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almost 4 years ago Syntax Podcast

Supper Club × Open Sauced With bdougie

bdougie

bdougie Guest

Wes Bos

Wes Bos Host

Scott Tolinski

Scott Tolinski Host

Topic 0 08:16

Open Sauce aims to provide tools for open source project maintainers

Guest 3

Andre And started, like, growing a bit of a following, I guess engineering number 3 as well, So if you've, like, built any GraphQL anywhere else, use any sort of modern GraphQL API, They decided what they wanted to be when they grow up, and a lot of times, it's not writing code.

Guest 1

them maybe not continuing to To support their GraphQL API or something, I could you do you know any insight there? Or I know a lot of insight. Yeah.

Guest 3

But things like GIST, like, you haven't seen any updates in GIST in in quite a bit of some some time, and it's because it was a side project for a team

Guest 3

but it became less of a focus as tools like GitHub Actions, which is not GraphQL adjacent at all, until it's, like, expanded into, like, actually being hosted on cloud. I might got I might have got the years wrong. It was also predates me, but, like, there's a lot of stuff at GitHub that is, like, A fun side project or, like, to get a profile read me was, like, a side project, that became, like, a a legit feature.

Guest 3

who I think now works at Shopify. He works somewhere else, but he came from Shopify. Like, we had a lot of stewards to, like, build the next level, in, like, probably the last 3 years. So that might be I can tell of what my answer is. I love graph fuel. I love, like, how What's up, y'all? Brian Brian Douglas,

Guest 2

Somebody wrote that on a Friday afternoon, and now anyone listening, maybe they're like, is it,

Guest 3

So when you use the GitHub GraphQL API, like, there's a lot of stuff that you're just like, oh, this doesn't make sense. This is not modern GraphQL. The answer is true. This hasn't been updated in quite a bit. So,

Guest 3

OpenSauce on pizza. It's, like, 2017 GitHub Universe.

Guest 3

on OpenSauce, and I would just build this in the open, the reason for that is, like,

Guest 3

it Became the focus around the company, so the API itself, it just got, like, sort of pushed down on the road map a bit.

Guest 3

GitHub jumped on board. So it was the 1st public GraphQL API.

Guest 3

into the GraphQL API, it's a lot of stuff's missing. There's a lot of things that are endpoints that are missing. There's also features in the GraphQL API that doesn't doesn't exist in the rest API. So, like, one of the tools I use is there's an endpoint where you could find the most popular PR in any repo,

Guest 1

at those aspects of, so I have to keep an eye on this here. I I'm wondering about so this GraphQL API, is it still on the the GitHub GraphQL API? I know

Guest 3

So actually so I I joined GitHub because that Open source project, I spoke at GitHub Universe on the GraphQL API

Guest 3

but, unfortunately, it probably is gonna get deleted.

Guest 3

our GitHub Pages, The outright, yeah. Dependent upon it. Yeah. I mean, so, like, GitHub is it's a it's a entire company of tech debt. And, so if you ever use things like Gist, year and a half, 100% open sauce.

Guest 3

It's because teams, they migrate, they move around, and, I GitHub Pages is getting a lot of new updates, so I don't wanna I don't wanna drag them.

Guest 1

I don't know too much about the situation, but I I saw some tweets about

Guest 3

Yeah. And that doesn't get exist in the REST API, and it's a fun little Parlor trick for me to pull up when I'm on stage,

Guest 3

GraphQL, fluid it feels. And once you get everything set up and the tooling set up, it just works.

Guest 3

And that's because for to be frank, it's, like, because people are now Rich, and they have 7 figure stock deals and stuff like that. So for that reason, like, there were new shepherds in the GraphQL API we we brought into Mark like, you a lot of times as a developer, you question, like, oh, why is this, like, why is this missing here and not here or whatever? It's They a lot of people are, like, really wanna get, like, GitHub trending or get on some algorithm, and, like, their real answer is, like, get a 100 stars and get 5 contributors, and, like, you're trending. So my goal is, like, to make open source more approachable is by unlocking open source for companies, for projects, for maintainers to attract contribution and make things sustained.

Guest 3

A lot of folks have left sensed because once your company gets acquired by Microsoft, people

Guest 3

So I guess I could be more vocal about what's going on as far as the GraphQL API, but, it really just comes down to, like, GitHub was super early, in the GraphQL API. They made a lot of decisions Yeah. When there was just no decisions made. So, like, this pre like, Apollo taking over GraphQL. Like, it was a I assume it was it was alpha or open spec.

Topic 1 02:33

Brian started Open Sauce to help people learn to contribute to open source

Guest 3

for managing your open source contribution. So, like, the extensions, the plug ins, those tend to be better places to make your first Contribution or if, like, building your own becomes a better place for contribution than, like, I definitely have a community around Open Sauced, and that's what I work on Every time I hit live, so we have, like, a a core group of people who watch me work on the thing.

Guest 3

to build the next open source intelligence platform, GitHub repo will help you be a better open source community person. Is that a how did I do? You're you're close and, like, honestly, this is how I learned what we're actually building is trying to figure out these answers. So, I did drop a link in our chat here. I don't know. Honestly, I don't know if y'all have show notes. You probably have show notes. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So we have a beta we have a beta tag on this this URL, beta.insights.opensaucedot But we're building actually a platform to index all of Hacktoberfest, GitHub now has to fig figure out what to do as far as, like, either reviving it or sunsetting it or whatever. I can't say whether they're sunsetting it or or reviving it or providing resources to it, but I would say it's a bit stagnant.

Guest 3

and I added user log in. Like, I started live streaming really regularly

Guest 1

Those indexing. Nice. I know I got one of your pizza logo stickers on my laptop.

Guest 3

Announced this GraphQL API. I was like, oh, cool. I can build, like, a cool React dashboard, create React app, At that conference, Kyle Daigle approached me in an interview to work at GitHub,

Guest 3

full time, like, as my 2nd job.

Guest 3

for encouraging people to contribute to open source. That was, like, where I got started because I'd done open source prior, like, got a couple PRs in in Random places.

Guest 3

connect it to GraphQL API, And that's what the original product Open Sauced was back in 2016, what I learned the purveyors of Jamstack, and, So what Open Sauced is gonna be is the intelligence platform for anybody who maintains a project to make their project the challenge I had was I wanted to, like, go

Guest 1

working with GitHub as being, you know, something you'd like to pursue? Or, you know, where's the inspiration come from? I learned how to code through this, this online program called Block and, I ended up working at Block,

Guest 1

for for starting this? Was this something that you've always wanted to do, is it something that you identified in your time

Guest 3

So pandemic hit, A feature so if you wanna do sort of post request, so as of the past

Guest 3

and then eventually left, as a developer advocate. So I spent, like, a year full time doing developer experience.

Guest 3

And while doing that, I created this, like, open source curriculum, contributing to, like, the main upstream, what's in your package side JSON.

Guest 1

And that's that's kinda how answer the question for inspiration and sort of origin story. Nice. Yeah. That's really neat. Yeah. We're gonna we're gonna have to ask you a lot of questions about live streaming, especially after talking to the PrimeGen. I know,

Guest 1

And it's a it's a whole world. Right?

Guest 3

stock projects before jumping in. Like, I just wanted to know, like, Is it something I work on? Can I stalk an issue, see how it gets contributed to? Like, learn how the PR gets gets merged in? And I would just take a bunch of notes, Like, on my own time in in random places like Dropbox Paper,

Guest 3

just for this one product.

Guest 3

Yeah. And then during the time at Netlify and at GitHub, I've been working on this little project called, Open Sauce, Open Sauce Hot Pizza, which is like the pathway to your next open source contribution.

Guest 3

But as I was teaching people how to contribute to open source and how to interact properly without being spammy and stuff like that,

Guest 3

as an open source project to find open source projects Yeah, we're we're indexing a lot of Git repos and providing in insights on on those,

Guest 3

which is, like, So, like, GitHub Pages internal war is, like, Left, like a lot lot of folks know Sarah Drasner. I left, like, right as Sarah Drasner signed her offer. I was like, I've got another job at GitHub. And,

Topic 2 14:44

Brian is trying out tRPC, Tailwind, TypeScript, Next.js stack for new projects

Guest 1

Hey, Wes. Do you wanna take a quick Quick second to talk about one of our sponsors today. Let's talk about Hasura.

Guest 1

trial just a, vanilla React app to snowpack. And then that conversion was tough. But then when we converted from snowpack to Veet, it took, like, a handful of minutes Because they're based. They were so similar. So it was, like Yeah. Effortless to switch over over in that way.

Guest 3

it's still I I've done this long enough, worked and reacted long enough, and I'm just, like, I've I've been here, like, Actually, Open Sauced, app.opensauced.pizza, and, ended up getting the job, and now I well, I recently left GitHub.

Guest 3

either wait to get billed or build ourselves in. We we spent mostly time, and I say we because I have open source Contributors, We When my open source journey is, like, I wanted to stop projects to make my own contributions,

Guest 1

built rather than building it ourselves. Yeah. I hear you. I we did that. We we used

Guest 3

we spent way more time waiting for things to get build,

Guest 3

just works, t m.

Guest 3

is it works really well. We had to learn a lot of stuff

Guest 1

Yes.

Guest 1

Only the first 100 people get it, so get in now.

Guest 1

like we said, we

Guest 1

So Hasura takes basically care of all of the hard tedious stuff about working with GraphQL unless you sit back and do it. Just make your API. So Hasura Cloud is a managed GraphQL service providing auto scaling and high availability.

Guest 1

API up and running in no time. Don't have to deal with any of those things like caching or, Thanks so much to HESARA for sponsoring.

Guest 3

Early. So all the stuff that was missing in Veet 2 years ago, we had to basically Yeah. But also there are some limitations in things like error handling and and caching. Like, obviously, Stellate or GraphCDM is now a tool that you can sort of now it's a it's a Soft problem.

Guest 2

So with with open sauce, What is your end goal? Are you going are you trying to make money with this? Are you trying to solve you're obviously trying to solve a problem with it. Is Is this going to be a business at some point, or is this a problem that you're trying to solve and maybe get scooped up by a a a company? I definitely try to solve Problem. I've had a, like, a very interesting onboarding path into open source. And, like, a bit of my background is, like, I learned how to code when I had already had a career in sales. I had my 1st kid and decided I wanted to build the app.

Guest 1

Let's say you have a Postgres family of database, and you're you're looking to just instantly have a GraphQL

Guest 1

the other one? Snowpack. We we converted ours from essentially

Guest 1

your system If you see B. Dougy at any, any event, make sure you try to get one of these Pizza stickers if they're still around. They're pretty sweet. Yeah. It reminds me, I actually gotta print print some more because I'm all out. Yeah. Yeah. So open sauce. So You said you've been working on this for at least a little bit. What was maybe the inspiration

Guest 3

where now t three provides, like, you just write functions on the back end and front end, and it

Guest 1

authorization I've been doing some of that myself on on Twitch and whatever we've been experimenting with different means of live streaming.

Guest 1

baked And with secure access to all of your data sources, databases, and any other external GraphQL API.

Guest 1

To your database, your Postgres family of database, and it goes ahead and creates your entire API for you. You also get granular

Guest 1

Hasura is a really great system if you're looking.

Guest 1

Oh, what was the, the caching GraphQL is no fun to do, but Hasura makes it so it's not even something you need to think about too much. Likewise, you can also not have to worry about n plus one issues where You have duplicate fields and multiple database calls, and, And if you sign up for the free tier, it only takes a moment, And you have an instant GraphQL and a rest server. So head on over to hasura.infoforward/free

Guest 3

it's a create React app, that's been ejected Those are the 3 t's. Yeah. Yes. And then Next. Js is is embedded in there too as well, so t three n.

Guest 1

Or use the code try Hasura,

Guest 3

just to get started, mainly because I just don't wanna think about tooling anymore. Like,

Guest 1

and you'll get 3 months of Hasura cloud standard for free.

Guest 3

But, yeah, I I find it fascinating, like, the t three stack is kinda how I I wanted the world to be back when people were doing express and and Node. Js, but it was, like, so complicated to, like, do your server side rendering and your client, Years ago, it got some focus, I saw there's more opportunity to, like, build a different product.

Topic 3 18:42

Goal of Open Sauce is to make open source more approachable and diverse

Guest 3

please reach out. I've I've got some Ideas and some pigment designs I can share with you. That's that's awesome.

Guest 3

We are a company. Like, I did take funding, angel funding, earlier this year, and that's what allowed me to work on this full time, for the past 3 months, we are taking on customers. So, like, if you're interested in, like, improving your open source story and your journey for your company, So that that's what I'm playing with now, but, like, I I do pick Next. Js for a lot of stuff,

Guest 3

have more than 5 contributors.

Guest 1

In your live streaming setup, are you primarily working on open sourced? Is that what you're doing? Are you doing live coding? Are you Teaching look. What what's your live streaming setup? So

Guest 3

So because of open source, I was able to, like, learn the ropes and learn how to Build apps and get a job. I see open source as a way for people to level up, and, like, change their career path. Yeah. Even if you're already an engineer, If you wanna do Svelte, like, you can go contribute to a Svelte example project. Or if you wanna, like, do Vue, like, go contribute to open source or build a plug in That helps out Vue and and Vue in that relationship, like, probably already exists. But what I'm getting at is, with Open Sauced, like, the the numbers I saw internally at GitHub is and this is public. It's on the it's in the, Octoverse. Mhmm. Of the 280,000,000 And those are usually, like, when you look at Webpack or or Babble, and it was like that for, like, about 4 years, to be quite honest. And until I joined GitHub, And now runs on Veeet.

Guest 3

So the end of the goal is, like, I wanna change open source and not be approach it. I wanna make open source more diverse. I wanna make open source more accessible.

Guest 1

So okay. Let's let's take a a detour to talk about live streaming.

Topic 4 00:57

Brian talking about meeting Scott and Wes at Jamstack Conf and his background in engineering and open source

Guest 3

I go by B. Dougie. It's, like, what I use in professional settings. Like, feel free to call me whatever here.

Guest 1

who you are, what your background is, what you've been up to, and maybe what you're doing right now. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, Brian Douglas. Go by b Dougie, as I mentioned. And,

Guest 2

API. And when you point at any of your data sources, a fire hydrant, incident management for every developer, and Story block,

Guest 3

my background is most recently, I spent four and a half years working at GitHub as leading their developer relations team.

Guest 3

Host a podcast called Jamstack Radio. Worked for Netlify, so or a popular issue.

Guest 3

But, yeah, B. Dougie on Twitter, and happy to chat about some pizza and the sauce.

Guest 1

Brian we met Brian. I don't know when you met Brian, but I met him at

Guest 2

component based headless CMS that gives you power to develop projects faster and better than ever. I'll talk about all of them partly through the episode.

Guest 2

We are sponsored by 3 awesome companies today. First1 is

Guest 2

Sura, they give you a real time GraphQL

Guest 1

Yeah.

Guest 3

actually, I was employee number 3.

Guest 1

Let's Get on into it. Welcome, Brian. Thanks so much for coming on. Yeah. My my pleasure. No. Yeah. So I guess first and foremost, it'd be it'd be great to tell the audience, could suffer performance wise because of it. Well, with Hasura, again, you just point Hasura

Guest 3

and, I

Guest 1

Sick.

Guest 1

Jamstack Conf when we did our 1st live show a long time ago. Yeah. You have real cool guy, Brian. Oh, yo.

Guest 3

was engineer but I'm just, like, a serial like, I come from the DevRel space, so, like, I constantly build new stuff all the time. What's the t three stack for everyone I was gonna say? T three stack is t RPC, Tailwind, and TypeScript.

Topic 5 05:43

Brian has been live streaming development on Open Sauce to build a community

Guest 2

view

Guest 1

it's like a triple triple open source here. Let's let's talk about a little bit more

Guest 3

the 230,000 And the last 3 months, I've been working on it full time, so anyway, I will I will call out the actual engineer, but, like, it was a server on under someone's desk. Like, that's what powered GitHub Pages open for contribution or make it very clear the contribution's not needed. So, like, we're we're gonna provide way more tooling and stuff like that around that Notion? I don't know. It's, it's it's the tagline that's hopefully gonna make us lots of money.

Guest 3

pizza. That's about full.

Guest 1

So I'm gonna have to get some of your takes on that later on in this episode, but it's really neat that you've chosen to do this

Guest 2

A GitHub repo, whether it's yours or another one that you're working on,

Guest 1

It's just

Guest 3

I found out once you find the repo, that maintainer or company or whoever is maintaining it, They need the tools to, like, be a better steward in open source if they want contribution.

Guest 2

surfacing things that are in the

Guest 3

but what I learned also is, like, I wanted to discover projects to go work on, And I think the most of the mantra around open source is, like, oh, go find go look in your package dot JSON, and go contribute to stuff that's in there. And I think that's, like, a good first start, but a lot of times those Projects don't need contribution

Guest 2

What open sauce is because, like, I I think I think I got it, but, like,

Guest 3

So what I was trying to discover is, like, what are good first repos as opposed to good first issues for people to contribute to.

Guest 3

or there's a lot of hoops to jump through.

Guest 3

So from that discovery, either I created, like, the CRM

Guest 2

of

Guest 2

and that sort of

Guest 1

open source project in the open about open source.

Guest 1

Hopefully, pretty soon. Very much a tool that I need. I have a a couple open source projects that I am not great

Guest 2

Is it a it's not a payment platform, you know, like so it's a tool that allows you to get a better

Topic 6 00:26

Intro to Syntax supper club episode with guests Scott, Wes, and Brian Douglas aka B Dougie

Guest 1

Welcome to Syntax.

Announcer

This

Guest 1

On this

Guest 1

supper club. We're gonna be talking with Brian Douglas of Open Sauced opensauced dot pizza, I should say, Which is maybe one of the the greatest,

Announcer

is the Syntax supper club.

Guest 1

With me as always is Wes Bos. Wes, how's it going? It's going good. Going good. Excited to have Brian on today. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Guest 1

URLs that anyone has bought recently. So we'll be talking all about that and more.

Topic 7 11:48

GitHub GraphQL API is stagnant due to teams moving around

Guest 3

for Open Sauced. It's like a nice little side project, which It's a little scary to have a side project when, like, my actual project is only just getting shipped.

Guest 3

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Or the product that's gonna make us money is just now getting shipped. So,

Guest 3

are you still a fan of it? Would you still use it? Yeah. That's a good question. I honestly have not built anything new graph GraphQL, Amazing tooling switch. Like, it it

Guest 3

It's a problem that I struggled with for years trying to build the stuff and try to cache things properly.

Guest 3

up until, like, probably 7 6 years ago, repos that are open sourced,

Guest 3

Who's working on this thing, or does somebody always have, like, domain over it? Yeah. You know, and it's, I honestly so I think of, like, companies like Vercel That grew really fast in the last couple of years. Yeah. I'm I'm 100% confident they have stuff like that internally. Like, you can't grow that fast and not have, like, Some teams shake shake up or some refocusing.

Guest 2

Someone has to figure out, oh, how does this even work? Like, does that happen inside of companies? Like, I haven't worked at a large enough company, but, like, is it sometimes, like,

Guest 3

Like, the t three stack is something that I'm I'm I'm actually playing with right now, and I'm actually building a tool with it right now, Jareau, you're it's missing, like, this mutations is, like,

Guest 3

And, yeah, just like You can't get a bunch of engineers at a cool company and building cool things and eventually having some tech debt sort of sit around as things sort of Migrate and not get less cool. What are your thoughts on Prior to that, you had mentioned we met at Jamstack Conf, So, like, we actually started using Veeet pretty like, right before 2 point o. We converted over the the Veeet from Webpack.

Guest 3

and now it sort of sits around. So, if you're looking for a job at GitHub and you wanna work at Gist, I know people. Just hit me up. I'm I was wondering about that. Like, somebody built it and moved on, and there's some poor guy that like, something breaks.

Guest 2

if you're building this thing from scratch, would you still go with with GraphQL? Like, what are your thoughts on Now that GraphQL

Guest 2

has been around for a couple years,

Guest 3

Totally. Yeah. So I think if I started today,

Topic 8 20:26

Brian live streams Open Sauce development and has built a community

Guest 3

And it it was mainly because open sauce and, like, I think so I'm but I wanted to centralize that in the 1 platform. And, back in 2016, GitHub

Guest 3

gonna cite the the primogen again. He Credit is, like he mentioned these buckets around this teaching, on Open Sauced, So that's a goal.

Guest 3

And, like, he definitely falls in, like, the meme Thing of the week, thing of the day. Theo's under another one of those meme streamers, thing of the week, thing of the day.

Guest 3

or you have, like, a community and a product that you sort of code, or you're, like, a meme streamer.

Topic 9 00:00

Transcript

Announcer

I sure hope you're hungry.

Announcer

so buckle up and grab that old handle because this ride is going to get wild.

Announcer

Oh, I'm starving.

Announcer

Wash those hands, pull up a chair, and secure that feed bag, because it's time to listen to Scott Talinsky and Wes Bos attempt to use human language to converse with and pick the brains of other developers. I thought there was gonna be food,

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