palermo's Twitter — Follow to stay informed about future events! Ep 62 with James Montemagno James Montemagno James on YouTube James Montemagno GitHub James on DevOps James on X .NET Aspire Manifest plus + azd + Bicep == Mind Blown Aspire Dashboard   Want to Learn More? Visit AzureDevOps.Show for show notes and additional episodes.

RJJ Software's Software Development Service This episode of The Modern .NET Show is supported, in part, by RJJ Software's Podcasting Services, whether your company is looking to elevate its UK operations or reshape its US strategy, we can provide tailored solutions that exceed expectations. Show Notes "So we're dealing with code bases that are getting bigger and bigger every day. You know, those million line code bases, two million line code bases is not unusual. We are being pushed to do more. I remember when I was working at Microsoft a couple of years ago, Satya Nadella, CEO, his favourite phrase was, "you have to do more with less." But yeah, so Satya was big on this idea of do more with less. And this has kind of resonated across the industry as a whole."— Jim Bennett Welcome friends to The Modern .NET Show; the premier .NET podcast, focusing entirely on the knowledge, tools, and frameworks that all .NET developers should have in their toolbox. We are the go-to podcast for .NET developers worldwide, and I am not your host: Jamie. I'm Delilah and I will be recording the intro for this episode because Jamie is suffering with a throat infection. In this episode, Jim Bennett returns to the show after a six-year absence. In his previous appearance, Jim introduced us to Xamarin, but in the time since that appearance, Xamarin has been sunsetted. So it felt natural to start our conversation about the wonderful outpouring of support over on X with the hashtag #XamarinGaveMe. The main topic of conversation is about Generative AI, Large Language Models, and how the new startup, Pieces, can help developers to keep the context of what they are working on at the front of their mind at all times; both when they are online and off. "If I said to you, "which character from the Pixar movie Up are you?" The answer is going to be, "Doug," we're all Doug. We're all like, "squirrel!" So if we have to go from our IDE to a browser to ask a question, we're reading email on the way. We are looking at chat tools on the way. Oh, we're in a browser. "Oh, I've got a notification on Blue Sky. I'm going to have a look at that." We are context switching. We are distracted. We are drinking coffee. We are losing our productivity"— Jim Bennett Anyway, without further ado, let's sit back, open up a terminal, type in `dotnet new podcast` and we'll dive into the core of Modern .NET. My voice was created using Generative AI. Supporting the Show If you find this episode useful in any way, please consider supporting the show by either leaving a review (check our review page for ways to do that), sharing the episode with a friend or colleague, buying the host a coffee, or considering becoming a Patron of the show. Full Show Notes The full show notes, including links to some of the things we discussed and a full transcription of this episode, can be found at: https://dotnetcore.show/season-7/unlocking-the-power-of-ai-jim-bennett-on-pieces-for-developers Jim's Links: Jim's linked on Link Tree Pieces Pieces Discord #XamarinGaveMe Xamarin in Action (AKA Jim's book on Xamarin) Jamie's Public NuGet Packages: OwaspHeaders.Core ClackMiddleware OnionArch.Mvc Useful Links Generative AI for .NET Developers with Amit Bahree Ollama OpenVino LLMs Mentioned: Llama Microsoft Phi Mistral Qwen-2.5 which Jamie mis-names as Quon. Supporting the show: Leave a rating or review Buy the show a coffee Become a patron Getting in Touch: Via the contact page Joining the Discord Remember to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, or wherever you find your podcasts, this will help the show's audience grow. Or you can just share the show with a friend. And don't forget to reach out via our Contact page. We're very interested in your opinion of the show, so please get in touch. You can support the show by making a monthly donation on the show's Patreon page at: https://www.patreon.com/TheDotNetCorePodcast.

Ep 248Apple Pay stigao u Erste Bank Srbija.Big Bang kupio BC Group FU: Mac mini na putu za Istru, Anker 240W na putu ka Mikiju4D saga4D SAS ima novog vlasnikaKako je počeloPrvo smo 28.11.2024. dobili email u kojem smo obavešteni da je 4D prodat, iako je većina nas to već pretpostavljala posle linka na forumu koji je pokazivao na promene u farncuskoj verziji APR-a.Dan kasnije stiže drugi mail koji nas obaveštava o promenama u EULA.Onda stiže informacija i o novim cenovnicima. Ovo je nemački (praktično je isti u celoj Evropi). 4D Server poskupeo sa 1300 evra na 1959, dodatni 4D Client sa 350 evra na 659, Web licenca za 4D server sa 1130 na 3990.Diskusija na 4D Forumu.###Ko je u problemuOni koji imaju standalone aplikacije, oni koji imaju mnogo 4D Clienata u klijent server okruženju.###Šta je rešenjeOvi sa standalone aplikacijama traže alternative.Favorit za prelazak: Xojo (formerly known as Realbasic).U opticaju su Xamarin (očajnici), Lazarus, Flutter, QT, ###Šta će Mikijevi poslodavci da radeIdemo dalje, s tim da ćemo tokom 2025 da ubrzamo proces da naša Web verzija dostigne funkcionalnost u klijent server okruženju.Šta će Miki da radiMiki se odlučio za Swift za svoj jedini standalone projekat za malu grupu klijenata.The Browser company ima framework za Windows.Alex Ziskind: M4 Mac Mini CLUSTER

Una cosa estremamente affascinante nell'informatica, per me, è il concetto di “multipiattaforma”. Si riferisce alla capacità di una roba, che sia un'applicazione o di un linguaggio di programmazione, di funzionare su diversi sistemi operativi e dispositivi senza bisogno di modifiche significative. Immagina di avere un'app che può girare su Windows, MacOS e Linux allo stesso modo, esatto come un sito web! Un sito si comporta bene su qualsiasi browser, Chrome, Firefox o Safari... Ecco, questo è possibile grazie a tecnologie e linguaggi progettati per essere compatibili con più ambienti: il multipiattaforma! Applicazioni come VLC e alcuni videogiochi hanno ottenuto successo grazie alla loro compatibilità su diverse piattaforme, garantendo esperienze di alta qualità ovunque siano utilizzati.Tutti i miei link: https://linktr.ee/br1brownTELEGRAM - INSTAGRAMSe ti va supportami https://it.tipeee.com/br1brown

Let's talk about keeping our apps going forever... or until the app store stops us. How long can we keep publishing our Xamarin apps? We talk the new and improved apple developer tax, and .NET 9 Preview 7 is here with tons of awesome updates! Follow Us Frank: Twitter, Blog, GitHub James: Twitter, Blog, GitHub Merge Conflict: Twitter, Facebook, Website, Chat on Discord Music : Amethyst Seer - Citrine by Adventureface ⭐⭐ Review Us (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/merge-conflict/id1133064277?mt=2&ls=1) ⭐⭐ Machine transcription available on http://mergeconflict.fm

Show Notes C# Azure Search Sample with MAUI! (https://github.com/Azure-Samples/azure-search-openai-demo-csharp) .NET AI Documentation (https://learn.microsoft.com/dotnet/ai) Follow Us: * James: Twitter (https://twitter.com/jamesmontemagno), Blog (https://montemagno.com), GitHub (http://github.com/jamesmontemagno), Merge Conflict Podcast (http://mergeconflict.fm) * Matt: Twitter (https://twitter.com/codemillmatt), Blog (https://codemilltech.com), GitHub (https://github.com/codemillmatt) * David: Twitter (https://twitter.com/davidortinau), Github (https://github.com/davidortinau)

On this episode of the Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different we have a conversation with Mike Maples Jr., co-founder of Floodgate, about his new book "Pattern Breakers." We explore the concept of Pattern Breakers, non-consensus thinking, and the breakthrough sequence for startups. Mike shares some insights on the role of language in defining new patterns and the significance of early adopters. The conversation provides valuable perspectives on the mindset and strategies essential for entrepreneurial breakthroughs and category design. You're listening to Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different. We are the real dialogue podcast for people with a different mind. So get your mind in a different place, and hey ho, let's go. Mike Maples Jr on Understanding Pattern Breakers Mike Maples Jr. introduces the concept of pattern breakers as individuals or companies that disrupt the status quo by proposing radically different futures. These entities don't just imagine a different future; they live in it, tinkering with new technologies and experiencing firsthand the opportunities to break the limits of current thinking, feeling, and acting. Mike also discusses non-consensus thinking, and how is crucial it is for pattern breakers. It involves challenging widely accepted norms and beliefs to create transformative value. He emphasizes that breakthrough startups often face resistance from the present and the status quo, making it essential for founders to be disagreeable in the right situations. The Breakthrough Sequence for Startups The first step in the breakthrough sequence is achieving insight breakthroughs. Founders need to immerse themselves in the future they envision, understanding new opportunities and creating new patterns. Mike uses examples of legendary founders like Marc Andreessen and Bob Metcalfe, who were visitors from the future, to illustrate this point. Once insight breakthroughs are achieved, the next step is to achieve product-market fit. This involves building what's missing for early adopters and lighthouse customers, who play a crucial role in shaping the direction of a startup. Founders must listen to these early believers and co-create the future with them. The final step in the breakthrough sequence is driving growth. This involves creating a movement and category design, gradually moving more people to the envisioned future. Mike highlights the importance of using differentiated language to escape the comparison trap and the conformity trap, leading people into a different future. The Role of Big Companies in Creating Breakthroughs Big companies can also create breakthroughs by harnessing inflections and insights to change the future. Mike discusses different approaches big companies can take, such as sustaining innovation, organic growth, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), and partnering. However, he also acknowledges the challenges and biases that come with being a successful company. One effective strategy for big companies is backcasting, where leaders stand in the future and look back to the present, envisioning how they achieved a radically different future. This approach helps companies switch their mental scaffolding from being in the present and looking forward to being in the future and looking back to the present. To hear more from Mike Maples Jr on Pattern Breakers and creating breakthroughs for your company, download and listen to this episode. Bio Mike Maples Jr. is an entrepreneur turned venture capitalist. He's co-founder of Silicon Valley based, early-stage VC Floodgate. And the host of the popular “Starting Greatness” podcast. Investments include Twitter, Lyft, Bazaarvoice, Sparefoot, Ayasdi, Xamarin, Doubledutch, Twitch.tv, Playdom, Chegg, Demandforce, Rappi, Smule, and Outreach. Link Connect with Mike Maples Jr.! Floodgate | Twitter | LinkedIn | Starting Greatness Podcast Check out Mike's new book, Pattern Breakers! Amazon Books | Porchlight Books | Starting Greatness | Patte...

OpenAI and Google are back with some new AI models that can talk to each other! .NET Aspire is getting close to release and Xamarin end of life is here, so we reflect back. Follow Us Frank: Twitter, Blog, GitHub James: Twitter, Blog, GitHub Merge Conflict: Twitter, Facebook, Website, Chat on Discord Music : Amethyst Seer - Citrine by Adventureface ⭐⭐ Review Us (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/merge-conflict/id1133064277?mt=2&ls=1) ⭐⭐ Machine transcription available on http://mergeconflict.fm

In this episode, Peter, Emad, and Nat debate the future of AI, predictions for the next few years, and their vision for AI's future.  07:11 | The Uncertainty of AI Understanding 17:44 | The Future of AI Staffing 38:05 | AI Solutions for Complex Challenges Emad Mostaque is the former CEO and Co-Founder of Stability AI, a company funding the development of open-source music- and image-generating systems such as Dance Diffusion, Stable Diffusion, and Stable Video 3D.  Nat Friedman is an accomplished entrepreneur and software engineer, known for co-founding Xamarin, a platform for building mobile applications, and for serving as the CEO of GitHub, the world's leading software development platform. He is also an active investor and advisor in the tech industry, supporting innovative startups across various sectors. Learn more about Abundance360: https://www.abundance360.com/summit  ____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are, please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:  Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/   AI-powered precision diagnosis you NEED for a healthy gut: https://www.viome.com/peter  ____________ I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today's and tomorrow's exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now: Tech Blog Get my new Longevity Practices book for free: https://www.diamandis.com/longevity My new book with Salim Ismail, Exponential Organizations 2.0: The New Playbook for 10x Growth and Impact, is now available on Amazon: https://bit.ly/3P3j54J _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Simon interviews Frank Calise, Senior Software Engineer at Infinite Red. Frank shares his experiences with different programming languages and platforms, including iOS, Android, Xamarin, and React Native. He also discusses the role of open source at Infinite Red and provides insights into Ignite, Infinite Red's battle-tested boilerplate React Native application, and its generators that help speed up development. Learn React Native - https://galaxies.devFrank CaliseTwitter: https://twitter.com/frankcaliseGithub: https://github.com/frankcaliseWebsite: https://www.frankcalise.com/Ignite: https://github.com/infinitered/igniteTakeawaysIgnite is Infinite Red's battle-tested boilerplate React Native application that includes generators to speed up development.The plans for Ignite include aligning with React Native's new architecture and continuing to support Expo and React Native upgrades.Ignite is expected to align with React Native version 10 and may not see major releases until then.

Show Notes The M365 Admin app is used to administer M365 tenants on the go. It's a complex app written in Xamarin.Forms ... or it was. Find out how the team behind the M365 admin app migration from Xamarin.Forms to .NET MAUI. .NET MAUI API Browser (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/?view=net-maui-7.0) Reuse Effects in .NET MAUI (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/maui/migration/effects?view=net-maui-7.0) Upgrade a Xamarin.Forms app to a .NET MAUI app with the .NET Upgrade Assistant (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/maui/migration/upgrade-assistant?tabs=vswin) Migrate a Xamarin.Forms custom renderer to a .NET MAUI handler (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/maui/migration/renderer-to-handler) Namespace changes (https://learn.microsoft.com/dotnet/maui/migration/multi-project-to-multi-project?view=net-maui-8.0#namespace-changes) API changes (https://learn.microsoft.com/dotnet/maui/migration/multi-project-to-multi-project?view=net-maui-8.0#api-changes) Update app dependencies (https://learn.microsoft.com/dotnet/maui/migration/multi-project-to-multi-project?view=net-maui-8.0#update-app-dependencies) Migration troubleshooting tips (https://learn.microsoft.com/dotnet/maui/migration/multi-project-to-multi-project?view=net-maui-8.0#compile-and-troubleshoot) Upgrade from .NET 7 to .NET 8 (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/maui/whats-new/dotnet-8?view=net-maui-8.0#upgrade-from-net-7-to-net-8) What's new in .NET MAUI for .NET 8 (https://learn.microsoft.com/dotnet/maui/whats-new/dotnet-8?view=net-maui-8.0) Cross-platform resource files with single project (https://learn.microsoft.com/dotnet/maui/fundamentals/single-project?view=net-maui-8.0#resource-files) Build accessible apps with semantic properties (https://learn.microsoft.com/dotnet/maui/fundamentals/accessibility?view=net-maui-8.0) Mono interpreter on iOS and Mac Catalyst (https://learn.microsoft.com/dotnet/maui/macios/interpreter?view=net-maui-8.0) Microsoft Intune App SDK for .NET MAUI (Android | iOS) (https://github.com/msintuneappsdk) Add authentication to your .NET MAUI app using MSAL.NET (https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/developer/mobile-apps/azure-mobile-apps/quickstarts/maui/authentication?pivots=vs2022-mac) A .NET MAUI sample using MSAL.NET to authenticate users with Azure AD (https://learn.microsoft.com/samples/azure-samples/ms-identity-ciam-dotnet-tutorial/ms-identity-ciam-dotnet-tutorial-2-sign-in-maui/) Follow Us: * James: Twitter (https://twitter.com/jamesmontemagno), Blog (https://montemagno.com), GitHub (http://github.com/jamesmontemagno), Merge Conflict Podcast (http://mergeconflict.fm) * Matt: Twitter (https://twitter.com/codemillmatt), Blog (https://codemilltech.com), GitHub (https://github.com/codemillmatt) * David: Twitter (https://twitter.com/davidortinau), Github (https://github.com/davidortinau)

Episode 240 of the #MVPbuzzChat interview series. Conversation between Microsoft Regional Director and MVP Christian Buckley (@buckleyplanet), and (now former) Developer Technologies MVP, Brandon Minnick (@TheCodeTraveler), a Senior Developer Advocate for.NET, MAUI and Xamarin at AWS, based in Napa, California. You can also find this episode on the CollabTalk blog at https://www.buckleyplanet.com/2023/11/mvpbuzzchat-with-brandon-minnick.html

Victoria is joined by guest co-host Joe Ferris, CTO at thoughtbot, and Seif Lotfy, the CTO and Co-Founder of Axiom. Seif discusses the journey, challenges, and strategies behind his data analytics and observability platform. Seif, who has a background in robotics and was a 2008 Sony AIBO robotic soccer world champion, shares that Axiom pivoted from being a Datadog competitor to focusing on logs and event data. The company even built its own logs database to provide a cost-effective solution for large-scale analytics. Seif is driven by his passion for his team and the invaluable feedback from the community, emphasizing that sales validate the effectiveness of a product. The conversation also delves into Axiom's shift in focus towards developers to address their need for better and more affordable observability tools. On the business front, Seif reveals the company's challenges in scaling across multiple domains without compromising its core offerings. He discusses the importance of internal values like moving with urgency and high velocity to guide the company's future. Furthermore, he touches on the challenges and strategies of open-sourcing projects and advises avoiding platforms like Reddit and Hacker News to maintain focus. Axiom (https://axiom.co/) Follow Axiom on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/axiomhq/), X (https://twitter.com/AxiomFM), GitHub (https://github.com/axiomhq), or Discord (https://discord.com/invite/axiom-co). Follow Seif Lotfy on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/seiflotfy/) or X (https://twitter.com/seiflotfy). Visit his website at seif.codes (https://seif.codes/). Follow thoughtbot on X (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido, and with me today is Seif Lotfy, CTO and Co-Founder of Axiom, the best home for your event data. Seif, thank you for joining me. SEIF: Hey, everybody. Thanks for having me. This is awesome. I love the name of the podcast, given that I used to compete in robotics. VICTORIA: What? All right, we're going to have to talk about that. And I also want to introduce a guest co-host today. Since we're talking about cloud, and observability, and data, I invited Joe Ferris, thoughtbot CTO and Director of Development of our platform engineering team, Mission Control. Welcome, Joe. How are you? JOE: Good, thanks. Good to be back again. VICTORIA: Okay. I am excited to talk to you all about observability. But I need to go back to Seif's comment on competing with robots. Can you tell me a little bit more about what robots you've built in the past? SEIF: I didn't build robots; I used to program them. Remember the Sony AIBOs, where Sony made these dog robots? And we would make them compete. There was an international competition where we made them play soccer, and they had to be completely autonomous. They only communicate via Bluetooth or via wireless protocols. And you only have the camera as your sensor as well as...a chest sensor throws the ball near you, and then yeah, you make them play football against each other, four versus four with a goalkeeper and everything. Just look it up: RoboCup AIBO. Look it up on YouTube. And I...2008 world champion with the German team. VICTORIA: That sounds incredible. What kind of crowds are you drawing out for a robot soccer match? Is that a lot of people involved with that? SEIF: You would be surprised how big the RoboCup competition is. It's ridiculous. VICTORIA: I want to go. I'm ready. I want to, like, I'll look it up and find out when the next one is. SEIF: No more Sony robots but other robots. Now, there's two-legged robots. So, they make them play as two-legged robots, much slower than four-legged robots, but works. VICTORIA: Wait. So, the robots you were playing soccer with had four legs they were running around on? SEIF: Yeah, they were dogs [laughter]. VICTORIA: That's awesome. SEIF: We all get the same robot. It's just a competition on software, right? On a software level. And some other competitions within the RoboCup actually use...you build your own robot and stuff like that. But this one was...it's called the Standard League, where we all have a robot, and we have to program it. JOE: And the standard robot was a dog. SEIF: Yeah, I think back then...we're talking...it's been a long time. I think it started in 2001 or something. I think the competition started in 2001 or 2002. And I compete from 2006 to 2008. Robots back then were just, you know, simple. VICTORIA: Robots today are way too complicated [laughs]. SEIF: Even AI is more complicated. VICTORIA: That's right. Yeah, everything has gotten a lot more complicated [laughs]. I'm so curious how you went from being a world-champion robot dog soccer player [laughs] programmer [laughs] to where you are today with Axiom. Can you tell me a little bit more about your journey? SEIF: The journey is interesting because it came from open source. I used to do open source on the side a lot–part of the GNOME Project. That's where I met Neil and the rest of my team, Mikkel Kamstrup, the whole crowd, basically. We worked on GNOME. We worked on Ubuntu. Like, most of them were working professionally on it. I was working for another company, but we worked on the same project. We ended up at Xamarin, which was bought by Microsoft. And then we ended up doing Axiom. But we've been around each other professionally since 2009, most of us. It's like a little family. But how we ended up exactly in observability, I think it's just trying to fix pain points in my life. VICTORIA: Yeah, I was reading through the docs on Axiom. And there's an interesting point you make about organizations having to choose between how much data they have and how much they want to spend on it. So, maybe you can tell me a little bit more about that pain point and what you really found in the early stages that you wanted to solve. SEIF: So, the early stages of what we wanted to solve we were mainly dealing with...so, the early, early stage, we were actually trying to be a Datadog competitor, where we were going to be self-hosted. Eventually, we focused on logs because we found out that's what was a big problem for most people, just event data, not just metric but generally event data, so logs, traces, et cetera. We built out our own logs database completely from scratch. And one of the things we stumbled upon was; basically, you have three things when it comes to logging, which is low cost, low latency, and large scale. That's what everybody wants. But you can't get all three of them; you can only get two of them. And we opted...like, we chose large scale and low cost. And when it comes to latency, we say it should be just fast enough, right? And that's where we focused on, and this is how we started building it. And with that, this is how we managed to stand out by just having way lower cost than anybody else in the industry and dealing with large scale. VICTORIA: That's really interesting. And how did you approach making the ingestion pipeline for masses amount of data more efficient? SEIF: Just make it coordination-free as possible, right? And get rid of Kafka because Kafka just, you know, drains your...it's where you throw in money. Like maintaining Kafka...it's like back then Elasticsearch, right? Elasticsearch was the biggest part of your infrastructure that would cost money. Now, it's also Kafka. So, we found a way to have our own internal way of queueing things without having to rely on Kafka. As I said, we wrote everything from scratch to make it work. Like, every now and then, I think that we can spin this out of the company and make it a new product. But now, eyes on the prize, right? JOE: It's interesting to hear that somebody who spent so much time in the open-source community ended up rolling their own solution to so many problems. Do you feel like you had some lessons learned from open source that led you to reject solutions like Kafka, or how did that journey go? SEIF: I don't think I'm rejecting Kafka. The problem is how Kafka is built, right? Kafka is still...you have to set up all these servers. They have to communicate, et cetera, etcetera. They didn't build it in a way where it's stateless, and that's what we're trying to go to. We're trying to make things as stateless as possible. So, Kafka was never built for the cloud-native era. And you can't really rely on SQS or something like that because it won't deal with this high throughput. So, that's why I said, like, we will sacrifice some latency, but at least the cost is low. So, if messages show after half a second or a second, I'm good. It doesn't have to be real-time for me. So, I had to write a couple of these things. But also, it doesn't mean that we reject open source. Like, we actually do like open source. We open-source a couple of libraries. We contribute back to open source, right? We needed a solution back then for that problem, and we couldn't find any. And maybe one day, open source will have, right? JOE: Yeah. I was going to ask if you considered open-sourcing any of your high latency, high throughput solutions. SEIF: Not high latency. You make it sound bad. JOE: [laughs] SEIF: You make it sound bad. It's, like, fast enough, right? I'm not going to compete on milliseconds because, also, I'm competing with ClickHouse. I don't want to compete with ClickHouse. ClickHouse is low latency and large scale, right? But then the cost is, you know, off the charts a bit sometimes. I'm going the other route. Like, you know, it's fast enough. Like, how, you know, if it's under two, three seconds, everybody's happy, right? If the results come within two, three seconds, everybody is happy. If you're going to build a real-time trading system on top of it, I'll strongly advise against that. But if you're building, you know, you're looking at dashboards, you're more in the observability field, yeah, we're good. VICTORIA: Yeah, I'm curious what you found, like, which customer personas that market really resonated with. Like, is there a particular, like, industry type where you're noticing they really want to lower their cost, and they're okay with this just fast enough latency? SEIF: Honestly, with the current recession, everybody is okay with giving up some of the speed to reduce the money because I think it's not linear reduction. It's more exponential reduction at this point, right? You give up a second, and you're saving 30%. You give up two seconds, all of a sudden, you're saving 80%. So, I'd say in the beginning, everybody thought they need everything to be very, very fast. And now they're realizing, you know, with limitations you have around your budget and spending, you're like, okay, I'm okay with the speed. And, again, we're not slow. I'm just saying people realize they don't need everything under a second. They're okay with waiting for two seconds. VICTORIA: That totally resonates with me. And I'm curious if you can add maybe a non-technical or a real-life example of, like, how this impacts the operations of a company or organization, like, if you can give us, like, a business-y example of how this impacts how people work. SEIF: I don't know how, like, how do people work on that? Nothing changed, really. They're still doing the, like...really nothing because...and that aspect is you run a query, and, again, as I said, you're not getting the result in a second. You're just waiting two seconds or three seconds, and it's there. So, nothing really changed. I think people can wait three seconds. And we're still like–when I say this, we're still faster than most others. We're just not as fast as people who are trying to compete on a millisecond level. VICTORIA: Yeah, that's okay. Maybe I'll take it back even, like, a step further, right? Like, our audience is really sometimes just founders who almost have no formal technical training or background. So, when we talk about observability, sometimes people who work in DevOps and operations all understand it and kind of know why it's important [laughs] and what we're talking about. So, maybe you could, like, go back to -- SEIF: Oh, if you're asking about new types of people who've been using it -- VICTORIA: Yeah. Like, if you're going to explain to, like, a non-technical founder, like, why your product is important, or, like, how people in their organization might use it, what would you say? SEIF: Oh, okay, if you put it like that. It's more of if you have data, timestamp data, and you want to run analytics on top of it, so that could be transactions, that could be web vitals, rather than count every time somebody visits, you have a timestamp. So, you can count, like, how many visitors visited the website and what, you know, all these kinds of things. That's where you want to use something like Axiom. That's outside the DevOps space, of course. And in DevOps space, there's so many other things you use Axiom for, but that's outside the DevOps space. And we actually...we implemented as zero-config integration with Vercel that kind of went viral. And we were, for a while, the number one enterprise for self-integration because so many people were using it. So, Vercel users are usually not necessarily writing the most complex backends, but a lot of things are happening on the front-end side of things. And we would be giving them dashboards, automated dashboards about, you know, latencies, and how long a request took, and how long the response took, and the content type, and the status codes, et cetera, et cetera. And there's a huge user base around that. VICTORIA: I like that. And it's something, for me, you know, as a managing director of our platform engineering team, I want to talk more to founders about. It's great that you put this product and this app out into the world. But how do you know that people are actually using it? How do you know that people, like, maybe, are they all quitting after the first day and not coming back to your app? Or maybe, like, the page isn't loading or, like, it's not working as they expected it to. And, like, if you don't have anything observing what users are doing in your app, then it's going to be hard to show that you're getting any traction and know where you need to go in and make corrections and adjust. SEIF: We have two ways of doing this. Right now, internally, we use our own tools to see, like, who is sending us data. We have a deployment that's monitoring production deployment. And we're just, you know, seeing how people are using it, how much data they're sending every day, who stopped sending data, who spiked in sending data sets, et cetera. But we're using Mixpanel, and Dominic, our Head of Product, implemented a couple of key metrics to that for that specifically. So, we know, like, what's the average time until somebody starts going from building its own queries with the builder to writing APL, or how long it takes them from, you know, running two queries to five queries. And, you know, we just start measuring these things now. And it's been going...we've been growing healthy around that. So, we tend to measure user interaction, but also, we tend to measure how much data is being sent. Because let's keep in mind, usually, people go in and check for things if there's a problem. So, if there's no problem, the user won't interact with us much unless there's a notification that kicks off. We also just check, like, how much data is being sent to us the whole time. VICTORIA: That makes sense. Like, you can't just rely on, like, well, if it was broken, they would write a [chuckles], like, a question or something. So, how do you get those metrics and that data around their interactions? So, that's really interesting. So, I wonder if we can go back and talk about, you know, we already mentioned a little bit about, like, the early days of Axiom and how you got started. Was there anything that you found in the early discovery process that was surprising and made you pivot strategy? SEIF: A couple of things. Basically, people don't really care about the tech as much as they care [inaudible 12:51] and the packaging, so that's something that we had to learn. And number two, continuous feedback. Continuous feedback changed the way we worked completely, right? And, you know, after that, we had a Slack channel, then we opened a Discord channel. And, like, this continuous feedback coming in just helps with iterating, helps us with prioritizing, et cetera. And that changed the way we actually developed product. VICTORIA: You use Slack and Discord? SEIF: No. No Slack anymore. We had a community Slack. We had a community [inaudible 13:19] Slack. Now, there's no community Slack. We only have a community Discord. And the community Slack is...sorry, internally, we use Slack, but there's a community Discord for the community. JOE: But how do you keep that staffed? Is it, like, everybody is in the Discord during working hours? Is it somebody's job to watch out for community questions? SEIF: I think everybody gets involved now just...and you can see it. If you go on our Discord, you will just see it. Just everyone just gets involved. I think just people are passionate about what they're doing. At least most people are involved on Discord, right? Because there's, like, Discord the help sections, and people are just asking questions and other people answering. And now, we reached a point where people in the community start answering the questions for other people in the community. So, that's how we see it's starting to become a healthy community, et cetera. But that is one of my favorite things: when I see somebody from the community answering somebody else, that's a highlight for me. Actually, we hired somebody from that community because they were so active. JOE: Yeah, I think one of the biggest signs that a product is healthy is when there's a healthy ecosystem building up around it. SEIF: Yeah, and Discord reminds me of the old days of open sources like IRC, just with memes now. But because all of us come from the old IRC days, being on Discord and chatting around, et cetera, et cetera, just gives us this momentum back, gave us this momentum back, whereas Slack always felt a bit too businessy to me. JOE: Slack is like IRC with emoji. Discord is IRC with memes. SEIF: I would say Slack reminds me somehow of MSN Messenger, right? JOE: I feel like there's a huge slam on MSN Messenger here. SEIF: [laughs] What do you guys use internally, Slack or? I think you're using Slack, right? Or Teams. Don't tell me you're using Teams. JOE: No, we're using Slack. SEIF: Okay, good, because I shit talk. Like, there is this, I'll sh*t talk here–when I start talking about Teams, so...I remember that one thing Google did once, and that failed miserably. JOE: Google still has, like, seven active chat products. SEIF: Like, I think every department or every, like, group of engineers just uses one of them internally. I'm not sure. Never got to that point. But hey, who am I to judge? VICTORIA: I just feel like I end up using all of them, and then I'm just rotating between different tabs all day long. You maybe talked me into using Discord. I feel like I've been resisting it, but you got me with the memes. SEIF: Yeah, it's definitely worth it. It's more entertaining. More noise, but more entertaining. You feel it's alive, whereas Slack is...also because there's no, like, history is forever. So, you always go back, and you're like, oh my God, what the hell is this? VICTORIA: Yeah, I have, like, all of them. I'll do anything. SEIF: They should be using Axiom in the background. Just send data to Axiom; we can keep your chat history. VICTORIA: Yeah, maybe. I'm so curious because, you know, you mentioned something about how you realized that it didn't matter really how cool the tech was if the product packaging wasn't also appealing to people. Because you seem really excited about what you've built. So, I'm curious, so just tell us a little bit more about how you went about trying to, like, promote this thing you built. Or was, like, the continuous feedback really early on, or how did that all kind of come together? SEIF: The continuous feedback helped us with performance, but actually getting people to sign up and pay money it started early on. But with Vercel, it kind of skyrocketed, right? And that's mostly because we went with the whole zero-config approach where it's just literally two clicks. And all of a sudden, Vercel is sending your data to Axiom, and that's it. We will create [inaudible 16:33]. And we worked very closely with Vercel to do this, to make this happen, which was awesome. Like, yeah, hats off to them. They were fantastic. And just two clicks, three clicks away, and all of a sudden, we created Axiom organization for you, the data set for you. And then we're sending it...and the data from Vercel is being forwarded to it. I think that packaging was so simple that it made people try it out quickly. And then, the experience of actually using Axiom was sticky, so they continued using it. And then the price was so low because we give 500 gigs for free, right? You send us 500 gigs a month of logs for free, and we don't care. And you can start off here with one terabyte for 25 bucks. So, people just start signing up. Now, before that, it was five terabytes a month for $99, and then we changed the plan. But yeah, it was cheap enough, so people just start sending us more and more and more data eventually. They weren't thinking...we changed the way people start thinking of “what am I going to send to Axiom” or “what am I going to send to my logs provider or log storage?” To how much more can I send? And I think that's what we wanted to reach. We wanted people to think, how much more can I send? JOE: You mentioned latency and cost. I'm curious about...the other big challenge we've seen with observability platforms, including logs, is cardinality of labels. Was there anything you had to sacrifice upfront in terms of cardinality to manage either cost or volume? SEIF: No, not really. Because the way we designed it was that we should be able to deal with high cardinality from scratch, right? I mean, there's open-source ways of doing, like, if you look at how, like, a column store, if you look at a column store and every dimension is its own column, it's just that becomes, like, you can limit on the amount of columns you're creating, but you should never limit on the amount of different values in a column could be. So, if you're having something like stat tags, right? Let's say hosting, like, hostname should be a column, but then the different hostnames you have, we never limit that. So, the cardinality on a value is something that is unlimited for us, and we don't really see it in cost. It doesn't really hit us on cost. It reflects a bit on compression if you get into technical details of that because, you know, high cardinality means a lot of different data. So, compression is harder, but it's not repetitive. But then if you look at, you know, oh, I want to send a lot of different types of fields, not values with fields, so you have hostname, and latency, and whatnot, et cetera, et cetera, yeah, that's where limitation starts because then they have...it's like you're going to a wide range of...and a wider dimension. But even that, we, yeah, we can deal with thousands at this point. And we realize, like, most people will not need more than three or four. It's like a Postgres table. You don't need more than 3,000 to 4000 columns; else, you know, you're doing a lot. JOE: I think it's actually pretty compelling in terms of cost, though. Like, that's one of the things we've had to be most careful about in terms of containing cost for metrics and logs is, a lot of providers will...they'll either charge you based on the number of unique metric combinations or the performance suffers greatly. Like, we've used a lot of Prometheus-based solutions. And so, when we're working with developers, even though they don't need more than, you know, a few dozen metric combinations most of the time, it's hard for people to think of what they need upfront. It's much easier after you deploy it to be able to query your data and slice it retroactively based on what you're seeing. SEIF: That's the detail. When you say we're using Prometheus, a lot of the metrics tools out there are using, just like Prometheus, are using the Gorilla data structure. And the real data structure was never designed to deal with high cardinality labels. So, basically, to put it in a simple way, every combination of tags you send for metrics is its own file on disk. That's, like, the very simple way of explaining this. And then, when you're trying to search through everything, right? And you have a lot of these combinations. I actually have to get all these files from this conversion back together, you know, and then they're chunked, et cetera. So, it's a problem. Generally, how metrics are doing it...most metrics products are using it, even VictoriaMetrics, et cetera. What they're doing is they're using either the Prometheus TSDB data structure, which is based on Gorilla. Influx was doing the same thing. They pivoted to using more and more like the ones we use, and Honeycomb uses, right? So, we might not be as fast on metrics side as these highly optimized. But then when it comes to high [inaudible 20:49], once we start dealing with high cardinality, we will be faster than those solutions. And that's on a very technical level. JOE: That's pretty cool. I realize we're getting pretty technical here. Maybe it's worth defining cardinality for the audience. SEIF: Defining cardinality to the...I mean, we just did that, right? JOE: What do you think, Victoria? Do you know what cardinality is now? [laughs] VICTORIA: All right. Now I'm like, do I know? I was like, I think I know what it means. Cardinality is, like, let's say you have a piece of data like an event or a transaction. SEIF: It's like the distinct count on a property that gives you the cardinality of a property. VICTORIA: Right. It's like how many pieces of information you have about that one event, basically, yeah. JOE: But with some traditional metrics stores, it's easy to make mistakes. For example, you could have unbounded cardinality by including response time as one of the labels -- SEIF: Tags. JOE: And then it's just going to -- SEIF: Oh, no, no. Let me give you a better one. I put in timestamp at some point in my life. JOE: Yeah, I feel like everybody has done that one. [laughter] SEIF: I've put a system timestamp at some point in my life. There was the actual timestamp, and there was a system timestamp that I would put because I wanted to know when the...because I couldn't control the timestamp, and the only timestamp I had was a system timestamp. I would always add the actual timestamp of when that event actually happened into a metric, and yeah, that did not scale. MID-ROLL AD: Are you an entrepreneur or start-up founder looking to gain confidence in the way forward for your idea? At thoughtbot, we know you're tight on time and investment, which is why we've created targeted 1-hour remote workshops to help you develop a concrete plan for your product's next steps. Over four interactive sessions, we work with you on research, product design sprint, critical path, and presentation prep so that you and your team are better equipped with the skills and knowledge for success. Find out how we can help you move the needle at tbot.io/entrepreneurs. VICTORIA: Yeah. I wonder if you could maybe share, like, a story about when it's gone wrong, and you've suddenly charged a lot of money [laughs] just to get information about what's happening in the system. Any, like, personal experiences with observability that kind of informed what you did with Axiom? SEIF: Oof, I have a very bad one, like, a very, very bad one. I used to work for a company. We had to deploy Elasticsearch on Windows Servers, and it was US-East-1. So, just a combination of Elasticsearch back in 2013, 2014 together with Azure and Windows Server was not a good idea. So, you see where this is going, right? JOE: I see where it's going. SEIF: Eventually, we had, like, we get all these problems because we used Elasticsearch and Kibana as our, you know, observability platform to measure everything around the product we were building. And funny enough, it cost us more than actually maintaining the infrastructure of the product. But not just that, it also kept me up longer because most of the downtimes I would get were not because of the product going down. It's because my Elasticsearch cluster started going down, and there's reasons for that. Because back then, Microsoft Azure thought that it's okay for any VM to lose connection with the rest of the VMs for 30 seconds per day. And then, all of a sudden, you have Elasticsearch with a split-brain problem. And there was a phase where I started getting alerted so much that back then, my partner threatened to leave me. So I bought a...what I think was a shock bracelet or a shock collar via Bluetooth, and I connected it to phone for any notification. And I bought that off Alibaba, by the way. And I would charge it at night, put it on my wrist, and go to sleep. And then, when alert happens, it will fully discharge the battery on me every time. JOE: Okay, I have to admit, I did not see where that was going. SEIF: Yeah, did that for a while; definitely did not save my relationship either. But eventually, that was the point where, you know, we started looking into other observability tools like Datadog, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that's where the actual journey began, where we moved away from Elasticsearch and Kibana to look for something, okay, that we don't have to maintain ourselves and we can use, et cetera. So, it's not about the costs as much; it was just pain. VICTORIA: Yeah, pain is a real pain point, actual physical [chuckles] and emotional pain point [laughter]. What, like, motivates you to keep going with Axiom and to keep, like, the wind in your sails to keep working on it? SEIF: There's a couple of things. I love working with my team. So, honestly, I just wake up, and I compliment my team. I just love working with them. They're a lot of fun to work with. And they challenge me, and I challenge them back. And I upset them a lot. And they can't upset me, but I upset them. But I love working with them, and I love working with that team. And the other thing is getting, like, having this constant feedback from customers just makes you want to do more and, you know, close sales, et cetera. It's interesting, like, how I'm a very technical person, and I'm more interested in sales because sales means your product works, the product, the technical parts, et cetera. Because if technically it's not working, you can't build a product on top of it. And if you're not selling it, then what's the point? You only sell when the product is good, more or less, unless you're Oracle. VICTORIA: I had someone ask me about Oracle recently, actually. They're like, "Are you considering going back to it?" And I'm maybe a little allergic to it from having a federal consulting background [laughs]. But maybe they'll come back around. I don't know. We'll see. SEIF: Did you sell your soul back then? VICTORIA: You know, I feel like I just grew up in a place where that's what everyone did was all. SEIF: It was Oracle, IBM, or HP back in the day. VICTORIA: Yeah. Well, basically, when you're working on applications that were built in, like, the '80s, Oracle was, like, this hot, new database technology [laughs] that they just got five years ago. So, that's just, yeah, interesting. SEIF: Although, from a database perspective, they did a lot of the innovations. A lot of first innovations could have come from Oracle. From a technical perspective, they're ridiculous. I'm not sure from a product perspective how good they are. But I know their sales team is so big, so huge. They don't care about the product anymore. They can still sell. VICTORIA: I think, you know, everything in tech is cyclical. So, you know, if they have the right strategy and they're making some interesting changes over there, there's always a chance [laughs]. Certain use cases, I mean, I think that's the interesting point about working in technology is that you know, every company is a tech company. And so, there's just a lot of different types of people, personas, and use cases for different types of products. So, I wonder, you know, you kind of mentioned earlier that, like, everyone is interested in Axiom. But, you know, I don't know, are you narrowing the market? Or, like, how are you trying to kind of focus your messaging and your sales for Axiom? SEIF: I'm trying to focus on developers. So, we're really trying to focus on developers because the experience around observability is crap. It's stupid expensive. Sorry for being straightforward, right? And that's what we're trying to change. And we're targeting developers mainly. We want developers to like us. And we'll find all these different types of developers who are using it, and that's the interesting thing. And because of them, we start adding more and more features, like, you know, we added tracing, and now that enables, like, billions of events pushed through for, you know, again, for almost no money, again, $25 a month for a terabyte of data. And we're doing this with metrics next. And that's just to address the developers who have been giving us feedback and the market demand. I will sum it up, again, like, the experience is crap, and it's stupid expensive. I think that's the [inaudible 28:07] of observability is just that's how I would sum it up. VICTORIA: If you could go back in time and talk to yourself when you were still a developer, now that you're CTO, what advice would you give yourself? JOE: Besides avoiding shock collars. VICTORIA: [laughs] Yes. SEIF: Get people's feedback quickly so you know you're on the right track. I think that's very, very, very, very important. Don't just work in the dark, or don't go too long into stealth mode because, eventually, people catch up. Also, ship when you're 80% ready because 100% is too late. I think it's the same thing here. JOE: Ship often and early. SEIF: Yeah, even if it's not fully ready, it's still feedback. VICTORIA: Ship often and early and talk to people [laughs]. Just, do you feel like, as a developer, did you have the skills you needed to be able to get the most out of those feedback and out of those conversations you were having with people around your product? SEIF: I still don't think I'm good enough. You're just constantly learning, right? I just accepted I'm part of a team, and I have my contributions. But as an individual, I still don't think I know enough. I think there's more I need to learn at this point. VICTORIA: I wonder, what questions do you have for me or Joe? SEIF: How did you start your podcast, and why the name? VICTORIA: Oh, man, I hope I can answer. So, the podcast was started...I think it's, like, we're actually about to be at our 500th Episode. So, I've only been a host for the last year. Maybe Joe even knows more than I do. But what I recall is that one person at thoughtbot thought it would be a great idea to start a podcast, and then they did it. And it seems like the whole company is obsessed with robots. I'm not really sure where that came from. There used to be a tiny robot in the office, is what I remember. And people started using that as, like, the mascot. And then, yeah, that's it, that's the whole thing. SEIF: Was the robot doing anything useful or just being cute? JOE: It was just cute, and it's hard to make a robot cute. SEIF: Was it a real robot, or was it like a -- JOE: No, there was, at one point, a toy robot. The name...I actually forget the origin–origin of the name, but the name Giant Robots comes from our blog. So, we named the podcast the same as the blog: Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots. SEIF: Yes, it's called transformers. VICTORIA: Yeah, I like it. It's, I mean, now I feel like -- SEIF: [laughs] VICTORIA: We got to get more, like, robot dogs involved [laughs] in the podcast. SEIF: Like, I wanted to add one thing when we talked about, you know, what gets me going. And I want to mention that I have a six-month-old son now. He definitely adds a lot of motivation for me to wake up in the morning and work. But he also makes me wake up regardless if I want to or not. VICTORIA: Yeah, you said you had invented an alarm clock that never turns off. Never snoozes [laughs]. SEIF: Yes, absolutely. VICTORIA: I have the same thing, but it's my dog. But he does snooze, actually. He'll just, like, get tired and go back to sleep [laughs]. SEIF: Oh, I have a question. Do dogs have a Tamagotchi phase? Because, like, my son, the first three months was like a Tamagotchi. It was easy to read him. VICTORIA: Oh yeah, uh-huh. SEIF: Noisy but easy. VICTORIA: Yes, yes. SEIF: Now, it's just like, yeah, I don't know, like, the last month he has opinions at six months. I think it's because I raised him in Europe. I should take him back to the Middle East [laughs]. No opinions. VICTORIA: No, dogs totally have, like, a communication style, you know, I pretty much know what he, I mean, I can read his mind, obviously [laughs]. SEIF: Sure, but that's when they grow a bit. But what when they were very...when the dog was very young? VICTORIA: Yeah, they, I mean, they also learn, like, your stuff, too. So, they, like, learn how to get you to do stuff or, like, I know she'll feed me if I'm sitting here [laughs]. SEIF: And how much is one dog year, seven years? VICTORIA: Seven years. SEIF: Seven years? VICTORIA: Yeah, seven years? SEIF: Yeah. So, basically, in one year, like, three months, he's already...in one month, he's, you know, seven months old. He's like, yeah. VICTORIA: Yeah. In a year, they're, like, teenagers. And then, in two years, they're, like, full adults. SEIF: Yeah. So, the first month is basically going through the first six months of a human being. So yeah, you pass...the first two days or three days are the Tamagotchi phase that I'm talking about. VICTORIA: [chuckles] I read this book, and it was, like, to understand dogs, it's like, they're just like humans that are trying to, like, maximize the number of positive experiences that they have. So, like, if you think about that framing around all your interactions about, like, maybe you're trying to get your son to do something, you can be like, okay, how do I, like, I don't know, train him that good things happen when he does the things I want him to do? [laughs] That's kind of maybe manipulative but effective. So, you're not learning baby sign language? You're just, like, going off facial expressions? SEIF: I started. I know how Mama looks like. I know how Dada looks like. I know how more looks like, slowly. And he already does this thing that I know that when he's uncomfortable, he starts opening and closing his hands. And when he's completely uncomfortable and basically that he needs to go sleep, he starts pulling his own hair. VICTORIA: [laughs] I do the same thing [laughs]. SEIF: You pull your own hair when you go to sleep? I don't have that. I don't have hair. VICTORIA: I think I do start, like, touching my head though, yeah [inaudible 33:04]. SEIF: Azure took the last bit of hair I had! Went away with Azure, Elasticsearch, and the shock collar. VICTORIA: [laughs] SEIF: I have none of them left. Absolutely nothing. I should sue Elasticsearch for this shit. VICTORIA: [laughs] Let me know how that goes. Maybe there's more people who could join your lawsuit, you know, with a class action. SEIF: [laughs] Yeah. Well, one thing I wanted to also just highlight is, right now, one of the things that also makes the company move forward is we realized that in a single domain, we proved ourselves very valuable to specific companies, right? So, that was a big, big thing, milestone for us. And now we're trying to move into a handful of domains and see which one of those work out the best for us. Does that make sense? VICTORIA: Yeah. And I'm curious: what are the biggest challenges or hurdles that you associate with that? SEIF: At this point, you don't want just feedback. You want constructive criticism. Like, you want to work with people who will criticize the applic...and you iterate with them based on this criticism, right? They're just not happy about you and trying to create design partners. So, for us, it was very important to have these small design partners who can work with us to actually prove ourselves as valuable in a single domain. Right now, we need to find a way to scale this across several domains. And how do you do that without sacrificing? Like, how do you open into other domains without sacrificing the original domain you came from? So, there's a lot of things [inaudible 34:28]. And we are in the middle of this. Honestly, I Forrest Gumped my way through half of this, right? Like, I didn't know what I was doing. I had ideas. I think it's more of luck at this point. And I had luck. No, we did work. We did work a lot. We did sleepless nights and everything. But I think, in the last three years, we became more mature and started thinking more about product. And as I said, like, our CEO, Neil, and Dominic, our head of product, are putting everything behind being a product-led organization, not just a tech-led organization. VICTORIA: That's super interesting. I love to hear that that's the way you're thinking about it. JOE: I was just curious what other domains you're looking at pushing into if you can say. SEIF: So, we are going to start moving into ETL a bit more. We're trying to see how we can fit in specific ML scenarios. I can't say more about the other, though. JOE: Do you think you'll take the same approaches in terms of value proposition, like, low cost, good enough latency? SEIF: Yes, that's definitely one thing. But there's also...so, this is the values we're bringing to the customer. But also, now, our internal values are different. Now it's more of move with urgency and high velocity, as we said before, right? Think big, work small. The values in terms of values we're going to take to the customers it's the same ones. And maybe we'll add some more, but it's still going to be low-cost and large-scale. And, internally, we're just becoming more, excuse my French, agile. I hate that word so much. Should be good with Scrum. VICTORIA: It's painful, but everyone knows what you're talking about [laughs], you know, like -- SEIF: See, I have opinions here about Scrum. I think Scrum should be only used in terms of iceScrum [inaudible 36:04], or something like that. VICTORIA: Oh no [laughter]. Well, it's a Rugby term, right? Like, that's where it should probably stay. SEIF: I did not know it's a rugby term. VICTORIA: Yeah, so it should stay there, but -- SEIF: Yes [laughs]. VICTORIA: Yeah, I think it's interesting. Yeah, I like the being flexible. I like the just, like, continuous feedback and how you all have set up to, like, talk with your customers. Because you mentioned earlier that, like, you might open source some of your projects. And I'm just curious, like, what goes into that decision for you when you're going to do that? Like, what makes you think this project would be good for open source or when you think, actually, we need to, like, keep it? SEIF: So, we open source libraries, right? We actually do that already. And some other big organizations use our libraries; even our competitors use our libraries, that we do. The whole product itself or at least a big part of the product, like database, I'm not sure we're going to open source that, at least not anytime soon. And if we open source, it's going to be at a point where the value-add it brings is nothing compared to how well our product is, right? So, if we can replace whatever's at the back with...the storage engine we have in the back with something else and the product doesn't get affected, that's when we open source it. VICTORIA: That's interesting. That makes sense to me. But yeah, thank you for clarifying that. I just wanted to make sure to circle back. Since you have this big history in open source, yeah, I'm curious if you see... SEIF: Burning me out? VICTORIA: Burning you out, yeah [laughter]. Oh, that's a good question. Yeah, like, because, you know, we're about to be in October here. Do you have any advice or strategies as a maintainer for not getting burned out during the next couple of weeks besides, like, hide in a cave and without internet access [laughs]? SEIF: Stay away from Reddit and Hacker News. That's my goal for October now because I'm always afraid of getting too attached to an idea, or too motivated, or excited by an idea that I drift away from what I am actually supposed to be doing. VICTORIA: Last question is, is there anything else you would like to promote? SEIF: Yeah, check out our website; I think it's at axiom.co. Check it out. Sign up. And comment on Discord and talk to me. I don't bite, sometimes grumpy, but that's just because of lack of sleep in the morning. But, you know, around midday, I'm good. And if you're ever in Berlin and you want to hang out, I'm more than willing to hang out. VICTORIA: Whoo, that's awesome. Yeah, Berlin is great. I was there a couple of years ago but no plans to go back anytime soon, but maybe I'll keep that in mind. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you could find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. And this podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Did you know thoughtbot has a referral program? If you introduce us to someone looking for a design or development partner, we will compensate you if they decide to work with us. More info on our website at tbot.io/referral. Or you can email us at referrals@thoughtbot.com with any questions. Special Guests: Joe Ferris and Seif Lotfy.

Seif Lotfy, Co-Founder and CTO at Axiom, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how and why Axiom has taken a low-cost approach to event data. Seif describes the events that led to him helping co-found a company, and explains why the team wrote all their code from scratch. Corey and Seif discuss their views on AWS pricing, and Seif shares his views on why AWS doesn't have to compete on price. Seif also reveals some of the exciting new products and features that Axiom is currently working on. About SeifSeif is the bubbly Co-founder and CTO of Axiom where he has helped build the next generation of logging, tracing, and metrics. His background is at Xamarin, and Deutche Telekom and he is the kind of deep technical nerd that geeks out on white papers about emerging technology and then goes to see what he can build.Links Referenced: Axiom: https://axiom.co/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/seiflotfy 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. This promoted guest episode is brought to us by my friends, and soon to be yours, over at Axiom. Today I'm talking with Seif Lotfy, who's the co-founder and CTO of Axiom. Seif, how are you?Seif: Hey, Corey, I am very good, thank you. It's pretty late here, but it's worth it. I'm excited to be on this interview. How are you today?Corey: I'm not dead yet. It's weird, I see you at a bunch of different conferences, and I keep forgetting that you do in fact live half a world away. Is the entire company based in Europe? And where are you folks? Where do you start and where do you stop geographically? Let's start there. We over—everyone dives right into product. No, no, no. I want to know where in the world people sit because apparently, that's the most important thing about a company in 2023.Seif: Unless you ask Zoom because they're undoing whatever they did. We're from New Zealand, all the way to San Francisco, and everything in between. So, we have people in Egypt and Nigeria, all around Europe, all around the US… and UK, if you don't consider it Europe anymore.Corey: Yeah, it really depends. There's a lot of unfortunate naming that needs to get changed in the wake of that.Seif: [laugh].Corey: But enough about geopolitics. Let's talk about industry politics. I've been a fan of Axiom for a while and I was somewhat surprised to realize how long it had been around because I only heard about you folks a couple of years back. What is it you folks do? Because I know how I think about what you're up to, but you've also gone through some messaging iteration, and it is a near certainty that I am behind the times.Seif: Well, at this point, we just define ourselves as the best home for event data. So, Axiom is the best home for event data. We try to deal with everything that is event-based, so time-series. So, we can talk metrics, logs, traces, et cetera. And right now predominantly serving engineering and security.And we're trying to be—or we are—the first cloud-native time-series platform to provide streaming search, reporting, and monitoring capabilities. And we're built from the ground up, by the way. Like, we didn't actually—we're not using Parquet [unintelligible 00:02:36] thing. We're completely everything from the ground up.Corey: When I first started talking to you folks a few years back, there were two points to me that really stood out, and I know at least one of them still holds true. The first is that at the time, you were primarily talking about log data. Just send all your logs over to Axiom. The end. And that was a simple message that was simple enough that I could understand it, frankly.Because back when I was slinging servers around and you know breaking half of them, logs were effectively how we kept track of what was going on, where. These days, it feels like everything has been repainted with a very broad brush called observability, and the takeaway from most company pitches has been, you must be smarter than you are to understand what it is that we're up to. And in some cases, you scratch below the surface and realize it no, they have no idea what they're talking about either and they're really hoping you don't call them on that.Seif: It's packaging.Corey: Yeah. It is packaging and that's important.Seif: It's literally packaging. If you look at it, traces and logs, these are events. There's a timestamp and just data with it. It's a timestamp and data with it, right? Even metrics is all the way to that point.And a good example, now everybody's jumping on [OTel 00:03:46]. For me, OTel is nothing else, but a different structure for time series, for different types of time series, and that can be used differently, right? Or at least not used differently but you can leverage it differently.Corey: And the other thing that you did that was interesting and is a lot, I think, more sustainable as far as [moats 00:04:04] go, rather than things that can be changed on a billboard or whatnot, is your economic position. And your pricing has changed around somewhat, but I ran a number of analyses on your cost that you were passing on to customers and my takeaway was that it was a little bit more expensive to store data for logs in Axiom than it was to store it in S3, but not by much. And it just blew away the price point of everything else focused around logs, including AWS; you're paying 50 cents a gigabyte to ingest CloudWatch logs data over there. Other companies are charging multiples of that and Cisco recently bought Splunk for $28 billion because it was cheaper than paying their annual Splunk bill. How did you get to that price point? Is it just a matter of everyone else being greedy or have you done something different?Seif: We looked at it from the perspective of… so there's the three L's of logging. I forgot the name of the person at Netflix who talked about that, but basically, it's low costs, low latency, large scale, right? And you will never be able to fulfill all three of them. And we decided to work on low costs and large scale. And in terms of low latency, we won't be low as others like ClickHouse, but we are low enough. Like, we're fast enough.The idea is to be fast enough because in most cases, I don't want to compete on milliseconds. I think if the user can see his data in two seconds, he's happy. Or three seconds, he's happy. I'm not going to be, like, one to two seconds and make the cost exponentially higher because I'm one second faster than the other. And that's, I think, that the way we approached this from day one.And from day one, we also started utilizing the idea of existence of Open—Object Storage, we have our own compressions, our own encodings, et cetera, from day one, too, so and we still stick to that. That's why we never converted to other existing things like Parquet. Also because we are a Schema-On-Read, which Parquet doesn't allow you really to do. But other than that, it's… from day one, we wanted to save costs by also making coordination free. So, ingest has to be coordination free, right, because then we don't run a shitty Kafka, like, honestly a lot—a lot of the [logs 00:06:19] companies who running a Kafka in front of it, the Kafka tax reflects in what they—the bill that you're paying for them.Corey: What I found fun about your pricing model is it gets to a point that for any reasonable workload, how much to log or what to log or sample or keep everything is no longer an investment decision; it's just go ahead and handle it. And that was originally what you wound up building out. Increasingly, it seems like you're not just the place to send all the logs to, which to be honest, I was excited enough about that. That was replacing one of the projects I did a couple of times myself, which is building highly available, fault-tolerant, rsyslog clusters in data centers. Okay, great, you've gotten that unlocked, the economics are great, I don't have to worry about that anymore.And then you started adding interesting things on top of it, analyzing things, replaying events that happen to other players, et cetera, et cetera, it almost feels like you're not just a storage depot, but you also can forward certain things on under a variety of different rules or guises and format them as whatever on the other side is expecting them to be. So, there's a story about integrating with other observability vendors, for example, and only sending the stuff that's germane and relevant to them since everyone loves to charge by ingest.Seif: Yeah. So, we did this one thing called endpoints, the number one. Endpoints was a beginning where we said, “Let's let people send us data using whatever API they like using, let's say Elasticsearch, Datadog, Honeycomb, Loki, whatever, and we will just take that data and multiplex it back to them.” So, that's how part of it started. This allows us to see, like, how—allows customers to see how we compared to others, but then we took it a bit further and now, it's still in closed invite-only, but we have Pipelines—codenamed Pipelines—which allows you to send data to us and we will keep it as a source of truth, then we will, given specific rules, we can then ship it anywhere to a different destination, right, and this allows you just to, on the fly, send specific filter things out to, I don't know, a different vendor or even to S3 or you could send it to Splunk. But at the same time, you can—because we have all your data, you can go back in the past, if the incident happens and replay that completely into a different product.Corey: I would say that there's a definite approach to observability, from the perspective of every company tends to visualize stuff a little bit differently. And one of the promises of OTel that I'm seeing that as it grows is the idea of oh, I can send different parts of what I'm seeing off to different providers. But the instrumentation story for OTel is still very much emerging. Logs are kind of eternal and the only real change we've seen to logs over the past decade or so has been instead of just being plain text and their positional parameters would define what was what—if it's in this column, it's an IP address and if it's in this column, it's a return code, and that just wound up being ridiculous—now you see them having schemas; they are structured in a variety of different ways. Which, okay, it's a little harder to wind up just cat'ing a file together and piping it to grep, but there are trade-offs that make it worth it, in my experience.This is one of those transitional products that not only is great once you get to where you're going, from my playing with it, but also it meets you where you already are to get started because everything you've got is emitting logs somewhere, whether you know it or not.Seif: Yes. And that's why we picked up on OTel, right? Like, one of the first things, we now support… we have an OTel endpoint natively bec—or as a first-class citizen because we wanted to build this experience around OTel in general. Whether we like it or not, and there's more reasons to like it, OTel is a standard that's going to stay and it's going to move us forward. I think of OTel as will have the same effect if not bigger as [unintelligible 00:10:11] back of the day, but now it just went away from metrics, just went to metrics, logs, and traces.Traces is, for me, very interesting because I think OTel is the first one to push it in a standard way. There were several attempts to make standardized [logs 00:10:25], but I think traces was something that OTel really pushed into a proper standard that we can follow. It annoys me that everybody uses a different bits and pieces of it and adds something to it, but I think it's also because it's not that mature yet, so people are trying to figure out how to deliver the best experience and package it in a way that it's actually interesting for a user.Corey: What I have found is that there's a lot that's in this space that is just simply noise. Whenever I spend a protracted time period working on basically anything and I'm still confused by the way people talk about that thing, months or years later, I'm starting to get the realization that maybe I'm not the problem here. And I'm not—I don't mean this to be insulting, but one of the things I've loved about you folks is I've always understood what you're saying. Now, you can hear that as, “Oh, you mean we talk like simpletons?” No, it means what you're talking about resonates with at least a subset of the people who have the problem you solve. That's not nothing.Seif: Yes. We've tried really hard because one of the things we've tried to do is actually bring observability to people who are not always busy or it's not part of their day to day. So, we try to bring into [Versal 00:11:37] developers, right, with doing a Versal integration. And all of a sudden, now they have their logs, and they have a metrics, and they have some traces. So, all of a sudden, they're doing the observability work. Or they have actual observability, for their Versal based, [unintelligible 00:11:54]-based product.And we try to meet the people where they are, so we try to—instead of actually telling people, “You should send us data.”—I mean, that's what they do now—we try to find, okay, what product are you using and how can we grab data from there and send it to us to make your life easier? You see that we did that with Versal, we did that with Cloudflare. AWS, we have extensions, Lambda extensions, et cetera, but we're doing it for more things. For Netlify, it's a one-click integration, too, and that's what we're trying to do to actually make the experience and the journey easier.Corey: I want to change gears a little bit because something that we spent a fair bit of time talking about—it's why we became friends, I would think anyway—is that we have a shared appreciation for several things. One of which, at most notable to anyone around us is whenever we hang out, we greet each other effusively and then immediately begin complaining about costs of cloud services. What is your take on the way that clouds charge for things? And I know it's a bit of a leading question, but it's core and foundational to how you think about Axiom, as well as how you serve customers.Seif: They're ripping us off. I'm sorry [laugh]. They just—the amount of money they make, like, it's crazy. I would love to know what margins they have. That's a big question I've always had. I'm like, what are the margins they have at AWS right now?Corey: Across the board, it's something around 30 to 40%, last time I looked at it.Seif: That's a lot, too.Corey: Well, that's also across the board of everything, to be clear. It is very clear that some services are subsidized by other services. As it should be. If you start charging me per IAM call, we're done.Seif: And also, I mean, the machine learning stuff. Like, they won't be doing that much on top of it right now, right, [else nobody 00:13:32] will be using it.Corey: But data transfer? Yeah, there's a significant upcharge on that. But I hear you. I would moderate it a bit. I don't think that I would say that it's necessarily an intentional ripoff. My problem with most cloud services that they offer is not usually that they're too expensive—though there are exceptions to that—but rather that the dimensions are unpredictable in advance. So, you run something for a while and see what it costs. From where I sit, if a customer uses your service and then at the end of usage is surprised by how much it cost them, you've kind of screwed up.Seif: Look, if they can make egress free—like, you saw how Cloudflare just did the egress of R2 free? Because I am still stuck with AWS because let's face it, for me, it is still my favorite cloud, right? Cloudflare is my next favorite because of all the features that are trying to develop and the pace they're picking, the pace they're trying to catch up with. But again, one of the biggest things I liked is R2, and R2 egress is free. Now, that's interesting, right?But I never saw anything coming back from S3 from AWS on S3 for that, like you know. I think Amazon is so comfortable because from a product perspective, they're simple, they have the tools, et cetera. And the UI is not the flashiest one, but you know what you're doing, right? The CLI is not the flashiest one, but you know what you're doing. It is so cool that they don't really need to compete with others yet.And I think they're still dominantly the biggest cloud out there. I think you know more than me about that, but [unintelligible 00:14:57], like, I think they are the biggest one right now in terms of data volume. Like, how many customers are using them, and even in terms of profiles of people using them, it's very, so much. I know, like, a lot of the Microsoft Azure people who are using it, are using it because they come from enterprise that have been always Microsoft… very Microsoft friendly. And eventually, Microsoft also came in Europe in these all these different weird ways. But I feel sometimes ripped off by AWS because I see Cloudflare trying to reduce the prices and AWS just looking, like, “Yeah, you're not a threat to us so we'll keep our prices as they are.”Corey: I have it on good authority from folks who know that there are reasons behind the economic structures of both of those companies based—in terms of the primary direction the traffic flows and the rest. But across the board, they've done such a poor job of articulating this that, frankly, I think the confusion is on them to clear up, not us.Seif: True. True. And the reason I picked R2 and S3 to compare there and not look at Workers and Lambdas because I look at it as R2 is S3 compatible from an API perspective, right? So, they're giving me something that I already use. Everything else I'm using, I'm using inside Amazon, so it's in a VPC, but just the idea. Let me dream. Let me dream that S3 egress will be free at some point.Corey: I can dream.Seif: That's like Christmas. It's better than Christmas.Corey: What I'm surprised about is how reasonable your pricing is in turn. You wind up charging on the basis of ingest, which is basically the only thing that really makes sense for how your company is structured. But it's predictable in advance, the free tier is, what, 500 gigs a month of ingestion, and before people think, “Oh, that doesn't sound like a lot,” I encourage you to just go back and think how much data that really is in the context of logs for any toy project. Like, “Well, our production environment spits out way more than that.” Yes, and by the word production that you just used, you probably shouldn't be using a free trial of anything as your critical path observability tooling. Become a customer, not a user. I'm a big believer in that philosophy, personally. For all of my toy projects that are ridiculous, this is ample.Seif: People always tend to overestimate how much logs they're going to be sending. Like so, there's one thing. What you said it right: people who already have something going on, they already know how much logs they'll be sending around. But then eventually they're sending too much, and that's why we're back here and they're talking to us. Like, “We want to ttry your tool, but you know, we'll be sending more than that.” So, if you don't like our pricing, go find something else because I think we are the cheapest out there right now. We're the competitive the cheapest out there right now.Corey: If there is one that is less expensive, I'm unaware of it.Seif: [laugh].Corey: And I've been looking, let's be clear. That's not just me saying, “Well, nothing has skittered across my desk.” No, no, no, I pay attention to this space.Seif: Hey, where's—Corey, we're friends. Loyalty.Corey: Exactly.Seif: If you find something, you tell me.Corey: Oh, if I find something, I'll tell everyone.Seif: Nononon, you tell me first and you tell me in a nice way so I can reduce the prices on my site [laugh].Corey: This is how we start a price was, industry-wide, and I would love to see it.Seif: [laugh]. But there's enough channels that we share at this point across different Slacks and messaging apps that you should be able to ping me if you find one. Also, get me the name of the CEO and the CTO while you're at it.Corey: And where they live. Yes, yes, of course. The dire implications will be awesome.Seif: That was you, not me. That was your suggestion.Corey: Exactly.Seif: I will not—[laugh].Corey: Before we turn into a bit of an old thud and blunder, let's talk about something else that I'm curious about here. You've been working on Axiom for something like seven years now. You come from a world of databases and events and the like. Why start a company in the model of Axiom? Even back then, when I looked around, my big problem with the entire observability space could never have been described as, “You know what we need? More companies that do exactly this.” What was it that you saw that made you say, “Yeah, we're going to start a company because that sounds easy.”Seif: So, I'll be very clear. Like, I'm not going to, like, sugarcoat this. We kind of got in a position where it [forced counterweighted 00:19:10]. And [laugh] by that I mean, we came from a company where we were dealing with logs. Like, we actually wrote an event crash analytics tool for a company, but then we ended up wanting to use stuff like Datadog, but we didn't have the budget for that because Datadog was killing us.So, we ended up hosting our own Elasticsearch. And Elasticsearch, it costs us more to maintain our Elasticsearch cluster for the logs than to actually maintain our own little infrastructure for the crash events when we were getting, like, 1 billion crashes a month at this point. So eventually, we just—that was the first burn. And then you had alert fatigue and then you had consolidating events and timestamps and whatnot. The whole thing just seemed very messy.So, we started off after some company got sold, we started off by saying, “Okay, let's go work on a new self-hosted version of the [unintelligible 00:20:05] where we do metrics and logs.” And then that didn't go as well as we thought it would, but we ended up—because from day one, we were working on cloud na—because we d—we cloud ho—we were self-hosted, so we wanted to keep costs low, we were working on and making it stateless and work against object store. And this is kind of how we started. We realized, oh, our cost, we can host this and make it scale, and won't cost us that much.So, we did that. And that started gaining more attention. But the reason we started this was we wanted to start a self-hosted version of Datadog that is not costly, and we ended up doing a Software as a Service. I mean, you can still come and self-hosted, but you'll have to pay money for it, like, proper money for that. But we do as a SaaS version of this and instead of trying to be a self-hosted Datadog, we are now trying to compete—or we are competing with Datadog.Corey: Is the technology that you've built this on top of actually that different from everything else out there, or is this effectively what you see in a lot of places: “Oh, yeah, we're just going to manage Elasticsearch for you because that's annoying.” Do you have anything that distinguishes you from, I guess, the rest of the field?Seif: Yeah. So, very just bluntly, like, I think Scuba was the first thing that started standing out, and then Honeycomb came into the scene and they start building something based on Scuba, the [unintelligible 00:21:23] principles of Scuba. Then one of the authors of actual Scuba reached out to me when I told him I'm trying to build something, and he's gave me some ideas, and I start building that. And from day one, I said, “Okay, everything in S3. All queries have to be serverless.”So, all the queries run on functions. There's no real disks. It's just all on S3 right now. And the biggest issue—achievement we got to lower our cost was to get rid of Kafka, and have—let's say, in behind the scenes we have our own coordination-free mechanism, but the idea is not to actually have to use Kafka at all and thus reduce the costs incredibly. In terms of technology, no, we don't use Elasticsearch.We wrote everything from the ground up, from scratch, even the query language. Like, we have our own query language that's based—modeled after Kusto—KQL by Microsoft—so everything we have is built from absolutely from the ground up. And no Elastic. I'm not using Elastic anymore. Elastic is a horror for me. Absolutely horror.Corey: People love the API, but no, I've never met anyone who likes managing Elasticsearch or OpenSearch, or whatever we're calling your particular flavor of it. It is a colossal pain, it is subject to significant trade-offs, regardless of how you work with it, and Amazon's managed offering doesn't make it better; it makes it worse in a bunch of ways.Seif: And the green status of Elasticsearch is a myth. You'll only see it once: the first time you start that cluster, that's what the Elasticsearch cluster is green. After that, it's just orange, or red. And you know what? I'm happy when it's orange. Elasticsearch kept me up for so long. And we had actually a very interesting situation where we had Elasticsearch running on Azure, on Windows machines, and I would have server [unintelligible 00:23:10]. And I'd have to log in and every day—you remember, what's it called—RP… RP Something. What was it called?Corey: RDP? Remote Desktop Protocol, or something else?Seif: Yeah, yeah. Where you have to log in, like, you actually have visual thing, and you have to go in and—Corey: Yep.Seif: And visually go in and say, “Please don't restart.” Every day, I'd have to do that. Please don't restart, please don't restart. And also a lot of weird issues, and also at that point, Azure would decide to disconnect the pod, wanted to try to bring in a new pod, and all these weird things were happening back then. So, eventually, end up with a [unintelligible 00:23:39] decision. I'm talking 2013, '14, so it was back in the day when Elasticsearch was very young. And so, that was just a bad start for me.Corey: I will say that Azure is the most cost-effective cloud because their security is so clown shoes, you can just run whatever you want in someone else's account and it's free to you. Problem solved.Seif: Don't tell people how we save costs, okay?Corey: [laugh]. I love that.Seif: [laugh]. Don't tell people how we do this. Like, Corey, come on [laugh], you're exposing me here. Let me tell you one thing, though. Elasticsearch is the reason I literally use a shock collar or a shock bracelet on myself every time it went down—which was almost every day, instead of having PagerDuty, like, ring my phone.And, you know, I'd wake up and my partner back then would wake up. I bought a Bluetooth collar off of Alibaba that would tase me every time I'd get a notification, regardless of the notification. So, some things are false alarm, but I got tased for at least two, three weeks before I gave up. Every night I'd wake up, like, to a full discharge.Corey: I would never hook myself up to a shocker tied to outages, even if I owned a company. There are pleasant ways to wake up, unpleasant ways to wake up, and even worse. So, you're getting shocked for some—so someone else can wind up effectively driving the future of the business. You're, more or less, the monkey that gets shocked awake to go ahead and fix the thing that just broke.Seif: [laugh]. Well, the fix to that was moving from Azure to AWS without telling anybody. That got us in a lot of trouble. Again, that wasn't my company.Corey: They didn't notice that you did this, or it caused a lot of trouble because suddenly nothing worked where they thought it would work?Seif: They—no, no, everything worked fine on AWS. That's how my love story began. But they didn't notice for, like, six months.Corey: That's kind of amazing.Seif: [laugh]. That was specta—we rewrote everything from C# to Node.js and moved everything away from Elasticsearch, started using Redshift, Redis and a—you name it. We went AWS all the way and they didn't even notice. We took the budget from another department to start filling that in.But we cut the costs from $100,000 down to, like, 40, and then eventually down to $30,000 a month.Corey: More than a little wild.Seif: Oh, God, yeah. Good times, good times. Next time, just ask me to tell you the full story about this. I can't go into details on this podcast. I'll get in a lot—I think I'll get in trouble. I didn't sign anything though.Corey: Those are the best stories. But no, I hear you. I absolutely hear you. Seif, I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me. If people want to learn more, where should they go?Seif: So, axiom.co—not dot com. Dot C-O. That's where they learn more about Axiom. And other than that, I think I have a Twitter somewhere. And if you know how to write my name, you'll—it's just one word and find me on Twitter.Corey: We will put that all in the [show notes 00:26:33]. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. I really appreciate it.Seif: Dude, that was awesome. Thank you, man.Corey: Seif Lotfy, co-founder and CTO of Axiom, who has brought this promoted guest episode our way. 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 comment that one of these days, I will get around to aggregating in some horrifying custom homebrew logging system, probably built on top of rsyslog.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.

We have so many goodies this lightning topic episode including llama.cpp, some Xamarin goodness in the latest .NET 8 RC 2, and so much more! Follow Us Frank: Twitter, Blog, GitHub James: Twitter, Blog, GitHub Merge Conflict: Twitter, Facebook, Website, Chat on Discord Music : Amethyst Seer - Citrine by Adventureface ⭐⭐ Review Us (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/merge-conflict/id1133064277?mt=2&ls=1) ⭐⭐ Machine transcription available on http://mergeconflict.fm

Show Notes Migrate your Xamarin.iOS Binding Library (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/maui/migration/ios-binding-projects) Migrate your Xamarin.Android Binding Library (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/maui/migration/android-binding-projects) Auth0 Documentation for .NET MAUI (https://auth0.com/blog/add-authentication-to-dotnet-maui-apps-with-auth0/) Mapbox .NET MAUI Support (https://github.com/tuyen-vuduc/mapbox-maui) Minnesota Enterprise Mobile UG: Party On with 3rd Party Binding Libraries in .NET MAUI (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJMoaH2Tzn0) .NET MAUI API Browser (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/?view=net-maui-7.0) Reuse Effects in .NET MAUI (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/maui/migration/effects?view=net-maui-7.0) Upgrade a Xamarin.Forms app to a .NET MAUI app with the .NET Upgrade Assistant (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/maui/migration/upgrade-assistant?tabs=vswin) Migrate a Xamarin.Forms custom renderer to a .NET MAUI handler (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/maui/migration/renderer-to-handler) Follow Us: * James: Twitter (https://twitter.com/jamesmontemagno), Blog (https://montemagno.com), GitHub (http://github.com/jamesmontemagno), Merge Conflict Podcast (http://mergeconflict.fm) * Matt: Twitter (https://twitter.com/codemillmatt), Blog (https://codemilltech.com), GitHub (https://github.com/codemillmatt) * David: Twitter (https://twitter.com/davidortinau), Github (https://github.com/davidortinau)

Brought to you by Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security | Mixpanel—Event analytics that everyone can trust, use, and afford | AssemblyAI—Production-ready AI models to transcribe and understand speech—Claire Butler was Figma's first GTM hire and their 10th employee. She led Figma's early GTM strategy from stealth through monetization. She also helped the team through the journey to find product-market fit and built the team that drove Figma's unique bottom-up growth motion. Eight years later, as Senior Director of Marketing, she continues to lead Figma's bottom-up growth motion, along with community, events, social, advocacy, and Figma for education. In this episode, we discuss:• An in-depth look at Figma's bottom-up GTM motion• Why you need to start with individual contributors (ICs) loving your product• How to spread adoption within the organization• How “designer advocates” have played a critical role in Figma's growth• The freemium strategy that drove massive growth for Figma• How to leverage product champions• When to leave stealth• Early-stage metrics, and why they are often unreliable• Advice for people looking to join a startup—Find the full transcript at: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/an-inside-look-at-figmas-unique-gtm-motion-claire-butler-first-gtm-hire/#transcript—Where to find Claire Butler:• Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/clairetbutler• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairetbutler/—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Claire's background(03:47) The huge branding decision that Claire made on day one at Figma(07:45) The most stressful memory of early days at Figma(09:55) Advice for people looking to join a startup(12:55) What a bottom-up go-to-market motion is(17:12) Figma's unique approach to bottom-up GTM(18:52) Figma's launch out of stealth (23:01) Signals vs. hard metrics in the early days (24:50) How Figma won over Microsoft(30:08) How to win over ICs(32:00) How to establish credibility(37:38) Customer obsession in action(41:11) Why getting users to love your product is so vital(44:01) How Figma used Twitter as its primary channel in the early days(49:06) Transparency and authenticity(49:52) GTM tactics at scale(52:09) “Little big updates” at Figma(54:16) Figma's acquisition, and why it was one of the hardest days of Claire's career(57:10) Figma's core values(58:06) The Config conference(1:00:21) Spreading your product within the organization(1:02:09) The pricing tiers at Figma(1:07:35) The role of designer advocates(1:10:57) Design systems(1:16:12) Leveraging internal champions(1:17:53) Accelerating spread at scale(1:19:14) What types of companies are a good fit for bottom-up GTM(1:24:16) A summary of the bottom-up GTM model(1:25:27) Lightning round—Referenced:• Dylan Field on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dylanfield/• John Lilly on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnlilly/• Ivan Zhao on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivanhzhao/• Xamarin: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/apps/xamarin• Josef Müller-Brockmann: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_M%C3%BCller-Brockmann• Datadog: https://www.datadoghq.com/• Coda: https://coda.io/• Oren's Hummus on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/orenshummus/• Intercom: https://www.intercom.com/• How Coda builds product: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-coda-builds-product• Dylan Field on Twitter: https://twitter.com/zoink• Dylan's tweet: https://twitter.com/zoink/status/1566566649712431105• Little Big Updates: https://www.figma.com/blog/little-big-updates-august-2022/• Sho Kuwamoto on Twitter: https://twitter.com/skuwamoto• Kris Rasmussen on Twitter: https://twitter.com/kris_rasmussen• Config: https://config.figma.com/• Tom Lowry on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomaslowry• Atomic Design: https://atomicdesign.bradfrost.com/• Figjam: https://www.figma.com/figjam/• Dev Mode: https://www.figma.com/dev-mode/• Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity: https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Candor-Revised-Kick-Ass-Humanity/dp/1250235375• Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts: https://www.amazon.com/Dare-Lead-Brave-Conversations-Hearts/dp/0399592520• 100 Foot Wave on HBO: https://www.hbo.com/100-foot-wave• Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones: https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Habits-James-Clear-audiobook/dp/B07RFSSYBH• Noah Weiss on Lenny's Podcast: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/the-10-traits-of-great-pms-how-ai-will-impact-your-product-and-slacks-product-development-process/• How to create an exceptional coverage plan for your parental leave (Tamara Hinckley): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-create-an-exceptional-coverage—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

Giorgi Dalakishvili is a software developer with more than a decade of experience. He works mainly with C#, ASP.NET MVC/ASP.NET Core, REST, WCF, Xamarin, Android, iOS, Entity Framework, Azure, SQL Server, and Oracle.   Giorgi is an open-source author and contributor on GitHub and a member of the .NET Foundation and InfoQ Editor.   Topics of Discussion: [3:33] Giorgi has worked with all the frameworks and libraries that Microsoft has come out with over the past 10‒15 years. He discusses using Entity Framework and starting his small speaking engagements. [5:12] Sessionize is a website where you can put out some different topics that you'd be willing to speak on, and just reach out to different user groups to take the plunge and do some public speaking for the first time. [6:03] Other types of data with Entity Framework beyond relational data, such as hierarchical data type from SQL Server. [8:49] How it simplifies your life. [9:28] What about JSON? Are there any limitations on the back-end database? [13:00] Is the support in EF Core 7.0 good enough to give a try if you're going against SQL Server? [14:09] What other types of data are interesting to work with with Entity Framework? [14:36] Using geospatial data. What does it even look like? [18:30] Full text search, and how it's different from a regular text search. [23:20] There are a lot of features to uncover in relational databases that we aren't even aware of yet. [26:22] There are some problems and some tasks that are better solved with non-relational databases, but the majority can overlap between the two systems.   Mentioned in this Episodes: Clear Measure Way Architect Forum Software Engineer Forum Programming with Palermo — New Video Podcast! Email us programming@palermo.net Clear Measure, Inc. (Sponsor) .NET DevOps for Azure: A Developer's Guide to DevOps Architecture the Right Way, by Jeffrey Palermo — Available on Amazon! Jeffrey Palermo's Twitter — Follow to stay informed about future events! Architect Tips — Video podcast! Azure DevOps .NET Giorgi Dalakishvili   Want to Learn More? Visit AzureDevOps.Show for show notes and additional episodes.

const podcast = { episode: 200, title: 'There's Something .NET Maui', topics: [ '.Net', 'C#', 'frameworks' ], guest: 'Jesse Liberty' hosts: [ 'John Papa', 'Dan Wahlin' ]};Recording date: June 8, 2023John Papa @John_PapaWard Bell @WardBellDan Wahlin @DanWahlinCraig Shoemaker @craigshoemakerJesse Liberty @JesseLibertyBrought to you byAG GridIdeaBladeResources:Jesse's Mastodon.NET MAUI For C# DevelopersChatGPTLearning .NET Maui.NET Multi-platform App UI Community ToolkitXamarin FormsC# DocumentationLearn about XAMLAnders HejlsbergZeldaFlutterReact NativeIonic FrameworkSpider-Man: Across the Spider-VerseJesse Liberty BookshopTimejumps00:30 Welcome01:19 Who is Jesse Liberty?05:38 What is .NET Maui?07:27 What was Xamarin forms?08:36 Sponsor: Ag Grid09:45 Why was .NET Maui created to replace Xamarin Forms?11:13 What is XAML?14:49 What do you need to build Maui applications?19:13 Sponsor: IdeaBlade20:09 Who is .NET Maui for?22:39 What is the community ecosystem for .NET Maui like?26:58 What's the process for building backend APIs with .NET Maui?30:13 Final thoughtsPodcast editing on this episode done by Chris Enns of Lemon Productions.

Show Notes Microsoft Build just happened - tune in to hear David's, James', and Matt's thoughts! Latest Releases Latest on .NET MAUI (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-dotnet-maui-in-dotnet-8-preview-5/?WT.mc_id=dotnet-99866-masoucou) .NET upgrade assistant w/ support for MAUI (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/upgrade-assistant-general-availability/?WT.mc_id=dotnet-99866-masoucou) NET 8 preview 4 & 5 and Visual Studio Previews Visual Studio 17.7 Preview 1 (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/visual-studio-2022-17-7-preview-1-is-here/?WT.mc_id=dotnet-99866-masoucou) Visual Studio 17.7 Preview 2 (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/visual-studio-2022-17-7-preview-2-is-here/?WT.mc_id=dotnet-99866-masoucou) .NET 8 Preview 4 (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-dotnet-8-preview-4/?WT.mc_id=dotnet-99866-masoucou) .NET 8 Preview 5 (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-dotnet-8-preview-5/?WT.mc_id=dotnet-99866-masoucou) Speech recognition in .NET MAUI w/ community toolkit (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/speech-recognition-in-dotnet-maui-with-community-toolkit/?WT.mc_id=dotnet-99866-masoucou) C# Dev Kit for VS Code (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/announcing-csharp-dev-kit-for-visual-studio-code/?WT.mc_id=dotnet-99866-masoucou) Latest News Visual Studio UI Refresh (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/visual-studio-ui-refresh/?WT.mc_id=dotnet-99866-masoucou) Create a PR in Visual Studio (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/create-a-pull-request-in-visual-studio/?WT.mc_id=dotnet-99866-masoucou) Surround selection (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/surround-selection-experiment/?WT.mc_id=dotnet-99866-masoucou) Azure News QnA assist in MS Learn (https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-learn-blog/microsoft-learn-announces-microsoft-q-amp-a-assist-and-new/ba-p/3614012?WT.mc_id=dotnet-99866-masoucou) Azure Service of the Month Azure Deployment Environments Build Session (https://build.microsoft.com/sessions/e102bb71-f8ef-4538-9a59-158ec6f442b6?wt.mc_ID=Build2023_comms_corp_OT_oo_bon_bon&WT.mc_id=dotnet-99866-masoucou) Azure Deployment Environments Azure Friday (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rRiVELgdf4) Follow Us: * James: Twitter (https://twitter.com/jamesmontemagno), Blog (https://montemagno.com), GitHub (http://github.com/jamesmontemagno), Merge Conflict Podcast (http://mergeconflict.fm) * Matt: Twitter (https://twitter.com/codemillmatt), Blog (https://codemilltech.com), GitHub (https://github.com/codemillmatt) * David: Twitter (https://twitter.com/davidortinau), Github (https://github.com/davidortinau)

On this episode of Lochhead on Marketing, we have a dialogue with Mike Maples Jr. on how artificial intelligence is changing startups and venture capital. Mike Maples Jr. is the co-founder of Floodgate, one of the highest profile early stage venture capitalists. He also has a podcast called Starting Greatness, and it is one of my absolute favorites. By the end of it, we hope that you'll gain a new way to think about both technical risk for startups and market risk. And why in an AI world, you must either be radically different or radically disintermediate something. Welcome to Lochhead on Marketing. The number one charting marketing podcast for marketers, category designers, and entrepreneurs with a different mind. Mike Maples Jr. on AI We begin the discussion on the topic of challenges of making sense of the rapidly evolving field of AI. Mike also talks about the traditional funding model of startups, where the primary focus was taking out technical risk, and how the LAMP stack, which commoditized what was once expensive, made it easier to start a startup. Mike notes that the nature of the LAMP stack changed what startups were funded for. “What I like to say is that the LAMP stack was deflationary in terms of the cost of starting startup. And so what does that mean? It meant that what you were funding was different, because if Kevin Rose can start dig for $1,500, over a weekend, there's no technical risks there. I mean, he hired a contractor to do it that he didn't even know at the time.” – Mike Maples Jr. Who gets Product Market Fit first The conversation then moves on to the changing dynamics of venture capital investment. The discussion continues with the notion that technical risk and market risk are inversely related. Solving a technically difficult problem that is valuable to society will create a market; if the problem is easy to solve technically, it will all come down to who achieves product-market fit first. To add value to the business, Floodgate and YC have taken the approach of funding market risk takedown. As technology becomes more commoditized and innovations become more accessible, the person who creates something people want the quickest wins. This is why YC was so successful: it offered young people $100,000 to either take market risks or leave. He also mentions that the traditional venture capital model may not be appropriate for all businesses and that deflationary factors such as content, code, and data may change the way businesses are built. Mike Maples Jr. on AI and the future of Venture Capital Mike Maples Jr. then returns to the topic of artificial intelligence and its implications for the future of venture capital. Here, Mike emphasizes two ends of the risk spectrum: high technical risk and high market risk. On the one hand, some projects require large amounts of funding for mass computation in order to build massive models that have the potential to change humanity. On the other hand, AI is being used in a variety of fields, including content generation for marketing, customer service chatbots, and lead generation, resulting in a deflationary effect on content, code, and data. According to Mike, some businesses may not require traditional venture capital funding and should instead focus on achieving $50 million in revenue with a small team and minimal funding. There is also speculation that the current billion-dollar funds may be providing the wrong incentives to these companies. To hear more from Mike Maples Jr. and how AI can affect the future of startups and venture capital, download and listen to this episode. Bio Mike Maples Jr. is an entrepreneur turned venture capitalist. He's co-founder of Silicon Valley based, early-stage VC Floodgate. And the host of the popular “Starting Greatness” podcast. Investments include Twitter, Lyft, Bazaarvoice, Sparefoot, Ayasdi, Xamarin, Doubledutch, Twitch.tv, Playdom, Chegg, Demandforce, Rappi, Smule, and Outreach. Link

James is on a mission to get his app on as many platforms as possible. This time he dives through his journey of getting his Android apps into the Amazon App Store which also means onto Windows 11! What did he have to do and what was the experience like for his end users? Follow Us Frank: Twitter, Blog, GitHub James: Twitter, Blog, GitHub Merge Conflict: Twitter, Facebook, Website, Chat on Discord Music : Amethyst Seer - Citrine by Adventureface ⭐⭐ Review Us (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/merge-conflict/id1133064277?mt=2&ls=1) ⭐⭐ Machine transcription available on http://mergeconflict.fm

It's conference season and Google kicks off things with lots and lots of AI at Google I/O 2023. We break down the latest happenings from the main keynotes including new Android Wear APIs, Pixel folding devices, AI infused Android Studio, Android 14, WebAssembly goodies, and so much more including AI. Follow Us Frank: Twitter, Blog, GitHub James: Twitter, Blog, GitHub Merge Conflict: Twitter, Facebook, Website, Chat on Discord Music : Amethyst Seer - Citrine by Adventureface ⭐⭐ Review Us (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/merge-conflict/id1133064277?mt=2&ls=1) ⭐⭐ Machine transcription available on http://mergeconflict.fm

On this episode of Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different, we have a dialogue with Mike Maples Jr. on how artificial intelligence is changing startups and venture capital. Mike Maples Jr. is the co-founder of Floodgate, one of the highest profile early stage venture capitalists. He also has a podcast called Starting Greatness, and it is one of my absolute favorites. By the end of it, we hope that you'll gain a new way to think about both technical risk for startups and market risk. And why in an AI world, you must either be radically different or radically disintermediate something. You're listening to Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different. We are the real dialogue podcast for people with a different mind. So get your mind in a different place, and hey ho, let's go. Mike Maples Jr. on AI We begin the discussion on the topic of challenges of making sense of the rapidly evolving field of AI. Mike also talks about the traditional funding model of startups, where the primary focus was taking out technical risk, and how the LAMP stack, which commoditized what was once expensive, made it easier to start a startup. Mike notes that the nature of the LAMP stack changed what startups were funded for. “What I like to say is that the LAMP stack was deflationary in terms of the cost of starting startup. And so what does that mean? It meant that what you were funding was different, because if Kevin Rose can start dig for $1,500, over a weekend, there's no technical risks there. I mean, he hired a contractor to do it that he didn't even know at the time.” – Mike Maples Jr.   Who gets Product Market Fit first The conversation then moves on to the changing dynamics of venture capital investment. The discussion continues with the notion that technical risk and market risk are inversely related. Solving a technically difficult problem that is valuable to society will create a market; if the problem is easy to solve technically, it will all come down to who achieves product-market fit first. To add value to the business, Floodgate and YC have taken the approach of funding market risk takedown. As technology becomes more commoditized and innovations become more accessible, the person who creates something people want the quickest wins. This is why YC was so successful: it offered young people $100,000 to either take market risks or leave. He also mentions that the traditional venture capital model may not be appropriate for all businesses and that deflationary factors such as content, code, and data may change the way businesses are built. Mike Maples Jr. on AI and the future of Venture Capital Mike Maples Jr. then returns to the topic of artificial intelligence and its implications for the future of venture capital. Here, Mike emphasizes two ends of the risk spectrum: high technical risk and high market risk. On the one hand, some projects require large amounts of funding for mass computation in order to build massive models that have the potential to change humanity. On the other hand, AI is being used in a variety of fields, including content generation for marketing, customer service chatbots, and lead generation, resulting in a deflationary effect on content, code, and data. According to Mike, some businesses may not require traditional venture capital funding and should instead focus on achieving $50 million in revenue with a small team and minimal funding. There is also speculation that the current billion-dollar funds may be providing the wrong incentives to these companies. To hear more from Mike Maples Jr. and how AI can affect the future of startups and venture capital, download and listen to this episode. Bio Mike Maples Jr. is an entrepreneur turned venture capitalist. He's co-founder of Silicon Valley based, early-stage VC Floodgate. And the host of the popular “Starting Greatness” podcast. Investments include Twitter, Lyft, Bazaarvoice, Sparefoot, Ayasdi, Xamarin, Doubledutch, Twitch.tv, Playdom,

That is right! Everyone's favorite MP3 player is back! This time due to a collaboration with Guardians of the Galaxy, but it doesn't matter because Hanselman and others have found ways to revive it in 2023. We discuss the Zune software, UI stack, why we loved it, and why it may have been the best XAML to XAML. Follow Us Frank: Twitter, Blog, GitHub James: Twitter, Blog, GitHub Merge Conflict: Twitter, Facebook, Website, Chat on Discord Music : Amethyst Seer - Citrine by Adventureface ⭐⭐ Review Us (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/merge-conflict/id1133064277?mt=2&ls=1) ⭐⭐ Machine transcription available on http://mergeconflict.fm

Maddy Montaquila is a Senior Product Manager on the .NET MAUI team and has been working with .NET mobile apps since 2018 working on Xamarin tooling. When she first joined Microsoft and worked with the Xamarin team as an intern, she realized the impact that she could have in creating amazing developer tools and frameworks, which inspired her to pursue a role as Program Manager. You can connect with her on Twitter and GitHub @maddymontaquila!   Topics of Discussion: [4:21] How did Maddy get lucked into development and the mobile side of product management? [7:39] You can distill product manager roles to the intersection of the technology and what's possible, the business, what's going to make you money, and what your customers actually want and need. [9:17] Why is it important for program managers to have at least some coding background? [10:41] When people dive into Maui, what can they expect right now? [15:44] What tools or resources does someone need to get started, and what are the limitations? [20:44] What is the current DevOps story for going from a developer workstation all the way through testing and packaging, and then finally delivering it to the App Store? [23:47] Is there a favorite deployed test framework? [27:26] Why does Maddy prefer sometimes to work in Xaml? [29:17] If you're going to reach for controls right now, is everything that they need built-in? What is the status of DevExpress? [37:03] It's a great time to be a .net developer!   Mentioned in this Episode: Clear Measure Way Architect Forum Software Engineer Forum Programming with Palermo — New Video Podcast! Email us at programming@palermo.network Clear Measure, Inc. (Sponsor) .NET DevOps for Azure: A Developer's Guide to DevOps Architecture the Right Way, by Jeffrey Palermo — Available on Amazon! Jeffrey Palermo's Twitter — Follow to stay informed about future events! Architect Tips — Video podcast! Azure DevOps .NetMaui Maddy on LinkedIn .NET Multi-Platform App .Net Maui Samples .Net Maui Development   Want to Learn More? Visit AzureDevOps.Show for show notes and additional episodes.

Show Notes It's been a little bit... but James, David, and Matt are back with the latest .NET MAUI and Azure news! Latest Releases The latest on .NET MAUI (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-dotnet-maui-in-dotnet-8-preview-3/?WT.mc_id=dotnet-95292-dotnet) .NET Upgrade Assistant (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-dotnettools.upgradeassistant?WT.mc_id=dotnet-95292-dotnet) .NET Upgrade Assistant NuGet (https://www.nuget.org/packages/upgrade-assistant?WT.mc_id=dotnet-95292-dotnet) .NET 8 Preview 3 (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-dotnet-8-preview-3/?WT.mc_id=dotnet-95292-dotnet) Visual Studio 17.6 preview 2 (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/visual-studio-2022-v17-6-preview-2-is-now-available/?WT.mc_id=dotnet-95292-dotnet) Visual Studio 17.5 updates (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/visual-studio-2022-17-5-performance-enhancements/?WT.mc_id=dotnet-95292-dotnet) Latest News Drawing elements on maps in .NET MAUI (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/drawing-on-maps-with-dotnet-maui/?WT.mc_id=dotnet-95292-dotnet) Azure Developers - .NET Day (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-azure-developers-dotnet-day/?WT.mc_id=dotnet-95292-dotnet) Let's Learn .NET - All Around the World (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/lets-learn-dotnet-anywhere-in-the-world/?WT.mc_id=dotnet-95292-dotnet) Build, Build, and more Build (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/microsoft-build-2023-and-dotnet/?WT.mc_id=dotnet-95292-dotnet) File and folder dialogs in with the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/file-and-folder-dialogs-communitytoolkit/?WT.mc_id=dotnet-95292-dotnet) Azure News Getting started with OpenAI in .NET (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/getting-started-azure-openai-dotnet/?WT.mc_id=dotnet-95292-dotnet) Data API Builder - Public Preview (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-api-builder/overview-to-data-api-builder?WT.mc_id=dotnet-95292-dotnet) .NET SQL Passwordless connections (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/database/azure-sql-dotnet-entity-framework-core-quickstart?view=azuresql&tabs=visual-studio%2Cservice-connector&WT.mc_id=dotnet-95292-dotnet) Azure Service of the Month Microsoft Dev Box (https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/dev-box/overview-what-is-microsoft-dev-box?WT.mc_id=dotnet-95292-dotnet) Pick of the Pod Apple command line tooling (https://twitter.com/redth/status/1649441263492513792) Follow Us: * James: Twitter (https://twitter.com/jamesmontemagno), Blog (https://montemagno.com), GitHub (http://github.com/jamesmontemagno), Merge Conflict Podcast (http://mergeconflict.fm) * Matt: Twitter (https://twitter.com/codemillmatt), Blog (https://codemilltech.com), GitHub (https://github.com/codemillmatt) * David: Twitter (https://twitter.com/davidortinau), Github (https://github.com/davidortinau)

Remember: you can also always follow the show on Twitter @dotnetcoreshow, and the shows host on Twitter @podcasterJay or visit our Contact page. Welcome to season 5 of the award-winning .NET Core Podcast! Check that link for proof. Hello everyone and welcome to THE .NET Core Podcast. An award-winning podcast where we reach into the core of the .NET technology stack and, with the help of the .NET community, present you with the information that you need in order to grok the many moving parts of one of the biggest cross-platform, multi-application frameworks on the planet. We recently interviewed Isaac Levin, a .NET Developer Advocate at AWS (Amazon Web Services). Isaac has been a .NET developer since 2010 and offered some interesting insights into the world of technology. Isaac discussed the need for developers to focus on the business value they can bring through technology, rather than the technical details. He highlighted the importance of having a team of developers with different levels of skill and experience in order to work together effectively. Isaac also stressed the need to use existing tools and libraries rather than trying to build everything from scratch. The conversation moved on to the importance of open-source contribution and the need for companies to support open-source projects. Isaac spoke of the importance of being thankful and appreciative, reporting bugs, writing documentation, or donating money to support open-source projects. He also mentioned the story of left-pad, which is an example of how a developer's choice can have a huge impact on many people. Isaac discussed his role as a developer advocate, talking about how he helps to filter noise and be a conduit between customers, the business, and the product group. He also discussed the need for technology to be more navigable and how developer advocacy can be a routing mechanism to help customers get answers. Overall, the conversation between Jamie and Isaac offered a lot of valuable advice and insights into the world of technology. They discussed the need to focus on business value and the importance of using existing tools and libraries. They also discussed the need for companies to support open-source projects, as well as the need for technology to be more navigable. Finally, they highlighted the importance of having a designated person or team to keep up to date with technology decisions.   The full show notes, including links to some of the things we discussed and a full transcription of this episode, can be found at https://dotnetcore.show/episode-121-dotnet-discussion-with-isaac-levin/ Useful Links from the episode: Isaac Levin's social links Coffee & Open Source Unlock the power of the cloud with .NET on AWS .NET on AWS - GitHub repo Porting assistant for .NET AWS app2 container AWS Microservice extractor for .NET What they didn't teach you at uni... Raw With Jay: Let's Ditch the Gatekeepers Episode 20 - Xamarin with Jim Bennett0 XKCD - Dependency Remember to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, or wherever you find your podcasts, this will help the show's audience grow. Or you can just share the show with a friend. And don't forget to reach out via our Contact page. We're very interested in your opinion of the show, so please get in touch. You can support the show by making a monthly donation on the show's Patreon page at: https://www.patreon.com/TheDotNetCorePodcast

It is said that the two greatest problems of history are: how to account for the rise of Rome, and how to account for her fall. If so, then the volcanic ashes spewed by Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD - which entomb the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in South Italy - hold history's greatest prize. For beneath those ashes lies the only salvageable library from the classical world.Nat Friedman was the CEO of Github form 2018 to 2021. Before that, he started and sold two companies - Ximian and Xamarin. He is also the founder of AI Grant and California YIMBY.And most recently, he has created and funded the Vesuvius Challenge - a million dollar prize for reading an unopened Herculaneum scroll for the very first time. If we can decipher these scrolls, we may be able to recover lost gospels, forgotten epics, and even missing works of Aristotle.We also discuss the future of open source and AI, running Github and building Copilot, and why EMH is a lie.Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.As always, the most helpful thing you can do is just to share the podcast - send it to friends, group chats, Twitter, Reddit, forums, and wherever else men and women of fine taste congregate.If you have the means and have enjoyed my podcast, I would appreciate your support via a paid subscriptions on Substack

Show Notes In addition to some good natured ribbing - James, Matt & David talk about the latest and greatest in .NET MAUI development. Latest Releases .NET MAUI Latest Visual Studio 17.5 Previews Markdown (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/write-markdown-without-leaving-visual-studio/?WT.mc_id=dotnet-87825-masoucou) Sticky Scroll (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/sticky-scroll-now-in-preview/?WT.mc_id=dotnet-87825-masoucou) Dev tunnels (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/dev-tunnels-in-visual-studio-for-asp-net-core-projects/?WT.mc_id=dotnet-87825-masoucou) Spell checking (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/visual-studio-spell-checker-preview-now-available/?WT.mc_id=dotnet-87825-masoucou) .NET MAUI Community Toolkit .NET Community Toolkit (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-the-dotnet-community-toolkit-810/?WT.mc_id=dotnet-87825-masoucou) Latest News MVVM in WinForms (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/winforms-cross-platform-dotnet-maui-command-binding/?WT.mc_id=dotnet-87825-masoucou) Updates to the podcast app (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/build-your-own-podcast-app-with-dotnet-blazor-and-dotnet-maui/?WT.mc_id=dotnet-87825-masoucou) Azure News Azure Developers YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/@AzureDevelopers) Azure CosmosDB Conf (https://learn.microsoft.com/events/learn-events/azure-cosmos-db-conf-2023/?WT.mc_id=dotnet-87825-masoucou) Azure Service of the Month Azure OpenAI (https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/cognitive-services/openai/overview?WT.mc_id=dotnet-87825-masoucou) Follow Us: * James: Twitter (https://twitter.com/jamesmontemagno), Blog (https://montemagno.com), GitHub (http://github.com/jamesmontemagno), Merge Conflict Podcast (http://mergeconflict.fm) * Matt: Twitter (https://twitter.com/codemillmatt), Blog (https://codemilltech.com), GitHub (https://github.com/codemillmatt) * David: Twitter (https://twitter.com/davidortinau), Github (https://github.com/davidortinau)

In the middle of the Great Recession, Thomas Dohmke quit a stable job at a good company because “I wanted to build stuff again.” Specifically, he was inspired by the release of the first software development kit for iOS, and wanted to be part of the mobile revolution. Two companies later and halfway around the world, he is the CEO of software development powerhouse Github and on the precipice of another revolution — that of AI tools such as Github Copilot. Up to 40 percent of Copilot users' code is already being autocompleted by AI, and Thomas predicts that number could get to 80 percent in the next five years. “We are heading into a world where developers are much more architecture and system designers,” he says.In this episode, Thomas and Joubin discuss staying excited, A/B tests for life, triggering emails, “the toys you can't have,” self-driving car sensors, the first iPhone SDK, app testing, US work visas, life-changing money, Xamarin, is Github a social network?, being ultra-transparent, ghost text, ChatGPT and Midjourney, generating passion, rehearsing forever, Mittelstand companies, and the zen of LEGO.In this episode, we cover: Titles at Microsoft and working with CEO Satya Nadella (00:58) Being “85% happy” and the temptation to leave big companies for a startup (05:33) How Thomas went from early user to CEO of GitHub (09:22) Growing up in East Germany and the fall of the Berlin Wall (13:19) Why Thomas quit his job at the height of the financial crisis: “I wanna build stuff again” (22:28) Being acquired by Microsoft and coming to America (27:26) The startup mindset and “open-source” values (34:09) How Github's “AI programmer,” Copilot, will change everything for developers (40:32) When will generative AI have its “iPhone moment?” (45:44) Exponential change and preparing your kids for the unknown future (50:57) Communicating in English, and whether Thomas' family would ever go back to Germany (57:21) Tech culture in Europe vs. Silicon Valley and the pressure of “more” (01:01:19)  The “LEGO room” in Thomas' house (01:07:18) Links: Connect with Thomas Twitter LinkedIn Connect with Joubin Twitter LinkedIn Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com  Learn more about Kleiner Perkins This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

After a quick recap of our top "things" from 2022, we discuss Frank's holiday hack, a DIT smart thermostat powered by .NET and ML.NET! Follow Us Frank: Twitter, Blog, GitHub James: Twitter, Blog, GitHub Merge Conflict: Twitter, Facebook, Website, Chat on Discord Music : Amethyst Seer - Citrine by Adventureface ⭐⭐ Review Us (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/merge-conflict/id1133064277?mt=2&ls=1) ⭐⭐ Machine transcription available on http://mergeconflict.fm

Frank drives into all of the complexities with android publishing including API targeting, AndroidX, and so much more. Follow Us Frank: Twitter, Blog, GitHub James: Twitter, Blog, GitHub Merge Conflict: Twitter, Facebook, Website, Chat on Discord Music : Amethyst Seer - Citrine by Adventureface ⭐⭐ Review Us (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/merge-conflict/id1133064277?mt=2&ls=1) ⭐⭐ Machine transcription available on http://mergeconflict.fm

James gets into maps and drawing all sorts of points and lines. We discuss. Follow Us Frank: Twitter, Blog, GitHub James: Twitter, Blog, GitHub Merge Conflict: Twitter, Facebook, Website, Chat on Discord Music : Amethyst Seer - Citrine by Adventureface ⭐⭐ Review Us (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/merge-conflict/id1133064277?mt=2&ls=1) ⭐⭐ Machine transcription available on http://mergeconflict.fm

Show Notes .NET Conf happened, it was amazing, and David, James and Matt will bring you up to date! The latest MAUI, .NET, and Azure are all coming at you. Latest News .NET Conf (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/events/dotnetconf-2022/) .NET Student Zone (https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/educator-developer-blog/net-conference-student-zone-7th-nov-2022/ba-p/3655584) Azure News Azure bicep (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/shows/azure-friday/authoring-and-deploying-azure-resources-with-bicep) Azure Service of the Month Form recognizer (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/applied-ai-services/form-recognizer/overview?view=form-recog-3.0.0) Follow Us: * James: Twitter (https://twitter.com/jamesmontemagno), Blog (https://montemagno.com), GitHub (http://github.com/jamesmontemagno), Merge Conflict Podcast (http://mergeconflict.fm) * Matt: Twitter (https://twitter.com/codemillmatt), Blog (https://codemilltech.com), GitHub (https://github.com/codemillmatt) * David: Twitter (https://twitter.com/davidortinau), Github (https://github.com/davidortinau)

We explore the world of GitHub Codespaces and all the joy that it can bring to development. Follow Us Frank: Twitter, Blog, GitHub James: Twitter, Blog, GitHub Merge Conflict: Twitter, Facebook, Website, Chat on Discord Music : Amethyst Seer - Citrine by Adventureface ⭐⭐ Review Us (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/merge-conflict/id1133064277?mt=2&ls=1) ⭐⭐ Machine transcription available on http://mergeconflict.fm

.NET 7 is a major update to the .NET platform and it comes packed with some awesome new features! In this podcast, we'll take a look at some of the most important new features in .NET 7 and what you need to know about them if you're using .NET 7 in your development work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BvCzZ9P7UY Follow Us Frank: Twitter, Blog, GitHub James: Twitter, Blog, GitHub Merge Conflict: Twitter, Facebook, Website, Chat on Discord Music : Amethyst Seer - Citrine by Adventureface ⭐⭐ Review Us (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/merge-conflict/id1133064277?mt=2&ls=1) ⭐⭐ Machine transcription available on http://mergeconflict.fm

Signing, provisioning, certificates, oh my! We break down what you need to know on how to really ship apps to the app store. Follow Us Frank: Twitter, Blog, GitHub James: Twitter, Blog, GitHub Merge Conflict: Twitter, Facebook, Website, Chat on Discord Music : Amethyst Seer - Citrine by Adventureface ⭐⭐ Review Us (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/merge-conflict/id1133064277?mt=2&ls=1) ⭐⭐ Machine transcription available on http://mergeconflict.fm

It is that time of the podcast where we do lighting topics! This time we are covering upgrading iPhone, Twitter takeover, the next social/metaverse platform, USB-C standards, and Apple's Ads on the App Store. Follow Us Frank: Twitter, Blog, GitHub James: Twitter, Blog, GitHub Merge Conflict: Twitter, Facebook, Website, Chat on Discord Music : Amethyst Seer - Citrine by Adventureface ⭐⭐ Review Us (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/merge-conflict/id1133064277?mt=2&ls=1) ⭐⭐ Machine transcription available on http://mergeconflict.fm

iPadOS 16 is here and with it are a bunch of new fancy iPads that Apple just released. We break down the latest Apple event and products and give a hands on review of Stage Manager. Follow Us Frank: Twitter, Blog, GitHub James: Twitter, Blog, GitHub Merge Conflict: Twitter, Facebook, Website, Chat on Discord Music : Amethyst Seer - Citrine by Adventureface ⭐⭐ Review Us (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/merge-conflict/id1133064277?mt=2&ls=1) ⭐⭐ Machine transcription available on http://mergeconflict.fm

We break down all of the latest goodies that Microsoft has from the latest Surface event including all of the new hardware, accessories, and software. Oh, and ARM on Windows is here in the main line Surface lineup with a whole bunch of AI features! Follow Us Frank: Twitter, Blog, GitHub James: Twitter, Blog, GitHub Merge Conflict: Twitter, Facebook, Website, Chat on Discord Music : Amethyst Seer - Citrine by Adventureface ⭐⭐ Review Us (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/merge-conflict/id1133064277?mt=2&ls=1) ⭐⭐ Machine transcription available on http://mergeconflict.fm

Frank has one heck of a journey trying to setup his new iPhone 14 Pro. From iCloud backups to eSim transfer.... it was an exciting adventure. How did it end and what is his overall review of the new phone? Tune-in! Follow Us Frank: Twitter, Blog, GitHub James: Twitter, Blog, GitHub Merge Conflict: Twitter, Facebook, Website, Chat on Discord Music : Amethyst Seer - Citrine by Adventureface ⭐⭐ Review Us (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/merge-conflict/id1133064277?mt=2&ls=1) ⭐⭐ Machine transcription available on http://mergeconflict.fm

Among the recruitment milestones that populate Bryan Morris's CFO resume, few can match the 6-month talent acquisition binge that he launched during the first quarter of 2015. “In terms of key hires, I never hired faster than I did then,” comments Morris, as he begins to lay out the circumstances that led to his need to speedily attract and hire talent. At the time, Morris was the newly appointed CFO of Xamarin, a creator of software tools used for mobile apps development.   This firm, then led by cofounder and CEO Nat Freidman, had doubled its revenue annually for the previous few years yet had theretofore focused its talent recruitment efforts mainly on nabbing software engineers and intrepid salespeople. “When it came to people, sales, marketing, and R&D were way out ahead of G&A, so I knew that my first few months would be dedicated to recruiting,” recalls Morris, who notes that until his arrival, the developer had outsourced its accounting function while relying on fractional CFO services to patch any management voids. “I made five key hires—head of HR, head of technical recruiting, controller, head of FP&A, and our first corporate counsel—all within the first 6 months,” remarks Morris, who believes that hiring can at times benefit from its own momentum. He explains: “Sometimes, when you're in a great situation and your company is growing, the press is great and the buzz is good—and what happens is that one great hire begets another. So, I kind of had this pinwheel going.” Still, what happened next made Morris's energetic hiring spree all the more consequential. During the second half of 2015, as Xamarin was preparing for another capital raise, Microsoft—one of the developer's strategic partners—acknowledged that not only would it be willing to serve as a reference on behalf of Xamarin for the venture investor community but also it might be interested in partnering with Xamarin to pursue something more strategic.   Subsequently, 12 months into Morris's CFO tenure at Xamarin, company management signed a letter of intent (LOI) to sell the business to Microsoft. Looking back, Morris doesn't hesitate to expose some of the drama that preceded Microsoft's signed LOI. “Here were my team and I—with only some 3 to 6 months of working together—and suddenly we were up against one of the most capable technology buyers in the world,” remembers Morris, who today believes that the timing of Xamarin's key hires and the timing of the deal were not unrelated events. “I couldn't have done it by myself,” observes Morris, who points out that there were a number of 20-hour days during the period leading up to the finalization of the deal. Morris notes that the merger provided mostly great outcomes for both investors and Xamarin employees—not excluding CEO Nat Friedman, who until late 2021 served as CEO of GitHub, which Microsoft had acquired in 2018. Looking back on the CEO who hired him and the subsequent “pinwheel effect” that within 6 months transformed Xamarin's lines of functional management, Morris highlights a shared mission: “Luckily, Nat was completely on board—he knew what I was inheriting, so he gave me the green light to go ahead and hire.” –Jack Sweeney

As cross-platform developers we build all sorts of libraries that need to target multiple frameworks. How do we do it? What do we need to do with .NET 6 and .NET 7!?!?! We discuss. Follow Us Frank: Twitter, Blog, GitHub James: Twitter, Blog, GitHub Merge Conflict: Twitter, Facebook, Website, Chat on Discord Music : Amethyst Seer - Citrine by Adventureface ⭐⭐ Review Us (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/merge-conflict/id1133064277?mt=2&ls=1) ⭐⭐ Machine transcription available on http://mergeconflict.fm

It has been several months since we last talked about GitHub Copilot, the automated AI coding friend inside of Visual Studio & Visual Studio Code. Let's revisit and give our hands on thoughts of what we think of this new technology. Follow Us Frank: Twitter, Blog, GitHub James: Twitter, Blog, GitHub Merge Conflict: Twitter, Facebook, Website, Chat on Discord Music : Amethyst Seer - Citrine by Adventureface ⭐⭐ Review Us (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/merge-conflict/id1133064277?mt=2&ls=1) ⭐⭐ Machine transcription available on http://mergeconflict.fm

We diagnosed and fixed performance problems in the wild and we break down how we did it and what you need to know. Follow Us Frank: Twitter, Blog, GitHub James: Twitter, Blog, GitHub Merge Conflict: Twitter, Facebook, Website, Chat on Discord Music : Amethyst Seer - Citrine by Adventureface ⭐⭐ Review Us (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/merge-conflict/id1133064277?mt=2&ls=1) ⭐⭐ Machine transcription available on http://mergeconflict.fm

It is a random topic week because we don't know what to talk about in-depth, so we chat up iOS 16 Beta, C# partial methods, scoped keyword, and running python inside of C# on an iPhone with IronPython! Follow Us Frank: Twitter, Blog, GitHub James: Twitter, Blog, GitHub Merge Conflict: Twitter, Facebook, Website, Chat on Discord Music : Amethyst Seer - Citrine by Adventureface ⭐⭐ Review Us (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/merge-conflict/id1133064277?mt=2&ls=1) ⭐⭐ Machine transcription available on http://mergeconflict.fm