Talking Startups And Pricing Strategies With John Nunemaker

FounderQuest

Show Notes:
Links:
John Nunemaker Website
John Nunemaker Twitter
Flipper Cloud
Speaker Deck
Scientist

Full Transcript:
Ben:
So today we have a special episode of FounderQuest. We have John Nunemaker with us, instead of Starr. Starr was taking a break today. And Josh and I are going to be chatting with John, and talking about the fun things that John's doing. John, I got to start off by saying that I'm a huge fan. I've been following your work since the Harmony days, back at Ordered List, I guess that was ... I don't know when that was, 2000 and something.

John:
'07, 8, yep.

Ben:
Yeah. Yeah. So I think I got introduced to you through the Rails community, being back in the early group. So I don't remember how exactly we bumped into each other back then. But I remember Harmony was pretty cool, and the other stuff you did with Ordered List.

Josh:
Yeah.

Josh:
I was newer to the Rails world back then. So both of you are Ruby celebrities to me. So yeah, it's cool. It's cool to have you here.

John:
Thanks so much. Yeah, I'm really excited about it. I feel the same way about you guys. Especially I remember I was at RailsKits.

Ben:
Yep.

John:
I remember ... Yeah.

Josh:
Yeah.

John:
I remember that. I remember a bunch of the stuff back in the day. And is it Stympy, or something? Website?

Ben:
Yeah.

John:
Yep.

Ben:
Yeah.

John:
Oh, yeah. That stuff sticks out.

Josh:
Nice.

Ben:
Nice. Nice, cool. Fanboys all around. It's awesome. And you're a prolific open-source author. We have in fact two of your gems in our app right now. We have nunes, and we have httparty running in our app. So thank you for those.

John:
That's awesome.

Josh:
Yeah.

John:
That's really cool.

Ben:
Yeah. I love nunes. And I love the description of it. It's like, "This is the monitoring app I would add to your app if I was working with you."

John:
Yeah. I feel like stuff like that, I get lucky and it sticks. But it's just this moment where I'm like, "I got to come up with some kind of a description. I really don't want to do this. What should I put?" And then it's like, "This is what I would. I would do this if I were you." So I'm just going to put that as my description and peel out.

Ben:
It's cool. But I think the ... We're not going to talk about this much today. But I just wanted to toss this in here. And I think one of the projects that you've done that I'm most interested is probably one there is least information out there about. And that's Haystack at GitHub.

John:
Yeah. Yeah. Hey, I can answer any questions related to that too. On air, off air, whatever you want. Yeah.

Ben:
Awesome.

John:
Yeah. I worked on that for a little while. I didn't build it, but I tuned it a bunch.

Josh:
Remind me what Haystack does.

John:
It was the exception tracker-

Josh:
I remember now. Yeah. Cool.

John:
Yeah. Yep.

Josh:
I have built a few of those.

John:
Yeah, I don't know if you guys have heard of exceptions.

Ben:
Yeah, we did a little bit in that line. But yeah, I remember reading some of your blog posts about Haystack, and I was kind of jealous. I was like, "Oh, man. It'd be cool if we got GitHub as a customer." But yeah, I totally understand why you'd have something totally internal and custom to what you do there at GitHub.

John:
Yeah. I still always wonder if they still have ... I need to reach out to people who are still there and ask. I'm always curious what technology has lasted and what hasn't, and stuff like that.

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
Yeah. So how long have you been gone from GitHub?

John:
I would say ... Hard to remember. I would say 2018 I think is when I left. So it was right when after the Microsoft stuff went through. And it happened to coincide with paternity leave ending for me, and all the ... Just perfect timing. So all the stuff kind of came down at the same time. And so my last day of paternity leave was a Friday. And that Friday was the day they closed the deal. And then that Monday, I resigned and moved on to the next stuff. I love GitHub. You can see behind me.

Ben:
Yeah.

Josh:
Yeah.

John:
No one listening can, but I have an Octocat behind me in my room. It's completely office is stuffed with Octocats. I'm a huge fan still. I just am not a big company person really.

Ben:
Yeah. Totally can relate to that.

Josh:
Yep.

Ben:
I've never thrived in big companies. So yeah, getting acquired by Microsoft would make GitHub a pretty big company.

John:
Yeah. And it was ... I mean, we were 45 through 50, and then watched it grow over six, seven years to in the thousands.

Josh:
Wow.

John:
And it was just totally different than we had started. So it was-

Ben:
No doubt.

John:
Yeah. And that's kind of where Flipper and Flipper Cloud and stuff like that even came from was because I was working there. And not to jump ahead or anything like that, but that's ... I was like, "I know I'm not going to be a big company person. So I got to come up with some kind of a runway, because I'm the guy who runs off the clock in the fourth quarter." I'm very safe and conservative in my moves. So yeah.

Ben:
I love that. So let's talk about that. That's very interesting.

Josh:
So you're in good company. That sounds a lot like Ben.

Ben:
Yep.

John:
Yeah. So basically it was like ... I mean, Flipper itself, I started in 2013 just for fun on the weekend, which was a lot of ... Httparty, a lot of gems like that, that's where they came from, was just hacking around on the weekend or in the evenings. I spent a lot of time doing that kind of stuff. And I have always been interested in feature flags, because I worked on, a long time ago. I don't know if you guys know this or not. But I worked on Words With Friends, the Scrabble game on the backend. So I didn't work on any iOS stuff, but worked on the backend. And every time I tried to roll out, I always joked that that time period in my life, all I did was write caching for a year. Because it was just trying to ... We scaled from 50,000 requests a minute to over a million. It was insane.

John:
And so we were just trying to keep the service up. And that's where feature flags came in, and it kept going down every time I tried to roll out this new caching. And the new caching was really important, and I couldn't get it to roll out, because every time I added it, the whole site would just screech to a halt due to a cold cache. So that's when ... I was working with Jesse Newland I don't know if you guys remember him from Rails.

Josh:
Oh, yeah.

John:
Yeah. So we were working together on it. We were like, "We should do feature flags." He was like, "Check out this thing called Rollout." And so I set it up and got it working. And we slowly rolled it out. And then I was just like, "Wow. This is amazing." So yeah. So then a couple years later though, I didn't love the API. I'm real picky about APIs and the way the code looks, and the way it feels. And their examples used like, dollar rollout equals, or something. And dollar just made scrunch my shoulders and nose, and everything.

John:
So at that point I was like, "I think I can do it better." And that I feel like how I always end up in open-source is some kind of silly idea like that. It's usually like you change one thing, and...