Open Sauced with Brian Douglas
Brian Douglas shares the origin of Open Sauced, its evolution from a side project to a funded startup, and the history behind Jamstack and Netlify's dev ecosystem.
Episode Description
Brian Douglas shares the origin story of Open Sauced, its evolution from a side project to a funded startup, and the history behind Jamstack and Netlify's developer ecosystem.
Episode Summary
Brian Douglas, known as bdougie, joins JavaScript Jam to discuss his journey from sales professional to self-taught developer, his early days as employee number three at Netlify, and how those experiences led him to create Open Sauced — a platform for discovering open source contribution insights. He explains how he originally built Open Sauced in 2017 as a personal CRM to track the dozens of open source contributions he was making monthly to promote Netlify, and how it eventually grew into a venture-backed company after he left GitHub. The conversation takes an interesting detour into the origins of Jamstack, which Brian frames not as a marketing ploy but as a practical support shorthand to quickly qualify whether someone's project could deploy on Netlify. He demos the Open Sauced platform, showing features like developer profiles, contribution graphs, project discovery, and an Explore page that surfaces real-time data about who's contributing to what across the JavaScript ecosystem. The discussion also covers an AI-powered Chrome extension called Repo Query, plans for a natural language query interface backed by vector databases, and a contributor reputation scoring system called OSCR. Throughout, Brian emphasizes the importance of talking to users over debating tech stacks, building in public rather than in stealth, and lowering the barrier to open source for bootcamp grads and early-career developers.
Chapters
00:00:00 - Introductions and Brian Douglas's Background
The hosts welcome Brian Douglas, widely known as bdougie in the developer relations space, to JavaScript Jam. Brian introduces himself, noting that despite his visibility in DevRel, he's always considered himself more of a behind-the-scenes contributor than a keynote speaker. He shares that he recently left GitHub after nearly five years to focus full-time on Open Sauced.
Brian provides an overview of Open Sauced as a platform designed to help people find their next open source contribution, uncover insights about open source ecosystems, and identify opportunities through data. Anthony notes that the project has an interesting history, having started as a side project long before it became a funded company, bootstrapped primarily through Brian's time and effort rather than money.
00:01:55 - From Netlify Employee #3 to Open Sauced's Origin
Brian traces Open Sauced's roots back to 2017 when he was at Netlify as employee number three, writing blog posts about React while the team converted their Angular app. He describes how he transitioned into a developer advocate role and eventually left for GitHub, crossing paths with notable figures like Swyx, Divya, and Sarah Drasner. He explains the clever strategy he used to promote Netlify — making legitimate open source contributions and including deploy preview links in documentation PRs.
Drawing on his four years of sales experience before learning to code, Brian emphasizes the difference between aggressive selling and respectful engineering outreach. He built Open Sauced specifically as a Salesforce-like CRM for tracking his 20-plus monthly contributions, since GitHub's search and tracking capabilities in 2017 were insufficient for managing that volume of work across multiple repositories.
00:07:17 - The Real Story Behind Jamstack
Anthony steers the conversation toward the Jamstack terminology debate. Brian provides an insider perspective, explaining that Jamstack wasn't created as a marketing gimmick but as a practical solution to a real support problem at Netlify. The team constantly fielded questions about whether Django, Rails, Express, or Jekyll sites could deploy on the platform, and needed a fast way to qualify users.
Brian recounts how having the entire engineering team in support made efficiency critical, and "Is your site Jamstack?" became the quickest qualifying question they could ask. He discusses the naming evolution from "Active Ingredients" to "New Dynamic" to Jamstack Conf, and explains why community-branded conferences like Next Conf work better than company-branded ones like Vercel Conf. He suggests the successor term may be "Composable Web" and reflects on how the industry naturally moves past these labels as technology evolves.
00:13:06 - Building Products by Talking to Users First
The conversation shifts to product development philosophy. Brian argues that developers spend too much time debating technical architecture when they should be talking to users. Scott agrees, advocating for validating ideas through pre-signups before investing heavily in building. Brian then shares how, while still at GitHub on sabbatical, he closed his first customer — DigitalOcean — by pitching a Hacktoberfest insights dashboard that solved their real pain points around spam tracking and rate limiting.
Brian explains his deliberate strategy of staying quiet rather than making splashy announcements, using angel funding to create runway for focused customer conversations. He describes the Secret Sauce podcast as a vehicle for building in public and identifying industry opportunities. He also makes the case against stealth mode, noting that Open Sauced's 4,000-person community represents a built-in user base ready to activate when the paid product launches.
00:19:21 - Live Demo of the Open Sauced Platform
Brian walks through the Open Sauced platform, starting with Highlights — a feature allowing developers to showcase contributions and skills beyond GitHub's green squares. He demonstrates the project recommendation engine, which suggests up-and-coming repositories with their first hundred stars rather than massive projects like React where maintainers can't mentor newcomers. He shares his philosophy that finding a broken clone process is itself a valid contribution.
The demo continues with Dev Cards rendered via edge functions, contributor feeds filterable by language, and the Explore page showing real-time contribution data across the JavaScript ecosystem. The hosts spot interesting data points like an individual contributor outpacing Dependabot on SWC and Jared Sumner's ramping activity ahead of a Bun release. Brian also shows insight pages that let companies like Stripe track contributions across their SDK ecosystem, distinguishing between employees and community contributors.
00:33:28 - AI Features, Repo Query, and the Road Ahead
Scott suggests integrating an LLM to generate narrative summaries of contributor activity, and Brian reveals they've already built exactly that — a project called Repo Query. Built with interns over six weeks, it's a Chrome extension that indexes any GitHub repository and answers natural language questions about setup, tech stack, and codebase details. Brian explains they're migrating from Quadrant to Chroma for their vector database infrastructure.
The team discusses plans to combine Repo Query with Open Sauced's API data so users can ask questions like "Who are the fastest growing contributors in Python?" Brian also touches on community members' imposter syndrome around AI, noting that most developers are just one blog post away from catching up, since working with LLMs is essentially just calling an API. He draws another Tesla test-drive analogy, arguing that getting developers to actually try tools is the hardest and most important part of adoption.
00:43:14 - Community Building, OSCR Score, and Closing Thoughts
Brian highlights Open Sauced's community initiatives, including the 100 Days of Open Source challenge timed to coincide with Hacktoberfest, weekly Twitter Spaces called Open Source Hour, and Discord office hours. He plugs the Secret Sauce video podcast for its high-production interviews with open source maintainers and founders, and Anthony shares his excitement about an upcoming appearance on the show.
Brian previews the OSCR (Open Source Contributor Reputation) scoring system, developed in partnership with a university, which measures contributor weight and reputation based on git commits rather than GitHub-specific activity. He emphasizes that Open Sauced is designed to work with any git repository, not just GitHub. The episode closes with Brian reflecting on his personal motivation — having learned to code through open source while starting a family, he wants to show others that free mentorship through open source is a viable alternative to expensive bootcamps, while also building a sustainable business around that mission.
Transcript
00:00:04 - Scott Steinlage
What's up, everybody? Welcome to JavaScript Jam. Anthony, what's up?
00:00:09 - Brian Douglas
How are you? Hey. Hey.
00:00:10 - Anthony Campolo
I'm good, how are you?
00:00:12 - Scott Steinlage
Fantastic.
00:00:13 - Brian Douglas
All right, we got a great guest.
00:00:14 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah, we have an awesome guest here today.
00:00:17 - Brian Douglas
Excited, Brian.
00:00:18 - Scott Steinlage
Sure. Brian, bdougie.
00:00:20 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, I'm in the house. Just ready to get in, get saucy.
00:00:24 - Scott Steinlage
I see you are in the house. Looks like it. Not outside this for sure.
00:00:27 - Brian Douglas
I'm in the basement technically, but yeah.
00:00:31 - Scott Steinlage
Awesome.
00:00:32 - Anthony Campolo
So, yeah, I want you to introduce yourself for our audience. I think people who know the DevRel web space may have seen you around as bdougie, but tell us a little bit of who you are and what you're doing, and then we'll get into your history.
00:00:46 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, yeah. And I'm always surprised by how many people know me for my DevRel background, because I feel like I've mostly been behind the scenes. I'm not always the keynote speaker or the person who built the thing, but Brian Douglas is my given name. I go by bdougie. I spent almost five years at GitHub, where I was known as bdougie, which is my GitHub handle. I left GitHub in September, which I guess is about a year now, to work on this little cool, saucy project called Open Sauced, which is a pathway to find your next open source contribution, get insights into open source, and uncover opportunity through some of this data. So that's the game we're playing and the goal we're trying to achieve with this product.
00:01:32 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, I'm really excited to get into this because I've been following this project since way before it was even a company. And you really built this as kind of a side hustle that eventually became a company. And you did that journey, I think an interesting way because it wasn't really like bootstrapped. You did eventually get funding, but you kind of just like worked on it, like bootstrapped it with your time. Not necessarily like money.
00:01:55 - Brian Douglas
Yeah. So Open Sauced started back in 2017. I got the URL while I was working at this company called Netlify. I was employee number three there, and I was a full-time engineer who also wrote blog posts. That was my angle, because at the time we'd converted the Angular app, app.netlify.com, from Angular to React. So I was writing blog posts like, "Here's a cool thing in React," or "Here's how to solve this problem." These were early days, pre-hooks, pre-server components, pre-everything, and we were learning how to build a company on top of this technology from Facebook.
At that point, I kind of transitioned into a dev advocate role, or what they called developer experience at Netlify. I was technically the first person to model that role. I'd say Swyx was the first person hired for the official role, but I modeled it before I left. We crossed paths because he joined after I joined GitHub. So I left to work at GitHub, and Swyx joined Netlify like a month after I left.
00:03:05 - Brian Douglas
So it was kind of awkward. I think Swyx had signed first but joined later, and then Divya had joined before Swyx. Ironically, I met them both early on. I knew Swyx from the React subreddit. He was super active on r/react.
00:03:20 - Anthony Campolo
He's a moderator.
00:03:22 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, yeah. So I knew him from there, and I thought it was pretty cool he was joining Netlify. Then Sarah Drasner joined shortly after to lead the team. But what I was getting at is Open Sauced. I built Open Sauced specifically because what I'd do to teach people about Netlify was make legitimate open source contributions, and then make documentation changes. Netlify has a cool deploy preview feature, so I'd create a link like, "Hey, here's a change in the docs, and here's a link to Netlify."
Then it would organically be like, "Oh, what is this thing? What's Netlify? That's clever, I should try this out." My background is sales. I did four years of sales out of college, then I learned how to code and went full-time in engineering at startups. It's like the classic, "Put your foot in the person's door and sell them a refrigerator," or whatever, but I tried to be respectful. It's the difference between doing sales in open source projects versus being an engineer and sharing cool code.
00:04:19 - Brian Douglas
I was way more like, "Hey, I just wanted to make some open source contributions. By the way, I do work at this company. Here's a link to the docs that I just changed. Let me know if you're interested. If not, we'll move on, and I'll never speak of this again."
00:04:30 - Anthony Campolo
Also, I think with Netlify, it was a tool that a lot of devs, certainly for me, once we saw it and used it, we were like, "This is incredible." It's really simple, it solves a problem, and it's a great use case. So even though you're going out and doing this thing to get in front of people, once you're in front of them, they're actually like, "Oh wow, this is awesome."
00:04:49 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, yeah, that's the thing. I share this anecdote all the time with folks. I've been on a couple podcasts recently talking about this: if you're in San Francisco, there's a Tesla shop right off Van Ness, pretty close to downtown. If you say you want to buy a Tesla, they'll give you 45 minutes and a key to go drive around San Francisco, which is the coolest San Francisco tour because it's seven square miles. So you can drive around twice if you really wanted to, probably even more than that. I went during the pandemic and did this, and I drove around those empty streets and was just like, cool, driving a Tesla. Best time to drive in San Francisco is empty streets, where you don't have to worry about roads that are straight up and down. It was a cool experience.
So what I'm getting at is, you want to get someone behind the wheel. Oh, and I ended up buying a Tesla.
00:05:38 - Scott Steinlage
I was.
00:05:39 - Brian Douglas
I was just gonna ask that. So did you? You want to get someone in the driver's seat and let them test-drive the thing, feel it, and know if it's good, if it works for them.
00:05:48 - Scott Steinlage
Absolutely.
00:05:49 - Brian Douglas
So with Netlify, I was like, "Hey, here's your project. Here's a deploy preview link." Also, this was so much easier than what people were doing at the time. In 2015 and 2016, everyone was building Kubernetes clusters to auto-deploy their stuff, or using GitHub Pages. It was pretty common to see a blog post a week of someone figuring that out, like, "Cool, I built this." That's what Netlify did for you: Kubernetes clusters to auto-deploy stuff to images and containers, or S3 buckets, basically.
But the magic was that once you solved that problem, and you could do it for pretty much free, at the time Netlify had this very generous free tier, the goal was just to get it in front of people to use. I say all this because that idea is what I built Open Sauced into. I kept going to all these projects, and it was my CRM, like my Salesforce for open source contributions, because I was doing like 20 contributions a month. So I had to figure out which ones were open, which ones had feedback, which ones didn't, and which ones were stale.
00:06:54 - Brian Douglas
I had to track that somehow, and GitHub back in 2017 did not have a proper way to do that without using the API. Even search in 2017 was nowhere close to what it is today. So you couldn't really do that with just search keywords. I built Open Sauced so I could maintain my contributions.
00:07:17 - Anthony Campolo
So not to go on too big of a diversion, but as someone who was kind of around when the term Jamstack was being invented and like, you know, put out into the world, what are your thoughts on the like, term being kind of phased out by most of the original people? Spicy.
00:07:33 - Brian Douglas
Yeah. So Jamstack, you had the blog post that came out a couple weeks ago. I know Jeff Escalante from back in the early Jamstack days, and he's like, "Oh, this is just marketing." And yeah, true, it is marketing, but it didn't start as marketing. The hard question we had to answer every time someone wanted to use Netlify was, "Can I ship my Django app to Netlify?" or "Can I do this Ruby on Rails thing?" or "Can I do this Node/Express server?" or "Can I do this Jekyll site?"
00:08:03 - Anthony Campolo
And yes, definitely Jekyll.
00:08:06 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, but Netlify had evolved past just static sites and static site generators. So it was this weird middle ground of, if you have a build command, then you can use Netlify. If you can bundle anything as static, you can use Netlify. It doesn't matter what your local dev looks like or what servers you're using, as long as you can bundle it down.
Then it got even spicier when serverless came out, because you could bundle in Lambda endpoints and do other magical things. So it was a constant battle in support, because everyone at Netlify was in support answering questions, including myself. How do you answer quickly and qualify a person in or out? The easiest thing we could do was say, "Is your site Jamstack?" And that was it. It was a support question we could answer really quickly. And if they're like, "Oh, what's Jamstack?" we'd say, "We have jamstack.org," which Matt threw together as a quick descriptor of the boxes you could check.
00:09:04 - Brian Douglas
So that way again we had once full time support person and then we had the rest of the team who were engineers in support and none of us wanted to be all day answering the same question over and over again. So is your project jamstack? And then that, that's what sort of built the whole marketing funnel of like okay, Jamstack this, Jamstack that, Jamstack comp this. And, and I think what the one thing that I'd also point out is the, there's like this notion of everyone wants to have like their own conference. So they have like, like Prisma has Prisma Day, Apollo had Apollo Day, whatever. Like you have your name, your name and then the conference. And the beauty of the Jamstack is that netlify that'd be like netlify Conf. Like that's cool but like it's better. Like next Conf is a better thing than Vercel Conf. Vercel Conf is like cool. I, I use Vercel. I don't pay Vercel but I guess I'll go to this conference and pay the conference. But Next Conf is a better idea on building a community. So jamstack was the Netlify community.
00:10:03 - Anthony Campolo
JavaScript jam you could say, right?
00:10:05 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, exactly. And the beauty of building in a place where everyone can participate was better than having. Yeah, we're just going to do Netlify Conf and if you're not a netfly user, get out of here. So that was the other angle of there. I think the new Jams Conf is composable Web is the new. Which is crazy because that was one of the ideas that we had years ago of names like we had active ingredients was the original Jamstack Conf. So year one Jamstack Conf was called active ingredients. And then we had like interesting. And then they had like Modern static or new static was New Static.
00:10:42 - Anthony Campolo
That was the new dynamic.
00:10:43 - Brian Douglas
New dynamic, that's what it was. New dynamic. Yeah, that was, it existed. And we also toyed at the idea of like are you new dynamic? But that's also like hard.
00:10:53 - Anthony Campolo
We had them on JavaScript jam a long time ago. What's that guy's name?
00:10:58 - Brian Douglas
Bud. Bud Parr.
00:10:59 - Anthony Campolo
Bud, yes, that's the one.
00:11:01 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, yeah. So it's crazy. Like, I was so involved in this whole community. I still do Jamstack radio. Like, I know all the sort of players and stakeholders in this conversation. And like, I think a lot of folks who came on the last couple of years are like, jamstack's dumb. Why are we at jamstack? And it's because we had to answer this question in 2017, like, can you ship to Netlify? And that we just had to answer that pretty quickly so we can move on to do the next thing. And now we're here. Like, the next thing is not jamstack. The next thing is whatever these server components turn us back into, which is what we did 10 years ago, which
00:11:35 - Anthony Campolo
is like, the answer had nothing to do with like, framing it as like this existential battle against WordPress, which I feel like was kind of like the narrative for a really long time.
00:11:46 - Brian Douglas
Oh, yeah. I mean, that's, that's a hundred percent like the positioning that Netlify sits in. But also like a lot of these Jamstack projects because where WordPress built their own WordPress API and now we saw all the CMS, headless CMSs. Also Netlify was behind the headless CMS as well. So maybe in a couple of years we're like, oh, why are we still calling a headless cms? We just call it whatever the Next thing it's called. But the idea is there is like, can we just get past that question and move on to the next ones? And that was like the goal for Jamstack. Just like, yes or no, let's ask if it's serverless now or. Or let's ask if it's got. If it needs a server. Like, let's just move on and like,
00:12:25 - Anthony Campolo
solve problem the next one.
00:12:27 - Brian Douglas
I mean, that's huge. Like, we're currently trying to ship edge functions and do all this whole, like, data management stuff now that we're becoming more of a serious company.
00:12:35 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, let's talk about that.
00:12:36 - Brian Douglas
But now I need to answer those questions quicker than, "Oh, well, this is our setup, and we're using Next here, and we have a Supabase database here." Let's just get the quick answers.
00:12:48 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah, because then, like, if you're dragging it out, it's like, then you don't really get to the solution as quickly. Or, you know, you get like, people just like, you know, like, you can only have a conversation so long with somebody about so much technical stuff and then it's like, okay, I'm exhausted. Let's continue this conversation another time or whatever it might be.
00:13:06 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, well, I mean, it gets pedantic. I think the Remix community has been interesting to watch too, because they solve a bunch of problems and then move on to the next thing. They're helping you advance your experience on the web, whether you like their flavor or not. They've already moved on to the next thing. And I think Next.js is kind of in a weird spot of, "Are we building apps? Are we building static sites? What are we building?" I think the consensus is we're building apps on Next.
Now we can move on to, "Okay, Next is for apps." Or, I don't know, I don't want to make a blanket statement. Maybe someone else has a counterpoint. But Astro for websites, or use Lit for your embeddable web components. If we could just check a box. Because at this point in my career, I don't want to answer these questions anymore. I just want to build something, have someone use it, and talk to users. If I have to talk about how my edge is built and deployed and managed,
00:14:05 - Brian Douglas
I've already missed the boat. Like I need to get users to use the thing. And I think a lot of times as developers we spend way too much time trying to think about the technical thing when at the end of the day you should be talking to your users instead.
00:14:19 - Scott Steinlage
That's good. Yeah, I think that's some powerful stuff there. It kind of goes along with the way I would launch something. I guess it would be not even necessarily spending a whole lot of time building it right away, but really just putting it out there and having pre-signups and stuff like that, 100%, then getting the user perspective and building it out to that criteria, and then making it even better than it could have been initially. And you're not wasting a bunch of time if you don't get the hook.
00:14:55 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, so you get the full story here on this podcast. But a year ago, I still worked at GitHub. I basically decided I was going to go on sabbatical. I'd spent four years, almost five years, working at GitHub, and I knew I wanted to do something different than what I was doing. I got into DevRel not as a goal of mine, it was more like I just kept doing it, and eventually GitHub noticed and asked me to work there. I kept doing it at GitHub, left as a director, had a team of four or five people under me, and we were scaling. We hired someone in Brazil, we were about to hire someone in the UK. We were this expanded team, and I didn't know if I wanted to do DevRel forever. I always wanted to get back into writing code and building product.
So it was either decide to switch inside GitHub with an internal transfer, or leave and focus on it outside. My focus shifted, and I asked my boss, "Hey, I'm going to be working on this Open Sauced thing."
00:15:52 - Brian Douglas
So I wanted to explore whether there was something here. I had a bunch of ideas I'd seen up close and personal. Before quitting my job, before even going on sabbatical, I ended up closing my first customer, and that customer was DigitalOcean. We partnered with them to build a dashboard with insights into Hacktoberfest, which we'll be doing again this year, not as a customer but by sponsoring this year. So anybody doing Hacktoberfest who wants to see contributions and recommendations for places to contribute, we'll be that platform for everyone.
We did that because every year I'd talk to DigitalOcean about Hacktoberfest, find the pain points, talk to the PMs, and most of the time there wasn't a lot we could do. We'd just divert energy away from spam or away from the wrong things, so we'd mostly be consultants every year. Knowing that, I went to them and said, "Hey, I have a way you can track spam across all Hacktoberfest contributions, and a way you can track contributions and leaderboards in a way that doesn't get you rate-limited."
00:16:56 - Brian Douglas
They get rate-limited every single year in what they're doing, which is why it takes a long time to figure out how many PRs you have. So to your point, Scott, about talking to customers, I talked to not just DigitalOcean but five other people and companies, like, "Hey, this is what we're building. One, would you pay for this? And tell me when you're at this pain point."
So we've been talking. We haven't been as splashy about Open Sauced and what we've been doing, because I think there's value in focusing. We took some angel money so we had runway. Rather than run out the gate and be like, "Hey, we're funded, look at me doing this thing," I spent way more time having conversations with folks on a podcast called Secret Sauce, identifying that there's an opportunity to move the industry in a way that's a little more sustainable for open source. And that's what we're trying to accomplish.
00:17:50 - Brian Douglas
Like, there's a paid product behind this, like, behind the scenes right now that we'll be launching next month. But the real goal was like, can we solve a problem and make impact at the industry?
00:18:00 - Scott Steinlage
And that's what building in public by utilizing your podcast, essentially.
00:18:04 - Brian Douglas
I mean, oh yeah, everything's open source as well. So if you want to see our next features, you can. I also stand by this: when you open source something, most people don't care, especially if it's a dashboard like Open Sauced. Unless they're getting value every single day, most people don't want to ship features for you in open source.
But what we found is we had built-in QA and a built-in user base from folks who were early-career devs and bootcamp grads who wanted to get their feet wet making contributions to real projects. So we have a lot of those folks. Our customers look at stuff, but they're not in our issues every day. Our competitors, if you want to call them competitors, aren't in our issues every day either. At the end of the day, we're building in public, and we're not really in stealth or anything like that, because I don't believe in stealth. If you one day unveil everything you've done, now you're in an uphill battle trying to figure out how to get adoption and eyeballs.
00:19:05 - Brian Douglas
And what we have right now is 4,000 people who are already attracted to our problem and our vision, and we can just turn that on. It's beautiful.
00:19:15 - Scott Steinlage
That's an amazing thing.
00:19:17 - Brian Douglas
I love it.
00:19:17 - Scott Steinlage
I'm excited for a month from now.
00:19:20 - Brian Douglas
It's going to be cool.
00:19:21 - Anthony Campolo
Man, do you want to demo some of the platform and some of the things you can do with it today?
00:19:25 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, I'll demo. I'll call this out: we do have some bugs that are live. Let me see if I can share.
00:19:36 - Scott Steinlage
There's always going to be bugs. Come on.
00:19:38 - Brian Douglas
Yeah. So this is my dashboard, me showing off my highlights and contributions. We built this feature earlier this month called Highlights. That's what this is.
00:19:48 - Anthony Campolo
You increase your font.
00:19:50 - Brian Douglas
Yep. Callout: normally when I'm streaming, I have this in like 720p. But this is an opportunity for folks to showcase their contributions and skills. We also have a contribution graph. On our landing page, we call out that we're more than green squares, which is true. We're trying to give a good understanding of what a person's contributions look like.
Obviously not everyone has open source contributions, which is fair. That's also why we have project recommendations. Based on the things you add as your interests, we'll recommend projects that are up and coming and have an influx of new contributions. One misnomer is that a lot of times people say, "I want to contribute to React, and I'm ready for it." But the React team doesn't have time to answer a bunch of questions and teach you how to use git and GitHub. So a better place to go is up-and-coming projects with their first star or first hundred stars. The focus is recommending projects with an upward trajectory that still have plenty of opportunity for you to contribute.
00:21:01 - Brian Douglas
The one thing that most people, they do when they go into a new project is like, oh, wow, I couldn't clone this and run it locally. Well, if you're looking for a contribution, that's your contribution, open issue and say, I cannot clone this and run it locally. But most early beginners, open source contributors, we'll just like move on and be like, oh, I couldn't. I wanted to make a contribution, but I couldn't actually even do anything because it was broken. It's like, that's your contribution. It's like the, what's that one story anecdote where someone's like, they're like praying to God for a helicopter on a stranded island. I'm gonna butcher this, right?
00:21:35 - Scott Steinlage
And they send you a boat or
00:21:36 - Anthony Campolo
whatever and it's like, yeah, he dies. And God was like, I Sent you all these things.
00:21:40 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
00:21:41 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah, yeah.
00:21:42 - Brian Douglas
I don't know where that comes from or whatever. Probably some sort of like old preaching sermon, whatever. But what I'm getting at is like, that's open source. It's. They're like, I would love a good first issue. Where can I find good first issues? And I wrote this article which is good first issues dot dev. I think I'm only sharing one tab at a time. Is this chromium? Oh, yeah. Anyway, I figured out, but basically I wrote this article called good first issues don't exist. And this is actually that one thing that everyone does which is like, show me the good first issue. But like, the answer is the good first issues are the ones that you open. So, like, if you found the bug or you found something broken, open the issue and someone will, a maintainer will love you forever and show you how to fix it. Not guaranteed. But like, if someone opens a good first issue and I see it's a good first issue, I'll tell them exactly how to fix it. And it's on to you if you want to fix it or not. And if you don't want to fix it, somebody else will quickly come through and try to fix it as well.
00:22:42 - Brian Douglas
At least in the open source community, we have like a signal, a bat signal on our channel called good first issues. So if we label anything, it gets alerted and usually gets picked up pretty quickly. But yeah, I digress. I did write another blog post on like different steps to finding good first issues which. Sorry, I have to switch back to the screen real quick, but I'll walk through really quickly what we have in addition to just profiles. We just shipped this thing and this is the thing that we actually shipped using edge functions, the ability to see a card. Currently we have this weird bug right now that we're going to. It's already fixed on beta. I can actually switch to beta. I guess I'm looking at this broken bug. There we go. But we call these dev cards. And this is the ability to see different folks that we shout out for making contributions. The challenge of being on beta, this is not live data. This is old data. We'll probably see some zeros. Like Becca has zeros because she.
00:23:49 - Anthony Campolo
Minor zeros.
00:23:51 - Brian Douglas
Yeah. In the development environment, not everyone has contributions, but the idea is you can click through and see John's contributions in his codebase. Let's take off this beta flag real quick. Netlify for easy subdomain deploys. So this is John. John's working on some pretty cool things for the pizza oven, and this is the thing we'll be announcing and sharing in a few weeks. I can get a good understanding of John as an engineer pretty quickly, what he's working on, and a bit of his story.
I've been alluding to this for a bit, but this is the challenge of zooming in. We have another bug that's been fixed, but basically when I zoom in, you can't see the full screen. The idea here is you can see a quick feed of folks contributing across the ecosystem and then shout out top contributors. Folks who have been active in our community, active in Open Sauced in particular, showing off their contributions. The other cool thing is you can also filter this for different types of contributions.
00:25:01 - Brian Douglas
So I don't know what project this is. Docs project, Codecademy, I guess Codecademy takes a lot of contributions. All right, well, here we are. That's the developer experience. Then we have the experience for potential maintainers. This is a feature we shipped for Hacktoberfest where you can see all contributions in the last 30 days, so October 1st to 31st, but we've expanded it so now you can see all contributions for Go or JavaScript. Then you get a quick bird's-eye view on who's making contributions and what.
I'll pick on fratsinger, who I don't know, but it looks like he contributes to Sequelize. Also, callout: if you haven't connected your GitHub account, your profile looks like this. We're making a clear distinction that we're not generating profiles for people and slurping data for recruiting or anything like that. They'll show up as a generic profile. Another cool thing is you can see contributions for all projects in JavaScript in the last 30 days, like last contributed. This is our high-level view of what's happening.
00:26:14 - Brian Douglas
The next step is being able to dig in and find the folks who are doing the work. So Shelley is a maintainer of Electron, and I know Shelley because I used to work with Shelley. That's the fun part of this. There are so many stories I have personally because my job was to work with maintainers and find out what features were missing inside GitHub. I have stories about Shelley and the Electron team, what they've been working on, what they've been participating in, and how they onboard new contributors.
What we're doing right now is prioritizing my experience and knowledge into this application. I can pause there if you have any questions. But I do have Figma designs I can show, I can show the pizza oven, the CLI. We've worked on quite a bit in the last 11 months.
00:27:05 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, no, it's very, very cool. Yeah, I like that it's both like good at kind of surfacing things that might be harder to see on GitHub while also creating like an analytics space where you can actually get more digs. I always find that there's like so much stuff happens on GitHub. People do so much work on GitHub but if you don't know like full very specifically how to look up commits and PRs and things like that, be very hard to get a sense of what's actually happening in a repo. So this stuff is really useful.
00:27:37 - Brian Douglas
Yeah. Doing DevRel at GitHub, we'd get pitches from Orbit and Common Room and all these community-led growth tools, which I think are all great. If you're doing DevRel, choose one, pick your poison, whichever one helps you scale your team and your goals. But there's a missing side there: in those tools, you can see what's happening in your ecosystem, but not everyone has a large enough ecosystem to even see meaningful data.
The idea is that we should be able to provide insight pages for this in open source. Imagine Stripe, for example. Stripe has a bunch of projects they care about, and then some projects they care about that aren't maintained specifically by Stripe. So dj-stripe is a large SDK for Django, and they want to see what's happening within the dj-stripe ecosystem. So if I'm Stripe and my directive for the DevRel team is to inject contributions into Stripe SDKs and make sure the community feels like they have presence and awareness from the team, anybody who's not a gray face is a non-Stripe employee.
00:28:47 - Brian Douglas
Well, that's not true. I guess people don't do gray faces anymore. So David's a Stripe employee. I guess they changed that before, because it used to be gray faces if they had a Stripe account. But this person in particular, Snoke, does not have a dj-stripe account, so they have contributions from stripe-node. Looks like we've got a closed PR and an open PR.
Eventually we'll do this in-app, but it seems like this PR had a bunch of back-and-forth and eventually got closed. Looks like they couldn't reproduce the bug anymore. That's why it got closed. But there's a story we eventually want to share within Open Sauced of, okay, what's the pattern that's happening?
00:29:36 - Anthony Campolo
If you go to just explore and show the graph of all PRs over the last 30 days, just everybody.
00:29:49 - Brian Douglas
Yeah. So this graph here.
00:29:57 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, but do it for like because if you just do it as general like not searching for a project.
00:30:03 - Brian Douglas
Oh, so this is golang actually.
00:30:05 - Anthony Campolo
Oh, so I'm looking at the JavaScript one.
00:30:07 - Brian Douglas
The. Okay, yes.
00:30:09 - Anthony Campolo
So this is super interesting. So don't do enhance for a second.
00:30:13 - Brian Douglas
Yeah.
00:30:14 - Anthony Campolo
So right now you have KD1 with more lines of code changed for SWC than Dependabot. Oh, really incredible. I wanted to point that out.
00:30:29 - Brian Douglas
That's amazing. Usually you can go here and identify, okay, this is 1,800 lines touched. So if I share this tab, it looks like there's a draft PR doing a bunch of bug backporting for Next.js. Okay, so they're doing something for some Next.js snafu that's happening.
00:30:51 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. Just making SWC work in general is extremely complicated. Aldo who was on the Redwood project, he was saying he was testing SWC with Redwood like two or three years ago and saying how it's like kind of fundamentally broken and you're project's gonna have like 50 of your tests failing. And he's like, this project has a long way to go.
00:31:11 - Brian Douglas
That does not sound like fun work. But there's work out there for anybody who wants to do some backporting.
00:31:17 - Anthony Campolo
And he's being sponsored to do it now, which is like, this wouldn't have been able to happen if there wasn't a company that basically said, "Here, do this full time, make this project work."
00:31:30 - Brian Douglas
And I did see a face that looks familiar. Oh, here we go, Andarist. So Andarist is interesting because it looks like they're pushing almost 100 PRs per month. They're also a person that touches TypeScript and React. I don't know what this query library is, to be honest. Oh, TanStack. Okay.
00:31:49 - Anthony Campolo
The new react query probably.
00:31:51 - Brian Douglas
Yeah. So the cool thing about this, and we don't expose this yet in-app, is that Andarist is top 10 in contributors in open source. Once you start looking at this data consistently, and once we start adding reports and we can do CSVs, this becomes an interesting tool for scouting folks.
00:32:12 - Scott Steinlage
Exactly what I was thinking when you said that.
00:32:14 - Brian Douglas
And collaborate. So like we built this feature way up there.
00:32:17 - Anthony Campolo
Jared Sumner.
00:32:19 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, yeah, the.
00:32:20 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah.
00:32:21 - Brian Douglas
And Jared's going to be doing a lot of like updates and new. I guess Bun has a new version coming out in 30 days. So like you'll see Jared's uptick of contributions really pick up as we get closer and closer to that date. So I actually, I don't think I could pick out Jared in a crowd. I could pick him up right below.
00:32:40 - Anthony Campolo
He's right below Katie. Very, very top.
00:32:43 - Brian Douglas
Right, this guy, yes. So Jared hasn't connected his Open Sauced account, just wanted to point that out. He has a very generic-looking profile, but you can see the uptick in contributions over the last 30 days. Quite a bit of PRs. And this one's like 1,600 to 1,800 lines touched, which is absolutely amazing.
If you're looking to do discovery and storytelling and understand what's happening across the ecosystem in places you care about, the idea is we have the Explore page for you to start there and eventually take a bunch of projects you're interested in and create an insight page. Sorry if you didn't see that real quick, I just checked all of them.
00:33:28 - Scott Steinlage
and go, I got an idea for you.
00:33:31 - Brian Douglas
Yeah.
00:33:32 - Scott Steinlage
Now you just need to take an LLM, connect it to where it'll give you a brief description or like it'll tell you like the story of this person over the last 30 days and what they've been contributing to and how it can help whatever, you know, I don't know, whatever the LLM you wanted to, you know, feed it.
00:33:51 - Brian Douglas
Yeah. I'll give you one better.
00:33:55 - Scott Steinlage
He's like, I already did something. I got you.
00:33:57 - Brian Douglas
Yeah. So we call it Repo Query. We've actually been working on this for the past six weeks. We're currently in a migration to switch to Chroma, but we previously were using Qdrant, which is another vector DB. That's literally what you just explained, and it's the next step we're working into.
00:34:16 - Scott Steinlage
You're welcome.
00:34:17 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. Supabase, which are already On.
00:34:22 - Brian Douglas
So technically we migrated off Supabase, so we had our own Postgres. We're in the process of migrating to Amazon Postgres. No, we're using DigitalOcean, but the Supabase pgvector setup is something we could potentially do. If I give you a quick little tour, this is a private repo, this is our backend. We have the insights thing that I showed you, we have an API, we've got a CLI, we've got this pizza oven, and then we have the vector DB that populates all this infrastructure here. Basically what I'm getting at is we're charting toward a path where you could eventually... actually, I'll show you some early design.
00:35:05 - Scott Steinlage
It's there for sure.
00:35:07 - Brian Douglas
Yeah. So we use this tool called Campsite to do some early design. So we've been. We have a design partnership with a few folks and we're getting some feedback around the future product. But I'll show you an early design which. It's pretty underwhelming but like we have a tab that will be Ask anything.
00:35:26 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah.
00:35:26 - Brian Douglas
And if you want to ask the question, who's the fastest growing new contributors in Python?
00:35:30 - Scott Steinlage
Right.
00:35:31 - Brian Douglas
It will generate that list for you. Or if you're in Redwood and you're like, okay, who are the folks making the most impact outside of Redwood, and on what projects? That becomes the story you want to collect, similar to what I was doing specifically for Netlify and getting folks to leverage Netlify for their docs.
The idea there is everyone builds this internally at their company. Their DevRel team, their engineering squad, they build this tool to identify what's happening in open source so they can recruit, attract interest, do a podcast, or raise funding. We're now building that. We're building the tool you can do that with. Most folks assume the GitHub Explore page would be that, but unfortunately that's kind of hit a wall based on where GitHub is taking it. We want to be that answer for folks.
00:36:31 - Scott Steinlage
That's cool.
00:36:33 - Brian Douglas
But the one thing I did want to show you is this little chat thing. It's weird because we haven't had a big splashy announcement yet. We're just building a lot of stuff to build the story. This will take a... I don't know why it's indexing again, maybe because we have an old version. But Repo Query, basically the project that exists, we've surfaced into a Chrome extension.
The Chrome extension lets you ask generic questions like, "How do I run this locally?" Sourcegraph Cody kind of does this, but this was our proof of concept to see if we could build an LLM workflow. We've done it.
00:37:14 - Scott Steinlage
So this is indexing what it's indexing
00:37:17 - Brian Douglas
this repo we're looking at.
00:37:19 - Scott Steinlage
Okay, got it.
00:37:19 - Brian Douglas
Okay, so any repo you're on in GitHub, if you have the extension installed, we can ask questions like, "How do I run this?" It might say, "Make sure you do this, this, and this, and there's a Docker container," blah blah blah.
00:37:29 - Scott Steinlage
Cool.
00:37:30 - Brian Douglas
"What's the tech stack?" So we have these recipes, again kind of lifting what Sourcegraph is already doing, not for the purpose of competing or doing the same thing. It was more like building a proof of concept with a couple interns. Truly, they were all interns in college during the summer.
The next step is combining this Repo Query with our API data, and now we're open-source aware. It's not about asking, "How do you set up a project locally?" It's more about, "Who are the top-performing contributors in the last 30 days? Give me the list of projects they've touched and what companies they work at," if that data has been shared on GitHub. That's where we're headed. But this is our playground sandbox. Test this out.
00:38:17 - Scott Steinlage
That's awesome. That's so cool to see that little inside bit there.
00:38:23 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, but I mean you asked, you pitched the idea. We already have it.
00:38:26 - Scott Steinlage
I know, right?
00:38:28 - Brian Douglas
And the beauty of this is, yeah, if anybody wants to clone this and leverage it in their own situation, or if they want to contribute alongside us, we're more than happy to take contributions. I think we're around 236 contributors across all collective projects. We're up there and moving up pretty quickly.
I think we're serving a need where most folks contributing to Repo Query and our AI extension don't come from a background where they know AI or LLMs, and they all get to learn it with us. That's fun, essentially.
00:39:07 - Anthony Campolo
What has that been like and what are some learnings you've gotten?
00:39:11 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, I mean the learnings is, it's the same. What's interesting about the current AI trend right now is there's a folks who like they're cutting edge, they're reading all the blog posts, they're like listening all the podcast and then there's like the folks who know it exists, but then they feel like they're not ready to even do anything with it. And it's been the constant, not battle, but kind of like pushing of our contributors and community members of like, to be honest, you're one blog post away from catching up with everyone else or it's OpenAI through and through. So like this, read the documentation, you're good. So it's just kind of like a lot of imposter syndrome that we've been working through with a lot of our community of just like just read the docs and like you're there. So that's been the interesting part because I think most folks, I think if you're building an AI, you have such a big moat because so many developers just don't think they can do it, despite the fact that the reason why everyone's doing it is because it's so easy. So that's been like, yeah, it's been kind of eye opening, like kind of watching that push and pull within community.
00:40:14 - Brian Douglas
But I'd recommend, if you're listening and you haven't touched AI, like just do a quick little side project, a little demo tutorial because like you'll, you'll be shocked on how easy it is to spin up an AI project today.
00:40:26 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, it seems really complicated because they associate like actually creating the model with that kind of work, which is actually very complicated and stuff that individuals can't really do and compete with a company like OpenAI. So really you're just taking an API and lobbing text at it and getting text back. So it's like if hopefully you know how to do that as a JavaScript dev, but if you know how to do that, you know how to work with the chat.
00:40:50 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, yeah, it's just like one of those things. Like again, going back to the Tesla, if you get behind a Tesla, you'll find out really quickly if you're comfortable driving it or not, but you have to get them in the Tesla, driving it for them to figure that out themselves. And I think with this, no matter what, if you're a developer tool company or your startup, you're selling databases, whatever it is, it's a constant battle just getting people in the seat and then making the decision there as opposed to looking at the logo and be like, I don't know about this logo, I don't think it's for me. And I think that's majority of developers. They're just kind of looking at the front of the box and not really digging in.
00:41:26 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, that's why hackathons can be good and why tend to be a thing projects and companies want to do. Because it's kind of like a captive audience that has to use your thing
00:41:35 - Brian Douglas
to win a prize.
00:41:36 - Anthony Campolo
And then maybe they are like, oh, wait, this thing was actually pretty cool to use.
00:41:40 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, I mean, that's. Supabase has done it pretty well where they. They consistently have a hackathon every three months. It's constantly just build something with our new technology, give, give us the feedback as fast as possible, and then you get to react to that as a company. And I think it takes a lot of energy to host and run hackathons, but when you can build it in the framework, then you're pretty good. You just have to figure out that framework. Oh, dude, you got the keyboard. Not from hacking. I want it. Oh, you want it. Okay. Yeah.
00:42:13 - Scott Steinlage
In the giveaway. But either way they do these, right? That's like one of their things they do for their hackathons.
00:42:19 - Brian Douglas
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:42:21 - Scott Steinlage
It's pretty cool.
00:42:22 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, it's really cool. I think we're tracking toward open source. What we did a year ago is we shipped the API first. We had no product, well, we had a product, but we sunset that for technical reasons. It didn't make sense to keep building something that wasn't going to be the future. So we archived that project a couple months ago.
So we just had an API, an API of data, and had to figure out what we were going to build. To reiterate what Anthony called out, we spent way more time talking to customers and users, trying to figure out what the needs were, and then we built a bunch of stuff. I admit we built a lot of stuff, and now we're figuring out how to glue everything together, and then we'll have a proper announcement pretty soon.
00:43:12 - Scott Steinlage
That's awesome, man.
00:43:14 - Anthony Campolo
Super exciting. Yeah. Do you do Twitter spaces? I think you do some things like that, right?
00:43:22 - Brian Douglas
Yeah. So on our Open Sauced Twitter, we've been hosting an event called 100 Days of Open Source. As of July 23rd, we started, and 100 days from July 23rd to October 31st is exactly 100 days. The reason for that is because Hacktoberfest itself ends on October 31st. Because we have a platform to show off highlights, we create these highlight reels for folks and celebrate their contributions over these 100 days.
I mention that because during these 100 days we've been doing a weekly Twitter Space on Tuesday mornings. The focus is having general conversations around open source. We're calling it Open Source Hour, kind of like office hours for folks to come and chat open source. Sometimes we have a guest, not always required, but the goal is really: can we have conversations with folks about open source?
00:44:40 - Brian Douglas
The podcast I alluded to previously just came out. Well, I guess this one came out two weeks ago. We've been using our studio space to have conversations with open source influencers, maintainers, and founders as well. So if you watch this on YouTube, like and subscribe over on the Open Sauced account as well.
00:45:07 - Anthony Campolo
I am such a huge fan of all the Secret Sauce videos because it's like really high production quality, like interview style show with all the people I hear on like podcasts and see on like, you know, streaming on Twitch and things like that. But it's like, you know, it's like movie star production, which is really cool.
00:45:25 - Brian Douglas
Yeah.
00:45:26 - Anthony Campolo
And I'm gonna be on an episode.
00:45:28 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, you will be on really soon.
00:45:30 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah.
00:45:32 - Scott Steinlage
Super excited.
00:45:34 - Brian Douglas
Yeah.
00:45:35 - Anthony Campolo
Anything else you wanted to talk about or let our viewers know about?
00:45:40 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, I mean, other than the podcast I'm showing here, we honestly love feedback. We have a Discord, which you can find pretty quickly in the bio here. Maybe there's not a Discord link there, I lied, but we have Discord at discord.gg/opensauced.
In addition to the Twitter Space, we do a Discord community chat in Discord. So if you're making contributions or want to make contributions, that's the place to raise your hand and be like, "Hey, I saw this thing, I'm not sure if it's a bug," or, "Hey, my PR hasn't been merged yet, can you take a look?" or, "Hey, I'm working on another project, let me tell you about it." It's kind of like office hours. It's an opportunity to talk to other folks and chat with the community. This morning we talked more about the features we're working on.
If you've watched this far into the interview, you get a bit of the secret sauce.
00:46:42 - Brian Douglas
So thanks for staying this long. The idea is that we want to be able to highlight, from a bird's-eye view, what's happening across your ecosystem. These are features we'll be shipping pretty soon in the platform.
The one thing I wanted to point out is the OSCR distribution. We've been working with a university and did a bunch of research around recognition and reputation, and what we currently have in development is called the OSCR reputation score. OSCR stands for Open Source Contributor Reputation.
Orbit has the Orbit model, which is like gravity and how deeply you orbit, which I think is pretty clever and something you should definitely check out. But what we're looking for is the weight of folks and their reputation and contributions within your community. We're focused on git commits, and we didn't go into too much detail on the pizza oven itself, but this is the secret sauce and the power of how all this will work: we take git commits and turn them into project insights.
00:48:01 - Brian Douglas
And the reason I say git commits is that most folks approach this in a GitHub-centric way, and we want to be clear that we're building a product you can use on any git repo. If you're not on GitHub, or if it's a private repo, or if it's a weird Linux distro that only publishes through email hooks or whatever fancy stuff people did back in the day, we want this to work in whatever ecosystem you're in. This is the thing we glue everything together with and then go out into the street, knock door to door, and get people to drive our Teslas.
00:48:39 - Scott Steinlage
That's super awesome. Yeah, you guys have really thought some things through on this. I mean it's crazy the amount of detail that you've gone into. Obviously it's taking a lot of time, but I think I'm excited for how it continues to grow out and further develops over time. Just with everything that you guys are putting. Putting into it. I mean, it. Yeah, it's phenomenal. So it's awesome.
00:49:03 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, it's a hyper-fixation on the problem. My story's out there, it's on freeCodeCamp's podcast with Quincy not too long ago, and I talk about my journey there. It's actually the complete opposite of this conversation. I never talk about Open Sauced, I talk about why Open Sauced and how I got to this point.
If anybody's interested in that story, it's out there. But it really comes down to this: I learned how to code after college on my own while getting my MBA and starting a family. I was only able to do this because of open source. So my directive since I've been at GitHub has been to get other people into open source, to show there's a pathway outside the norm, outside paying $15k for a bootcamp. There's another path, with free mentorship through open source.
00:49:59 - Brian Douglas
And we want to showcase that, so that's the goal. It's just that because we took the VC route, we also have to have a viable business, which we have. So for that reason, we're really focused on the problem, trying to have an elegant solution that makes sense. This entire path has been: how do we make this make sense where we can still encourage new bootcamp grads to do open source, but also connect with companies that need to validate their presence in the space?
00:50:33 - Anthony Campolo
Awesome.
00:50:34 - Brian Douglas
Yeah.
00:50:34 - Anthony Campolo
And I was grabbing links to that and some other stuff throughout the show. That'll be in the show notes for people to check out. Let people know where they can find you and Open Sauced on the internet.
00:50:45 - Brian Douglas
Yeah. bdougie on Twitter, bdougie on GitHub, and opensauced almost everywhere else except Twitter, which is saucedopen.
00:50:55 - Anthony Campolo
And try and get opensauced.
00:50:57 - Brian Douglas
I've been tweeting out this person and dming them. I'm pretty sure it's a dead account. So I gotta ask Elon at this point.
00:51:05 - Scott Steinlage
Interesting.
00:51:06 - Brian Douglas
Yeah.
00:51:07 - Anthony Campolo
I want to get JS Jam because I don't like having to type out JavaScript Jam every time. I went to one of our handles that has 0 followers and 0 following, and they joined in March 2009. It says Jenny James. I feel like this would be an
00:51:23 - Brian Douglas
easy one to make a case for. Yeah, if they had a customer support team, it'd be so much easier. But honestly, they should really just have pay-to-claim or something. I don't know what the deal is, but obviously they can get X as an account name, so we'll see. One day we'll get there.
00:51:49 - Scott Steinlage
Cool.
00:51:50 - Brian Douglas
Well, hope everyone stays saucy. Yeah.
00:51:53 - Scott Steinlage
Appreciate you, man. Thanks, everybody.