devrelshow episode 5 - Dan Moore from FusionAuth - YouTube
devrelshow ăšăăœăŒă 5 - FusionAuth ăź Dan Moore - YouTube
Summary:
èŠçč:
Dan Moore has over 25 years of experience in software development, including roles like engineering manager, CTO, and now Head of Developer Relations at FusionAuth.
Measuring business value and setting metrics is important but challenging in developer relations. Approaches include tracking website visitors, signups, tutorial engagement, etc. It requires talking to the business to understand priorities.
The best thing about developer relations is the variety of tasks, but also the worst as it can feel scattered trying to focus on many different things at once.
FusionAuth is an authentication and authorization service that makes it easy for developers to add features like magic links, passwordless login, social login (Google, etc.) to their apps through simple configuration.
Developer relations roles are increasing, so there are good opportunities for those interested in the field. Companies need a mix of traditional engineers and developer relations professionals.
(00:01) [Music] hello everybody I I I think I'm going to change that song because I spend the first 15 30 seconds one minute of like every show to just continue to dance or talk about that song so you know what I guess maybe it's just how that podcast and live stream is starting so hello everybody thanks for uh joining us live or watching the recording this is episode episode number five of the Devo show a show where uh it's a mix between you know just two friends or two new friends talk talking about developer
(01:01) relation and uh talking about life talking about her career uh trying within those discussion to share some tips and tricks for people wanted to work in devl or just wanted to work in Tech and on top of that because you know we are Developer Advocates there's always like a demonstration a demo part where we're going to like our guest going to demonstrate about a specific technology and open source project programming language like whatever they want to share that could make sense for developer Advocate and or developers or
(01:33) getups people or devops people just you know what for the sake of learning new stuff having fun while learning new stuff so episode number five now and I'm really happy to have someone I quote unquote know for a while down more we do not know each other unless I'm wrong we do not know each other in person I don't think we know each other even that much online but we've been connected and like Twitter LinkedIn for a while so Dan first thanks for being here and welcome to the show so if you would like to
(02:05) introduce yourself to uh the people listening right now sure thanks Fred yeah um I do not think we've met in real life but you know that the line is so blurry right because you can interact with someone and I actually just met someone today that had we had a a pretty extensive interaction and we'd never met in person so anyway um I'm Dan Moore I'm head of fusion o uh say head of devil at Fusion off and I been doing software in one form or another for about 25 years and uh we're just really thrilled to be
(02:38) here talk about devell and and demo kind of an identity solution and um yeah thanks for having me my pleasure my pleasure so uh you just said that you've been in tech for 25 years uh which is amazing um I don't I don't know if you reach that point where like when I tell people I've been in tech for I don't know 22 years like the younger people they were always like what like yes like we are a dead hold sorry to include you that then but uh tell me a little more about like what were those 25 years like
(03:11) what did you do and and obviously you're not doing devil for 25 years so that's true what happened what what's your story yeah so I uh get started I like to say got started Tech because my parents had an insurance brokerage and they needed to send out paper letters to people who were um getting uh their insurance policies renewed and I realized that they were basically asking me to help him and there was a lot of copy and paste going on back then and I realized you could do mail merge and minimize the pain and you got a whole
(03:47) much more benefits by um putting all those clients into a database and so I started to do that and that was in I want to say in high school and it just showed me how much technology can actually help alleviate the burdens of people um even back then right because it was really te to send out hundreds of letters a year to uh and make and create them manually um worked at web consulting company I've contracted for a while I I've done a couple of startups um I've been an engineering manager a couple of
(04:18) times uh one of the startups I was a CTO at I've taught AWS um I moved into develop relations in 2019 after I realized that being engineed enging manager was not where I wanted to go and I wanted to see where I could grow um without being an engineer but being engineer adjacent yeah I I mean that that's uh that's a pet peeve of mine uh there was something in Tech when you're a developer and engineer where it seems like the only next step is like becoming a manager and it is not true and it should not be true meaning
(04:54) like like it's fine if it is what you want to do and it's perfect if you want to try it and you try it and it's good for your is not good for you but you know it you tried it but like you should have like as a company you should have like a a step ladder when like people can go from you know like Junior to senior to principal to like like any other type of leadership role that may not include managing people because you know what not everybody likes or is good at managing people yeah I almost I'd add
(05:24) two points that the first is I understand and have been part of smaller companies like 10 or 20 person companies where it's really hard to have that senior IC role um but I just I do think it behooves everyone to at least consider that as an option when you're building a company the second is um and I've done two stins as an engineering manager I like to say that it's like uh it's the same as engineering the same way that football American football is the same as football like soccer because
(05:55) you know they they vaguely are similar right they both have a field they both have teams they both have points but like the skill you're you're a novice again when you move from being an IC to an engineering manager and you'll appreciate a lot of things um that your manager previous managers did but is don't think that your your skills translate um you know no matter how technical or how apt you are that's the best metaphor analogy that like I've heard about it it is exactly that like
(06:25) obviously there's like part of your job that you bring to that new Ro but like it's so different like the I I I think the biggest part is that you're going to work with engineers and you used to be one so I think it's the closest relation that you have between those Ro but uh yeah anyway and I understand also as you said like I understand like in some companies it's harder to like have all that lad or like or the next step that is not managing people especially in startup when you're smaller and you have
(06:53) like your first Engineers they are doing a great job you want to hire more people but like the CTO may not be able to like manage the people people and like really concentrated on the technology and what's next and like the architecture and stuff like that so you need people to manage and you're going to trust like you need someone that may be able to do a little bit of management but also still code a lot so it's kind of like a hybrid role so I understand that but still a bad PE of mind it doesn't mean
(07:18) that like it's the next step it should have like developers Engineers should have a next step that does not involve managing people so with that said um you said you're already the head of the relation at Fus and H I'm wondering what does that mean now like being ah head of that department so are you managing people or what what kind of like head of developer relation are you right now yeah yeah it's a great question I think all your listeners all your viewers should should have this in mind because
(07:49) um the title is super um yeah thank you thank you C first um the title is very variable right just like being a CTO and a startup I mentioned being a CTO in a startup and I've had friends and colleagues who have been CTO of 500 person or thousand person companies obviously CTO of a two person startup is different than CTO of a thousanders company your your skills and your your view and your tasks are different same is true with head a deel right when I started um I uh was the only person doing it um obviously the founders were
(08:24) doing some work too right like around devil specific tasks like documentation excuse me and speaking and things like that uh as we've grown I have uh We've hired a couple of people we've engaged with some contractors to provide content and um example applications and things like that so I still try to keep my hands in the code the example apps um the documentation as much as I can and talking to users and in the community so interacting with people on slack or the Forum or other places but a lot of what
(08:59) I do now is project management right like deciding what the priorities should be um helping the other folks on the team when they run into blockers or when they you know are confronted with multiple pieces of of high priority things you know how do you prioritize which um and trying to push the the Strategic goals of the business forward right um and that's something that I think um everybody at a company should be thinking about but especially if you're kind of running an Department you want to make sure you
(09:30) connect your activities with the big bigger goals of the company yeah yeah that that's awesome I used to now I'm I'm back in a high SE role um I don't have a team but like the last the last job prior to where I am right now was also head of developer relation and it was a little more similar to like I had one person on my team so I was not managing a big team she was a technical writer um she was not even a developer Advocate but like she was part of developer relation but yeah my job was like leading developer relation like
(10:01) taking taking the decision defining what we're going to do next the priority and like mostly like everything that you've uh you've just said so um that's an interesting role and you know what uh I forgot to ask you before I'm curious about that what brought you from a more developer Centric role or like management of engineering CTO like all those like more technical maybe a little less social role to like a role in developer relations so what what brought you to that kind of roow yeah sure so I
(10:34) like I mentioned I done a couple of Stines in engineering manager and had realized that that wasn't a good fit for me um I had carried a pager as a developer and you know if you have to carry a pager you got to do it but I decided I didn't want to actually carry a pager or I want to see whether I had a job or whether I could find a job where I didn't have to do so I understand that yeah right um anybody who's cre pag probably does um and so I had done some Technical Training uh in while I was doing that
(11:05) doing that startup where as the CTO and i' really enjoyed the Technical Training aspect and I'd been blogging I've been blogging since 2003 uh not I think I've I've done a decent job of keeping it consistent but I really enjoyed the writing part too so when I was talking to a startup that um had a need you know I just said hey I'll you know take a take a chance on this it's like a move that is again engineering adjacent but not pure engineering and it leverages some of these other things that I think
(11:36) I like right like I like the training I like the writing so let me give this career choice a try and that was like I said in 2019 so I think Devo was if not um super well established definitely like there'd been five or 10 five or eight years I guess depending on how you kind of count it of people building that practice there still weren't a ton of people doing it but but um it was not like I was a Pioneer I was able to follow in a lot of people's footsteps yeah yeah yeah like developer relation is a thing for a while now but
(12:13) it was mostly a small number of like really really big company like like apple which yeah they used to have I think they still have but it's more like Enterprise Focus so you don't really see developer Advocate but they are still the one who like kind of like creating created the role but he when I started I I started in uh 2011 and it was at a company like Microsoft because you know Microsoft was like a big company and they were starting those like actually they had those uh team in like bigger countries
(12:45) of like specific countries Focus developer relation but like the teams were pretty young and I was still like it was kind of like still a new role so there was at the beginning when like no startups wanted developer relation or even known what it was and and even when I started my title was uh it was more popular before developer Advocate like the title that was more popular was like technical evangelist so nobody known really like nobody was knowing what I was doing and I had to explain people like hey are you going to church and I I
(13:19) think it's part of the reason why like the title mov from like evangelist to Advocate like for two thing one just to be respectful for for religious people uh because the the I think the definition behind it because of like you know techn technology is a religion sometime you know talk about talk to people about their their their preferred programming language or like even even like consumer about their phone like ask a iPhone user to switch to Andro the other way around that's not going to work so there is that kind of like
(13:48) religion where it's not always based on fact but um the second thing is is really just uh you know evangelizing seems like you were just like pushing things to people instead of like really having a discussion and like bring that feedback to the to the people but yeah uh even even like when you started like it was still like a new practice uh now it's now it's crazy like I have a startup where like they fourth or fifth Tire they're looking for a developer Advocate like they have like basically a
(14:18) CEO CTO maybe a CEO one or two Engineers maybe a sales and they're like yeah we want dero I'm like okay that's crazy because before that it was not a thing yeah so many things to tease out there one is um I think that calling it developer Advocate was a good transition because that's really what you want to be right you wanna um I think Taylor Barnett told me once or I saw in a presentation she gave that you want to be an advocate for the developers uh outside your company in the company and you want to be an
(14:50) advocate for the company to the outside Community developers which I think is a great formulation of it um the other thing is um you know around kind of the scope right you talked about Microsoft and having kind of a super focused piece and I think that there's still big companies out there where you can be a de a developer relations professional who just does video or just does python um there's a lot of startups to your point where if you're building a developer tool I think you realize that you need some kind of technical
(15:18) marketing right and that can be a technical marketer a product marketer or it could be a developer relations professional and there's at an ear stage startup there's definitely kind of overlap between those two roles because at the end of the day in early stage companies you're just trying to get noticed right and so there are definitely ways to get noticed that are more developer friendly and there are ways to get noticed that are less developer friendly but um your your role is really to get noticed and I think
(15:45) that's where a lot of startups oh actually I will say I think that it was super white hot for devell folks in like 2020 to 2022 and then I've noticed I've actually talked to a couple of startups and they're saying well actually we thought we were going to do devil but now we're kind of dialing back and and aiming more towards a technical marketer or something like that which I think is an interesting perspective because sometimes startups like all of us just want that magic fairy dust right
(16:13) to like solve all of our problems right like we just want to code and you know make S you know have someone else do all the sales and marketing all that stuff that is important to building a company and I think Deo had that kind of AA for a little while and it's not now which I think is great because Deo still has a place and I think it's hugely important for a you know proper Dev tool but there's it's not it's not magic fairy dust I I love I love that you said that because um as I said I've been doing
(16:46) devil for a while and I've been in big medium like really big medium uh small startup and Company and Fortune 500 and like the I would say the big biggest problem I had was mostly with startup because you know it's the startup it's the ecosystem you need to have result right now and I've always said that like developer relation is a medium to long-term type of impact job so because it's about people because it's about building relationship because it's about building trust because it's about
(17:18) helping people being successful hopefully with your product but at the end of the day you're there to help people and people internally and externally but all those things because it's a people Centric role because it's let me say it's a no role you're not going to be successful if your your way through discussing with people to like trying to quote unquote sell things to people so because this is that like transparent honest people base role it takes time because it's about all that and
(17:52) sometimes it doesn't work and start up so I I agree with what you said with like it's nice that people start to understand that like it's not that very dust like one trick pony to like Hey we're successful because we have one person like it takes time so it's great that there's a good mix right now where there's a lot of startup that say like hey maybe it's not the right time now which is good because there's nothing worse been there than that more than once it's really not good when you're in
(18:20) a place where like in terms of like developer relation you're successful but in terms of like the startup metrics and what they want to achieve now you're not and it's really hard to be successful so it's good like not being that spot but at the same time there are still startup that are like yeah we're still going to do that affort to build something because we're not just thinking about right now we're thinking about medium to long term so I think I think that's the sweet spot right now to be in devel
(18:47) people understand a little more the role um so yeah yeah know I I love that I mean I think that um I can tell that you're not top talking hypotheticals and that's been a you know it's it's tough right like uh and and I have sympathy for the startups too right because they are looking for a solution when you're at the end of your Runway or approaching it you know you want to think about how can we bring Revenue in the door and so if anyone's thinking about joining a startup uh with deah like make sure you
(19:20) understand the runway make sure you understand you know I was really lucky with with Fuso the the founder really understood the value of devell um and do great documentation and we had the luxury of time and um so I think that worked out really well I could see if I was dropped into the exact same situation um but the founder didn't have buying with devil and you know the runway was shorter then that would have been a different experience for me and so it's not enough just to have someone who's enthusiastic about devil you need
(19:56) to make sure you again back to kind what we were talking about when we were running the team you make sure that like the Devo activities are like directly tied to the value the business is going to create and to your point it doesn't have to be it shouldn't be the next quarter or the next month or the next week it should be where do we want to be in six months or 12 months because I'll be honest with you developers see startups come and go right like and you and I are both have been devs like we
(20:22) understand how easy is to be cynical about someone who comes in and is like rah rah rah like here's the right thing um we're going to you know kill take over the world and then you know in a year three years whatever they're they're they're gone and so that's where the honesty piece I think comes in right and I've actually told people hey Fusion offs is not the right fit for you at this point in your application process and come back when it is right maybe leave them some educational stuff or
(20:49) other things like that and having that credibility is going to matter more in the long run but in the short run that's that's a hard pill to swallow for for kind of a Founder who's looking at the runway yeah credibility is so important in that role uh because like not just for your your job right now like it follows you through your career especially if you continue to do develop a relation so credibility is important and I feel like as you said it's your job to tell people when it's not a good
(21:19) fit and it may seem like it's a bad thing for the company but I feel like I strongly think that it's a positive thing because yes at the beginning obviously you want customer you want customer uh you want users at some point you want customers people's going to pay for it but like if you bring people at the wrong time especially developers we usually give one chance and it's done so if I try your product right now it's not answering my needs or it's buggy or it's not working it's done like if if I see
(21:51) you in six month it's finished it's like I tried you didn't work sure or if i' or if I've lied to you right like if I say Fred this was will solve your problem and and I and it's very very clearly apparent that my product doesn't actually solve your problem I just wanted you to try my product because I was trying to hit a metric or something yeah that trust is broken and and I will be you know totally honest I think that's true of good sales people too right like good salesp people will say
(22:15) the same thing they'll be like you know obviously they want to get to yes they want to get the sale but like a good technical salesperson will say actually yeah you should talk to somebody else yeah no I I totally agree uh you touched base about um something about like you know bringing values to the business and this is some kind of like a Hot Topic when it comes to devell uh meaning that like some people think like it's it's it's not possible or it's really difficult to measure the business value of developer
(22:46) relation or like how do you measure your return on investment or how do you define your metrics I know it's a topic that like you you are passionate about you wanted to share a little more so I'm all here I want to learn a little more about you like how do you think Deval should be measured how should we measure devil how can you how how do you do that yeah I mean I think that's that's the answer to that question is like how long is the string right like you need to first of all talk to the business right
(23:14) and like determine um there's a great book by uh Carolyn lcco and somebody else uh where she talks about the developer like life cycle um of evaluating a product being aware of it evaluating it um implementing it and then like operating it I think there's another one in there but um you need to talk to your business about where they need that right like what do you need um what does the business need right so for me when I joined Fusion o it was awareness that was like the most important thing and so we actually track
(23:46) uh the number of website visitors and not just like the overall website visitors but the visitors for the portions of the site that we imp we Implement right like we help with like the docs um quick starts um blog posts things like that and it's not perfect but if that number goes up we can actually see you know some kind of impact right now tying it back to specific Dev activities is hard you have a lot of anecdotal evidence um you know we've definitely had people on sales calls be like oh yeah I saw Dan's post
(24:20) on Hacker News or I ran Jan conference um but I will say I have talked to other people or heard of other people who like track things down to like the the length of time that someone watches the video and I don't I've never been in that kind of organization so I don't know the benefits of that I think that just like I mean the way I would say it is like just like marketing like there's marketing goals that are kind of fluffy and then there's kind of like end of day goals um an easy one that's an end of
(24:55) day goal for Devall team would be like number if you're social ass application is like how many people have signed up right like and that is again that's an aggregate effort right that's not just the Deval team but it's something that you can like point to and be like hey you know this is something where we can move the dial right because if we create tutorials if we create example applications if we are out in public speaking um and you can even try to like tie it to particular events right if you
(25:21) just Mark in your Analytics tool this is when I spoke um but to SU what's that to no I was I was just going to say to to add to your point about um it's it's like I always say that developer relation is a shared afford meaning that like yes I'm the one responsible or my team or like like the people in the department or whatever you call that uh like yes we are the the the owner we are the responsible of like all the developer relation activities or or what you do like I don't know video speaking
(25:54) at conferences running the docks doing tutorial those kind of things day-to-day stuff but in the end it's really a business AFF for meaning that like every time someone talk to a potential user customers they're doing developer relation uh every time that you know you share a link to the documentation you're you're a salesperson you're in a sales call and hey you know what there is that documentation that is helpful and you share that link to a potential customer an actual customer or even better you
(26:23) bring me feedback about the Ducks because when you were talking to that customer it was like Hey I was not a I did not understood that part and you bring that feedback to me so I can improve the documentation it's developer relation so I firmly believe that I I I say a lot of like strong opinion in that show but like I firmly believe that like it's impossible for a developer Advocate to be successful without like a company slash team and for um like if you're the only one doing that is not going to work
(26:53) like it's it's really a company AFF for yeah I mean imagine a salesperson or marketing person where they were responsible for everything right like from the initial sale to the to the implementation of the product like you can do it right there are Solo Founders out there who do that but it is not not an easy Road it is a long road and it's it's hard and um you know even when I was the only developer relations professional on the fusion team like I said the founders helped out we had contractors who helped write content and
(27:25) there are ways to be a solo Devo without being the only person helping push things forward yeah speaking of of Sol derel um so that's another topic that um you wanted to talk about and for people watching the show uh we didn't we didn't we do not rehearse the show it's really like just a a flow like a normal discussion but uh when I have like a really intense form that people need to sign up to be in the show because I asked them a lot of question and there is one just like hey is there also like
(27:59) some talking point that you would like to bring in the discussion if that makes sense if it's natural out of it and uh solo Dell was one of it so uh this one I didn't ask you before but like I'm not sure do do you wanted to talk about like being the only developer relation person in a company or like being some kind of like freelance around developer relation because both are interesting to me sure yeah I can't say I mean I have experienced being a freelance contract software developer but I don't have
(28:30) experienced being a freelance devl person um I'm sure you and I can think of people that we would want to bring around and do that kind of thing to have that conversation but for me I think being a solo Devo even if you have like contractors to help or Founders to help um you know you have a kind of a particular set of uh challenges that I think it's worthwhile to go find a community right there are deels like to congregate so there are a number of different communities um out there and I think finding one
(29:01) where you can bounce ideas off where someone says hey can you do this and you can say to the community like if someone in company says hey can you do activity X you can go to the the community and say hey um especially if you're new in your career your Devo career like I was you could say does this make sense right or how would you actually um think about you know approaching this task so that'd be my first thing for the solo Deo and then the second thing would be just um taking advantage if you have if your
(29:31) company has money they may not have money to hire second Deo but they probably have some money to like do some technical documentation or some technical like blog posts or things like that and that can help you create more Buzz or output or content um without you having to work um you know yeah twice as heart yeah because that job I don't I love doing developer relation uh being developer Advocate but it's like I don't know 20 jobs in one so when you're the only one at a company especially like in
(30:07) the startup when you're the the first person to do that and obviously like the team before started to do something like you started to work on the docs a little bit they may have done a video or two but like you still have like to Define what is developer relation at a company you still need to like put the basis and the foundation that like what is the min um needed things just to be a successful company when it comes to devil sometime like you have yeah like there's a lot on your plate so I come back to a little
(30:37) bit of what you said about like you know like trying to get like outside resources but also trying to find internal resources and I know everybody has a lot on their plate but I always approach this with what's in for them so what like what could be the benefit for them to helping me um because you know it's life is business like even if they're nice people people uh at some point like it needs to bring value to them so I go back to the salesperson example that I was talking before where like you know the benefit of like
(31:08) bringing the feedback to me about like the documentation some stuff missing in the documentation some stuff that are not clear or even telling me like a question you often have that will give me the opportunity to maybe create a tutorials about that question your offer gap or to update the documentation which mean that like instead of spending like 30 minutes on the phone or like not on the phone anymore but like on the zoom call to like help your customer you can have like that one link to rule them all when you send that tutorial and it save
(31:38) you some time so yes that's going to give you a little more time to give me feedback and bring bring that stuff to me but at the end that's going to help me and wow that's going to help you too so trying to find that approach about like what's in for them yeah it's it's what I try so it's a it's a little bit uh sneaky but you know it's it's working well well so far so good I love that idea right because um one of the things I've observed about deell is they tend to kind of float between different
(32:05) departments right like they're talking to product they're talking to sales they're talking to marketing they're talking to uh customer service and having that kind of mindset of how can I help you help me help you is means that everybody wins and by the way the salesperson doesn't just save time the customer probably gets a better answer right because they will actually have like a full-fledged tutorial rather than salesperson or the technical salesperson trying to solve the problem kind of on
(32:31) the Fly um and you know technical salesp people are various levels of expertise around the product whereas the documentation is going to be kind of you know topnotch and and one and done yeah awesome um one maybe one last question um that I wanted to discuss with you before we move to the demo because I'm excited about demo also uh you know um like what's from your point of view you've been doing that for for a while now um what's like the the best thing about developer relation from your point of view in terms of like not the
(33:07) activity itself but like for you has a job and because I'm that kind of person like what's the not so good thing about their from your point of view again has an employee has someone doing that job yeah yeah I mean um I think that the the best thing about devil is the sheer variety of tasks that you have right uh and I think I've been a software engineer and you can have a variety of tasks as a software engineer too but you tend to be kind of focused whereas Devo I can and have in one day talk to a
(33:38) customer right piece documentation debug an an app and you know add a GitHub action and I like that I will say the flip side of that and my answer to what's the worst part of that is is is that same thing right like you can feel like you're pushing in a hundred different directions at one time and so it can be hard to be like okay I'm gonna block out this time um and I'm gonna really push this example out forward or this blog post forward um so yeah that that's my answer and I mean I think of
(34:11) any of your listeners or viewers are considering devell you know there's no rule that you have to jump into a full-time job like you can start to do some of these activities right out the gate and and then look back over your career and say like did I like variety or did I like really diving deep and I think you can be aende with both those options it's just a different size of organization that you're probably going to be in if you really like to dive deep one particular thing versus um spread out yeah and and and it's a little bit
(34:42) like that that I started ell where um I was starting on my on my own personal time I was starting to write blog po I started to speak at conferences I started to organize meet up but I was doing that really just for fun because like I like to share with people I like to help people always been like that um and I was like that's awesome because I need to talk to more people than like the other like small developers team that I had at the time that I work with like I'm a people person I'm an extrovert I'm a social person so there
(35:12) was like all those things were like perfect for me but uh something that I tried which didn't work but like working in most cases like trying to bring that also at the company saying like hey you know what like maybe I could like code maybe one hour less per week but like spend that time to write a tutorial about you know the latest feature that I implemented so I I know the best I created that feature and write a blog post about that and it didn't work in my case because um we're doing like technical tutorial around our technology
(35:42) and they were like complicated so we take a little more time to write those and we're a small team and it was like when I tried that it was like I don't know 16 17 years ago where um like deah was not a thing blogging was a thing is but not really like company we're not blogging that much so my bus was like yeah we're just losing time it's too much time to have like a good quality blog article technical blog tutorial so it didn't work but like trust me right now it doesn't mean it's going to work
(36:12) for your company but like that's also a good Avenue to just like try to you know put your feet like one foot in the water and see like if you like that and still bring value to the business so it may not be possible in a small team or small company but that's a way to get started with without doing that on your free time and it may work and you know other tips is like just you know you know technology you have a specific expertise propos to do something that won't even take your like uh your workload from
(36:41) like other stuff to doing that it's just like proposing to do like a how do you call that like a a lunch brown bag or a learning lunch where you're just like hey you know what like I would like to share about that specific learning piece or expertise that I have with the rest of the team I'm going to do this during lunchtime you're going to prepare this string your own time but you still going to have an audience that hopefully is going to be friendly and receptive and it's a good way to maybe start to like
(37:05) share about your know ledge but also uh start to do like public speaking if you want to yeah I'll I'll just put one one quick plug I help run the boulder Ruby Meetup in in car USA and we are almost always looking for speakers and you can zoom in and you can do like a f minute talk or you can do a 35 minute talk and I know that other meetups are in that same boat right like they're always looking for interesting content and you know that doesn't mean you can come to the bould meet up and like say I I'm
(37:34) gonna demo a net application but if you say I'm GNA talk about engine management or I'm talk about machine learning and there's like a a slight Ruby component or a ruby component we will be interested so that's another great way to like very low effort um you know take that brown bag lunch presentation and do it for a Meetup yeah no that super great advice and as you said every Meetup are in that same situation because most of them run like once a month and like you need new speaker you need new content in(38:05) you new faces and like many people that want to start speaking they want to go to the conference first it's way harder to get accepted at conferences it's a lot easier at meop and to be honest sometime the quality is even nicer at the me Toops because like those are friendly people you get those faces that like go every month and like you're usually between friends and it's just nice so and and again uh you have the possibility to like speak uh between like a smaller amount of time to a longer amount of time usually those are
(38:35) free too so you don't have the pressure like hey people pay like 500 bucks to go to the conf so like if you screw it up it's you know a a little less bad so yeah this is this is a good way to start and uh thanks from proposing so people that um have Ruby expertise uh please look it up so uh on those beautiful words that we just shared uh I would like to know more about your company because to be honest uh you're doing some awareness right now I don't know Fusion V that much so I want to learn
(39:08) more about what it is and see some uh Cool Tech stuff yeah so I'll give you the 30 second overview basically Fuso is an architectural component a server that you snap into your application that helps you provide authentication authorization um a lot of people know off zero or Cognito if you're the abos world similar to that we have some differences but this is not a pitch so I'm not going to not going to pitch you on that um I'm going to go ahead and share my screen you know what on that show it's it's like you pitch as much as
(39:40) you want because you know I've been I've been there a long time and nobody wants you to pitch your product but at the end of the day like this is what you need to do a little bit to be successful you need to create awareness talk to people and as long as it's a product that is useful for people I'm super happy about that okay so on that note I stop talking and I give you the stem okay great um so you can see my screen yep great so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna basically I've started out with one of these quick
(40:12) starts we have about 20 of these in different languages that show how to snap Fusion o into your Jango spring larabel Etc application and I'm going to augment that uh and I'm going to as Fred mentioned in the uh announcement excuse me I'm going to add magic links support to it so the first thing we're going to do I've checked out this this GitHub repo because they're all out on GitHub and I'm going to spin up Fusion o using Docker and something we call Quick Start and so this is going to run for a fair
(40:49) while and this is uh Kickstart is a basically a way to configure Fusion off to a certain known State like you can set up users you can set up applications you can set up all kinds of other interesting pieces and that's what's happening right here right basically we're just calling in a bunch of these apis and setting things up the way we want to have them set up um also as I mentioned like you're never going to use Fuso by itself you're always going to use it as part of an existing application so I happen to have
(41:22) uh this quick start includes the complete rails application so I'm going to just run this which basically just starts up rails and then I'm going to kind of switch over to here and go Local Host that's a great thing that you you provide an application because one one of the thing that and it's a real strong personal opinion that I think some company fails is that when you have a product and there is no easy way for me to test it and when I say easy I say easy and quick because I'm a developer I can create
(41:57) stuff I can build stuff but right now what I need to do is test your product to see like if it fits my needs so doesn't need to be something complicated can be like a kind of like hello world but like give me a way to test your product quickly and you're doing that so that's fantastic yeah thank you for the feedback um yeah so these example apps like I said we've got a number of them for different languages they all play off of the change Bank thing which is a I should have sent you the video it's a
(42:23) Saturday Night Live video where it's a bank that just makes change they don't do anything else so um we can log in here and so here I can I have a account balance I can make change you know what's the change for7 cents you can do 17 nickels and two pennies so that is kind of the base application so what we're going to do next is we're going to um add magic links so magic links what they do is Local Host so I stood up uh it's it's a it's a Dev focused like SMTP server which just
(43:09) has this HTTP interface so you can send email to this and it'll just pop up here so it's perfect for loal what's that it's super useful yeah mail catcher is what it's called um I don't know but maybe I need to make that a little biger so um so we're going to configure that in Fusion off but I'm going to switch back to here so Fusion o has an admin interface that we're going to see here and um the reason why I logged in with a separate browser is because it actually like it's it it's the admin
(43:45) interface is itself an application inside Fusion o um we have you know two examples two applications here this example app which is the rails app and then the fusion of in UI but you can have we actually have people who have like 10,000 applications because you can kind of manage all your applications in one place which is where an identity provider like Fusion o like some of the other ones that I mentioned earlier can help you right you have one central place to to normalize your user data and your access data so like I said we're
(44:18) going to add magic links which a magic Link in case your users or sorry your users your viewers don't know is a way to Lo in but you're not using a username and password or another set of credentials you're logging in because you've got a link or a code sent to your email address or your uh texted to you so we're going to enable that for our application the change Bank application so the first thing we need to do is set up an email so wordless login and we're just going to uh log do change bank with just a
(45:02) click and we have an HTML template and a text template um you can localize these we're not going to do that today but you know there's support for a bunch of different languages and obviously if you're in the market in Canada for instance you might want to do an English and a in a French translation and then whatever the user has actually set up for their profile you can send in the right uh email a so I'm going to just uh over here so PB copy is a really amazing tool that lets you copy stuff from the to the
(45:45) clipboard so this is just out of the docs um I'm not doing anything special here um and you'll obviously want to customize this if you were to use this and I've I've seen some templating so I assume in the docs you have the information about like what you can use in the template yeah which variable this happens to be free marker which is kind of an old school templating system but similar to mustache or okay you know something like that where it's like you got variables you can do some logic
(46:17) right like this is doing like a a four basically a a four each loop on um on a variable okay wonderful yep no worries so we've created this now now we need to set up the um excuse me now we need to set up the actual email system so future has this concept of tenants where tenants are basically separate spaces of users and applications so it's really great for a SAS application you can have you know again we have people running thousands of tenants and each tenant is totally separate so you can have the same user
(46:54) with the same email address in different tenants uh it really works well if you going to private label something but we're just going to stick with one here and we're going to go ahead and do mail catcher and it's port and let's just send the test email make sure that it's set up correctly so here we are we got the test so that's good um and then we're going to down here we need to configure the passwordless login we call it passwordless it's really magic link we click save and then the only other thing
(47:34) you need to do to turn on Magic link applications is you edit it at the application Level and it's under the security Tab and again all this can be driven by an API call or a client library that is in PHP or Java or Ruby or python or jav JavaScript um but I'm just going to manually do it now um I click password is login I click save and now everything everything is done in the interface well I'm doing everything in the interface if I was going to do this some production I'd probably use terraform or one of those client
(48:13) libraries yes okay cool yes cool cool so you have a terraform provider we do it's community supported right now but we do have one y awesome I love that big fan of uh or like infrastructure SC a little less of ter form with the recent news but uh yeah do you like palumi then or what's your other option actually no it's it's I said a wrong meaning like I'm a little less a fan of like ashy Corp I still really love terraform and actually terraform is the technology we use at Cube first uh within platform so I love
(48:47) terraform I love infrastructure C I know a little less po me uh I used it like years ago but um like terraform kind of like became the de facto technology for people doing like I uh so still love the technology but uh yeah I'm I was not super excited but the news and the license change that's a whole separate discussion about like open source business models and things like that it's it's I have I have understanding and empathy for both sides right like but we should probably say that for exactly exactly yeah sorry about that no
(49:23) don't worry about it it's it's a it's a tough problem so um so yeah so we've enabled this and now we have a login with magic link button here sorry it's a little small I was messing around with the CSS but if I go here I can type in this and I click Send and it sends it it's GNA say that same message whether that user exists or not but we can see over here we actually got this right which is our the the template that we had sent um you can also see the plain text version but if we click on
(49:58) this we are now logged in right we have Richard example.com we can make change is you know one of the fundamental value propositions of a solution like Fusion o is that you get the ability to like add on all these different authentication options with just configuration as opposed to writing in code um yeah so I could stop here I did have a stretch goal of showing login with Google if we want to do that um but I'll I'll let you decide since you're the host yeah actually uh let's do that because I I really love you know I'm a
(50:37) big fan of um any technology that help developer and please bear with me but like focus on what they do best or the think that is a little more exciting and I'm sure the people on the engineering team at Fusion Hut they love what they're doing but to me like doing the logging stuff as a developer is not the thing that get me the most excited so like if I can use a product that's going to help me to do that with either a couple of clicks or like some like uh Terra tf5 some terraform files or even
(51:11) using the like something that makes me do that part really quickly so I can focus on like the rest of the business logic wow like I'm a fan so yeah I I would like to if you want to if you have time would love to see how can do that because uh as we've seen it's pretty fast so I assume that's going to be another like quick demo and voila we're going to have like Google support like yeah yeah I'll I'll do that real quick so here we would just do we go to Identity providers and you know there's
(51:42) a number that Fusion off supports um some of these you have to pay for um but Google is Google is free so let me just uh I got these and I did probably less practice on this so that's fine we're whole friends here um I'll rotate that client secret um and then Google has these magic incantations about Scopes which are right here so we will paste that in and I'm not going to customize the button or anything um I'm going to enable the Google identity provider for this this application I hit save and it should be configured so I'm
(52:32) just gonna click login log in with Google oh so and oh I forgot to log out um here let me go to I created a test LED so yeah so that's one of the benefits but if we go sign out so if I go I'm going to log out here and let's just log in again choose D more test n i you know that's a good way to not display password when you do demo I like that I should I use PB uh PB copy for everything but uh that's a good thing that's so here we are so we're logged in um and if we go back and look at that
(53:29) that's crazy because when you proposed to to demoe that part I was like hey that's fine there's going to be another 10 minutes and I'm like yeah 30 second actually took one minute because you had to log out twice like from Google your appication I was like that was fast awesome I love that I mean to be fair just you know so your you your viewers aren't kind of um deceived I had previously set done all aot set up in the Google side right like you need to set up an application and the correct
(53:54) that's complicated part but doation about it but you do because of you it's not your product it's like Google like when know when you need to use Google as a third party service you need to like like you know uh enable the API and like put the quote and all those things I don't know if it's the same foro SSO uh connection but using it IDC provider but um every time I need to do something uh the Google API console is my enemy or it's it's so tough yeah I mean again respect to them because they make a lot
(54:28) of stuff available in place but yeah it is it is complicated and it is confusing so yeah so that is um and again I just want to emphasize to your viewers like I just demoed Fusion off and I think Fusion is a great solution there are other identity providers out there that will give you the exact same benefit or similar benefits in terms of isolating your user uh data and the way kind of the the high level pitch for the entire class of Solutions is um you would not unless you were in a really specialized case you would not have all
(55:02) of your data in a in your application cooll with your application you'd move it out to a relational database we think the same thing is true of your user data if you have significant benefits in terms of user experience security and user data Integrity if you move user data out to an identity provider like Fusion off so cool um am I good to stop doing the demo that's awesome great yeah that's awesome and uh Andy uh Andy cron uh said cool concealment of your password there thank youed and I'm going to do
(55:39) something that I don't usually do live but I checked quickly Andy shared uh uh his own project about uh setting password in uh Windows Unix Linux environment variable um and keep them the password it uh so it's on get up it seems legit so use at your own risk because I didn't try it I usually wouldn't share something like that but it seems interesting and uh yeah so that's awesome so uh thanks a lot for your time Dan uh that was a really nice discussion it's nice to uh talk with someone who has experience in Tech
(56:19) experience in devell to share your point of view that was a really great discussion great demo uh f folks if you want to get in touch with Dan uh you can do this on Twitter you can do this I assume on LinkedIn because he told me I could share his LinkedIn URL uh I guess you're the same kind person of me where I'm like hey if you work in tech let's connect uh I mean like I'm that kind of person so connect with me on LinkedIn if you work in Tech I'm more than happy my only piece ofice would be about that is is send a note if
(56:53) you click to someone LinkedIn say hey I saw you on fr show or it whatever um because that's going to help me understand where I the context in which I know you but yeah love to connect with people exactly and there's a third place where you can connect it's the blue um blue uh how do you call that the blue house sky blue sky yeah I I forget about that like I create an account like everybody do do you use it you know I I have done a little bit of that it's it makes me appreciate Twitter's algorithm
(57:23) more because all it is is reverse mostly it's reverse chronological and it's just hard but um I use it some yeah that's interesting I mean um I tried it at the beginning but like it was really hard for me to kind of like start over again like all the effort that I put in Twitter as much as like I don't use Twitter that much as I used to like I was using Twitter like a maniac like personally professionally now I mostly use it professionally so I'm I'm there a lot less uh but I try uh Blue Sky when
(57:54) it started because That was supposed to be like the Savior like the the new Twitter with the everything that helmo was still doing to Twitter or should I call x uh but um you know it's like any other social media I created an account and I have an account there I have probably four tweets or whatever they're call is uh there and uh that's kind that's kind of done um so hey Andy again I say oh I should have shared thanks Fred but also thank you Dan yeah thank you Andy uh so again thanks for the show
(58:29) uh go check Fusion H uh if you have any question about what Dan share or how to use a product don't talk to me I don't know what to product talk to Dan it's gonna be more than happy to help you this job uh with that said uh thanks again for being on the show great discussion great demo and uh hopefully uh we're gonna have the chance to meet each other in person at some point at one conference like I travel a lot less uh where I am am right now so I do a lot less conferences I have less opportunities to meet people sure person
(59:01) but hopefully in the near future that's going to be something possible and uh before I let people go uh two things uh thanks again to your sponsor CU first which happen to be my employer um they're sponsoring that uh live stream so thanks for letting me do that and then any last word last bits of wisdom for people sure I would say just like we need more people to be software developers we need more people to do develop relations so if you have an interest in it uh reach out to me happy to answer questions uh Fred obviously is
(59:35) a tremendous resource but uh we need all different kinds of experiences and all different kinds of uh expertise levels so uh come on in the water's fine I agree with that that's a good I love when I I'm just like ask any one last piece of advice I'm like yes I'm going to give you like the best piece of advice that you ever had like I'm like that's also it was ready for the question and he did not even know it was coming so again uh thanks for your time that was a pleasure everyone uh you've
(1:00:03) been a little bit quiet today so feel free to if you have any comment following up the show had them on YouTube and if there's like specific thing for done I will uh follow up with him uh for the question with that said uh I really need to take notes about like who's my next guest so I can announce them like and I always forget like who's going to be the next guest on my show but uh what I can say is that it's going to happen in two weeks so join us in two weeks uh it's probably going to be Thursday at 3 pm like I'm
(1:00:32) trying to do the only time where it's not at 3 p p.m it's because my guest is like in a real uh far away time zone from that and it's too way too late or too early so on that note uh thanks again Dan thanks everybody who joined us thanks everybody who's watching the show and uh see you in about two weeks oh and just before that because one last comment that just arrived this is Vlad uh from Fitbit from oh Vlad so maybe one of the Vlad I know I used to work at Fitbit uh thanks for oh nice seeing you
