Beyond the Network: Unlocking the Power of Programmable Traffic with Ngrok cover art

Beyond the Network: Unlocking the Power of Programmable Traffic with Ngrok

Beyond the Network: Unlocking the Power of Programmable Traffic with Ngrok

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 Richard Moot: Welcome to the Square Developer Podcast. I'm your host, Richard, head of developer relations here at Square, and today I'm joined by Peter from Ngrok. Peter, thank you so much for being with us here today. I'd love for you to just give us a little bit about yourself, a little bit about Ngrok, and let's kick things off.Peter Shafton: Sure, hey, thanks Richard. Thanks for having me. So my name's Peter Shafton. I'm the CTO of Ngrok. I've been with the company for a little over three years, and I actually learned about Ngrok way back from when I was at Twilio about 13 years ago because the founder of Ngrok, Alan Shreve, was an engineer on a team there that I was running at Twilio. So I first started the voice and messaging parts of Twilio, that was actually the beginnings of Ngrok. But I've been sort of bouncing around Silicon Valley for a lot longer than that. A bunch of companies you all have heard of, probably Cisco and Yahoo, those who are old enough, SGI, and then a bunch of little startups that people maybe didn't hear of as much. But yeah, that is my past. So I'm a developer at heart, an engineer at heart, and then somehow ended up doing architecture and running technology.Richard Moot: I feel like they always trick us and lure us into this in some way. I mean, it's very alluring, but then eventually you're just like, wait, what happened? I'm now the CTO of a company.Peter Shafton: That's right. As long as they don't take away the keyboard, I can still type code there. I'm happy.Richard Moot: Do you still get to occasionally write some code for things or do you find the time for it?Peter Shafton: I do. I do. I do it badly, and most of my engineers hopefully don't let me do that. I end up in the data space more than anything or through SQL or the data warehouse and data lake areas, but at times I'll write some low level code and networking code and things like that.Richard Moot: I mean, you got to find the time for it. It is kind of invigorating, but at the same time, I would agree that outside of Dev Rel, I am less inclined to build stuff that's going to be relied on in production, and I'm more inclined on building, here's how to do this particular thing, or here's a little script for pulling some data together so that we can make sense of stuff.Peter Shafton: Yeah, I think most of us got into this because we loved writing code. I think if you'd asked me, I was a young kid, an Apple++, and I didn't realize this was a career. I just thought it was a really cool hobby to have, and then the thought that somebody would pay me to do it, and so this is the piece that got us excited. If you left most of us alone, we would still be writing code. It's just nicer when you're doing it at scale and allowing other people to see what you built versus,Richard Moot: Yeah, no, I mean I think that it's really well put. I mean, most of the time I'd build tiny little automations in my house for like, oh, now it's much easier that when I want to go to bed, it turns all my lights off at one time instead of just me having to go through all of them. But now it's like now I can solve problems for thousands of people, millions people.Peter Shafton: Oh yeah.Richard Moot: So you used Ngrok a long time ago before you actually even joined the company. I'm curious, what was it when you first used, well, two things I kind of want to answer. For anyone who's maybe not familiar, we can give a quick little explanation of what Ngrok is and then what was it like when you first used Ngrok that made you fall in love with it, or I don't know if you'd call it love, but I mean I felt like I fell in love with it when I first used it.Peter Shafton: No, it's a good story. It's a good story. Yeah. So there was an engineer by the name of Jeff Program. He was one of the early engineers at Twilio at the time. He had come from NASA and he built a tool called Local Tunnel, and he built it for a very specific purpose. So Ngrok basically fit into the webhook infrastructure that was Twilio. So the early days of Twilio, it's still true today is all powered by webhooks, which effectively means you get an inbound phone call, you get inbound text messages, you want to respond to that and control the programmability. You had to respond with XML, with twiML at the time to an inbound web request because that looked very much like how the internet worked. They figured people were writing PHP scripts or Python code for a website. They were used to getting a form post and responding, they thought, you can just reuse that infrastructure. It just happens. It's a telephone that's calling you instead of a browser client making the request, which made a lot of sense because that was what the developers were doing and it was easy to build on.The challenge was if you're inside Twilio and you're building the product and you need to be able to test it or even iterate on what you're doing, a very slow loop is I build a thing, I deploy it to production, I let...
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