Jonathan Ellis on working on cassandra to starting datastax remotely

Hobbies & Favorite past time 

Shubhanshu

Welcome to the new episode of the remote podcast by crewscale. And today we are having our guest, Jonathan Ellies is Co-founder and CTO of Data stax, which is a company based out of us. It’s a decade old company. And you know, this is doing really, really well. And I’m Shubhanshu, your host, CTO of Crewscale. So we start the conversation. Welcome to the podcast. Jonathan. Thanks a lot for taking the time out and speaking to us. Delighted to join you. Yes, sorry. I’m delighted to join you. Thank you. Absolutely. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Thank you for this. So, before, before we start, I just wanted to know more about you. I mean, apart from work for what what, what are the hobbies? What are the different things that you do on a personal note to keep you unwinded? And keep you out of stress? What exactly is as a person, right? So just wanted to a bit curious about this piece.

Jonathan  

Yeah, with the pandemic, a lot of the things that I was doing, were not available anymore. So I had to pick up some new hobbies. So I started working on generative art. So art, which is art, that’s no created with code, but with randomness components, so that no two pieces generated by the same algorithm are the same. So I’ve been a fan of generative art for a while, especially the work of an artist named Tyler Hobbs. And so I decided to, you know, start making art myself and it worked. It’s going pretty well. And then on the more physical side, I actually started skateboarding in my 40s last year. So I actually do have one accident story there, which is that I landed on my wrist. And it was a pretty hard fall. And I thought it might be broken. So I went to see the doctor. And there were 2x Ray technicians. There was a man and a woman. And the woman said, you know, what happened to your wrist? And I said, I fell on it skateboarding. And she’s like, Oh, I’m so sorry. And the man says, Wow, cool. So, you know, just just a little bit of a different reaction there. Absolutely.

How to manage remote work with kids around 
Shubhanshu  

This is very interesting. Absolutely. So as we spoke last time, Jonathan, you have five kids at home and looking at the work from home scenarios. Just wanted to knew we know your views about it. I mean, how you’re managing your work, and that can be a good incentive for a lot of a lot of people working from home having you know, stress about their kids. And so what to understand from you how you are managing this work from home with the five kids at home.

Jonathan  
Yeah, so I started working from home full time, when I started data stacks, no 11 years ago, and at the time, I only had three kids. So I’ve added two more since then. But it’s, it is important to as much as possible, if you can carve out a space in your home, that’s your workspace. And so for me, that for the first couple years, I was literally working from inside my closet. So I didn’t have any other space in the house that I could, you know, separate myself from the kids. And so, you know, it is, you know, to the degree possible, and I know, it’s not always possible, but I feel a lot more productive when I’m able to have that separate space. And especially if you can have a door that closes, that door kind of symbolizes the difference between, okay, I’m working, versus I’m, you know, I’m in, you know, Dad mode and husband mode and so forth. So, my, the second answer I would give to that question is, you know, especially during, you know, the, the pandemic, you know, last 18 months, so, my had kids at home, when they ordinarily would have been at school, you know, so now they’re a little older, now my youngest is seven, so eat, so he’s going to school too. But you know, having the kids at home all the time, you know, was, it was difficult for my wife, it was difficult for me. But one of the things that I do like about working from home is that I don’t need to be super rigid about my working hours. So rather than saying, I’m working from nine to six, or whatever, and trying to be, you know, completely focused on work during that time, I think one of the advantages of working from home is that, you know, I can, you know, help get the kids ready for school in the morning, then work for a while, then, you know, have lunch with my 18 year old and then you know, go back to work, and then pick up the younger kids from school and then work some more. So having that flexibility to say, you know what, it’s okay to step away from work, and interact with my kids again, especially when they were at home all day. I think that was a big advantage to working from home and be used to working from home and not just like, you’re trying to figure it out as an emergency situation that we’re not used to.

Casio cassondra journey
Shubhanshu
Awesome, awesome. I think that that’s really enlightening. I want to speak a bit, and this is my favorite portion. So I want to understand from you about Casio cassondra journey, right? Open Source. You know, typically open sources, anti capitalism, right, so you’re not earning anything out of it. Right. But at the same time, you feel really awesome to contribute. Right. So what is your motivation level? And you said, as a chairman of that, Cassandra, Apache Cassandra community for a very long time. So what’s your what’s your motivation for a lot of people, you know, that that will be really helpful for a lot of people to understand how they can be more contributing towards open source. So from from your side, what’s your view? for that? What is your motivation?

Jonathan  
So I’ve, I’ve been exposed to open source as a, you know, as a kind of a hobbyist as someone who’s contributing, you know, on a, on a spare time basis. So before, you know, working on Cassandra, before, starting datastax, I, you know, I was a big fan of the Python programming language. Cassandra, of course, is in Java, much higher performance than Python. But Python has an elegance to it, that that I really appreciated. And so, you know, I spent some time you know, 15 or so years ago, contributing to a Python project called SQL alchemy, for instance. And so, you know, that was something that I was using at work, and it was useful to me, but also I enjoyed the, you know, the challenge of, you know, contributing to this project that was useful to lots and you went to millions of people. But, I think, four, I think, so there’s the world of new people contributing part time like that, where it’s just like, kind of partly motivated by improving the software but also partly motivated by The spirit of community and you know, giving back. And then there’s the other world, which is more the more corporate, open source and Cassandra falls into this category, the Linux kernel falls into this category where most of the contributors are paid by a company to work on on that open source project. And so, you know, it is. Yeah, it is. It’s not traditional capitalism. But I think I think it is still a form of capitalism, because you’re datastax is paying a team of people to work on Cassandra, because Cassandra helps us get customers, both for our new enterprise distribution of Cassandra, and also our streaming stuff. Sorry, our cloud service, of course, for Cassandra. So and we’re doing the same thing in the streaming space with Apache pulsar. So I’m going to back up just a little bit in time, the way that I started contributing to Cassandra, I wasn’t one of the original authors. Cassandra was created by a handful of engineers at Facebook. And they open sourced it in the summer of 2008. And I had been hired by a American hosting company called Rackspace. And they said, We need you to build us a scalable database. And so I looked at New the no SQL databases that were super, super young at the time. So there was MongoDB, there was h base. Companies that aren’t around anymore. basho had react. And I really liked Cassandra’s foundational technology. And I knew that to to build a scalable database for Rackspace, when it’s effectively just me working on it at first, I would need to build on open source rather than trying to start from something completely new it in. And so that’s what I started doing. I started contributing to Cassandra, I became the first committer outside of Facebook. And later on, I became the project chair. So that’s an example of where Rackspace was motivated to pay me to work on Cassandra full time to solve their problems. And other companies were doing that as well. So Netflix was an early Cassandra adopter Apple was an early Cassandra adopter. And so in a similar way, you know, those companies are funding people to work on Cassandra as well. So that’s a long answer to your question. But I do think that the larger the open source project is, the more likely it is to be funded in that kind of corporate contribution or model.

Unique open source experience 
Shubhanshu 
Absolutely. So that thanks a lot for you know, providing this kind of insight in open source, any, any story or anything, would you like to share about your open source experience, which, which was something which was very unique or something which you faced, or let’s say you try to develop as a module, though, you have any instance of that sort?

Jonathan  
Well, so as I mentioned, I started working on Cassandra, I was in Texas, and your Facebook is in California, so I wasn’t near the Facebook, Cassandra engineers. And, you know, the other people that started working on early Cassandra. Know, I’m thinking way, way, way back, one of the engineers was in London and other was in the East Coast of the United States. So we were, you know, very, very remote from each other. And, as I, you know, started working on that. And, you know, started, you know, I started data stacks, I started trying to hire +people to come work on Cassandra with me, I wanted to keep that open source model of, I will, you know, hire smart people anywhere in the world. And I don’t want that to be an obstacle to, you know, being able to work with them. So the classic so we did move our corporate headquarters to California, which was something that our investors advised us to do. And from a sales standpoint, they were right. It was good to have the headquarters there. But we we’ve been very clear for the entire history of the company that your engineering could be distributed and engineers could work from anywhere. And I think that, you know, kind of the rest of the industry is It’s kind of catching up to understanding that, you know, thanks to COVID-19. You know, they were forced to figure out how to make that work. And now they’re realizing Oh, like, that can be a good way to build teams, even when there’s not a pandemic. And so, yeah, I really like the the whole management philosophy behind distributed teams. And what I mean by that is, if I’m, if I’m leading a team in an office, the human mind is biased. And it will think like, Oh, you know, pushpak is, you know, he’s a funny guy, when we sit next to each other at lunch, or lunch. And I really like the jokes that he tells, or Jonathan comes in early and stays late. And I really like seeing him in the office. And when you’re distributed, you don’t have any of that, all you have is pushpak is writing great code, and solving problems, and, you know, creating value for our customers. And it’s, it’s almost like, it’s as close to a purely fair system, as I think we can get. So I really like that that part of it. And I also know, we’ve talked about a little bit about the work life flexibility. So between those two, I think it’s I think it’s the right way to, to build teams and companies.

Managing a distributed team remotely
Shubhanshu
Absolutely. I think a very important thing is that you were able to vision, this whole thing when you started data stax, right? So you’re able to visualize that remote and distributed team is something which can be very, very productive, right? So at that point of time, when, you know, work from home was not a compulsion, right. So that that is something that, you know, I would like to understand what was the main convincing factor, because this is something which you’re going out of the way and you know, creating something, some some different philosophy for your own right? To have any kind of helping material how to be more productive, or you cannot learn from people. Right? So. But still, you took a call to go for a completely distributed team, right? So what did you understand what motivated you or not? Not exactly? motivation? But what are the factors, which actually, you know, was very prevalent in your mind saying that, okay, if I do this, you know, this is a clear cut winner, for me a distributed team is a clear cut. Yeah. So what was those points?

Jonathan 
I mean, so it’s kind of like the open source philosophy of scratching your own itch. Like you, you work on open source to solve a problem that you’re experiencing. And distributed teams were kind of like that, for me. I did not want to move to California. So I needed to have a way to run engineering teams that could let me stay in Texas. And so and I think that one of the things we found is that the the mix of having that, you know, work life flexibility, and that your egalitarian management model is particularly attractive to more senior engineers, who you know, are hitting the time of life where they’re in relationships, and they’re starting families and so forth. So basically, I was I was solving a problem that I knew what I wanted to solve for my own family situation. Okay, that’s, that’s

Future of work culture – in office , hybrid or remote 
Shubhanshu  
That’s a very good analogy, I mean, a very good example, that he told about open source philosophy. So what do you think of the offices that are dead? Or is it going to be hybrid, or it’s going to be completely remote? What’s the future? You see? What’s your view on that?

Jonathan
I think that the trend right now is towards hybrids. And what if you’re thinking about doing a hybrid, what you need to be very careful of is falling into the trap of treating the remote employees as second class somehow. And you know, a simple example is if I hold a meeting, in an office building, and I have three people on my team in the meeting room with me, and I have four people on my team on a screen on the wall joining remotely. It’s very, very difficult for those four people in the room, you know, to give equal weight To the people that are remote. And so the way you solve that problem is you say, if you’re serious about doing hybrid, you need to say, even if you’re in the office together, if you are doing a meeting where people are remote, everyone needs to be on a laptop on their own and not in not in the room together so that everyone is on an equal. field. Yes.

Shubhanshu    
So taking a hint from the example that he gave, you know, that’s, again, a thought that I had personally, in my mind. So either, you can actually have a completely in office kind of a setup. Or you can go for a remote kind of setup. I think hybrid is something that might face challenges, as you mentioned. And let’s say even if you talk about scenarios where you have a personal life, you have families, right? So even if you have a hybrid model, you have to, you know, relocate anyways, right? So the problem is not solved, right? So either. So, let’s see, let’s see how things will evolve in the future. But it will be an interesting thing to watch. Yeah.

Jonathan  

Yeah, I think people are looking at it and saying, I can have the best of both worlds. But it’s really easy to get the worst of both worlds instead. So that said, no Data stax is trying to make hybrid work now. Or we will in the very near future, because we do have that headquarters in California, we’re going to be opening that back up, we’re going to be getting the you know, the the members of accounting, the members of HR that are used to working in that office together, we’re going to start start bringing them back in. And so yeah, we will, we will, in fact, see how it goes.

Major challenges while being completely remote 
Shubhanshu
Absolutely. So any major challenge that you face, while being complete remote, as you mentioned, like a very good example that, you know, being involved in a meeting is something which is a challenging part. So apart from that, If you face any major challenges, which which are in something, some some something which was not there in office kind of setup, but at the moment, we are at work from home, and this is a very big issue. So yeah, any challenge in that any any scenario or any challenges?

Jonathan  
So there’s there’s two challenges that I think, in particular, that I don’t have great solutions for, and I think that we collectively, as an industry need to figure out better answers for. So one of them is, you know, completely new graduates, like you’re hiring someone with no previous work experience, and saying, Okay, now, here’s your laptop, and you’re going to be on zoom calls with your team. That’s super, super difficult for them. Because there’s the there’s a barrier to collaboration in that environment where, you know, if I have a problem, and I need to reach out to a senior engineer to help me solve it, it just feels more intimidating. If I have to do that over email, or over slack or over zoom. versus if the, you know, my coworker is in the cubicle right next to me, and I can just say, you know, hey, do you have a minute to look at this. And so, you know, when after you have a few years of experience working, then you you kind of understand intuitively where that line is of when to, you know, kind of escalate those problems, as you know, loop in other members of your team or, or your team lead. But as a brand new to the workforce. That’s something that just about everyone struggles with. So that would be the first one. And then the second one is kind of what we’ve experienced over the last year where not only are we are we distributed, but we’re distributed 100% of the time. And I think the I think the best option is to be distributed 99% of the time. In other words, it’s very helpful to have a team meeting in person, you know, every six months or every 12 months, but you need to get that time, face to face where you can, you know, share drinks, where you can share food and interact with each other, not just on a purely transactional working basis. And so, you know, during COVID-19 You know, we’ve hired a bunch of new employees that nobody has ever met, and so you don’t have that. Same kind of social capital, as you do with people that you’ve met in person in your more, you know, social environments. So hopefully, you know, with no Vex vaccination going up, we’ll be able to start doing that again soon. But if we were, I don’t, I don’t know how, or if it’s a good idea to try to be 100%, remote 100% of the time.

Cross Cultural barriers 

Shubhanshu 

So, a scenario I would like to present in front of you. So another angle on, let’s say, being completely remote. So you might be a cross cultural team as well. So for example, you might be having few Indian guys to Chinese guys, few Eastern European people, right? Or maybe from Europe or South America, right. So that actually have a lot of cultural barriers. So for example, if Indians are cracking a joke, which might be a very good local, slap, but not be understood by others, or a set of people. So that I think is a is a major cultural gap that has to be built in a completely distributed team as well. Looks like but as you said, Yes, it’s a very interesting problem to solve. Let’s see. There’s no clear cut answer to that.

Jonathan 

Yeah, I think, yeah, there’s, yeah, um, so like, my, my inner, so I have a lot of, I have a lot of Scandinavian ancestors. So my, my grandparents were no Olsen’s and Johnson’s, and you know, Erickson’s, and so forth. So I kind of have I, I definitely have a, an empathy or an attraction to kind of that that Nordic bluntness that you often get. And, you know, it does throw off some Americans, I think, but I like that, that kind of thing. So I think the answer is just primarily well, so there’s two answers. Three answers. first answer is, No, there is a common ground, like we have the common language of, you know, business, we do business in English. So we’ve got a couple Italian engineers on the team. And when they’re discussing technical problems, they discuss them, you know, in English for the benefit of everyone else. So that’s kind of obvious. But then the second one, that’s a little squishy around the kind of cultural thing you’re referring to. I think it just comes down to, you know, be understanding and, you know, assume, assume good intent, rather than trying to think of like, you know, that, you know, Did, did he mean to be offensive, just like, Oh, no, he probably meant this, you know, innocuous thing. And just assuming that people mean, well, and that you’re on the same team and striving for the same goals. The third thing is that, and this, this is another thing where, you know, I guess I’m not, you know, I’m not 100%, remote 100% of the time again, which is that it does help if you have some overlap in the time zones. And so datastax hires, primarily in American time zones, and European time zones, because when you get to Asian time zones, it’s just, there’s very, it’s very difficult to get synchronous, face to face communication times. So very early on at datastax, we had a new an engineer that we wanted to hire in Japan. And so he knew he was super independent. And he had already started writing patches for Cassandra and giving presentations on Cassandra in Japan, without any training from us. And so I said, No, of course, we want to hire you like you’re obviously very, very good. And so we we did, we hired him, and I knew that it was going to be hard working with him across the 13 hours or so the time difference, but it was even harder than I thought it would be. And even as independent as he was, it was hard for both of us, it was hard for him because there was literally nobody else within you know, eight or so hours, like the closest people were in Europe. And it was hard for me as well trying to manage him at that at that distance, and you’re helping, you know, again, you’re always going to come out up against a you know, a part of the code that no somebody else wrote and you You’re one Ask him what were you thinking when you wrote this? And you know, that engineers asleep for the next four hours, like, it’s just harder. Fortunately, there’s actually a happy ending to that story, which is that he already said that he wanted to move to the United States. And so we got him a VSA in Texas, actually, for five years. And, and he’s actually he’s still with the company, he moved back to Japan. He’s raising his kids in Japan. But you’re not having had that experience of being closer for five years, you know, he can be independent now, you know, even from Japan. So again, like having that synchronous or that that closeness, you can kind of build that up in that like a bank account. And then you can you can spend it later, but you need to have it in the account first.

Favorite books 

Shubhanshu  

completely understand completely? Fine. So I think on the personal notes, are you how are you? I mean, do you favor reading books and how I’ve been? I’ve,

Jonathan  

yeah, I’ve been mostly reading nonfiction lately. But I’ll give you I’ll give you one recommendation for fiction. That is probably not something you hear a lot. And that is a series of graphic novels, called planetary. Planetary. And that’s by a writer named, I want to say it’s wearing Ellis, who’s not a relation. Yeah, it’s written by wearing LS who’s kind of famous in the comics industry. And it’s, it’s just very, very plot driven. Even though you know, it’s about superheroes. But the writing is great. The art is great. So I guess if I were going to say if you’re not, if you haven’t read graphic novels before, that’s probably not the one to start with. Maybe the one to start with is Batman Year One. Because everybody knows who Batman is. You kind of think you know, the character. But and I think it was Frank Miller, who wrote this one, he takes it in a more mature direction, not in the sense of mature means it’s super violent, but in the sense that mature means there’s more character development, and so forth. So that would be my recommendation to start with Batman Year One. If you’re already into graphic novels, and you think you might want to try something a little different, then look up planetary.

Non- Fictional books
Shubhanshu 
Any recommendations for non-fiction books that you’re reading lately?

Jonathan  
In nonfiction, let me look around my office and see what I’ve got, like. So the one right that I’m reading right now is called the Constitution of knowledge, a defensive truth by Jonathan Rouch, which is basically about how our society has gotten increasingly polarized. And this is from an American standpoint, up in large part because people can’t agree on a source of truth. And so you have no right wing Americans listening to different media and reading different media than left wing Americans. And so Jonathan Roush is saying, how do we like what are the principles upon which to rebuild a shared agreement on you know, this is this is truth. And we can start to, you know, create a mutual understanding from that.

Favorite Remote tools

Shubhanshu 

And since data stax is remote for a very long time, what are your favorite tools that you really like using any three? Can you name any three favorite remote tools?

Jonathan  

Yeah, so this one, I think, is a little bit. It’s obvious, but at the same time, I don’t know very many people who are using it. And that is using an iPad with the Apple Pencil. And so like three or four years ago, you had to buy an iPad Pro to use the iPad pencil and so it was news that was much more expensive. But today, the the entry level iPad supports Apple Pencil, and what that means is, you know, I can What I’ll do is I’ll get on a zoom call, like we’re on now, but I’ll join from my laptop. And I’ll also join from my iPad. And if we need to collaborate on diagrams, or even, you know, your take notes collaboratively, I’ll, I’ll use the iPad as the whiteboard. And so I’ll still have the camera on me from my laptop. But I’ll be able to use, you know, do handwriting and, you know, drawing diagrams with the Apple Pencil. And so that resolves one of the big reasons why, you know, people tell me, Hey, we can’t be remote, we need to be in an office. So we can whiteboard things together. Well, okay, technology solves that problem now. And you know, it costs, I think, is it $300 for an iPad and $100 for the Apple Pencil. So if you’re paying an engineer, you know, 1000s of dollars a year, you can afford an investment of $400, to make him or her, you know, more productive in that environment. So that would be the big one. And then the the other two that I would call out, or not specific pieces of technology, but more principles. So the first one is that, you know, when you’re doing video conferencing, you need good. You need good video, and you need good audio. And the way you you can get good video by buying expensive camera hardware. But generally, that’s not necessary, what is necessary is good lighting. And you can get a lighting setup for video conferencing for $50. So it’s, it’s very inexpensive, in terms of the capital required, it’ll take a little bit of time to set up the the lighting, tools, but it’s a good investment, and even a cheap laptop camera will give deliver good results, when there’s good lighting in the room. And then the other one that I think is maybe a little under-appreciated is the importance of good audio as well, and hear what comes with the laptop is not adequate. And so you know, even an expensive laptop, like you know, an apple laptop or whatever. Like they, one of the places they save money and save space is on the microphone and speakers. And so you can get a Bluetooth, no desktop microphone that can work with both your phone and your laptop for you know, 70 or so dollars, significantly higher audio quality, sync both, both from the speaker and from the microphone. And the microphone is really the important part for the benefit of the people that you’re communicating with.

Shubhanshu

Absolutely, especially the ipad as a collaborative tool could be super useful while working remotely.

I really appreciate the insights on open source, on remote communities and on the tech ecosystem. Thank you for your time. 

Jonathan Ellis

Thanks for having me on the show. It’s been a pleasure.