Welcome to the Code to be podcast. We talk to people on their coding journey in hopes of helping you on yours. I'm your host, Suran, and today we're talking about starting out in open source with Brian Douglas, founder and CEO of OpenSost. I learned a ton working at startups and seeing how the world works and really understanding

how the world of software and business works. The thing that I've taken away is like I like working at companies that I can use.

And it's kind of been like the difference of my career is that I'd always been working at developer tools that even the boot camp I worked out.

I used that boot camp software to learn iOS programming while I was working at the job. So let's be excited about

what you're working on and if you're not excited for me I just go move on to the next thing.

Brian talks about starting his own company, takeaways from working at startups and describes

what open source is all about after this.

Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for having me again.

So, Brian, we had you on the podcast many, many, many years ago.

You were one of our very, very first guests. And we had you when you had just graduated from your boot camp. Fill us in on your coding journey. What happened since those early days? And when you got up to now? It was crazy times because I think I'd spent like about 17 weeks from deciding the code to then getting my first job. And I think it was probably the second week I had that job. You had reached out and we had that interview. So everything was brand new. Didn't really

know what was going to happen. So yeah, fast forward. Spent 10 months at that job with an IZ as a

Ruby on Rails engineer, then made the leap to move to San Francisco right after that for another job. And I worked for a block, which got acquired by Thinkful. The boot camp, the boot camp actually I learned from. And then I spent a quick tour of duty at an early startup called Netlify as employee number three. Wow. It was like very seridipitous. I had sort of, while being in San Francisco, ran into the CEO and co-founder and started to be using the product.

A year later, they reached out because of my podcast and blog.

And then spent four and a half years at GitHub, then most recently in the last six months, went full-time on my own startup.

Yeah.

So I know that the reason you had initially got to boot camp is because one day you hoped to start your own company.

Why did you want to start a company and why did you think learning to code would be the way to get you there? Yeah. So my story of learning how to code was my son was born early, about 11 weeks early. Wow. And we were in the hospital. And at that same time, I was getting my MBA. Oh my goodness. So much going on. Yeah. So I was getting my MBA to basically be an entrepreneur. I was doing sales at the time. And I learned from my first dissertation, first semester, I wrote about basically a dissertation on Google and how that company was founded and how they basically had no brick and mortar business behind it, which is they just knew how to write code. And some other stuff. They got a CS background and stuff like that. But that kind of sparked in my mind. It's like, I can get this MBA. And then I can also learn how to code and build my own stuff. And that was the goal until I found out you can get paid more as a junior engineer. And I basically went down that route for a while. Very cool. So once you graduated from boot camp as opposed to starting your own company right

away, as

you said, you threw yourself in the tech industry, you learned through other companies.

Was the goal to eventually come back to that dream of starting a company?

Or were you just focused on making that sweet developer money back in those days? Yeah. One of the best ways to kind of learn how to build a company is go work for a company. Right. And that's like the sort of mantra I had the entire time. I wanted to be a good engineer. Wouldn't know what all the skills I didn't have. So like I need the sales background because I did that for four years outside of college. I had the business background with the MBA and also the college degree. I had a finance degree as well. So learning how to code is like another skill set I can

...