Supabase DevRel with Jon Meyers
Jon Meyers, Supabase developer advocate, discusses edge functions, GraphQL extensions, launch weeks, and the growing Supabase platform.
Episode Description
Jon Meyers, Supabase developer advocate, discusses edge functions, GraphQL extensions, launch weeks, and the growing Supabase platform.
Episode Summary
In this episode, Jon Meyers, a developer advocate at Supabase, shares his journey from teaching bootcamps to working in DevRel, explaining how the role blends education with exposure to more complex engineering challenges. The conversation covers the current state of Supabase as a hosted Postgres platform wrapped with convenience tools like auth, realtime subscriptions, file storage, and newer additions including a native Postgres GraphQL extension and Deno-powered edge functions. Jon explains how the GraphQL extension was built as an open source Postgres extension rather than a proprietary dashboard feature, reflecting Supabase's commitment to portability and the broader open source ecosystem. The discussion traces the evolution of Supabase's serverless function strategy through multiple phases, from Postgres functions and webhook-style triggers to fully integrated Deno Deploy edge functions. Jon also talks about Supabase's launch week culture, which originated from the company's Y Combinator roots, and highlights the community-driven hackathons that follow each launch week. The episode touches on the company's $80 million Series B raise and wraps up with a look at the Made with Supabase showcase and the vibrant developer community building on the platform.
Chapters
00:00:00 - Meet Jon Meyers and the Path to DevRel
Jon Meyers introduces himself as a developer advocate at Supabase and shares his unconventional path into programming, which began with a failed high school programming class that kept him away from coding for years. He eventually returned to it at university, where things clicked so well that he began teaching the course during his second semester.
After teaching at a bootcamp, Jon moved into software engineering roles at a real estate company and a bank in Australia before transitioning into DevRel through a brief contracting stint at Prisma. He explains how DevRel sits at the intersection of teaching and tackling more complex, practical problems, and describes the three pillars of developer advocacy: content creation, community engagement, and product feedback. He also discusses how the Supabase DevRel team of four splits responsibilities organically based on strengths and time zones.
00:05:38 - What Is Supabase and the GraphQL Extension
Jon provides an overview of Supabase as a hosted Postgres database wrapped with a suite of tools including authentication, realtime subscriptions via WebSockets, file storage, edge functions, and a newly launched GraphQL capability. The GraphQL feature is highlighted as a native Postgres extension built by Oliver Rice, meaning any Postgres database can install and use it independently of Supabase.
This approach reflects Supabase's broader philosophy of building open source tools that benefit the wider ecosystem rather than proprietary features locked into their platform. The conversation covers how the extension introspects the database to generate types and default resolvers, with the option to write custom resolvers for more complex queries. Anthony and Jon compare this to PostgREST and discuss how the extension is still in its early stages following its debut during a recent launch week.
00:11:43 - Launch Weeks, Y Combinator Roots, and Community
The discussion turns to Supabase's distinctive launch week format, where new features are released daily over the course of a week. Jon explains that this practice grew out of the company's experience in Y Combinator, where the intense demo day culture inspired the co-founders to maintain that energy as a permanent part of company culture. Anthony notes that other projects like RedwoodJS have drawn inspiration from this approach.
Jon describes how each launch week is followed by a community hackathon, encouraging developers to experiment with the newly released features. The Made with Supabase showcase, itself a hackathon submission winner, has become the central hub for community project submissions. This combination of launch events and hackathons creates a feedback loop that keeps the community engaged and surfaces creative use cases the team hadn't anticipated.
00:13:17 - Edge Functions and the Serverless Strategy
Jon walks through the evolution of Supabase's approach to serverless functions, starting with native Postgres functions written in SQL or PL/pgSQL, then moving to function hooks (soon renamed async triggers) that call external HTTP endpoints when database events occur. The community's persistent demand for integrated serverless functions led the team to evaluate multiple providers before settling on Deno Deploy as the foundation for edge functions.
The conversation traces Supabase's original three-phase roadmap for functions: external HTTP triggers, managed serverless on AWS or GCP, and finally their own serverless offering. Jon explains how the last two phases were effectively combined, with Deno edge functions providing both the managed hosting and tight integration with the Supabase platform. This means functions can access environment variables and database connections automatically, making them more convenient than a completely separate microservice while still being deployable via the Supabase CLI.
00:21:28 - Integrations, Series B, and Community Projects
Jon discusses the recently launched integrations page, which showcases partner tools that extend Supabase's capabilities across auth, dev tools, and low-code platforms. The conversation touches on how Supabase's modular design allows developers to swap components like auth or the query builder with alternatives such as Auth0 or Prisma, emphasizing portability and avoiding vendor lock-in.
The episode then covers Supabase's $80 million Series B raise and what it means for the platform's future, including sustaining a generous free tier. Jon highlights the Made with Supabase community showcase and encourages listeners to explore the diverse projects built on the platform. The conversation wraps with Jon sharing his history as an FSJam listener and reflecting on the surreal experience of appearing on a podcast he's followed since its early episodes.
Transcript
00:00:00 - Anthony Campolo
And then what's your official title?
00:00:01 - Jon Meyers
Oh, it's Supabase. Just a developer advocate.
00:00:04 - Anthony Campolo
We've had many of those.
00:00:06 - Jon Meyers
They tend to be the ones with the time to go out and talk to people because they're getting paid to do it.
00:00:23 - Anthony Campolo
Jon Meyers, welcome to the show.
00:00:25 - Jon Meyers
Hey, thanks for having me.
00:00:26 - Anthony Campolo
You are a developer advocate at Supabase, which is very exciting. We have had two episodes already about Supabase with Paul and Ant, and so we're excited to get a developer advocate on.
I've always said that you can kind of tell where a company is in its lifecycle based on who's going out and doing the podcast. Is it the CEO? Is it someone in the C-suite, or is it a developer advocate? It seems like Supabase is at the level now where they can hire someone to just go out and do podcasts for them, which is great.
00:00:55 - Jon Meyers
Yeah. Finally reached that level where the CEO and CTO don't have time for this kind of stuff. Too many things on fire.
00:01:01 - Anthony Campolo
Why don't you let our listeners know a little bit about yourself? How did you get into coding, and how did you get involved with Supabase?
00:01:08 - Jon Meyers
Yeah, my name's Jon Meyers. I started off, well, I guess if you go way back, I took a programming class back in high school. I actually got dropped about six weeks in, and it made no sense to me. It completely freaked me out, and I thought that I couldn't do programming. So I kind of steered well away from it for a very, very long time and went through a whole bunch of other careers to finally end up falling back into programming.
So when I started doing programming at university, it really clicked with me. Then I started teaching the course in the second semester that I was there. So I was like, yeah, okay, I'm okay at this, and I really enjoyed teaching and learning at the same time. When I finished university, I went and taught at a bootcamp, and then I got a little bit over teaching the same thing over and over again and not getting presented with more challenging, more unique problems working as a software engineer.
[00:01:53] So I went and worked for a real estate listing company here in Australia, and then a bank, working as a software engineer for maybe three or four years, and then moved into DevRel. I did a short stint at Prisma and then moved to Supabase, where I've been up until now.
So DevRel is kind of this nice intersection where I get to see more challenging problems and more interesting stuff. I'm not teaching the same "Introduction to programming. This is a variable. This is a function" kind of stuff. I get to teach more practical "how you integrate something with something else" stuff, which is much more interesting and keeps the job much fresher. But I do get to scratch that itch of being able to teach people and being able to create educational resources and help other people learn things.
00:02:31 - Anthony Campolo
That's cool. I didn't know that you had worked at Prisma before Supabase, actually. That's pretty cool.
00:02:36 - Jon Meyers
Yeah, it was a very short stint — only two or three months. I was kind of contracting there, but used that as bargaining power for why Supabase should employ me because, at that point, prior to Prisma, I had no developer advocate experience, and I was trying to move into a startup that was looking for someone to kind of run all of DevRel. I got to do a very short stint at Prisma and then kind of use that as a negotiation tactic to get in at Supabase.
00:03:00 - Anthony Campolo
That's cool. So if you're running DevRel, are there other DevRel people working at Supabase right now?
00:03:05 - Jon Meyers
Yeah. So I'm not running the entire thing. At the time, they were kind of looking for their first DevRel, and then me and Thor, who was working at Stripe at the time, we both started at Supabase around the same time. So we kind of, I guess, kicked off what sorts of things we do as DevRel and set the tone.
And then more recently, Andrew Smith, or Silent Works Online, has joined us, and also Tyler. So yeah, there's four of us now, which is very nice. We're kind of spread a little bit across the world as well. We still haven't got anyone in the US, which would be very convenient given all of the podcasts and things like this that we need to go on. But we've got good coverage across the APAC region and then into the UK.
00:03:41 - Anthony Campolo
I'd be curious how you think about separation of duties and who does what. Do some people focus on certain kinds of content? Are some people more community-focused versus content-focused? How does that division of labor work?
00:03:54 - Jon Meyers
Yeah, totally. The way that I see it, the way a lot of people see it, is there are kind of three different pillars to developer advocacy.
So there's content creation. That's, I guess, what I fall into most, where you're creating YouTube videos, writing blogs, doing live streams, going on podcasts, things like that. You then have the community-focused side of it, so people talking to the community, getting them excited about the product, sending them support resources and things where they can find answers to their questions and links to documentation, and making sure that the documentation is fairly up to date.
And then the third pillar is the product feedback side of things. I guess this is the only part where the actual advocacy part comes into it, because you're talking to a lot of developers and you're getting a lot of feedback, taking that feedback and feeding it into product decisions. So you're kind of advocating on behalf of the developers using the product.
[00:04:43] What sorts of things are the most important to be working on? We kind of fit into different slots at Supabase. I don't think we've had that conversation where it's like, you fit into this box and you fit into this box, I guess because we're a startup and there's just so much we need to do. We can all kind of just work on whatever we're best at and whatever we're going to have the most impact on.
And so for me, being in Australia and outside of convenient time zones, kind of being in probably the worst time zone for doing things synchronously with the US, going into the content creation side made a lot of sense for me because I could do that asynchronously. Obviously live streams, maybe not so much, but doing video tutorials and writing blogs and all of those things I can do at any time. So yeah, we've kind of just leaned into the things that we probably feel most comfortable with.
[00:05:30] And then if something outside of that needs to get done, then we'll have a conversation about it. But I guess that's how we split it up: what can we do the best at?
00:05:38 - Anthony Campolo
So we've had some episodes about Supabase already, but those were quite a while ago. For any listeners who haven't heard those, why don't we go ahead and let them know what Supabase is?
00:05:48 - Jon Meyers
Yeah, I probably should have mentioned that up top. So yeah, Supabase is, I guess, primarily a hosted Postgres database. You create a new project with Supabase, and we go and host that for you and give you a URL and a connection string to connect to that.
We then kind of wrap a collection of convenience tools around that Postgres database. So we have auth, the ability to sign in and sign out, and also some authorization stuff around row level policies written in your database that determine who is allowed to see that content.
Realtime is subscribing to realtime events. So as things change in your database, your client application can get notified via WebSockets that things have changed so your application can update the UI. We offer file storage, so the ability to store larger content or images and music or movie files.
We've just recently launched edge functions, which are a wrapper around Deno Edge Functions, which is very cool. Yeah, we've also recently released GraphQL. So we've built a GraphQL plugin for Postgres itself and then have wrapped that up into our hosted Supabase project.
[00:06:47] So when you create a new Supabase project, you will automatically get a GraphQL endpoint that you can interact with as well.
00:06:52 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, I know the GraphQL and Deno edge functions. Those are both definitely new since we last talked with Paul and Ant, and it's actually really funny. If you listen back to the episode with Paul, we were talking about GraphQL stuff specifically because this was when I was starting to get my job at Stetson. So I was like, so what's the deal with GraphQL stuff? And he's like, oh, right now for us, it would be a huge loss of focus. So it was just kind of kicked down the road. I'm glad that it got kicked down the road and eventually actually got done, because the GraphQL thing is very cool.
What you did that I think is very smart and very much in line with the Supabase ethos is that you didn't build the GraphQL thing into your dashboard. That's what most people do if they want to create some sort of nice GraphQL interface. You'll have something where you log in, and then there'll be a graphical editor that's kind of embedded into it.
You can do queries through that, but you now have a Postgres extension that is like a native Postgres extension that allows you to do GraphQL. So could you talk a little bit about what exactly a Postgres extension is and what makes that kind of unique?
00:08:02 - Jon Meyers
This definitely all kicked off because of the genius of Oliver Rice, who pitched this idea of being able to build GraphQL on top of Postgres. I haven't had much experience with writing a Postgres extension, but I believe it's Postgres that you write it in. Maybe it's C, maybe it's something scarier.
But a Postgres extension is something that you can install on any Postgres database. Usually there are some extensions that are provided in certain environments. So there'll be extensions that exist within an AWS-hosted Postgres instance, and then you can install your own custom ones just from the source code of that.
I'm going to claim that they're in C because I feel like there's a makefile, and I associate makefiles with C. So I'm just going to make this statement that they're written in C for your Postgres database, but that may not be true.
But yeah, as you were saying, that's very in line with how Supabase tends to build these features. We've always looked at: is there something that exists out there in the market? Is there an open source product that we can support, or a maintainer that we can support to build this thing and then just integrate it into Supabase? Or is it something that we actually need to build in-house?
So with building GraphQL into Supabase, it was obviously something that didn't exist out in the world. Rather than just building it internally and offering it for just Supabase instances, as you're saying, we built a GraphQL extension for Postgres. Any Postgres instance can run this extension and get all the benefits of that GraphQL piece on top of Postgres database.
And then we just made that available within our hosted instances of Supabase. It's definitely a very cool thing about the ethos of the company, looking for other ways to support what is already there and bring them into what we're offering as Supabase, or building something that other people can use out in the open source community, and then again making it available integrated into everything else with Supabase.
00:09:43 - Anthony Campolo
So is it just an extension where you would just send GraphQL queries to the database, or does it come with something like a graphical where there's some sort of UI that you can interact with?
00:09:55 - Jon Meyers
Yeah, it's still sort of in development at the moment. So I don't think it, by default, gives you a graphical interface to play with. You can plug it into any other, like you can run it through the Hasura GraphQL Playground interface to be able to look at it visually.
But yes, it gives you the ability to write the code to translate a GraphQL query into a resolver that can query your database in Postgres. It introspects your database to pull out all of the types, and then it gives you a few resolvers by default: how to get all of a collection, how to insert or update or delete something from that collection.
But then if you want to do anything beyond that, you can write your own resolvers and write what that would translate to in your Postgres queries.
00:10:36 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, it sounds a lot like PostgREST. That was something that we had talked about last time when Paul was on, because PostgreSQL takes your database and auto-generates REST endpoints. So, similar deal. And that would have been like if you had decided, you know, how could we do this without having to build something entirely in-house. Then pulling out something like PostgREST would have been probably the thing to do.
But building the extension is definitely really interesting. I'll be kind of curious to see where that goes in terms of how it gets integrated into the Supabase dashboard, but I imagine that's probably still future-facing stuff right now.
00:11:08 - Jon Meyers
Yeah, it's a very newly released feature. This came out during our last launch week. So at Supabase, if you're not familiar with the way that we release features, usually we kind of work on things across a period of three or four months or something like that. And then we organize a big launch week where we release a new feature every day, or end up releasing many more than five features across the week.
So this was one of the things that came out of the last launch week. This is kind of V1 of this, or I guess probably more like a beta version of this. Then we'll keep iterating on it and pushing out new features and announcing even more cool things probably every launch week.
00:11:43 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, launch week is awesome. The Redwood team took a lot of influence from Supabase when we had our V1 kind of launch week. We didn't do a different feature every day, but we had a whole week where every day we would interview people or announce something that was really fun. And I think that having seen Supabase do their launch weeks was probably where we got the idea from, I would guess.
00:12:06 - Jon Meyers
Yeah, I think Redwood were very open about that. But yeah, we've had super positive feedback from a lot of people wanting to do launch week similar to Supabase's. And this kind of whole idea spun out of the origin story of Supabase coming from Y Combinator.
Y Combinator, for anyone that's not aware, is like an intensive incubator for startups. It's a very intense program where you learn how to basically pitch and launch a product, and you have a very tight time frame. You have a big demo day at the end where you show off everything that you've done during your Y Combinator batch and cohort.
The CEO and CTO and co-founders of the company wanted to keep that as part of the culture of the company after finishing up at YC. That's kind of what we're trying to emulate. We work on things throughout this period of time, and then we have this demo day or this launch week where we do a big event where we talk about all of the cool things and show them off to the public.
[00:12:55] It's very cool.
00:12:56 - Anthony Campolo
And I imagine you probably have one coming up in maybe a month or two.
00:13:00 - Jon Meyers
Yeah, we do. I don't know if the date has been announced publicly, but I believe there is a date.
00:13:05 - Anthony Campolo
It's fine. This isn't going to come out for a while anyway, so it doesn't really matter.
00:13:09 - Jon Meyers
We probably will have already done it or it's probably coming up very soon. So yeah, keep an eye on the Supabase Twitter. That probably would be the best spot to find out when that is.
00:13:17 - Anthony Campolo
Let's get into the edge functions a little bit. So before we talk about edge functions, I know there are Supabase functions. I'm not sure if Supabase edge functions are considered like a subset of that, or kind of how all of that branding works. So what's the deal with functions on Supabase?
00:13:33 - Jon Meyers
Yeah, this is something that gets confusing because of all the different kind of iterations that we've had on what we offer as functions. It's always been something that the community has asked very, very loudly for. We've been looking at different ways that we could do this properly, and I think we've settled on a really good solution with edge functions wrapping around Deno.
But yes, what was already available in your Postgres database was Postgres functions. So that's what we started with. You can write in a collection of different languages. You can do just standard SQL, you can do PL/pgSQL, which is Postgres procedural language. That gives you a few more superpowers. And you can also write them in C if you're a crazy person. Or you could write them in, I think, V8 as well, so you can write some more familiar JavaScript if you would like.
But yeah, Postgres functions exist within Postgres databases and just give you the ability to write some programming statements but have direct access to your Postgres database.
[00:14:27] We then released, well, they're called Postgres triggers. Currently, they will be renamed Async Triggers soon, probably by the time, well, hopefully by the time this episode comes out, because it's something that I'm meant to be working on. This was the ability to call an endpoint somewhere on the internet, so, like, make a request to an API anytime data in your database changes. You choose to subscribe to particular events on particular tables.
So let's say you want to subscribe to insert events on your posts table. Anytime anyone inserts a new post, it's going to make a call to this API and say, here's the new record that's been inserted into the database.
So this was... what did I say before? No, function hooks. Function hooks is what it's called. Async triggers is what it will be called. And then more recently we have released edge functions.
So we had those two different ways that you could write this kind of programming logic. You had Postgres functions in your database, and then you had this kind of webhook-style thing where you could subscribe to changes in the database and call an external webhook. But everyone was just saying, well, why can't we have that serverless function or whatever that API is on the other end of our function hook? Why can't that be in the Supabase instance itself?
We spent a lot of time investigating, trying to work out what the best way to do this was. We looked at a whole bunch of different providers and settled on Deno as definitely having the best offering for what we wanted. So Deno is similar to Node, a bit different to Node, but a similar kind of programming language. It's built on TypeScript.
If you haven't checked out Deno, it's very cool. They have a slightly different way of pulling in packages, so it's not like you just npm install a package. You need to point to where that package exists on the internet or locally, and then you can write similar Node-ish kind of stuff in a Deno function.
[00:16:09] And now you can do that within your Supabase instance. So we have a Supabase CLI where you can create a new function, and that will create a little folder locally that has the serverless function that you can open up and edit. And then you just deploy that, and it will go off to be hosted on Deno.
And then yeah, that gives you the ability to use that in function hooks within your Supabase instance as well.
00:16:32 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, I've been following Deno pretty closely for like two years now. I remember when I was first learning to code, and I was kind of looking at different open source projects that I felt like were kind of interesting. And coming up, that was one that was still very early but very obviously going to be important at a certain point, so I was kind of learning about it.
I even did a meetup talk for Deno Paris a really, really long time ago, and I wrote a bunch of blog posts. It's only really been probably in 2022 that it seems to have started to finally pick up in terms of companies using it and other frameworks starting to integrate with it, like Remix now works with Deno in kind of an experimental mode. And then Netlify. They now have their edge functions that are using Deno.
We talked to someone from the Netlify team, and that episode will air before this one. I was curious. You said that you get your function going and then it gets hosted on Deno. So is that Deno Deploy? Do you integrate with Deno Deploy specifically?
00:17:35 - Jon Meyers
Yeah, we do. So Deno Deploy is where the function is hosted. You get a little bit more in your Supabase dashboard around that. So you get access logs.
And we also set some environment variables to make it easy to connect to your Supabase database from Deno Deploy. But yes, you could also just go and host a completely separate Deno Deploy function or even a Lambda function or any kind of serverless function, and then tie it into your Supabase instance using function hooks or async triggers, maybe. But yeah, this gives you the ability to have it integrated in with the rest of the tools that exist within Supabase and appear there, like in the dashboard alongside the rest of your database.
00:18:12 - Anthony Campolo
I remember there was a Supabase blog post a while ago that said there was going to be different phases of rollouts for different types of functions. That was a while ago, so I'm not sure if that's still a thing or not, but are there other phases that are coming up now?
00:18:26 - Jon Meyers
Yeah, I think the different phases. I think we're looking at Postgres functions being that first phase, async triggers allowing you to make requests out to other things and kind of subscribe to those changes in the database, and then looking at how do we do serverless functions on top of that.
So you've always been able to just create a serverless function in anything else that you're working with. Like if your client application is written in Next.js, for example, then you've got your API routes folder, which gives you serverless functions. And so this Deno edge function part of Supabase was looking at bringing that into the Supabase platform.
I guess the benefit there is you can kind of conceptually think about these things as separate concerns. So if you have serverless functions that are related to the data that exists in your database, then maybe it makes more sense for those to kind of be conceptually coupled with your database and in your Supabase instance.
So an example of this is integrating with something like Stripe. If every time you create a customer in your application, you want to create a Stripe customer in your backend, that's kind of a concern that's related to the data that's stored on the backend. That doesn't really relate to the client application that your user is using.
So those kinds of things, where you want to automate those tasks and subscribe to changes in your database and then have it automate other things that happen and other data that's created in your database, then yeah, it makes sense to have all of those things existing in your Supabase instance.
00:19:47 - Anthony Campolo
And I found the blog post I was thinking of. It was three stages. The first stage was give developers the ability to trigger external HTTP functions today using function hooks. Stage two was trigger serverless functions on AWS or GCP. And then stage three was release our own serverless functions. So I'm guessing that's kind of what ended up becoming the Deno functions thing.
00:20:10 - Jon Meyers
Yeah. So I guess we've kind of mashed those last two together a little bit. The initial vision was being able to create those serverless functions within your Supabase instance, so being able to click, like, "I want a Lambda function," and clicking "Create Lambda Function," and then being able to write the code in your Supabase dashboard and have that go and update your Lambda function on AWS.
And so I guess we've kind of combined those last two steps. The separation there between those last two points is one is completely just existing somewhere else. So you've got a Lambda function that is just completely separate from your Supabase instance. And then us building our own functions like that would obviously be a wrapper around something like Lambda or, in this case, Deno.
So because that exists within our Supabase infrastructure, it has access to those special things like being able to tie into your database directly and some of those smarts about it, knowing about your Supabase instance rather than just being a completely separate microservice off somewhere else that needs to be told everything that it needs to know about how to get back to your Supabase instance.
[00:21:09] So I guess by combining those two steps, we've realized we want the ability to be able to write this function in our Supabase instance or be able to create that with the Supabase CLI and be able to view logs alongside our Supabase instance. But we also want it to have that special integration into Supabase and know that it's a part of your Supabase instance.
00:21:28 - Anthony Campolo
So I'm looking at the home page and you have an integrations page. I'm not sure how long this has been around, but you have integrations for different auth platforms, different dev tools, and different low-code tools. I'm curious if you've played around with many of these. Actually, I see we have a snippet from Peter in here.
00:21:44 - Jon Meyers
Yeah. So this is something that's launched quite recently. So this is part of our collection of partners that work with Supabase. We have integrations where you can look at different tools that you can click together with your Supabase instance to make it more powerful.
We've also got experts. So we've got a collection of agencies that are working with Supabase and have experience with Supabase. This partners page is a good place to look at things that you can easily integrate into your Supabase instance. I've played with a couple of these. I haven't played with all of them, but yeah, very cool collection of tools to go and check out.
00:22:15 - Anthony Campolo
I think it's interesting that you have an auth one, like there's Clerk, but Supabase comes built-in with auth. Do you put auth on your auth?
00:22:25 - Jon Meyers
I guess that's one of the things that Supabase has always tried to offer as well, is the flexibility around taking some of those features or all of those features but not sort of being tied into a particular vendor for any of those parts.
So if you want to swap out the auth component for Auth0, for example, then you can do that. If you want to swap out the ORM or the kind of query builder thing that we have in Supabase JS with something like Prisma, then you can totally do that. We give you direct access to the Postgres instance that's running under the hood. It makes it a lot more flexible and a lot more portable.
If things didn't happen to work out with Supabase, you could just dump your whole Postgres instance and go and host it somewhere else. You're not tied into it, only working in this protected proprietary space.
00:23:08 - Anthony Campolo
Just last month, there was some very big Supabase news. You raised your Series B, and it was an $80 million Series B, which is quite large for a Series B, I think.
00:23:21 - Jon Meyers
Yeah, it turns out people are very excited about Supabase, or not just Supabase. People are very excited about dev tools and making devs' lives easier. Turns out that's the way to squeeze the most efficiency out of application development. So it's a very nice number for a Series B.
00:23:38 - Anthony Campolo
Are there kind of goals that you have now that you've crossed this milestone? What's kind of the vision of what to do with all this money?
00:23:46 - Jon Meyers
Yeah, there's lots of cool ideas. I don't know what's out in the public yet and what I'm allowed to talk about, but yeah, $80 million unlocks a lot of cool features that we can build and unlocks a lot of exciting launch weeks that we can do, and a lot of free tier projects that we can host for a long time before running into trouble.
00:24:07 - Anthony Campolo
That's true. Yeah, you got so many people's databases just sitting there for free.
00:24:12 - Jon Meyers
Yeah, that's right. One of the benefits of at least my job is I get to go and talk to all the people building those things and find out all the cool use cases that that unlocks by having such a powerful collection of tools available at the free tier.
00:24:24 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. Do you want to talk about some of the use cases that are out there or some of the things that people are currently using Supabase for?
00:24:30 - Jon Meyers
Yeah, there's a whole bunch of cool stuff if you check out Made with Supabase, I believe, which was actually built as one of the hackathon submissions. One of the things that we do after each launch week, or that we have done after each launch week so far, is a hackathon.
And so we talk about all these cool features that are coming out, all these new things that are being launched. Then we kick off a hackathon that goes for a week, where we encourage people to build cool things with those new features and show us what they discover they can do, rather than the things that we thought that they could do. And then we give out a bunch of prizes and a bunch of limited edition swag and things for the people that win those different categories.
The cool thing is this Made with Supabase site was one of the submissions for the hackathon, so I believe it was the winner of maybe the first one.
00:25:15 - Anthony Campolo
That's very meta.
00:25:17 - Jon Meyers
Yeah, it is. But this basically hosts all of the things that we've been told about that use, or that were made with, Supabase. And so it's kind of become a part of our hackathon process.
We now get people to actually submit at the end of launch weeks. We get them to submit their project to Made with Supabase, and then we go through the submissions there to determine who won each of those categories. But yeah, I recommend checking out Made with Supabase and having a scroll through and looking at all of the cool things that exist that you could build.
00:25:45 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, I'm looking through the list now. There's a couple interesting things. There's a Supabase schema visualizer. There's a "build blazing fast websites with Notion, GitHub, Google Sheets and more."
00:25:58 - Jon Meyers
Yeah, lots of cool page builders and things where you can click together things to build up a website. I guess because of that realtime subscription aspect, you can do really cool things around scheduling apps and things like that, building calendar integrations. And yeah, it's very cool.
00:26:14 - Anthony Campolo
Sizzy, a new way to browse Twitter. Need to check that one out.
00:26:18 - Jon Meyers
Not approved by Elon.
00:26:21 - Anthony Campolo
Are there any other things you want to talk about before we start closing it out here?
00:26:25 - Jon Meyers
Just go and check out Supabase. Have some fun. Go build some cool stuff with all the tools that exist there. Yeah, let us know what you're building.
00:26:31 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. I love how community-focused Supabase is. Having a page to highlight projects that people built with them is very, very cool, and I would expect no less from you all.
And you had mentioned actually before we started recording that you've been listening to FSJam for a while. I was kind of curious if you had any big episodes that you really enjoyed or topics that we've covered.
00:26:54 - Jon Meyers
Yeah, I started listening. I was saying to Anthony, I started listening to FSJam back when it actually started. So I think maybe like episode three or four, I started listening. I was super excited about the Redwood community at the time. And there was a lot of you and Chris talking about Redwood and obviously having people like Tom on from Redwood to talk about why it was so cool.
But yeah, there's just been so many super interesting episodes I really liked. The episode on Blitz was awesome as well. It was interesting hearing from the two sides of you obviously being more heavily on the Redwood side and Brandon being on the Blitz side, but yeah, there have always been super interesting guests on there. Yeah, it's a good podcast. Keep it going.
00:27:31 - Anthony Campolo
That's cool. Happy to hear that. Yeah, I always felt like, for me, I really wanted to get Brandon on to talk to him because I knew that, as a podcast listener myself, I would have loved to hear those kinds of episodes. So that's what usually helped direct me to what I thought would be good episodes or good guests, what I actually want to listen to.
So glad to know that that ended up panning out, and thank you so much for being a listener. I'm glad that we got to get you on here. We always really appreciate getting to have fans of the show on to speak with the audience, so you can listen to it back and be like, oh, this podcast I like, oh, I'm on this podcast that I like.
I've had the same experience of getting onto podcasts that I'd been listening to for years and years, like JavaScript Jabber or something. And the way I described it, I feel like it's like watching one of your favorite TV shows and all of a sudden you walk in as a character on the TV show.
00:28:21 - Jon Meyers
Yeah, for sure. It's always good when there's quite a big delay as well. Like, you don't forget that you went on, but you forget that it's coming out at a particular time.
00:28:29 - Anthony Campolo
You forget what you said.
00:28:31 - Jon Meyers
Yeah, that too, definitely. And I guess working for somewhere like Supabase, if something is delayed by a couple of months, usually the whole company has changed or there's a whole bunch of features that I said don't exist yet that have been launched. Things come out so quickly. The landscape changes very quickly.
Yeah, it's always interesting. My phone just automatically downloads episodes and then I just open up to see what podcasts are there, and my name is there. It's a very weird thing. Very surreal.
00:28:56 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. Totally is. That's very cool. Life of a DevRel.
00:28:59 - Jon Meyers
It's hard being famous.
00:29:00 - Anthony Campolo
And then why don't you let our listeners know what your socials are, how they can get in contact with you?
00:29:05 - Jon Meyers
Yeah. So the best place to contact me would be on Twitter. So if you go to JohnMeyers_io, that's my Twitter handle. DM me, @ me, do whatever. Let me know what you're building, and yeah, I'd love to see it.
00:29:19 - Anthony Campolo
Thank you so much, Jon. It's a real pleasure, and I'm sure we will have someone else from Supabase on in no time for sure.
00:29:26 - Jon Meyers
Thanks for having me. This has been awesome.
00:29:57 - short split/interjection
[unclear]