Kickin It With Mike Perham, Author Of Faktory & Sidekiq

Show Notes:
Links:
Mike Perham
Full United Flight
Sidekiq
Faktory
Heya
Patrick McKenzie
Techstars
TinySeed
Roy/SAC
Honeybadger

Full Transcript:
Starr:
What's on your wall behind you? You've got like a autographed jersey like a hockey jersey.

Mike:
Yeah, I'm I'm a soccer fan.

Starr:
Oh, a soccer jersey. I'm sorry.

Mike:
It's the Portland Timbers. Yes.

Josh:
The timbers, yeah.

Mike:
And it's not looking good for us playing in 2020.

Josh:
Yeah.

Starr:
It's looking good for anybody?

Mike:
Some people more than others. Yeah.

Josh:
I never... I thought it'd be cool to make it to one of those games I've never been. I've never been to any sporting event in Portland, even though like...

Mike:
Well, I'm a season ticket holder. So Josh, if you ever want to come on down and we can go to a game together, I'm in.

Josh:
That would be awesome.

Starr:
Oh my gosh, this is great. I'm glad we're recording this. This is like networking. This is like stuff happening. This is like deals happening.

Josh:
This is actually like, when people are like seeing each other going to events.

Mike:
When you invite guests onto your show magic happens.

Starr:
I know, right?

Josh:
Yeah. Yeah, Ben and I have been talking about snowboarding too someday. And Mike and I have been talking about snowboarding as well. So that's another networking opportunity. Maybe for next winter.

Mike:
Yeah, in fact, I had a pass to meadows and they said that they're closed down so you can't use the pass and so people were freaking out.

Josh:
Yeah, they didn't refund any anything, did they?

Mike:
They say that you can use your punches in the first three weeks of next season.

Josh:
First three weeks.

Mike:
Yeah.

Ben:
Sounds kind of bogus. I mean, that's like the-

Mike:
So if it doesn't snow, well, your out of luck.

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
It sounds a lot like the airlines policy to get a credit rather than a refund.

Josh:
By the way the season is starting three weeks early.

Ben:
Starting the season in July.

Mike:
It starts in August.

Ben:
That reminds me of a tweet that I saw this week. I think it was and someone was they tweeted picture of themselves on an airplane and the airplane was full.

Josh:
Oh, I saw that one.

Ben:
Three by three.

Josh:
Where they're in the middle seat or something or?

Ben:
I don't remember but. But they were on a United flight. And I'm thinking what do you expect? Like it's United of course you're going to have every seat full on a United flight. They're not going to care about Coronavirus.

Starr:
Okay, so I feel like I should do like a record scratch now. And we should stop and actually say to our loyal listeners, I'm sure you're thinking, well, what's going on? There seems to be like one more person. And that's because there is. We have a special guest today, Mike Perham. And if you don't know Mike, he is very well known in the open source community for such projects as Sidekiq and Faktory. Are there any other projects?

Mike:
That's about it.

Starr:
That's about it?

Mike:
I've only got so many hours in the day Starr.

Starr:
What's the matter? I thought you hustled, I thought you knew how to hustle.

Josh:
That you're a hustler.

Mike:
I'm getting old. In my old age. I'm getting old so I'm slowing down.

Starr:
I mean, that's fair.

Mike:
Yeah.

Josh:
What is Sidekiq anyway, Mike?

Mike:
Sidekiq is the number one universal way of doing background jobs on Ruby. Except no competition.

Starr:
There you go.

Josh:
Nice.

Mike:
And Faktory is taking my background job knowledge and patterns and bringing it to every programming language. So you can use Faktory with JavaScript, with Python, PHP, Elixir, those sorts of languages.

Ben:
Yeah, naturally, we're big fans of Sidekiq here at Honeybadger, we use it quite a lot.

Josh:
Yes, Sidekiq since the beginning.

Mike:
Y'all were, yeah, one of my first pro customers along with TravisCI was also a very early pro customer. So thank you very much.

Josh:
Yeah.

Starr:
Yeah, so Mike is a... Mike knows a lot about making a living from open source. And so we're having him on to talk about that about little bootstrap life because he's a fellow bootstrapper. And, I don't know, we have palled around with Mike throughout the history of our company. And yes, we're just going to have an open discussion but vaguely generally centered around open source, bootstrappy stuff.

Josh:
And we're also just all losing our minds being stuck at home and it's nice to see another human face or three of them.

Mike:
Yeah, the listeners probably don't know, but I generally go up to Honeybadger HQ, well, in Vancouver, like once a quarter or so, I'll go out there and have lunch with you guys. So since we're about 20 miles apart, I'll generally go up there and say hi and hang out with the gang and have lunch together. But we had to cancel our last meeting because it happened right as the virus was picking up.

Josh:
Yeah, this was pre virus life.

Mike:
Right. So it's good to catch up remotely now.

Starr:
Mike I'm sure the question that all of our listeners are wanting to have answered is how do you manage to create an open source project that basically is a required piece of infrastructure for every Rails project, and then monetize that.

Mike:
Well, you start off by scratching your own itch, so to speak. And then it turns out, everybody in the Ruby world has that exact same itch.

Starr:
Okay. That's sounds easy I should do that.

Mike:
Well, I'm a big believer in eating your own dog food is the common expression. But you solve your own problem first. And if that problem and your solution deliver a lot of value, and you can productize it, then boom, all of a sudden, you've got something which could potentially have some income around it. And of course Heya is your guys's latest thing. But the opportunities there for people to solve their own problem, and if they think outside the box and want to make it more of a sustainable long term thing, they can build a business around it, and that's exactly what I did with Sidekiq when I started it.

Mike:
I said to myself, this is going to be popular if I do it well. And it's going to require a lot of my time to support people. And so I almost immediately started doing financial experiments around how can I make money off of this thing so that I can, money, I still believe money is the best way to incentivize people to do something. So if this is my full time job, then I'm going to do it and I'm going to support people.

Ben:
Can we just rewind just a little bit? Because I want to talk about that scratching your itch thing. I want you to talk about like because yours wasn't the first background job system that came out for the Ruby world, right? There was at the time there was Delayed Job and there was Resque, those I think were the popular ones at a time.

Ben:
So can you ...