Ryan Peterman

But I went from being one of the people on the team building experimentation tools to the only one who remembered how anything worked left.

And suddenly, I went from being sort of random IC5 to de facto TL for a bunch of stuff.

which was actually an amazing opportunity for growth.

And I think people understate how often these things can happen in tech.

But it meant that I wound up really being able to drive a bunch of the vision for the A-B testing tools for years, which were hugely successful at Meta.

And it really was some of the most fulfilling work I ever did at Meta.

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that's actually kind of mind-blowing to me is, like, you know, actually, it's one of these decisions where maybe I did make bad career decisions, which is, like, as far as I can tell, every time I've ever looked at it, the Statsig product, which I now don't know what its state is after they got put open AI, is just, like, is deltoid.

This is one of the things where, like, you know, stuff in meta, when you've been in meta, you work on these things, like, awesome, and there's data soaring.

But when people are like, what's Dataswarm?

I'm like, it is literally Airflow.

And it's not like metaphorically Airflow.

Like the guy who wrote Airflow built Dataswarm, quit, and like a week later, open sourced Airflow.

And the Deltoid is like not quite the same because it's not the same people left and built Statsig.

But my perception is that for most people who will be watching this, if they've ever seen Statsig, my perception is that like almost the entire UI is the same.

Almost all the functionality is the same.

That's one of these things where I probably should have built a stultoid startup many years earlier and I did not have the wisdom to do that.

Yeah, well, certainly I think I made it more of a part of the war.

I don't think it had to necessarily be part of it.

Although I do think also like the simple fact of the reality is like programming languages are products and products exist in an ecosystem where they're in zero-sum competition and claiming that they're not in zero-sum competition is like a very cute thing that people say is appropriate, but it's clearly false and I think just makes everyone worse by misleading them.

But like, I mean, so Julia for me, and it's actually sort of why did Julia so appealing?