8 ms·

Hi all, I'm not sure how responsive I'll be able to be on this thread since I'm in orientation today. :) But, here's the things I expect to be repeating a lot:

by kentonv 10y ago

Hi all, I'm not sure how responsive I'll be able to be on this thread since I'm in orientation today. :) But, here's the things I expect to be repeating a lot: - Sandstorm is still an independent company, under control of Jade and myself. - Sandstorm is "my baby" and I'm not going to stop working on it just because I have a day job. Yes, it will slow down a bit -- but on the bright side, we were previously spending the vast majority of our time trying to figure out enterprise sales (rather than actually building cool features), and we don't have to do that anymore. So, the difference may not be as big as you'd think. See: https://sandstorm.io/news/2017-02-06-sandstorm-returning-to-community-roots https://sandstorm.io/news/2017-02-06-sandstorm-returning-to-... - Nevertheless I'm pretty excited about the work I'll be doing at Cloudflare as well -- which includes Cap'n Proto and other fascinating infrastructure tech.

jacquesm 10y ago
> Sandstorm is still an independent company, under control of Jade and myself. Whenever I hear that I'm subvocalizing 'for now'. How do you see this in the longer term?
- nine_k 10y ago
  (Isn't everything in our life "for now", given a sufficiently long now?) What kind of hostile commercial interest there might be, especially when the technology is protected by open-source licenses? If there were a non-hostile commercial interest, akin to Citus in Postgres, won't it be a win for all?
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    That such independence is - historically at least - usually the opposite. There are very few examples of where post acquisition such independence turned out to be the real deal.
    - geofft 10y ago
      As far as I can tell, Sandstorm did not get acquired or acquihired - Kenton, Jade, and others (?) as individuals all accepted job offers from Cloudflare.
      - detaro 10y ago
        I think some others of the team work for stripe now.
      - kentonv 10y ago
        That's correct.
      - jacquesm 10y ago
        Ah ok, so the team has joined cloudflare but the corporate entity continues with the original owners. So in some ways better than an acquihire and in some ways worse.
        mnutt 10y ago
        It seems almost universally better? I can't think of any acquirer that would be more successful with Sandstorm than the founders themselves. Nobody I can think of is aligned with "users own their data" and big enough / cares enough to help Sandstorm gain adoption. Even Sandstorm not gaining traction with their B2B strategy is likely a blessing in disguise: with enterprise money coming in they would have felt a hard pull to do more things that enterprises like. No matter how much conviction you have, making payroll often trumps that. Now, they've proven that the enterprise route doesn't work. My hope is that the project can continue to improve and gain traction to the point where it sets up or joins a foundation, then potentially try to restart a complementary commercial venture on top of that.
        kentonv 10y ago
        > Now, they've proven that the enterprise route doesn't work. Well, no... I don't think we proved it didn't work, only that we lacked the expertise to make it work. With more time and some good hiring I think we could have fixed the problem, but the investor money ran out, so...
- r00fus 10y ago
  Contrast that with the problem for Sandstorm if they couldn't figure out how to fund the effort.
nemo1618 10y ago
I've often found that my motivation to work on something decreases if I'm being paid to do it. Side projects are often much more fun and energizing than your day job. Hope you feel the same!
- kentonv 10y ago
  Back when I worked at Google, my favorite weekend activity honestly was working on open source side projects. I'm a workaholic like that. Even while working full-time on Sandstorm, on weekends I'd work on "things I want to code" rather than "things I need to code".
  - AceJohnny2 10y ago
    But where do you fit the LAN parties or that FF playthrough? Do you sleep?
    - kentonv 10y ago
      LAN parties are every third Saturday. :D I usually take a week vacation when there's a new FF to play. :P
michaelmior 10y ago
Happy to see work on Cap'n Proto continue!
josh_carterPDX 10y ago
I guess I'm confused by the carefully chosen wording of this post. Did Cloudflare acquire Sandstorm? Was this an acqui-hire? Appreciate the clarity and I understand if there are elements that can't be shared publicly.
- kentonv 10y ago
  No, Cloudflare did not acquire Sandstorm, but four of the seven team members (including both founders) are joining as individuals. This was our preference -- I love Cloudflare but I'd also like Sandstorm to remain independent. Sorry, I meant for that to be clear in the post but I guess I failed.
  - josh_carterPDX 10y ago
    It's ok. That's why I asked. I've seen acquisition announcements worded the same way so I just wanted to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding. Thanks for the clarity!
- djsumdog 10y ago
  I suspect they intend to keep working on Sandstorm in their spare time (like most of us on here and our OSS side projects), but my have explicitly had their work contracts worded in such a way as that's allowable (or maybe Cloudflare is giving them x% of time to dedicate to it?) I'm currently in the process of leaving my full time job to work on my OSS stuff full time again. It's a tough move because you do eventually run out of money if you can't get enough grants, donations or a following on Patreon. That's how I ended up back in a full time gig myself.
- derefr 10y ago
  If you're running a founder-team-only private company without any real assets, the company only really "exists" for as long as the founders can be considered to be its employees. So, if another company comes along and makes an offer to the people to hire them as individual employees—not a company, not even a gelled team, just individual offers—then the company-that-was just sort of ceases to exist, because it now has nobody working for it. I think that's more what happened here.
strlen 10y ago
Congrats Jade and Kenton. Personal thanks to you for both Cap'n Proto and Sandstorm.
simplehuman 10y ago
Hey Kenton, you replied previously (in another thread) that he will keep running Oasis since it's your baby. So, let's say Oasis goes down right now and right now you are in the middle of your orientation... does it mean that nobody will look into it until later tonight (that too if you have time) ? What is the agreement with Cloudflare?
- kentonv 10y ago
  If I get paged I'll step out to deal with it. Other team members can also handle pages, though I'm primary on-call. Note that Oasis is extremely stable. We haven't had an incident requiring human response in weeks -- and the only kind of issue we regularly had before that is now automated.
cstrahan 10y ago
I'm pretty stoked about future cap'n proto developments. In the scenarios where I've brought up Cap'n Proto, all but the most senior/prolific developers have a near impossible time of ascertaining why one might want to use capnp over competing approaches (e.g. Protobuf). I think, despite a pretty decent description on the website and my own skills in explaining/teaching, such protocols are nearly impossible for the majority of developers to intuit -- so they're all perceived as being nearly identical, save for financial backing and other forms of social proof. With some of the rough corners filed smooth (e.g. Windows support), a bit more marketing and promotion, and eventually more big names advertising their use of capnp, my job getting buy in from my peers would be much easier.
- StreamBright 10y ago
  Performance might be one reason to use Cap'n Proto over Protobuf. http://dbeck.github.io/5-lessons-learnt-from-choosing-zeromq-and-protobuf/ http://dbeck.github.io/5-lessons-learnt-from-choosing-zeromq...
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- hueving 10y ago
  Can you provide a 'top 3' list of reasons to use Cap'n Proto over Protobufs?
  - doh 10y ago
    1) Cap'n Proto doesn't encode/decode messages thus it's nuch cheaper for processing and memory management 2) protobuf in the proto3 design doesn't cary default values. So if you have a bool field and want to explicitly send false, well you have to change it to some other type or use the default values all the time 3) protobuf generates incredibly large serialization/deserialization support coce for each template. For some languages like Python in can be in hundreds of kilobytes. Cap'n proto messages are significantly smaller There is more for CnP but Protobuf has much better support and is by default used in projects like gRPC. Also new CnP is lacking speed in new development in comparison to Protobuf. But I'm using in one of my side projects and I'm very happy with it
thejohnhenry 10y ago
Hey Kenton! Congratulations, I'm really happy for you, Jade, and the rest of the team. I am sad about the projected lower development activity in Sandstorm in the coming months. You had a tremendous community/brand built up, which is very hard to do for decentralized web technology initiatives -- several independent chat groups I'm in are lamenting the news today. If you're aware of any groups discussing further development in the decentralization space, please let me know (email's in profile, or I will check this comment every hour or so). Seriously great work so far.
- kentonv 10y ago
  The community (including me) is continuing to organize on the sandstorm-dev mailing list (https://groups.google.com/group/sandstorm-dev https://groups.google.com/group/sandstorm-dev) and #sandstorm on Freenode IRC. Definitely drop by and say hello! https://sandstorm.io/community https://sandstorm.io/community
msmith10101 10y ago
Congrats! Since your LAN House is in Palo Alto do you take the Caltrain up there? What do you think of the commute? I myself am between jobs now and trying to settle on a place - currently located in SF but thinking of moving to Palo Alto.
- kentonv 10y ago
  Yes, Jade and I are taking Caltrain. CF is right next to the SF station so it works. I have yet to find out if spending 1.5 to 2 hours on the train every day will drive me crazy. :)
  - praneshp 10y ago
    I started commuting on Caltrain (Mountain View <-> SF) 3 months ago. For me it's quite easy to read a book on the onward trip and work on the return trip. The only time I'm annoyed is when I board in the morning, people never stand in a line (like BART). They just approach the coach from all directions and pile inside. But it's empty enough that I can wait till everybody gets in, and I will still get a free seat/comfortable corner.
    - nostrademons 10y ago
      I did Santa Clara -> 22nd a couple years ago when I had a cofounder who lived in the city. I found I ended up writing a significant amount of code for that startup on the train. It actually worked out pretty well; I'd put the finishing touches on features on the way in, then discuss with my cofounder, figure out what we needed to do next, maybe talk to some potential users in the city, and write the code for new features on the way back. If you've got most of the reference docs for the frameworks you're using downloaded or memorized, or are working on stuff that's mostly thinking and not looking stuff up (I'd imagine capnp fits in that category), you can get a significant amount of work done.
      - frik 10y ago
        That's a very good point. Working from train often means spotty internet connection. So it's hard to instantly look up something in Google. A good offline documentation helps. For older languages and IDEs like C and C++ and Visual Studio 2005 like 10 years there were CHM help files for everything. Nowadays almost everything is available almost only as web help, if there is even an official full documentation at all. Also like 10 years ago, books came with an CHM file on CD/download. Nowadays books are already outdated when the get published, things like App and Web development is moving very fast. So starting a new project on train is not a good idea, fixing bugs from error/warning messages isn't a good idea, but doing some maintenance/refactoring work is well suited for boring train rides.
zeusk 10y ago
Unrelated - I just read your `Owner of a LAN-party optimized house` and it seemed quite interesting, have you made any updates since to the architecture or the hardware? The last blog post was in 2011!
- kentonv 10y ago
  A couple months ago I updated the graphics cards to GeForce 1060s (from 560s) and doubled the RAM to 16 GB, which seems sufficient to run modern games at high graphics settings. Otherwise, no changes.
nickpsecurity 10y ago
Are you going to integrate any of the LANGSEC principles or stuff like formally-verified parsers at INRIA into Cap n Proto? Or have you already? I've been especially curious to see what a combination of your excellent scheme with verified parsing/protocol tech would be like.
sandGorgon 10y ago
are you planning to have a pure-python implementation at some point ? I understand about the performance... but there are many usecases where a pure python implementation is far more practical.
- kentonv 10y ago
  I don't have specific plans regarding language support -- mostly that's been up to contributors so far, with me focusing on the C++ "reference" implementation. Hopefully, though, at CF we can find more resources. (The author of pycapnp, Jason Paryani, also joined CF with us, FWIW.)

by kentonv 10y ago

jacquesm 10y ago

> Sandstorm is still an independent company, under control of Jade and myself. Whenever I hear that I'm subvocalizing 'for now'. How do you see this in the longer term?

nine_k 10y ago
(Isn't everything in our life "for now", given a sufficiently long now?) What kind of hostile commercial interest there might be, especially when the technology is protected by open-source licenses? If there were a non-hostile commercial interest, akin to Citus in Postgres, won't it be a win for all?
- jacquesm 10y ago
  That such independence is - historically at least - usually the opposite. There are very few examples of where post acquisition such independence turned out to be the real deal.
  - geofft 10y ago
    As far as I can tell, Sandstorm did not get acquired or acquihired - Kenton, Jade, and others (?) as individuals all accepted job offers from Cloudflare.
    - detaro 10y ago
      I think some others of the team work for stripe now.
    - kentonv 10y ago
      That's correct.
    - jacquesm 10y ago
      Ah ok, so the team has joined cloudflare but the corporate entity continues with the original owners. So in some ways better than an acquihire and in some ways worse.
      - mnutt 10y ago
        It seems almost universally better? I can't think of any acquirer that would be more successful with Sandstorm than the founders themselves. Nobody I can think of is aligned with "users own their data" and big enough / cares enough to help Sandstorm gain adoption. Even Sandstorm not gaining traction with their B2B strategy is likely a blessing in disguise: with enterprise money coming in they would have felt a hard pull to do more things that enterprises like. No matter how much conviction you have, making payroll often trumps that. Now, they've proven that the enterprise route doesn't work. My hope is that the project can continue to improve and gain traction to the point where it sets up or joins a foundation, then potentially try to restart a complementary commercial venture on top of that.
        kentonv 10y ago
        > Now, they've proven that the enterprise route doesn't work. Well, no... I don't think we proved it didn't work, only that we lacked the expertise to make it work. With more time and some good hiring I think we could have fixed the problem, but the investor money ran out, so...
r00fus 10y ago
Contrast that with the problem for Sandstorm if they couldn't figure out how to fund the effort.

nemo1618 10y ago

I've often found that my motivation to work on something decreases if I'm being paid to do it. Side projects are often much more fun and energizing than your day job. Hope you feel the same!

kentonv 10y ago
Back when I worked at Google, my favorite weekend activity honestly was working on open source side projects. I'm a workaholic like that. Even while working full-time on Sandstorm, on weekends I'd work on "things I want to code" rather than "things I need to code".
- AceJohnny2 10y ago
  But where do you fit the LAN parties or that FF playthrough? Do you sleep?
  - kentonv 10y ago
    LAN parties are every third Saturday. :D I usually take a week vacation when there's a new FF to play. :P

michaelmior 10y ago

Happy to see work on Cap'n Proto continue!

josh_carterPDX 10y ago

I guess I'm confused by the carefully chosen wording of this post. Did Cloudflare acquire Sandstorm? Was this an acqui-hire? Appreciate the clarity and I understand if there are elements that can't be shared publicly.

kentonv 10y ago
No, Cloudflare did not acquire Sandstorm, but four of the seven team members (including both founders) are joining as individuals. This was our preference -- I love Cloudflare but I'd also like Sandstorm to remain independent. Sorry, I meant for that to be clear in the post but I guess I failed.
- josh_carterPDX 10y ago
  It's ok. That's why I asked. I've seen acquisition announcements worded the same way so I just wanted to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding. Thanks for the clarity!
djsumdog 10y ago
I suspect they intend to keep working on Sandstorm in their spare time (like most of us on here and our OSS side projects), but my have explicitly had their work contracts worded in such a way as that's allowable (or maybe Cloudflare is giving them x% of time to dedicate to it?) I'm currently in the process of leaving my full time job to work on my OSS stuff full time again. It's a tough move because you do eventually run out of money if you can't get enough grants, donations or a following on Patreon. That's how I ended up back in a full time gig myself.
derefr 10y ago
If you're running a founder-team-only private company without any real assets, the company only really "exists" for as long as the founders can be considered to be its employees. So, if another company comes along and makes an offer to the people to hire them as individual employees—not a company, not even a gelled team, just individual offers—then the company-that-was just sort of ceases to exist, because it now has nobody working for it. I think that's more what happened here.

strlen 10y ago

Congrats Jade and Kenton. Personal thanks to you for both Cap'n Proto and Sandstorm.

simplehuman 10y ago

Hey Kenton, you replied previously (in another thread) that he will keep running Oasis since it's your baby. So, let's say Oasis goes down right now and right now you are in the middle of your orientation... does it mean that nobody will look into it until later tonight (that too if you have time) ? What is the agreement with Cloudflare?

kentonv 10y ago
If I get paged I'll step out to deal with it. Other team members can also handle pages, though I'm primary on-call. Note that Oasis is extremely stable. We haven't had an incident requiring human response in weeks -- and the only kind of issue we regularly had before that is now automated.

cstrahan 10y ago

I'm pretty stoked about future cap'n proto developments. In the scenarios where I've brought up Cap'n Proto, all but the most senior/prolific developers have a near impossible time of ascertaining why one might want to use capnp over competing approaches (e.g. Protobuf). I think, despite a pretty decent description on the website and my own skills in explaining/teaching, such protocols are nearly impossible for the majority of developers to intuit -- so they're all perceived as being nearly identical, save for financial backing and other forms of social proof. With some of the rough corners filed smooth (e.g. Windows support), a bit more marketing and promotion, and eventually more big names advertising their use of capnp, my job getting buy in from my peers would be much easier.

StreamBright 10y ago
Performance might be one reason to use Cap'n Proto over Protobuf. http://dbeck.github.io/5-lessons-learnt-from-choosing-zeromq-and-protobuf/ http://dbeck.github.io/5-lessons-learnt-from-choosing-zeromq...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
hueving 10y ago
Can you provide a 'top 3' list of reasons to use Cap'n Proto over Protobufs?
- doh 10y ago
  1) Cap'n Proto doesn't encode/decode messages thus it's nuch cheaper for processing and memory management 2) protobuf in the proto3 design doesn't cary default values. So if you have a bool field and want to explicitly send false, well you have to change it to some other type or use the default values all the time 3) protobuf generates incredibly large serialization/deserialization support coce for each template. For some languages like Python in can be in hundreds of kilobytes. Cap'n proto messages are significantly smaller There is more for CnP but Protobuf has much better support and is by default used in projects like gRPC. Also new CnP is lacking speed in new development in comparison to Protobuf. But I'm using in one of my side projects and I'm very happy with it

thejohnhenry 10y ago

Hey Kenton! Congratulations, I'm really happy for you, Jade, and the rest of the team. I am sad about the projected lower development activity in Sandstorm in the coming months. You had a tremendous community/brand built up, which is very hard to do for decentralized web technology initiatives -- several independent chat groups I'm in are lamenting the news today. If you're aware of any groups discussing further development in the decentralization space, please let me know (email's in profile, or I will check this comment every hour or so). Seriously great work so far.

kentonv 10y ago
The community (including me) is continuing to organize on the sandstorm-dev mailing list (https://groups.google.com/group/sandstorm-dev https://groups.google.com/group/sandstorm-dev) and #sandstorm on Freenode IRC. Definitely drop by and say hello! https://sandstorm.io/community https://sandstorm.io/community

msmith10101 10y ago

Congrats! Since your LAN House is in Palo Alto do you take the Caltrain up there? What do you think of the commute? I myself am between jobs now and trying to settle on a place - currently located in SF but thinking of moving to Palo Alto.

kentonv 10y ago
Yes, Jade and I are taking Caltrain. CF is right next to the SF station so it works. I have yet to find out if spending 1.5 to 2 hours on the train every day will drive me crazy. :)
- praneshp 10y ago
  I started commuting on Caltrain (Mountain View <-> SF) 3 months ago. For me it's quite easy to read a book on the onward trip and work on the return trip. The only time I'm annoyed is when I board in the morning, people never stand in a line (like BART). They just approach the coach from all directions and pile inside. But it's empty enough that I can wait till everybody gets in, and I will still get a free seat/comfortable corner.
  - nostrademons 10y ago
    I did Santa Clara -> 22nd a couple years ago when I had a cofounder who lived in the city. I found I ended up writing a significant amount of code for that startup on the train. It actually worked out pretty well; I'd put the finishing touches on features on the way in, then discuss with my cofounder, figure out what we needed to do next, maybe talk to some potential users in the city, and write the code for new features on the way back. If you've got most of the reference docs for the frameworks you're using downloaded or memorized, or are working on stuff that's mostly thinking and not looking stuff up (I'd imagine capnp fits in that category), you can get a significant amount of work done.
    - frik 10y ago
      That's a very good point. Working from train often means spotty internet connection. So it's hard to instantly look up something in Google. A good offline documentation helps. For older languages and IDEs like C and C++ and Visual Studio 2005 like 10 years there were CHM help files for everything. Nowadays almost everything is available almost only as web help, if there is even an official full documentation at all. Also like 10 years ago, books came with an CHM file on CD/download. Nowadays books are already outdated when the get published, things like App and Web development is moving very fast. So starting a new project on train is not a good idea, fixing bugs from error/warning messages isn't a good idea, but doing some maintenance/refactoring work is well suited for boring train rides.

zeusk 10y ago

Unrelated - I just read your `Owner of a LAN-party optimized house` and it seemed quite interesting, have you made any updates since to the architecture or the hardware? The last blog post was in 2011!

kentonv 10y ago
A couple months ago I updated the graphics cards to GeForce 1060s (from 560s) and doubled the RAM to 16 GB, which seems sufficient to run modern games at high graphics settings. Otherwise, no changes.

nickpsecurity 10y ago

Are you going to integrate any of the LANGSEC principles or stuff like formally-verified parsers at INRIA into Cap n Proto? Or have you already? I've been especially curious to see what a combination of your excellent scheme with verified parsing/protocol tech would be like.

sandGorgon 10y ago

are you planning to have a pure-python implementation at some point ? I understand about the performance... but there are many usecases where a pure python implementation is far more practical.

kentonv 10y ago
I don't have specific plans regarding language support -- mostly that's been up to contributors so far, with me focusing on the C++ "reference" implementation. Hopefully, though, at CF we can find more resources. (The author of pycapnp, Jason Paryani, also joined CF with us, FWIW.)