December 7, 2021 • 60 mins
This week we chat with Michael Staib, Microsoft MVP, Author of Hot Chocolate and founder of Chili Cream. Join us as we learn about Michael's journey into tech!
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Episode Transcript
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Pj Metz (02:01):
limited edition.
Limited Edition Music Intro
Brandon Minnick (02:11):
we keep getting copyright claims,
Pj Metz (02:13):
even though we use methods to do it. We did
everything right and we arebeing unfairly.
Brandon Minnick (02:22):
It's right.
Well, you got the copyright andeverything.
Pj Metz (02:26):
Welcome to the show we're complaining.
Brandon Minnick (02:30):
That's right.
Yeah. Welcome back to ape. It'severybody, the show where we
interview the people behind thetech. I'm your host Brandon
Minnick. And with me as always,DJ, Matt's DJ.
Pj Metz (02:43):
Listen, my weeks Great.
It's only Tuesday. But I'mreally excited because this is
my last full week before I takesome PTO for December. Because
next week, so this is first offan exciting moment for me. For
those of you who are justhearing me for the first time, I
have a former high schoolteacher who got into tech in May
of this year, after learning tocode with a with Brandon and
(03:07):
Chloe and the rest of the techcommunity on Twitter. Everyone
helped me learn really, but Iwas afraid I'm like I'm getting
out of teaching. I'm losing outon winter off. I'm losing out on
summers off, I'm losing out onall this time off that comes to
teaching. No, the company hasunlimited PTO, and my boss was
like, Hey, I'm taking two weeksat Christmas so I can spend the
(03:29):
holidays with my family. I waslike you we can do that. And she
was like, yeah, like I'm notgoing to be here you should be
here that was like this isgreatness. Very
Brandon Minnick (03:45):
Microsoft for December's are dormant. And
basically, I've learned over thelast couple years of working
here that you just don'tschedule anything for December
you have any deadlines, or ifyou have any, like critical
meetings and milestones. getthem done before giving holiday
(04:08):
here in the US, which is the endof November, or scheduled for
January because yeah, yeah, welike to take a well deserved
break. And even yesterday, mywife and I were chatting about
look, what do we want to do? Andso we've we've, we're doing a
we're doing a road trip tosomewhere warmer.
Pj Metz (04:29):
Awesome. What's the address of where you're going to
be staying so we can all findyou.
Brandon Minnick (04:34):
Yeah. My week's been good. But speaking of
which, this is our last episodeof eight bits for the year. So
speaking of well deserved timeoff, we'll be back in full force
in January. But stay tunedbecause we already have a bunch
of amazing guests queued up.
Pj Metz (04:55):
Absolutely, absolutely.
Absolutely. And very excited forus. Today and like, I'm
interested to get into it, Idon't have a lot to talk about.
I ran a half marathon. I'mshowing it off here.
gratulations. I've got the metalback here. Took me two hours and
50 minutes, I was out of 2000plus participants, I was in the
(05:17):
last 100 across the finish line.
But look, I did it still counts.
I can still say I ran it. Andthe only reason I bring it up is
because I know branded, you alsoare training for one. I'm
excited for that. That's an zetthe Napa marathon.
Brandon Minnick (05:36):
Napa Valley marathon in March. That's right.
Pj Metz (05:39):
I might have to come out to support you in that just
because I know how much a halfmarathon hurt and you're twice
as much as me. So I need to bethere to cheer for you and like
meet you at all the spectatorspots.
Brandon Minnick (05:52):
That'd be awesome. I mean, yeah, after the
show, I'm literally runningafter do a seven mile warmup.
And then I do three to fourmiles at my training pace, which
will be like seven minute 32ndmile or eight minute mile. So
yeah, after you do a casualSeven Mile warm up. For those
Pj Metz (06:13):
of you listening, you can't see but my eyes are the
size of dinner plates right now,when he said seven mile warm up
because the longest distance Iever ran and training for my
half was seven. Because I'm bad.
I'm bad at training. Drinkmonster energy drinks. And
that's, you know, not good forme either. But
Brandon Minnick (06:35):
yeah, yeah. I mean, for what it's worth, I
don't I just Google, like how totrain for a marathon. And
usually, there's like a 16 weektraining program that you can
just copy paste. And so I just Ijust blindly follow it. And in
hopes that I'll be able tosurvive on marathon day.
Pj Metz (06:55):
Yeah, man, I'm sure you're gonna be fine. Because
you've got a you don't have theextra heft that I have. So it
takes a lot more energy to push270 pounds than it does to push
you. You live athletic boy, you
Brandon Minnick (07:15):
got the new Nikes. Oh, to help you cheat.
Pj Metz (07:19):
Oh, is it the ones that are banned?
Brandon Minnick (07:22):
I think they're technically legal. But rules
were made after they werealready used in like record
setting races. So they kind ofmake them legal. And they're
incredible. Like, you can feelit pushing you. And you kind of
have to change your stride whenyou run with them to like, take
full advantage of it. But onceyou figure it out, it's like you
almost feel it's like Boydenboing boing.
Pj Metz (07:45):
It is fears that the tech industry is taking this
amazing places. And that leadsme to think about a tech in
general. And that's the point ofthe show, right, Brandon?
Brandon Minnick (07:57):
Absolutely. And we have such a great guest to be
a disservice to be chattingabout ourselves any further. Our
guest today I've known him for acouple years, we kind of live in
same tech circles with mobileapp development with Graph QL.
But speaking of Graph QL, he isthe founder of chili cream. One
(08:19):
of the most well known companiesfor making Graph QL services in
dotnet. Welcome to the show,Michael. Stay fed. Hi, guys.
It's so so good to see you. Foranybody that doesn't know
Michael and I are actually justhanging out together in person.
We got to see each other inPrague a couple weeks ago at a
(08:40):
conference called Update. ButMichael, for anybody who doesn't
know you, who are you in? Whatdo you do?
Michael Staib (08:48):
Yeah, so who am I? Yeah, I'm Mike Stipe, as
Brent already introduced me. AndI'm a vivid dotnet developer for
I would say, for the last 20years. And I really love open
source. So I'm an open sourcedeveloper, and got actually into
(09:13):
open source. Because of mybrother, he dragged me into it
doing free work for others. And,yeah, and then at some point, I
met Graph QL for the technology,when Facebook introduced it, and
started an open source project.
And that's actually how I gotinto touch at one point with
(09:35):
Brendan. Awesome.
Brandon Minnick (09:41):
Yeah, let's do a quick describer cuz I'm sure
we'll be talking about Graph QLa lot. For anybody who doesn't
know Graph QL what what is it?
And maybe, how does it compareto what we know is rest?
Michael Staib (09:59):
Yeah, so Graph QL was introduced by a company
called Facebook, I think most ofus know this company. And they
actually introduced Graph QL asa way to fix the issues that
they had with their first mobileapplication. So when they
initially released theirFacebook apps for mobile, they
(10:21):
got a lot of criticism. And,yeah, I remember these crappy
apps, but do it the wrong way.
They just just they just usedwhat they know. So HTML and
standard rest, cause they putthis all together, essentially,
in a browser frame in an app.
(10:43):
Actually, what do you do today,a lot of mobile apps today are
made with React or stuff likethat. But what they found out is
that back then it really didn'tperform, because we had rubbish,
3g networks. And rest is notvery optimized for the mobile
(11:06):
use case, because we have thesepredefined. Pre predefined back
back ends where we havepredefined requests. And that
means we in the end, willconsume a lot more data than we
actually need for our mobiledevices. So that's when three
developers in Facebook came upwith something called Graph
(11:29):
square, which essentially givesthe consumer of API's the power
to ask for what you want. Sothat's the short version of
graph.
Brandon Minnick (11:41):
Yeah, it's really that's that's why I, when
I first thought, I fell in lovewith it, because as a mobile app
developer, myself, I know thepains of having to a trust the
users internet connection,users, cellular data plans are
constantly switching betweencell phone towers, especially if
you're moving through the cityon a bus, or maybe then you go
(12:03):
underground on a train. Internetconnections can't be trusted.
And so you want to make as fewinternet requests as possible.
And yeah, I remember the firsttime learning about Graph QL. Or
I was like, wow, instead ofmaking a dozen API requests, I
can just make one. So my apploads faster. I use less of my
(12:27):
user cellular data plan, like,yes, give it to me,
Michael Staib (12:33):
is really important. If you, if you if you
show it to front end developers,it's, it's it says it's us. So
they just say just see it, tryit a bit out. And then they say,
Oh, I don't want to do anythingelse anymore. I'm just doing
graph bear from now. But, butfor back end developers, it's
(12:54):
sometimes scary. It's like,okay, now everybody can ask for
what they want. So everybody canarbitrarily grow in my backend.
So people get a bit freaked. Butit's actually not. not that
scary when you get into it.
Brandon Minnick (13:11):
Oh, I can.
Yeah, I've heard the same, thesame concerns. But talk about
let's, let's let's zoom out alittle bit, because Because
Graph QL is definitely todaysomewhat zooming out. It's it's
the future. We're on the videopodcasts zooming out. Also, not
just metaphorically. But uh,yeah, let's, let's go way back
(13:34):
is Michael, you haven't beenworking on Graph QL your whole
life. And on apex, we love toknow, the people behind the tech
and how you got into it. So ifwe go way back, when did you
first start coding or gettinginto computers getting into
tech?
Michael Staib (13:55):
Yeah, I often think that's, that's different
for my site. So I'm not 40. So Iactually be going on my 42 now
in the summer. So it's reallydifferent. Yeah, yes. On the 20
years since my birthday, so sentme a GitHub star as the
president. That's right.
Pj Metz (14:20):
Right, y'all. Right there. So you because earlier
you said 20 years ago, right. Soat 2022 is when you got started
in tech. Did you start in that'dbe college age. Did you get
introduced to it in college backin the 90s? How I
Michael Staib (14:38):
I have a zigzag way I would say. So I actually
got into computers with aroundsix because my my father was an
engineer. And we we had thesebig IBM machines. And so I got
into programming very early. Dueto my farther, but into
(15:03):
professional development, I getaround 20. And in Germany, we
have several ways to get intoyour job. So you don't have to
have a college degree in thebeginning. I actually started
with something. How would wetranslate that into English,
(15:23):
it's it's way actually learn onthe job in the beginning. But
it's more formalized, you haveschool school system, set their
up and you, you learn computerscience on the job. And I
actually did my college way backafter that in the evenings, so
(15:48):
I'm not there to stay and not Ididn't take the straight way
into college
Pj Metz (15:57):
fairs. The Straight Way is is the non zigzag way is, I
think, the less fun path.
Because oftentimes, it's thatzigging and zagging that gives
you something outside ofeveryone else's experience, that
becomes what makes you notvaluable, because like, you
know, we're not commodities, butlike, what gives you insight
into things that you otherwisewouldn't? Like? You know, I'd
(16:18):
say that Brandon, of the threeof us might have the most
straight line in the tech. Buteven he will tell you that no, I
was over here and engineering.
And I was over here on cruiseships working on Comm systems
and I was doing server stuffthat wasn't really quite what I
do. Now, you know, that Zigzagis what I mean, if the journey
(16:41):
if the point of a journey is tosee things along the way, then
the Zigzag is gonna make for abroader journey and nothing you
bring more to the table. And soyour experience, so I would say,
you know, it sounds to me, itsounds like you're saying like,
Oh, I I had to go here and thenI had to go here that zigzag,
that's fine. We like that,especially on this show. We love
(17:01):
that.
Michael Staib (17:03):
It's, it's the problem, I think, in today's
world is that you expect a 20year old to know what he wants
to do. So I was 20. I was notsure if I really wanted to do
computer science because thiswas a hobby for me. So I did it.
And I essentially grew up atstartup in, in Germany. So
(17:27):
technical, technology wise, workwise, I grew up at a startup
where just did it for fun, justprogrammed. And I didn't want to
go to college yet because Ithought I really wanted to work
to mess around with stuff. Andalso do parties wants to do. So
(17:54):
I took this this detour anddropped out of of my school back
then went to that startup. Andyeah, did a lot of work. Work
there learned a lot. I have tosay I learned a lot about how to
(18:14):
start a company how to how toget projects done. I wouldn't
say that I learned cleanconcepts. In the beginning it
was more we need to get thisfeature out. We need to get this
done. So you did did everythingto just make things happen. But
it's good to have experiencedthat.
Brandon Minnick (18:36):
Absolutely.
Yes. You mentioned when you wereyounger, I think you said six
years old. Kind of got intocomputers with the help of your
your engineering father. WhatWhat was that first computer? Do
you remember? What you wereworking on?
Michael Staib (18:54):
Wasn't not an IBM do at 16 I don't know if
somebody knows that. Do it 6pmand has two floppy disks. And
the thing that mesmerized me ismy father this AutoCAD program
where he essentially did didplannings for for for system,
(19:15):
but it could draw a spaceshuttle. It took I think it took
five minutes to actually draw.
But it was like this thing cancreate that the space shuttle
and I really wanted to createalso my stuff that I wanted to
draw essentially on the screen.
And my father essentially showedme and told Pascoe how to use
(19:41):
the line commands to draw stuffnot in AutoCAD, but with with
with programming commands. Andthat's essentially how I got
into programming. And thatfaster fascinated me that you
could create something withthese devices. Yeah, and it's
still an empowering Feeling toprogress.
Pj Metz (20:02):
That seems to be a common theme among a lot of the
guests that we talked to. Andeven just people I talked to in
tech, the idea of you discoverthat the machine when you tell
it a certain password or secretcode will create something, and
that you've been involved inmaking something brand new, is a
lot of the excitement that getspeople into tech. And it's, oh,
(20:23):
well, if I can make a spaceship,or if this can make a spaceship,
what can I make it do? And I dowant to highlight that that
tendency of early tech to belike, we're going to show you
this picture, but we're going todraw it right in front of you
with like lines and colors andshapes. And I love the idea of
like, the system's like, it'slike the machine is drawing. You
(20:43):
don't see that enough anymore.
Michael Staib (20:46):
Yeah, it's it.
Also, we don't build themachines. When I look at Tech
today, like my son, or mydaughters, they grew up with
this device. So they, theyreally did digital natives, but
they don't build their iPads.
They just get these machines andthey work. And, yeah, we built
(21:08):
them essentially back thenbuild. Try to get maybe a new
graphics card in there. And thenI destroyed a lot of computers
in my family.
Pj Metz (21:19):
Brandon, did you ever?
Did you ever brick a computer ormess up a computer in your house
when you were growing up whenyou were messing with it?
Unknown (21:27):
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, I
Brandon Minnick (21:28):
did the same thing. Where? Yeah, you want to
buy a new graphics card? Or? Ithink the one time I really did
some damage was I bought a newpower supply.
Pj Metz (21:38):
Over you at this?
Brandon Minnick (21:41):
Oh, probably teenager. Yeah. But
Pj Metz (21:46):
old enough to know, like, this is what it's called
unable to find it. Maybe notdoing that on your own. But
yeah, put a new power supply inmom and your mom's like, sure.
Brandon Minnick (21:58):
Yeah, well, then you just kind of guessing
check. Like, you know, how doyou connect the power supply to
the motherboard? Like, here'ssome pins. Let's see if this
works. But yeah, when you're,when you're dealing with
electricity, you don't reallywant to guess a check. Because
if you get it wrong, sometimes,
Pj Metz (22:17):
yeah, sometimes it's a little bit more dangerous. Oh,
bad car, Bob said. I took a CPUoff board and put it back and it
didn't turn on afterwards.
Michael Staib (22:28):
Yeah, to think of thing.
Pj Metz (22:31):
Totally normal. You're in good company, Bob. So at a
young age, you're, you're youtalked about putting together
computers six years old, you getthis first machine? You said it
was a hobby even going intocollege? What are some of the
languages what are some of thethings you were doing as a hobby
(22:52):
in your in your teenage years.
Michael Staib (22:54):
So I started, I started with to Pascal, but that
essentially what was what myfather could do. But then also
went in queue basic. So thebasic, basic dos programming
things that came basically forfree. But I also did some
Delphi. And then in 2002, camethe first betas out of Microsoft
(23:22):
dotnet. And I did all by then Idid already a bit of Java, like
several programming and stuff,messing around with that. But
Microsoft TechNet was like thisnew stuff. And that really got
me although it was rubbish inthe beginning, the idea behind
(23:44):
it, and yet the perspectivewhere it could go was amazing. I
think it was it just got towhere it had to be when Moodle
came out. And it was then youcould run it on Linux, you know,
with dotnet quad. went evenfurther, you can run it
everywhere. Now, on a RaspberryPi you don't you don't you're
(24:06):
not limited anymore.
Pj Metz (24:08):
Those early days, man like it really like I remember,
like when you're talking aboutdotnet and what you're building
with dotnet in, you know,2002 2003 this is still where
the internet is like the.combubble just happened. So people
thought the internet was done.
And it was stuff. But like, thisis a unique era that we're
(24:31):
talking about here. This isstill Angel Fire in geo cities
and these like there's a vibe tothat time period, you know. But
so you're talking about startingwith dotnet. And those early
days, did you start buildingwith it like pretty quickly, or
is it something that you saw andcame back to later?
Michael Staib (24:53):
Yeah, remember?
So So Microsoft was looking forbeta testers and you could order
a CD I mean, today you justdownload it right. But they that
you could order a CD, you couldsign up and they sent you a CD
with dotnet on it. And VisualStudio beta for dotnet. It was.
It was it was great. I mean, ifyou go further back here, you've
(25:15):
got windows and floppies. Yeah,I think kids today don't don't
appreciate these days anymore.
These days,
Pj Metz (25:23):
more floppy disks, that's for sure.
Michael Staib (25:27):
Yeah, but I but I got these, I think it was three
CDs with Visual Studio on adotnet framework on it. And I
started installing it and, andjust playing around for that.
And here was pretty easy to getin because they they copied a
lot of the concepts of Java. Soyou can kind of you you could
(25:49):
get started very quickly withit. And then I tried to put it
in projects I was working on.
And try to find a use case forit. So just to keep using it.
And kids were essentially gets agood stack. It worked. And I, at
one point ended up at a companycalled red dot, which was a web
(26:12):
content management company,which fits perfectly in this
comm dot bubble, where you hadall these CMS companies building
these web CMS. And yeah, Iworked at Red Dot and we were I
think twice bought by first theCanadian company. And then
(26:35):
another Canadian company. Yeah,so yeah, it was it was fun. It
was fun to see all these verytiny companies coming up with
similar ideas. Like making useof the web. I think web 2.0 was
(26:55):
the term that everybody lovedback then. It was it was a
great, great time.
Brandon Minnick (27:04):
Yeah, it's funny that you mentioned red
dot, I didn't I didn't know youworked there. But yeah, I
remember one of my first or myfirst internship, I worked in IT
for Walt Disney World inOrlando. And we actually were
looking for a new CMS system.
And remember the red dot vendorscoming in? And so I don't I
(27:25):
don't remember if we bought itor not. I wasn't that important.
I was just kind of happy to beinvited to the meeting as an
intern. But that's so cool tothink you might have been
working there. Well, we werelooking to buy and your product.
Why didn't you?
Pj Metz (27:45):
Yeah.
Brandon Minnick (27:47):
Honestly, we probably did. I remember. Like I
said, like, I was an intern. SoI didn't get to make any
decisions. Even if I did I, Iwas only there for three months.
But I remember being at the topof the list. I think it was
between like, do we just makeour own or yeah, do we go with
this third party vendor? Butyeah, yeah. That's
Michael Staib (28:11):
that's that, by the way, fits also perfectly to
that work back then. We builtour own CMS, we do it on. And
most of these projects crashedand burned. And yeah, took a lot
of money with them. Buteverybody was building a CMS
back then.
Pj Metz (28:31):
I got stuck on something you said the idea of
Visual Studio showing up on likea CD. And I just activated this
thing in my brain of like,that's how you used to get
anything you had to go and getsomething physical that
contained it. And so I typed aVisual Studio to 1000s. And I've
(28:52):
got an eBay listing here. Andyou can buy Microsoft Visual
Studio 6.0 Enterprise Edition.
For what I think is 108. Yeah,$187. US, but it's three CD
system right here. And for thoseof you who will be listening to
the podcast later, yeah, it itlooks like the Visual Studio
logo, except, like instead ofthe flat edges where it's like a
(29:16):
flat infinity sign. It lookslike a straight up number eight
turned on inside like a realinfinity sign. But it doubles.
It's the double CD case. It'sthat typical 2000s where it's
very shiny, and it's got like aghost of an image on it rather
than a full image on it. There'sa key that you need on the back.
(29:36):
That is only I think it's only11 digits total. Here we can't
see the key just so you know,they blocked it with a pen cap.
But you can guess amazing
Brandon Minnick (29:55):
yeah, yeah, it's very, very spoiled
nowadays. It's like, if you wantto do anything, try anything.
You just go to the website,download install, if that's even
required, you know, a lot ofstuff you can do just in your
browser. But yeah, back in theday, you had to you had to order
stuff, you had to pay for it.
They had to pay for me. So like,Yeah, I'll bet this cost similar
(30:19):
amount back then. Right?
Michael Staib (30:24):
You think about?
Did anybody have you guys hadMSDN subscription back then? Or
worked for a company that up?
Because the MSDN subscription,you get got a huge package with
hundreds of DVDs with everyproduct. So essentially, if you
go online, and look at your MSDNsubscription, you see all those
(30:47):
products that you have there.
You got them on CD, everything,and every update was shipped to
you. So every I think everythree months, you got a new
package for you.
Pj Metz (31:00):
I understand why waterfall. Work that because you
literally had to ship theproducts to people, you couldn't
just update it. You're like, thenewest updates here. Get the
Postal Service ready? Here wego. And for the young people,
yeah, that's why it's calledshipping. That's shipping, we're
(31:21):
gonna choose a new product likeno, we're not actually putting
it on a on in the UPS truck. Butyeah, that's where the term
comes from. And also the littleSave button. That's the floppy
disk we've been talking aboutbefore for the 20 Somethings
that surely tune into ourpodcast. Yeah. I love it. So
Michael Staib (31:39):
go ahead, Michael. Yeah, it's it's also
just to throw in terms, if youhear about Apple just has a goat
master of iOS or something.
That's essentially the goldmaster that they sent down to
the factory that produced theCDs from that goat master.
Pj Metz (31:59):
Amazing. Absolutely.
But, Brandon, you were talkingabout how nowadays you just go.
And if you want to trysomething, they're like, Yeah,
try it here. Here's, you know,you can use Visual Studio Code,
download it for free, startusing it now. And this idea of
creating things so people cantry it back, then you had to buy
the software, there wasn't,you'd get a demo, but wasn't a
(32:21):
lot. And that really ties intoopen source, there's just a
shift at some point where itbecame, we want you to be able
to try it, we want you to beable to do it, because you might
be able to help us make itbetter. And that's really what's
exciting about modern tech andMichael, you are passionate
(32:41):
about open source. And and thatreally takes us to a to this
link that we've been postingbefore to chili cream. So what's
Yeah, cream.
Michael Staib (32:57):
So to free myself, so we started. Okay, I
have to go a bit back,
Pj Metz (33:04):
take us back or paint a picture.
Michael Staib (33:07):
So essentially, all my all my things I did in
work, I actually always didtogether with my brother. So my
brother and me actually workedon every company together. I
think there's just one companywe didn't go and work to add
together. And my brother wasalways the front end guy. So he
built always the UI stuff. And Iwas the backend guy. So
(33:30):
perfectly perfect match. And atone point, because he does all
this JavaScript stuff, hestarted with this thing called
open source free software andstuff and build open source
components for something likejQuery. If somebody remembers
jQuery was a thing back then.
And he built, he startedbuilding plugins for that. And
(33:53):
that's essentially how he pulledme in to this open source space.
And then there were otherdriving factors like mono came
out, you had now some guy thatwas producing an open source
dotnet stuff. And that really,they really triggered me I
(34:14):
wanted to break free from thethings we adopted was confined
to on Windows and start startdoing open source software. And
it took me a couple of projects.
So I I didn't just start withhot chocolate. I started with
smaller projects that were justtrying out putting something,
(34:38):
putting something in the open,let's work together with with
people and try something out.
And that works quite well onGitHub. I think GitHub
essentially created the platformwhere you collaborate on there
were others and I tried theseothers. I don't remember the max
of complexity. I think it was myfirst
Brandon Minnick (35:05):
GitHub before GitHub.
Michael Staib (35:07):
Yeah, it was Microsoft's try to produce a
space like GitHub. It didn'twork. But everybody moves to
GitHub. And then GitHub became apart of Microsoft. So it did. In
the end, they got their opensource base. Up there,
Pj Metz (35:27):
they sure did it just million dollars.
Michael Staib (35:36):
Yeah, then then, at some point, I was on a
project with my brother and thiscompany called Swiss live, I'm
still contracting for them. Andthey said, We want to overhaul
our whole back end API's and dosomething called Graph square.
(35:58):
And I said, what is that? Isthat all data? And I actually
chastise people for saying thatbut back then I was in that this
this person that's sat there,and the teammate said, You go
explore Graph QL.
(36:19):
Then I SMC went, and I looked atthe options that we have it was
I think, there was Graph QLdotnet. One of the really first
dose of them, so it was a, theywere just starting. And I looked
at that, and I said, I don'twant to do graph graphs like
this. And I essentially wentback to the team lead and said,
(36:44):
let's let me build that. I needtwo weeks for it. And then we
have about
Brandon Minnick (36:52):
two minutes. It wasn't two weeks, right.
Pj Metz (36:57):
We finished in two weeks.
Michael Staib (36:59):
It took it took I think it took me half a year to
have something that that kind ofworked. But on the first
presentation, it completelybroke together. And I really had
to tell my colleagues okay, Icome back in two more weeks,
maybe took a year. Product.
Yeah, but that but thatessentially started this thing.
(37:28):
In the beginning, we called theproject I think project Zeus,
but we kind of didn't like that.
And my and I'm a passionateStarbucks coffee drinker. And
every time I go with my sonthere, he wants a hot chocolate.
So
Pj Metz (37:50):
did my bros out on purpose. Brandon, hold on,
Brandon held a Starbucks cup? Isit hot chocolate?
Brandon Minnick (37:57):
No is a venti flat wait. I'm not
Pj Metz (38:00):
even a mocha, mocha.
Partially hot chocolate.
Brandon Minnick (38:05):
I just got back from Europe. So I've been waking
up at 5am Every morning, and Ihave nothing else to do. So I
just walk over to Starbucksaround the corner and I grab it.
Biggest coffee I can get
Pj Metz (38:19):
somebody Michael, tell us more about that. So your son
loves hot chocolate. And thatleads us to
Michael Staib (38:25):
yeah, my open source project that started then
we essentially named our graphboys ever they know chocolate.
Because I love I love to stuffthat my brother actually did in
JavaScript, they just have sillynames. And I thought, actually,
it's it's random. Like if you goand do an open source component
(38:45):
in dotnet, like let's say GraphQL. Then either people call a
Graph QL dotnet and Graph QL. Oryou, I don't know, graphics link
or something like that. And Ithought it's kind of Yeah, a bit
boring. And I loved how theJavaScript guys do it. And my
(39:06):
brother just said, let's call ithot chocolate, because we all
were just at Starbucks, and thenwe went with it. And from there
came up with other silly nameslike chili cream, like a softer
bakery around that.
Pj Metz (39:22):
I love strawberry shake. And finally, the one I'm
thinking is pretty cool. BananaCake Pop.
Michael Staib (39:32):
And that's, that's because at the Build
Conference in in San Francisco,they had banana cakepops at
Starbucks. And actually, whenyou went to the Microsoft Store,
in the north storm that they hadthere, they have these banana
cake pops from Starbucks and youcould get some free I don't know
(39:55):
which which year it was, but itwas one of the last MSBs at San
Francisco.
Pj Metz (40:02):
I love a good lesson.
All this all this talk aboutlike cake pops and Starbreeze
shakes and hot chocolate. It'sgot me, it got me hungry. And
that reminds me that I need totake an ad break real quick. So
we'll be back after a quick wordfrom our sponsors, y'all. Hi, I
if you're hearing my voice, thatmeans you've been listening to
(40:22):
or watching eight bits withBrandon and PJ. And we're here
to talk to you about yourproduct. And how it can help you
in your life by to do whateveryour product does. So if you're
an avid listener of the show, oryou watch us on Twitch, then you
will know that your product yourproduct is right for you that's
(40:46):
right so
Michael Staib (41:05):
actually stop ours could have sponsored this
show.
Pj Metz (41:08):
They should we'll reach out to them. That's right
Starbucks
Brandon Minnick (41:11):
use an email Hello at eight bits.tv or truly
anybody? We are a tech focuspodcast. If you'd like to
represent your tech producthere, let us know we're not
looking to become millionaires.
We just want to be able to payour server costs at the end of
the year.
Pj Metz (41:29):
Core Bob mentioned Mountain Dew finally sponsored I
wish you'll know today. Not akickstart Mountain Dew you're
losing me you're losing me. CoreBob says products and services
are the goodness they are thegoodness that's right.
Brandon Minnick (41:49):
So So Michael, you start building this, this
empire of products and noticechili cream products known as
hot chocolate strawberry shake,Nana cake pop, when what does
this for you turn fromsomething? If this is just a
(42:10):
cool open source tool into maybeI can create a company out of
this?
Michael Staib (42:16):
Yeah, and so we're actually two years into
the project because it is a lotof work. And I my main, my main
my main focus or the peoplecontacting me, and now
contacting me because I, I dothis kind of thing. They
(42:37):
essentially want people from theproject to help them build their
solutions, or have them scaletheir solutions, revenue them.
So then started shifting intothat direction. And we thought
about Yeah, actually, it's alsofor us, we don't need to get
rich, but it would be cool justto pay our bills for doing this,
(43:03):
so essentially earn our moneyfrom the open source project.
And, yeah, we started steeringthis community, and trying to
think about things how we canmake money for ourselves from
that without losing these opensource components. So we are
(43:25):
putting a lot of emphasis thatwe want to keep that as an under
the MIT license, we are notgoing to change that this will
always be open source. But thereare ways ways like that come
natural, like people asking youcan you help me on my project,
we we are willing to pay forthat. And this is essentially
(43:46):
how we got into making it more acompany around it. And in
August, we finally filed ourcompany. So we are now a
Delaware company, becauseDelaware is very tax friendly.
Pj Metz (44:01):
Delaware. Listen, I can't believe how much big stuff
is in Delaware, despite beingsuch a little state.
Brandon Minnick (44:11):
I do have a consulting company that's
founded in Delaware.
Pj Metz (44:14):
That's right. Thanks, Delaware. I don't know why. Like
that's just the advice. That'sjust what you do. Yeah,
congratulations in August.
That's only I forgot how to domath there for a second a few
months ago,
Michael Staib (44:32):
a few months ago.
Until then we essentially Yeah.
Money through contracting. So weour core team of three and then
we have like the corecontributor team around that
have another six persons thatthat are only working on stuff.
And we three core persons refermy brother and pasca essentially
(44:58):
started billing more More thancome into a company and building
tools around that, like bananacake pop, which we hope, at one
point will give us morestability to live on. But, yeah,
it's just trial.
Brandon Minnick (45:15):
Because that's always something that seems
counterintuitive because your,your code is open source, I can
go get it on GitHub, I can go togithub.com/chili griemann. And
there's all the products. And sosomebody outside looking in this
maybe not familiar with the opensource world might think like,
(45:37):
well, that's silly, because thatwould be like Coke, Coca Cola
posting their formula, and thenPepsi could just steal it. So
what, what is that businessmodel around open source
software? And have we moved awayfrom necessarily the code and
the software being that mainproduct?
Michael Staib (46:02):
Yeah, I mean, think about it, like the dotnet
code is on GitHub, it's opensource, so you don't have you
don't necessarily earn moneyfrom selling dotnet to somebody
the same as for us. We don'tearn if somebody has a hot
chocolate sell. I don't want toknow that it's there. But we
(46:23):
earn money with the thingsaround that people needing
specialists on that. People arebuying workshops with that with
us, or also enterprise servicesaround that, like advanced
telemetry, and stuff like that.
So you can earn a lot of moneywith things around open source
(46:45):
and keep actually, the wholesoftware free. And if somebody
doesn't want to pay then doesn'thave to, there is no license
that you have to pay. It's anMIT license, you can fork it,
you can use it. And I think thatis I like that more like, when I
use dotnet. And something goeswrong, I just look at the code.
(47:09):
And if I find an issue, I canessentially fix it and do a PR.
So it's it's it's much a muchopener approach to software
engineering, but still there ismoney that you can earn around
these things like Microsoft withAzure around that they don't own
from dotnet. But with thingsaround
Pj Metz (47:36):
it. Yeah. Go ahead.
Brandon Minnick (47:41):
Yeah, sure.
Yeah, I've noticed that similartread, because if you look at
even the biggest tech companiestoday, versus 10 years ago, 10
years ago, if you wanted toupdate to say windows 10, you
had to buy a Windows 10 license,or Apple was doing the same
thing with Mac, where if youwanted to update to Snow
Leopard, you had to buy the newversion of Snow Leopard. And it
(48:04):
feels like the industry hasgotten to a point where the
software itself, it doesn'tdoesn't bring in enough money to
warrant that high barrier toentry. And if you get people
onto your platform, then you canmore easily keep them there more
(48:27):
easily. Introduce them to otherservices you offer. And, yeah,
it's a common trend I'm seeingwith the open source world
where, yeah, hey, let's makethis product open source.
Because a enterprise companiesactually love that. Because that
means if for some reason,there's an open source project
(48:48):
that the maintainers decide theydon't want to do anything
anymore. That's okay, becausethe source code is still there.
So like you said, they can forkit, they can still maintain all
their services. But at the sametime, having worked at
enterprises, they are very, veryconcerned about support. And
(49:09):
we'll pay a lot of money forsupport. And I remember when I
worked at a company calledHarris, our support contracts
were always more valuable thanthe initial installation
contracts. And it was always,you know, quite literally, we
(49:29):
would, when we would bid forcontracts, we would take a hit
on the front end, so maybeinstall it at a loss, but then
say, hey, we want to supportthis for 10 years, and here's
what we're going to charge youevery year for 10 years for that
support. And at that point,it's, that's that's where you
(49:50):
actually make back that money.
And so, yeah, I'm seeing that alot with the open source world
where we support contracts. Forthings like, if an enterprise
needs to get a hold of you orone of your engineers at chili
cream, you can guarantee themsomething like 24 hour support
or 72 hours. Exactly. And you'llrespond back and help them fix
(50:14):
any problems. And that's almostmore valuable to them than had
they paid for the product.
Michael Staib (50:22):
Exactly. And that's essentially how we, how
we make money with it. And,yeah, I mean, we have like a
community support. So peoplethat go into our platform, they
can just join us on Slack andget a lot of support for free.
But it's it's the best effortthing. And companies want to
(50:43):
have this. Yeah, they want onereliable, tap on on the
developer
Pj Metz (50:51):
of the platform. Right.
And what's useful about a toolis, do you have access to the
tool? And then do you know howto use the tool? So you got the
software? Cool, if somethinggoes wrong? Do you know how to
fix it? Do you know how to makeit work? And God, I love it.
That's fantastic. This is I'mtaking notes.
Brandon Minnick (51:12):
Early, you know, when you think about, you
know, big, big online retailers,like Amazon and Walmart, they
know how much revenue they makeper minute. And so literally, if
the, if the website just goesdown for a couple minutes,
they're out millions of dollars.
And so for them to pay for asupport contract, where within
(51:33):
24 hours, you'll have experts onthe phone or on the on the
servers fixing it. That's almosta no brainer. To them. It's this
insurance policy that says, hey,this website instead of going
down for a week, worst casescenario will have a backup and
running in a day.
Pj Metz (51:55):
If anything goes down for a week does not exist
anymore. Facebook was down forthree days, wasn't it? But it
wasn't two days. It
Michael Staib (52:08):
was partly Pompey, they came
Brandon Minnick (52:11):
Oh, yeah. When they lock servers already
forgotten that they had tobreak.
Michael Staib (52:19):
And the issue were that they almost wrecked on
Cloudflare. Because it becausethey get got all these
additional requests than thatthen again checked for failing
DNS. Yet we are running on
Pj Metz (52:37):
was it a day? It was only a day. My brain remembers
it as like, half a week. Maybe?
It was a series today. Yeah, itwas. Your right was it was like
a year long loss of Facebook.
Which might be a good thing forthe world for a little bit. Meta
(52:58):
now, right?
Michael Staib (53:00):
Yeah. I think I think people people, people are
not so concerned about Facebook.
But Instagram is also Facebook.
And that's right.
Brandon Minnick (53:09):
Even WhatsApp.
My wife
Michael Staib (53:10):
was effective.
Yeah, WhatsApp, you're right.
These are the critical thingsnow.
Pj Metz (53:18):
So back to open source, the idea of support and the idea
of like, like, like, stuff'sfree. Now, like, I remember,
Brandon, when we started, whenyou started teaching me to code,
everything was free. Like,here's, here's an IDE, it's
free. Here's Visual Studio, it'sfree. And I was like, I remember
at one point going this crazythat all of this is just free.
(53:41):
But that's kind of what I saidearlier, it has just shifted to
what is valuable is getting morepeople involved. And not just
like in an open source project,it's valuable that you have
support for it. If somethinggoes wrong, if something is not
working, well, the open sourcecommunity can be like, Oh, this
isn't working. I think I know away to make this better, and
(54:02):
they can contribute and thatcontribution. And the desire to
fix things seems to be what ispart of the open source
community. Amazing.
Michael Staib (54:13):
Yeah, that's, that's even. That is a great way
thing. Like when we started, Istarted the project was my
brother. But now we have over100 contributors, people that
are working also on thatplatform.
Pj Metz (54:30):
And that's a good number of contributors to
Brandon Minnick (54:34):
absolutely, yeah, we we only have about five
minutes left, Michael, but I'dlove to get your advice. So
let's say there's somebody outthere right now who similar to
you. They're, they're young,they're they're interested in
technology. They they're notsure if they should go to
(54:54):
college or how to get started.
What would be yourrecommendation to that person?
Michael Staib (55:01):
Yeah, first, I wouldn't worry about making a
big decision. When I'm young, Iwould just go first with the
thing that feels best for you.
That that essentially was washow I did it. And then and then
I just went with the flow. Inorder to get into tech, there's,
(55:22):
there's so many ways, I wouldactually start with open source
from my perspective. And goingto open source projects or going
to user groups will open up alot of other contacts, because
what I have experienced in mylife is that you need to meet
the right people, that that helpyou onboard that it's much
(55:49):
easier than if you strugglealone and try out on your own.
For me, it was always best, thepeople that essentially have
helped me and lifted me like,from my small age on my father,
that guided me into things, thenI had a lot of mentors during my
career. That then helped me.
(56:13):
Yeah, open the right doors. Sodon't worry to make mistakes.
Brandon Minnick (56:20):
Yeah. You mentioned user groups. I know
meetup.com has a lot. That'susually where I found a lot of
fellow developer user groups.
Are there any else you'd like torecommend?
Michael Staib (56:33):
Yes, so I'm involved with my friend, Jose,
who is also who's running thethe user group. So we having a
user group here, but it's alsoon meetup, a lot of dotnet user
groups, that's the space whereI'm at, but the graphical user
groups, JavaScript UI group, sofor, for the user groups for
(56:57):
whatever makes you happy. Sothat's a great place to actually
start and even look at if thatis something that you would like
for Korea, if it's just a hobbyfor you. And then stop
tinkering.
Brandon Minnick (57:11):
With fantastic advice. I appreciate his so much
coming on the show, Michael.
Hopefully, we've inspiredsomebody out there to get
started, start searching foryour local user groups take
advantage of this open sourceworld we live in, or you can get
free tools. So Michael, foranybody listening who wants to
keep up with you followeverything you're working on?
(57:34):
Where can they find you? Online.
Michael Staib (57:39):
So first, you can naturally follow me off on
Twitter if you want. But if youwant to, even if it's your first
contribution to open source, ifyou want to get into open
source, start with us start withcherry cream. We have a lot of
very interesting projects. Soyeah, try out. And we are very
(58:00):
open and there's we acceptanybody who wants to help I
Brandon Minnick (58:06):
love it. Love it. And that's for anybody
listening on the audio podcast.
It's github.com/chili cream.
It's right. Yes, it's a cream CREA M.
Pj Metz (58:23):
It doesn't taste good, but it is a great thing to be a
part of.
Michael Staib (58:30):
Yeah, my wife is British. So that's all I have to
Brandon Minnick (58:37):
say it's truly been a pleasure. Thanks for
joining us on the podcast thisweek. And thank you for
listening. We're actually takinga break for the rest of the
year. So you won't see me and PJagain until January. But we
already have a couple guestsqueued up so make sure to
subscribe make sure to tune backin and we will see you next
(58:59):
year.
limited edition.
Limited Edition Music Intro
Brandon Minnick (02:11):
we keep getting copyright claims,
Pj Metz (02:13):
even though we use methods to do it. We did
everything right and we arebeing unfairly.
Brandon Minnick (02:22):
It's right.
Well, you got the copyright andeverything.
Pj Metz (02:26):
Welcome to the show we're complaining.
Brandon Minnick (02:30):
That's right.
Yeah. Welcome back to ape. It'severybody, the show where we
interview the people behind thetech. I'm your host Brandon
Minnick. And with me as always,DJ, Matt's DJ.
Pj Metz (02:43):
Listen, my weeks Great.
It's only Tuesday. But I'mreally excited because this is
my last full week before I takesome PTO for December. Because
next week, so this is first offan exciting moment for me. For
those of you who are justhearing me for the first time, I
have a former high schoolteacher who got into tech in May
of this year, after learning tocode with a with Brandon and
(03:07):
Chloe and the rest of the techcommunity on Twitter. Everyone
helped me learn really, but Iwas afraid I'm like I'm getting
out of teaching. I'm losing outon winter off. I'm losing out on
summers off, I'm losing out onall this time off that comes to
teaching. No, the company hasunlimited PTO, and my boss was
like, Hey, I'm taking two weeksat Christmas so I can spend the
(03:29):
holidays with my family. I waslike you we can do that. And she
was like, yeah, like I'm notgoing to be here you should be
here that was like this isgreatness. Very
Brandon Minnick (03:45):
Microsoft for December's are dormant. And
basically, I've learned over thelast couple years of working
here that you just don'tschedule anything for December
you have any deadlines, or ifyou have any, like critical
meetings and milestones. getthem done before giving holiday
(04:08):
here in the US, which is the endof November, or scheduled for
January because yeah, yeah, welike to take a well deserved
break. And even yesterday, mywife and I were chatting about
look, what do we want to do? Andso we've we've, we're doing a
we're doing a road trip tosomewhere warmer.
Pj Metz (04:29):
Awesome. What's the address of where you're going to
be staying so we can all findyou.
Brandon Minnick (04:34):
Yeah. My week's been good. But speaking of
which, this is our last episodeof eight bits for the year. So
speaking of well deserved timeoff, we'll be back in full force
in January. But stay tunedbecause we already have a bunch
of amazing guests queued up.
Pj Metz (04:55):
Absolutely, absolutely.
Absolutely. And very excited forus. Today and like, I'm
interested to get into it, Idon't have a lot to talk about.
I ran a half marathon. I'mshowing it off here.
gratulations. I've got the metalback here. Took me two hours and
50 minutes, I was out of 2000plus participants, I was in the
(05:17):
last 100 across the finish line.
But look, I did it still counts.
I can still say I ran it. Andthe only reason I bring it up is
because I know branded, you alsoare training for one. I'm
excited for that. That's an zetthe Napa marathon.
Brandon Minnick (05:36):
Napa Valley marathon in March. That's right.
Pj Metz (05:39):
I might have to come out to support you in that just
because I know how much a halfmarathon hurt and you're twice
as much as me. So I need to bethere to cheer for you and like
meet you at all the spectatorspots.
Brandon Minnick (05:52):
That'd be awesome. I mean, yeah, after the
show, I'm literally runningafter do a seven mile warmup.
And then I do three to fourmiles at my training pace, which
will be like seven minute 32ndmile or eight minute mile. So
yeah, after you do a casualSeven Mile warm up. For those
Pj Metz (06:13):
of you listening, you can't see but my eyes are the
size of dinner plates right now,when he said seven mile warm up
because the longest distance Iever ran and training for my
half was seven. Because I'm bad.
I'm bad at training. Drinkmonster energy drinks. And
that's, you know, not good forme either. But
Brandon Minnick (06:35):
yeah, yeah. I mean, for what it's worth, I
don't I just Google, like how totrain for a marathon. And
usually, there's like a 16 weektraining program that you can
just copy paste. And so I just Ijust blindly follow it. And in
hopes that I'll be able tosurvive on marathon day.
Pj Metz (06:55):
Yeah, man, I'm sure you're gonna be fine. Because
you've got a you don't have theextra heft that I have. So it
takes a lot more energy to push270 pounds than it does to push
you. You live athletic boy, you
Brandon Minnick (07:15):
got the new Nikes. Oh, to help you cheat.
Pj Metz (07:19):
Oh, is it the ones that are banned?
Brandon Minnick (07:22):
I think they're technically legal. But rules
were made after they werealready used in like record
setting races. So they kind ofmake them legal. And they're
incredible. Like, you can feelit pushing you. And you kind of
have to change your stride whenyou run with them to like, take
full advantage of it. But onceyou figure it out, it's like you
almost feel it's like Boydenboing boing.
Pj Metz (07:45):
It is fears that the tech industry is taking this
amazing places. And that leadsme to think about a tech in
general. And that's the point ofthe show, right, Brandon?
Brandon Minnick (07:57):
Absolutely. And we have such a great guest to be
a disservice to be chattingabout ourselves any further. Our
guest today I've known him for acouple years, we kind of live in
same tech circles with mobileapp development with Graph QL.
But speaking of Graph QL, he isthe founder of chili cream. One
(08:19):
of the most well known companiesfor making Graph QL services in
dotnet. Welcome to the show,Michael. Stay fed. Hi, guys.
It's so so good to see you. Foranybody that doesn't know
Michael and I are actually justhanging out together in person.
We got to see each other inPrague a couple weeks ago at a
(08:40):
conference called Update. ButMichael, for anybody who doesn't
know you, who are you in? Whatdo you do?
Michael Staib (08:48):
Yeah, so who am I? Yeah, I'm Mike Stipe, as
Brent already introduced me. AndI'm a vivid dotnet developer for
I would say, for the last 20years. And I really love open
source. So I'm an open sourcedeveloper, and got actually into
(09:13):
open source. Because of mybrother, he dragged me into it
doing free work for others. And,yeah, and then at some point, I
met Graph QL for the technology,when Facebook introduced it, and
started an open source project.
And that's actually how I gotinto touch at one point with
(09:35):
Brendan. Awesome.
Brandon Minnick (09:41):
Yeah, let's do a quick describer cuz I'm sure
we'll be talking about Graph QLa lot. For anybody who doesn't
know Graph QL what what is it?
And maybe, how does it compareto what we know is rest?
Michael Staib (09:59):
Yeah, so Graph QL was introduced by a company
called Facebook, I think most ofus know this company. And they
actually introduced Graph QL asa way to fix the issues that
they had with their first mobileapplication. So when they
initially released theirFacebook apps for mobile, they
(10:21):
got a lot of criticism. And,yeah, I remember these crappy
apps, but do it the wrong way.
They just just they just usedwhat they know. So HTML and
standard rest, cause they putthis all together, essentially,
in a browser frame in an app.
(10:43):
Actually, what do you do today,a lot of mobile apps today are
made with React or stuff likethat. But what they found out is
that back then it really didn'tperform, because we had rubbish,
3g networks. And rest is notvery optimized for the mobile
(11:06):
use case, because we have thesepredefined. Pre predefined back
back ends where we havepredefined requests. And that
means we in the end, willconsume a lot more data than we
actually need for our mobiledevices. So that's when three
developers in Facebook came upwith something called Graph
(11:29):
square, which essentially givesthe consumer of API's the power
to ask for what you want. Sothat's the short version of
graph.
Brandon Minnick (11:41):
Yeah, it's really that's that's why I, when
I first thought, I fell in lovewith it, because as a mobile app
developer, myself, I know thepains of having to a trust the
users internet connection,users, cellular data plans are
constantly switching betweencell phone towers, especially if
you're moving through the cityon a bus, or maybe then you go
(12:03):
underground on a train. Internetconnections can't be trusted.
And so you want to make as fewinternet requests as possible.
And yeah, I remember the firsttime learning about Graph QL. Or
I was like, wow, instead ofmaking a dozen API requests, I
can just make one. So my apploads faster. I use less of my
(12:27):
user cellular data plan, like,yes, give it to me,
Michael Staib (12:33):
is really important. If you, if you if you
show it to front end developers,it's, it's it says it's us. So
they just say just see it, tryit a bit out. And then they say,
Oh, I don't want to do anythingelse anymore. I'm just doing
graph bear from now. But, butfor back end developers, it's
(12:54):
sometimes scary. It's like,okay, now everybody can ask for
what they want. So everybody canarbitrarily grow in my backend.
So people get a bit freaked. Butit's actually not. not that
scary when you get into it.
Brandon Minnick (13:11):
Oh, I can.
Yeah, I've heard the same, thesame concerns. But talk about
let's, let's let's zoom out alittle bit, because Because
Graph QL is definitely todaysomewhat zooming out. It's it's
the future. We're on the videopodcasts zooming out. Also, not
just metaphorically. But uh,yeah, let's, let's go way back
(13:34):
is Michael, you haven't beenworking on Graph QL your whole
life. And on apex, we love toknow, the people behind the tech
and how you got into it. So ifwe go way back, when did you
first start coding or gettinginto computers getting into
tech?
Michael Staib (13:55):
Yeah, I often think that's, that's different
for my site. So I'm not 40. So Iactually be going on my 42 now
in the summer. So it's reallydifferent. Yeah, yes. On the 20
years since my birthday, so sentme a GitHub star as the
president. That's right.
Pj Metz (14:20):
Right, y'all. Right there. So you because earlier
you said 20 years ago, right. Soat 2022 is when you got started
in tech. Did you start in that'dbe college age. Did you get
introduced to it in college backin the 90s? How I
Michael Staib (14:38):
I have a zigzag way I would say. So I actually
got into computers with aroundsix because my my father was an
engineer. And we we had thesebig IBM machines. And so I got
into programming very early. Dueto my farther, but into
(15:03):
professional development, I getaround 20. And in Germany, we
have several ways to get intoyour job. So you don't have to
have a college degree in thebeginning. I actually started
with something. How would wetranslate that into English,
(15:23):
it's it's way actually learn onthe job in the beginning. But
it's more formalized, you haveschool school system, set their
up and you, you learn computerscience on the job. And I
actually did my college way backafter that in the evenings, so
(15:48):
I'm not there to stay and not Ididn't take the straight way
into college
Pj Metz (15:57):
fairs. The Straight Way is is the non zigzag way is, I
think, the less fun path.
Because oftentimes, it's thatzigging and zagging that gives
you something outside ofeveryone else's experience, that
becomes what makes you notvaluable, because like, you
know, we're not commodities, butlike, what gives you insight
into things that you otherwisewouldn't? Like? You know, I'd
(16:18):
say that Brandon, of the threeof us might have the most
straight line in the tech. Buteven he will tell you that no, I
was over here and engineering.
And I was over here on cruiseships working on Comm systems
and I was doing server stuffthat wasn't really quite what I
do. Now, you know, that Zigzagis what I mean, if the journey
(16:41):
if the point of a journey is tosee things along the way, then
the Zigzag is gonna make for abroader journey and nothing you
bring more to the table. And soyour experience, so I would say,
you know, it sounds to me, itsounds like you're saying like,
Oh, I I had to go here and thenI had to go here that zigzag,
that's fine. We like that,especially on this show. We love
(17:01):
that.
Michael Staib (17:03):
It's, it's the problem, I think, in today's
world is that you expect a 20year old to know what he wants
to do. So I was 20. I was notsure if I really wanted to do
computer science because thiswas a hobby for me. So I did it.
And I essentially grew up atstartup in, in Germany. So
(17:27):
technical, technology wise, workwise, I grew up at a startup
where just did it for fun, justprogrammed. And I didn't want to
go to college yet because Ithought I really wanted to work
to mess around with stuff. Andalso do parties wants to do. So
(17:54):
I took this this detour anddropped out of of my school back
then went to that startup. Andyeah, did a lot of work. Work
there learned a lot. I have tosay I learned a lot about how to
(18:14):
start a company how to how toget projects done. I wouldn't
say that I learned cleanconcepts. In the beginning it
was more we need to get thisfeature out. We need to get this
done. So you did did everythingto just make things happen. But
it's good to have experiencedthat.
Brandon Minnick (18:36):
Absolutely.
Yes. You mentioned when you wereyounger, I think you said six
years old. Kind of got intocomputers with the help of your
your engineering father. WhatWhat was that first computer? Do
you remember? What you wereworking on?
Michael Staib (18:54):
Wasn't not an IBM do at 16 I don't know if
somebody knows that. Do it 6pmand has two floppy disks. And
the thing that mesmerized me ismy father this AutoCAD program
where he essentially did didplannings for for for system,
(19:15):
but it could draw a spaceshuttle. It took I think it took
five minutes to actually draw.
But it was like this thing cancreate that the space shuttle
and I really wanted to createalso my stuff that I wanted to
draw essentially on the screen.
And my father essentially showedme and told Pascoe how to use
(19:41):
the line commands to draw stuffnot in AutoCAD, but with with
with programming commands. Andthat's essentially how I got
into programming. And thatfaster fascinated me that you
could create something withthese devices. Yeah, and it's
still an empowering Feeling toprogress.
Pj Metz (20:02):
That seems to be a common theme among a lot of the
guests that we talked to. Andeven just people I talked to in
tech, the idea of you discoverthat the machine when you tell
it a certain password or secretcode will create something, and
that you've been involved inmaking something brand new, is a
lot of the excitement that getspeople into tech. And it's, oh,
(20:23):
well, if I can make a spaceship,or if this can make a spaceship,
what can I make it do? And I dowant to highlight that that
tendency of early tech to belike, we're going to show you
this picture, but we're going todraw it right in front of you
with like lines and colors andshapes. And I love the idea of
like, the system's like, it'slike the machine is drawing. You
(20:43):
don't see that enough anymore.
Michael Staib (20:46):
Yeah, it's it.
Also, we don't build themachines. When I look at Tech
today, like my son, or mydaughters, they grew up with
this device. So they, theyreally did digital natives, but
they don't build their iPads.
They just get these machines andthey work. And, yeah, we built
(21:08):
them essentially back thenbuild. Try to get maybe a new
graphics card in there. And thenI destroyed a lot of computers
in my family.
Pj Metz (21:19):
Brandon, did you ever?
Did you ever brick a computer ormess up a computer in your house
when you were growing up whenyou were messing with it?
Unknown (21:27):
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, I
Brandon Minnick (21:28):
did the same thing. Where? Yeah, you want to
buy a new graphics card? Or? Ithink the one time I really did
some damage was I bought a newpower supply.
Pj Metz (21:38):
Over you at this?
Brandon Minnick (21:41):
Oh, probably teenager. Yeah. But
Pj Metz (21:46):
old enough to know, like, this is what it's called
unable to find it. Maybe notdoing that on your own. But
yeah, put a new power supply inmom and your mom's like, sure.
Brandon Minnick (21:58):
Yeah, well, then you just kind of guessing
check. Like, you know, how doyou connect the power supply to
the motherboard? Like, here'ssome pins. Let's see if this
works. But yeah, when you're,when you're dealing with
electricity, you don't reallywant to guess a check. Because
if you get it wrong, sometimes,
Pj Metz (22:17):
yeah, sometimes it's a little bit more dangerous. Oh,
bad car, Bob said. I took a CPUoff board and put it back and it
didn't turn on afterwards.
Michael Staib (22:28):
Yeah, to think of thing.
Pj Metz (22:31):
Totally normal. You're in good company, Bob. So at a
young age, you're, you're youtalked about putting together
computers six years old, you getthis first machine? You said it
was a hobby even going intocollege? What are some of the
languages what are some of thethings you were doing as a hobby
(22:52):
in your in your teenage years.
Michael Staib (22:54):
So I started, I started with to Pascal, but that
essentially what was what myfather could do. But then also
went in queue basic. So thebasic, basic dos programming
things that came basically forfree. But I also did some
Delphi. And then in 2002, camethe first betas out of Microsoft
(23:22):
dotnet. And I did all by then Idid already a bit of Java, like
several programming and stuff,messing around with that. But
Microsoft TechNet was like thisnew stuff. And that really got
me although it was rubbish inthe beginning, the idea behind
(23:44):
it, and yet the perspectivewhere it could go was amazing. I
think it was it just got towhere it had to be when Moodle
came out. And it was then youcould run it on Linux, you know,
with dotnet quad. went evenfurther, you can run it
everywhere. Now, on a RaspberryPi you don't you don't you're
(24:06):
not limited anymore.
Pj Metz (24:08):
Those early days, man like it really like I remember,
like when you're talking aboutdotnet and what you're building
with dotnet in, you know,2002 2003 this is still where
the internet is like the.combubble just happened. So people
thought the internet was done.
And it was stuff. But like, thisis a unique era that we're
(24:31):
talking about here. This isstill Angel Fire in geo cities
and these like there's a vibe tothat time period, you know. But
so you're talking about startingwith dotnet. And those early
days, did you start buildingwith it like pretty quickly, or
is it something that you saw andcame back to later?
Michael Staib (24:53):
Yeah, remember?
So So Microsoft was looking forbeta testers and you could order
a CD I mean, today you justdownload it right. But they that
you could order a CD, you couldsign up and they sent you a CD
with dotnet on it. And VisualStudio beta for dotnet. It was.
It was it was great. I mean, ifyou go further back here, you've
(25:15):
got windows and floppies. Yeah,I think kids today don't don't
appreciate these days anymore.
These days,
Pj Metz (25:23):
more floppy disks, that's for sure.
Michael Staib (25:27):
Yeah, but I but I got these, I think it was three
CDs with Visual Studio on adotnet framework on it. And I
started installing it and, andjust playing around for that.
And here was pretty easy to getin because they they copied a
lot of the concepts of Java. Soyou can kind of you you could
(25:49):
get started very quickly withit. And then I tried to put it
in projects I was working on.
And try to find a use case forit. So just to keep using it.
And kids were essentially gets agood stack. It worked. And I, at
one point ended up at a companycalled red dot, which was a web
(26:12):
content management company,which fits perfectly in this
comm dot bubble, where you hadall these CMS companies building
these web CMS. And yeah, Iworked at Red Dot and we were I
think twice bought by first theCanadian company. And then
(26:35):
another Canadian company. Yeah,so yeah, it was it was fun. It
was fun to see all these verytiny companies coming up with
similar ideas. Like making useof the web. I think web 2.0 was
(26:55):
the term that everybody lovedback then. It was it was a
great, great time.
Brandon Minnick (27:04):
Yeah, it's funny that you mentioned red
dot, I didn't I didn't know youworked there. But yeah, I
remember one of my first or myfirst internship, I worked in IT
for Walt Disney World inOrlando. And we actually were
looking for a new CMS system.
And remember the red dot vendorscoming in? And so I don't I
(27:25):
don't remember if we bought itor not. I wasn't that important.
I was just kind of happy to beinvited to the meeting as an
intern. But that's so cool tothink you might have been
working there. Well, we werelooking to buy and your product.
Why didn't you?
Pj Metz (27:45):
Yeah.
Brandon Minnick (27:47):
Honestly, we probably did. I remember. Like I
said, like, I was an intern. SoI didn't get to make any
decisions. Even if I did I, Iwas only there for three months.
But I remember being at the topof the list. I think it was
between like, do we just makeour own or yeah, do we go with
this third party vendor? Butyeah, yeah. That's
Michael Staib (28:11):
that's that, by the way, fits also perfectly to
that work back then. We builtour own CMS, we do it on. And
most of these projects crashedand burned. And yeah, took a lot
of money with them. Buteverybody was building a CMS
back then.
Pj Metz (28:31):
I got stuck on something you said the idea of
Visual Studio showing up on likea CD. And I just activated this
thing in my brain of like,that's how you used to get
anything you had to go and getsomething physical that
contained it. And so I typed aVisual Studio to 1000s. And I've
(28:52):
got an eBay listing here. Andyou can buy Microsoft Visual
Studio 6.0 Enterprise Edition.
For what I think is 108. Yeah,$187. US, but it's three CD
system right here. And for thoseof you who will be listening to
the podcast later, yeah, it itlooks like the Visual Studio
logo, except, like instead ofthe flat edges where it's like a
(29:16):
flat infinity sign. It lookslike a straight up number eight
turned on inside like a realinfinity sign. But it doubles.
It's the double CD case. It'sthat typical 2000s where it's
very shiny, and it's got like aghost of an image on it rather
than a full image on it. There'sa key that you need on the back.
(29:36):
That is only I think it's only11 digits total. Here we can't
see the key just so you know,they blocked it with a pen cap.
But you can guess amazing
Brandon Minnick (29:55):
yeah, yeah, it's very, very spoiled
nowadays. It's like, if you wantto do anything, try anything.
You just go to the website,download install, if that's even
required, you know, a lot ofstuff you can do just in your
browser. But yeah, back in theday, you had to you had to order
stuff, you had to pay for it.
They had to pay for me. So like,Yeah, I'll bet this cost similar
(30:19):
amount back then. Right?
Michael Staib (30:24):
You think about?
Did anybody have you guys hadMSDN subscription back then? Or
worked for a company that up?
Because the MSDN subscription,you get got a huge package with
hundreds of DVDs with everyproduct. So essentially, if you
go online, and look at your MSDNsubscription, you see all those
(30:47):
products that you have there.
You got them on CD, everything,and every update was shipped to
you. So every I think everythree months, you got a new
package for you.
Pj Metz (31:00):
I understand why waterfall. Work that because you
literally had to ship theproducts to people, you couldn't
just update it. You're like, thenewest updates here. Get the
Postal Service ready? Here wego. And for the young people,
yeah, that's why it's calledshipping. That's shipping, we're
(31:21):
gonna choose a new product likeno, we're not actually putting
it on a on in the UPS truck. Butyeah, that's where the term
comes from. And also the littleSave button. That's the floppy
disk we've been talking aboutbefore for the 20 Somethings
that surely tune into ourpodcast. Yeah. I love it. So
Michael Staib (31:39):
go ahead, Michael. Yeah, it's it's also
just to throw in terms, if youhear about Apple just has a goat
master of iOS or something.
That's essentially the goldmaster that they sent down to
the factory that produced theCDs from that goat master.
Pj Metz (31:59):
Amazing. Absolutely.
But, Brandon, you were talkingabout how nowadays you just go.
And if you want to trysomething, they're like, Yeah,
try it here. Here's, you know,you can use Visual Studio Code,
download it for free, startusing it now. And this idea of
creating things so people cantry it back, then you had to buy
the software, there wasn't,you'd get a demo, but wasn't a
(32:21):
lot. And that really ties intoopen source, there's just a
shift at some point where itbecame, we want you to be able
to try it, we want you to beable to do it, because you might
be able to help us make itbetter. And that's really what's
exciting about modern tech andMichael, you are passionate
(32:41):
about open source. And and thatreally takes us to a to this
link that we've been postingbefore to chili cream. So what's
Yeah, cream.
Michael Staib (32:57):
So to free myself, so we started. Okay, I
have to go a bit back,
Pj Metz (33:04):
take us back or paint a picture.
Michael Staib (33:07):
So essentially, all my all my things I did in
work, I actually always didtogether with my brother. So my
brother and me actually workedon every company together. I
think there's just one companywe didn't go and work to add
together. And my brother wasalways the front end guy. So he
built always the UI stuff. And Iwas the backend guy. So
(33:30):
perfectly perfect match. And atone point, because he does all
this JavaScript stuff, hestarted with this thing called
open source free software andstuff and build open source
components for something likejQuery. If somebody remembers
jQuery was a thing back then.
And he built, he startedbuilding plugins for that. And
(33:53):
that's essentially how he pulledme in to this open source space.
And then there were otherdriving factors like mono came
out, you had now some guy thatwas producing an open source
dotnet stuff. And that really,they really triggered me I
(34:14):
wanted to break free from thethings we adopted was confined
to on Windows and start startdoing open source software. And
it took me a couple of projects.
So I I didn't just start withhot chocolate. I started with
smaller projects that were justtrying out putting something,
(34:38):
putting something in the open,let's work together with with
people and try something out.
And that works quite well onGitHub. I think GitHub
essentially created the platformwhere you collaborate on there
were others and I tried theseothers. I don't remember the max
of complexity. I think it was myfirst
Brandon Minnick (35:05):
GitHub before GitHub.
Michael Staib (35:07):
Yeah, it was Microsoft's try to produce a
space like GitHub. It didn'twork. But everybody moves to
GitHub. And then GitHub became apart of Microsoft. So it did. In
the end, they got their opensource base. Up there,
Pj Metz (35:27):
they sure did it just million dollars.
Michael Staib (35:36):
Yeah, then then, at some point, I was on a
project with my brother and thiscompany called Swiss live, I'm
still contracting for them. Andthey said, We want to overhaul
our whole back end API's and dosomething called Graph square.
(35:58):
And I said, what is that? Isthat all data? And I actually
chastise people for saying thatbut back then I was in that this
this person that's sat there,and the teammate said, You go
explore Graph QL.
(36:19):
Then I SMC went, and I looked atthe options that we have it was
I think, there was Graph QLdotnet. One of the really first
dose of them, so it was a, theywere just starting. And I looked
at that, and I said, I don'twant to do graph graphs like
this. And I essentially wentback to the team lead and said,
(36:44):
let's let me build that. I needtwo weeks for it. And then we
have about
Brandon Minnick (36:52):
two minutes. It wasn't two weeks, right.
Pj Metz (36:57):
We finished in two weeks.
Michael Staib (36:59):
It took it took I think it took me half a year to
have something that that kind ofworked. But on the first
presentation, it completelybroke together. And I really had
to tell my colleagues okay, Icome back in two more weeks,
maybe took a year. Product.
Yeah, but that but thatessentially started this thing.
(37:28):
In the beginning, we called theproject I think project Zeus,
but we kind of didn't like that.
And my and I'm a passionateStarbucks coffee drinker. And
every time I go with my sonthere, he wants a hot chocolate.
So
Pj Metz (37:50):
did my bros out on purpose. Brandon, hold on,
Brandon held a Starbucks cup? Isit hot chocolate?
Brandon Minnick (37:57):
No is a venti flat wait. I'm not
Pj Metz (38:00):
even a mocha, mocha.
Partially hot chocolate.
Brandon Minnick (38:05):
I just got back from Europe. So I've been waking
up at 5am Every morning, and Ihave nothing else to do. So I
just walk over to Starbucksaround the corner and I grab it.
Biggest coffee I can get
Pj Metz (38:19):
somebody Michael, tell us more about that. So your son
loves hot chocolate. And thatleads us to
Michael Staib (38:25):
yeah, my open source project that started then
we essentially named our graphboys ever they know chocolate.
Because I love I love to stuffthat my brother actually did in
JavaScript, they just have sillynames. And I thought, actually,
it's it's random. Like if you goand do an open source component
(38:45):
in dotnet, like let's say GraphQL. Then either people call a
Graph QL dotnet and Graph QL. Oryou, I don't know, graphics link
or something like that. And Ithought it's kind of Yeah, a bit
boring. And I loved how theJavaScript guys do it. And my
(39:06):
brother just said, let's call ithot chocolate, because we all
were just at Starbucks, and thenwe went with it. And from there
came up with other silly nameslike chili cream, like a softer
bakery around that.
Pj Metz (39:22):
I love strawberry shake. And finally, the one I'm
thinking is pretty cool. BananaCake Pop.
Michael Staib (39:32):
And that's, that's because at the Build
Conference in in San Francisco,they had banana cakepops at
Starbucks. And actually, whenyou went to the Microsoft Store,
in the north storm that they hadthere, they have these banana
cake pops from Starbucks and youcould get some free I don't know
(39:55):
which which year it was, but itwas one of the last MSBs at San
Francisco.
Pj Metz (40:02):
I love a good lesson.
All this all this talk aboutlike cake pops and Starbreeze
shakes and hot chocolate. It'sgot me, it got me hungry. And
that reminds me that I need totake an ad break real quick. So
we'll be back after a quick wordfrom our sponsors, y'all. Hi, I
if you're hearing my voice, thatmeans you've been listening to
(40:22):
or watching eight bits withBrandon and PJ. And we're here
to talk to you about yourproduct. And how it can help you
in your life by to do whateveryour product does. So if you're
an avid listener of the show, oryou watch us on Twitch, then you
will know that your product yourproduct is right for you that's
(40:46):
right so
Michael Staib (41:05):
actually stop ours could have sponsored this
show.
Pj Metz (41:08):
They should we'll reach out to them. That's right
Starbucks
Brandon Minnick (41:11):
use an email Hello at eight bits.tv or truly
anybody? We are a tech focuspodcast. If you'd like to
represent your tech producthere, let us know we're not
looking to become millionaires.
We just want to be able to payour server costs at the end of
the year.
Pj Metz (41:29):
Core Bob mentioned Mountain Dew finally sponsored I
wish you'll know today. Not akickstart Mountain Dew you're
losing me you're losing me. CoreBob says products and services
are the goodness they are thegoodness that's right.
Brandon Minnick (41:49):
So So Michael, you start building this, this
empire of products and noticechili cream products known as
hot chocolate strawberry shake,Nana cake pop, when what does
this for you turn fromsomething? If this is just a
(42:10):
cool open source tool into maybeI can create a company out of
this?
Michael Staib (42:16):
Yeah, and so we're actually two years into
the project because it is a lotof work. And I my main, my main
my main focus or the peoplecontacting me, and now
contacting me because I, I dothis kind of thing. They
(42:37):
essentially want people from theproject to help them build their
solutions, or have them scaletheir solutions, revenue them.
So then started shifting intothat direction. And we thought
about Yeah, actually, it's alsofor us, we don't need to get
rich, but it would be cool justto pay our bills for doing this,
(43:03):
so essentially earn our moneyfrom the open source project.
And, yeah, we started steeringthis community, and trying to
think about things how we canmake money for ourselves from
that without losing these opensource components. So we are
(43:25):
putting a lot of emphasis thatwe want to keep that as an under
the MIT license, we are notgoing to change that this will
always be open source. But thereare ways ways like that come
natural, like people asking youcan you help me on my project,
we we are willing to pay forthat. And this is essentially
(43:46):
how we got into making it more acompany around it. And in
August, we finally filed ourcompany. So we are now a
Delaware company, becauseDelaware is very tax friendly.
Pj Metz (44:01):
Delaware. Listen, I can't believe how much big stuff
is in Delaware, despite beingsuch a little state.
Brandon Minnick (44:11):
I do have a consulting company that's
founded in Delaware.
Pj Metz (44:14):
That's right. Thanks, Delaware. I don't know why. Like
that's just the advice. That'sjust what you do. Yeah,
congratulations in August.
That's only I forgot how to domath there for a second a few
months ago,
Michael Staib (44:32):
a few months ago.
Until then we essentially Yeah.
Money through contracting. So weour core team of three and then
we have like the corecontributor team around that
have another six persons thatthat are only working on stuff.
And we three core persons refermy brother and pasca essentially
(44:58):
started billing more More thancome into a company and building
tools around that, like bananacake pop, which we hope, at one
point will give us morestability to live on. But, yeah,
it's just trial.
Brandon Minnick (45:15):
Because that's always something that seems
counterintuitive because your,your code is open source, I can
go get it on GitHub, I can go togithub.com/chili griemann. And
there's all the products. And sosomebody outside looking in this
maybe not familiar with the opensource world might think like,
(45:37):
well, that's silly, because thatwould be like Coke, Coca Cola
posting their formula, and thenPepsi could just steal it. So
what, what is that businessmodel around open source
software? And have we moved awayfrom necessarily the code and
the software being that mainproduct?
Michael Staib (46:02):
Yeah, I mean, think about it, like the dotnet
code is on GitHub, it's opensource, so you don't have you
don't necessarily earn moneyfrom selling dotnet to somebody
the same as for us. We don'tearn if somebody has a hot
chocolate sell. I don't want toknow that it's there. But we
(46:23):
earn money with the thingsaround that people needing
specialists on that. People arebuying workshops with that with
us, or also enterprise servicesaround that, like advanced
telemetry, and stuff like that.
So you can earn a lot of moneywith things around open source
(46:45):
and keep actually, the wholesoftware free. And if somebody
doesn't want to pay then doesn'thave to, there is no license
that you have to pay. It's anMIT license, you can fork it,
you can use it. And I think thatis I like that more like, when I
use dotnet. And something goeswrong, I just look at the code.
(47:09):
And if I find an issue, I canessentially fix it and do a PR.
So it's it's it's much a muchopener approach to software
engineering, but still there ismoney that you can earn around
these things like Microsoft withAzure around that they don't own
from dotnet. But with thingsaround
Pj Metz (47:36):
it. Yeah. Go ahead.
Brandon Minnick (47:41):
Yeah, sure.
Yeah, I've noticed that similartread, because if you look at
even the biggest tech companiestoday, versus 10 years ago, 10
years ago, if you wanted toupdate to say windows 10, you
had to buy a Windows 10 license,or Apple was doing the same
thing with Mac, where if youwanted to update to Snow
Leopard, you had to buy the newversion of Snow Leopard. And it
(48:04):
feels like the industry hasgotten to a point where the
software itself, it doesn'tdoesn't bring in enough money to
warrant that high barrier toentry. And if you get people
onto your platform, then you canmore easily keep them there more
(48:27):
easily. Introduce them to otherservices you offer. And, yeah,
it's a common trend I'm seeingwith the open source world
where, yeah, hey, let's makethis product open source.
Because a enterprise companiesactually love that. Because that
means if for some reason,there's an open source project
(48:48):
that the maintainers decide theydon't want to do anything
anymore. That's okay, becausethe source code is still there.
So like you said, they can forkit, they can still maintain all
their services. But at the sametime, having worked at
enterprises, they are very, veryconcerned about support. And
(49:09):
we'll pay a lot of money forsupport. And I remember when I
worked at a company calledHarris, our support contracts
were always more valuable thanthe initial installation
contracts. And it was always,you know, quite literally, we
(49:29):
would, when we would bid forcontracts, we would take a hit
on the front end, so maybeinstall it at a loss, but then
say, hey, we want to supportthis for 10 years, and here's
what we're going to charge youevery year for 10 years for that
support. And at that point,it's, that's that's where you
(49:50):
actually make back that money.
And so, yeah, I'm seeing that alot with the open source world
where we support contracts. Forthings like, if an enterprise
needs to get a hold of you orone of your engineers at chili
cream, you can guarantee themsomething like 24 hour support
or 72 hours. Exactly. And you'llrespond back and help them fix
(50:14):
any problems. And that's almostmore valuable to them than had
they paid for the product.
Michael Staib (50:22):
Exactly. And that's essentially how we, how
we make money with it. And,yeah, I mean, we have like a
community support. So peoplethat go into our platform, they
can just join us on Slack andget a lot of support for free.
But it's it's the best effortthing. And companies want to
(50:43):
have this. Yeah, they want onereliable, tap on on the
developer
Pj Metz (50:51):
of the platform. Right.
And what's useful about a toolis, do you have access to the
tool? And then do you know howto use the tool? So you got the
software? Cool, if somethinggoes wrong? Do you know how to
fix it? Do you know how to makeit work? And God, I love it.
That's fantastic. This is I'mtaking notes.
Brandon Minnick (51:12):
Early, you know, when you think about, you
know, big, big online retailers,like Amazon and Walmart, they
know how much revenue they makeper minute. And so literally, if
the, if the website just goesdown for a couple minutes,
they're out millions of dollars.
And so for them to pay for asupport contract, where within
(51:33):
24 hours, you'll have experts onthe phone or on the on the
servers fixing it. That's almosta no brainer. To them. It's this
insurance policy that says, hey,this website instead of going
down for a week, worst casescenario will have a backup and
running in a day.
Pj Metz (51:55):
If anything goes down for a week does not exist
anymore. Facebook was down forthree days, wasn't it? But it
wasn't two days. It
Michael Staib (52:08):
was partly Pompey, they came
Brandon Minnick (52:11):
Oh, yeah. When they lock servers already
forgotten that they had tobreak.
Michael Staib (52:19):
And the issue were that they almost wrecked on
Cloudflare. Because it becausethey get got all these
additional requests than thatthen again checked for failing
DNS. Yet we are running on
Pj Metz (52:37):
was it a day? It was only a day. My brain remembers
it as like, half a week. Maybe?
It was a series today. Yeah, itwas. Your right was it was like
a year long loss of Facebook.
Which might be a good thing forthe world for a little bit. Meta
(52:58):
now, right?
Michael Staib (53:00):
Yeah. I think I think people people, people are
not so concerned about Facebook.
But Instagram is also Facebook.
And that's right.
Brandon Minnick (53:09):
Even WhatsApp.
My wife
Michael Staib (53:10):
was effective.
Yeah, WhatsApp, you're right.
These are the critical thingsnow.
Pj Metz (53:18):
So back to open source, the idea of support and the idea
of like, like, like, stuff'sfree. Now, like, I remember,
Brandon, when we started, whenyou started teaching me to code,
everything was free. Like,here's, here's an IDE, it's
free. Here's Visual Studio, it'sfree. And I was like, I remember
at one point going this crazythat all of this is just free.
(53:41):
But that's kind of what I saidearlier, it has just shifted to
what is valuable is getting morepeople involved. And not just
like in an open source project,it's valuable that you have
support for it. If somethinggoes wrong, if something is not
working, well, the open sourcecommunity can be like, Oh, this
isn't working. I think I know away to make this better, and
(54:02):
they can contribute and thatcontribution. And the desire to
fix things seems to be what ispart of the open source
community. Amazing.
Michael Staib (54:13):
Yeah, that's, that's even. That is a great way
thing. Like when we started, Istarted the project was my
brother. But now we have over100 contributors, people that
are working also on thatplatform.
Pj Metz (54:30):
And that's a good number of contributors to
Brandon Minnick (54:34):
absolutely, yeah, we we only have about five
minutes left, Michael, but I'dlove to get your advice. So
let's say there's somebody outthere right now who similar to
you. They're, they're young,they're they're interested in
technology. They they're notsure if they should go to
(54:54):
college or how to get started.
What would be yourrecommendation to that person?
Michael Staib (55:01):
Yeah, first, I wouldn't worry about making a
big decision. When I'm young, Iwould just go first with the
thing that feels best for you.
That that essentially was washow I did it. And then and then
I just went with the flow. Inorder to get into tech, there's,
(55:22):
there's so many ways, I wouldactually start with open source
from my perspective. And goingto open source projects or going
to user groups will open up alot of other contacts, because
what I have experienced in mylife is that you need to meet
the right people, that that helpyou onboard that it's much
(55:49):
easier than if you strugglealone and try out on your own.
For me, it was always best, thepeople that essentially have
helped me and lifted me like,from my small age on my father,
that guided me into things, thenI had a lot of mentors during my
career. That then helped me.
(56:13):
Yeah, open the right doors. Sodon't worry to make mistakes.
Brandon Minnick (56:20):
Yeah. You mentioned user groups. I know
meetup.com has a lot. That'susually where I found a lot of
fellow developer user groups.
Are there any else you'd like torecommend?
Michael Staib (56:33):
Yes, so I'm involved with my friend, Jose,
who is also who's running thethe user group. So we having a
user group here, but it's alsoon meetup, a lot of dotnet user
groups, that's the space whereI'm at, but the graphical user
groups, JavaScript UI group, sofor, for the user groups for
(56:57):
whatever makes you happy. Sothat's a great place to actually
start and even look at if thatis something that you would like
for Korea, if it's just a hobbyfor you. And then stop
tinkering.
Brandon Minnick (57:11):
With fantastic advice. I appreciate his so much
coming on the show, Michael.
Hopefully, we've inspiredsomebody out there to get
started, start searching foryour local user groups take
advantage of this open sourceworld we live in, or you can get
free tools. So Michael, foranybody listening who wants to
keep up with you followeverything you're working on?
(57:34):
Where can they find you? Online.
Michael Staib (57:39):
So first, you can naturally follow me off on
Twitter if you want. But if youwant to, even if it's your first
contribution to open source, ifyou want to get into open
source, start with us start withcherry cream. We have a lot of
very interesting projects. Soyeah, try out. And we are very
(58:00):
open and there's we acceptanybody who wants to help I
Brandon Minnick (58:06):
love it. Love it. And that's for anybody
listening on the audio podcast.
It's github.com/chili cream.
It's right. Yes, it's a cream CREA M.
Pj Metz (58:23):
It doesn't taste good, but it is a great thing to be a
part of.
Michael Staib (58:30):
Yeah, my wife is British. So that's all I have to
Brandon Minnick (58:37):
say it's truly been a pleasure. Thanks for
joining us on the podcast thisweek. And thank you for
listening. We're actually takinga break for the rest of the
year. So you won't see me and PJagain until January. But we
already have a couple guestsqueued up so make sure to
subscribe make sure to tune backin and we will see you next
(58:59):
year.
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