Mitch VanDuyn - CTO at CatPrint

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) I enjoy life and growth. My tribe is those like you who are constantly improving. The people who listen to this podcast are the people in life who want to do better and be better. If you are this type of person, I recommend you visit leaderbits.io, which is a company that I started that is dedicated to helping you grow as a technology leader. The best part is if you want to improve, we will have your company pay for it for you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:26) So just reach out and we'll take care of the rest. Leaderbits.io. Today, we are talking to Mitch VanDuyn, the founder and CTO of CatPrint, and we discuss creating community environment at work, bringing up developers within your company, and Mitch's claim to fame with a contribution to modern computing. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:00:52) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:53) This is the Modern CTO podcast. So he was asking if you 3D printed cats, right?

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:01:09) No, no. We can't figure out 3D printing yet because we don't know how we would get the jobs because people don't have the technology to create the artwork to print.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:22) Well, I thought you guys could just say that you 3D print cats and then you just go put out a food bowl somewhere and just find the cat that looks closest to the one they wanted.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:01:32) And you ship that cat, right. Well, we have cats in the customer service offices. The customer service manager is very involved in animal rescue, and so we almost always have one or two rescue cats who are waiting for a permanent home hanging around in customer service. They really wouldn't do well on the factory floor, but they hang around over there. So we have a kind of a wall of all these cats that we've taken care of, and the customers really love that. We advertise it and we actually invite people to make donations towards the animal rescue shelter and stuff. So people get into that a lot.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:11) Oh, nice. My wife has been a vet tech for about a decade, so she's always around the animals, and we have three dogs. But we don't have any cats.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:02:20) Well, it's interesting. I mean, we had four cats when we started the business. We started in our basement, and they got into things. You know, they're running around, and now we're down to zero cats. And we had a cat for a short while, and we discovered that we were kind of allergic to them, you know, very mildly. But we just sort of—until we're so old that we can't have a dog, we'll probably just keep dogs instead of cats for now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:47) That's exactly why I don't have a cat. And well, it's one of those things where I'm very allergic to cats, right? So, and then some dogs, but not all dogs. So what happens is you can't get close to something or really experience if you can't be around it because it causes you pain.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:03:05) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:06) Right? Yeah. So it's like I've never bonded with a cat because I can't get close to cats. I just have to stay away from them.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:03:13) Right. Right. So it'd be tough. And we have to ask that when we interview people because we have our dogs and employees' dogs come to work. And so an interview question is, you know, are you violently allergic to animals? Because if you are, you're probably gonna be tough working here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:32) Because that's not something your insurance covers.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:03:34) Right. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:36) Now, Amazon has the whole Dogs of Amazon. And do you put that on your website too? Like, here are the cats of CatPrint?

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:03:43) Yeah, the cats—you know, because they come and go—they are, you know, we'll show here's our newest. Not so much on the website, but on the social media, you know, like on the Instagram and Facebook feeds, we'll celebrate the cat getting their forever home, as it's called. So the cats, that's kind of how they work. And the dogs, though, they are sort of employees, you know. So sometimes—I don't know—we're redoing the employee profile pages, but I'm sure when we get done redoing, there'll be a—we'll treat each of the dogs as an employee and have them on there. And so yeah, that's exciting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:24) Well—

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:04:24) We try to have fun with it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:26) Well, that's what it's—I mean, that's the human element, and that's what makes the work worth doing is getting to explore that human part of it too.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:04:34) Yeah. We were just talking—we just had our annual information share with the entire cast. And afterwards, the three partners, my wife and the CFO, John, and I were talking about it. And the thing is, in today's world, you're at work eight plus hours a day, and it's your community, right? And it's for a lot of people, they don't have big families anymore, you know, and they don't have—you don't get community from your family, you're at work. So work should be a place where you can make friends and you do feel comfortable and you feel like it's a community. So we try hard to do that and encourage that, and I think it works. I think people are happy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:24) How big is your community currently?

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:05:26) Twenty-eight. I think 28. It employs 29. I think we just—28.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:31) So about 28, 29 CatPrinters?

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:05:34) Yep. Is that what you guys call each other?

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:34) So, yeah.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:05:35) Exactly. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:38) That's so exciting. And then is your site actually written in your Hyperloop that you made?

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:05:43) It is. But quite an old version. You know, Hyperloop is a moving target. We're trying to get 1.0 out, the Hyperloop team, and getting pretty close to that. But, you know, CatPrint is on a real, probably two-year-old iteration of it. And so we have a staging area where we're integrating, you know, all the latest changes. The trouble is there's been a lot of deprecations, and so I have to get through all those breakages and fix stuff. But I think probably within a month, it'll be full Hyperloop.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:19) Nice.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:06:20) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:21) Was that Elon Musk-inspired naming?

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:06:23) Yes, it was. It was definitely. Yeah. I mean, you can see the kind of fun pun there, but it's like the Rails of the 21st century.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:33) I love it. I thought it was really interesting when I was going through it. It kind of stretched my mind quite a bit.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:06:39) Yeah. That's one of the harder things that we've had about getting people to understand is it, in a sense, is so simple. But if you say, "Well, how does that actually work?" It kind of is mind-blowing, and then some people get confused, and they think, "Well, that couldn't possibly work that way." And so people on the chat area will be having these elaborate chunks of code, and it's like, "No. You just write this one line." And they're like, "How does that even happen?"

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:08) You're like, "Magic." That's your answer.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:07:11) Yeah. Well, it is. And that's the kind of the magic, you know. Back in, you know, '90-whatever it was, '93 or '94, when, you know, that was the magic of Rails, right? So it's kind of—that's our hope is that we can take that to the next quantum level.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:28) That's a really good point you just brought up. Like, at first, when you started using Rails, it was magic. You're like, "Woah." And that was the same thing when I saw Hyperloop. I was like, "That's unbelievable. How is that happening?" And it takes a while to get a collection of people to become used to something, to get comfortable with it.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:07:46) Right. And then the other problem we have is that, you know, we're in a sense competing—I don't know, competing is not quite the right word—but if you didn't use Hyperloop, what would you do? Well, you'd probably use React and JavaScript and that whole thing, right? And if you look at that world, I am constantly amazed by what people put up with in terms of difficulty. You know, just the amount of boilerplate code you have to do. I have a—I'm mentoring a young man who wants to be a software developer, and he's going through some boot camps and stuff. I meet with him once a week and go over any questions he has. And I look at this coursework in JavaScript and go, like, you know, I just bite my tongue and I help him through it. I'm like, "That's gotta be the hardest thing in the world to do just to say 'Hello, World.'" Like, generating all this code and all this crap to put this thing together. So we kind of compete with that because the expectation is, "Well, I'm gonna have to do all that stuff." And you don't know. You actually just add this gem to your Rails app and start writing code. And they're going, "Yeah, but where does this go? Where does this thing go?" "We don't need that thing anymore." "Where's my controller?" "Well, what does a controller really do for you? You know, there's no functional—the customer isn't paying you for a controller, you know. They wanna pay for you to have this button place an order. So let's get all the other stuff that doesn't help you with that process out of the way."

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:18) Yeah. That's—I encourage everybody go check it out. It's Ruby Hyperloop, right?

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:09:23) Yeah. ruby-hyperloop.org. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:26) Yeah. It was unbelievably interesting. And it had a lot of resources around it too, which is always extraordinarily useful.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:09:33) Yeah. We've got a—I think I mentioned there's a guy, Barry Hadfield, who is a—he's a real CTO. I'm sort of—I'm more—I was talking about doing this podcast with you guys, and my CFO said, "Well, yeah, you're not really the CTO. You're like the principal scientist of CatPrint," which is closer to the truth of it. I have nine patents, and that's kind of my gig. But there's a guy, Barry Hadfield. He's a real CTO and of a—you know—and he's much more successful than I am. I think—I don't know—he's on his third or fourth iteration of companies and they do very well. And he is—he's betting his next business on Hyperloop. He's developing it all on Hyperloop. And he's responsible for the name, actually. We were kicking this around a couple years ago, and he says, "Well, how about Hyperloop?"

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:25) What's his project now?

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:10:27) Well, I think you should talk to him about that. I'm not—

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:30) What world is it? And is it in the cat world or the camel world or—

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:10:37) I think it's to do with nonprofit enablement. I mean, his previous project was—or the one he's still the CTO of—this firm that they're trying to, you know, whatever you do, sell it or whatever you do, whatever you call that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:56) Exit.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:10:56) Yeah. Exit. That's the word I was looking for. They're trying to—you know, they're getting ready to exit. And that has to do—it's I think it's like a Google Docs sort of an enterprise Google Docs type system. But I had spoken to him, and he'd love to talk to you guys. And I think you'd get a real—

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:13) Oh, yeah.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:11:14) You'd get a real CTO out of that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:16) I consider you a real CTO, by the way.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:11:18) Oh, I don't know. All that Internet plumbing and stuff like that, I just call it, yeah, this is plumbing. Just call the plumbers and fix this thing, you know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:28) Yeah. I love this perspective. I love—when I run into people that have unique, different perspectives, it's definitely a treat talking with you.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:11:37) I will say one of the reasons I can say that, and I guess this is sort of a CTO decision, right? I made a commitment back—when we were quite a bit smaller, but probably goes back seven years ago—and I said, "We will never, ever have another server in my business. Everything is on the cloud." And that was before the cloud is really like it is now, because we bought the server and paid like $10,000, which at that time was a big purchase for us. And, you know, it just never did us a bit of good. It was just a nightmare. And the whole thing, I said, "Never, ever again. It's all—" and so everything we do is online. You know, accounting, we use QuickBooks. HR, we use Bamboo. And, you know, the Rails app is—it's served off the cloud. And, um, but even when it comes down to machinery and production that there—you know, obviously, some machinery that's touching motors and stuff. And so it has to have a PC. But what we do is we download—we deploy off the cloud and download into an Electron app. So it's also written in Hyperloop. So we download into an Electron app, and then that then can touch, you know, motors and servos and USB ports and stuff like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:01) And how many developers do you currently have on your team?

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:13:04) Oh, we're up to five, not including me. That's a pretty rapid—this is like we went from two to five in just a couple months here. So it's kind of a new for us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:16) Exciting. And they're all helping progress Hyperloop too, right?

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:13:20) Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And two of those five are CatCoders. They're apprentices. So two of them had no development experience, and one of them came from production. Both of them came from production. One has a high school education, but, you know, was interested in being a developer. We have a policy that if you wanna learn to be a developer, you can take some tests and do some work on your own. And if it looks like you're good, we'll put you on half time, train you, and after about six months to a year, bring you in full time as a developer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:56) That's awesome. You have a little recruiting pipeline, right, in your business.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:13:59) Yeah. And it's good for them. You know, you take people that have the talent and you give them an opportunity. It's gonna be a much more interesting job for them. They know the business. You know, like both those guys, they know how production works. So when we need a new feature that's gonna help the production floor, they know what it's about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:21) Oh, that's—more businesses should deploy a program like that.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:14:25) It's pretty easy, and it's predictable. It works. It works. Yeah. You have to work it, but it works. And no, we recently just hired three college grads that just graduated. And, but one guy actually finished his degree while working here, but he was well on the way. That was a funny thing because he still had a couple of classes to take. So the last class he had to take was on web development. So he's sitting here writing in Hyperloop, right? And he's going back to school at night and they're teaching them PHP and HTML. So this is the most frustrating, you know, it's the most frustrating 13 weeks of his life.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:06) Well, the good thing is when you get these people fresh or you recruit from within or, you know, I don't know, recruit's like—I don't like the sound of the word. When you pull people up from within, right?

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:15:15) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:15) Then you don't have to spend all the time dealing with all their bad habits, right, that they picked up from other places.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:15:23) You just

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:23) kind of get to teach them fresh.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:15:25) Right. I would be, yes, you're right. I mean, these guys that have college degrees, they seem to be working out great, but they're brand new out of college.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:36) Right.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:15:36) So they haven't gotten any craziness yet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:39) Well, with college, I like to say it's an expensive piece of paper that says you could do things you don't necessarily want to do.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:15:47) I guess. I guess.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:49) Right? So if they have that mentality to go study and pass the test, because the reason why I say that is this: no matter what your passion is, right, you have to take classes that don't relate to your passion in order to get the degree. So by definition, everyone who has this degree, in my opinion, has the ability to make themselves study and learn things that they don't want to learn.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:16:11) Right? Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:12) Yes. That's not a bad trait.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:16:14) Right. That's true. That's a good point. There's some, yeah, that's a very good point.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:19) A lot of people who won't. A lot of people who will not learn something they don't want to learn.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:16:24) And a lot of times, those classes that maybe you didn't want to take, in the end, you know, I think about I went—I have a degree in comp sci way back, way back when, before there were computers. I mean, my first programming class was on punch cards.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:40) Nice. Did you stand in line to get them run?

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:16:42) Exactly. Exactly. You stood in line to run the punch cards, and then you came back the next day to see if your program ran.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:49) Well, I remember hearing a book from Martin—I think it was Martin Fowler. I was reading one of his books, and he's talking about how he would write the code, and then they would get on a plane, and they would fly across the United States to go run the test.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:16:59) Right. So when I went to college, one class though that I think outside of the core, you know, comp sci classes and some of that stuff—I still, you know, sticks with you. But outside of that, I think every day about the things I learned in the anthropology class. You know, just how people, how human beings organize and behave and the commonalities that we have. I think about that all the time.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:17:23) And I wouldn't have taken that class except, you know, you had to take a certain number of electives in the humanities department. So.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:32) What are your patents in? Like, what area are your patents in?

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:17:35) They're almost all in software algorithms. I worked at Xerox for many years. And, you know, as a, now starting as an engineer and then as a manager. You know, it's the usual corporate thing. You got to—the only way to really pay the bills is to move up into management and talk about doing what you don't want to do.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:17:57) Oh my gosh. This is the worst. But, you know, just the politics and the, you know, the big company bureaucracy is insane. I think about what we get done here at a small company compared to how big companies work. It's insane.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:12) Luckily, I haven't ever actually worked as an employee inside of a big company because I've always done my own thing. Right? Because my dad freelance made technology, so I went right there and then started my own technology company just taking on clients. But when I got, when I had to work with the large clients, like I remember when I got one of my first Fortune 500 clients, I was just like floored by the amount of money they spend and how slow they move.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:18:39) It's amazing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:41) Unbelievable. I was like, you guys realize we could just make a decision and do it. We can just do it. We could just say, let's try these two things and do them, like, real quick and see which one works better.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:18:53) Great. No, no, no. Yeah.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:18:55) Yeah. Well, you know, like Hyperloop, the name was, we kind of, you know, there's all these gems that were kind of coalescing together, you know, and they had names like Reactive Record, which is actually pretty cute, you know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:08) That's cool. Yeah.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:19:09) Yeah. And Reactive Record, and then there was React.rb, and there was, you know, so I don't know what else. But it just, we needed a single name, and we're just kind of kicking it around. And Barry suggested on the chat Hyperloop, and a couple of people said that's cool, you know, and then people said, you know, it's pun to it. It works.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:19:32) It just works really well. It also works well architecturally. What we're constantly doing is using push from the server. You're basically closing the loop, so you're constantly looping the data between the server and the clients. So it just works on any number of levels. And so, you know, I went on, I got the domain name, and I said, okay, name's changed.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:19:53) We're going to call it, and I went in and, you know, took all the gems and renamed them and redeployed them. It's like, that was the fastest name change I ever saw. That's what you could do. That's what you can do when you're small. Right?

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:20:05) So.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:06) Right? You got to find a room in your place.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:20:09) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:10) Hey. So I have a, I'm really interested in this thing that you're doing about bringing up your developers within. I have a couple questions about that. Are you noticing when you're bringing these people up, do you have any issues with, like, spaghetti code or indentation or properly naming of functions? Like, how do those things come up?

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:28) How do you handle them? What are you noticing in those areas with these people that don't have experience and you're pulling them up inside your company?

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:20:35) Yeah. There's two different levels of that question. Right? There's two different levels of that problem. The base level is super easy, fixed by RuboCop.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:20:46) Right? So RuboCop solves that. You just say you don't check in code that doesn't follow, you know, the RuboCop standard. And then, what's it called on the when you run it in the CI server?

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:20:58) It's basically, yeah, it's all the RuboCop rules up there, and then it gives you a grade. So you don't check in code that doesn't get an A. So that takes care of all the, you know, the sort of the lower-level syntactic issues around that.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:21:12) Right? And then you get into the, and this is the hardest thing to teach anybody, is how do you teach good architecture? I mean, that's a lifelong, you know, that's—I still look, I'm constantly refactoring chunks of Hyperloop because I go, what was I even thinking when I wrote that code? It's like, I mean, how much beer did I actually have when I wrote that code? It's like, it's insane. So you constantly, and sometimes I think that's really the, that's the only, there is no good architecture. There's just a willingness to refactor your code. And there is a, if you rely on test specs, if you say, look, what I'm really going to do is I'm not like a test-driven development Nazi. Like, I wouldn't insist that you got to write the test spec first, but I would say you, you know, you got to write the test spec somewhere in the process.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:22:06) And if you've got the specs to go with the code and you feel really like you got solid specs, then you have the freedom to at any time say, all right, I'm spending too much time in this module. It's too hard to make changes here. This needs to be redone. If you've got a good healthy set of specs, then you can say, okay.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:22:25) I can take the risk of refactoring this stuff. And when you do that, then you learn and evolve. And then I think in your own learning, you say, yeah, that was a better way to do it. But you're, you got to constantly—I just don't, that's the only way I can think about software architecture.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:22:39) It's not like building architecture. You're constrained by these laws of physics to what's going to work and what's not going to work. But in software, we're so flexible and open. There's so many new ideas that come along, you know, and.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:55) Well, it's a story. I mean, you can go back and rewrite your story a million times, tell it slightly different. Anyone can have a different perspective of it and inject stuff different places. It's so tough, like, to put concrete items in place and say, this is how it's done. Like, RuboCop is a great answer.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:23:14) Yeah. Well, I mean, to me, that's just a joy to, like, not have to worry about, to have something else just saying, you just type, Atom just says red flag, and you go, what's that? And then it, and then you learn things. I learned Ruby from RuboCop because it'll be like saying, don't do this.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:23:31) And you go, well, how do you want me to do it? And then you look, you know, you look at the little link and it, and you Google it a bit and you go, oh, wow, you didn't know there was this operator, you know? And, so it's a, but to me, the whole interacting with that whole thing, especially for my life, you know, to have started on punch cards and to have actually taken classes where you would talk about, well, this is the algorithm that we could use to, like, graphically display stuff if we ever had a processor fast enough to display it. Right? And this is how you could actually have a dynamic compiler and a dynamic language and stuff. If we ever have a computer that has enough processing power to do that type of dynamic type checking and stuff. And then to kind of go through it and to be then in a world where all that stuff not only exists, but then people are writing it as a community and could, you know, here's Atom, the world's best editor.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:24:36) I mean, I'm not saying it is the world's best, but it's a beautiful editor. Right? Compared to—

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:41) I use it currently.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:24:42) Compared to what I was using thirty years ago. Right? It's free. And people are contributing it to help each other and, you know, they're growing their own business with it, and it's just exciting. It's just a beautiful thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:59) Thank you, Chris. Right? Chris Wanstrath, he's like, awesome.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:25:03) And it's, yeah, the whole thing. And then RuboCop is saying, well, why do we have it? Right?

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:25:08) And that's my biggest hope with Hyperloop is I just, I would love to give back in some way and just say thank you because I couldn't have this business without Rails and, with—I suppose there might be something else, an alternative, but I couldn't have this business without all the open source software that it depends on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:27) You ever write out to DHH or Fried or any of those people?

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:25:31) No. I, maybe I should. Do you think I should? I don't know what—

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:35) Yeah. Like, we had Ryan Singer. It's Ryan and DHH and Jason are the three people that run Basecamp, and he was on the show.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:25:44) I mean, I could send him a note and say a—

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:47) Send him an email. They're, like, totally cool people.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:25:50) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, all we see is tweets once in a while and sometimes, you know, whatever.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:58) They're people, man. They like a good line dropped on them. Right? Like, thanks, man. He'd be like, no problem. You're awesome.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:26:03) All right. Well, I should do it. I should do that. Yeah. Thanks.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:26:06) Thanks. This is a good secret.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:08) Now do other languages have RuboCop the way Ruby does?

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:26:12) Well, it wouldn't be called RuboCop. Right? It'd be called—

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:14) Yeah. Well, yeah. But—

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:26:15) It'd be called, you know, choke your, choke your—I don't want to say that. I was about to say something you can't take off the air. I mean, what would the Python equivalent of RuboCop be?

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:29) I don't know.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:26:30) You could have a lot of fun with that and.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:32) Right.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:26:33) And Go, I guess Go could be Stoplight, you know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:39) Oh, man. That's so—what a boring name. I just Googled it real quick. I like, first of all, Go Stoplight is not what I was saying boring name to. That's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:47) I like that. But this would, Python has a package called Code Validator 0.8.2. Come on. Where's the branding on that?

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:26:55) Yeah. It's, to me, that's an amazing thing about, you know, Python and Ruby because they are, at some level, very similar. Right? And, very similar causes and why they exist in the world.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:27:08) But then, if you take the differences in the language and map those to the difference in the personalities of the guys behind them, right, it maps—

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:18) perfectly. Culture. Yeah.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:27:19) Just look at, yeah, if you look at the Wikipedia articles on, you know, Matz versus the Python guy is, Guido. But when you read it, like, you know, and you just read what the guy writes. Right? He's a, I'm sure he's a great guy, but the philosophy is very reflected in the language.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:27:39) Guido advertises himself as the benign dictator of the Python language. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:47) He's Dutch too. Right? That's hilarious, man.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:27:50) He's the benign dictator. Well, that's fine. A lot of people would say, well, yeah, you have to have somebody to make the final decision. Right? You got to have some, otherwise—things that a lot of people would share that philosophy.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:28:01) And then you read Matz. Right? What's Matz all about? Well, programming should be happy. It should be friendly.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:28:06) I want to maximize programmer joy. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:09) Right.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:28:10) So, you know, these attitudes get reflected in the actual language, and there's room for everybody. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:17) Right. So what are you most excited about right now, like, in life? It doesn't have to be technology. It could be the company, technology, whatever you want, but what are you most excited about?

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:28:26) Oh, man. That's tough. I'm pretty, I'm pretty pumped about Hyperloop. I mean, I, you know, I, it's my, so it seems like it's coming along, but that's technology. You know, at my age, you know, it's kind of like, hopefully, most of the rapids are behind me.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:28:47) I'm excited about, you know, I'm in the canoe. We're paddling along, enjoying the scenery a little bit. That's pretty exciting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:53) At any point in time, you can just grab a jet engine, right, off of Amazon and just hold on to that for a minute.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:29:02) Well, I don't know. Jeez. I don't know if you, I mean, you know, I am a—I tell you, I am very excited, you know, getting out of my personal, it's not really my personal life, but I am so excited about—I've always been kind of a space nut. When I was a kid, I wanted to be an aeronautical engineer, and my uncle, who is an electrical engineer, said, nah. He goes, you don't want to do that.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:29:25) He goes, you know, you'll just end up, you go to old school and you'll end up, you'll be doing nothing but designing the left nut on the right wheel of, you know, some jet plane. Right? You know? And he said, you're not going to do what you think you're going to do in that world. He says, you just go into computers, kid.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:29:43) He always called me Sheep for reasons we won't go into. He goes, Sheep, you ought to go into computers. And he took me to a friend of his that had built an eight-bit, you know, one of these things you could punch in the front panel and load up a program. And he took me and showed me that.

(Mitch Van Dyne at 00:29:57) I got kind of interested in that. So, but I've always been, you know, fascinated in space. I'm an instrument-rated private pilot and—

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:06) Oh, nice.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:30:07) Yeah. And I built my first—I built a hang glider when I was 15, and, you know, out of—I stole a book from a store. It's confession time, but I went to a store and, you know, they had this book about hang gliding and I stole the book, and then took it home and took it apart and sort of figured out how these things were designed. And then my friend and I built this hang glider, and we were, you know, jumping off sand dunes and stuff and flying around.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:30:37) So I've always been like—planes and aerospace has been a big thing for me. So what I'm excited about, I'm just every day, like, I'm seeing what is Elon doing now? And when those two—did you watch the Tesla take off?

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:52) Oh, yeah. We watched our launches.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:30:55) Business office. Yeah. We were shut down here. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:58) Yep.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:30:59) I don't know. The production was still going. But up here in R&D, we were all just looking at our screens. My one of my sons works at the big G Ranch there in New York City, and my other one is a consultant in New York. We're all online chatting each other.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:31:16) When those two things came down, I thought, okay, that's a clip somebody made. You know, that's just an artist rendering of what it's gonna look like that they're showing us. Right? I thought, okay. Gosh. Something bad must have happened because they're just showing us this artist rendering of what it's gonna look like. And, you know, that's very exciting. And I got so excited about it the other day that I went and I took the size of the planets, the relative size of the planets and the sun and their distances, and I put them in a spreadsheet. And I said to my wife, you know, I wanna go down to the science museum. I wanna donate a bunch of money to them to put up, like, a display where the sun would be the size of a dinner plate.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:32:02) Right? And it can sit on one corner of the museum, and then you can go down East Avenue in our city, and about 1,500 feet later would be the Earth, and it would be the size of a grain of rice. And then you could—and then by the time you get a mile away, you'd be at Mars. Right? And there's a nice long street in our city. Right? And it's a nice walking—it's a nice street to walk on. There's famous houses and museums and stuff. You could have these and—and time you get to Mars, right, Mars is like a grain of sand. Right?

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:32:32) You know? And then the distances are just amazing. It's just so vast. And, but yet, you know, this guy Elon is just turning it upside down, says we're gonna do it. You know? We're gonna do it. And he's off into space. And then there's this thing called the EM Drive. Have you ever heard of the EM drive?

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:54) Oh, come on. Yeah. How can you not?

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:32:56) Yeah. Get out of here. So, you know, I'm just saying, please let it be true.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:00) He's gonna make it work?

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:33:01) Yeah. It's gotta work. Right? It's gotta work. Because—

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:05) I think we've all pored over schematics of that.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:33:07) It just—and I have a godson who's a physics professor at Alfred University, and, you know, I'm always trying to—do you think how could this thing work? He goes, I don't know. You know, he just—I'm not getting too excited about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:22) China claims to have made one.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:33:24) Yeah. Exactly. And now everybody's, you know, everybody's saying, well, the Air Force probably had—you know, there's all these experiments saying, I think the Air Force has got a satellite up, but they're just not talking about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:34) My dad was in the Air Force for many years. That's actually how he got educated in computer science to then eventually teach me. Right?

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:33:43) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:43) And they were putting the first GPS system into stealth bomber out at Air Force base in Nellis. He said it was so cool. So what they do is they put them on a plane, windows blacked out, like 12-passenger plane, and then they fly you to the middle of the desert. And then it's, like, behind a mountain thing, like, you know, the desert rocks. I don't know. I would call them mountains if they had trees on them. Right?

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:34:05) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:06) But some sort of geographical structure. And then they would work in these giant airplane hangars, and there's these lines on the ground, and you walk from hangar to hangar. You lived in one, you worked in the other, and then you'd go home on the weekend—or you were just kind of out in the desert—and they put the GPS into the stealth bomber.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:34:24) Nice. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:25) And he didn't tell me that until I was 18 because that's when it was declassified.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:34:29) Very cool. Yeah. There's also a really cool irony in that. Right? That they're putting these people in a blacked out plane and hiding where they actually are.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:34:42) They're working on technology so that everybody can know where they are all the time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:46) Life is beautiful that way.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:34:47) There's a great irony in that. Right? Is you are working on technology so that you can precisely pinpoint where you are on the Earth, and we're not gonna let you know where you are on the Earth while you're working on it. I love it. That's beautiful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:07) There's been a question sitting in the back of my mind since you talked about patents and Xerox, and I believe it was either a Steve Jobs or Bill Gates interview. I was watching one of them several years ago, and they said that they went together to some large company, and they actually saw, like, the first GUI interface. And they both went back home and created them. And because the company wasn't really positioned—was that Xerox?

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:35:32) That's Xerox. That is Xerox. So when I started—yeah. That's Xerox. And there's a book called Fumbling the Future.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:41) Yeah. That's a good name for that book.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:35:44) It's called Fumbling the Future, How Xerox Gave Away the Personal Computer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:49) Really? That's a whole book. Oh, great.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:35:51) Yeah. It's a good book. It's a well-written, readable book. Yeah. So when I got to Xerox, I was an intern in 1981. You know, and that's a whole other story. But I was the only intern at that time Xerox had ever had that was married. Because my wife and I were married while we were in college. And so, you know, we packed up every belonging we had in the back of this car and drove to Xerox and we got there. And I had said that I was married, but, of course, they lost the paperwork.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:36:28) So they didn't know where to put us. So they put us up at this executive hotel, which, you know, would be, like, my whole salary for the summer for one night, you know, so I can't stay here. So I went to work, and my wife went down to the university and found us a flophouse to live in for the summer because we were—anyway, that was a big adventure. But, yeah. So—did you work on that project at all?

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:36:56) I did. Well, I'll tell you a little story on that. But when I got to Xerox, I was given, on my desk, was sitting the Alto, the Xerox Alto. So what what happened was at PARC, Palo Alto Research Center, where a lot of our Internet technology and stuff came from, at PARC back in the seventies, they said, well, here's Moore's law. Right? Moore's law says that by, like, '85, every medium-size and above employer will be able to afford a computer for every one of their office workers. Okay? So that's like in fifteen years. So what we need to do now is build that computer even though it's gonna cost, like, an amazing amount of money, but we'll build it and we'll issue it to every office worker within, like, you know, parts of Xerox and at PARC so that we can start to learn how people would use a computer like that in an office environment. So they built this computer called an Alto, which is basically a Data General—the code name was Eagle. I can't—Data General 10. That's not right, but—

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:09) Eagle sounds cooler.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:38:11) Well, Eagle was the internal code name. There's actually a great book written about the making of that computer about, you know, all the technology nonsense that goes on and all the fun stuff while you're trying to build a product. It's written back in the seventies, I think. But, anyway, so they took this Data—it's very much like a PDP-10. Right? And they—PDP-11, PDP-10, that kind of class of mini computer, you know, 64K of memory max, 64K address space. Wicked fast. And they took that thing and they miniaturized it as much as possible, which means that it would fit like, you know, where those old school desk drawers would fit.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:38:51) So you could take a desk, rip out the drawers, and sit this computer underneath. And the disk drive was removable and it was a great big platter. It was about as big around as a large tray that you might, you know, for a Super Bowl game have shrimp and stuff on. It's about that big around.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:39:08) And you would have racks of these above your desk. So you'd pop in the disk, and I think it had, like, a megabyte of data on the disk. And the screen was a great big portrait mode, pretty high res, black and white. And they were set up in portrait mode because they said, well, it's for an office and everybody looks at documents, you know, portrait. So the display should be portrait.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:39:35) And somebody at Stanford had developed a mouse, and they're just down the street from PARC. So they said the mouse would be a great input device, so they incorporated the mouse. So that's what I had when I got there at Xerox. That was what I used. I was actually working on a C compiler for the summer because C was the new hotness, and they wanted to use C in some of their internal development.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:39:56) So I was porting a C compiler, but I had the Alto as my kind of my workstation. And I said, this thing is the nuts. So I went back to—I went back to college. I was getting a master's degree, and I ported, you know, as much code as I could to computers I had there so I could at least, like, make my thesis on a reasonably well-written editor. But that—yeah.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:40:19) So we had all that tech going on way back when. And so you said, well, did I work on any of that? I didn't. I was working on developing software, like languages, compilers, and stuff that were used in the Xerox products that they were making because they—in the eighties, they—it was the first time they put microchips into a Xerox printer. So before then, everything was analog.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:40:48) So, you know, analog controls and so they were digitizing it. But at the time, there just wasn't any tools available to, like, even, you know, write real-time software or anything. So everything had to be done in-house. So that was the kind of group I worked in. But I do have one contribution to modern computers. Right? And if you look—if you look in your, like, on either an Apple or a PC and in your device menu, you know, there's a setting that controls what's called the mouse acceleration. And so it basically means if you move your hands slowly, the tracking rate of the mouse is, say, X. But if you move your hand quickly, the tracking rate accelerates so that rapid movements move the mouse farther than slow movements.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:41:41) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:41) Like inertia?

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:41:43) Yeah. You probably just do it all the time. You don't notice it. But and you look, there's a little thing you can turn that on and off for just the rate of how the acceleration is affected. So when I came back to Xerox as a full-time—the next year, I was issued the newest hotness, which was they'd moved on from the Alto to a box called the Dorado, was their internal name, which now had some—for that day, some pretty hefty compute power in it.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:42:13) And, you know, the first thing I wanna do is I wanna make it do something. Right? And in those days, you know, there was no—to do anything, there's no, like, simple APIs or anything. And so you were issued a box of manuals that covered probably the whole—you know, 10 feet above my desk was on a shelf of all these principle of operation manuals that had all the APIs and everything, how this thing worked. I said, I just wanna say hello, world.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:42:40) But it was, like, so complex. You know? You just had to call—I just wanna make it do something. Right? I got this brand new toy they've given me. I wanna make it do anything. So I said, alright. And I looked through, and I discovered the one section had the mouse control where you would, you know, you could read the current X-Y coordinate of the mouse, and then you could also write the current X-Y coordinate. So normally, you know, the driver is just reading it and writing it. And I said, oh, that's cool.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:43:12) And I said, I can do something. So I kind of played around with it, and I reversed X and Y. So you'd move your mouse one way, and it would, like, do the exact opposite as if your screen was, like, turned sideways. So I felt good because I'd actually made it do something, you know, with, like, about ten minutes' code. And, you know, I'd achieved, like, you know, some intimacy with my new toy. Right? But then I'd worked with these guys. You know, I knew some of them from the summer before.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:43:36) And so I said, oh, great. You know? So I went around that night and installed this piece of software on all their computers. So the next day, they come in, and then they're all like, oh, man. I moved my mouse. It's moving exactly the opposite way. What is wrong? What's going on? And, yeah, I could hear all these shouts around, you know, it was like a QB farm. Right?

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:43:57) And I can hear all this commotion. And then, you know, about ten minutes, everybody's in my office. And they said, what did you do? I said, why are you blaming me? And you're the only one who would do something like this. And so I said, oh, crap. So then we were kind of joking about it, but then we got to talking about it and we said, well, actually, you know, what could you do useful with this? And then I said, well, wouldn't it be nice, you know, the mouse and stuff? And we said, hey. That's a great idea.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:44:24) So I wrote a little—you know, it was like a little library, like a gem. We call it in Ruby a gem that would give that behavior of the mouse acceleration. And then—and Xerox had—this is the cool thing. This is back in 1982. We had so much of what we have today was already there.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:44:43) Like, they weren't called the same things. They were a little bit more clunky to use, but it's the same idea. So I released what we would call a gem into, like, the sort of the Xerox library of stuff, and it became popular and eventually became part of the operating system. And, eventually, when Apple came in and said, hey. We love this idea. Can we use this technology? And the guys at PARC were so frustrated with nobody—nobody in marketing was listening to them. They said, sure. Take it all. Have it.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:45:13) So so my little idea is there in every computer today. That's my claim to fame.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:20) You're a hero.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:45:21) Go, Mitch. Let's say it right. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:23) Go, Mitch. All day, dude.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:45:27) So that's a long and very apocryphal story, but, you know, I think largely true. And—but—

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:33) I love it, though.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:45:34) But the important thing to me that was amazing that in my life and, you know, you said, what am I excited about? Well, just one thing that's exciting is just how this has all panned out, that those seeds were all there. And, you know, here we are, you know, many years later, and a lot of the ideas, the right ones have evolved to be the ones that are very dominant. And, you know, we use these things today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:00) That's why I'm so excited about the AR, the VR, the drones, the automation cars, like, all of this stuff because that is your mouse accelerometer. Right? That is, in twenty years, it's just gonna be completely saturating the market and just a common thing for that generation.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:46:20) I have a little bet with myself that the car I own now, I have a 2014 Jeep Cherokee.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:27) Oh, I have a Wrangler.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:46:28) Yeah. And, yeah. Very nice. And my bet with myself is that that's the last car I'm ever gonna buy. That by the time that car wears out, we'll have autonomous vehicles, and it'll just be easier to own a club membership, and the car will come to you when you need it.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:46:48) And you get the car you need for whatever you're doing. So I think it'll happen within five years by the time I need to give up that car.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:57) Yep. That's what I was talking about with my wife. We talk about this all the time. We have a six-month-old baby girl.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:47:02) Congratulations. Congratulations.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:05) I'm counting giggles and watching her eat her feet every morning, so that's the way I get to start my day. So awesome. And I tell my wife, I said, I don't think we're gonna have to buy her a car. That's not gonna be a thing we're gonna have to make a decision about. I think the thing we're gonna decide is what tier subscription of how nice the car is going to be.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:47:23) Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. I think that's exactly right. And there'll be this sort of the public transport subscription, which eventually, you know, cities will just say—just like some cities have internet—some cities will just say, okay, everybody here gets the base tier. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:38) Right.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:47:39) And I bet you that. I hadn't thought about that till this time. I bet you that'll happen. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:44) Well, thank you so much for coming and hanging out with us, Mitch. This has been—I love this conversation.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:47:50) I did too. It was—we could do this all day long. You're in New York City?

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:55) We're in Florida.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:47:56) In Florida? Well, I don't get down there much. Otherwise, I would say next time I go, we'll go hang out and have a beer. But—

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:02) What we'll do is I'll put—where are you? Where are you located right now?

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:48:06) Rochester, New York.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:08) Oh, come on. I've spent so much time there. I was—I hang out in Buffalo, eat at Charlie's, beef on weck, go to the—what are the hockey team there?

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:48:18) Yeah. Amerks. Amerks and Sabres. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:20) I go to Sabres games. Yeah. I spent a lot of time there.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:48:23) Yeah. Well, next time you're up, you look me up and we'll hang out. Alright?

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:28) Yeah. I think later this year, we're going up through there and then up into Canada to see some of our other friends. But my wife's flying up there Saturday.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:48:40) Oh. Do you have family in Westchester? It's not—it's actually not up there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:45) Yeah. You're not flying up there. Sorry. I'm glad you understood.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:48) You're flying to Westchester, which is, like, an hour outside the city. That's not, like, upstate.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:48:52) No. No worries. Yeah. I've flown in there many times. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:55) Oh, you have? Okay. Yeah. IBM's there. They're really big there.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:48:58) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:58) If people wanna find out more about you, how would they do that?

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:49:02) About me?

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:03) Yeah. They wanna find out more about you.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:49:05) Well, they can—I don't know. I'm not very good at this answer to this question.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:10) No worries.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:49:11) I mean, I'm on LinkedIn, although it's just sort of a reference page on there. You know, if you go to my GitHub, my email's on there. [email protected]. You can drop me a line.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:49:26) If you search for Robert—my actual name is Robert, Robert Mitchell VanDuyn. But because of my brother, I always go by Mitch or Kathmandu. But if they wanna search, they can search for Robert VanDuyn Illuminati, and you will find out there's a guy—there's a nut job out in Idaho that has, for a long time, had an article about how me, my family, my dad, my grandfathers are one of the top 13 families running the world. So you can find out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:03) Oh my god. That is awesome.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:50:07) But my handle on GitHub is Kathmandu. And, you know, I'm always hanging around in the Hyperloop Gitter chat room. And, so I'd love to hear from anybody who wants to have any advice or wants to come to Rochester and be a cat coder.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:25) Nice. Yeah. I can't wait to check out the facility. I'm gonna stop by. I was gonna pop in and, like, hey.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:50:30) Oh, you should. From a Rails app standpoint, people are blown away that come in here because the production system's fully automated. So an order is placed somewhere on the web, comes in, gets queued up, scheduled. The production people just say, okay, here's the next job you gotta print. They click a button. It sends the job to—lays it all out, you know, does all the what's called imposition, lays it out, sends it to the press. It's picked up, just barcode scanners that track its progress to the system. It's all run by a big Rails app.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:04) What? Jake, we should go do a video of that.

(Mitch VanDuyn at 00:51:06) Oh, you should. Come on up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:07) Awesome. Well, thank you so much. So the way it works is—Thank you so much for listening to the Modern CTO Podcast. Share this. Get the word out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:19) Thank you guys so much. I couldn't do it without you. I appreciate it. You guys are the absolute best.