Blockchain. It is a solution looking for a problem. There is a company in every category claiming blockchain solves some major problem or literally just makes something better thats working perfectly fine. I think its a great technology and there are useful applications, but they aren't world changing.

I want to disclaim right now that there are some very valid and legit companies using Blockchain, so don't take my statements as a blanket.

But I truly believe that over 95% of "blockchain"-related initiatives are scams. At best, money is moving from one pocket to another, probably with some fraud thrown in, and that's about it.

I think process is important. I think breaking things down into smaller chunks is important. I'm not particularly religious about specific methodologies, but at a certain size of company its definitely important to have a consistent process and you should reflect on that process to determine if it can be more efficient.

What kinds of products are missing in 2019 and are going to get a lot bigger? (Not limited to infrastructure)

I recently picked up an iPad Pro (2018 model). Before owning one, I thought of it as "just another iOS device." I've owned other iPad models in the past. But this iPad Pro in particular is different: it represents a huge opportunity to shift day to day workloads to it. It's so much closer to just being a computer in the... useful sense.

I think iPad Pro-focused software will grow. I don't necessarily think that 2019 will be huge for it, but I think a lot more people will pick up on this trend.

What do you credit for the success of your open source projects like Vagrant?

A lot of things. A lot of people!

I think the early adopters that help shape the products, take the risk in using an unstable product, etc. are a huge part of that success.

What other open source projects are you a fan of?

Besides the big obvious ones like Vim (I'm a vim user)...

I've really loved watching the serverless stuff take off. I think a lot of it has major issues still but its definitely a radical way of thinking and I give a lot of credit to the "crazies" trying to make it a real thing (I'm not saying it won't be).

What steps would you recommend to an early-career developer to position themselves to work on successful large-scale, well-designed software projects?

I explain in other answers, but be more than just a good coder: be good at communication, be kind, be pragmatic, etc. From there, work on some products and continually shift towards what you want to do.

What does your average day at work look like?

So as a founder, the type of work I'm doing month to month can change quite dramatically. I'd say my average at home workday is:

• 7:30 AM - 8:30 AM - Wake up, shower, cook breakfast, eat with my wife.
• 8:30 AM to 10 AM - Answer emails, catch up on Slack, review RFCs.
• 10 AM to 12 noon - Usually I take meetings here. The type of meetings vary but can be product plannings, 1:1s, etc.
• 12 noon to 1 PM - This is a mandatory 1 hour lunch break I impose on myself. I eat lunch and just take a break. I stay away from work, maybe I watch TV, maybe I read, maybe I hang out with my wife if she's home, etc. No work.
• Afternoon - I try to keep this relatively meeting-free. This is when I'll get more technical -- I still write code! -- or work on the company a bit by writing google docs and so on.
• 2 or 3 PM - I take a break and usually work out here. That might mean riding my Peloton or working out in my home gym. This is usually 45 minutes.
• 530 to 6 PM - Done! Go eat dinner, hang out with my wife if she's home.

However, I also travel quite a bit. I live in LA and take day-trips to SF a couple times a month for various meetings that have to happen in-person. These days are really long. I take the 8 AM or 9 AM flight to SF, I work all day, then I take the 8 or 9 PM flight back. I also drive myself to the airport on these days. Overall, a very long day.

Besides SF, I take many field trips for sales or community events. Sales trips are grueling: basically meetings non-stop from 8 or 9 AM through to the evening, followed by a social dinner with customers, employees, etc. They're FULL days and usually for a week, but I do my best to make the most out of my travel.

Which tips woud you give to people who just became CTOs?

Matters what kind of CTO you are and for what sized company.

The biggest tip I'd give is that your primary job is to create the framework for a successful technical organization (along with a VP Eng if you have one). You should be enabling others in the organization. At the same time, you should be thinking strategically about the business's technical decisions and planning for that.

Thanks!

Who comes up with all the logo/ux design for Hashicorp? The website and all the logos have always been looking clean and snazzy to it.

Our Director of Product Design (JT) came up with all of this initially. We now have many designers working on it but JT set the initial look & feel.

He was actually my roommate in San Francisco when I first moved there. I didn't know him prior to that. He lived across the hall from me. I didn't even know if he was good, but I knocked on his door one day and just said "hey, can you help me design something?" (of course I offered and did pay him) And he was really good! And we just kept working together. This was before HashiCorp even existed.

For infrastructure code for Terraform, is Hashicorp come up yet with an approach to testing? We have engineers building lines and lines of Terraform code but we have always been stuck on how we can improve confidence in our codebase.

Yeah, this comes up a lot and we're looking into it. There are a number of other OSS tools like Test Kitchen and Gruntworks has a test framework and so on. You should look at those.

What is your advice to popular open source projects who do not yet have any official funding sources yet - how should they keep going on? Assuming maintainers' still enjoy the work, do they keep on the good work or should they wind down and stop accepting features until they can find more resources (contributors, time).

This is a double-edged sword.

On one hand, I think you push off funding for a long time. I think too many OSS projects are getting "funding" (in the VC sense) too early. The downside to this is it puts a clock on you: there are external expectations of what your project should achieve. Pressure.

You want time to be creative, to be able to just explore the problem space. I was lucky to have that with Vagrant and to have the privilege to do that. I worked on Vagrant for 2 years before being paid a single cent for any of the work I did. I had a normal job during the time and worked on Vagrant on evenings and weekends. But... I was not under any pressure.

On the other hand, being able to work on projects for free is a privilege that many do not have. So, having more avenues to make money needs to be there. I answered another question where I talked a bit about this.

Finally just to ask the question everyone is probably asking, ETA on Terraform 0.12.x? :D

Beta any week now. It is feeling really good. You can see the activity on the Terraform GitHub repo, lots of stuff every day.

At the time, I worked for a consultancy with many clients on different tech stacks. My dream was a one-click solution to setting up a development environment for a client. I felt it was taking too many hours to context switch between clients. At the same time, I wanted a way to run quick Linux-based workloads for school (I was a CS student at the time and diving into operating systems and so on and it was tough to work in the lab setting).

I had actually just learned about virtualization maybe a few months prior. And I chose VirtualBox because it was free and I was a college student that had to pinch every penny I had.

Then I just started building, trying to make that dream a reality. I failed a good many times privately before inching closer and closer to what was eventually released. I think "eating your own dog food" is really important and I did that throughout: using Vagrant as much as possible. That led me to some things where I thought "wow, yes, this is really good" and some other things where I felt "this is not right, this is bad work."

Vagrant 0.1 wasn't great, so don't get the wrong idea that I shipped something amazing. But it worked, and I kept iterating, and it got a lot better.

Easy: communication. 100%.

This isn't just person-to-person communication, it is the ability more broadly to convey thoughts and accept feedback. The best engineers I've ever worked with create and move information efficiently and effectively.

So, concretely this is being able to plan with a team, writing design documents, breaking down work for review into small tasks, making pragmatic decisions by understand the needs of the company (requires some good listening), etc.

How do you recommend anyone who wants to start a startup in open source as solo developer and want to monetize?

I answered this elsewhere! Check that out.

How do you keep up with Work and Life balance?

Create a schedule and be disciplined to stick to it.

For example, I only accept recurring meetings on Mondays and Fridays (with a couple exceptions for good reason). If another recurring meeting needs to be scheduled, another one has to go. I use T - Th for one-off meetings and to focus on other work.

Also, I have a mandatory policy for myself (and I highly encourage it for others) to take a 1 hour lunch break. I have a calendar block so no meetings can be scheduled during that break. Of course, I'm practical and make exceptions once in awhile, but I'll just shift my 1 hour. I almost always take a full 1 hour break every day.

I built a home gym for myself. It wasn't cheap, but can you really place a price on personal health (for money that would be spent on non-necessities anyways)? This means I can interrupt my day to work out for 30 or 45 minutes, and I don't have to commute to a gym. I can shower at home right when I'm done. It is very efficient and I work out much more because of it.

Oh whoops just saw this one:

How do you think AI will affect virtualization, cloud and infrastructure?

I think basic AI concepts will start making their way into it. We announced "Vault Advisor" at HashiConf last year (a paid feature) that is basic AI. It watches access patterns to Vault along with the way you've configured your policies and recommends improvements.

I think for AI to be useful, we need to have a firm grasp of the underlying layers and I don't think we're quite there yet, but closer than we've ever been for sure.

explain about networking now you have teased us with that ha ha. is it this a future product?

IBM in terms of bureaucracy. large companies seem to spend exponential amount of time on communication. Never been successful working for large companies always found them frustrating when working directly for them.

"because I can judge very accurately if they're "good" or not" - I think this is very important and difficult from my experience working for software companies. Too often financial pressure can trump "goodness" of software.

Yes! I write on pen and paper a lot. I've been known for my entire professional life to carry a moleskine with me at all times. This year, I switched to a 2018 iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil. I use Good Notes. I still "hand-write" all my notes but do it on the iPad instead. So far so good I'm in love with it.

In terms of the note structures themselves: each page (I use front/back and left/right) has a title and I just use bullet points and arrows and so on to collect thoughts.

I also preserve my notebooks. I still have the original moleskine where I sketched out Vagrant, Packer, Consul, Terraform, and others! This was back in 2009 or so.

One thing someone told me when I was starting HashiCorp was: "Never let your startup get in the way of living a healthy life." I think that's really important. At the end of the day, what's most important is health, family. I made sure while I was working on HashiCorp that I continued to pursue my life. The best example of that is I met Amy, got married, and I do my best to be an attentive and loving husband every day. Work can wait, it can always wait.

More directly work related, though: I take breaks!

I think people look at how much HashiCorp has done or how productive I've been personally or whatever and think I just work all the time. And that's just not true.

I cook myself breakfast and eat with my wife every morning. I take a full hour lunch break, often sitting outside, watching YouTube, doing something not work. I take an hour in the afternoon a few times a week to work out. I stop at 530 PM every day to help with dinner and eat, again usually with my wife.

I usually go back to the computer around 8 PM until 11 PM. I don't usually work on HashiCorp-related things here. I try to just improve myself as an engineer. Or sometimes I just play video games. 🤖

Mitchell Hashimoto Great advice! People often underestimate the power of breaks and taking time off. I hope this reinforces the fact that "breaks" are good.

Hey Michael Winick, I think you mixed HashiCorp with Hashnode 🙂

You can ask our co-founder Sandeep anything in this thread

I think you'll find answers to your questions there 🙂

I've made a lot of mistakes! I'll bring up a few.

Misidentifying our target market. Our original commercial product we built ultimately fell hard for a lot of reasons, but one big one was we were trying to build something that individuals would like and large Global 2K companies. That might be possible but its really hard. When we decided to focus in on Global 2K and "enterprise," we were much more successful. This mistake though ended up costing us years of engineering time.

Not solidifying processes quick enough. It may seem crazy, but its better to start thinking about and implementing consistent processes to product development and so on earlier than later. We didn't do it in earnest until we had maybe 50 people in product/engineering. We're still digging ourselves out of that hole. Before then we just kind of jumped around and worked on what needed to be worked on. That's productive for awhile but breaks down eventually!

I'll just leave it at that... but its always a bumpy road!

In your opinion, what is the best way to recruit and retain a great team?

I think our principles cover the core things best: hashicorp.com/our-principles

I think above everything else, people want to work at a place that is friendly, they feel respected, and there is humility. Egos are not fun, political games are not fun, being attacked or harassed is not fun (also just wrong), etc. It doesn't matter how rewarding the work you're doing is, I think these qualities override that.

Once you have that in place, you can focus on ensuring people have rewarding things to work on. Or, if they're not particularly rewarding, ensure that they have a path to rewarding things. Let's face it: some stuff we have to work on is a slog, its not fun but has to be done. That's okay. But timebox that, be able to say "we have to do this the next 6 months, but then we'll make sure you get to work on something different." As a manager, I think its your responsibility to helping your reports achieve their goals while also being happy. So, the manager should be thinking about this.

What are some interesting ways to promote and monetize Open Source work?

Monetization is still hard. I think Adam Jacob did a good job for listing business models here: sfosc.org/business-models The business model that'll work for you is highly dependent on the type of software you've created.

Monetization to me means: a business. When people say "how do I monetize open source work" the question is really "how do I start a business?" That's important because I think people sometimes think: "how do I get paid to write code on this project" but the REALITY is far far more complex: writing code is a tiny aspect, how do you build a business? Do you even want to build a business?

If you don't want to build a business, you have only one option: get paid to write code through the patronage of someone else. That means donations or employer-sponsored or whatever. The downside to this is you have zero control over your destiny, the patron has 100% control of your destiny. If they decide to stop funding you next week, then whelp, you're out of luck.

There are interesting companies like Tidelift attempting to help maintainers monetize. I think there is a big need for that for sure, but I don't see that as a panacea for the maintainer to be able to just dedicate time to their project. I think you'll inevitably be stuck with support, training, etc. at a bare minimum.

What non-technical aspects do you examine when hiring engineers?

Non-technical aspects are the primary thing I and our company examines when hiring engineers. I hate to break it to most engineers, but being able to understand systems, code, etc. is not the hard part. It's not what makes an engineer special. Of course we expect technical ability, but this quality isn't particularly difficult to find.

Our interviews primarily examine teamwork, conflict management, and alignment with our principles: hashicorp.com/our-principles Kindness, humility, pragmatism. These are things that are unfortunately much more difficult to find!

Concretely, one of the interview questions (a coding question) we ask is impossible in the time we give you to do it. We give you a task that would take maybe 60 or more minutes and give you 15 minutes to do it. Yes, we expect you to do something technically correct, but we're mostly interesting in how you react non-technically. Oh also, the code we give you to get started with is hideous, poor quality, poor tests, also straight up broken in places.

Some people react with anger: "this isn't fair! its impossible! only idiots would write code like this!" Well, that's not very nice (and seriously, we've heard it all here). Some people react by being totally frozen, they have no idea what to do because the time constraint is too much. That's not the point either. Some people fixate on the fact that the code is so ugly, and start cleaning it up. 15 minutes later, they've done nothing except make whitespace line up. Yikes. What we're looking for is someone who says: "okay, I don't think I can do everything, but what's most important is some of X, some of Y, and what you get in the end is Z." It isn't complete, but its an improvement, and they've justified the improvement. Just one example...

Lastly, do you think cats are cuter than dogs? 😃

I'm a dog person. 🐶 Sorry! twitter.com/mitchellh/status/1050873078614355969

So your interview would involve giving me horrible broken code, impossible deadlines, and then I'll be spending that time justifying why it has to be fixed first? I'm not sure I'd want to work there after that...

Sorry I haven't answered this, this is a really big question and difficult to answer without just typing for hours and hours. I've learned a lot of lessons, I've made numerous mistakes. It's hard to pinpoint them in the moment also because there is so much context around them.

I think my one tip I'd give, and I mentioned this in detail in another answer so for full detail check that out: starting a company of any form is so much more than the technical bits. For me, the technical bits were easy, a given. But you still need to build out support, sales, marketing, etc. And each of those is just as hard in their own way as the core product and technology. It is a big undertaking.

I don't want to discourage people from starting companies though! It has been very rewarding, I had no idea what I was doing going into it, and I am doing okay. You can too. But I also didn't realize how hard it would actually be.

Thank you!

My entrepreneurial journey started very early. I started trying to make some money for myself back in middle/high school by building little programs I'd sell people. I sold a program that did algebra for example. I did some other things.

I don't really know why I did that. My parents took good care of me and provided everything I needed, and I didn't really want for much. But still, I thought money added some tangible success factor to what I was doing and I liked that.

Building tools for developers can be rough. They're highly critical of the work and there can sometimes be an attitude of "I could've done a way better job than you." That's not fun. Further, monetizing developers is difficult because of similar attitudes: why pay for something you can build yourself? To be fair, I've been like this in the past too, I think it's natural.

But, that's being quite critical. Developers are also great because in open source they're much more willing and able to contribute! They are patient early adopters because they understand that software has bugs. Etc.

My standard workstation:

• 5K iMac. I bought this thing 4 years ago and its still perfect.
• 2018 MacBook Pro. No touch bar (👹) Bleh. My 2014 MacBook Air was still the best laptop I ever owned.
• Vim
• A bunch of CLI tools.

That's it really. I don't use anything fancy.

There aren't great book resources across the board. There is a great Terraform book (google "Terraform book"). The best way to learn though is our new learn platform: learn.hashicorp.com More content is being added all the time and if you look a year from now I think you'll find it dramatically different cause its getting so much attention right now.

Pen and paper! Also: regular schedules including breaks.

I don't really use any software tools to help me with productivity beyond just normal bog-standard development tools (Vim, I don't use an IDE, I don't use a debugger, a browser, etc.)

I write a lot of human language before I write computer language. 🙃 I plan things out to a pretty detailed degree. For example before starting Terraform, I think Armon and I collectively wrote about 60 to 80 pages of Google Docs thinking through how it'd work before we wrote ANY code.

After having that detail, I think of a component I want to build, and then usually break that component down to tasks that are achievable in less than an hour. Then, I focus in on that task and while I'm working on a task I do nothing else. I don't use any tools for this although a lot exist, I just focus in. When that task is done, I feel a sense of achievement, happiness, and usually take a break.

I think this "bite-size" task is really important. If you look at any problem holistically, its just too large. If you work on something too long without seeing results, its easier to get demotivated. I recognized this early on in myself, so in high school I started breaking things down into achievable goals first. And that has been key!

Breaks are really important, and I think its why I like working remotely so much. I actually take quite frequent breaks: stopping for 10 or 15 minutes every hour or so. To some bosses that may seem wasteful, but I think my past can show I am productive, and its mentally helpful. I like to sit outside and have a coffee, or just sit.