Those 5$/mo droplets let me explore a lot of software and run proper production-like benchmarks for my own learning.

Over time I moved a lot of my personal projects and infra over to DO (and started working on new ones now that I had a good provider to host them on).

And now with the new managed offerrings for the CORE technologies people need (databases, caches, K8S etc.) I'm happy to see that I can start being a little more productive with my side projects.

So, in essence I want to thank the people at DigitalOcean for what they've built and continue to build.

Our goal with DigitalOcean was always to help more people get involved with technology.

The community team that is one of the pillars of DigitalOcean was built by Etel. She herself went through this transition. She graduated college with a liberal arts degree and was working as a bartender because she couldn't get another job.

I gave her a book on programming and told her that if she figured it out I would figure out a way to get her a job. She indeed did figure it out and when DigitalOcean was able to start hiring, she was the first hire we made.

Initially she worked customer support, and soon after we put her in charge of building "community".

She wrote the first several hundred articles herself. She then went on to build an entire team of writers and editors and community managers. And that team also created amazing events both on a local scale as well as Hacktoberfest.

So many people have been thankful for to us for our articles and resources, but they wouldn't be what they are without people like Etel. It's really an expression of who she is and her beliefs and values as a person.

That's why we want to continue investing in community and ensure that those individual developers just getting started feel like they truly have a home at DigitalOcean. Because those are the very same people that built DigitalOcean in the first place.

It's surprising really that in all the praise I threw to DigitalOcean the awesome documentation and tutorials flew under my radar. That's not to say that I don't value them. Rather the complete opposite. They had become such an integral part of my life when getting my hands wet with a new technology or a tool or setting up any new software or system that I completely forgot that they were something that someone invested a lot of time writing.

I was still in college/starting out then and had never learned that most developers don't document things (let alone write tutorials). I believed there must be internal websites similar to DO's documentation and tutorials in each company and took DO for granted.

It'd be really great if you could share my thoughts about how great and instrumental the documentation and tutorials have been to Etel and the team specially.

Also, have a great weekend.

Seconded.

Thank you thank you thank you cloud providers for making compute power so cheap. I realize you do it because you know you will eventually make the money back 10000x over when we persuade our bosses to lock in to your ecosystem, but I don't care. (Capitalism is not perfect, but hey, sometimes it can be okay)

DO tutorials are amazing, by the way. I learned so many things from your docs, it shows a lot of hard work by some very talented people.

Programming in the 2010s and 2020s is kind of like union labor work back in the 1950 and 1960s: not instantaneous riches, but meaningful work that leads to a decent middle to upper class life.

Unfortunately, this won't last forever. Other countries are catching up to the U.S. quickly. Eventually, development will move to cheaper labor countries like so many other industries. What is frustrating though is that if the U.S. actually focused on developing its talent, we could maintain the lead for another decade or two longer than if we just sit on our hands. With that extra lead time, we could come up with the next major industry (AI-training? quantum computer programming?), but as it stands now, many other countries will be equally poised to jump on the next opportunity and we'll squander our lead forever.

People have been saying this for like 2 decades now when the magic buzz word then “offshoring” [0]. Offshoring and its cousins still happen as a cost-cutting measure, except not at the scale most people would imagine based on the enormous hype it received from “thought leaders”.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Is_Flat#Ten_flattene...

I think it is happening at the scale people imagined. The amount of foreign trade and offshoring that the U.S. is doing with developing countries is multiple orders of magnitude higher than it was in the early 1990s.

I've also seen cases where it clearly wasn't worth it. It just depends on the project, communication and company culture. There's something to be said for walking down a hallway to actually talk to someone.

Of course the disparity north to south is less so, as meetings can be aligned better... such as with say California, Washington, Arizona and Brazil. The fact is, value is value... if you're constantly learning and experimenting, you're ahead of the curve and can deliver value where others don't.

Agreed. I have several (very smart) coworkers in other countries. And our political system is an atrocious thing to watch these days. Whatever happened to compromise?

I don't think anybody really knows for sure what the future holds. The thing is with cloud computing and with the spread of technology into the developing world they will likely be needing engineers too.

Of course that may not happen if the software world is so carved up that all of the business goes to a handful of companies that are employing a fixed number of people and concentrating the gains.

And if Elon Musk has a breakthrough with neuralink, then maybe we'll all be out of a job. Why write code when you can think print('hello world')?

On the other hand, big players can get disrupted, technology can change, and its not like every human being has the capacity/stomach for the abstract problem solving we do day to day.

Outsourcing can, in some cases, raise additional obstacles to this goal through differences in language and/or culture, and every mistake here adds additional cost to the project. This isn't insurmountable, but usually I don't see this even considered when the question of outsourcing comes up.

That, and the group we outsourced to happened to be in a part of the world that was in the middle of a literal civil war, so staff sometimes couldn't work because staying alive was more important. Being aware of the near-future geopolitical situation of your people is important anywhere, and just kind of happens by osmosis when you're working domestically.

I very much look forward to Neuralink, but as you point out on the following line, this will also not turn non-programmers into programmers because the main hurdle is not knowing the syntax, but formulating thought into a structure that's useful for computers, and it seems most non-programmers do not have the mindset for it. Programmers are people who turn ideas into formal logic. Although some things can be automated there, I personally think the future's still bright for developers with people skills, wherever they may be.

DO's board has been atrocious (not you and Ben). The way they handled bonuses even the years that we were growing 40+% because we missed #'s due to factors outside any employees control, was a joke. The hiring of Mark Templeton was one of the absolute worst things that could have happened, he damn near put DO on the brink of destruction.

That said, it seems like Yancey is doing all the right things. The internal DO culture has been coddled for way too long and has been way to top heavy, predominately due to the revolving door of engineering leadership. Since I joined, I've seen Julia, Greg, Dizzy, now Al w/ Barry... and that's been what like 3.5 years?

The Boards support of the current GC is also astonishing, he's been incredibly anti-people and has downright participated in discriminatory practices. I'd HIGHLY encourage DO to setup an ethics hotline, there's been a long-term lack of ability to report concerning behavior without fear of reprisal.

Also, in your previous comments, yes the profitability #'s look surprisingly good, but lets be honest with the community and talk about cash. It's easy to look profitable when you are capitalizing so much, and it's not a fair representation of company performance. While I admittedly don’t really have any transparency into our #’s, its been talked about internally plenty that we have a cash issue. (Although it’s never been indicated that it’s desperate, and for those reading the company isn’t in financial distress, although they’ve been subtly cutting a lot of benefits and doing things to save cash like reduce travel, cut meal benefits, etc).

I'm proud of Yancey and Bill. GC needs to go, period, demonstrate ’togetherness’ Yancey talked about by showing us that accountability applies to all levels. Head of people is doing her best, but we deserve someone that wasn’t a Mark hire that understands our industry, and CTO I'm on the fence about, he's not an inspiring leader.

(Apologies for the throwaway account, surviving here for as long as I have has been difficult. I’ve connected through TOR and two VPNs, and don’t know PW so will never be logging into this account again — so, don’t bother trying to find me.)

There is no company that gets everything right and I know that DigitalOcean hasn’t, and personally I haven’t gotten everything right myself. Certainly, I’ve made a ton of mistakes.

The real question is are we headed in the right direction now?

And you yourself have said that it looks like Yancey is right leader for DigitalOcean. And I would agree with that wholeheartedly.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Satisfying people's curiosity improves the conversation, and calling someone out in the public square is a good way to create accountability that doesn't exist in private communication.

Is HN an appropriate way to tell the DO board that XYZ people should be fired? In the end I just don't get it. This sort of comment isn't doing the commenter any good.

They're an employee concerned about their company (and arguably more important, their job security). A public forum like HN is absolutely a way to highlight workplace discrimination, which this person did in a way that doesn't publicly accuse anyone yet allows someone with power ('raiyu in this case) to know who is doing it.

Also, they points out that 'raiyu is lying, or at minimum being misleading, to everyone on HN in his comments. That's valuable to the community.

There's no such thing as proprietary information, and I think most people on HN will agree with that statement. There are secrets, but proprietary information is a buzzword. That sounds like a defense contractor term.

It's also not "guesses as truths." That's a very curious way to describe "shared knowledge." The person seems to have gotten information from their coworkers, and they're talking about it in the context of that.

Sending a private message on another protocol/platform brings zero accountability while reducing the person's anonymity (which they're clearly worried about maintaining), while this at least leaves a mark that can't be deleted (by replying to it, you actually made it so it couldn't be deleted if the person wanted to within the deletion window. That's one of my favorite features of HN; it makes historically-relevant information stay there forever, essentially).

A public forum is an appropriate place to tell someone who has power over you that someone else who has power over you should be fired, especially given Digital Ocean's seeming lack of a way to do so with anonymity otherwise. Anonymous disclosure is necessary for power structures to function without serious abuse.

One mans opinion, whether he be a wage slave or not, is not the property of his employer.

Did you pass that through legal? :)

Thanks, yours, another loyal not-customer-support-harassing 5$/m DO customer.

Besides the lack of BS, I think I can learn a lot from your sentence and paragraph structure. Well-thought-out but to-the-point sentences. Short paragraphs. Direct communication on a difficult subject that shows empathy but doesn't try to sugarcoat.

Thanks, I bookmarked this page just as a reminder of effective communication.

The more time you spend in the corporate world, the more comfortable you are with corporate speak.

I haven't spent any time in the corporate world and I personally value honesty very highly, so I always try to be as forthright as possible, while still respecting the privacy and feelings of other individuals.

Honesty only works when the things you are doing are good

All the best, love DO, simple + clean and get's the job done.

I used to be with AWS before (still use their S3) but now I have switched from EC2 to DO droplets. Only thing I am missing with DO is the ability to set up ACL on the firewall itself so it can only be reached via cloudflare and the firewall IP isn't exposed to outsiders.

Please don’t add too many services to Digital Ocean ;)

It's obviously an incredible platform with excellent tooling, and it probably powers most of the websites I use. But like most trades the same job can be done to a similar standard at a variety of scales using wildly different processes and tooling. And that's fine. The economics seem to be inverted (AWS is large scale and quite expensive in my experience while DO is smaller and cheaper), but it's also not a perfect analogy. I just won't begrudge anyone for using a tool or process I don't love. If it gets your blog or multi-million dollar revenue product online, that's awesome.

I'm glad I can say I used some AWS stuff on my resume, but for my own work I'd only use it if it had a clear advantage over whatever else I'm using.

The thing I am proposing about the ACL on firewall already exists in DO - but it only exists for the droplets. I don't think it would be too hard for them to port it over for the firewall too without making things too complicated.

I know DO is just stretching their legs on hosted solutions beyond simple storage and droplets (compute), but these are two features I'd rather not manage myself, that have some pretty big value.

Being API compatible to AWS (or even GCP/Azure) would be relatively big... that said, would just be nice additions that would round things out a lot imho. I don't think I am really wanting for anything else (since DBaaS with PostgreSQL started).

The changes were mostly internal in how teams were structured and was the result of leadership changes that happened.

From the customer perspective we have never launched a product and then killed it. Anytime you are dealing with infrastructure and building services that other companies rely on for their business you have to be very sure that whatever you launch you plan to support just about forever.

A lot of the changes are actually about getting refocused on what made us successful, which is developers and the larger developer/open source community.

Can you please deliver a talk at Google some time?

2019 was one of the worst years for me financially, jobless, in debt and with a one year old child and girlfriend to look after. I was always late on payments for my 5$ digitalocean droplet and would always have my account suspended. I would always ask for an extension period and the wonderful guys at digitalocean would gladly grant me an extension and lift the suspension off my account.

And when I read the story my heart skipped a beat wondering what was going to befall my entrepreneurship dreams this year. Thanks a lot for the comment and am forever grateful to you and the team at digitalocean

While I don’t think there is anything deceptive or mean-spirited about your comment, it just doesn’t add up, and comes off a bit like the same old corporate verbal shuffling.

Nothing obligates you to comment or speak out on this. Why do so here in this forum if this is all there is to say?

But that doesn't not mean not having a Plan B just in case. And think it out. Do you want redundancy in provider in case you're blocked? Do want redundancy in payment system in case your bank blocks you? Do want redundancy in data centre in case a data centre is destroyed or becomes unavailable? Other, staff unavaibility plan, etc. All of these have some cost. Think what's most important for you.

Are you running at a profit or at a loss?

In 2013 when we hit product market fit, we ran at a huge loss (on a percent of revenue basis), so much so that we wouldn't be able to survive without raising capital from investors. That or 90% of the customers signing up wouldn't be able to launch a droplet.

We are running at a modest loss now, which is ok because we are growing and also because whenever you launch a new product or feature the up-front costs are much higher to get the initial product built and there is no revenue contribution from it until it's launched and has ramped up.

But even so we did manage a completely net profitable year in our history in 2017, which I'm very proud of, and have been at a slight loss in other years. We still have plenty of our Series B raise in our bank account.

When you look at today's IPOs they are losing 40% more money than they collect in revenue! We are no where close to that. As we have been net profitable already, and now are just fine tuning our investment vs return, so that we can continue to grow responsibly.

What made us successful was focusing on a core set of customers, developers like ourselves, and they really appreciated what we built.

The only thing I worry about is ensuring that we continue to do that. The only constant in technology is that it will continue to evolve and change, and you have to make sure that you don't get distracted from your core mission. You certainly have to be aware of the competition and what they are doing, but you also have to figure out your path and who you are the "best" solution for, and continue to evolve that overtime.

I run all my JS / Front & back at glitch.com , with a another glicth.com app that awakes the others each 4 min

Could you operate at a profit if you wanted to?

You guys haven't always nailed it, but overall, all of the points you've listed show that the ship isn't sinking even if it took on some water. It's great that you addressed this and all, but overall, all of this is a sad part of business. As long as it's not taken lightly and everything that can be done to avoid a repeat of this in the future is being done, that's all you can really do.

Just curious, why DO needs an outsider as ceo rather than somebody from founding team?

There are no shortage of requests for this feature and as owner of my data and VM, I'm simply trying to keep an offline backup. Linode has had this feature for a very long time.

When a company becomes a certain size, it's inevitable that you will hire people looking for a job.

Firing people sucks. Yes, it affects their livelihood, but having warm bodies on your roster affects your business.

The problem with people who have a job is that they affect company culture as they set the tone for acceptable and unacceptable behaviors in the workplace. It spreads like a disease and the effect can cripple those who show up to work.

Sometimes, this can lead to confusion as people who have a job might think, "I was doing what I was told. I don't understand why." Creating value is much more than simply following orders.

Out of the blue, one day the boss summoned me and told me I wasn't delivering enough value so I would be leaving. I knew he was lying (I had the numbers), and it still made me feel terrible.

If someone here is on a similar situation, let me tell you this: if you do your best and yet they tell you "you don't deliver enough value", it is the company's fault, not yours.

Really, just shrug it off and move on. Keep working hard and things will eventually work out.

PS: Four months later they wanted to hire me again, paying 50% more than before. I already had a better job ;)

You're contradicting yourself here.

They had several different chefs that all had different ideas about the menu, probably resulting in too many odd dishes, and maybe more cooks than necessary. That might lead to not executing well on the dishes at hand. Refocusing on a few good dishes, and making sure there's not too many cooks, might result in a better dinner. Unfortunately, that may require letting some cooks go.

If you haven't had a need to raise capital since your founding because your were capital-efficient, then why did you raise an equity round in 2015?

Either your statement is worded inaccurately or you did need capital funding after your founding, indicating you also need it now or will soon.