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Interview with Anil Dash (Part 1)

Published 10/28/2019

Anil is the CEO of Glitch. He's an activist, writer and host of the podcast, Function. In today's episode, we sit down with Anil to talk about the origin story of Glitch and the journey to making cool things for and with the developer community and thoughts on the whiteboard interview process.

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Transcript (Generated by OpenAI Whisper)

Hey everyone, welcome to today's episode of Developer Tea. I'm very excited for today's episode. We have a wonderful guest for today's show. His name is Anil Dash. We're going to get to that episode in just a moment. But before we do that, I want to take a moment to invite you to do a couple of things. First, as you're listening to this episode, try to look for things that are valuable to you. And if you find something that's valuable to you, I want you to consider subscribing to this podcast, but also sharing that thing with another person. It's likely that if you found it valuable, then someone else might as well. Secondly, I want to remind you that you can always reach out and talk directly to me. You can email me directly, developertea at gmail.com. And I'm also on Twitter at developertea. My personal Twitter account is developertea. As I mentioned already, today's guest is Anil Dash. As you'll hear from Anil, this is not his first rodeo. He's been doing things on the internet for a long time. Most recently, he is well known for his role as the founder of Glitch and as the host of the podcast Function. Let's get straight into the interview with Anil Dash. Anil, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. It's kind of an honor. I feel like I've seen your work for a long time, and I think the world is a better place because of what you do. But for those who, for whatever reason, they haven't encountered what you do, the things that you are a part of, can you kind of give a basic background to the work that you're doing in tech? Sure. You know, I'm a guy that makes stuff on the web. And so the first thing I became known for is I started blogging about 20 years ago. Writing about tech and software and pop culture and whatever else. And back then, you didn't have to be, you didn't have to pick a lane. You can sort of try stuff. And then along the way, I got to work at a number of startups. In the early days of social media, I helped build a tool called Movable Type that was sort of one of the first big blogging tools. And they used, you know, people used that to build Huffington Post and Gawker and other things like that. And then more recently, a lot of my work has been around trying to enable. Collaboration, creativity, coding together. So I'm on the board of Stack Overflow. And Stack Overflow actually spun out of a company called Fog Creek that had also built Trello amongst other products. And about three years ago, I took over the company and we launched sort of the latest in that series of products called Glitch. And it has become a very substantial, very interesting community of people creating web stuff together. And it's both a development platform. We can code right in your browser and instantly ship an app, you know, to the entire web. And also a really great creative community where you can sort of see other people's work and remix it and collaborate together. And it's been a pretty, you know, knock on wood, a pretty nice success out of the gates. We've had just lots and lots of devs come in and feel like, oh, this brings back that creative feeling around coding. And so we ended up actually renaming the company to Glitch and focusing all in on it. And since we decided to do that about a year, year and a half ago, it's really taken off and people have now built millions of apps on Glitch. And that's my day to day is running the company and getting to work with the community and the team. Fantastic. I'm going to ask you a intentionally broad and difficult question about Glitch now. Sure. Who is Glitch made for and who is it made not for? Who is it not made for? I guess is a better way to use English properly today. Who is it not made for? Oh, that's a great question. So, you know, the first thing I thought about is every time I'd seen a developer tool in the past, it had always been this, I felt like they had pictured a guy sitting at a desk with a black terminal screen and green text on it. And that was the sort of the ethos and the aesthetic and the mindset of this thing. And it was, you were going to prove your, you know, command line bona fides, and this is how you became a developer. And we actually have a great cohort of people that work that way. And they're using those kinds of tools like Glitch. But it wasn't that we put them first. You know, we thought we know, we know how to check that box for those kinds of developers. But for people, interestingly, on other, like the sort of opposite ends of the bell curve from that, that's the middle of the curve of developers. On one end are real experts, people who love making stuff on the web, but have had, you know, and they might be, you know, the people that create the frameworks we use or create the tool work, the tools that we use. And, and I think they've lost some of the, the joy and the fun of just making stuff and sharing it because it's become very complicated. You know, you can't just ship stuff and all of a sudden you're negotiating your deployment environment and all this other stuff that's just in the way. And so those very, very experienced coders, I think have lost the, the fun or the soul of what connected them to creating. And at the other end are beginners. And this can be, you know, a kid who's learning to write their first line of HTML. It can be an experienced developer who's trying out an API that they haven't used before, where they're sort of back to square one or somebody that doesn't think of themselves as a coder at all, but maybe they do, you know, they edit formulas in the spreadsheet at work or something like that. But all those people share in common, they've got some technical skill, but they're a little bit out of their comfort zone, a little bit out of their norm. And for them, interestingly, they had the same needs that that expert coder has when they just want to get an idea out of their code. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which is, I don't want to worry about the overhead and the complexity. I don't want to be distracted by getting something, just the basics running. I want to be able to express this idea. I want to capture this, this little moment of inspiration that I had before it evaporates because it's so fragile. And I see it the same way as like, you know, I know I have a lot of friends who are musicians and they'll always have, you know, their guitar tuned and ready and sort of sitting next to them so that if they got a song stuck in their head, they can just capture it. I think the same thing applies for, for making stuff on the web where, sometimes you just had this fun idea you want to get out there and on glitch it's as easy as finding something close to what you do remix it and change it tweak it to be exactly what you need for that idea that's in your head we're making it for everybody that's ever had a moment where i thought you know what'd be cool to make you know what the world should see it's one little idea that i have yeah that's super cool so there's a lot to be said for lowering the barrier to entry both for people who are you know well into the industry have a job and are doing fine but also it's perhaps more importantly for people who are not in the industry yeah who who want to try something for the first time but they don't want to learn 16 hours worth of kubernetes material right like exactly right that that's not what they're looking for yeah and even you know like i can't i can provision a server on aws i can set up a deploy script but my gosh i don't want to you know what i mean like i've been at work all day i just want to make something and and back in the day i'm old enough i used to be able to go on geocities or live journal or you know what myspace whatever the sites were at the time and just sort of like shove something onto the internet and it would work and then it got hard you know and and so it got so difficult that i couldn't just you know try something i couldn't just experiment and so having that feel where it's as you know like i said as as as sort of joyful as just like tapping out a song on a piano or something it's a really it's a nice feeling yeah i think uh so so what you've said is this really cool idea of of a quick idea get it out on paper you know i think a lot of people may have a misconception about glitch based on our conversation so far that it's only made for like these prototyping ideas right but there's actually these like the ability to do a production level thing oh yeah right yeah very much so i mean we run glitch.com glitch itself on glitch it's a glitch after we edit you know and we did and and and that's obviously you know it's mission critical for us it's a very important app but but you know there are lots of companies where you know you're not going to run your air traffic control system on it you're not going to that's fine you're not going to run a stock exchange on it but short of that a lot of times people are just like i want to you know i we have some some old proprietary app at our company and we want to run it on our own so we're going to run it on our own and we're going to run it on our own like to have it you know drop something into slack so we have a reporting system and i just want to set it up but i'm not the one the person at the office who has permission to launch a production app and do all that kind of stuff and i don't want to ask the it guys to do it for me in the third quarter of next year and so maybe i can just put something together and i think that that you know that's the work case but i think that's true at home or somebody who's like i just want to you know put together a website to organize everybody in the neighborhood that wants to clean up the park the playground but i don't want to have to do a facebook group for it and and so there's a lot of just sort of different ways of capturing that impulse but they're real apps and they really run and they they're full stack and they are you can use any framework any toolkit any api i i do think a lot of times we start with that in the coding world of like here are the technical bona fides and not so much the creative impulse which is that's the thing i care about the most is you you will actually figure out any tech you need to do it and you're going to be able to do it in a way that's going toension you may have to figure out evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution 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And then maybe they've got some experience coding, or maybe you don't, but will handle all that other complexity, no matter how far you want to go. If you want to run a large scale production site like you are, that's great. That's all in there. But you don't have to think about that when you start. Right? Yeah. I think there's there's an interesting discussion here that kind of emerges when, when you start thinking about, you know, that seam between and back when I was an agency work, especially I saw the same pronounced even more, but it's between the kind of creative people and the technically adept people, right? Designer and developer prototype kind of people, where the designers kind of quarantined to this area, where, you know, they might be able to make a motion prototypes, they may even be able to work with HTML and JavaScript, right? But there's no way that that stuff is going to make it over. That seam, it's not going to get into the quote, real app. Yeah, right. And it got harder, too, because we introduced the frameworks and the toolkits and the build scripts, that you couldn't just tweak it yourself. Now you have exactly you had to have this knowledge. Yeah, we kind of lock people into react now. And if you don't have this big, and it creates again, the barrier to entry is like growing, right? Yeah. And I was that person, you know, I was a friend of depth for most of my depth career. And these days, you know, I'm a suit, so I don't get to trade as much code. But, but the, you know, I did feel that, especially towards the end of that phase of my career, where I was like, I am, this feels more like engineering, right? And like, declarative markup, or the expressive parts of the web, that was what drew me in in the first place. And they don't have to be intentional. It's not necessarily oppositional, but that sense that there's something closer to an expressive feel. I think it's just very, very powerful people. And you see it, it's interesting, because like, if you talk to writers, even people that write books, or screenplays, or whatever, you know, they're all used, they use Google Docs, sort of the standard, we can go in there, we can edit together at the same time, it's cool. And visual designers have that capability in Figma, or in vision, or whatever, you know, sketch, whatever tools they're using, where they're sort of able to draw together, create together, design together, obviously, in gaming, single player games, right? It's all, multiplayer, collaborative games. And then coding is still this world left to be sort of single player, even what we call social coding or collaboration is really, let me throw this code over the wall to you and hope you don't slap it back at me with my pull request being rejected. Yeah. And rather, I think about like the ability, I see this on glitch every day, if you have an error, there's an editor in the browser, and it's got a, you know, it'll, it'll lint catch errors and that kind of stuff. And if you want, there's a little, there's a little emoji, the person with their hand raised, and you can click that if you get stuck. And the homepage will say, you know, Jonathan wants help, you know, Jennifer, do you want to go in and help him and click on the thing, and you're in there coding together in real time together in the code and, and Oh, that's cool. And then and then somebody helps you, you say thank you, and you click the button, their screen fills with hearts. And it's just this like, moment is like, this is what it should feel like when you make something and that you're surrounded by people who want to help you and collaborate with you and help you create that thing. Yeah, I'm trying to like, in my mind, I'm trying to imagine what is what is an allegory to this? What is another place in life, where we are, where we actually have that kind of collaborative, and I'm thinking, like, walking around the supermarket, and trying to find a particular fruit that is esoteric, and I can't find it. And somebody says, Can I help you? Yeah, that that seems like the closest representation in the physical world. Yeah, well, there's definitely that sense of we, we in the physical world and community, we help each other. All the time. I'm sure you've been to the supermarket, somebody can't reach the top shelf, and you can. Yeah. And they're like, Can you get that? You know, can you get that can of beans for me, and you'll get it. And I see this having a kid, an eight year old, and if I'm at the playground, kids will ask each other, will you push me on the swing? And will you, you know, open up the gate for me, I can't reach the handle or whatever it is. And they do it reflexively. It's innate. It's a thing that people love to do is a little bit of help. That thing that's easy for me. It may be hard for you is to give I can give you that cost me nothing. And that reaffirms our humanity to one another. And we have provided each other so few spaces to do that in the technical world, even though it is one of our deepest impulses. So this leads to maybe a more kind of a deeper systemic question. Why did we get there? Why did we get to this place where, you know, first of all, asking, asking for help felt like an admission, rather than a human moment. And secondly, I guess a more important question is, you know, how did we get to this place where the barrier to entry was so high to begin with? You know, what, what is that? What do you think the history is behind what causes or caused that? You know, there are a lot of factors. One of the fundamental things about asking for help, and I talked about this with our product team all the time, is, you're putting yourself in a position of vulnerability. And so you have to create an environment where that asking for help is normal and rewarded. And actually, we do this thing when you raise your hand, you ask for help on glitch, like these little kind of bubbles, and it's very colorful, you know, experience comes together. And we're sort of saying this is normal. And by making it a visible thing, it's one of the few things you can do in the editor, like we've limited it very much. It's a normal thing to do. It's as easy and accessible as liking a photo is on Instagram. It's very core. And so we normalized it. But it's about this sort of sense of like, this is a place you can be vulnerable. And that even goes down into something like, I mean, the name of it is glitch, right? So obviously, the mistakes are okay here. Obviously, nothing is supposed to be perfect here. And we try to communicate that through design, we try to communicate that through language. But it's all very much about setting an expectation that there's a place where, you know, perfection is not expected, humanity is expected. And, and the imperfections are welcomed. And I think that's one big important piece. You know, I think a second part about how did we get to the gatekeeping? You know, where the who has access to information and who is deemed correct, and who's allowed to have it? You know, honestly, some of this is economics, right? The information of how to make code, how to make software is information that potentially allows you to become part of the class of workers who are amongst the most well compensated workers in the history of the world. Yeah. Right. That is a that's a that is an elite priesthood. And once that started to become true, it is no surprise that some people will try to erect a barrier or some gatekeeping around it. And then obviously, all the other, you know, systems of injustice that we have in society, replicate themselves in technology, no different than anywhere else. But I say this, where, you know, we share a glitch, co founders, and a lot of sort of historic DNA with Stack Overflow, our sibling company. Yeah. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We still see in so many companies, like the one I work at, used to do whiteboard interviews until I joined. We're never going to do that again because I wouldn't pass it. And I think I deserve to be here. And I think that our whole team deserves to be. And we started to evolve. And we saw that a lot of things changed. All of a sudden, one, the product that we made became more welcoming to more kinds of coders when we became more welcoming to more styles of coders. And our team got much more diverse, much more representative. We still have a lot of work to do. But the bar is low in tech. So we've already cleared the bar of at least being a little more inclusive than most other tech companies that we want to keep going. But without doing that for the team, then we certainly couldn't do it for the community. And those things are linked. We're going to take a quick sponsor break and then come back and continue our discussion with Anil Dash. Today's episode is sponsored by Flydark. At Flatiron School, you learn how the future is being built so you can change anything, starting with a new career and user experience in UI design. No matter where you are in your career, it might be time to go back to school. 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And when you're ready to make the decision, head over to FlatironSchool.com slash developer T. That's FlatironSchool.com slash developer T. That's FlatironSchool.com slash developer T. That's FlatironSchool.com slash developer T. That's FlatironSchool.com slash developer T. That's FlatironSchool.com slash developer T. That's FlatironSchool.com slash developer T. That's FlatironSchool.com slash developer T. Thank you again to FlatironSchool for sponsoring today's episode of Developer T. Thank you again to FlatironSchool for sponsoring today's episode of Developer T. Now let's get back into our discussion with Anil Dash. Now let's get back into our discussion with Anil Dash. So, I think there's people who are listening to this right now So, I think there's people who are listening to this right now and they got caught on the question about whiteboarding. We haven't really talked about it a lot on the show. Sure. And I want to know kind of two sides of this question. The first side is, you know, what is wrong with that from the skill evaluation level, right? If we're evaluating how good of an engineer or what kind of value you're going to bring to the table, what's wrong with it in that frame? But also, in the cultural, as you were saying, we're replicating our cultural biases, for example. What kind of sub-selections are accidentally being made through that kind of selection process, through whiteboarding interviews, for example? Well, it's interesting. This is a very personal story for me. The company I run, Glitch, used to be called Fog Creek. And the co-founders are Michael Pryor and Joel Spolsky. Joel used to write a blog called Joel on Software. It was very influential in the early 2000s on software development. And he really was one of the people that popularized doing whiteboard interviews. And I went back and I read his sort of original blog posts on this thing. And what he said was, during the interview process, you should capture how people think about the code they're going to write. How do they structure it? How do they approach the problem? And, you know, he's like, a whiteboard could be a useful tool for while you're in discussion with the candidate to see how they think and have to be able to map it out and give you something to respond to. And that's very reasonable, I think very thoughtful and smart. Like, you don't want somebody stuck in the weeds of, like, I can't get the compiler to run, so I can't or whatever it is that's there. So you just want to sort of capture how do they think about the problem. That impulse, I think, is very, very positive. What I think happens a lot in tech is there's a, like, sort of a cargo culting of, like, the ritual becomes more important than the purpose of it. And so I think what happened over time in many organizations, and to some degree our own until relatively recently, is it became kind of a hazing ritual. And it was, show me your knowledge of some arcane data type or data structure or, you know, so what do you memorize, and recite it to me on this whiteboard in front of me. And it became very contrived. And very obviously, nobody's ever written code that runs on a whiteboard. Like, it's definitionally not the actual environment that you work in. And the thing I came back to was I want our interview process and our recruiting process to resemble the work as closely as it can. And the way we work is not one person on their own being grilled and examined by somebody else. We work together. We code together in Glitch. I mean, that's how the company runs. And so our interview process kind of works the same way. We'll be like, here's some code. Let's work through it together. We can talk about how you would solve it, what your approach is. And by all means, if you are Googling while writing that code, if you are going to Stack Overflow writing that code, great. I don't want you to be working from memory about some API that changes every two weeks. I want you to look at the docs. And so all that put together, I think what happened is this very well-intended and actually very thoughtful process of let me see how you think became about the ritual of how that happens rather than the output. And then that result of that was it was used as a wedge or a lever to re-erect barriers around who gets included because people wanted to self-select for who has that degree from that institution that I want or who has that identity or profile of what everybody else in the rest of the team does. And you can use it as a bit of a gate or a fence around who gets in. That thing, I think, is that misuse of it I think is really poisonous. And to that point, it's worth discarding the entire ritual if it's so often misused. It almost feels like the troll on the bridge that asks you and I don't mean to mischaracterize all these well-meaning people, but for the sake of the cultural discussion, like a troll on a bridge that asks you to solve an esoteric riddle that has nothing to do with whatever is beyond that bridge. It's this moment where you have to have a passcode basically to get through. And while it evaluates maybe a particular vertical of a skill, it also leaves out a bunch of other things and includes a bunch of irrelevant things, I feel like. Yeah, and I thought really deeply about it, and I think it's understandable how we got here. Because one, everybody's moving quickly. You've got to hire quickly, you've got to move quickly, you've got to make a decision quickly. So what could be a good code? It takes a long time to write good code. So what can I do that would be a shorthand, quick signifier of knowledge? Well, a trivia test, basically. So that symbolizes a larger knowledge, and maybe it's imperfect, but this will be useful. Sort of similarly, there's an enormous amount of anxiety around the bad hire. It's a really interesting thing. What if we hire somebody bad? And the truth of it is, you already have, right? If you have more than three people at your company, there's different levels of skill. And how do you define that? But also, you would know. That's not so much the issue. It's this plausible deniability of, well, nobody can pass through our screening. We're very, very meticulous. And there's, I think, just an underlying anxiety that nobody wants to be on the hook or to blame for who let that person in here. They didn't know how to do this one task. And the truth of it is, and this is something I think we really built as a fundamental principle in how Glitch works, but I think many of the sort of future forward-looking coding environments are doing this, is we're all constantly copying each other's code and looking at each other's documentation and referencing what somebody else's code has on GitHub and doing view source on somebody's webpage. There's all these things we're doing that are about learning together, sharing together, and it makes the work better. And so anything that doesn't honor that tradition of coders love to collaborate. Coders are fundamentally generous people who like to share their ideas with the world and like others to build on what they made. And anything that betrays that tradition sort of drifts away from the most positive aspects of why we started doing this in the first place. Yeah. I would say this is kind of fundamental to any cultural revolution. It is the ability to pass on information. You know, that's what differentiates humans, for example, from other primates. And it's important that we can pass these things on because that's the only way we can build on top of the knowledge. If we had to do everything from first principles and that's the way we lived, man, we would be that would be pretty difficult, right? We would have civilization. And every great cultural artifact, every great expression is a remix. Everything is built on somebody else's work. Everything is a reference to somebody else's work. That song you love, that musician was influenced by something else. That film you love, that filmmaker saw other films and shaped what they did. And it doesn't mean they're not innovative. It doesn't mean they're not brilliant. It doesn't mean you weren't moved and touched by what they said. It just means we exist in a context of building on each other's work. And anything you know, as soon as you look at it through that lens, you see how much of the creation of software and technology is made solitary. We are meant to be alone in the dark, on our own, nobody else around us. And our creation of software is meant to happen on its own, in a vacuum, without being informed by other disciplines, by being informed by the arts, by being informed by civics, by being informed by sociology and anthropology. And that disconnect at the systemic and structural level is just as poisonous to the software we make as the disconnect at the personal level is. to our psyche in working alone and not having help. Yeah. And I think this is something that is, because of the history of software development, kind of where it came from, perhaps we kind of held on to the limited nature that it started out with. But I believe that some of the original kind of people in this, in tech, some of the early, whatever you want to call them, forefathers, many of them are still alive, because this is still new. But they would absolutely say, no, please, pull from the arts. Pull from whatever inspiration you can. We just did it that way because we were working basically with metal. Like we were, it was so... Well, computing resources were so scarce. Exactly. And the knowledge was so scarce that they did what they could. But it's funny because people will look at sort of the titans of tech. Steve Jobs, right? Archetypical tech titan. And they will copy wearing a black turtleneck. But if you listen to the man and what he talks about and what his public persona was, he spent as much time talking about the Beatles and the music he loved, and their obsessions of the entire company about film and music and these things as anything else. Same with, I look at Microsoft, and though he's often overshadowed by Bill Gates, Paul Allen, the other co-founder, this is a guy, like the animating force of his life was his love for Jimi Hendrix. You know? And what he wanted to do to fund the creation of the other music experience museum, the rock and roll museum and all the other stuff that he did, was like this guy. And he could play too. He was a pretty good guitarist. And cared deeply about that. And so there's this animating thing even in Gates' case, and he's probably one of the, you know, definitely one of those people who feels more into that nerd stereotype and very analytical. But, you know, he was raised in a family that cared about philanthropy. His mother was on the board of the United Way with the guy who was in charge of the IBM PC project at IBM. And the reason he got the introduction for them to be able to sell MS-DOS to IBM, or the IBM PC, was a connection through his parents' philanthropy. And it was later that his father became the first chair of the Gates Foundation in philanthropy. And that is these deep connections to very human things. You don't go into philanthropy at a global scale and try to end polio, and you don't build a museum to Jimi Hendrix, you know, unless you have care about some human passions. And so, developer tea is a part of the SPEC Network. Head over to spec.fm to find all of the episodes of this show, as well as other shows that are relevant to designers and developers who are looking to level up in their careers. Today's episode was produced by Sarah Jackson. My name is Jonathan Cottrell, and until next time, enjoy your tea.