Adam Jacob
Appearances
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
It's taken us five years to build it, and there's a couple of reasons for that period of time. What we wanted was an order of magnitude better experience than what you could have doing it with the existing tooling. And the existing tooling is pretty good. If you think about trying to be an order of magnitude better, there's just a lot you have to account for.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
And then when it gets down to the ground truth, engineers typing on keyboards, you want to be pretty specific about how what they're doing attaches to that higher-level concept.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
A lot of the metaphors we use to describe businesses and describe software engineering come from the idea of a factory. So they tend to come from factory optimization. So lean, agile, a lot of that stuff was very steeped in Deming. And Deming was doing factory optimization. And so when we talk about it, the metaphors we use very frequently are similar to the ideas we use in factory optimization.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
That metaphor and the way it causes us to think about building companies and teams is bad. It doesn't fit very well to the truth. The truth is people also don't love sports metaphors, but sports, professional sports in particular, are a much better analogy for what it's like to build great software engineering teams.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
These are highly trained teams of experts who work autonomously to achieve an objective, and you have to keep them operating at that high level over a long period of time. You can't observe a team in isolation, so you can't look at a single day's effort from an engineer and predict anything about the outcomes of that engineer's work, right?
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
It just takes time to understand what the actual outcomes of any individual engineering choice or any individual product feature would be. We have to figure out how to teach people to be the best athlete that they can be. In the case of a software engineer, if you think about them the same way you would think about someone on a basketball team, like you gotta train them. I have to drill them.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
I have to give them feedback all the time. I have to be present and talk about their career growth and talk about what makes them a great engineer and what makes them unique as an engineer. And then you gotta figure out how that plays with the other people that they work with in the team. And how do we keep their ability to play the game
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
and keep the context coming to them that they need about how the tactical work that you're asking them to do attaches to that strategic work that's on that roadmap. And so that's how I think about building teams. I think about them literally like I'm assembling a team of professional experts. And what I'm going to do is train them to be the best possible version of themselves they can be.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
And then I'm going to put them on teams where I'm situating people by looking at their strengths and weaknesses and trying to figure out how do I build the strongest possible team to attack these problems.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
Look, there's always pinch points around scale. It doesn't matter who you are or how good you are at the job. You'll just scale will always be painful because there's no real substitute for production load when it comes time to tell you how complex distributed system will work under pressure.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
One of the things that we've had to do in order to make this work is we built that big hypergraph of functions that I mentioned at the top. That thing is literally like a big in-memory graph and the speed of the operations that you can do on that graph and the speed with which we can then recalculate those functions.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
So if you imagine I change a property that then could change hundreds or thousands of other things. How do you calculate what's going to change? Then you need to execute all the functions in the right order. And then you need to apply all of those things back to this big graph so that when I display it to the user, that happens.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
And it all has to happen fast enough that it feels basically like real time. That was a very difficult scaling challenge, right? Because when you look at traditional database technologies, they're all fantastic on some different angle. but they're not quite the right fit.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
And so to get that interactivity and to get the shape of the system correct, we had to do a lot of work basically designing our own in-memory database. And it's super cool. I'm very proud of it. And also, whoa. Those have been a lot of the big sort of scale challenges. You mentioned sort of building for scale.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
And I think in general, the way you build for scale is to try to think about how those distributed systems will work under pressure, and more importantly, how they fail under pressure. If the system's going to break, does it break in predictable ways? And how do you know what they are?
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
If you can understand what those boundaries are between the different components of the system, then you can start to understand predictably, here's the couple of different ways that the system could possibly fail. And then you can look at any individual failure and start to assess what you're going to do about it. There's a great story. I don't know if it's apocryphal or not.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
I think it was Brian Kernaghan and Ken Thompson were pair programming in the early days of Unix and they were trying to fix a bug. And I think Kernaghan was at the keyboard and he was like attaching, attacking this bug. Ken Thompson was standing behind him and he was getting all frustrated.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
And then Thompson had his like eyes closed for a couple of minutes and then opened his eyes and was like, maybe open this file and go to this line number. And there was the bug.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
As I've gotten older and my career's gotten longer, I really have learned to understand what I think he was doing in that moment, which is he was thinking through the boundaries of how the software worked, of the different ways that the different pieces of software interacted with each other, and how could those things possibly interact in order to create the outcome that you're seeing that's wrong.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
And that ability to do that, I think, is the critical thing to figuring out how to help systems scale in the face of failure.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
I'm most proud of the raw ambition of it, which I know sounds ridiculous, but there's just very few moments in your life where you have the permission to just make the best possible thing you can imagine building. And that's what I have been given the permission to do in Building System Initiative. And it's such a gift to be able to do it.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
And I think that I hope people love it as much as I love it. But even if they don't, it doesn't matter because it's the best possible thing I could have done. Do you know what I mean? Like I just there's I couldn't have built better art. If it turns out that you don't like my art, so be it. But it's not because it wasn't the best thing I could build.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
A lot of my life, I feel like I was trying to prove to myself that I was a person who could build products or a person who could build technology or could make things that were useful for other people. And at this stage in my life, I know that's true. I know I'm a person who can do that. And now the question is, what can I do that's the most fun?
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
What can I do that's the most interesting, that's the most impactful, that if it worked would be the greatest thing I could spend my time doing?
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
one of the like core tenants of the company is that we're just wrong all the time and you should just like you just need to accept that you're wrong by default because it makes it a lot easier to make a decision if i don't need you to be right i just need you to choose that's a lot easier bar than being like oh you got to be right all the time i don't need to be right all the time i just need you to adjust
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
Very big one was we were trying to discover how to build this reactive engine that would be able to scale to really large, to conceptually scale to really large graphs and really large infrastructures and applications. And so we built that engine a couple of different times.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
And one of the passes of it, the most recent, not the most recent pass, but the pass right before, used a lot of very old techniques. It looked a lot like an Oracle application from the 90s. A lot of stored procedures and a lot of like smart activity in the database because we're basically building a custom database engine.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
So we embraced that and built a custom database engine inside of Postgres, which on some levels was magnificent. But in the end, it got overwhelmed by the things that always overwhelmed those systems, which is it's a little complicated to deal with. The table structure gets complicated. More complicated performance becomes a problem, not that those are unfixable.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
And so then you had to back up and try again with a completely different architecture, with a very different approach to how everything would work. The important piece of that was we had a moment where we believed that that old engine was going to be good enough to get a couple of customers to experience the product while we were working on this newer engine that we knew would scale better.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
So I split the baby in terms of having the team work on both. So there was a set of people who were... optimizing the old engine, just trying to get it good enough. And another team that was working on what was obviously going to be much better long term and even near term, but was going to take a little longer to build.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
And while I'm glad that we did it because it did allow us to get a little more directed customer feedback, the customer feedback we learned was that it was too slow. We had to just come back to the team and be like, hey, we onboarded this customer. It quickly became too slow to use. So we're not doing that anymore. And it's all hands on deck. Everybody go work on the new engine.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
And that's the way it is. As much as it's about the story of sort of the technical mistake or the failure, I think a lot of those stories really need to be about, like, how quickly did you learn that it was a failure? And then how quickly did you adjust? And how much time did you spend crying over the metaphorical spilled milk?
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
I like to think about software development a little more like art than like science. Like it's a thing that we're creating because that's what we want to see. And then we're observing how other people react to it. And it's in that conversation that the art shapes itself.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
We're just in an exciting minute where the product's basically ready and we're onboarding a first couple of customers to our SaaS platform right now and learning from those customers, like what they need and, and finding new bugs because there's no substitute for real users when it comes to finding bugs. As soon as possible, we're going to just open it up to the whole world.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
Not that long from now, you'll be able to go to the system initiative website and click a button and then you'll have a workspace and you can just start managing infrastructure right away. Those moments are fun and it's fun to ship, but it's also fun because we build a product for operations people and it's all open source.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
And so we can talk about the journey we're on in a really honest way with the people that are coming to use it because they are also people who love to do that kind of thing. I'm looking forward to when we break the platform and we have to like all hop on Discord and fix it in public because those are the people that I love anyway.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
And I know I don't know about you might not be this kind of person, but I'm totally the kind of person who if I could come sit in a Discord channel while the team is troubleshooting a production outage in their production SaaS platform, I would totally hang out.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
And so I'm really looking forward to those interactions and those moments where they finally get to come and play with this platform we've built that we think is really amazing and help us build it into the future and have that experience together of what it's like to bring it into the world. So that's what's next for us. And it's I'm very stoked about it.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
In terms of product, I would say you have people like Marty Kagan, who wrote a book called Inspired. You have Jeff Patton, who has done more for me personally than anybody else has.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
I feel like Jeff gave me my instincts and the things that I intuitively believed about how to build great products, like both the vocabulary and some more technique, like story mapping and those sorts of things that I could use to really bring those things into the world. When I worked at Chef and was the CTO, I got to work with a lot of different CEOs.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
Jesse Robbins, who was the founding CEO of Chef. Mitch Hill, who succeeded Jesse. Barry Crist, who succeeded Mitch. All three of those people taught me so much about building businesses and being in venture capital businesses and building teams. I continue to learn a ton. I have a very well-educated... My wife is Katie Bethel. She's a very impressive human being who does a lot of like...
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
political advocacy and management of large organizations, which is the kind of person who can like look at the power structures in the universe and think about ways to manipulate those power structures to create the outcomes you want to see in the world. And I continue to learn a ton from her and from the sort of people around her.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
Sammy Hagar, who was the second lead singer of Van Halen and himself like a solo star for a long time. I feel like he's really figured out how to be maximum Sammy Hagar all the time in a way that I really appreciate and would like to be.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
As quickly as possible, you need to move from this being your calling and a question of like your identity. Like when you first start in this journey, there's a lot of questions for yourself and from other people about whether you can do it and whether you're good enough or whether you're qualified or whether or not you have enough technique or any of those sorts of questions.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
And then there's that question about who you are as a person, right? Am I a person who can do this? Am I a person who can be an entrepreneur? Am I a person who can do all of that stuff? All of that's very incredibly heavy, right? It's just it's really very emotional and takes a toll on everyone who decides that this is the work that they want to do.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
It took me a long time to realize that this was my profession. And I think the sooner you can turn this into your job and a thing that you can get good at, it's very difficult to decide to be good at becoming the person you hope you could be. That's a it's a pretty big ask.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
But if I ask you to become good at a skill, if I ask you to become good at the skill of managing people or to become good at the skill of thinking about strategy in a company or to become reasonably facile with finance or with any of the hundreds of things you have to do in order to run a startup, those are jobs you can learn how to do enough of and become good enough at that they can become your vocation.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
and the sooner you can figure out how to turn it turn yourself into a professional doing a job instead of a person reaching for an identity the better off you'll be both in the things you can create in the world and also in how it feels to you as you move through the world because you can take that confidence in your skills and in your training and in your capacity to grow and use that as the fuel that moves you through all this difficult journey that sits ahead of you as an entrepreneur
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
Whereas if the fuel you're burning is, am I good enough? Am I smart enough? Will people like me? What happens to my family if I fail? What about my investor? You know, like all of that other stuff is very difficult, but you can put it all aside if this just becomes your vocation.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
What System Initiative is, it's our attempt to rebuild the way that we do DevOps work. Part of my background in technology is once upon a time I wrote a thing called Chef, which did configuration management. Tools like Chef and Puppet and Ansible created a lot of the modern automation that we all use now. So they were like the precursors to things like Terraform and that sort of thing, Kubernetes.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
My title is CEO, but in reality, I love building infrastructure and I love building tools for people who build infrastructure. System Initiative is our attempt to think about what would be a truly massive leap forward in the user experience of building and maintaining these complex infrastructure and application platforms.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
We started about five years ago, and the big difference is basically rather than thinking about all of the software, that the way that we do it now is we have a bunch of different tools that get glued together across the stack, right? So you've got source control and you've got a little bit of automation. Maybe you use Terraform, maybe you use Ansible, maybe you use Chef.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
Maybe you use GitHub and then you use maybe GitHub Actions and GitLab and CI and all this stuff. And you cobble together your pipelines, put together some shape of stuff, and you try to automate all of this work. In truth, though, doing that is pretty not only hard, but the experience of doing it isn't very good.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
So if you ask people who are great at it, like how they feel about their tools, they're proud of them because they work. But the experience of doing it is let's just call it suboptimal. And so what System Initiative does is basically transforms all that stuff up into data rather than code and then takes all of that information and tries to model the world as it is one to one.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
And so the first MVPs of System Initiative started with trying to build systems where we could infer as much about the infrastructure as possible. My name is Adam Jacob. I'm the CEO and co-founder of System Initiative.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
So we build these digital twins of all your digital assets. And then we use that data and we stick it on this big hypergraph of functions. So think of each property of each thing you need to configure or each thing you want to manage or each application you want to describe or whatever it is you need to model.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
And each of those properties is the result of a reactive function that takes other properties as inputs. If I say that this load balancer is configured because it's going to load balance your application and your application exposes itself on a port number, I can use that port number as an input to setting the load balancer's pool up.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
And then if I change the application's port number, it would automatically reconfigure the pool. And then you can fork that into multiple dimensions and do all that stuff. And then we use all of that information in this big hypergraph of functions to deliver a user experience that's much more multiplayer and interactive in real time.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
So we basically allow you to compose your infrastructure in a way that kind of feels like building an architecture diagram. But what it's really doing is driving this huge graph of all these complex functions and then letting you program those functions if you need to. So it's a little more like thinking about infrastructure
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
It's taken us five years to build it. As we're talking to each other, we're onboarding the very first production users. And there's a couple of reasons for that period of time. The big one is just that what we wanted was an order of magnitude better experience than what you could have doing it with the existing tooling. And the existing tooling is pretty good.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
If you think about trying to be an order of magnitude better, there's just a lot you have to account for. I like to think about software development a little more like art than like science. Like it's a thing that we're creating because that's what we want to see. And then we're observing how other people react to it. And it's in that conversation that the art shapes itself.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
And so the first MVPs of System Initiative started with trying to build systems where we could infer as much about the infrastructure as possible. A little like how a lot of people are trying to think about using LLMs now to try to like automate infrastructure.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
We basically built these really high fidelity models with all these tunable parameters and constraints, and then would let you specify the smallest number of constraints. And then we would infer all the rest. So you could say, I need a server that can run Postgres. And we would infer from those statements that you probably meant you wanted to run it in AWS.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
You probably wanted it to be of a particular size, right? We could infer all that behavior. And that initial MVP was pretty cool. The bummer was that in infrastructure, something works or it doesn't, usually because it's quite specific. It's not like you can just swap one thing for another most of the time.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
Usually what makes any individual application work is some specific set of infrastructure choices and configuration. And so you wind up kind of playing whack-a-mole with the constraints. You'd be like, which constraints do I need to specify in order to get the thing I already know that I want?
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
And then from there, I think we've probably evolved and rebuilt and redesigned the fundamental technology probably half a dozen times.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
With venture-backed startups in general, there's a question always of which game really are you playing? For me, the game I want to play and what this company is designed to do, like I want to win. I want to build a product that transforms the whole industry. System Initiative has the potential to do that. Obviously, you can't say you've done it until you have.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
So time will tell if we actually did or do. But some of the hard trade-offs you make are when your ambition is really high and you believe that something should be possible, but no one's ever built a system that works this way or had to think of it this way before.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
You're constantly making trade-offs about how powerful the underlying system will be versus what you can get in front of someone immediately. We had working versions of System Initiative that could generate like Kubernetes configurations and in a pretty delightful way, but it wasn't very programmable, right?
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
You could use it to put together things that we put together for you, but you couldn't really make it do things that were bespoke. You have to make a decision, which is, do you bring the first thing to market where it's not very programmable, the use case is a little more constrained, and what do you learn by bringing that thing into the market?
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
For us, the decision was, what we want is to build a transformative product that we believe people could use across the spectrum from giant banks to small companies, and that they could use this technology to really run the entirety of their infrastructure automation, but eventually the whole of the DevOps stack. So we had to make trade-offs on how much time are you willing to spend?
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
How much effort are you willing to expend? How difficult is it in order to get that vision to come into fruition? Where at each stage, there's an off-ramp where you could build a less powerful thing. You could decide to bring a version of it that is less functional, a version of it that maybe does a little less or is a little less valuable. And you have to decide, is that what you want to do?
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
Or do you want to keep building the more powerful thing that you really believe is transformative in the end? There's tons of smaller technical trade-offs. For example, we started out by modeling Kubernetes. We then learned that while there were plenty of people who had complaints about Kubernetes, overall, the market kind of still was a little in love with it.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
People would be like, yeah, that bothers me, but it's fine. And there were other tools that we could focus on modeling more like the experience of putting together your infrastructure for AWS, for example, where people hated it. When you ask them, how do you feel about the tools that help you manage all your AWS infrastructure? It was like grudging respect was like a pretty good answer.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
And so it made more sense to think about moving the product in that direction because A, it was easier to focus in on, but B, there was a little more discontent with the shape of the tooling that they already had.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
Roadmaps are tricky, right? There's a comedian who had a quote. I wish I remember their name because I'm going to quote them now. I'm sorry that I don't. But when somebody comes to you with a problem, they're usually right about the problem and they're totally wrong about the solution. Conceptually, this is very true in products.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
Like people will tell you if somebody comes, if you have a customer come and tell you what's wrong with your product, they probably come with an answer to what they think you should do. And that answer is usually the wrong thing because there's usually no delight to be found in it, right?
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
If your customer knows the product as well as you do, understands all the details, maybe they're going to give you like a really delightful solution, but usually they don't. You have to think about how do you build a roadmap that allows you to talk about the general direction that the technology and the platform is going to head while leaving the space to allow the specifics to evolve?
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
Because on any given day, I know less today than I'll know tomorrow about what would actually make my customers happy, what would actually make the product better, what would actually make those things happen. So you have to give yourself the space to be able to embrace that truth and move through it. I look at a year out, and what you do is think about themes.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
And inside there, you've got stuff that you vaguely believe is important to do, and you have reasons why you believe it. And so you tell those stories to each other and to your people who ask you about the roadmap by saying, look, in System Initiative's case, we need to increase the number of assets that you can use. So we need more coverage of various cloud providers.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
And we also need to do some improvements to the authoring experience. And we need to add some security RBOX stuff to it. And maybe we have to do SOC 2 compliance or whatever.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
You can take those things and you put them roughly on a map according to time and you talk about them not in terms of the specific features you're going to build, but of the thematic through line that is important to the evolution of the product. That allows you to get feedback on whether those themes resonate, right? Because people can listen to the story of the theme and say, yeah, that's right.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
I do care about that. That generalized problem domain is the thing that that that resonates with me as a user or me as a customer. And then it also leaves you the flexibility to discover what's the exact right thing to build, right? And how do you evolve that in the right way? And it allows you to move things around a little bit in space and time, right?
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
Because as the landscape changes, as your experience of actually writing the code, the truth of the system, plus the the exterior landscape of what's happening in the world, those things will always manipulate your roadmap in some way or another.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
And so by keeping the focus on these high-level themes and the broad strokes of what you think needs to happen in there, it also gives you the space to move those things around without really changing strategic direction.
Code Story
S9 E30: Adam Jacob, System Initiative
John Lewis Gaddis, who is a professor, wrote a book called On Grand Strategy, and he defines strategy as how you connect your limited resources to your unlimited aspirations across time, space, and scale. And that is what roadmaps do, right? So you want to keep the high-level scale and scope in the roadmap to be high and flexible.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Display custom maps on your website for free (News)
Yeah. Oh, I'm stoked. We did. Yeah, we launched something on the 25th of September. And yeah, you can use System Initiative now by going to a website and signing up. And three clicks and you're in. And then you can automate infrastructure. It's sick. It's the coolest thing in the universe. I'm so proud of it.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Display custom maps on your website for free (News)
Yeah. I mean, that's what I hope is true. Okay.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Display custom maps on your website for free (News)
i think look i here's here's what it is we figured out part of the reason that it's so hard for us to achieve the outcomes we're looking to achieve with the kind of devops and operational work that we do is because the tools we're using bring about those tough outcomes it's a lot harder to like write static code have your friends review it in system initiative what you do is you use this like living architecture diagram
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Display custom maps on your website for free (News)
to put together all the different relationships between the things that you use. And then you can program that architecture diagram to do all the stuff you needed to do. So it automatically understands how to do things like create resources and delete them or update their tags or do those things. But then you can also extend it with your own custom policy.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Display custom maps on your website for free (News)
And the whole thing happens in real time in multiplayer. So you actually get to hang out with people again and build infrastructure and see what's happening and see it evolve over time. That's a pretty transformational change in how people spend their day. And we think that's the biggest thing that's going to level people up is that suddenly they get to actually do it together again.