(click) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at Node Summit 2017 in San Francisco at the Mission Bay Convention Center. We've been coming here for years. A really active community, a lot of good mojo, about 800 developers here. About to the limits that the Mission Bay center can hold. Now we're excited to have our next guest. He just came off a panel. It's Jacob Groundwater. He's an engineering manager for Electron at Github. Jacob, welcome. >> Thank you, it's great to be here. >> So really interesting panel, Electron. I hadn't heard about Electron before, I was kind digging in a little bit while the panel was going on, but for the folks that aren't familiar, what is Electron? >> Yeah. Electron, there's a good chance that people who haven't even heard of it might already be using it. >> (chuckles) That's always a good thing. >> Yeah. Electron is a project that's started by Github and it's open source and you can use it to build desktop applications but with web technologies. We're leveraging the Google Chrome project to do a lot of that. And Node. And Node. Node.js is a big part of it as well. >> So build desktop apps using web technologies. >> Yep. >> And why would somebody want to do that? >> You know, I think at the root of that question, it's always the same answer which is just economics right now. Developers are in demand, software developers are in demand. The web is taking over and the web is becoming the most common skillset that people have. So you get a few benefits by using Electron. You get to distribute to three platforms automatically, you get Linux, Mac, and Windows. Sometimes it's like super easy. Sometimes you do a little bit of building to get that to happen, but it's, you know, you could cut your team size down by maybe two thirds if you do it that way. >> Wow, that's a pretty significant cut. Now you said one 1.0 released year, and how's the, how's the adoption? >> I actually can't even keep up with the number of applications that are being published on top of Electron. I'm often surprised, I'll go to a company and I'll say, oh I work on Electron at Github. And they'll be like, oh we're developing an Electron app, or we're working on an Electron app. So it, it's kind of unreal. Like I've never really been in this situation before where something that I'm working on is being used so much. I think it's out, it's out there, it's in production, it's running in millions of laptops and desktops. >> Yeah. That's great though, 'cause that's the whole promise of software, right? That's why people want to get into software. >> Yeah. >> 'Cause you can actually write something that people use and you can change the world. It could be distributed all over the world with millions of users before you even know it. >> There's this wonderful thought of like writing something once and then it running in millions of places potentially. I just love it. I love it. I think it's super cool. Yeah. So as it's grown what have been some of the main kind of concerns, issues, what are some of the things you're managing within that growth that's not pure technical? >> Yeah. That's a great question. One of the biggest things that I found interesting is when I got on our website and check the analytics, it's almost uniform across the globe. People are interested in it from everywhere. So there's challenges like, right now I had to set up a core meeting to talk about some of the like, updates to Electron and that had to be at midnight pacific time because we had to include the Prague time zone, Tokyo time zone, and Chennai in India. And we're trying to see if we can squeeze in someone from Australia. And just the global distributive nature of Electron, like people around the world are working on this and using it. >> Right. The other part you mentioned in the session, was the management of the community. And you made an interesting, you know, we go to a lot of conferences, everyone's got their code of conduct published these days which is kind of sad. It's good, but it's kind of sad that people don't have basic manners it seems like anymore. We've covered a lot of opensource communities. One that jumps to mind is OpenStack and watch that evolve over time and there's kind of community management issues that come up as these things grow. And you brought up, kind of an interesting paradigm, if you've got a great technical contributor who's just not a good person for, I don't know you didn't really define kind of the negative side but got some issues that may impact the cohesiveness of the community going forward, especially because community is so important in these projects. But if you got a great technical mind, I never really heard that particular challenge. >> I think it comes up a lot more than people realize. And it's something that I think about a lot. And one thing I want to focus on is, what we're really zeroing in on is bad behavior. >> Bad behavior. That was the word. >> And not a bad person. >> Right, right. >> One of the best ways to, to maybe get around that happening is to set an expectation early about what is acceptable behavior and alert people early when they're doing things that are going to cause harm to the community or cause harm to others. And also frame it in a way where they know, we're trying to keep other people safe, but we're also trying to keep those offenders, give them the space to change. If you choose not to change, that's a whole different story. So I think that by keeping the community strong, we encourage people around the globe to work on this project and we've already seen great returns by doing this far, so that's why I'm really focused on keeping it, keeping it a place where you know you can come and show up and do your work and do your best work. >> Right. Right. Well hopefully that's not taking too many of your cycles, you don't got too many of those, of those characters. >> Every hour I put in, I get like 10s and 20, like hours and hours back in return from the people who give back. So it's well worth it. It's the best use of my time. >> Alright good. So great growth over the year. As you look forward to next calendar year, kind of what are some of your priorities? What are some of the community's priorities? Where is Electron going? And if we touch base a year from now, what are we going to be talking about? >> Excellent question. So strengthening, formalizing some aspects of the community that we have so far, it's a little ad hoc, would be great. We want to look to having people outside of Github that feel more ownership over the project. For example, we have contributors who probably should be reviewing and committing code on their own, without necessarily needing to loop in someone from my team. So really turning this into a community project. In addition, we are focusing up on what might go into a version 2 release. And we're really focusing on security as a key feature in version two. >> Yeah, security's key and it's got to be baked in all the way to the bottom. >> Yeah. >> Alright Jacob, well it sounds like you've got your work cut out for you >> Thank you. and it should be an exciting year. >> Yeah, thanks very much. >> Alright. He's Jacob Groundwater. He's from the Electron project at Github. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. We'll see you next time. Thanks for watching. (sharp music)