Introducing Season 2 of the Yes-code Podcast

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This is the Yes-code Podcast. We’re here in your feed to let  you know that Season 2 is just around the corner. We’ve got some really interesting technical deep-dives coming your way this season. You can look forward to: feature flags with Launch Darkly, building internal tools with Retool, multiplayer collaboration with Liveblocks, and content management with Strapi.

The ability to write software is a superpower. With the knowledge of code, and the ability to build software, you can solve problems with a huge amount of leverage. It is such a force multiplier.

You can write an application that does some tedious task, and over the course of a year, it saves you hundreds and hundreds of hours.

You can also write a piece of software that has massive scale. Maybe it's a very simple piece of software, but tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people find it useful.

But it's also challenging. Ultimately the task of helping people become software developers isn't just the task of teaching people how to code, it's a task of making the software development landscape easier to consume.

The worldview of Yescode: we want our jetpacks

Right now software engineering and software development is almost archaic. We're using these very rudimentary tools. You have to do everything bit by bit.

This bothers me to my core because I am an optimizer. I like everything to be as highly efficient and organized as it possibly can be. And so whenever I see the opportunity to improve something, I really want to do it. And so the reason I complain about things a lot is that my tools are substandard, and because I know that there's a better way. I just wish that I could have it.

So we developed the Yescode pattern for better developer tools.

Introducing the Yescode podcast

I'm so excited to share the first season of the Yescode podcast with you. Over the last few weeks, we've had great conversations about some of the most widely-applicable problem domains, like authentication, product notifications, and membership and payments.

We’ll be taking a deep dive into each of these problem domains with the subject matter expertise of the people making them. This season, we feature folks from Oso, Knock, Memberstack and Supertokens. Each episode digs into the specifics of the problem space, design decisions, and product surface area.

Who is this guy?

My name is John Britton and I love developer tools. I’ve spent a lot of my career in developer advocacy, developer outreach, go to market, types of functions where my job was to get developer tools into the hands of the most users possible. The number one technique I used to do that was education. The idea being that we could teach developers how to achieve their goal, give them the skills to unlock the solutions, and ultimately they would make the choice to use our tools.

The two biggest companies that I worked with in that way were Twilio and GitHub, and both of them took the same kind of strategy of teaching developers what they need to know to be successful with the product, ultimately helping them unlock the power of software.

Now I’ve taken that expertise, and brought it to the wider ecosystem of developer tools. Join me and sign up for the Yescode podcast so you never miss an episode.

Transcript

[00:00:00] John Britton:

I'm John Britton and I'm a developer who loves developer tools.

This is the Yes-code podcast. In each episode, we take a deep dive into one problem domain and learn about what makes it hard. What are the complexities, edge cases, and unexpected challenges faced by developers implementing solutions. We're joined by subject matter experts: founders, engineers, product managers, designers, community managers, and everybody else involved in delivering a Yes-code tool.

We learn about the motivations behind creating their tools and the various problems they've solved. Additionally, we'll take a look at the developer experience and the primitives exposed by their systems. How did they design their abstractions to make life easier for developers providing a great developer experience while also hiding away complexity?

Finally, we'll learn about how these tools can scale with you as you grow.

I'm so excited to bring the first season of the Yes-code podcast to you. You can look forward to some great conversations about widely applicable problem domains. Here are a few highlights from upcoming episodes.

On product notifications with Sam Seely from Knock:

[00:01:00] Sam Seely (Knock):

So I think that's one of the things that I'm most excited about with all these different tools and in this kind of application layer as a service or this Yes-code space is that they enable teams to ship the experiences they want to ship a lot faster and then move onto the next thing knowing that there's going to be a great team focusing on those questions of scale and maintenance and things like that.

[00:01:26] John Britton:

On authentication recipes with Advait Ruia from Super Tokens:

[00:01:30] Advait Ruia:

So one is like this concept of recipes or modules, which is essentially you pick, I think like I alluded to earlier all you're right. You pick what authentication method you want. So do you want passwordless do you want email password? Do you want social login? All of that. Right. And then once you pick that, you've now picked the recipe.

[00:01:45] John Britton:

On developer efficiency with Sam Scott from Oso:

[00:01:48] Sam Scott (Oso):

This is something that people typically spend a little time building themselves. And we, ultimately we want developers to spend about a 10th of the time that they currently do on authorization.

[00:01:55] John Britton:

On tiered membership with Tyler Bell from Memberstack.

[00:01:59] Tyler Bell (Memberstack):

So the couple of things that come to mind, so the is the first thing that we're removing from the developer's plate is the logic to even process those upgrades and downgrades. So for example, if you have, if you're building a website that say has three tiers, so you've got basic pro and premium and you want your members to be able to navigate up and down those plans to get different access.

[00:02:19] John Britton:

All that and more on The Yes-code Podcast. Subscribe at yescode.org.