Quincy Larson

Right. I think it's valuable to understand the magic behind a cloud because you can build better features for users, basically, if you understand that. You can do a lot of stuff, particularly now that people are doing LLM stuff. But you can do a lot of stuff if you get that and can be creative with it.

Right. I think it's valuable to understand the magic behind a cloud because you can build better features for users, basically, if you understand that. You can do a lot of stuff, particularly now that people are doing LLM stuff. But you can do a lot of stuff if you get that and can be creative with it.

In some ways, it means these all came from somewhere. Like there was a simpler time before clouds where we'd get a server at Rackshack and we'd SSH or Telnet into it even and put files somewhere. and run the web servers ourselves to serve them up to users. Clouds are not magic on top of that.

In some ways, it means these all came from somewhere. Like there was a simpler time before clouds where we'd get a server at Rackshack and we'd SSH or Telnet into it even and put files somewhere. and run the web servers ourselves to serve them up to users. Clouds are not magic on top of that.

They're just more complicated ways of doing those same things in a way that meets the needs of a lot of people instead of just one. One of the things I think that people miss out on, and a lot of this is actually because AWS and GCP have created such big black box abstractions. Lambda is really black boxy. You can't pick apart Lambda and see how it works from the outside. You have to sort of

They're just more complicated ways of doing those same things in a way that meets the needs of a lot of people instead of just one. One of the things I think that people miss out on, and a lot of this is actually because AWS and GCP have created such big black box abstractions. Lambda is really black boxy. You can't pick apart Lambda and see how it works from the outside. You have to sort of

just use what's there. But the reality is like Lambda is not all that complicated. It's just a modern way to launch little VMs and serve some requests from them and let them like kind of pause and resume and free up like physical compute time. The interesting thing about understanding how clouds work is it lets you build kind of features for your users you never would expect it.

just use what's there. But the reality is like Lambda is not all that complicated. It's just a modern way to launch little VMs and serve some requests from them and let them like kind of pause and resume and free up like physical compute time. The interesting thing about understanding how clouds work is it lets you build kind of features for your users you never would expect it.

And our canonical version of this for us is that like when we looked at how we wanted to isolate user code, we decided to just expose this machines concept, which is a much lower level abstraction of Lambda that you could use to build Lambda on top of. And what machines are is just these VMs.

And our canonical version of this for us is that like when we looked at how we wanted to isolate user code, we decided to just expose this machines concept, which is a much lower level abstraction of Lambda that you could use to build Lambda on top of. And what machines are is just these VMs.

that are designed to start really fast or designed to stop and then restart really fast or designed to suspend sort of like your laptop does when it closes and resume really fast when you tell them to. And what we found is that giving people those primitive is actually there's like new apps being built that couldn't be built before.

that are designed to start really fast or designed to stop and then restart really fast or designed to suspend sort of like your laptop does when it closes and resume really fast when you tell them to. And what we found is that giving people those primitive is actually there's like new apps being built that couldn't be built before.

Specifically because we went so low level and made such a minimal abstraction on top of generally like Linux kernel features. A lot of our platform is actually just exposing a nice UX around Linux kernel features, which I think is kind of interesting. But like you still need to understand what they're doing to get the most use out of them.

Specifically because we went so low level and made such a minimal abstraction on top of generally like Linux kernel features. A lot of our platform is actually just exposing a nice UX around Linux kernel features, which I think is kind of interesting. But like you still need to understand what they're doing to get the most use out of them.

birthday it's age right it's a celebration either way yeah but now it's 10 years quincy so it's that was five years ago that we interviewed you about five years of free code camp here you are on your 10th year right yeah we just uh we're hitting 10 years like this month like i think it's like uh toward the end of the month i'll have a big announcement article that'll come out so if this may come out before or after that but uh yeah it's late october

birthday it's age right it's a celebration either way yeah but now it's 10 years quincy so it's that was five years ago that we interviewed you about five years of free code camp here you are on your 10th year right yeah we just uh we're hitting 10 years like this month like i think it's like uh toward the end of the month i'll have a big announcement article that'll come out so if this may come out before or after that but uh yeah it's late october

2014 is when i sat down in my closet and i bashed out the first commits uh and put them on the internet and then started you know tweeting about them and posting stuff on hacker news and stuff yeah how much does free code camp today look like what you thought it was going to look like in october 2014 when you first started hacking on it does it look like what you expected

2014 is when i sat down in my closet and i bashed out the first commits uh and put them on the internet and then started you know tweeting about them and posting stuff on hacker news and stuff yeah how much does free code camp today look like what you thought it was going to look like in october 2014 when you first started hacking on it does it look like what you expected

Well, you have to consider that Free Code Camp is the product of thousands of contributors at this point. And I'm just like a single dev. And I had like this much more narrow kind of like, I guess, like general image of what I was hoping to achieve. And what that was, was free developer education, extremely generically. We wanted to make sure that

Well, you have to consider that Free Code Camp is the product of thousands of contributors at this point. And I'm just like a single dev. And I had like this much more narrow kind of like, I guess, like general image of what I was hoping to achieve. And what that was, was free developer education, extremely generically. We wanted to make sure that