Alya Abbott
Appearances
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
And then Just when somebody sees that it was posted on place, they'll move it around to where it should be. So it's not like a big job. It's just you're reading your messages. You're like, oh, this belongs to another channel. Let me move that over there.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah, and that's a really big thing we're trying to solve for as well, to sort of feel like, oh, somebody sent a message, I have to respond right now. Otherwise, it's going to be messy, it's going to be confusing, I'm not going to be able to reply.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah, exactly. And then that disrupts people's focus time, even if they are online. You want to be able to just dive into your work and focus for a couple hours, and then when you need a break, maybe check in on your chat messages and follow up on stuff. Most of the messages people are sending are probably not so urgent that you need to interrupt your flow to jump in right away.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
And so that's part of the design here is that to really make it possible to say, okay, I'm going to dive into the code. I'm going to dive into my project and then reemerge and follow up on all the chats where I need to respond and then go back to what I was doing.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah, well, now they're going to actually start erasing it after a year, I think, right?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Well, we did... I guess maybe you guys remember it was a couple of years ago, maybe now, that Slack switched from letting folks see 10,000 messages of history to just 90 days on a free plan. And that...
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
That was really, it was framed as kind of a positive, but what we saw is a huge influx of folks, communities who don't find, can't afford something like paying for a pro plan on Slack, leaving Slack and importing their data and moving to Zulop. And I mean, for us, we have a really robust sponsorship program for communities and open source projects, nonprofits,
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
education, kind of all kinds of non-business uses for Zulip. We really try to, you know, enable folks to benefit from our software. So we do sponsor free Zulip Cloud standard plans for folks. We have over, I think, over 1,500 sponsored organizations at this point. So it's a really robust program.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah, and it's something that we really believe in Zulip as a way to help folks be more productive and really help them accomplish what they're trying to do. And so we don't want to wall that off as much as we can. Of course, we do need businesses and organizations that can afford it to pay for the product.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
But otherwise, we really do want to share it as much as we can and enable folks to do awesome things with it.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah, well, and I guess our general philosophy on pricing is, look, if you're a business and you're paying somebody a salary, paying a small monthly fee for that user, a few dollars a month to have chat software that they use hours every day, and in our case, that can help them be more efficient with their time, that's just so worth it. And it's a very reasonable way to do things.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
But if you're looking at an organization where the folks using chat are not your employees, so even if there's some kind of core employee corps, a few folks who are part of a business, but then you have a large community that's part of that organization, now the pricing doesn't make any sense at all. And so that's Folks can contact our sales team for their specific situation.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
But in general, our approach is really businesses. It makes sense to pay that kind of level, but not for community members, even if there's a business involved.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah, absolutely. We definitely see folks say, oh, I used it. We ask folks who are creating new Zulip organizations how they learned about Zulip. And a lot of them say, I've used it in a Zulip organization before. And I think a lot of the time that will be an open source community somewhere.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
And also, you know, another way that folks from these communities are really contributing is that we get a ton of user feedback. So as you saw, our development community is open and it's open sign up.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
So folks will just come and come by and kind of share how they're using Zulip, what they think could work better, any kind of bugs they encounter, but also feature requests, as well as like just posting and proposing feature ideas on GitHub. And we just have these really open discussions with our users, and that's really valuable for just figuring out the ways that we can improve the product.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah, absolutely. So Zulip, you can use it just in a browser tab. There's also a desktop app for all the major platforms. And then, yeah, Android and iOS apps. And we're actually currently in the process of rewriting our mobile apps from the ground up using a different framework. We're switching to Flutter-based apps. So our current apps are definitely functional, but not as...
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
sort of smooth and beautiful as we would like them to be. And so that next generation app is really going to get us all the way there. So we're very excited for it. And for sort of old school folks out there, there's also Terminal Client for Zillow if anybody wants to use it that way.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah, there's an open API and actually our mobile and terminal apps use the API to communicate with the servers. So we're constantly kind of testing it ourselves and using it ourselves and relying on that documentation ourselves. So absolutely.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
It is, yes.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
My understanding is that the engineering team was thinking about it and was kind of waiting for it.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Great to be here. Yeah.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Good question, I guess. I mean, one sort of thing that is complex for us is the competitive landscape, like Slack and Microsoft Teams being the sort of big gorillas in the room, and Teams effectively gives away their chat for free, oftentimes as part of their Microsoft Suite, and it's really hard to get folks kind of... At the same time that It's free. It's not free, right?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
In the sense that people are spending their time and their energy and their attention in ways that aren't making them productive. You know, like they're wasting... Your employees' time is your most valuable resource. And so...
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
wasting that time and energy on an app that's frustrating or hard to use or is not organized in the ways that you'd want it to be is a major cost, but it's hard for companies to budget it that way and to really evaluate it that way. So I think one thing we're really trying to do is get better at telling that story and really communicating with folks and trying to explain this
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
make people really sort of feel in their guts this sort of, okay, this app might be free or it might be kind of an easy choice like Slack for most, a lot of folks are familiar with it. It's sort of like, nobody got fired for buying IBM, probably nobody got fired for picking Slack for their chat. And there's lots of things that are great about it compared to sort of
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
products that had come previously. But choosing a chat app is just so important to how folks are going to collaborate in your organization. And so that's really the message we're trying to get across. And that's, I think, kind of a big challenge for us is to really...
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
get people off of their kind of default mode or the easy decision there and really, really get folks to consider and evaluate our product and to take that time and attention away from, and there's so many other things that they need to be doing to really think about this choice in a very like intentional way.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah, I mean, Microsoft is facing anti-competitive lawsuits in Europe because of how they've set things up.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Zilp has kind of an interesting history. So it was started back in 2012. So before things like Slack were out there. Yeah. That time it was not open source. It was just kind of your regular closed source startup out in Boston. And when it was still in private beta, the company was acquired at Dropbox.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah. And I think in the past, a couple of things that have held us back have been, one, the design of the app. That's really something that we've been focused on improving. That's been a major, major investment for us over the past year or two and continues to be. For the longest time, our users would tell us that
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
the user experience in Zulip is second to none, but the design could use some work. And that's not such a big problem necessarily for folks who have got kind of like, once you've gotten used to an app, you might kind of stop noticing some of these things. But in the initial evaluation, it makes a huge difference. If you open an app, you're like, oh, this doesn't look modern.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
This doesn't look beautiful. And so we're really trying to get away from that and have folks have an immediate kind of like positive response to the app as well as enjoying the UI over the long term.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
And then another thing we've been really focusing on is that the onboarding experience, because there is a little bit of a different mental model for Zulub compared to other apps folks might have seen. And we do want to have that be easy to understand and easy to onboard people, easy to get everybody in your organization, kind of have folks get started with that.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
And also, I think almost any app, when you first encounter it, might feel a little overwhelming. If you've never seen Discord before and you open it up, there's a lot going on. But some of these apps that we're competing with, most folks have seen them before, and so now they have forgotten that first initial feeling of, oh, there's so much happening, it's different.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
So we really want to help folks through that experience with Zulip, because... We do have a lot of users who are coming in who haven't interacted with it before to really get them across this threshold of like, oh, I get it. This is comfortable. This is not, you know, some things about it are different, but a lot of patterns I'm familiar with from other applications work here as well.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
And it really is pretty intuitive once I kind of like have a handle on it.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah, I'm not so sure because we do provide different ways to export your data, including like compliance exports, or you can just export it. I don't know. Okay, okay.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
All right, well. So that's cool. But that's an example of that kind of like, what might be a little bit, I don't know, it's like, I guess folks have their own priorities and I don't want to like second guess the management, but. That's just where that perspective of your team's efficiency and how happy they are with the software they have to use every day.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
At the time, Dropbox was exploring kind of different strategies with chat as kind of providing a suite of Office products alongside with the file storage. And then they went in a different direction and actually open sourced the entire Zulip code base along with the full history of the project.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
So it depends. So Discord is not so much designed for business use or use within organizations that needs to be closed and have sort of, because it's a single account across all your organizations, it's sort of a different structure there. We do have folks who are Discord users who have definitely requested some features that Discord has.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
I would say that, yeah, their kind of video and calling and the way they do that is quite nice. And that's something we've heard folks interested in.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Something that we're actually working towards is Discord has, maybe if you haven't administered organizations, you haven't explored that side of it, but they have really nice ways and flexible ways to manage permissions and groups within an organization. And so that's actually a big project that we have going on right now, like really, really flexible ways
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
permissions management where you can create an arbitrary group and then give that group kind of an arbitrary set of permissions within your organization. And I think that's going to be really, really nice for anyone administering a large organization.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
So all that commit history, there was a hack week project to clean that up and make that something that can be publicly shared. And they very generously, I guess, once it was open sourced, Tim Abbott, who was one of the original co-founders and was working at Dropbox at the time, started running that open source project in his kind of nights and weekends in his spare time.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah, we have some tools. I guess if you deactivate a user, they won't be able to rejoin with the same email. And you can also disallow throwaway email domains if you want to prevent definitely is helpful for preventing spam. You can also, personally, you can mute a user.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
So if you, as an individual, don't want to see somebody's content, we do let folks have the option of muting that person and that just hides all their stuff for you. So you never have to interact with it.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Write a bot, I guess.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
So for something like moving from Slack into Zulub?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah, sure. Just for instance. Yeah.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah, so we have instructions on our health center for how to go about it. So basically what you would want to do is, assuming you want to keep your message history, you can export that through Slack. It might be limited, I guess, now, depending on your situation.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
And then if you're moving, say, to Zulip Cloud, so that's our managed SaaS offering, you would just send over that data to us, and we would import that into a new organization for you. And so you could preserve not just the messages, but also the user data. So you'd have a running start on that.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
And then we also, I don't know if you guys have integrations, but also to make it easier to move over your integrations, if you have any, we have Slack-compatible webhooks. So basically you could... just kind of remap where your webhooks are sending in their data to be Zulip. And then on your own time later on, if you want to move over to more like Zulip native integrations, then you can do that.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
But things would be working for you right away. So yeah, and you can tell folks where to log in or we can automatically send emails to all the users that you imported with their login information. So however you want to manage that.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah. And we have all the social auth as well. So if folks want to log in with their, you know, Google account and GitHub or anything like that, that's also on offer.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
And Dropbox also very generously gave that trademark for Zulop to Tim as well. So at this point, there's no relationship between Zulop and Dropbox.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
I can't promise anything about your specific experience, but we have had folks tell us that when they moved to Zulip, they actually started getting much better at community engagement. Because it works quite nicely for folks who are not around all the time.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
So, I mean, one kind of category of folks, as you were saying, is maybe people who are lurking or who are just kind of coming by once in a little while, once in a while to check in on something. And if you're coming to something like Slack, you know, it's hard to... you might see the latest messages.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah, yeah. But we're definitely very grateful that they decided that they would be happy to open source it, given that they were not using it themselves.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
It's going to be not really possible for you to kind of catch up on what you missed if you're checking out every couple of weeks or every month in an active organization. Whereas for Zulu, if you just want to sort of check in on things occasionally, folks will come in and they'll look at that recent conversations you maybe saw when you were exploring the app.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
And instead of having to look at sort of individual messages and try to figure out what's going on, they'll just see that list of topics and they can be like, oh, this topic sounds interesting. Let me jump into that.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
And so you don't even have to feel obliged to kind of make everything be marked as red or kind of manage your own reds necessarily if it's just something where you're not following every little detail. You really can kind of just skim that list of what's been going on and jump in to the ones that are of interest. And so...
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah, so we've had folks say that something like an open source project, that it can actually really be great for community engagement because people can select the parts that are interesting to them and just follow those and jump in on those. You can even configure notification.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
There's a concept of following topics, so once you've seen something that's interesting, if it's a community you're not engaged with very regularly, you can follow that particular topic and, say, get email notifications when there's more messages just to that topic. And so... There's really ways to follow specific conversations and find things to engage with for occasional users in a community.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah, exactly. So this is something that there's an overall organization setting for whether you want to have public channels as an option. So for example, some businesses might not want to share anything and they just want to turn that all the way off. And then, yeah, for any given channel, you just configure it.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
I know Tim advocated for it, and that's really just they wanted to contribute to open source and just kind of a generous gesture for the community.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
You can configure it to be kind of public for logged in folks, private or public even without logging in. So, yeah, what you guys were seeing in the development community is a bunch of channels that we've marked as completely public. And then, yeah, you can just kind of come by and not have to log in and just view messages there.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
And then, of course, if you want to participate, then you would create an account and log in and post.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
They don't. We do have a way to, a tool for exporting your Zulu data, and then you can get that indexed by search engines and like a kind of an archive of all the messages. But it's actually kind of a major technical, the reason is that it's a major technical project to make those searchable, indexable by search engines.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
And we just haven't had a chance to prioritize that project yet, but that's definitely on the radar, but it just requires quite a bit of technical work to make that work.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
One thing we do a lot is linking to conversations. So you can link either to a conversation or even to a particular message within that conversation. And so, for example, when we, say, file an issue for a Zulu feature... we'll generally link to a conversation where we had some initial brainstorming discussion of that feature.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
And so when folks are working on it, they can get that extra content and context. And then also, if they have a follow-up question, they can just pose that question in the same conversation and continue from where it left off. So that linking does make some things easier to find.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah. So it's pretty similar, except for you would skip the part where you email us, and you would do that for yourself.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah, the product was called Zulip at the time.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Exactly. Yeah, we have an installation guide that is pretty straightforward. We really do work hard to make it easy to self-host Zulupe and also make the installation process as easy as possible, really smooth upgrade process when the new version comes out. So it's definitely a priority for us. And there's detailed documentation on how you need to do everything.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
So it should be very doable for you if that's something that you're enjoying. Yeah.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yes. Sorry, this is not the part that I personally work on nearly as much as some other things.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
You hear that, Adam?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
It is all there. So Zulip is 100% open source. There's nothing that we're locking away from self-hosters. If you self-host, this is the one thing that... So we do offer paid plans for self-hosters. You don't have to sign up for one, but they're on offer. And the kind of two major things that we're providing with those paid plans. So one is mobile push notifications, right?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
So the way that App Store policies work, both on Android and iOS, is that if you have a mobile app, which our apps are also 100% open source, but you probably want to use the app that we put in the Play Store or the App Store, rather than kind of rolling your own, which is a whole thing.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
And so the way those app store policies work is that a single app can only get push notifications from a single server. It's kind of like an anti-spam security measure on their end. And so for your self-hosted server to send notifications to those little mobile apps, what you do is basically bounce that traffic through our server.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah, originally, I don't know the details of their strategy, but probably I think originally they had thought that they might build their own chat app. As you know, I know you maybe have heard of Dropbox Paper, Mailbox. They kind of were at the time acquiring startups in a bunch of the office tools, in the office tool space more generally. And then kind of company priorities shifted.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
And so that's a service that a lot of folks who are self-hosting choose to pay for as part of our plans. And then the other piece is just support. So if you want any kind of support with running your Zoop server, there is community-based support in our development chat. So folks do come by and get some help there.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
But if you need SLAs or if you need something more than just asking a question on chat and seeing if folks are around to reply, then we do have support offerings as well. So those are kind of the types of... plans for self-hosted organizations.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah, so I guess the way it's described in our docs is it's an officially supported experimental Docker image.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
That's right.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Like, would we just create a... Yeah, just when you sign in, you put in the URL for your server and you're good.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
I asked that one. Yeah, exactly.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
No worries, yeah. So when users log in, they'll just put in the URL for your server and then they're good to go.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
The Zulu team ended up working on the core Dropbox product. And yeah, so they just kind of didn't end up going in that direction.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
I mean, we've had folks self-host Zulip air gaps, like on a ship.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Where they weren't going to have connectivity with the wider internet, just as there's chat within that ship community. That's cool.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Might not be required if you have five people on your boat.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah, and one thing that's pretty cool is that we actually still have some of Zulop's 2013 beta customers using Zulop today continuously. So they still have all their chat history. We've kept that running for them throughout the years, and they're still there.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah, if you go to zilv.com slash apps, you'll see a link to it.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah, Zulp was one of the first major projects to be using MyPy static typing in Python. So our engineers were part of developing that.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
I don't have a number handy for you. I mean, folks do use it. Definitely not as much as their other clients, but for sure. I guess sort of philosophically, I would say one piece of it is that we've talked about just how much time folks are spending in chat. And so having that chat experience feel pleasant and natural and sort of do what you want, I think is really, really important.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
You don't want to be annoyed and frustrated by something in an app you're using every day. And so we do believe in giving folks flexibility and options and configurations and different ways to experience Zulip that sort of matches well with their workflows.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah, so like HipChat and IRC were around at the time, exactly.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
And I would say having a terminal app as part of that, just for some folks, that is really the natural way for them to engage with a piece of software, and it feels really smooth and kind of... how they want to experience it. And so I think that's really valuable just because people are different. We can't make an app that is just one way and works perfectly for everybody.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
There has to be flexibility for folks to engage with it in different ways.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah, and we had multiple interns working on it this summer. So yeah, it's definitely interactive.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that was a competitive landscape at the time.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah, so we have a pretty small kind of core team of folks who are paid full-time to work on, or full-time or part-time, I guess, to work on Zulip. And we do think that's really important kind of as part of our model that there is... a team of really talented expert engineers and other folks for whom this is their day job.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
It's really hard to run a project where it's kind of a side gig for everybody. So with this core team, we've also invested a lot into... making it really easy for folks to get started contributing to Zulop. So there's been a huge amount of investment into creating the space for a really active, really lively community around it as well.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
And that comes in terms of like tons and tons of documentation I think you saw. some of our production documentation. There's also tons of contributor side documentation from, you know, as you mentioned, how systems work, but also just the contribution process, what a good pull request looks like for us, kind of everything about that process.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
And that's really something that we put a lot of thought into, like what is that process of contributing and how do we make that a really excellent experience both for us in terms of kind of reviewing the work as well as for the contributors themselves and make that a really great experience positive experience, great learning experience for folks.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
So for example, on the order of 15 paid team members, we had 124 people contribute to our last major release. So that's about a six-month cycle. So it's a lot of folks who are either doing, some of them are doing kind of a formal internship program with us. We've been participating in Google Summer of Code for the past for a number of years now.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Totally, yeah. So the big innovation in Zulop is how it organizes conversations. And the idea actually came from an older technology that was popular at MIT at the time for lots of students and folks were chatting there. But what's different about it is how conversations are organized. So in some of the tools folks may be familiar with, you probably have channels and within that channels,
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
I don't know if you're familiar with it, but basically Google funds internships for open source projects as well as kind of managing that overall structure of helping folks find projects to work on. So that's been amazing for us. Most years we have about 15 to 20 interns, most of them mentored by kind of alumni of the program or other community members.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
And that's been another really great way for us to bring folks into the community. So yeah, but it's, you know, Zulp is open source, not just in the sense of like the code being open, but really just in our whole model of how we develop the product and how we engage with contributors, how we engage with our users. You know, one time, I guess one of our...
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Folks who joined recently, he started out as an intern and then joined as a full-time team member. And he commented that he was surprised when he got added to kind of all our private company channels, just how little traffic there is in those channels.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Like he was thinking that, you know, when we were giving him feedback on things he was working on, maybe we're like somewhere off on the side discussing that amongst ourselves. And then like...
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
providing the summary version he was like oh wait no that's not how it works i was like no no no yeah we if we're talking about how the product should work we just talk about that in the open and you know that way everybody can kind of see understand the decisions can can contribute to the decisions like yeah we're very like non-hierarchical in terms of it's really about what your ideas are and how clearly you communicate them and explain to them not you know what
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
what your title is or how long you've been involved with Zulip or anything like that. It's really about kind of working together to come to the best decision we can about how something should work. Yeah, let me know if I didn't quite answer everything, all the parts of your question.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah, absolutely. So we have intentionally not raised VC money and do not plan to raise VC money. And in terms of the business model, what we want is just to build a sustainable company on top of this open source project. So we've discussed some paid plans we have on the cloud side, on the self-hosted side, services we can provide.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
And so that's really our strategy to have our users pay for the software and then that funds the development of the project and the product. And kind of a key reason we don't want to go the VC route is that We feel that kind of misaligns the incentives. There's kind of an inherent misalignment of incentives. So for us, we're not going to take 100 swings at this.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
We're not going to try to build 100 different products and see which ones land and abandon ones that don't. We really are building Zula because we think it's a better way to work. And we're really, really committed to making that around for our users for the long term. So as I mentioned, we still have users from 2013 who are on Zilp now, and we want that software to be around for the long run.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
And so we want to just take that one single bet and make it work. Whereas VCs, their incentives are, you know, they're looking for like the next, you know, your next Facebook, your next like giant company that just explodes. And they're willing to take big risks in order to have that probability of a really remarkable, amazing return.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Whereas for us, we want to take very small risks and have a very high probability of kind of success without necessarily aiming for that like galactic outsized return, right?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
A lot of discussion going on kind of like in that main channel feed. Maybe you have some threads on the side. Zulip is different in that when you start a conversation, you give that conversation a brief topic. So something similar to what you might do if you're sending an email and you write a quick subject line for your email.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
We just, you know, our main priority is really to get to a point where the software, we have enough, you know, we're making enough money to really continue to develop the software and have the staffing and the team that we want. And it doesn't have to be, you know, stratospheric. And of course, we would like to reach as many people as we can.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
And we think it can benefit lots and lots of different kinds of organizations. It's a huge market. There's definitely tons of opportunity. But just like the kinds of risks we're facing comfortable taking to get there are very different from the kinds of risks VCs would feel comfortable with taking to get there.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Which part?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Well, I think it's not just about open source. I think there are now starting to be VC firms that are focused on open source and really buy into that model. But it's also just kind of the structure of how you do that investment, right? So do you...
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
try to like hire up really quickly, spend tons of money, you know, in marketing, even if it's the return is not there, but just to, to get that growth curve, you know, like, what are you, what are you trying to do? Right. And like, what is your strategy to get there? I'm not going to tell you 100% never in the next 100 years we'll take VC money. We're a small company, right?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
We do to some extent make decisions about things when we need to make them, not planning things for 50 years ahead. But just that has been our kind of strategy so far. And we have not been approached by a venture investor who we think would be completely different from all the other venture investors such that we would start thinking about it.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
And then when people respond to your messages, they respond within that topic. And so... it's a little bit of extra effort to start that conversation. You do need to give it a topic, but then it just makes a huge difference when you're reading your messages. So now instead of kind of everything being mixed up, you have these organized conversations labeled with our topic. And so it's,
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah, and we're definitely, so we're not currently raising money, but we definitely are. Currently exploring different strategies on the go-to-market side, and that's something that we're thinking very actively about. How do we increase that reach and grow faster in terms of finding different ways to introduce folks to Zulub and to reach more people?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
So that's definitely a major priority for us right now.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's true. It's true. Yeah. It is a major challenge.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
For sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
I mean, some of them are kind of standard things. So like paid advertising, going to conferences and various kinds of events and sharing Zoom that way. One thing that another direction is kind of content. So we've had blog posts on various topics. We're starting to...
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
You know, one of the things that I talked to, you can see, probably see my excitement about is this kind of side of community management and getting folks engaged in an open source project. So, for example, like we're working on some, partnering with some organizations on blog posts around that kind of thing. And so, yeah. Just kind of getting the name out there in whatever way.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Because I think, you know, as you were saying, kind of the brand recognition and just kind of awareness matters so that when not everybody's all... People aren't like constantly in the market for a new team chat, but we want to be top of mind when they are starting to think about it and when it does come up. But yeah, I would say we don't necessarily have kind of like...
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
So something unique other than, you know, we do have this open source angle and so things engaging with community and like the open source community more broadly and sponsoring open source projects is definitely like one angle for us that we're investing in.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Exactly. But in general, our style is just try to be really like as clear and direct as we can. That's really our focus for all our kind of marketing and so on. Just we think the value is there for folks. And if we can communicate that clearly, we don't need to get super marketing, super salesy. Just tell folks what's there.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
You can come in and read your messages one conversation at a time. Rather than everything happening chronologically, you could say, okay, people are talking about this. Let me read about that. Okay, I'm done with that conversation. Let me move on to the next one. And so it doesn't matter if people are... And it's a busy channel. People are talking about 10 different things at once.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah, and some of what you described, we do have case studies on our site where a lot of folks talk about starting initially with something else and then moving over to Zulip and sort of that experience. But part of what you said, you're kind of reading off of the to-do list I was working on yesterday. Just yesterday? Okay, cool.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Literally just yesterday, yeah, I was thinking, you know, we have some content in our help center about that migration path, but... We definitely need more clarity on just kind of bring all those pieces of information together and coming from different kinds of tools. Here are the steps you take. And just, yeah, folks are busy. There's a lot going on here.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
To the extent that we can make that easier for people, it can make a big difference.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
It's just not a problem. You can...
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
read everything in its own context and you can have a conversation that's goes across time so you know maybe people are working async or just busy with meetings and so somebody comes in a few hours later or a day later and wants to comment on something that was going on rather than getting kind of like lost in the noise you have all that context in the same place
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
I mean, or if you want to just try a Zulip, it literally takes less than two minutes to create an organization Zulip cloud and then you can just poke around and experience it for yourself.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
And then give us feedback. That's the other thing. If there's anything that feels off or feels confusing, just come by the development community and tell us and we'll try to fix it.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Thank you for the great set of questions.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, and then each topic is basically kind of a topic of conversation and that can be very ephemeral or it can be something that you come back to after a while and that, that, you know, both, both ways work.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
I mean, the channel is very similar to channels in other apps. So, for example, it comes with some metadata like subscribers, privacy settings, those sorts of things. And then topics are just another level of organization within that channel. So, for example, for...
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
your subscriptions, you would be managing your subscriptions to channels, and then you would automatically see the topics that are in the channels that you're in. We do actually have ways to, within that, mute specific topics or follow specific topics, so you can kind of set your preferences there as well, but Yeah, just kind of another level of structure.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
And that, you know, there's also ways to view, instead of viewing all your messages in a feed, you can also view the topics. So there's an inbox style view where you can see your unread topics. And then you can just jump into the places where you're, you know, you're like, oh, this is relevant for me. Let me take a look at that.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
And there's also, there's another view that lets you see the recent conversations. So again, kind of gives you different ways to summarize what's going on and really dive into what's important for you and where you need to participate.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah, that's something that's configurable by the organization administrators. In general, there's not a lot of need for these. It depends. But in general, we recommend having at least the vast majority of the messages happen in topics. I mean, once you're replying to a conversation that's already ongoing, you kind of hardly notice this. It doesn't create any extra work.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
You just click in and you're replied. It's not like you have to retype the topic or anything else. So it's really... not a lot of overhead. And once people get the idea, it's really pretty seamless. And we also give folks tools to reorganize everything if things do end up out of place. So you can move messages between topics as well as between channels.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
So especially when an organization is just getting started and folks are getting used to the model, that really lets you reorganize things if things do end up in the wrong places to start with.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
And then you're just like, you know, it becomes a junk drawer.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah. And the thinking is really that people are spending tons of time throughout the day on communication. Some surveys found that it's something like half of the time for a knowledge worker is spent on some communication of one kind or another. And so just making that more efficient can make a huge difference in terms of people's time.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
And if you think about what you're actually doing when you do communicate and when you do chat, most of that time is really spent reading messages. So of course you're sending some messages, but there's more time spent kind of ingesting content.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
And so if that process is really smooth and seamless and feels kind of structured and not chaotic, that's going to make a huge difference for people's experience the other day.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah, it is.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Pretty accurate.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah, I mean, that's the, you know, we get lots of feedback from folks and that's really the biggest differentiator for people is that level of organization just makes a huge difference in people's experience using the product. Like people tell us, like, I can't, you know, it's hard to, you know, sometimes I have to go back to Slack to talk to my customers and it's just so chaotic.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
And it's just having experienced the level of organization within Zulupe Other things feel, people start feeling like other things are messy and hard to follow.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Yeah. Have you found messages from me yet?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)
Well, for the most part, it's kind of self-organizing. So just when somebody is starting a new conversation, they'll start a new topic. I mean, in the Zulip community, we do have a lot of folks who are new contributors or somebody who's coming in who's kind of brand new to the product or just checking it out. So sometimes they might not be sure exactly how to name a topic well or where to post it.