Open Sauced with Brian Douglas

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.

Speakers

• Scott Steinlage
• Anthony Campolo
• Brian Douglas

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 and before even going 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 Qdrant 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

Scott: What's up, everybody? Welcome to JavaScript Jam. Anthony, what's up? How are you?

Anthony: Hey, hey. I'm good. How are you?

Scott: Fantastic. All right, we got a great guest. Yeah, we have an awesome guest here today. Excited for sure. Brian, BDougie.

Brian: Yeah, I'm in the house. Just ready to get in, get saucy.

Scott: I see you are in the house. Looks like it. Not outside, that's for sure.

Brian: I'm in the basement, technically, but yeah.

Anthony: 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 a little bit of who you are, what you're doing, and then we can get into your history.

Brian: Yeah, yeah. And I'm always surprised with how many people know me for my DevRel background, because I feel like I've been mostly behind the scenes. I'm not always the keynote speaker or the person who built the thing. But Brian Douglas is my given name, go by BDougie. Spent almost five years at GitHub, where I was known as BDougie, which is my GitHub handle. And as of last year, I left GitHub in September — which I guess, yeah, 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, insights to open source, and sort of like uncover opportunity through a bit of this data. So that's the game we're playing and the goal that we're sort of achieving with this product.

Anthony: 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, in an interesting way, because it wasn't really bootstrapped. You did eventually get funding, but you kind of just worked on it, bootstrapped it with your time, not necessarily money.

Brian: Yeah. So Open Sauced started back in 2017. I got the URL. I was working at this small company called Netlify. So I was employee number three there and was engineer — this full-time engineering that wrote blog posts, basically, is like my angle. Because at the time we had converted the Angular app, the app.netlify.com, from Angular to React. So I was writing blog posts on specifically, oh, here's a cool thing in React, or here's how to solve this problem. So early days, pre-hooks, pre-server components, pre-everything, and was sort of learning how to build a company on top of this technology out of Facebook at the time. At that point I kind of transitioned into a dev advocate, or what they call developer experience at Netlify. And I was technically the first person — I'd say Swyx was the first person hired for the official role, but I was the first person who modeled that role before I left. So me and Swyx were like ships passing.

Anthony: Did you and Swyx work together?

Brian: No, we crossed paths, where he joined after I joined GitHub. So I left to go work at GitHub, and Swyx had joined like a month after I left. So it was like an awkward — I think Swyx had signed first but joined later, and then Divya had joined prior to Swyx. And ironically, I met them both — I knew Swyx from the React Reddit.

Anthony: He's a moderator.

Brian: Yeah, yeah. So I knew him from there. So I thought that was pretty cool. He was going to be joining Netlify, and then Sarah Drasner also joined shortly after them to lead the team. But what I was getting at is Open Sauced — I built Open Sauced specifically because what I would do to teach people about Netlify is I'd go make open source contributions, like legitimate ones. And then I'd go make documentation changes. And Netlify has a cool deploy preview feature. So I'd create a link of, hey, here's a change to the docs, here's a link to Netlify. And it would organically be like, oh, what is this thing? What's Netlify? Try this out. So, my background is sales. I did four years of sales out of college, and then I learned how to code and then went full-time in engineering at startups. It's just a classic, hey, put your foot in the person's door and sell them a refrigerator or whatever. I try to be pretty respectful. It's the difference of doing sales in open source projects versus being an engineer and sharing cool code. I was way more on like, hey, I just want to make some open source contributions. By the way, I do work in this company. Here's a link to the docs that I just changed. Let me know if you're interested. If not, we'll just move on. I'll never speak of this ever again.

Anthony: Also, I think that with Netlify, it was a tool that I think a lot of devs — certainly for me — once we saw it and used it, we were like, this is incredible. It's really simple and solves a problem. It's a great use case. So it's like, even though you're going out and doing this thing to kind of get in front of people, once it's in front of people, they're actually like, oh, wow, this is awesome.

Brian: Yeah, that's the thing about — so I share this anecdote all the time with folks. If you're in San Francisco, there's a Tesla shop right off Van Ness, it's like 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 like the coolest San Francisco tour because it's seven square miles. I went during the pandemic and did this, and I drove around those empty streets and I 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 being on these roads that are straight up and down. And it was like a cool experience. So what I'm getting at is you want to get someone behind the seat, like the driver's seat, and test drive the thing and feel it and just know if it's good, if it works for them — oh, I ended up buying a Tesla.

Scott: I was just gonna ask that.

Brian: So with Netlify, I was just like, hey, here's your project. Here's a deploy preview link. Also, this is so much easier than at the time in 2015, '16. Everyone was building Kubernetes clusters to auto-deploy their stuff to GitHub pages. It was pretty common. It was like a blog post a week of someone figuring this out. I'm like, cool, I built this. That's Netlify — Kubernetes clusters to auto-deploy stuff to images and containers, or S3 buckets basically. But the magic of that is once you have solved that problem and you can do it for pretty much free — at the time, Netlify was just a very, very generous free tier — the goal was just to get it in front of people to leverage and use.

So I say all this because that idea is what I built Open Sauced into. So I kept going on all these projects and it was like my CRM, like my Salesforce for open source contributions, because I was doing like 20 contributions a month. I had to go figure out which ones were open, which ones had feedback, which ones didn't, which ones were stale and I would just close. Had to track that somehow. And GitHub back in 2017 did not have a proper way to do that without using the API. Even 2017 search was not as great as it is today, not even close. So I built Open Sauced for me to maintain my contributions.

Anthony: 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 put out into the world, what are your thoughts on the term being kind of phased out by most of the original people?

Brian: Spicy. 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. He's like, 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? Can I do this Ruby on Rails thing? Can I do this Node/Express server? Can I do this Jekyll site?

Scott: And yes, definitely Jekyll.

Brian: Yeah, but Netlify had evolved past just static sites and static site generators. So it was this weird middle ground: if you have a build command, then you can use Netlify. If you can bundle anything into 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 can just bundle in Lambda endpoints to 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, oh, we have jamstack.org, which Matt threw together as a quick little descriptor of the boxes you could check. So that way, again, we had one full-time support person and the rest of the team were engineers in support, and none of us wanted to be all day answering the same question over and over again. So it was just, is your project Jamstack? And that's what sort of built the whole marketing funnel of like, okay, Jamstack this, Jamstack that, Jamstack Conf this.

And I think the one thing I'd also point out is there's this notion of everyone wanting their own conference. So they have — Prisma has Prisma Day, Apollo had Apollo Day, whatever. You have your name and then the conference. And the beauty of the Jamstack is that Netlify had to be like Netlify Conf. That's cool, but it's better. Next Conf is a better thing than Vercel Conf. Vercel Conf is like, cool, I use Vercel, I don't pay Vercel, but I guess I'll go to this conference and pay for it. But Next Conf is a better idea on building a community. So Jamstack was the Netlify community.

Anthony: Kind of like Edgio's JavaScript Jam, you could say.

Brian: Yeah, exactly. And it's like the beauty of like 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 Netlify user, like get out of here. So that was the other angle of there. So they have — I think the new Jamstack 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 they had like Modern Static, or New Dynamic.

Anthony: New Static — that was the New Dynamic.

Brian: New Dynamic, that's what it was. And we also toyed at the idea of like, are you New Dynamic? But that's also like hard to...

Anthony: We had them on JavaScript Jam a long time ago. What's that guy's name?

Brian: Bud? Bud Parr?

Anthony: Bud, yes. That's the one. Yeah.

Brian: Yeah, so it's crazy. I was so involved in this whole community. I still do Jamstack Radio. I know all the sort of players and stakeholders in this conversation. And 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: can you ship to Netlify? And we just had to answer that pretty quickly so we can move on to do the next thing. And now we're here. 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 is also kind of wild.

Anthony: 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.

Brian: Oh, yeah. I mean, that's 100% the positioning that Netlify sits in, but also a lot of these Jamstack projects because WordPress built their own WordPress API. And then we saw all the CMSs, 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 it headless CMS? We just call it whatever the next thing it's called. But the idea is there — can we just get past that question and move on to the next ones? And that was the goal for Jamstack. It's like, yes or no, let's ask if it's serverless now, or let's ask if it needs a server. Let's just move on and solve the problem.

Brian: I mean, that's huge. We're currently trying to ship edge functions and do all this data management stuff now that we're becoming more of a serious company.

Anthony: Yeah, let's talk about that.

Brian: But now I need to answer those questions quicker than like, oh, well, this is our setup and we're using Next here and we have a Supabase database here. And like, how do we — let's just get the quick answers.

Scott: Yeah, because then like if you're dragging it out, then you don't really get to the solution as quickly. 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.

Brian: Well, I mean, it's a pedantic thing. So I think the Remix community has been interesting to watch too as well, because they solve a bunch of problems and you just move on to the next thing. Like, they're just helping you to 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 going in a weird spot of like, are we building apps? Are we building static sites? Are we building — what are we building next? We're building apps on Next. I think that's the consensus of where the team is leading that project. But now we can move on and be like, okay, Next is for apps. Astro for websites, or use Lit for your embeddable web components. Like, 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. I want to build something, have someone use it, and talk to users. And if I have to talk about how my edge is built and deployed and managed, I've already missed the boat. 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.

Scott: That's good. Yeah, I think that's some powerful stuff there. I mean, it kind of goes along with the way I would launch something, I guess, would be not even necessarily spend a whole lot of time building it right away, but really just putting it out there and having like a pre-signup, you know, and stuff like that. And then getting the user perspective and then building it out to that criteria and then making it even better than it could have been or would have been initially. And you're not wasting much time if you don't get the hook, you know?

Brian: And this is like — 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. So 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. So I got into DevRel not as a goal of mine. It was more of like I just kept doing it and eventually GitHub noticed, asked me to work there, kept doing it at GitHub. I left as a director and had a team, I think at that point four or five people under me, and was only scaling. Like, 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 really wanted to do DevRel forever. And I always wanted to get back into writing code and building product.

So it was either decide to switch inside of GitHub — internal transfer — or leave and focus on the outside. So my focus shifted where I just asked my boss, hey, I'm going to be working on this Open Sauced thing. Just want to explore to see if there's something here. Had a bunch of ideas that I'd seen up close and personal.

And so before quitting my job, before even going on sabbatical, I ended up closing my first customer. And so our customer was DigitalOcean. We actually partnered with them to build a dashboard to see insights into Hacktoberfest, which we'll be doing again this year — not as a customer, but we're actually sponsoring this year. So anybody who's doing Hacktoberfest and wants to see contributions and recommendations for places to contribute to, we'll be that platform for everyone.

And we did that because I knew every year I would talk to Hacktoberfest or DigitalOcean about Hacktoberfest and we'd find out the pain point, go talk to the PMs, and most of the time it was just like we didn't really have a lot we could do. We'd just divert energy away from spam or divert energy away from the wrong things. So we'd just be more consultants every year.

But knowing that, I went to Hacktoberfest and said, hey, I got a way you can track spam across all of Hacktoberfest contributions. And I got a way you can track contributions and leaderboards and et cetera in a way that doesn't hit your rate limit. Like they get rate limited every single year in the stuff that they're doing, which is why it takes a long time to go through and figure out how many PRs you have.

So to your point, Scott, like talking to customers — I went and talked to not just DigitalOcean, but like five other people and companies of like, hey, this is what we're building. One, would you pay for this? And tell me where we're at on this pain point.

And so we've been talking. We haven't been as splashy about Open Sauced as far as what we've been doing, because I think there's some value in focusing. We took some angel money, so we had a runway. So rather than run out the gate, be like, hey, we're funded, look at me doing this thing, I spent way more time just having conversations with folks on a podcast called The Secret Sauce — identifying that there's an opportunity for folks 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. There's a paid product behind the scenes right now that we'll be launching next month. But the real goal was, can we solve a problem and make an impact in the industry?

Scott: And that's what we're doing. You're still building in public by utilizing your podcast, essentially.

Brian: Oh, yeah. Everything's open source as well. So if you really want to see our next features — I stand on this where most people, when you open source something, most people don't care, especially if it's like a dashboard like Open Sauced. Unless you're getting value every single day or you have features, most people don't want features. They're not going 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, bootcamp grads, who wanted to get their feet wet making contributions to real projects. So we have a ton of those folks, but our customers, they look at the stuff, but they're not in our issues every day. And our competitors — I guess if you want to call them competitors — they're also not in our issues every day.

So 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. I think if you have to one day unveil everything you've done, you're now in an uphill battle trying to figure out how do you get adoption and eyeballs. And what we have right now is 4,000 people who are already attracted to our problem and our vision, and that we can just turn on. It's beautiful. Like, tomorrow.

Scott: That's an amazing thing. I love it. I'm excited for a month from now. It's going to be cool, man.

Anthony: Do you want to demo some of the platform and some of the things you can do with it today?

Brian: Yeah. I'll demo what — so we do have, I'll call out, we do have some bugs that will be live. Let me see if I can share.

---

[Brian shares screen and begins demo of the Open Sauced platform]

Brian: So this is a feature we shipped this month actually. We call it Highlights. The tagline is "more than green squares" — it's about recognizing contributions beyond just the GitHub contribution graph. So this is a recommendation engine. Based on your interests, it surfaces up-and-coming projects — like projects with their first star, or first hundred stars — not something like React, which is too big and won't have time for beginners. The logic is, if you can't clone and run it locally, that's actually your contribution — open an issue.

And bootcamp grads or early career devs are our built-in QA. That's a feature, not a bug, because our customers — actual companies — they're not in those issues every day either. So it works out.

Scott: That's interesting. And because you are fully open source, those competitors you might have aren't in your issues either.

Brian: Exactly. So we're in this anti-stealth mode with 4,000 users we can just flip on. And what you see here are dev cards — like a kind of profile card for contributors. We also have this pizza oven feature, which visualizes the "cooking" status of contributions. These Netlify subdomain deploys are for beta features we're testing behind flags.

Here's a feed of top contributors. And for Hacktoberfest — October 1 through 31 — there's a maintainer view where you can filter by language, like Go or JavaScript. And here's what we call the eagle-eyed view — the gray face means the contributor hasn't connected their GitHub. So that's Shelley, who maintains Electron. This is "productizing my experience" — I saw this up close working with thousands of projects at GitHub.

We compare a bit to Orbit or Common Room, but our angle is more about the contribution health of a project. Like, here's the Stripe DevRel team's repo — DJ Stripe, the Django SDK. And look, KD1 has 1,800 lines touched for SWC. That's amazing. And there's actually a draft PR for backporting Next.js and SWC.

Scott: So let's look at the VS Code extension — the Copilot-style thing you were showing me before.

Brian: Yeah, so this is a GitHub Copilot-style VS Code extension. And we have a feature called RepoQuery. This was inspired by Sourcegraph recipes — we built it with some college interns over the summer. The idea is it combines repo query with our Open Sauced API data, so it's "Open Sauce aware." So you can ask it questions about a repository, and it layers in who the top contributors are, what companies they work at, that kind of thing.

We have a playground sandbox to test this, and eventually the ask could be: who are the top contributors in the last 30 days, and what companies do they work at? We have 236 contributors across our collective projects right now.

Scott: That's awesome. That's so cool to see that little inside bit there.

Brian: Yeah, you pitched the idea, we already have it.

---

Anthony: I feel like AI is one of those things where it seems really complicated because people associate it with creating models, which is really hard. But just using the APIs, you're basically just lobbing text at something and getting text back.

Brian: That's it. You're one blog post away from catching up with everyone else. It's OpenAI through and through. Just read the documentation. I think there's a lot of imposter syndrome in the developer community around AI right now. People see what the big labs are doing and assume that's what "building AI" means. If you're building an AI product, you have such a big moat because so many developers just don't think they can do it — despite the fact that the reason everyone's doing it is because it's so easy.

Like, circling back to the Tesla — if you get behind a Tesla, you'll find out really quickly if you're comfortable driving it. The constant battle is getting people in the seat. Majority of developers are just looking at the front of the box and not really digging in.

Anthony: Yeah. Hackathons work because you have a captive audience that basically has to use your thing to win a prize.

Brian: Supabase does it really well — hackathon every three months, build something with our new technology, give feedback fast. It's a really tight loop.

Scott: Oh, and keyboard giveaways — that always helps. Nothing like a nice mechanical keyboard as a prize.

Brian: Ha, that's true. We've been doing that kind of stuff too.

We shipped our API first about a year ago. We had a product, but we sunsetted it for technical reasons — archived that project a couple months ago. Just had the API with the data. We built a lot of stuff. Now it's about figuring out how to glue everything together. There's a proper announcement coming pretty soon.

---

Brian: In terms of community, we have a few things going on. We did a 100 Days of Open Source event — it ran from July 23 through October 31, which aligns with the end of Hacktoberfest. So it's basically a 100-day challenge for making open source contributions.

We also do a weekly Open Source Hour on Twitter Spaces — Tuesday mornings. It's kind of like office hours for people making contributions or wanting to get started.

And then there's The Secret Sauce podcast — shoutout to Leon, who produces it. It's conversations with open source influencers, maintainers, and founders. Really high production quality, interview style.

Anthony: I am such a huge fan of all the Secret Sauce videos. Really high production quality — like movie star production, interview style show. I'm going to be on an episode.

Brian: Yeah, you will be on really soon.

You can find us at discord.gg/OpenSauce. We do also, in addition to the Twitter Space, have a Discord community chat. 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 gotten merged yet, can you take a look? It's really, again, like office hours. This morning we actually talked about more of the features we're working on.

---

Brian: I wonder how far I go. At this point, if you watched this far into the interview, you get a bit of the secret sauce. Thanks for staying longer.

We have what we call an eagle eyes view — it's seeing what's happening across your entire ecosystem. That's shipping soon.

And we've been working on something called the OSCR score — Open Source Contributor Reputation. We worked with a university on recognition and reputation research. Orbit has the Orbit model, which is like gravity into how deep you orbit something — I think that's pretty clever. But what we're looking for is the weight of folks and their reputation and contributions within your community.

The pizza oven feeds into this. It's all git-centric, not GitHub-centric — so it works on any git repo, private repos, Linux distro email hooks. Like, you don't have to be on GitHub. This is the thing that we sort of glue everything together with, and start going out in the street and knocking door to door and getting people to drive our Teslas.

Scott: 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 taken a lot of time. I'm excited for how it continues to grow out and further develops over time with everything you guys are putting into it. It's phenomenal. So it's awesome.

Brian: Yeah, it's a hyper fixation of the problem. My story's out there — I was just on the freeCodeCamp podcast with Quincy, not too long ago, and I talk about my journey and my story — actually the complete opposite of this conversation. Like, I never talk about Open Sauced. I just talk about why Open Sauced and why I got to this point.

But it really comes down to — my ultimate goal was — because I learned how to code after college on my own while getting my MBA and had just started a family, I was able to only do this because of open source. So my entire directive since I've been at GitHub is I want to get other people to do open source, to see that there's a pathway that's outside the norm, outside the sort of "I gotta pay $15K for a bootcamp." There's another path where you get free mentorship through open source, and we want to be able to showcase that.

So that's the goal. And because we took the VC route, we also have to have a viable business, which we have. So for that reason, really focused on the problem, trying to have an elegant solution that makes sense. And this entire pathway has been: how do we make this make sense where we could still encourage new bootcamp grads to do open source but also connect with companies that need to validate their presence within the space?

Anthony: Awesome. Yeah, and I was grabbing links to that and some other stuff about 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 internets.

Brian: Yeah, bdougie on Twitter, bdougie on GitHub, and Open Sauced almost everywhere else except Twitter, which is saucedopen.

Anthony: To try and get Open Sauced?

Scott: Yeah. Appreciate you, man. Thanks, everybody.

Discover Related Content

• The History of the Jamstack with Brian Douglas - An earlier FSJam Podcast interview where Brian traces the origin of the Jamstack term from inside Netlify, providing crucial backstory for the naming-evolution discussion he revisits in this episode
• A Bootcamp Student's OSS Contribution - OpenSauced - Anthony's first Open Sauced appearance, recorded years before this episode, where he explains how open source contributions to RedwoodJS launched his career — the origin story Brian references when describing the platform's original purpose
• JSJam Live with the Open Sauced Team - A follow-up JavaScript Jam episode featuring the full Open Sauced team discussing open source collaboration, project sustainability, and the community-building philosophy Brian outlines here
• How to Hacktoberfest 2022 - Covers the Hacktoberfest ecosystem that Brian cited as the entry point for his first paying Open Sauced customer, DigitalOcean, offering practical advice for the open source contribution pipeline the platform is built around
• Building Developer Communities with Domitrius Clark from Xata - Domitrius Clark discusses the mechanics of running developer communities — meetups, Discord vs. Slack, DevRel strategy — themes that run throughout Brian's account of how Open Sauced grew its 4,000-person community