The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Build software that lasts! (Interview)
Wed, 05 Feb 2025
After 30+ years in the software industry, Bert Hubert has experienced a lot. He founded PowerDNS, published articles for places like IETF / IEEE, and built his own parliament monitoring system. That just scratches the surface. Recently, Bert wrote about what it takes to build software for the long term. Let's dig in.
Full Episode
I'm Jared Santo, and you're listening to The Change Log, where each and every week we have conversations with the hackers, the leaders, and the innovators of the software world. We pick their brains, we learn from their mistakes, we get inspired by their accomplishments, and we have a lot of fun along the way. Today we are joined by Barrett Huber.
After over 30 years in the software industry, Barrett has experienced a lot. He founded PowerDNS, published articles for places like IETF and IEEE, and built his own parliament monitoring system. That just scratches the surface. But recently, Bert wrote about what it takes to build software for the long term. We dig in.
But first, a quick mention of our partners at Fly.io, the public cloud built for developers who ship just like us. Yes, Fly is the home of changelog.com. Check them out at fly.io and tell them changelog sent you. Okay, Bert Hubert on the changelog. Let's do this.
Well, friends before the show, I'm here with my good friend, David Shu over at Retool. Now, David, I've known about Retool for a very long time. You've been working with us for many, many years. And speaking of many, many years, Brex is one of your oldest customers. You've been in business almost seven years.
I think they've been a customer of yours for almost all those seven years to my knowledge, but share the story.
do you do for brex how does brex leverage retool and why have they stayed with you all these years so what's really interesting about brex is that they are a extremely operational heavy company and so for them the quality of the internal tools is so important because you can imagine they have to deal with fraud they have to deal with underwriting they have to deal with so many problems basically they have a giant team internally basically just using internal tools day in and day out so they have a very high bar for internal tools
And when they first started, we were in the same YC batch, actually. We were both at Winter 17. And they were, yeah, I think maybe customer number five or something like that for us. I think DoorDash was a little bit before them, but they were pretty early.
And the problem they had was they had so many internal tools they needed to go and build, but not enough time or engineers to go build all of them. And even if they did have the timer engineers, they wanted their engineers focused on building external facing software, because that is what would drive the business forward. The Brex mobile app, for example, is awesome.
The Brex website, for example, is awesome. The Brex expense flow, all really, you know, really great external facing software. So they wanted their engineers focused on that as opposed to building internal CRUD UIs. And so that's why they came to us. And it was awesome. Honestly, a wonderful partnership. It has been for seven, eight years now.
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