Kalix’s Newest Version – Hugh McKee, Lightbend

This is Textron tv. Hey everyone. Welcome back to techron tv.

I'm really happy to have a first time guest on our show, and I think it's the first time we've covered this company. Let me introduce you to Hugh McKee. Hugh is with a company called Light Bend, and uh, Hugh is a developer, developer advocate for Lightbend.

Hugh, welcome to Tech Drunk tv. It's a pleasure to have you on here. No, thanks a lot for having me.

Excellent. So, Hugh, before we jump into Lightbend and we, we talk a little bit about that and, and some of the news we want to cover today. You know, uh, let's hear kinda a little bit of Hugh's journey and how you came here to be a developer advocate today.

So, I sometimes hesitate to admit this, but I've been a professional developer for about 47 years now. So it's a long time. That Is a long time.

But I started when I was three, so, you know, I was just gonna say that you must have started in vitro or something, right? Yeah. But, uh, So I've been, uh, but think about it, you've seen a lot of, a lot of code under that bridge in 47 years.

Lot of Code. Yeah. And a lot of change.

A lot of change. Um, but, you know, the thing that brings me joy continuously in this job is, well, first I've never gone into management. It's one thing I've always been a developer and, and now I have this pretty cool job as developer advocate, but it's the, um, the innovation, the changes that keep rolling.

And it's just been that way for the last, you know, almost five decades for me and that, and it's like every year, every, every, you know, bit of time I say it, it just can't keep getting any better. But it does, you know, it's like what's happening right now is just incredible, uh, in the world. And I just, you know, I just love that stuff.

And so I've been developing, you know, kind of enterprise applications for most of that career. You know, backend applications, things like that. I, I worked for a long time at Heal Packard, did all kinds of different roles there, consulting, you know, enterprise it.

I've traveled all over the place, and now as a developer advocate, I get to evangelize technology to all the, you know, all the, the people out there, which I absolutely, um, am thrilled to be, have, have that opportunity to do it because it's so much fun to talk about this new stuff, like what we have at, uh, lighten. Mm-hmm. A absolutely.

And that's great, man. Right? It's interesting, right after all these years of being a developer now, now to be a developer advocate, and think back 47 years ago, 40 years ago, there was no such thing as a developer advocate.

There wasn't a, you know, that this is a whole, I mean, I think, so I've, I've been in technology a little bit myself, you know, and over those years I've hired a lot of salespeople, enterprise salespeople, right? Mm-hmm. Who you paid big money and they, you know, wind and dined the CIOs and so forth.

And when you think about how software is, is distributed and, and sold today, those, I mean, there's still a role for them in some kinds of software, but for a lot of the developer tools, it really is about getting the hand, getting your software or to SaaS, whatever it may be, in the hands of the developers and letting them see for themselves, right? If, if the dog hunts or not. And, and so the role of the advocate, the evangelist is it's rep.

It's not a sales job, but it's replaced in many ways, the salesperson from, you know, in terms of getting, getting software into people's hands and hopefully delivering delight. And then, you know, the software sort of sells itself, if you will, if it does what it you claim it's supposed to do. Yeah.

And in this role, it's interesting because you're, you really are forced to, to present it if keeping the benefit of the person that you're talking to or the people that you're talking to in mind, you know, as a developer, why is this important to you? Or why should, you know, why should it be interesting to you? So it's, it is just like you're saying, it's, it's, it's, you can't sell it, you know?

In fact, you don't get into conferences to speak if you're gonna sell something, you have to teach, Well, maybe once, but they'll never invite you back. Right, Exactly. So, yeah, no, we've found that out for sure.

Yeah, for sure. So, Lightbend, though again, company, many of us out here may not be familiar with. Why don't you give us the scoop on that?

So Lightbend is a really interesting company. It's been around, I think around 11 years or so now, um, maybe 12. And it started out with, uh, Jonas Bonier.

And, um, he was the, the main drive behind, um, a, um, software toolkit as it's called now, called aka. And aka was, um, bringing the actor model, which was a first conceived back in the seventies, you know, back when I was getting started. Uh, and bringing that to Java, the Java community, and, uh, the scholars community.

So, um, it's a really interesting programming approach for how you do software actors. Are these in, you know, kind of independent objects? They have all kinds of interesting behavioral patterns and things like that.

I, I could talk about it forever, but it's a very natural thing for distributed systems, you know, so 1, 1, 1 of the biggest features of Vaca was, uh, is, uh, building clustered systems. So actors are talking to each other, you know, via messaging across clusters, but from a software perspective that they don't, the actors really don't know that they're talking over the network or talking within the same process. It's all very, uh, transparent and abstracted away.

And, um, and then now we've, uh, we've been building on that for a long time, aka, uh, AKA's, um, over 10 years old as as well, of course. And now we're building on, on top of that with something called Calyx, which is a platform as a service, again, focused on backend systems and kind of making things, uh, a bit more simplified, uh, as far as from a developer standpoint with, and there's some really, really interesting characteristics of Calyx as well, that with its own abstractions that, um, uh, I could, I could talk forever about, but I'll try and convince About as much as possible. Let's dive in a little bit.

Let's dive into that a little bit. So Calyx is this platform as a service, right? Yep.

But it's, it's a developer platform to develop applications. Yes. And it being that it's as a service, I'm assuming it's a hosted service that that's offered in there.

Um, I mean, we've had, we've seen similar offerings in the market. Mm-hmm. You know, uh, similar kind, you know, platform as a service.

What, what are some of these enhanced developer experience features that a developer would say, man, I'd like to work in that. The, uh, the biggest one I think, and this is the one that drew me the most, is as a developer and where I'm telling people, like in my company as well as to the external world, I don't wanna go back to the old world. And what I mean by that is that with Calyx, it, um, it is, it's, I call it fully serverless.

And it's not just serverless code, but the database is serverless, the messaging is serverless. Kubernetes is service. All the infrastructure is there, all the advanced infrastructure is there for highly scalable distributed systems that are reliable, you know, because of the underlying things like Kubernetes and all that great stuff.

But at a, at a software development level, I don't have to deal with any of that. In fact, you know, even at, in the code, you don't even, um, make a connection to a database. I mean, you're, you are persisting data to a database, but there's a nice kind of, I think, very powerful, straightforward abstraction that's provided by the software development kit for doing that.

So the result is that I'm spending all of my time thinking about the design and implementation and coding of the application, and none of my time, which was getting to be more and more and more significant over the last few years, dealing with YAML files, you know, YAML for Kubernetes, you know, configuration this databases, message brokers, you know, provisioning, uh, servers in the cloud and so on. I mean, there's, all these things have gotten easier, but a lot of the responsibility has fallen on developers. And I know for me, and I, I know from, you know, a lot of us as developers, we spend a pretty significant chunk of our time in what I call non feature related development.

You know, all this stuff that enables us to run our applications and developer applications. And when you look at it from that perspective, and that's when I really kind of had my, you know, aha moment was like, wow, I'm spending ton of time learning about things like Kubernetes. 'cause it was new to, when it was new to me, learning about this database or that database, learning about all these different, say, cloud services and which ones should I use?

And all this stuff was like, now within Calyx, I'm focused on building event driven types of backend applications, you know, microservice types of applications in a really cool environment. And I'm all, my intellectual capacity is focused on that as a developer versus getting what I look at now as being distracted by yaml this and YAML that, you know, configure these services and all that stuff. And, you know, I, it's all important, but this, this extracts it all away.

So ACA loves Kubernetes, you know, it's an ideal platform for running a clustered system. Sure. But I had to deal with aca, uh, with Kubernetes and everything else, and databases with caly.

I'm getting a lot of the good that I had naca, you know, in building these distributed types of event driven systems without all that. And it's, to me, it's huge. To me, it's huge.

Like I say, I, I'm spoiled now. I, I can't go back. I'm not, you know, don't make me go back to the old ways of doing things because it's so much fun to just sink your teeth into cranking out features and, and the interesting patterns of that have emerged in building, uh, these types of, of systems that I just never could even dream of doing before.

Absolutely. Hugh, if you don't mind, I want to turn a little bit to the business end of things here. Um, you know, in addition to the rise of developer advocates and evangelists and all of that, the other big change, I think, in the way we get software in the developer's hands is we don't make 'em write a check front.

We, we let 'em, you know, try the software and hopefully it delivers the delight we're talking about. And, and then they can tell their powers that be, Hey, we should be using this. I want to purchase it, whatever.

Yeah. Um, you know, and they're usually monthly versus a big outlay of, you know, OPEX versus CapEx, all that stuff. Give us kind of the on-ramp here for, for Calyx, if you will, how Yeah.

Something like that. Yeah. And, uh, this is a, a recent announcement of ours, and it was a big bit of feedback that I provided as well as others, but I was really pushing, because initially QX has, has been out, uh, for just about, just about a couple years.

But initially the developer experience was, was, was highly emphasized on, well, you set up an account and then you go in and you do this. And I was pushing back on even setting up an account because I know that that's a kind of, um, a, a commitment that we have to make as a developer to, you know, what, whatever entity is providing this to us. And, you know, for a lot of what you're, just like what you're saying, developers like to investigate software and be as anonymous as possible.

Don't, you know, don't ask me for my information until I think this might be worth me letting you know, I'm interested. So the, the onboarding experience now is, the initial experience is fully anonymous in that you can grab the software, you can go through the documentation, you can write applications, building kit, you know, building applications, using the caly software development kit, and you can run 'em locally full, full local. And I mean, it's not capable of doing production, but it's, it's capable of doing enough.

That's really interesting. Like I, I, you know, my job is to write demos and I write demos that'll create, say, a couple thousand orders or something like that in a, you know, in some kind of a demo. It's got a capacity for that, but it's not, you know, it's not production capacity, but it's fully anonymous and you can really sink your teeth into it.

And then if you, if you are interested, which is what we're trying to, you know, get you interested, but you're really fully informed before you even have to let us know who you are, where you create an account, and then you can, you still have a free trial, but you know, a timer starts and you know, you, you gotta make that decision. But, so it's kind of a two stage process. There's a fully anonymous play with on your, your development, you know, your laptop or whatever your development environment is, Brady, go crazy with it, you know, take a look at some of the example code that we're cranking out as fast as possible.

And then if you, you like it, well, okay, now try going with the trial, actually deploy it to the KX platform, see how it behaves, you know, in, in the real platform. See what the deployment process is like, and then boom, you know, we hope, hopefully then we really got you excited and, and see the value of being able to do this with all the, all that infrastructure drama I was talking about a few minutes ago. You know, just what's, what's it like to be a, like a pure feature, you know, crank out features, headstone development, a event driven type of a, of a developer, which, like I say, it is, I I think it's a blast.

So, Absolutely. Very cool. Um, q we're running low on time.

Let, let's, uh, people who, you know, maybe we've wet their whistle here and they want to go further, like, what's the website? Where do they go For Kax? It's real easy.

io and so that's K L I X E. Exactly. It's a city IO River in Sweden.

You know, a lot of our engineers are from Sweden. CCA is a mountain in Sweden. Sweden.

So ca io and very quickly, I mean, you, you hit kind of the, you know, the, the high level material, but there's links very quickly to go straight into the developer site and you can find out about the onboarding experience. I was just talking about the documentation and how to get started, and it's pretty quick. Um, so that's, that's it.

Okay. So Calyx io and you could jump from there. Hugh, I want to thank you for coming on today and telling us about Calyx and a little bit about Light Bend.

And thank you for what you do, man. It's, you know, it's pretty cool. You're obviously a voice of experience as I am, and it, and it's good to see, you know, passing it on and, and making our knowledge available to people Exactly.

In new stuff. Good stuff, man. Keep it up.

Thanks A lot. I really appreciate it. All right, Huma key developer advocate at Lightbend here on Tech Drunk tv.

We're gonna take a break. We'll be right back.