Episode 217 Simon & Ethan (repeat), CTO and DevRel at Vaunt

Fireside with Voxgig

Today we’re joined by Ethan Lewis and Simon Cheng, CTO and DevRel of Vaunt.dev for a discussion on how their work enables individuals and companies to nurture their open source communities. Vaunt is a SaaS tool that was built on a key ethos: saying thank you. It’s no secret that thanking people for their work creates a rewarding environment where they feel encouraged to continue making that work. Or is it? The treatment of developers can often communicate the opposite message. Instead of thanks, hard work is often rewarded with requests for measurement and insights into revenue growth in proportion to contributions. In other words - if you want a seat at the table, you have to earn your dinner. Simon and Ethan knew that if they could use Vaunt to foster a different attitude towards developers, then they would be able to make a real difference in the open source world. Ethan and Simon reveal that a huge part of their desire to build this service, and eventually product, was their own encounters with the problems faced by open source developers. One of those problems is that open source community building, as valuable as it is, is time consuming. And it often involves a great deal of trial and error; throwing things at the wall until they stick. Vaunt’s goal is to streamline these processes into a more efficient set of steps. They also speak on what they believe is missing from GitHub, and how having developers on your side is an asset that won’t be going out of style anytime soon. Reach out to Ethan here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elewis787/ And Simon here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simoncheng-kc/ Check out Vaunt.dev’s services here:‍ https://vaunt.dev/ Find out more and listen to previous podcasts here: https://www.voxgig.com/podcast Subscribe to our newsletter for weekly updates and information about upcoming meetups: https://voxgig.substack.com/ Join the Dublin DevRel Meetup group here: www.devrelmeetup.com