(crowd talking) - On the 26th of June, the place I've been working at for two years, a bit more than two years, filed for bankruptcy. And on the 7th of July, it was Sunday, I was let go, because the company didn't really exist anymore. - Big news? - Yeah. - Well, not news to me. We've spoken a little bit about it before, but still. - Yeah. And I've felt quite a lot of feelings about this, but it was mostly a huge relief because it's been a rocky road. - Typical sign of a healthy place when you're like, "Ah, yeah." (laughing) Actually, even when a place is good, exciting, fun, or something you really like, it can still be very relaxing when it goes away. - Yeah. - Like ending a tabletop role-playing game that has gone on for a long time, or stopping an activity that you enjoy, but that just takes a lot of time. There can be a calm in just ending something. - Yeah. The first three days of the vacation feeling. - Yeah. - And then I usually get a cold, so. (laughing) - Yeah. - Did you get a cold? - Yeah, I think so. Or the whole body just went, (growling) So I guess I had had some feelings stored up in... - Your sinuses. - Yeah. Yeah, it was wild. So, it's been a strange month. I'm super grateful for the (speaking in foreign language) it must be a good English word for me. - In short wages or something, like when a company folds, then police still get paid. - Yeah. So I get paid during the, oops and instead, there are lots of good English words. - They don't have in mind right now. (laughing) - During your termination period or whatever that's called. - Yeah, which is two months according to the law. - I guess it's the notice period. - Could be. It's also exciting because it doesn't really map culturally nor legally between the countries. So, or countries and languages. So if we had a, if English was to do official language in Sweden, I think there would be better words for it. Or just other words that only English Swedes would understand. Or yeah, so I don't know. Yeah, so that insurance, which is guaranteed by the government, makes sure I get my wages during these two months. And then I'll have to look at doing something else. And since I'm a developer and the market isn't, it's not too cold, it's quite good. I'm not worried at all. I'm more worried about getting all the rest and recovering that I need from this roller coaster ride that has been working at a startup for almost three years now. So that's where I'm at. It's a bit of a sadness. I think I did most of the grieving around Christmas. And because we merged with another company that didn't really understand what we did, nor why, but they liked our money. And they will keep going, keep doing what they did before. So that's cool. - Got ejected as ballast. - Yeah. (laughing) Throw out the developers. (laughing) Whee! - But at least all of your code lives on, right? - Kinda. - It was moved to the mother company. That's English, before all the bankruptcy. - And parent company. - Parent company, that's it. When a mother company and the father company likes each other very much, they get subsidiaries. - That's what I call my children. (laughing) - They're subsidiaries. - Morning subsidiaries. And they's a good morning father company. (laughing) So, the software, it was probably okay. And it lives on. And we'll see who will maintain that software in the future. - Are you gonna miss it? - Yes and no. It's a bit Stockholm syndrome. - Are you gonna miss the code? - Well, no, not really. (laughing) It's, I think I've gotten the most out of it by now. I know how to not do this kind of system. I don't know how to do this kind of system, which is scary, but I know how not to do it. - That is also a learning. - Yeah, negative learnings are the best. Or something like that. So that's where I'm at. I'm in the limbo of a company death area because of price, the right genre for everything. Or medium for everything. (upbeat music) In national news, we can report that hill, yeah. An area of Malma City has sent notice about a coming influx of programmers, developers, software engineers, and inspiring speakers. In the bitter cold of November, one of Scandinavia's largest developer conferences will make landfall, causing the collision of ideas from a hundred speakers and over a thousand attendees. Citizens are advised to stay away from Malma Mesum from the sixth to the eighth of November as not to learn cloud devops.net, the JVM, Security Web, or AI by Osmosis. Early forecast warrants for a significant podcast presence from several of Sweden's most prolific podcasters. Expect words and lots of them. The authorities would like to warn the developer population that the FOMO is real and the most effective and affordable mitigation is to talk to your employer about your conference budget today. Get it approved early so that you can attend. The website is uradev.org, that's O-R-E, d-e-v.org. We contacted the earlier dev conference for comments and they said, well, basically everything we just said just now, and now the weather. - And for every company that falls, new one must take its place. And so I am in the throes of starting the company. - Cool. - So one of the things that got me into Elixir properly, like I was both looking at Elixir and thinking, this is cool and then I started looking at some conference talks about cool stuff in Elixir. Then I stumbled on a talk by Frank Hunlith on this neat thing called NURVs, which is an IOT framework for Elixir. And I'd been poking around with Raspberry Pi and stuff and doing things with the Raspian and putting Python on there and like following all the tutorials that is just like so many Python scripts that are strung together by wire. And it's like, oh, this Python scripting installs kernel modules and this Python script talks to hardware. And this Python script does crime, but it's in kind of need to do, to be able to do Elixir on like a Raspberry Pi. And this was in the era of the Raspberry Pi 3, I guess. So I think the Pi Zero existed as well. And that became one of the things I started doing when I started poking up more in depth to Elixir and the Elixir community. I wrote like a ported Python library from Adafruit for their, or Pimmeroni. I think it's Adafruit for their inky fat, the P hat. Is this an eink display, small eink display? And I ported the library partially blindly, got a bunch of help from like the NURVs community on the Elixir Slack and made blog posts and had fun going on hacker news with that. And generally just got some proper coding practice with Elixir just figuring out like, oh, where's a map, where's a good time to use a map? When should there be a struct? What is a good data structure for this weirdo thing I wanna do? How do I make this testable? So a bunch of those, just a bunch of my practice was with that and just trying to build a few projects with NURVs on Raspberry Pi. Some projects completed, some I never did, but I got a decent bit of Elixir practice and a little bit of experience with the deeper parts of NURVs, like how it deals with like embedded Linux and stuff. And if you do embedded Linux, like NURVs would stand next to like, build root or yachto, but it also goes to a much kind of higher level of abstraction. So I build root and yachto our computer ways to get Linux built for a specific device. NURVs uses build root under the hood, but it, instead of like going into your init system, like a good normal thing would do, NURVs just starts the beam. And then you run the beam as your operating system pretty much on top of a very small Linux. It's a really cool embedded project. There's a ton of cool things around it and things that it can do. And one of the cool things is NURVs Hub, which is over the air updates service, but it's a system for shipping new firmware packages to your device and going, hey, update yourself. So your package essentially holds a WebSocket connection to the server and goes and gets a notification when there's new firmware to be downloaded and then downloads it and applies it and tries to start with it, and if it fails, it goes back to the previous one and all the fun stuff. And NURVs Hub has been a project for a pretty long time and then the company that tried to run it and support it kind of effed off in a particular way. And since then, people have done some work to make NURVs Hub simpler to run yourself. And, but there hasn't been like a hosted offering of NURVs Hub and that is what we're doing. So working with a guy called Josh, who is one of the Travis CI founders, and he fell into a NURVs shape delixir hole recently. And he saw NURVs Hub went, huh, this is a heck of a thing. And then he started improving it instead of building the like water monitoring thing he wanted to build. And after a while, he was like, hey, I'm actually going to try and launch NURVs Cloud. This hosted NURVs Hub version because I think that's a cool thing. And I talked a little bit to him and like, hey, I've never heard of you before. Who are you? Hello, nice to meet you. What are you doing? I want to do NURVs stuff as well. So I want to know what's going on and this seems neat. So we talked a little bit and after a while it was like, hey, you should join me in doing this NURVs Cloud thing. And I was like, yeah, well, I'm doing a consultancy and I'm pivoting into NURVs and it's going to be awesome. And I have so many plans. So I was a bit hesitant, but I've wanted to do a product for ages. And eventually we hit up on some ideas and thoughts and was like, yeah, all right, let's do it. See what we can do. So right now I own part of a company in, what's the place? It's not Milwaukee. It is not. Delaware, Delaware, exactly. It's Delaware, in Milwaukee by Hensha, sorry. Like they put places in places in the US. I'm not sure. Yeah, it's probably Massachusetts or something, Delaware. Oh, it is a state. So it's a state. Is it one of those really small ones, the OG states? I think Delaware is kind of small. Yeah. All right, it's next to Washington, I guess. Cool. So it has some of that Washington vibe while still being a state. It's kind of is in between Washington, the city and New York. Oh, cool. Yeah, so then it's one of the OG states. They're like tiny, tiny, tiny, before anyone had really realized how much land they could put in a state. Yeah, they have Camden there, that's weird. Cool. Camden ladies or something newer? Or is that another Camden? I don't know, but Delaware, that's the place where you incorporate things at least because that's the court that made Elon Musk buy Twitter. After he said he would buy Twitter. (laughing) Is this some kind of logical reasoning? These two things connect, yes. So, okay, cool, very good. The recent people incorporate in Delaware, I think it might be slightly tax advantageous, but also they have a very well understood, I think is the probably most important bit, well understood and kind of, I guess, fair-ish, probably fair for business people, court. Oh, good. So, like, many courts would probably have been like nah, you don't have to buy Twitter, this seems weird, but Delaware is very much like, oh, but you signed away your right to do diligence and said you would buy it, go right ahead. This is your problem. (laughing) It's time to do the transaction, good luck. Yes, you did bad business. (laughing) So, it's like, it's a state where people expect their company legalities to be handled as expected in an orderly fashion. It is kind of what the state is known for at this point, I think, at least in business and tech. Like, almost all startups are, as far as I know, incorporated in Delaware. And then you've got even more because of Stripe Atlas, right? Oh, yeah, so Stripe Atlas is kind of the, I guess the Ruby on Rails of starting a startup or something. It's like, oh, we do this, you do that, then you get a good rate at this weird startup bank and then you get a good price on Notion Slack and everything else. I love it. Yeah, it's Stripe Atlas. We're all Stripe Atlas and it's, I know next to nothing about it. Cool. So, then it's no meaning that I ask all the tricky questions. No, not particularly. Like, I've understood the ownership structure. I know what we're doing with, like, we're doing an initial friends and family round and that should be interesting 'cause we want to give some upside to the people that built the open source project that we're building off of. So we're bringing in, like, some technical advisors and stuff that then get some shares and all that. And then we're taking some early investment to try to enable me to spend actual work hours on this instead of just doing client work. 'Cause I don't have the finances to just F off and do it right now. Last few quarters, we're not that hot. And so I'm not all, like, swimming and money. If I just did full time cranking out code work instead of faffing about with like building brands and marketing myself and building a name, I think I think I could, I would have made much more money. But this is a bit of a lottery ticket because, of course, like startups fail more often than they succeed. And we're doing this, the startup way mostly. So we will be looking for funding and stuff. And what that will enable is primarily pushing adoption because the product exists. I mean, it needs work, there's stuff to do in terms of building the product. But it's also building the ecosystem and taking like this very good opinionated approach to building embedded Linux systems and then spreading it and making it, showing it to more people, putting it in front of people, improving it, removing a bunch of stumbling blocks and polishing the path and kind of making it this freely compelling way of building. And then where, of course, the premium provider of firmware updates and like health dueling and data automation. And like, there's a bunch of stuff we will build out. And the primary reason people will choose us is because we're both building out the ecosystem and where we have the best kind of product offering. 'Cause like it's all open source. So like anyone can host this stuff, but people don't want to host their own stuff all the time. - No, it's expensive and hard to host stuff. - Yeah, and it's like managing your over the air system yourself is a distraction from building your products. - Yeah, I know that because I have, no, I never managed it. We just, me and my colleague got one dumped in our niece. - It just built the DP or the Dev, the packages. - Yeah, and we were like, yes, it would have been amazing if this was an existing software as a service that we could call and say, hello, what did our predecessors do? And what do they want with this? So instead of just a random pile of probably quite good Python code, I never looked at it. So yes, I'm all for what you're doing. - Yeah, it's gonna be fun. I'm having a ton of fun diving into more and more embedded and like companies are crawling out of the woodwork going, hey, we actually use nerves and we would like to do a thing. Hey, can you help us or should we use nerves? So suddenly there's a lot of activity and people, like I've been fairly clear recently in like my podcast and stuff where I've gone and said, hey, I do nerves now and we're focusing on, focusing in on nerves. And I've had some immediate response to that where people have reached out because of it. It's super interesting because it's not well known who uses nerves. It's like an open source thing and you can just go, we use it. But now we need to figure out how big is this community? How much bigger do we need it to be and all that stuff? - Yeah, I was just going to ask if it is big enough. So the current nerves ecosystem is not big enough for, well, it might be big enough for a kind of decent, sustainable business. Well, it can definitely get there. So I think we've had enough conversations with enough companies that like you could fund like a developer working on it. If we landed all the deals with all the prospective devices, yada, yada. But yeah, the real story is reaching the wider embedded ecosystem is showing the distinct advantages of what we're building. And that is a longer journey and it's a bigger lift and it's pretty exciting and a lot of it's gonna be sort of evangelism type stuff. So I guess I'm gonna be on the road talking up a fair bit, which I think is interesting. So the next thing that's up on my agenda is essentially, I think I'll go to an embedded conference where I'm not speaking. I'm just going to go there and get a feel for the community and the ecosystem and the world. But because I'm used to the Elixir space, which is not the same as like embedded Linux. It's a different culture, it's a different mindset. There's a lot of differences. And I'm learning a lot about it as I go and I have some really good people helping me navigate it. But I also need to just go there and get comfy and get uncomfortable to get comfy. Then in October, there's Code Beam in Berlin, where I'm first doing a nerves workshop the day before the conference to kind of have some, some time to hack on nerves together with a bunch of people and intro them to Nurse Cloud and that type of stuff. So that's going to be something fun. The details are not pinned down yet, but you can sign up for it. You should go to Berlin, that's a good place to go. - Yeah, as you go to Berlin, it's, yeah. - So Berlin in October and I'm also speaking during that Code Beam. So I will be speaking on nerves. And my talk is titled "The Nerves Community Fleet." And I'm currently preparing firmware that people will be able to put on their devices to join my fleet of devices that I will do demos on. - This sounds excellent. - It's going to be fun. And I think I'll get at least 50 devices, probably more. - Nice. - And it's going to be a damn mix because it's like, "Oh, this is a Pi 4, this is a Pi 5, this is a Pi 0." You can't ship the same Linux to all of this. (laughs) - Oh no. Well, it's, yeah, of course, but oh no. - Yep, but nerves mostly has me covered in that regard, thankfully. - Sweet. - I need to write a few pass scripts, probably. - Yeah. - Yeah, so that's what I'm up to. And I'm not quitting on the dude. If things go really well, on the dude will probably be mostly developing nerves cloud instead of other client work. But for the foreseeable future, it's mostly me focusing on nerves cloud. And then it seems like I'm going to be fortunate enough that one of my nerves based customers has some needs for work on nerves hub, the open source project that overlaps what one would do with nerves cloud. So there's some synergies there where one of my employees will actually be working on the same stuff that I am, kind of. - Nice. - Yeah, it ain't bad. - Indeed. - So that's my new beginning while your thing is winding down. - Yeah, it sounds exciting all of it. I'm holding my thumbs that this will work out. - Fingers crushed. - Fingers crushed. - The metal. - Crushing it. - Yeah. - Oh, did you see my best tweet linked in whatever I did it on? - I have seen many good ones. - Well, I recently posted her goat in the fog, which was just what I ended up with because a typo on my phone when I was going to write her ghost in the fog and then it was her goat in the fog and then it was very funny. So I, probably, yeah. But no, I went on LinkedIn. I went heartbleed, shell shock, stage fright, row hammer. And now crowd strike. If you know, heartbleed, shell shock, stage fright and row hammer, did those seem familiar? - Way too familiar. - Yeah, old name brand exploits, right? So. - Yeah. - I'm branded exploits, that's a new thing. But crowd strike, not actually an exploit. - It's so bad when there's a company name that could be a named exploit. - Yeah. - This is like one of those marketing, maybe not one or one, but two or one or something like that. Like, don't name your company something that could be a named exploit. - Yeah. - I have a name problem in my business that I can't talk too much about because I don't want to tell everyone exactly who my customers are because I don't think my customers want that. - Yeah. - But I've had in recent year, across the recent year, I've had at least four or five companies with Adjective Noun as name. - Oh. - So I can definitely mention like, well, flick switch. It's debatable if that's, well, it's kind of a, well, that's more verb noun, but. - Yeah, or noun noun. - Yeah, possibly. - Because like. - And then smart rent is not a secret that I'm working with them. And that's like, that's definitely an Adjective noun. But then I have like, yeah, two or three more of those where it's like, some employees have told me, like, you are not allowed to make, to joke about mixing these names, like smart switch or flick rent or whatever because they're terrified of just mixing them up with the actual customer. (laughing) - Yep, I can totally see that. - Yeah. (laughing) - I have a domain I don't really know what to do with because I was young and foolish and bought all the cool domains. And then I haven't used them for anything else. I'm considering just putting one of those combining words on it and let it generate combinations of words and permanent links to them for the lumps. Like something that was cool 20 years ago. - Lumps were cool 20 years ago. - Lumps were epic, the best thing ever. Has it ever struck you that we will talk like this when we become really, really old and maybe not cognitively at our best anymore? - So remember in my day we had the lus. (laughing) - Exactly, we're first nappers, just have your yeats. (laughing) - Mood. Mood. (laughing) (crowd chattering) (crowd chattering) (crowd chattering) (crowd chattering) (crowd chattering) (crowd chattering) (crowd chattering) (audience chattering)
