Hank:

We have kids, okay? So if you hear the background noise a little bit, deal with it. We're trying to do the Earth some good and bring some more smart people around.

Gonto:

I don’t know about smart, but at least people. Before we start the show, today my bed is made. I don't know if you've realized there's no clothes in the floor.

Like, I'm kicking ass.

Hank:

I've been made fun of because I'm like meticulous about my background and people be like, can you get Ganto to clean up his room or like pick up the floor? I'm like, why do I even try? Why do I even try with this?

I'm glad you made your bed. 

Gonto: I didn't, but the cleaning lady came earlier today. 

Hank: Oh, classic. Well, you're building a new house. Build yourself a podcast studio in the new house. That'll be good.

Okay. We have a ton of great stuff. It's been a while.

I've been at React Miami. You've been sick. So we've been having different experiences.

We're going to talk about GitHub, losing trust. We have some other stuff, but first I want to do, this is a fun thing we did with AWS re-invent. I showed you a bunch of pictures and just had you react to a conference that I went to and you didn't.

I'm going to start with this though, because I want to sip. I love this swag, a little koozie to keep my drink cold from a clerk. You can see their logos.

They really match the vibe of React Miami. So that's fun.

Gonto: I have to say that I like it because they're a customer and I actually gave them feedback that I thought it was pretty good before they did it.

Hank: So one of their team members, Jeff Escalante, who I've been friends with for years, he had this and I was like, oh, I want one of those koozies. And also is that a Diet Coke? And it was in the middle of the day.

He's like, no, we only have beers, dude. I was like, oh, all right. You really leaned into the vibe then.

Another prop I have, another favorite swag leaning into the millennial nostalgia is Pogs from Mux. They've got a bunch of stuff in there. Oh, they got a syntax.

Gonto: You know, we in Argentina, we call them tassels and we actually had like a machine gun for those that you could buy where you put them in and you could like throw them around too. That's very fun.

Hank: Anyways. So those were fun. That's swag stuff.

I'm going to share a screen. This is an episode. You want to watch it on YouTube, honestly, or we have the video on Spotify, too.

You can watch it there. OK, first, this is what I don't I didn't take a picture of all the booths, which I regret. This is what most of the booths look like.

They have this background. They had a screen. They had some guys sitting there with the stickers.

Pretty typical. Not much to react to here, but I'm just setting the baseline.

Gonto: Yeah, my only comment on this is like in AWS, there are booths like this and they are like the smallest, the poorest one, I would say. So it sucks that the baseline looks like this because it looks like a cheap booth. And it's sad that that's the baseline.

Hank: It's interesting, too, because like these are you know, this is like a prebuilt thing. It's standardized. And I don't know.

To me, this is no different than just having a roll up banner and a high top table.

Gonto: I would rather do a side event or an installation rather than have this booth, which is bad for the conference organizers. I'm sorry, Michelle. I'm sorry G2I, but that's the reality for me.

Hank: Yeah. Well, let's let's give ourselves a challenge real quick. If this is all you had and it's all you can do, how do you maximize this?

My first instinct is, OK, can you make a really killer video for that screen? Can you make some sort of fun challenge so that at least there's a reason to visit your booth? Because the swag, like the stickers aren't going to do it.

And that whatever that handout is, isn't going to do it. Sorry, Arcjet, but like nobody cares about your paper handout.

Gonto: I think when the booth is not good, then what's surrounding the booth should be good. And what I mean by that is are you dressing up the people who are in the booth somehow differently? I like your idea on the video, but could you have something that's interactive?

Could you have something on the table that people would want to grab that is not the stickers? Maybe a better swag, maybe something to eat, maybe something to drink, maybe something that's useful while you're in Miami. Like, I don't know, give them sunscreen so that they can go to the beach eventually.

Or I don't know. I think that and the clothes, like what people are around, they're doing, I think changes a lot. And then don't make it black.

That's the other one.

Hank: Black is out, I guess. All right, let's go to the next photo. Here's a fun one.

I got to know Kent at these things, if you recognize Kent C. Dodds here, but I took a picture of the Code Rabbit cupcake. So that's something more fun at the booth.

Their booth was one of the more typical ones, but hey, cupcakes and it's carrot cake because rabbits eat carrots. So I like that.

Gonto: I like it too. The only problem to me is that this is good for people who know what Code Rabbit is. Like I knew what it was for people who don't know what Code Rabbit is.

Does it tell you anything?

Hank: Well, the cupcake doesn't, but you get that cupcake and then a person tells you what Code Rabbit is, I guess. Oh, so it's part of the booth experience. It's part of the booth.

I didn't take the picture at the booth. I think this is Leah's hand from Laravel. And I was talking to Kent C.

Dodds and I was like, oh, let me take a picture. And he leaned in.

Gonto: I like it. Like, at least it looks cool. And it's not the typical coffee that people put like and print the thing on top, which is what everybody's been doing.

Hank: I'm pretty sure this is a deep cut, but I'm pretty sure our very first or second episode of Code to Market, you said you want cookies at booths. So you should be praising the heck out of these guys because you love to eat at a booth.

Gonto: Oh yeah.

Hank: Clerk's booth. This was awesome. So Clerk, they've got the podcast set up.

They went all in. They had, you know, obviously the theming here. I think these are towels that they were giving away.

Gonto: They were giving away. They are towels.

Hank: Little beach towels. I showed you the drink koozie. They've got the beach chairs for the podcast.

Here's Ken Wheeler. If you know this guy, he's outrageous on Twitter. And there's a little more to the booth.

They have basically like the setup. They have like one of these things as well right here. And yeah, they were making content.

They were getting tons of people on there. I need to go check what they were doing with the content. They were also doing like other content beyond this area, but it was really good.

There was always something going on there and you couldn't really listen in to this. If you remember like one of my favorite AWS booths, you could listen in to the podcast being recorded as it was being recorded. So it wasn't really that, but that's okay.

And yeah, Clerk, you did a good job.

Gonto: On this, I'll be honest, but I remember that we talked about this with the team and we actually stole the idea from Michael on Unwork OS, who was actually doing this on AWS. We discussed about it. So we inspired on it.

That I think is really good. And I agree, like if you couldn't listen, that sucks. Like ideally next time we could do that.

But what I do like is they did Miami vibes. Like you have the chairs, the towels, the palm trees, like everything I think is good. And I like that it's more colorful as well.

Overall, I think they did a good job.

Hank: Yeah. They also had like these button down short sleeves that had the same design. So some of the team were wearing that.

So that was fun. Okay. This was my favorite, like, cause I love a creative activation.

This is something cool they did. So, and I told Steven, Steven was running this good old stifle from the, Oh, geez, I'm outing. I don't follow stifle.

All right. I didn't get you to follow. I've known this guy for so long.

He and I worked together, geez, six years ago. Okay. So check it out.

They had this little printer. Now, before you got to this, they had an app. So they just had a and you took a selfie with the app.

You picked a style. So you can see they have different styles over here. Like I picked the same style as me.

I think, yeah, you could do this one. It was very cool. And they print this thing out for you in real time.

And I have it somewhere around here and here's mine. It even captured my, it tried to turn, it turned my diamonds for expert into their triangles for Vercel, of course. So, yeah.

Gonto: I think the pictures look really cool and it's something that at least you take home. I would have loved if they were stickers, for example, because then you can put them somewhere besides the picture. I think that would have been better, but I like the picture and the style and what you're doing.

Hank: I saw some people like sticking them. I mean, maybe it is a sticker. Some people had them stuck on their badges.

They were putting these over their badges, which is kind of an iteration on this idea. Like if you could give people something specific to stick onto your conference badge, that would be cool.

Gonto: Yeah. And that came from Vercel. I think they did a really good job with the custom badges last time.

So I think doing something like this where you can stick it or do something, fantastic idea.

Hank: Yeah. I told Steven, I was like, you guys should be doing something like this for next JSConf.

Gonto: Yeah.

Hank: Okay. What's our next photo here? Oh, that's just, that's just my photo of my photo.

Very meta. Yeah. I'll talk about the side events too here, though.

I don't have photos. I will say Michelle, this is Michelle and her sister. Shout out Michelle and Becca, Beckles.

Michelle announced that she's no longer running the conference, but she had an amazing run. Really, really good conference. And I think Becca will do well.

This year they tagged, oh, and I didn't talk about AIE. So this year Becca mainly ran the AIE Miami, and then Michelle, as usual, planned React Miami and kind of both. Michelle announced she's moving on to OpenCode.

So pretty cool move for her.

Gonto: Interesting. She's moving from consulting company to a product company that she'd probably do some other type of conferences or stuff like that, I imagine. She's actually in Buenos Aires now on vacations.

Hank: That's right. Yeah. Both of them.

Yeah. Decompressing near you. So yeah, you know, it was funny.

The vibes for AIE Miami were a little more black and like cool and AI. The setup was different. They had this buffer day between where they had a hackathon.

I feel like, I don't know the goal. If you want people to come to both, I feel like you need to get rid of that buffer day. So that's just four days in a row.

Because for me, the buffer day was a little awkward. So I had a ton of calls to do. As usual, this conference is very heavy on the hall track and the side events.

There were lots of dinners. Oh, they did one of the most amazing things for one of the nights. Instead of having like after party or activity sponsored by several sponsors, they said, hey, sponsors, each of you come up with your own activity and we'll help people get to them.

So like it was a competition. Yeah, it kind of was. So like there was like mini golf.

There were like people doing like sports. There were people just doing dinner. There was a bar crawl.

There was all sorts of stuff. We can find the tweet that showed all the different side events.

Gonto: I saw some pictures from the Mimplify event that I heard good things at least on Twitter. I know exactly what they did. But I think besides the side events, the other thing, for example, that Clerc did and I've heard from people that they saw it was they did a lot of billboards around the conference with the same style and vibe as the booth, the event and everything.

I think this idea of focusing on doing something that is same brand specific for the conference all around and using it everywhere makes people really, really remember about what you're doing, who you are and why they should care about you.

Hank: Yeah, I don't know. I'm not sold on it. So this is like it's like a 500 person conference.

And so I think you're already front and center. Like everyone had to see the Clerc booth to get into the main thing. And I think the main thing you get from the billboards, which as a side note, this is what I see from Vibe.co. Vibe.co. I've never seen a billboard or a bus ad or whatever. Of course, I'm in Boise, Idaho most of the time. But boy, do I see them tweet and do LinkedIn posts about their out of home marketing. And so most I'm like, are they is the most value they're getting from their physical ads just actually for their digital ads.

And I feel like I saw content about Clerc's billboard and bus ad. I don't know that people actually saw those in the wild. It's kind of hard to see it on the freeways that passes by when you're in the back of an Uber.

But yeah.

Gonto: And I think it's a mix. It's both the billboard and then how people see it on social. But I like this idea just because like there's this theory that says that before you're willing to try something, you need to see it 16 times.

So then if you can see it, it's one more touch. So maybe the booth wasn't enough. It's the booth and the t-shirt and the billboard and this and this and that.

Another thing that I think is interesting is what if you do it on the airport? So when people are arriving or leaving, they remember you. Daniel Kahneman says a lot that people remember the strongest experience and the end.

So if you can be the strongest experience on the event through a party or something, and then in the end, in the airport, you see it, then that's the main brand you're going to remember. So also could be a cool idea if you're sponsoring conferences.

Hank: Yes, true. And I love bringing in the behavioral economics, behavioral psychology. One other neat thing.

I didn't show G2I's booth. They had an okay booth, but the coolest thing they did was because they were on the conference, they like announced, hey, we're trying to get in front of some frontier labs. If you get us an intro into a frontier lab, we'll give you a spark, an NVIDIA spark, which is like pretty cool.

And let me tell you, they got some good intros. So the ROI, I mean, it's hard to get those things and give them away, but the ROI was pretty good. Are my kids loud right now?

Do I need to go show something?

Gonto: They've been loud the entire show. It's okay.

Hank: We have kids. Okay. So if you hear the background noise a little bit, deal with it.

We're trying to do the Earth some good and bring some more smart people around.

Gonto: I don’t know about smart, but at least people.

Hank: I'm going to take that as a dig on your own son and not on my kids.

Gonto: I don't know your kids though. Anything else on this one? Should we change topics?

Hank: No, I think that's it.

Gonto: Tell us about GitHub. Yeah. So GitHub has been losing a lot of trust lately.

If you see what has happened since the Microsoft acquisition, it's that GitHub has been going down all the time. I think they lost a lot of nines on their uptime and people have been complaining about, Hey, we need a competitor. We need something else.

Like GitHub is down all the time. But then I think something that will make others change is that Mitchell, who was the creator of Backgrounds, the founder of HashiCorp, who is now building Ghosty, which is the most used terminal for developers, just announced he's moving Ghosty outside of GitHub. And the interesting thing about it to me is that he doesn't know where he's moving it yet.

He hasn't announced where he's moving it yet. He just said he's leaving GitHub. And I think it was to make the point of GitHub is fucking up, so we're changing.

At the same time, after that, I started to see a lot of tweets about how can we fix GitHub? Sam Lambert was talking about the first 20 people on GitHub were great. The rest was meh.

The COO now in GitHub was from the early days. He's good. Give it to him.

Others were saying it's unsolvable. Others say it's solvable. And at the same time, GitHub posted a blog post talking about why they went down multiple times.

And their main explanation is that the number of new commits, new pushes, thanks to agents, has increased so much that it's making it all go down, basically more on the last three months.

Hank: But what's your take? First, I'm like, okay, should I be buying some call options on GitLab or something? Who's the winner here is one place my mind goes.

Because yeah, what is the alternative? I don't see people going in troves to Bitbucket. GitLab's a maybe.

Knowing the developer space, people are going to be like, we need a brand new thing. And a brand new thing, that's hard. So even Ghosty, Mitchell said he didn't say where he was going.

He just said he's leaving. And so I wonder if a little bit of that is like, it's more of a shot across the bow. Like, hey, fix your stuff.

I'm serious. But is it ultimately an empty threat? What will change here?

So that's kind of a question. The real issue though, is if they're losing trust, even if these threats right now are empty, and we don't know where they would go, it opens up the opportunity. And it opens up the opportunity for people to think of entirely new ways to do this, and something that could be transformative.

I don't see a mass migration in the next year, but over the next five years, this could be the trigger of something like some sort of big, massive migration. Exactly.

Gonto: And to me, at least, I don't think GitLab is the solution. GitLab actually launched a page called Slash Switch, where they are pushing people to switch. And the copy is intense.

Like, hey, we all knew after acquisition that this might happen, and it did happen. And then they have quotes from people on Reddit, just bashing on GitHub. So I thought it was tacky, because it was a very strong message on switch to GitLab, but it's all focused on how much GitHub sucks, and there's nothing around why GitLab is better.

And the problem is that GitLab is not better. Like, maybe uptime, but then all of the rest of the features are not good. And if you're not highlighting them, I don't think people will switch.

And also, to get you to switch, they had a contact form. Like, developers don't want the contact form. They want to sign up, they want to try, they want to see a differentiation.

So I think they fucked up with the switch page. But at the same time, I think GitHub fucked up with their blog post, because on the blog post, they are putting the excuse that commits and push 3x, sorry, improve, increase so much on the last time. That's why it's going down.

But agents have been out for three years now. It's not expected this and fixed it before. So the excuse sucks.

And at the same time, it has been going down since the acquisition, not really just on the last two months. So I don't like excuses.

Hank: The whole acquisition thing of like, oh, it's been getting steadily worse for eight years. But like, I don't know. I don't feel like I've seen these type of complaints really until recently.

Gonto: Like, I agree. They should have prepared. And I feel that the blog post sounds more as an excuse rather than what are we doing to fix it?

Hank: Yes, it's an excuse. And it's not a, you know, they have the our commitment. If you have a section or if you're if you're saying like, our commitment to you, like, that's always just a flag of like, OK, we don't really we don't really have something.

Gonto: Exactly. And I think learnings from these are like, if you're the competition and you're focusing on developers, focus on signups and focus on differentiation, not in using them and having a form field. And then if your product is going down instead of excuses, actually share exactly what you have been doing to change and what's coming and don't put as much focus on why it went down and stuff like that, because it all sounds as excuses.

Hank: Yeah. There's also things of just like I feel like related to this. I sent you this short where the guy talks about Copilot injecting ads.

And I think Copilot like Copilot had such a lead on Cogen and it's been completely fumbled. And, you know, it doesn't make sense because they also had the relationship with OpenAI. Yeah.

Like, I feel like all of this is related. I mean, they've they've just GitHub and Microsoft were so close to being cool again, like specific.

Gonto: Exactly.

Hank: GitHub almost helped GitHub and Copilot almost made Microsoft cool enough again that I was like, all right, they might stop making fun of me for using a Windows machine because we're getting there. And then it just all fell apart in the last year.

Gonto: Exactly. And it feels like everybody was talking about how Satya was changing the company around. But now I think they are fucked again.

And GitHub, for example, the other problem with the images, they have no CEO. Like you want one person to talk to. Of course, there's Kyle, who is the CEO.

But you need a CEO. And then Jared joined, I think, a year ago. He was very vocal on Twitter about the fixes, what they were doing and stuff like that.

But then lately he hasn't posted anything else.

Hank: Well, he replied to somebody. Somebody was saying, Jared, Jared Palmer, please fix this. I haven't been working on GitHub since December.

Basically, as soon as he joined, he's now on some secret special project. So that's another problem is how many people are at a giant company like Microsoft. And let's insert, please insert the image of the different hierarchies at different companies.

Microsoft is the one with guns.

Gonto: Yeah.

Hank: How much of what's going on at Microsoft is people getting sniped and stolen and put on other projects that are more pressing and therefore abdicating those individuals' responsibility for the foundational core things. Now, all that being said, cloud adoption on Azure, if you've looked at the earnings of any of the cloud providers in The Magnificent Seven, cloud adoption is skyrocketing. That's all going great.

And that was Satya's thing, was Azure. That's true.

Gonto: But AI is going to matter so much more. And Satya lost where before OpenAI would be used exclusively in Azure. And now it can be used in Amazon.

So I think they're losing a bit of the edge on that too.

Hank: Yeah. It's going to be interesting. I wonder what people will do.

We had other stuff to say, but we're not going to say it because we respect your time and we're only keeping the best in here. I think that's the pod today.

Gonto: That's it. I won't say that we're back because every time we say we're back, we're not back.

Hank: I know, it's such a curse.

Gonto: No. So hopefully we start doing this a bit more often. We'll see, but thank you for listening.

And as usual, if you've got feedback or thoughts, let us know.