Gonto:  I think focusing more on what are the problems that a typical developer has with Node.js and how they can solve them with Deno, that I think would be more appealing. So that's number one thing I would do to make it less boring, make it more based on use cases and on specific pain points. Again, like we talked last time, the second thing that I think is this is a great opportunity to highlight the things that are great with Deno. They don't have to be great only in version 2. They could have been great in version 1. But it's a great time for people to remember. 

Gonto:  Hi everybody. My name is Martin Gontovnikas, but everybody calls me Gonto. I'm here with Hank Taylor. 

Hank: Hi!

Gonto: Every week, Hank and I boil down the most important product, growth and marketing learnings from what's happening in DevTools. So in simpler terms, we'll give you our thoughts on the current thing on the DevTools space. We hope you enjoy it. 

Gonto: Welcome to the third episode of Code to Market. Today, like every week we come to you with two main topics that we want to discuss. And then some miscellaneous. I present the first topic. Second topic will be presented by Hank.

First of all, today we want to talk about Deno. I don't know if you've heard of Deno, but Deno is basically a runtime that competes with Node.js and they just released the version 2 right now, four years after. 

If you look at the tweets that they used to launch, you'll see that the first one explains that they launched a version that is now backward compatible with node and NPM and that it has long term support. At the same time, they also did a pretty cool video on this launch as well.

And then we spent some time looking at the comments, looking if people reacted, how they felt about it and why, which is what we'll talk about today. Um, Hank, I know you had some thoughts on how do you ship boring stuff like this one, that doesn't seem very interesting. What are your thoughts on that? 

Hank: Yeah, especially the main tweet of just, you know, the URL is /2. It's a very basic OG card and the main two things they were talking about were long term support and backwards compatibility. They're not like sexy things. They're kind of like, I don't know painkillers, that’s not the right term, like there's not even a good term. That's kind of how boring it is to me.

They did get a lot of likes and stuff. My thought is that if you're gonna do, it feels like a maintenance and a quality of life ship more than anything. And if that's going to be your main version or your version bump, cool, whatever. But I think you can play it up on how, hey, this isn't, this is to improve quality of life, this is to make it easier to migrate. This is to help you finally make the jump to Deno. I think they could have leaned into those things because there's major reasons they did, they did it. It's not just people were simply asking them for, uh, Oh, we wish we had backwards compatibility. Like these actually, when you look deeper, it actually feels like these have long term and serious implications for people's businesses and they can actually build on top of them. Um, and I don't know, I think there's lots of ways to spice up, um, a boring launch. 

Gonto: How would you spice this one up? 

Hank: I mean, 1. they did do a video, which is nice. And you, you especially liked the video. I thought it was okay. I thought, you know, it's different for sure. Um, you know, including like the shirtless guy in the middle, but I think it starts with the floating guy and his feet. 

But I think with the main tweet and the main thing they put up front,  I think instead of starting with their whole history, like, Oh, four years since blah, blah, blah…Get right to why it matters and we spoke about this last week with oh product marketers always want to put like the value prop and it's better to show, not tel. Well, in this case, they're not showing it.

Um, so if you're not going to show, well, you at least better tell why it's important and, uh, a little, at least a little bit, right? Like, you know, what, what are the implications of this I think. I don't know. Maybe I'm contradicting myself from last time. You know, maybe it is good that they just put it out there.

Like, what do you think?

Gonto: I still do believe in show, don't tell. But on this one, to me, what's very interesting on the on the boring stuff is I was reading tweets about how people felt about it. And I saw a lot of people who were excited because they were talking about “Oh, in version 2, they fix all of my pain points that I had with node. And now I can finally use Deno.”

So I think on one side, if that's the thing that wasn't clear in the blog post and it wasn't clear on the tweets. So I think focusing more on what are the problems that a typical developer has. With Node.js and how they can solve them with Deno that I think would be more appealing.

So that's number one thing I would do to make it less boring, make it more based on use cases and on specific pain points. Again, like we talked last time.

The second thing that I think is this is a great opportunity to highlight the things that are great with Deno. They don't have to be great only in version two, they could have been great in version one, but it's a great time for people to remember. 

Another tweet that I would have done is something starting to show, for example, Deno, one of the main things they have that is really good is their speed. They're much faster than Node. So potentially showing how you can do an NPM install or a Node install, like a Deno install. And show how much faster it is and how much you're saving time and stuff like that.

That's another opportunity to do a show, don't tell. And even though it's based on Deno 1 thing stuff, it doesn't matter. I saw a lot of tweets from people saying like, “Oh, I've been trying to try Deno for three years. And I've never done, I've, I've not done it. Maybe now is the time.”

I think it's about giving them excuses and reminding them of why Deno is awesome even though it's not different in version 2 so then other people can start to try it out. Those are the main things that I would do to make it less boring, I think.

Hank: Yes, so like if we rewrote that tweet or announcement, we would probably instead of the like Oh 4 years and here's like the 2 main changes, we'd probably say  x100, 000 million, I don't know how many people use Deno. It's a lot. Maybe, maybe it's like,  maybe it's like 5,000 people. I don't really know. Um, you know, we'd say this many people have adopted Deno.  Here's what's been holding back the rest of you. Like this compatibility, this type of support. Here's what you'll get if you try it now with version 2, you'll get this, you'll get that.

And these can be a mixture of new things and old things, but it's just a refresher. And it reminds me of the other day, somebody told me “I don't use openAI. I don't use GPT anymore because it doesn't, uh, remember your chats or something.” I was like, it totally remembers your chats. Like that's been a feature forever. And they just hadn't tried it for a while, and that's kind of an error in marketing, right? Like, they're not reminding people of, of what they can do and what the new features are. 

Gonto: Exactly. The one thing that. As you said, that I do think they did well was the video. Like, even if you look at the video, they had like 2000 retweets, which is pretty fucking good.

And what I thought about it, it was very unique. Like, as you said, there was a guy flying, another one that was shirtless, weird story, and it's a nice way to spice up something that's so boring. At the same time, I think more and more people care about videos. And I've been seeing a lot of companies shipping new launches, like full new launches that are huge with new videos that are pretty cool.

One of the agencies that does most of these videos is called Sandwich. I don't know if it was Sandwich video, Sandwich board, something, but they are really fucking good. And this video looks like it was, it was done by them. I don't know if that's true, but it made me remember of the friend.com release video because the video was cool. And because the guy paid 2 million, which was his entire stake on friend.com. But that made it actually blow up and people related to the video in part because it was creepy and people were talking about it, but it doesn't matter. I think the video adds a new way that you can engage with content and I think more and more people as we chatted last time engage with video rather than just text mostly because we're more impatient than before and because of that the video is fast I see it and that's it I'm done.

Hank: I might even argue with the impatience angle. I think it's just more engaging if you're scrolling through Twitter or LinkedIn which is important you see a video and you want to know what's going on and.  And it's also more algorithmically recommendable. The platforms all want to recommend video, so their bar for what engagement they have to see on video to start recommending it is lower. Because they know it keeps people on the platform longer, it gives them better chances for more engaging ads, et cetera, et cetera. 

So. That's a way to actually align your incentive, which is to get distribution, with the platform's incentive, which is to get people to stay on the site. And it's also why you should upload video native to the platform.

You should upload it to Twitter, upload it to whatever, rather than just having a YouTube, or even worse, like there are people who still do like Vimeo links and then they link to the Vimeo on all the platforms, and that's just like the, the worst of it all.  

Gonto: Agree 100%. And talking about popularity before we switch to second topic.

In our first episode we talked about WordPress. WordPress is becoming even a bigger mess now, just as a sort of short mention, but Matt stole a plugin from WP Engine and stole the reviews and everything. Then he wrote a blog post, telling DHH how he sucks because he hasn't built any project that scale and he's not as millionaire as him. Like he's absolutely insane. I don't have any other new comments on this. I know you do, Hank, but to me, it was just mind blowing.  

Hank: My main new comment is that since we spoke about this, the implications of whatever legal battle comes out of Matt/ Automatic taking over a plugin and actually damaging a lot of people's live sites and they did it on a Saturday morning, by the way, which is kind of a dick move.

The implications … that come from this are, are going to be huge. People in Opensource, at least at this scale, haven't really tried such shenanigans, so it'll be weird to see. Cause if Mac gets away with it, that's just going to be terrible. It ruins a lot of the trust in open source licensing.I don't think he will get away with it.

Gonto: If he does, it will change opensource forever. Similarly to how Elastic changing the license also changed open source, so we'll see. 

Hank: Let's go on to our, uh, next little topic, which  there's kind of a parallel. So the, the dot IO. domain is getting deleted. It's not clear how certain it is that it's getting deleted.

And there's a rumor that Google might buy it, but it just got me thinking. And I want to talk to you about naming because so many companies have  locked into the dot IO domain as part of the name that now dot IO is kind of synonymous with Google. Oh, it's a tech company. 

Gonto: I remember trying to buy an IO domain and that every fucking year they were more and more expensive because everybody was using them like AI now.

Hank: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, um, I saw it because the, the builder. io CEO retweeted this tweet and it was kind of like, Oh,  and I was like, huh, what do you do? And builder.ai  is already taken by some other company and builder.com is probably expensive. So this could have. Interesting implications for a lot of companies.

Um, a former company I used to work for trade.io rebranded a few months ago to ai. Um, and so maybe they're glad they did that now. But it, it got me just thinking about names and I'm curious your thoughts on names, because engineers, I, I mean everybody, but they have lots of different ideas on naming and sometimes people wanna name, they want to give a proper name to everything.

So like, I'm at Laravel now, and they have a proper name for everything in the ecosystem, and every package, and there's so many names, it's so hard to keep track of. When I was at Vercel, I tried to keep them from giving proper names to everything, because there's so many three letter acronyms, for every little function.

And they just announced, this is also kind of recent news, uh, serverless servers, which I think they say they're gonna give a proper name, but whatever that means. And, and most of the tweets around that were around, uh, wait, what is this name? What does this mean? It's just memes. 

Gonto: I'm actually with you, I would say on naming, like I always try to name the least amount of things possible.

And by that, what I mean is each name adds more cognitive load to people. So if I need to understand how a product works, what it does, And I also need to learn a name. It's so much harder to do all of it, rather than not picking names. Like at Auth0  we did something similar where we thought everything should have a name.

And remember that multi factor authentication at Auth0 was called Guardian. And it took us like three fucking months to come up with the name. We had like sentinel because we like metrics and other things and stuff like that. In the end, we picked Guardian. And in the end, it was very hard for people to like, what the fuck is Guardian?

What does it do? And in reality, Guardian was just multifactor.  Did it have some cool stuff? Yeah, sure. It had like the push notification that you could click on it and then don't have to copy paste the code and stuff like that, but it was still multifactor. So eventually we actually renamed it back to Auth0 Multifactor, which I think was a better choice.

So my thinking on naming is I try to name the least amount of things possible. And if the name is for the company, I try to start with an a, that was like a great takeaway from odds. You know, we were always first when they were like sponsors in conferences and stuff like that's always like our logo was first, which I think was a good addition, but yeah, I don't know. I'm not into names.

 Vercel has something similar with conformance, but they have conformance It's like what the fuck is conformance? And I know they were changing the name to checks, which I think makes more sense Because what does it do? It checks your code. So something that I think more familiar a lot better.

Hank: Conformance was a name inherited through google which loves to name things. So the google chrome team kind of pushed it. You're also seeing that influence from the CTO of Malta is an ex Googler. Um, and he claims to have named, uh, V0. Which, if I were there, I probably would have just named it Vercel AI, or something like that.

Um, cause I, you know, I also push for, oh, it's an analytics product? Let's just call it Vercel Analytics. Oh, it optimizes images? Great, let's call that image optimization. Maybe it's a great name, but like, Incremental Static Regeneration was, uh, That was before me, and I don't know if I would have been able to influence that.

But,  yeah, like, Laravel is the complete offset. Everything has a proper name, and I don't think I'm gonna be dying on any of those hills. Names are fun, but they do, they do have implications and they can,  they can cause costs. And like you said, I think the biggest cost iscognitive load of people forgetting what the product actually does and if it's affiliated.

The worst example I can think of this is I worked with a client who had one product and it has a different name than their company name. And I really tried to talk them into like, guys, just call the thing your thing. Even if you use the word platform, which I hate using the word platform, just call it your platform rather than give it a totally new proper noun name. 

They're like, no, and it needs its own landing page and all this. I think it just caused this brand confusion. 

Gonto: And it's not just forgetting, it's not understanding it or not remembering it. Like we had problems with people not understanding like what the fuck is this? Like, because if you name it differently than what it is, then there should be something else.

And sometimes there isn't. So people expect more. And because of that as well, they sometimes get confused. But yeah, like to me, even if you're using the domain, Even if you like the IO, don't make that part of your name. Like I did that mistake with my domain. Everybody calls me Gonto and my website is gon.to. So if the Tonic Island stop doing that, I'm fucked because it's part of my name. So I shouldn't have done it, but I don't care. 

Hank: Yeah. Wow. You're Gonto though. Uh, but yeah, now you have to worry about that. These islands are giving up their domains potentially and no, and Google's not going to step in to save “to.”

Gonto: I was so worried when I paid my domain in  to because they didn't use HTTPS. And I remember that I paid for 20 years just because I was scared that if I was going to get stolen my credit card, if I paid multiple years, but anyway, that's, that's another story. 

Hank: Cool. Well, I think that's it. Thanks for joining everybody.

Gonto: We'll see you next time. So if you have any feedback. Feel free to tweet either to Hank or to me on any feedback on this. Thank you.