swyx Profile picture
12 Oct, 12 tweets, 7 min read
This year I've done a total 180 on open source strategy.

Remember Elastic making a fuss with "Amazon: NOT OK"? I was quite persuaded. If MongoDB, Redis, Cockroach, Confluent relicensed and do fine, maybe SSPL just becomes acceptable "open source".

Now I think MIT is just fine.
Probably my biggest test of confidence was in March when @martin_casado and @davidu pushed back on the open source religion - if your monetization is SaaS, then open source is just marketing (there's nuance here, pls read his replies before reacting)

Open sourcing has a cost - at @temporalio it impacts decisionmaking in engineering, product, docs, devrel. Tradeoffs we wouldn't have if we just had a free tier.

But look at how extensively @NetflixEng has been able to adapt our SDKs and devtools:
To put Temporal inside of Netflix's "paved road", they needed every part of the stack to adapt to their needs, from Fast Properties (config store) to Chaos Monkey (fault injection) to Metatron (certs) to Wall-E (authn) to Gandalf (authz) to their own flavor of gRPC.
They didn't ask permission to do that.

We didn't anticipate them doing that.

But they did it anyway.

Every month our users teach us something new about the platform we built – because Open Source.

community.temporal.io/t/using-dynami…
Now the hard question: Could Amazon host Temporal as a service?

Yes. Just like Hashicorp does (), or Stripe (come learn more at our Nov meetup temporal.io/meetup), or {REDACTED_BIGCORP}, in a long tradition that goes back to our origins at Uber.
Amazon merely adopted the open source.

@temporalio was born in it, molded by it.

Countless nontechnical concerns ("you're just series A, how can we rely on you?") addressed with: "Here's our code. No strings attached."

Open source decouples tech adoption from vendor maturity.
@temporalio That is not to say we aren't mature! Just that it buys time and trust. We are already SOC2Type2 certified and serving multi-bn $ publicly listed companies in production. We're just not GA/self serve yet.

(We're taking waitlist signups for Temporal Cloud temporal.io/cloud)
@temporalio The rest of OSS startup moat I reckon comes down to 2 things:

- Sweat the DX: Intuitive, honest docs. Treating onboarding like game design. Handling exceptions (). Build a media company around domain, then build community.

Mindshare -> market share.
@temporalio - Product: what else can you build to serve power users? eg Apollo Studio, MongoDB Atlas, Hashicorp Vault

Companies become platforms when they ship the *2nd* blockbuster product.

They become generational when their loops make any product a blockbuster.
ok, ok, 1 more way you can beat Amazon:

Support. Offer a shared Slack with SLA. Enterprise contracts are being closed on basic premise that "someone who knows what the heck is going on is on Slack with you, whether we are down or you are".

Beats this:
correction from @sogrady on store-brand licenses - i was aware of some but secretly hoping the industry would settle on SSPL - instead, Elastic seems to have gone and made its own license! :(

further cements my belief in @joshsimmons' OSI™ open source

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More from @swyx

11 Sep
Never thought I would see a frontend eng team celebrate shipping a static marketing site with 847kb of JS.

Until I saw what it used to be…

notion.so/blog/migrating…
I'm no perf expert or perf shamer (let he who is without sin...)

But here's what I do believe:

1. local Lighthouse runs are not credible. Use webpagetest or web.dev/measure.

2. you do NOT have to use the same tech for app and site! :)
in fact i’m -so- not a perfshamer I shall now say the thing I’m not supposed to say:

before today you didnt know or care that Notion had a 9.1MB JS marketing site; if it impacted them enough they would’ve fixed it sooner; you may have a fast site but they have 10 million users.
Read 4 tweets
28 Aug
Most people know the 4 key metrics of Dev Ops:

- Delivery lead time
- Deployment frequency
- Mean time to restore service
- Change fail rate

What would the 4 key metrics of Dev Experience be?
my picks:

🌏 Time to World Tour

Anyone can do "Hello World" with `git clone` and not teach a thing. More impt to give the developer a useful mental model of what they should know in short time.

You can't visit all 192 countries, but you can show that there are 7 continents.
🏃‍♀️ Time to Implement Change

Anyone can build brittle systems. But great DX optimizes for 1-2 standard deviation changes in requirements:

- find helpful docs fast (better: no docs needed)
- low edit distance
- smooth migration paths

Read 5 tweets
1 Jul
"Broccoli positions": Opinions that may be good for you, but make the person extremely unpopular/exposes them to looking stupid.

Diametric opposite of @shreyas' Apple pie positions.

Some I've seen, no particular order:
"No amount of hiring will help us."

"This isn't good enough. Ship it."

Better than never-shipping perfection.

The more stakeholders, the better you get at not-shipping.

Make sure to build in the feedback loop or you won't know what's embarrassing.
Read 9 tweets
22 Apr
I'm turning 35 today! 🎉

As I grow older, I'm realizing the value of principles to make decisions and guide behavior. What are yours?

Here's 35 of mine:
This is a thread of 35 Principles from my 35 years, but a full writeup of these will be available on my blog: swyx.io/35-principles/

and discussed on newsletter ✉️ (good reads every week!)
1. Life is Too Short for Short Term Games

We only have so many years for long term games to compound. Make 'em count.

Read 38 tweets
14 Mar
🆕 The Part Time Creator Manifesto

swyx.io/part-time-crea…

There's a lot of "quit your job, indie hack your way to freedom" on social media.

I like my job. But I want to make too. There has to be a middle way.

Quick thread 👇
Creation is about more than just money.

It's about self sufficiency. Self actualization. Playing long term games. Collecting optionality.

It's about having a job while not *BEING* your job. Making $100k a year has alw...
I don't WANT to go full-time now, but I *could*. And I'm putting in the reps before I need to.

Because I don't derive all my self worth from my employer, I stand a little taller. Dream a little bigger. Negotiate a little harder.

It's a powerful feeling.
Read 6 tweets
6 Mar
A common question I get:

Is #LearnInPublic suitable for everyone?
What if I look dumb?

My answers below, but I'd love to hear yours too!

(DM shared w/ permission) Hi, Shawn 👋! My name is Choong Kyu and I've been wonderin
1/ Learning in Public is *not* “broadcasting everything”. Nobody wants that.

It is about realizing you have a choice to go from 0% to not-0% public. The stuff you do share, you will learn faster, while building a network. It’s up to you to set the boundaries of what you share.
2/ Understanding how to turn your ignorance into power is a key career skill. If you want to grow at all you must make ignorance an old friend, and make friends out of ignorance.

Lean into the discomfort. Become a professional (but responsible) ignoramus
Read 4 tweets

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