Understanding Bitcoin From a Developer's Perspective

Show notes:
Links:
Mike Mondragon
CRDT
Ship of Theseus
Exceptional Creatures
Shiba Inu

Full Transcript:
Ben:
I'm just gonna dive on in there. I'm so eager. I'm so excited. It's actually weird because Starr is the one that typically starts us off.

Josh:
Yeah. I thought we were just going to start with our just general banter, and then not introduce the guest until 30 minutes later.

Ben:
By the way.

Josh:
It is also our tradition.

Ben:
Yeah. Well we're getting better at this thing.

Josh:
Where we say, "Oh, by the way, if Starr doesn't sound like Starr..."

Ben:
Right, yes. Today Starr doesn't sound like Starr because today's star is Mike Mondragon instead. Welcome Mike.

Josh:
Hey Mike.

Mike:
Hey.

Ben:
Mike is a long time friend of the show, and friend of the founders. Actually, Mike, how long have we known each other? It's been at least 10, maybe 15 years?

Mike:
Probably 2007 Seattle RB.

Ben:
Okay.

Josh:
Yeah. I was going to say you two have known each other much longer than I've even known Ben.

Ben:
Yeah.

Josh:
So you go back.

Ben:
Way back.

Mike:
Yep.

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
Yeah.

Josh:
Because I think Ben and I met in 2009.

Ben:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Josh:
Or something.

Mike:
Okay.

Ben:
Yeah, Mike and I have been hanging out for a long time.

Mike:
Yeah.

Ben:
We've known each other through many, many different jobs, and contracts, and so on. It's been awesome.

Josh:
Yeah, Mike, I feel like I've heard your name since... Yeah, for the last, at least, 10 years just working with Ben. You've always been in the background. And we've realized this is the first time we've actually met face to face, which is crazy. But it's great to... Yeah.

Mike:
Yeah.

Josh:
... have a face to put with the little... What is it, a cat avatar? Is a cat in your avatar? You've had that avatar for a really long time I feel like.

Mike:
Yeah, that's Wallace.

Josh:
Okay.

Mike:
So I'm Mond on GitHub and Twitter, and that cat avatar is our tuxedo cat, Wallace. And he is geriatric now. Hopefully he'll live another year. And if you remember in that era of Ruby, all of the Japanese Rubyists had cat icons. And so that was... I don't know. That's why Wallace is my icon.

Josh:
Yeah. Nice.

Ben:
So, so do Wallace and Goripav know each other?

Mike:
No, no, they don't. They're like best friends, right? They had to have met at Seattle RB.

Ben:
Yeah. Internet friends.

Mike:
Internet friends, yeah.

Ben:
Yeah. So, Mike is old school Ruby, way back, way back, yeah. But the other funny thing about the old Rubyists, all those Japanese Rubyists, I remember from RubyConf Denver... Was that 2007? Somewhere around there. I remember going to that and there were mats and a bunch of friends were sitting up at the front, and they all had these miniature laptops. I've never seen laptops so small. I don't know what they were, nine inch screens or something crazy.

Mike:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ben:
I was like, "How do you even type on that thing?" But it's a thing. So I guess... I don't know. I haven't been to Japan.

Mike:
There are laptops that you could only get in Japan and they flash them with some sort of Linux probably.

Ben:
Yeah. Yeah.

Mike:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Josh:
Okay. I wonder how long it took them to compile C on there.

Mike:
Yeah. So, about the orbit with the founders. So, I think I'd put it in my notes that I... And I consider myself a sliver of a Honeybadger in that I did have a conversation with Ben about joining the company. And then in 2017, I did do a little contracting with you guys, which is ironic in that... So we're probably going to talk about cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin. So the Bitcoin protocol is, essentially, on a four-year timer. And in 2017 was the last time that we were building up to, I guess, an explosive end to that cycle. And I had just been working at Salesforce at Desk.com, And I left because of Bitcoin. And then this year, four years later, I, again, just left Salesforce, but I just left from Heroku. And I didn't leave so much because of Bitcoin, I just got a better opportunity, and I'm a principal engineer at Okta, and I'm in the developer experience working on SDKs, primarily, the Golang SDK.

Mike:
So I think one of the things that they were happy about was that I had experience carrying the pager, and knowing what that's like, and they wanted to have an experienced engineer that would have empathy for the engineers to main the SDK. So I'm really excited to be here, because I'm not going to be carrying the pager, and it is the fun programming. What I imagine, listening to the founders, about the kind of fun programming that you guys get to do, working with different languages and whatnot. So, obviously right now, I'm starting out with Golang. We don't have a Ruby SDK, because OmniAuth provider is the thing that most people use. But, there's also PHP, and some Java, so I'm just looking forward to being able to do a bunch of different languages.

Josh:
Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. We don't know anything about SDK teams, Honeybadger. But yeah, it sounds like we have very similar jobs at the moment. So that's cool. We'll have to trade tips at some point. Yeah.

Ben:
Yeah, I'm excited that you're there, because I'm definitely going to hit you up on the SAML stuff, because SAML's a pain in the tuchus yeah, I'm sure you'll have some insights from your time there.

Mike:
Well, that was how I was even open-minded to talking to Okta, was the recruiter had contacted me and I think actually it was the recruiter... I don't know the structure of how this works, but a lot of companies have a prospecting recruiter. And I think that a veteran oriented prospecting recruiter contacted me. And so being a veteran, I'll usually entertain those cold calls. And so then when I was at Desk, I wrote... So Desk was a big Rails monolith. I wrote a microservice to break some of the SSO off of the monolith itself. And in writing the API documentation that was on desk.com, I actually used Okta as one of the examples as a SSO identity provider using SAML. So yeah, I have had a little bit of experience from the outside of Okta with SAML. And so maybe I'll have more experience here to answer your questions.

Ben:
Yeah. We'll have to have you back and we can just do a whole hour on that. It's a fun world.

Josh:
After we do an hour on SDKs.

Ben:
Yeah, and your code that you wrote for us still lives on in Honeybadger.

Josh:
Yeah. Was it the webpack? That was some of the work, right?

Ben:
Some of it, yeah.

Mike:
Yep.

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
And some GitHub integration work.

Josh:
And the integrations, yeah.

Mike:
Yeah, well if I remember correctly with the GitHub integration, I did do some GitHub integration, and it tickled your enthusiasm, Ben, and then I think you went in and like refactored that a little bit.

Ben:
Well, if you have a monolith like Redo that's been around for as long as ours has, things don't... It's like, what was that Theseus' ship, it's goes around the world but you replace things as it goes, and it's never the same app, right?

Mike:
Yeah, that's...