So later on what happened which was really interesting was we would subscribe to this magazine called PC Users. That also is a part of the hacker mindset, in some ways it’s like, find the workarounds for getting some sort of result. But I think it wasn’t that clear back in the day, so I’m really happy that… So I think today it’s sort of an inevitable part of building a business with open source technology that you also participate in that collective conscience and that feedback loop. At the end of the day, technological solutions are so varying, they are so many, there are so many ways to skin this cat that when you’re in the context of a community that supports you with block blog posts or patches, or gives you ideas for how you could apply certain techniques to your day job… I think it’s a part of your day-to-day: we are working on a product, and at the same time we’re plugged into this collective conscience that’s Twitter, and all these different people with all these different opinions, sharing what they think about technologies and what open source project they’re creating. Right, but when you try it and the more you look into that you realize, “Well, it makes the teams more productive, it makes everyone really happy.” I think motivation in developer teams is a really big part of what we do. It’s obviously not super obvious when you look at it, like, “Oh, why am I spending so much time patching all this stuff and contributing it back, if I’m trying to ship a product to teachers?” And while we weren’t the first to do that, I think we were also pioneers a bit in that sense, and I know this because a lot of other startup founders have come to me and said, “You know, it’s been an inspiration to see how you can juggle the day-to-day of building a startup and also this idea of contributing back to open source”, because there is this really great feedback loop, as it turns out, once you start doing it. So the company was built on hiring a lot of people that were working with us on open source. So a lot of our time actually went into supporting and helping out the community with that project and at the same time receiving help back. Everything from little utilities to patches, to the HTTP servers, to forking Node when something goes wrong in production. And you know what happens when you start off with a project so new, we sort of had to start porting over a lot of things that are not written in it. I’ve been telling some people, I’ve been saying on Twitter a few times, I think it’s only been realized maybe over the last few years, but I think a lot of us that went into Node.JS with so much faith in it were like, “Okay, what if we could do universal rendering, or what if we could make teams more productive if they don’t have to do so much context switching?” And this was way before transpilers were mainstream… We decided to go full-stack JavaScript.Īt the time I think what really drew me was this idea of universal JavaScript. That’s what we did with LearnBoost - we took a leap of faith with that project, with JavaScript in general. Maybe it crashes a few times…”, I remember they said that, but it’s such a much better model for programming asynchronous networking services that you can just take that leap of faith. This thing actually could be production-ready. So we’re very technical folks, product-oriented folks, and we can pick a field that needs it the most”, so we picked education.Īt the time, I think Node 0.1 was the latest version, and I remember vividly… I would be on the IRC and Ryan Dahl, the creator of Node, would be telling everyone, “Oh, this is not production-ready.” And I remember some company from Japan - which it’s been on the back of my mind to check out which one it was, because it was amazing - they were like, “Oh yeah, we had like a hundred Java servers and we replaced it with five Node.JS processes.” That was sort of like the moment where everyone was like, “Wow. But together with two of my co-founders at the time, Rafael Corrales and Thianh Lu, we said “Let’s make a really big impact with technology on perhaps a field where they don’t get a lot of technological progress. LearnBoost is my first startup, in the sense that I had tried many different things, I had tried many different projects and products and enterprises over time.
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